Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I had a vaccine,” she said abruptly, but they ignored her, they were still talking among themselves.

  In the car, Duse apologized. “We didn’t know—” she said, and when she noticed Isadora’s face, she said she would wheel the TV into Isadora’s room if she liked, that she could serve her cake right in bed and Isadora could choose the kind.

  “I don’t want cake,” said Isadora.

  “Oh, oh, someone’s getting fussy,” said Duse.

  All the way home, Isadora kept her arms folded about herself, hedging her anger in. She kept thinking, kept racing it through her mind, that somewhere, someone had lied to her. She hadn’t known about polio, about different vaccines, she hadn’t really known about anything. Martin and Duse had, though, and she saw them now as having some sort of almost secret knowledge that she herself lacked, a knowledge that she would have to get to be really protected, and she didn’t think they would help her to get it. They had lied, but she had been the one who had been punished for it, somehow she had been the one who suffered. It was the first real doubting for her, the first tiny fissure in her strange paradise.

  Isadora never talked about having a vaccine anymore, and she worried, too, that maybe nothing could ever really give you any sort of protection from anything, maybe you were never safe. For a while, she was suspicious of Duse. She stopped bringing objects home, and she began to spend a great deal of time by herself. Duse never cared whether Isadora ever ventured out of the house, whether she ever even bothered to say hello to the neighborhood kids. For Duse, solitude or company was Isadora’s choice, her right. She didn’t see anything in Isadora’s shutting herself up in her room.

  It was Martin who worried. He worked in the mouths of enough kids to know what things kids did and he saw how Isadora wasn’t part of it. “Go outside. Look how nice and hot the sun is,” he’d tell her, pulling her up with his two hands, taking her away from a book, from a big yellow pad of paper. “Draw outside,” he said. She’d go outside. He’d see her squinting against the sun, pulling her tee shirt up from her stomach, but if he didn’t keep watch, she’d come back inside, she’d lie back down on the rug again with her pad and crayons.

  “Find someone to play with,” he’d tell her, and when he saw her walking toward Duse, he put out his hand to stop her. He didn’t like her dependence on Duse. It was fine to be close to your mother, but he wanted her to have some independence, too. He didn’t relax until he saw her tramp into the house one Saturday with five other kids. He recognized some of their faces and he gave them all old stained quarters from his pocket for the ice cream man. When he left the house he wouldn’t know that Isadora took those kids with her to Duse for readings. Duse, though, didn’t like trancing on demand, and the hungry open stares of all those kids unnerved her. “Not now, Baby,” she said. “I have to fix dinner.” Duse wouldn’t see how all those kids told Isadora she was a liar, how they all made rough faces and then scattered away from her into the streets, how Isadora stood watching as their sneakers faded in the distance as they ran, turning into colored pinpoints.

  Isadora wouldn’t miss friends while she had Duse, while she had a sense of how special she was, how separate from everyone else. Duse made sure she knew that, Duse made sure Isadora knew that it was only a matter of time before her own stars emerged in her palm. “You’re my daughter, aren’t you?” Duse told her. “I wouldn’t have an ordinary daughter if my life depended on it.” Isadora, though, was too wrapped up in Duse to worry much about her own gifts. That would come later.

  Isadora was ten when Anna died. Duse had sporadically kept in touch with her mother. The distance between them had somehow made it easier. The irritants seemed muted. Every year the whole family went for a visit. Isadora never liked going; she turned stubborn, she’d refuse to look out the car window at the scenery Martin pointed out to her, and she insisted on sitting in the back seat with the luggage, her legs so cramped she had to keep them crossed for the entire ride. Anna always had about ten different kinds of soda pop going flat in the refrigerator because she thought that that stuff was what kids were weaned on. Isadora hated it.

  A year before she died, Anna had married Stan Morgan in a private ceremony. Spur of the moment, she told Duse. She mailed them a huge framed photograph of the two of them, both of them in white suits, both holding the same bouquet of daffodils, the tops of the flowers dusting the bottom of Anna’s chin. No one seemed to like Stan very much except Anna. He was always suggesting places for Duse to get her hair cut, was always lifting up the long red tail of hair Isadora wore and shaking his head, asking her didn’t it feel hot on her neck in this summer weather and wouldn’t she be cooler with her neck nice and clean and bare? “Oh, leave her alone, would you please,” said Duse mildly, and that mildness didn’t stiffen until Stan made fun of her palm reading, of the way she was peering into Anna’s outstretched hand.

  Duse had written to her mother more and more as the years progressed. The telegram about Anna’s death came in the spring. Martin came home to find Duse by the window, rocking on her heels. “Anna,” said Duse. “She’s dead.” He moved to her. “Don’t,” she said. She pried herself from the wall and slumped into a chair, still not looking at him. “Heart attack, right in the street. I got a telegram from some woman, some name I didn’t even know. Can you imagine that? So I called Stan, but he wouldn’t come to the phone, he refused. I got this woman, turned out to be Stan’s sister.” Duse shook her head. “Isn’t that odd?”

  “What happened?” said Martin.

  “She told me they were in the street,” said Duse. “Stan and Anna, and she just kind of fell. He grabbed for her, but he said she slid through his hands. The woman told me that. He just stood there because he was afraid to bend down to help her. He didn’t want to touch her and find her flesh going cold, her limbs getting stiff. So he just kind of helplessly stood there and waited for the cops. The cops came all right, but when they did, they thought he had done it to her. He was holding her purse, they thought he had knocked her down. They cuffed him, and he just let them.”

  “What about Anna—” Martin said.

  “The cops didn’t find out that he was Anna’s husband until they had him in the station and he started to cry. Can you imagine a grown man crying? He said he had worshiped Anna. The cops undid the cuffs. They thought he was crazy but they let him go. Where could they put someone like that?”

  “Duse—” said Martin. “Tell me about Anna. Did he say she had been feeling sick, or what—”

  Duse looked at Martin. Her eyes were shiny and hard and very clear. “I can’t believe any of it,” she said abruptly. “It’s not real, it just isn’t.”

  “We’ll go to the funeral,” Martin said. “I’ll take time off.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We won’t.” Then she went to the bedroom and closed the door.

  He worried about her. Everything about her suddenly seemed to be moving. Even her clothing was in motion, her skirts fluttered when she went from the kitchen to the hall, the bows of her shoes unlaced and flapping along the floor. At night, she sat up and rocked violently in her chair, and he sat beside her, waiting for her to talk to him, to tell.

  “It feels so different,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “Missing her. I never did when she was alive.”

  “She didn’t suffer at least.”

  Duse snorted. “Oh Christ,” she said. “Don’t you start that with me, Martin. Just don’t you give me any of that. Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I don’t even feel her presence. I always did before, maybe that’s why I never thought it was such a big deal if I ever visited her, if I ever even picked up the phone once in a while to call her. She was accessible.” Duse stood up from the chair. “I never want to feel like this again. Like anything could happen.”

  “But anything can happen,” said Martin, trying to be gentle. “That’s why you can’t worry, why you can’t blame yourself. You’re not responsible. You c
ouldn’t know.”

  “I can’t feel like this again,” Duse said. “I never want to be so”—she hesitated—“so unprepared.” She bit the end of the word off. “Palms aren’t enough, sensations wear off clothing. You need those things fresh.”

  “Unprepared?” he said, baffled.

  “I want to be prepared,” she said.

  It was shortly after that that Duse began her habit of predicting deaths. She probed for reasons why Anna might have died so suddenly, she searched for some kind of warning no one had bothered to see, some signal that might have been overlooked. “People just die,” Martin told her. “There isn’t always a reason.”

  “I’m not going to just stand here and let things that are part of me be taken away. Things aren’t that random. I won’t let them be,” said Duse.

  She called Stan a great deal for information. He was always very polite to her and he seemed desperate for talk, for conversation. He kept telling Duse the same frail stories over and over again, forgetting that she knew them as well as he did, that she probably could have recited them back to him. He said he remembered Duse as a baby, he remembered how Anna had worried because Duse had liked solitude so much, and he said that he thought Isadora was the picture of Duse, a real carbon copy, he said. But he couldn’t give her much information on other deaths that he might have known about, and he was curious why Duse would want that information at all. “I thought there might be a connection there,” she said. “There has to be a reason why Anna died.”

  He whooshed out his breath; she felt it through the wires. “What are you being so morbid for?” he said. “Dwell on life now. It’s terrible to live in the past, it just isn’t right, and you can’t go getting all worked up and preoccupied about death.”

  She kept badgering him, though, and she wouldn’t let up until he told her, regretfully, that his own half brother had died of a tumor a month before Anna. “But he was really an old one,” Stan said, “and he never took care of himself.”

  “What do you think of that?” Duse asked Martin when she related the story. “Coincidence,” he said. Even when, two months later, Stan himself died in his car, trapped as it lost control and pitched, flaming, into a ravine, Martin had said, “This is nonsense. How in God’s name can it possibly make you feel any better to think those three deaths were linked up like some kind of sausage meat?”

  Duse was suddenly convinced, though, that there was a key somewhere to all this, that all she had to do was to find out what thing it was that linked these three people together, and then she could always know who would die, she would always be prepared.

  She combed the obituaries, looking for clues, trying to piece out connections. The more she fiddled with those names, the more convinced she became that death traveled in threes. Three people always seemed to share some sort of link, some common element—even if it was only a gold filling, a blemish on the thigh, or the same street name. But it was enough to join them, to have them die within days of one another, or weeks. She never found a spacing more than eight months apart. “You’re just seeing what you want to see,” Martin told her, exasperated, but she wouldn’t hear him.

  Everything became a source for Duse. She would take the bus to the library downtown and plow through the obituaries. She made up lists of people who lived in certain cities, lists of people who collected things as hobbies. She linked up names she knew with names she didn’t, and then she waited, she plundered the death pages to see if she would be proven right. When the breadman came to the back door, she managed to pry a family history out of him. He was pleased at the attention of someone so lovely. He didn’t care what she talked about, he never really paid much attention to anything but her face and the curve of her body. He started leaving her extra sweet cream, Hoodsie ice cream cups for Isadora. Duse began reading palms vigorously. She’d take a gold lipstick from an Avon lady and keep reaching, keep stretching her fingers until she had the woman’s palm, open and exposed. Anyone who set foot in the house made her itchy with want. She looked at all this palm reading as backup; she tried to see the faint ending of the lifeline before it was fully formed, before it had changed into something finite.

  Duse kept two file boxes crammed with index cards of names of people she felt would die. The first box was for her triads of predictions, the second box for the death trios she felt were already proven. Isadora sometimes filed the cards for Duse. Handling them, setting them in order, made her feel protected, safe. She sometimes saw Duse as a barrier to death, and she reasoned that Duse would know when Isadora was in danger, and she was sure Duse would know what to do to thwart it.

  For Martin, though, it was more unsettling. He tried to pretend that all those boxes contained were recipes for chicken Kiev and chocolate cake. He kept pushing the files toward the far end of the kitchen. He always cringed whenever someone came into that house and wandered to the kitchen. He used to try to keep them in their seats. He’d insist that Duse didn’t like anyone else in the kitchen with her. “Don’t listen to him,” Duse would call out. “He’s just being silly.” The guest would get up, would disappear into the kitchen, and Martin would fiddle with his water glass, knowing that one day a hand could inadvertently leaf through those files for meal ideas and find names spattered with death. He tensed until Duse and the guest came out, balancing trays of coffee or tea, or cakes. He wouldn’t search their faces. Really, all he wanted was to think that nothing had been uncovered at all.

  7

  Isadora had her own room, her own safe pocket of space, but even so, she was always clamoring to sleep beside Duse at night, she wouldn’t sleep beside Martin. It disconcerted her to lie against his hard muscular back. She made fish movements. She stirred up the sheets with her tanned legs, and she sat up against the headboard, watching Duse dream, occasionally dusting one finger over Duse’s lids as they moved and jerked in sleep. “Come on, lie back down,” he told her, but she pulled away from him. In the morning, he sometimes found her still sitting, sifting one hand through the lines of light that pushed through the blind slats, sneezing at the dust sparkling the air. If he looked at her through half closed lids, she looked like Duse, the same orangey hair, the same pale fine skin, the same crazy kind of beauty. Oh, you could tell those two were linked all right.

  She wouldn’t get up when he did, although he tried to bribe her with pancakes. Instead, she followed Duse, she became her shadow.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” he told Duse.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course she does,” Duse said. “You’re her father. Why wouldn’t she? I like you.”

  Still, he wasn’t quite certain, and he began to court Isadora. He took off work the first shiny hot day that spring and packed a picnic lunch for the two of them, stuffing a wicker basket with meat and cheese and red cream sodas. Isadora wore her straw boater with the striped ribbon streamers, but it wouldn’t lay flat on her wild mass of hair.

  He took her to the park. There were some rides there—a ferris wheel, a baby roller coaster—and the whole place was clotted with teenagers. They made him uncomfortable. Isadora herself was only ten, but it wouldn’t be long, he thought, before her gaze would slope toward him under disdainful lids, before she would lose herself in boys and hair and clothing and shut him right out of her life.

  He pushed past a young couple, jarring their bodies, making their hands unlace. “Want to go on the roller coaster?” he asked Isadora. “You’d probably feel like you were flying right off the earth, I bet.”

  “Oh, you would not,” she said, her face friendly.

  “Trust me,” he told her, settling the basket on the table, leading her over there.

  Seated, on the slow ride to the top, he realized that it wasn’t such a baby ride, that the distance was deceptive. On the first curl, he saw Isadora’s grip whiten, he saw her face closing up, and he pried his own hands from the edge of the car to hold her stiff body against him. “Isn’t this great—” he shouted at her, over the screams. He glanced aroun
d back. Some idiots were holding up both hands, letting the wind pummel their bodies, but even so, he saw how it was, how jubilant their faces were, and when he looked back at Isadora, he saw she was crying, her face was slick with tears. “It’s almost over,” he told her helplessly and then she started to shout, to scream that she wanted to get off right that very moment, that Martin had to stop the ride or she would be ill. “There’s nothing I can do, Baby,” he told her and then she threw up, across her lap, alongside his, and he clutched at her.

  She was shamed when the ride stopped. She saw the other kids watching her, snickering, making faces and pinching their nostrils against the scent. He tried to swab off the vomit with one of the cloth napkins from the basket, but she jerked away from him, and when she looked at him, her eyes were hurt and angry. The whole ride home, Martin was loony with grief. He felt a death, a sense of loss, and as soon as they pulled into the drive, she was running, calling and crying to Duse, who came out and hugged the girl against her as if the two of them held salvation for each other.

  Duse didn’t blame him, and Isadora seemed to forget the whole incident in days, but Martin remembered it. It was a wound for him, and already he felt the scar, he had the sense it would never quite heal.

  He tried to be her champion. When she came in to have her teeth cleaned, he let her play with his equipment, he sang to her while he polished her mouth. When she decided she wanted ballet lessons after seeing The Red Shoes, he paid. He even went to her recitals although her clumsy movements made him wince.

  Duse took Isadora’s interest in dance as a sign, as a proven fact that she had recognized her daughter’s rightful name and given it to her. She even thought her girl might be a dancer, might swoop and weave on the stage someday. Isadora knew her birth stories, she loved them for the heroics, for what was added to Duse’s mystique, and too for the possibility of a gift within herself. She could believe, too, that a name had power, but the more she studied dance, the more she began to feel that maybe there was another Isadora who did something other than dance; maybe, too, Duse hadn’t picked up on something Isadora Duncan did well other than dance.