Isadora Read online

  He shrugged, watching them eat. “You’d be surprised.”

  “I hope they won’t stay overnight,” she said. “The man is supposed to bring the children here tomorrow morning, and then we’ll all go to the cemetery together.”

  “Which man?”

  “The man from the morgue, with the children.”

  “How macabre!”

  “He insisted. There is some artistry involved in their presentation, apparently. Paris spared no expense.”

  “They’ll most certainly stay to see that.”

  She sighed. Clearing her throat, she got the attention of a few of the guests, who were swiping the last pieces of salmon through a dish of crème fraîche. “Look, everyone,” she said, “Augustin is here.”

  21 April 1913

  Teatro della Pergola

  Ted Craig, Direttore

  Non leggere i giornali

  Firenze

  Teddy—

  They’ve laid them out in the sitting room. The sitting room! Two doves nestled together on the chaise, two halves of my broken heart drained of all its blood.

  You must imagine it though I’m certain you’d rather not, and I must describe it to you though I would obviously rather forget. This is the duty of the living, the curse on those who must walk on as the dead find their rest. You should find a quiet place to sit backstage, perhaps near that cubby where you hide the gin.

  Paris insisted Patrick wear the gown we bound him into for the overwrought teatime we called his christening and had a white dress found somewhere for Deirdre. He wants to make sure we won’t be barred from the parties thrown by the devout next season, always the best parties around. I do remember your mother bought Deirdre’s first christening dress, and all complaints aside I did like that dress, and I do hope she is well, your mother, I miss her very much, send her my love, all of it! Box it up!

  After a long morning of dread and speculation the children were unboxed and brought in holding hands. Two men had to maneuver them awkwardly through the door, tipping their bundled bodies upright like a conjoined set of porcelain dolls before laying them out on the chaise. Fortunately I was asleep when they arrived and only heard these details later.

  Elizabeth woke me to say they were in the other room, and I was very confused, thinking for a moment that it had all been a terrible dream. Once I remembered the morning’s itinerary, I was afraid to move for fear I would be sick. I thought that perhaps if I could convince Elizabeth I was ill, she would let me stay in bed, but she pulled me to my feet, talking of getting things over with.

  She helped me into the other room, and I saw them there, holding hands. The men who arranged them couldn’t have known, but it was precisely how they tended to sleep, holding hands like that, one leading the other into a dream.

  I stretched out face down on the floor and crawled to them as if it were one of our games. We loved our games very much and had some favorites which retained their charm no matter how often we played. Patrick had an after-dinner habit of hiding under the table and startling the adults, which of course was great fun whenever we had a party over for dinner. The first time he did it, the nurse tried to pull him out and he screamed and kicked at her and the second time he actually bit her, catching a tender place on her hand between her thumb and pointer. He was a toddler then and half-feral. She went to whip him but I made a small scene, stripping to the waist and offering my back in his place, and ho hum! Of course we had all been drinking some, even Annie, who burst into tears and ran to the bedroom where Deirdre was sweetly reading. Following Patrick back under the table, I saw how the wooden legs made a strange forest and the funny way the feet shuffled about depending on their owner’s mood.

  Patrick was the observant one, though Deirdre could better articulate; she often interpreted his tantrums. I could picture the two of them as adults, traveling to cities where she might give lectures on artistic invention before he took the stage to introduce his choreographed masterworks. They held the very best of all of us, you see, and none of the awful bits.

  The two of them holding hands were silent as I crawled to them there in the parlor—naturally so, Elizabeth would say later, and one would hope—but everything has felt so impossible lately that in a strange way anything seemed possible, breath and movement not the least of it, not even from the dead. I felt a strange peace when I approached them and none of the horror I feared, for it was the two of them there with me and there was no strangeness in it. I kissed their bellies and held their sockied feet and my hands grew cold as theirs seemed to warm. There was another possibility, that everyone was fatally confused; perhaps the water had merely shocked the life temporarily out of them. If warmth could return, then breath would not be far behind, and holding them close might inspire some life. As their bodies took on more of my heat, I began to think we might meet mild-blooded in the middle. We could take this show on the road! How strange we would be, how unique! It was only when I tried to take their clasped hands in mine that I found I couldn’t pry them apart.

  It wasn’t a natural bond, despite how it seemed. They had been forced by the undertaker into this little play of clasped repose. I felt the hard ridge across the baby skin on the backs of their hands where he must have tightened a belt. When I tried to separate them, I found to my horror the line of pale thread that stitched their palms together, holding Deirdre to Patrick and keeping them there. They were sewn and sealed with casein glue, fixed for the viewing.

  Poor Deirdre! Who hated sticky hands and, despite our pleas and threats, was always dunking them in her water glass to clean them. And poor, sweet Patrick! Who never could be held in place, who even in his sleep roiled like a restless sea.

  A keening scream spread swiftly from my body to reach the walls and floor. It made a residence of sound echoed through my empty core, my ribs a spider’s web strung ragged across my spine, a sagging cradle for the mess of my broken heart.

  Their flat on Rue Chauveau, every light on past midnight

  They were teaching one another deeply inappropriate songs of Irish mourning when Paris arrived back at the flat. He was about to cast them out on their asses when he saw Isadora’s blissful face, her telltale half-sleeping sway. He was drunk too, only modestly, having stopped on the way home for dinner, where he was easily steered toward a bottle of fine Bordeaux. Gus and Elizabeth had both grimaced up at him with expressions of suffering saints, but hours after he said good night and shut the bedroom door, it sounded as if they were happy enough to lead the singing. Elizabeth’s man was there, and Paris tried earnestly to remember his name. He had known it before. They were all dressed in black for the funeral in the morning, and they would surely stink uniformly of cigarettes and whiskey by the time they piled into the pew beside him. And cheap perfume; one of their visitors seemed to have marinated in the stuff like a chippy sardine. Retreating to the bedroom he could smell her through the pillow he pressed to his face.

  Rolling onto his back, Paris stared up at the ceiling. He could never sleep when others were awake, a habit he learned as a child. His father worked through the night on his patents and, on realizing some altering detail or improvement to his plans, would cry out, startling the dogs and children and throwing them all into a frenzy. The breakthroughs had a terrifying ecstatic quality, and Paris would slip out of bed to watch from the top of the stairs as the man mopped at his face, muttering Draw the stitch by the shuttle or Frame the friction surface, of course of course, and pacing the length of the kitchen. Isaac Singer’s children—there were twenty of them at the time—quieted their sniffling to hear the incanted phrases as they one by one returned to sleep, dreaming of production lines. Paris stayed awake the longest, not daring to leave his perch in the stairwell, ready to spring into action if any of his father’s sounds turned out to be the death throes they seemed to portend.

  Hard work was a necessity at the time, if the Singers were going to improve their lot there in upstate New York, where bitter cold was met with an exceptional bitt
erness among people and his father was eager to escape life as a factory warden. Isaac kept his promise to make his name and never return, but the old homestead would always mean something special; as a grown man in New York, Paris often found himself walking idly north from the Singer building on Broadway, as if a magnet were drawing him back to Pittstown.

  It had been quiet pandemonium all morning at the flat. The undertaker had apparently delivered the children’s bodies in a massive wooden box, something that might otherwise store an oversize wreath. He finally left once every single one of the guests had plied him with enough compliments to his craft to last him the season and enough money too, of course, from Paris.

  Everyone had their hand out lately: the officers who kept a crowd from setting up camp in front of their flat; the men who dove in after the car and came to offer their condolence along with a passive remark about leather shoes after a soak; of course the clothier in Italy who had stored Patrick’s christening gown and the tailor as well. Ted Craig had contacted him to ask for money to travel, and Paris threw the wire out before fully considering it, though he was satisfied, thinking about it later, to find that his thoughts on the matter were the same.

  A glass shattered in the sitting room, and there was a second of silence before they all screamed with laughter. Paris had the uneasy sense that he should be out there with them, that his absence would be seen as indifference, but he had already taken on the responsible role. If he went out now, they would quiet down, sweep up the glass and apologize. He hated the position he had placed himself in, relegated to his bed like a dog.

  Isadora’s voice rose with her sister’s, the two of them braying “The Parting Glass:”

  Of all the money that e’er I spent

  I’ve spent it in good company

  And all the harm that ever I did

  Alas it was to none but me

  And all I’ve done for want of wit

  To memory now I can’t recall

  So fill to me the parting glass

  Good night and joy be with you all

  If I had money enough to spend

  And leisure to sit awhile

  There is a fair maid in the town

  That sorely has my heart beguiled

  Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips

  I own she has my heart enthralled

  So fill to me the parting glass

  Good night and joy be with you all

  Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had

  They’re sorry for my going away

  And all the sweethearts that e’er I had

  They’d wish me one more day to stay

  But since it falls unto my lot

  That I should rise and you should not

  I’ll gently rise and softly call

  Good night and joy be with you all.

  Of course, it was hardly notable that they would drink to the children. Only a few months back, Isadora had led everyone in toasts to their own health, the health of their friends and enemies, the health of persons known and unknown, to good fortune and moderate, bad fortune when it comes at the right time, to improvements in science and the arts, to sustenance and glory, the shipping trade, its sailors and captains, to moments of leisure and industry, to vital literature, good strong liquor, chocolate Napoleons, the human spine, oil and vinegar, fiscal irresponsibility, half-decent sunsets, the comfort of surrender, loyalty, cartography, friendship, and easy evenings. She could go on all night.

  Paris turned his thoughts to the morning, which would arrive soon enough. He would hire a second car for the siblings. They were all set to arrive at the cemetery by eight, which meant he would need to start trying to get everyone up at sunrise. At the chapel, they would have to suffer through a visitation and another viewing. He would give Isadora a few minutes alone with the children or else he would hear about it for months—his coddling, her precious privacy—and then they would all go and have lunch and put the whole funerary business behind them. No life in it.

  The crematory room at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where in the confusion of the proceedings someone allowed Isadora to sit unattended with the children

  Of course they have a flooding problem. Once Étienne with the gastric eye burped his way through basic condolences, fiddling with the chain to balance the pin weights of the cuckoo clock in his office, I should have called for the car, written a note with varied apologies, and slipped out the side door, keeping my eyes trained forward in an only slightly conspicuous way as I slapped the color back into the children’s cheeks. But duty makes a sturdy trap, hard to escape in the best circumstances, and so the three of us find ourselves penned in by death in a half-lit basement as upstairs they deal with a backed-up toilet. A stinking thin wash of sewage flows the length of the marble hall, finding the linen draped across the table on which the children are laid out. The dark water draws swiftly up the material, fluid ruin here again to remind us of its power.

  Their bodies, despite the heat of the room, are even colder than before, refrigerated for the pleasure of their guests. Deirdre once set her bare feet on a skating rink and drew them back shrieking, but Patrick has steeped his whole life in palm-tested bathwater and never once met the cold which has him now. He shouldn’t have known pain for years, protected until young love had him sobbing shamefully into fistfuls of spring roses. The world feeds us sugar and then crushes us in a single afternoon.

  I find myself passing the time with sweet and familiar thoughts, like a tourist wandering through a grocery store stocked with items from their hometown. I think of Deirdre’s pink toes curling against the skating ice, having removed her shoes and socks. She was meticulous, like Ted, and she liked to keep a list of all the items she had enjoyed on any given day:

  three dresses (long)

  two dresses (short)

  doll (rag)

  doll (straw)

  playing cards (half deck)

  clasp from Mother’s sandal (brass)

  one lizard (wooden)

  orange peel

  cinnamon stick

  shoelace (half)

  Happily she bore none of Ted’s grumpy neurosis, caring for herself with the same detached interest she gave her inventories. She was thoughtful with her things, always searching for her special woven purse in which she kept her special pieces—buttons or perfect acorn caps, a doll’s porcelain leg. She had that purse with her always; now, her treasures speckle the floor of the Seine like nonpareils on a cake.

  But where did they go? I should have run before they told me. To the train station, riding to the farthest stop, to Russia! Finding transport further and further out until I was cradled in the wild like the stone in my own throat, exiled to a land where the children were neither dead nor alive, and in that permanent uncertainty I could live and work. I have built my world around the feeling of being tipped forward on my toes, gathering with outstretched arms the whole of life as a harvest and releasing it without a moment’s moderative thought to the potential for that energy’s extinction. But here it is, proof of the world’s end.

  Étienne asked me to knock when I was ready to go but I’d prefer to stay forever. This is the columbarium, the interment room serving the entire cemetery, a city block of souls. Urns stacked to the ceiling hold the dust of a thousand dead, and the room is ringed with names, each tin plate meant to convey wealth to those who have never truly known it. In this dark hall, countless men and women wept with bitterness because they came to realize the mistake they made in thinking their love was stronger than death. The children and I are the central exhibit in a museum of failed hope.

  I always thought that if I suffered enough in service of Art, if I laid down my life to please the world, I could live in peace. Now I know that the world will consume everything in its path. Art is not even an appetizer to the horrors of the world. The world consumes horror itself and savors it and is never sated.

  My mind turns to regret, an emotion that has lately found an endless quarry in me, my mind’s darkest tun
nels bearing cartloads of salt for the wound. I torture myself with particulars. There was my choice of café, when cold meats at home would have sufficed. There was our very presence in France, which had seemed so necessary by a schedule of debuts and the promise of a new school. There was Annie, hired because her thin waist gave her quite the look of a lady; my bind to pride of impression despite all my talk of classical simplicity; my flirtation with the waiter, which clouded my intuition and sent me away distracted, embarking on a self-satisfied nap rather than my usual afternoon walk through the neighborhood, where surely I would have discovered the accident, stripped off my clothes, and gone down to save them. There was the practice I neglected in honing my intuition as a mother, as I’ve heard that good mothers know their children’s thoughts even when they are far away; my waste of this intuitive practice on art; my inattention and laziness, which resulted in three deadly items of blind trust—in the hand brake, an item of such frailty; in the man who operated the brake; and in the world, to keep them safe. The evidence of my own failure lies in state before me and will be interred this afternoon in my heart.

  The children and I suffer the indignity of one last waiting room, where my gown makes a cornered shadow. Soon enough they will be introduced to a chamber blackwalled with a sudden fire. What silly thing is art to fire?

  This is our last chance to escape. If we found a car, we could make it to that country home we once visited, that friend of a friend’s place with the small pond and pasture, a single sweet passenger train chugging by once an afternoon. Her name escapes me, the friend of a friend with a tray of lemon fizzes, silver cups sweating in the afternoon, the sweet little pond in tall grass, the children fascinated by a dying oak tree, the black lightning of its bare branches. If only we could leave here and travel back to that afternoon! We would arrive in these ill-fitting clothes, Patrick squeezed pathetically into the gown his father insisted on, owing to the expense in shipping it from Rome and its inherent blessings; Deirdre in a white dress the maid brought from storage, upon inspection clearly unwashed, with spots of fruit pulp at the collar from the day she insisted on blackberries for breakfast. How satisfying it will be to thrash that idiot maid! If it were her own child, she would have scrubbed that dress so well, the lye would rise up and fill the room, and everyone would come away from the casket with raw-rimmed and burning eyes, and there would certainly be no idle talk of the weather.