by Amelia Gray
“I felt it building. I thought for sure we were going to sink, that there would be some accident, and I became terrified of every swell and sick with worry overnight. I would sit up all night watching the horizon, as if I could stop any monster that came on the waves.
“The feeling grew and grew, and I finally realized the source: it was coming from the captain and the mates, the cook and the nurse, everyone working to serve us. They smiled and cleaned up our crumbs and made pleasant conversation, but I realized true as morning that they hated us all the while. How could they not?
“Finding the source of the feeling made it impossible to ignore. It was baked into the bread we buttered for lunch, it shone from the deck they scrubbed after the children’s scuffing games, and it fluttered from our clothes pinned to the starboard wire. The polished silver was so hot with resentment it ought to have burned us.”
“Poor dear! Loathing in your soup.”
“I was afraid! Don’t laugh at me. I felt the fortune of my birth and couldn’t escape it. I knew my station was determined by chance. Their loathing flattened me, and my art became something they could work up in their spare time if they were only so luckily born, so starved for fame as to spend their hours preening, if only they were as cruel and selfish as I. They made me into a paper doll with tunics and sandals to attach or whip away.”
“Perhaps you were flattening them as well, my dear.”
“I counted the hours until we could get away, but the feeling was even keener when we landed. The landlord, the nurse. The cord the postman used to bundle the mail was threaded with resentment thick enough to strangle me.
“And that was Europe, where class is so fixed. Now imagine what I would find in New York, a city that doubles as the world’s longest dinner table, everyone turning in unison to stare down the stranger at its door? They threw Raymond in jail. I cannot bear to think of what they’ll do to me.”
“And so—”
“And so no, I will not go to New York, not for Andrew Carnegie and not for you.”
The rain starts up again. Hopefully the boy fetching the champagne will find us another parasol. “Your mind is set on France,” she says, watching the rain on her sill.
“My mind is set. If everyone so desperately wants me to go back to work, I will go back to work and make a new dance to attend it. Paris is the only place. There, my life was burned to dust. What better stage for a revolution than on its ashes?”
IV
At the new school in Paris’s Bellevue, a family reunion presents far more trouble than it solves
Mother arrived before the ice and complained so heartily that everyone else came to assume her bad attitude had conjured it. We were trapped together, a feeling that transported me back to childhood. The support staff had gone to be stuck with their own families, and the girls mostly kept to themselves in the bedroom they shared, all six of them lined up in an extravagant bed like girls in a fairy tale. The school in winter really feels like the abandoned hotel it is. Mother quarantines herself at night in the east wing, her bed padded with cards and sweet letters from her Oakland friends.
To pass the time in the later evening hours, the adults go around the group and tell stories of other awful holidays. Elizabeth remembers the year she exiled herself to New York and spent the season warding off the attentions of the father of one of her charges, culminating in a New Year’s party where she had to remove his hands from under her dress. Mother tells a charming holiday story about Father making love to a banker’s wife in order to secure a loan and how the banker arrived at the house that night to both personally reject the application and to punch Father in the mouth. Elizabeth’s strange suitor, Max, speaks at length about how he was never allowed to celebrate the New Year as a child and how even as a young man he was sent to bed early, including a meandering detail about a gift of tobacco he once bought for himself; he could have saved us all the agony and passed on the question.
We have burned through the firewood and most of the pantry, and the fear is it will be days before they dig a path in to save us. Of course none of us ever think to save ourselves, but were happy enough to complain. I can’t think of a worse New Year’s than this one, kitchen rations and no liquor, and six girls who are strangers to me. But I don’t want to be cruel, and so I make up a story about starting a jealous row with Paris while the two of us were dancing a waltz.
After that game is exhausted, I try convincing them that everyone should set their own personal New Year. Only the poor idiot who slipped on ice in the middle of a depressing January night might mark the day he cracked his hip and was required to keep completely still for months while his desperate wife dug snow from the garden to uncover frozen patches of thistle she might boil for their supper. Perhaps this is the old Father Time we hear so much about.
Elizabeth, on the last of the port, declares that 1914 will stand as a monument to all the years before and past, and the few who don’t feel optimistic about the future should keep it to themselves. I’ll toast to that!
This blizzard has been a real bell jar, but seclusion has its benefits; most importantly, it gave me a chance to consume the larder without witness, first the bread with jam and then crackers and figs and hard cheese and then a jar of crème fraîche, which I ate with my fingers at precisely the time Saint Nicholas was crooking his staff around children’s stockings all over the quiet city.
The snow outside mutes every sound and the house sleeps deeply, which means that I can wander the halls without having to run from them. I walk all night sometimes, rolling a single chunk of bone across my tongue like sweet sugar.
Finally we hear a shovel scrape and frantic knocking at the cook’s door. Two men from the city had been trying to dig us out for days, handsome fellows and very cold. The path cleared, the others arrive with mutton and jam and sacks of cornmeal and goose fat and champagne and eggs and enough kindling to light the whole place up. All three jars of the good crème fraîche were long gone by then, much to the dismay of the cook, who had been planning a crepe. Once they clear the electrical box and start lighting the halls again, it feels as if there are far too many people and everyone is far too illuminated, so I make a quick retreat to the darkness of my locked wing.
It is good to lie on the marble floor and feel it against the exposed bit of skin at the nape of my neck. It feels so very good, so clean and cold, that after pulling off my dress, I lie on my side to feel more of it against my body, which shudders with picky sickness at the temperature change. This child, which began on the beach in Viareggio, will bring me a New Year in August.
You must see them, comes a voice from a hunting portrait, from the portrait itself. You know well enough they have come for you. It’s coming from the dog at center, a pointer; and there’s the pretty doe the men have found collapsed in the brush. The dog’s eyes water at the scent of his own loyalty. I cannot hold them. You must let them come. The wide-eyed doe in the grass is a living corpse for their taking.
Watching this charming scene, I feel my lovers past and present grasp my hands and caress me, taking up my arms to nibble my fingertips. When they see their own greed in the others’ eyes, they try to pull me off to consume me in private.
My family gathers around my head, to kiss my temples, whispering platitudes and truths as they stuff themselves with my hair.
My students crouch at my feet, filling their cheeks with my bones, chewing toes and knobby ankles as they try to enter through my veins, to grow strong and vital there before they gnaw their way out.
It is an agony to endure until I feel my two babes nestling at my breast. I murmur down to soothe them, but this is different from before. They hunch over me, sucking with all their might, furious by the failure of their effort. They sink their teeth sharp as sawpoints and rear back blood and flesh. They thrash against me, digging to pry open my ribs. But still, I bear them gladly; if this pain has the power to destroy me, I welcome it to my breast.
Max attempts to practice the
life of the mind in order to forget he is trapped with Elizabeth and her terrible family
The whole sad story of the accident was a real distraction for Max. In Germany it had been easy enough to ignore, but avoiding the idea was impossible in Paris; the river was close enough to Bellevue that it could be viewed through the slim windows flanking the top floor even without going out on the balcony, which seemed to Max unstable. Though he had no business above the ground floor, he ventured up a few times to peer at it through the dusty glass.
Their poor nurse had died that day as well. Annie Sim was her name. Max found himself thinking of her often and pitying her, for he knew that everyone else dwelled on the unknown potential of the children. But this woman Annie Sim—who reminded him of his long-suffering mother and slightly resembled her from the picture he saw, the same hardness in the eyes—had lived and known her own full life, had surely known heartbreak and shame, and enjoyed the attention of a fellow at school, and snuck a half glass of beer from the bottles littered about the kitchen after her parents had gone off to bed. She had cared for and soothed the two children in her charge and maybe even loved them and entertained the fantasy that they were her own. She must have often fantasized that she was the famous one, that every evening would find her onstage, performing for a breathless gathered crowd.
How the woman died was not as important as how she lived, Max told himself. It would be an insult to reduce the woman to the moment of her death, a moment she hadn’t chosen and one in which she was not even present, not really. He hated the thought of the crowd at the riverside, waiting for the bodies to be dredged out. He tried to imagine Annie Sim’s personality from photographs he had seen of her. Max felt a real kinship to the woman. If she was still alive, after all, she would sleep a few doors down from him in the employee wing. She would sit at the edge of her bed just as he was, in a bedroom appointed in the same spare way; Singer had only had a few pieces of furniture installed.
Perhaps Annie, brushing her hair while sitting on the very edge of her bed, which was made up with a plain white coverlet, might feel the same longing he felt. Perhaps, he dared to believe, she might unfasten her skirt and run her fingers across her soft belly, touching the mark the garment had made. Max thought of her soft skin and abused himself with a guilty fury, spitting on his hand.
When he was finished, he felt such a wave of revulsion that he stumbled to the corner of the room and forced his fingers between the bars of the radiator grille, gritting his teeth as the pain absolved him. He slapped himself briskly in the face and went down to breakfast.
* * *
At the table he found toast and coffee and an egg dish that he wouldn’t touch. When he asked for tea with cream and sugar, they brought it already prepared, a tannish mix.
Elizabeth and her mother had come to the point of their morning argument where they were addressing each other by name. Max was annoyed to realize that no matter where he chose to sit, he would be forced to place himself between the two of them.
“Dora, dear,” Elizabeth said, “would you pass the butter?”
“Of course, Elizabeth,” her mother returned. “Do you need the salt as well?”
He thought about how strange it was that old Dora Duncan had given her own name to Isadora, a convention he had previously seen only among men. Max himself had always been told he was named after a member of the Austrian navy, but on her deathbed his mother confessed that they had actually named him after a favorite dog. The original Max was a schnauzer and a good boy by all accounts.
They ate in silence. Halfway through the meal Max was startled by the sound of a woman crying out. Isadora was keening again and wanted them all to know. Elizabeth grimaced at the newspaper folded primly on the table beside her. The sound extended to make itself known and held to the ragged end of the performer’s vocal ability.
“What on earth?” Max said at last. The women looked up, one frown repeated on the other’s face. Dora’s thicker skin slackened around her jaw, which was at that moment working industriously at a piece of ham steak. She had been reading the social pages, fashion and petty crime.
“Shouldn’t someone go and quiet her?” Max added, realizing too late that the question might have implied an annoyance he hardly felt and certainly hadn’t intended to express. A maid came to offer more tea and left without even a moment of corroborative eye contact.
“She’s fine,” Elizabeth said. The two of them went back to their reading.
The wail started up again, as if to contradict her directly. Elizabeth took a piece of toast spread with a lemon marmalade the cook had found in the market earlier that morning. The cook, it seemed, was awake at all hours. There was an unsubstantiated report that she slept standing at the larder, her face pressed onto a side of beef.
“Apparently the education board and clergy are considering substitutes for the tango,” Dora said. “They visited the École Massillon and found it vulgar among the students. They very much enjoyed the perigon, though.” She looked up. “Should we teach the perigon to the girls? I enjoy nothing more than pleasing a man of the cloth.”
“Try as I might,” Elizabeth said, “I can’t imagine anything less vulgar than a bunch of twelve-year-old girls fumbling through a tango.”
“But what will you say to the clergy, Elizabeth?”
“They may visit and judge us all they like as paying guests of our next performance, Dora.”
Her mother gave a humorless little laugh. “I hope I’ll be here to see it.”
The wailing continued, attended now by a muted thumping noise, as if she were beating her fists against a wall.
“I really am concerned,” Max said.
“Go see for yourself,” said Elizabeth, sliding her keys across the table.
“You locked her in?”
“More likely she locked us out.”
Max goes on a journey to save a woman and to say maybe just one thing about his own ideas
He needed to think strategically; this was his moment to realize a plan that had been in motion for years, a journey that began the day he met Elizabeth in Vienna. Here he was more or less at the center of an artistic movement, with a chance to see his theories honed by willing subjects.
He had always heard that Isadora tended to run in extremes with children, first doting and then shrugging them off. He sometimes found old lecture notes of hers tucked into books in Darmstadt, but nothing made sense to him. The joining of the child’s life to Nature’s, one of the lines read. Every child’s love for music. There was no organization to her thoughts, no central idea.
The walk to Isadora’s private wing required passing through an empty hall, cold and unfamiliar. Rooms flanked the hall, full of furniture under protective cloths. The first was draped in ivory, the second in black, and so forth, reminding Max of zoo animals sleeping in their pens.
Elizabeth’s keys were lined up on a brass ring like a warden’s set. As he unlocked the big door to the wing, he was startled to hear a roaring like a car engine, though they were far from the road and the sound came from directly overhead, so close that Max crouched down until it faded, fearing the whole place was coming down. The door swung open into darkness, and his eyes strained to adjust.
Isadora appeared to him in silhouette, seated on a velvet bench like a girl in a museum, staring at the painting on the far wall. She was stark naked, her clothes in a pile at her feet. Max stood at a distance he deemed respectful and averted his eyes. On the walk over, he had thought he might offer himself up romantically to her, but he changed his mind seeing her posture, which was unnaturally straight in a way which seemed mildly possessed.
“Madame might join us for breakfast,” he said.
She made no response. It occurred to him that between the formality of his question and his pressed white shirt she might confuse him for a member of the staff. If she failed to recognize him in daylight—as she had failed, on his arrival with Elizabeth to Bellevue—she would never know him here. The hall was
lit only vaguely by a window far down the hall, around the corner. It was even colder than the others, the marble like ice under his feet. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw that she was patting the bench beside her. Obediently, he came and took a seat.
“There is toast and marmalade,” he said. “Something the cook brought up from town. A lemon marmalade.” It was a small bench, with more room for carved wooden filigrees than for comfort, and they were forced very close as a result, their arms touching. She must have been cold but he didn’t dare move to warm her.
“Did you hear the aeroplane?” she asked.
“Your mother sent me to check on you.”
She didn’t respond. He hated himself for lying, and hated her as well for inspiring the lie. His intentions had been muddied, he meant to show her simple human kindness, but she was cold to him and the whole thing was ruined.
Desperately he tried to assure himself that this was the last place to be ashamed by his own emotion. He was an intellectual artist, after all, and had once developed an interpretation of Beethoven’s piano sonatas that spoke to the composer’s mathematical phrasing. But she didn’t think of him as an artist or an intellectual. She gave more care and regard to strangers. Max knew all he needed to know about Isadora from what he had heard of her behavior at parties. She was always trying to reflect herself off flattering surfaces; Elizabeth had a story about her sister dragging a destitute man from his pallet on the street and parading him around a gala, introducing him as a cousin of the Kaiser. She would have looked like a goddess escorting a mortal to his own sacrifice. As an added benefit, Elizabeth pointed out, the others assumed it was the strange cousin who had arrived smelling like a distillery.
