Isadora Read online

  The nurse lifts the pillows to prop me up for lunch, arranging my body like a waxwork. She brings the tray, on which she has arranged a thin cup of broth and a palm-size cracker burdened with figs and honey. At my funeral, Gus will give an overlong oration from behind a shroud and Elizabeth will manage the recital, the girls all dancing in black. It will be a dear performance. Raymond will arrive too late to offer much beyond tears before decamping again to Albania, where he is cementing some philosophical movement among the refugees. Mother will write a note to the priest a few months after the whole ordeal. From his flat in London, Paris will put down the paper and look out at the busy street before taking his dinner in his room.

  Ilekobathee.

  Of course the reporters didn’t ever name Paris when they wrote about the funeral, despite the proof of our love draped in white roses. The weight of these will always rest squarely on my shoulders.

  The nurse plucks the fattest kumquat from its perch and places it on the tray like an ornament. Christ’s sake, it was perfect. My limbs lack the strength, and words may as well be etched on a block of ice for all the good they’re doing us.

  Really, though, Paris would as soon plunge a paring knife into his palm than take a meal in his room. He’s a glorious depressive, and hiding away would deprive him of the chance to brood in public.

  My nurse is patient with her spoon, but her hand quakes with age and inattention, the tremor enough to bail most of the chicken broth port or starboard en route to the mouth, pale limonate buttons weeping across the bed. When it reaches me, the spoon holds only a foul memory in warm silver. She eyes it with dread, as if dark magic has willed the liquid away.

  “That’s fine,” I assure her. “I’m so tired.” When we children fell ill in California, Mother would bring in hearty fistfuls of bougainvillea and jasmine, depositing the flowers into our beds. We thought at first that they were meant to be a comforting distraction, and in a strange way they did have their use; the petals would stick to our arms and legs and make a gummy cast, and swaddled in the rotting material, we felt warmed and comforted. It would be years before she confessed that she was only expressing a morbid practicality; at the first sign of every rash, she was prepared for us to die, and so gathered our funeral flowers. She would always seem surprised and unsettled each time we got better, but then another would fall ill and she would bring in the flowers again. Eventually a few of the neighbors decided she was a witch and left a basket of stones in our garden. It all gave illness a magical quality, and death seemed to spite her preparation by staying away. Perhaps I should have dressed in mourning from the day my babies were born.

  The nurse keeps watch over her patient, who is running a high fever, convulsing at times, and lately has begun to groan

  Marta yawned, looking out the window. The long days had been no good, not worth the extra money. She was missing her usual routine with her friends, who on cooler afternoons liked to go and collect glass around Kanoni. At that moment they were surely gossiping on the beach, admiring the day’s collection.

  But Marta was stuck inside, all on account of this woman, apparently an American dancer. The dancer had been warbling insanely in English and Italian all week, and laughed through tears streaming down her face. Her fever was very high. It was unusual, and Marta thought a few times that she might try addressing her in Italian but decided she would prefer they continue their acquaintance without conversation. The rambling looked like a real mental break, something Marta could well recognize; her own mother had been hardy and well until one evening when she stood up from the table, declared that she was a dark angel cracked from the egg of the world, crouched down on the floor, and died.

  The dancer certainly seemed on the verge of mental collapse. She would hold suddenly still and narrow first one eye, then the other, like a slug squirming on a twig after a day’s slow rain.

  “Hasfyn,” the dancer murmured, appearing at first swollen and then deflating, a strange old stain on the pillow making a brown halo around her head as if her ears were leaking a dark fluid—“Hasfyn, eymsotied”—falling asleep so quickly that Marta leaned forward to check her pulse at the wrist before gathering her things to go. She dropped a foot back into a quick curtsy to Elizabeth, who was brooding in the hallway, and excused herself to the kitchen, where an olive oil cake was waiting for its walnut glaze.

  After a few featureless weeks, Isadora remains ill enough for her siblings to almost worry

  Something was off about the furniture, Elizabeth decided. The wood was so dry she could feel the desire it held for her skin’s own moisture. She wanted desperately to rub a teak oil into the dresser, as close as it sat to the sun and salt air. Cover the wood and keep it fine, that was her thought. If it were up to her, they’d oil up the desk, the armoire, and the bed frame as well. They could fit a cloth cover on the heavy oak door, another for its brass knob and the filigree on the base of the bed and the glinting pulls on the desk. It’s a sad task indeed to keep the old things nice but sadder to see them go.

  She couldn’t bear it and went back out to the hall. It was almost worse out there, where she felt like a draped statue guarding a crypt. She pictured herself cast in marble and posed in an attitude of standing penance, head removed at the neck to make a place for birds. One fat pigeon would take up residence, his feathers blending nicely with the marble as he watched over the women and children laying down flowers, mistaking Elizabeth for her sister, their sweet students saying prayers for successful recitals, dropping to their knees to sop up with their own hair the perfume they poured onto her stone feet, so fully unaware of their freedom, their ability to shake the ash from their coats and go for a cup of tea before scattering like seeds to find enough obligations to fool anyone into thinking that time was something to be endured. They would all leave, eventually, and once the paths cleared and the last mourners had gone home, a gardener would take up their wilted gifts and toss them over the far wall. But Elizabeth would remain, standing in witness because witness was her destiny. She couldn’t leave if she tried.

  There was a shuffling sound at the end of the hall and Gus arrived, dragging two parlor chairs up the narrow stairwell. In the hallway, they could be close enough to her fevered agony without being directly accountable to it. Gus had found a book among the stacks of newspapers in the coatroom and was enraptured, as if he had never encountered a book before, reading the pages again and again and making notes shamelessly in the margins. Elizabeth leaned against the pitted velvet rise of the armchair and rested her eyes.

  “Listen to this,” he said, tipping his head slightly back in the way he would deliver a monologue and lifting the book up to his sightline. “‘It was different out upon the rose-tinted waters of the central lake. It boiled and heaved with strange life. Great slate-colored backs and high serrated dorsal fins shot up with a fringe of silver, and then rolled down into the depths again.’ Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Heavens. What is it?”

  He showed her the cover, one of his adventure books. “There’s an entire half-hidden world that we have never known or seen in the Southern Hemisphere. Can you imagine, all of us on a low barge, a reeded shelter in the center with provisions, schooning deep in-country?”

  Elizabeth imagined fish cutting through shallow water, fins like knives lodging wetly in the soft wooden hull of the boat.

  Gus flipped back to an earlier page. “We would refer to things as In-Country and Out-Country. I’ll need to look that up. It would be a real adventure.” He showed her a sketch he had made describing the dimensions of a raft. He had spent a lot of time drawing the various fauna on its flanking shores.

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said. “You’ve been reading a fiction with scattered scientific terms, and now you believe you are prepared to pilot a low barge.”

  “No, no, listen.” He found his place again. “‘Lord Roxton rushed forward, rifle in hand, and threw it open. There, prostrate upon their faces, lay the little red figures of the
four surviving Indians, trembling with fear of us and yet imploring our protection.’ You see?” he asked, keeping his place with his thumb. “They need our help.”

  The hall was warm and humid, which made it feel as if they were seated in a chafing dish. The cook insisted every afternoon on roasting carrots and potatoes in the French style and, in doing so, humidified the building, swelling the floorboards from tea to sunset. Elizabeth had wondered why the thick air hadn’t made its way into the bedrooms until she saw in the doorframe a layer of wooden clapboard, which meant the front rooms had been a hasty addition. The building was a long way from the painted stone she remembered from Athens and had imagined when this trip was suggested to her. The whole place had the feeling of a swallow’s nest built thicker by new birds, and it ensured, as did the differences in climate from room to room, that the building groaned with every breeze and shuddered whenever the cook closed the oven.

  Elizabeth felt some affinity with the place. Her joints never quite agreed with the salt of the sea air, despite her physician’s recommendation that she immerse herself in thalassotherapy as a practice whenever possible for the health of her hip and leg. The physician had claimed that the climate would ease and comfort her, but she found the effect was quite the opposite; an afternoon on the beach made her feel internally powdered.

  “Stop reading that trash,” she said. “Don’t you have a pregnant wife to attend to in London?”

  He looked up. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re so overcome by the details of your own life that you need to go insert yourself into someone else’s. What need do native people have for an actor?”

  “That’s exactly it,” he said. “The arts. Leisure. These people have so many troubles I could so easily solve.” He was chewing his nail as he read, an ugly habit. “Anyway it’s the stuff of manhood, that’s why you don’t find an attraction to it. There’s a romance portion too, if that helps.”

  “I’m not interested in any romance portion.”

  “I should send it in to the sickroom, then?”

  She snorted. “You’ll be sorry if this turns out to be her deathbed.”

  “Oh, come on. She’s only having a bit of fun with us. Remember the week in London when she claimed to have the flu? She saw so many doctors in private I thought she would contract syphilis and pass it to us through the toilet seat.”

  “My God, Augustin.”

  It was true that Isadora had invented illness in the past, but Elizabeth knew it was different, because her sister didn’t have the energy to deliver her usual cruelties. Just after she gave birth to Deirdre, she requested a private visit from her Dear Friend, the Great Italian Actress Eleonora Duse; it would be many years before Isadora stopped introducing her like that. Word was sent, and her Dear Friend, the Great Italian Actress Eleonora Duse, arrived a few days after, apparently having nothing better to do. She went to Isadora’s chamber, and they were alone for only a few minutes before Eleonora emerged again, holding her face as if it had been slapped. The rest of them rushed in to find the new mother propped up with pillows in her bed, the babe at her breast, preening like a satisfied cat and claiming before anyone asked that her guest had tried to suckle the other teat. It was a naughty rumor, one delivered with the intention to instantly spread, yet Eleanora returned the next day, walking proudly through the crowd of whispering visitors, and half an hour later the two of them were walking arm in arm around the garden, pausing at a bench to embrace like lovers reunited, one pulling the other laughing to the grass, out of sight of the line of shocked employees watching from the windows, the baby having been handed off to a nurse.

  It was most distressing to see Isadora so ill. It seemed to herald a worrying new trend. Elizabeth remembered the week before, the sight of her sister at the cliff’s edge, the uncertainty in her expression suggesting that if only they came a little closer, she would recognize them as old friends. Alone up there, her hand wavering back to find the rail, she seemed complicit in their judgment, ready to confess her sins before they pushed her off. She may very well have been drunk.

  The walls heaved and swelled. Elizabeth heard the Italians laughing outside as they came up the road. Romano had been very sweet to mostly not ask after her sister, mentioning her only once with an easy smile that suggested he didn’t care if she lived or died.

  Elizabeth thought guiltily of Max for the first time in a week. Ever since he returned to Darmstadt, he had been sending daily telegrams updating her on the school, but she couldn’t make it to the office every day to receive them.

  “My sweetheart would be displeased to hear you selling me on this tropical adventure,” she said. The days seemed shorter on vacation, late mornings and early supper.

  Gus looked up. “Who is displeased? The Italian, you mean? What’s bothering the Italian?”

  “Max Merz, for God’s sake. You’ve met him twenty times. He was at the funeral.”

  Her brother frowned. “Max Merz.”

  It was his cruel idea of a joke. A few months before they met, Max denounced Gus’s Oedipus revival publicly at a summer recital, going on about the failures of the adaptation as an aside to his introduction as he mopped his forehead with a cloth. It was all written up in embarrassing detail in the local paper, the greatest surprise being that a reporter was at the concert at all, though he could have also heard the story from a friend. Later, Max would try to claim that it hadn’t been a personal denouncement, that he took issue with the Oedipal myth itself, its familial cruelty and vengeance. But the damage was done, and Gus would always insist on subsequent encounters on having forgotten the poor man.

  “Ah yes,” Gus said. “I’m sure Herr Merz would be additionally disappointed to know you were not buried in the anatomy books he sent with you to prepare for your advanced class.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you about those.”

  “Perhaps he has already written you out of the payroll for insubordination.”

  The teasing annoyed her. Max was working diligently in Darmstadt, obedient to his work and to her. Isadora couldn’t be bothered to manage the school as long as it was turning a profit, and so Max enjoyed the freedom to try out his little ideas, such as having the girls skip their afternoon cookies, performing deep lunges between sips of tea.

  Elizabeth rotated her ankle in a slow circle as she studied the door, half listening to her sister’s clotted cough. “You never complained when he picked up the round,” she said at last, but Gus was no longer listening. She turned her attention to the door’s brass hinges, thick cast in a twisting rope pattern and secured firmly with small bright brass screws, giving the old wood a gilded look despite the fact that it was too pale to be oak or maple and, on closer inspection, was splintered at the base where it ran against the rug. Perhaps it wasn’t as sturdy as she thought, a hollow pine. “What do you think that is?” she asked.

  “Bronchial infection,” Gus said, turning the page. “She’ll be just fine. We’ll make our journey to the Mighty Amazon at the end of the month.”

  “Confusing it with the Mississippi should prove to be the least of your troubles.”

  “I suspect they’re at least comparably mighty.” He closed the book and stroked its leather. “I forget that you’re not the adventurous one.”

  “You’re calling her adventurous now?”

  “Her parties begin in the city, continue on the docks, and end on the Nile.”

  “Yes, but try convincing her to get off the boat. Try to bring her to a show that’s not her own.” They were all dismissive of ballet, but Isadora could be really insufferable about any alternative, which she regarded as a personal attack. There was one road to glory, as far as she was concerned, and it would be paved with stones she laid herself. She seemed to dismiss the idea that she might be building over someone else’s footpath or grave.

  “I’m feeling my age too keenly,” Gus said. “The only antidote is adventure. Come now, before you ruin the game for everyone.�
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  “I will not be the Lewis to your Clark this time.”

  “Well, for one thing, you would be the Clark to my Lewis.”

  “There’s too much to do at the school.”

  It was true: the one letter that arrived from Max spent three full pages detailing the school’s problems, the personal funds he had poured into advertising and the return they had not drawn. Because he was short on staff and had to teach chorale and theory both, he was forced to arrange the classes to create one long day from sunrise to sunset. A second pianist would ease the burden a little; the new girl he was considering could cover the chorale to allow him to focus on theory. Elizabeth remembered his insistence upon chorale, which she had been against to begin with. At the letter’s close he asked after her trip, which Elizabeth took to mean he missed her. He was a man of deeply subtle insinuation.

  Gus found another book to read from the pile at his feet. “You should task Herr Merz with the whole operation,” he said. “Give him the school, have him write us a cheque every month. He would be happier to know he could have control of everything, and you would be free to pursue your own interests.”