by Amelia Gray
“My darling girl!”
“Mother, my dear Mother.” Isadora took her mother’s face in her hands and kissed her tenderly again and again on both cheeks. They held each other, weeping. The girls lay prostrate around them.
The rest of them watched from their seats. Paris shoved something into his valise, and before he closed the hasp, Elizabeth saw that it was a paper bag holding a baguette.
Max leaned over. “I don’t think she’s really crying,” he said in a whisper.
On closer inspection it seemed he was right; Isadora seemed to be only mirroring her mother’s expression, her open mouth trembling in the same precise way as she stroked the woman’s hair.
“We should go,” Elizabeth whispered back. She considered bringing Paris along but decided to leave him be.
Elizabeth and Max eased themselves from their chairs, waiting to see if anyone would notice. They left, holding hands.
It was cold outside, still snowing, but neither seemed to want to go back for their coats. Max put his arm around her as they walked.
They had almost reached the road when he doubled over, clutching his chest.
“What is it?” Elizabeth asked, alarmed.
She couldn’t tell at first, but soon it was clear; he was laughing. He made a few constipated snorts and tried to straighten up. For a moment he controlled himself, his shoulders shaking, before he gave up with a snort, pressing his hands to his knees. He laughed, pounding the snow. It looked as if he might collapse.
“My word!” she said. She had never seen him like this, and the sight of it mystified her. She glanced back at the school and was relieved to see that nobody had followed them out. Unsure of what else to do, she reached out and patted his back.
He howled, senseless. Tears streamed from his eyes, but he made no move to wipe them away. She waited while he got it all out, holding himself against one of the brick pillars bounding the property.
“What is it?” she asked at last.
“She thinks,” he said, gasping for air. “She thinks it is so easy.”
The charm of a second ice storm is lost on the group
After a week without newspapers we’ve resorted to reading the old editions aloud to one another, changing the names to try to keep some mystery about it. None of the boxes on the third floor held any books, and we found the library shelves were bare except for a heavy set of texts describing varied financial systems in foreign lands. Paris picked up Afghanistan-Andorra and excused himself to his office. He’s angry with me, of course.
This time the staff is trapped as well, and the cook has kept us all more or less happily alive with a series of indistinguishable meat pies. The girls and I can focus on a performance which will usher in the aforementioned new age. They anticipate such pleasure and love from their work that they beg me every morning to teach them more complex methods, as if I have been keeping a tumbling course from them. Irma seems particularly keen on perfecting herself and the others, which gives me a chance to relax and lean against the wall, the mirror a cool hand on my neck.
Right before the second storm, word came that Gaston Calmette was dead, killed by some awful woman. I wish I had paid him a visit the day I returned to France! My last memory of him will have to be of his kindness at the children’s service, where he kissed my hands and wished me peace again and again with such vigor it was as if he could brand me with the sentiment.
Calmette had been a gentleman of the finest sort. The woman shot him over some question of her own romantic life, the details of which nobody at all would even care about after a few boring afternoons listening to her go on about it. She had found him in his office—the very worst of all places!—and after it was done, she didn’t flee, but waited for the police to pick her up, wrapping the pistol in a square of white lace while the poor man bled and died. She must have thought herself very clever to bring the lace.
There was a long piece about it in the newspaper the morning of the storm, so now we’re stuck with the story. It has been torture to hear it again and again, and Elizabeth hasn’t made it any better with her morbid speculation about who came to clean the carpet and what menial tasks the doomed man might have been pursuing at the moment Death arrived for her appointment.
Mother attends my rehearsals, and though it was a happy diversion at first and a chance to show her all I’ve learned, her presence wears a little thin. At the very least, she’s agreed not to wear shoes in the room. She sits beside me in her stockings, holding her skirts off the polished floor as if the shine might muss them, and though her milky eyes can’t distinguish the actual girls from their reflections, she smiles cheerfully and nods to keep time with the piano, more or less.
“That’s quite well,” she says.
“They’re only warming up.”
“Eight lovely girls who each hold a piece of the same soul. What a blessing to have such sweet souls near.”
“Well, and there are six of them.”
“Such heart,” she says.
The child has begun to assert itself inside me with a ticklish feeling of soap bubbles bursting. Mother may not have seen it at the recital, but Elizabeth surely caught her up. Paris and I have settled into a situation in which he ignores me in favor of Antigua. Earlier we had a ripping fight about Ruthie Denis, that little snip from Newark who saw a tintype Cleopatra on a box of cigarettes and decided to model her entire career after it. Paris pointed out that I had an Oriental phase myself, and it was off to the races. It’s good to have him here to fight whenever I like.
“No time like the present,” I say. “Let’s get started. The polka, ladies.” The girls stop along with the pianist, a dull-looking German girl. They all stare with the same slack expression.
“Whats’it?” the little one asks.
“Don’t be impetuous.”
The little girl bursts into tears. She’s a sickly one and too delicate. Each of them is a lovely green thorn to me.
Enough of this! I start the piano up again. “Watch them,” I call back to Mother, who jerks her head in my direction, smiling.
* * *
Paris spends each morning in his office, a room set with old pieces. I recognize the carpet from the boat, something we kept on the bed on colder nights. The chaise from the old flat looks so comfortable that I fall onto it in a trance, listening to him complain about Elizabeth hoarding all the newspapers.
“Feeling a little tired?” he asks, startling me from the half sleep that could have lasted a minute or an hour. He’s wearing a tan suit belted at the waist and tall brown boots.
“You look like an archaeologist.”
“And what would I find in you, my dear?”
Stretching, I beckon him over. “Any number of things just below the surface.” Taking his hands, I press them to my belly, where he holds them for a moment before he gets my meaning.
“Of course,” he says. “Our love has led us to tragedy. My last goal was to create this school so that we might make some beauty on this sad earth for others.”
“That’s somewhat formal.”
“Are you aware,” he says, “of the funds I’ve put into the building alone? The underground plumbing was all rooted through, there was mold behind the kitchen walls. The whole place was bizarrely wired for electricity, a spider’s web of wires behind the plaster. Switching on a bathroom light could send the whole place up. You don’t save a second thought for the dangerous world, which puts these thoughts on the rest of us. And obviously you wouldn’t appreciate that rushing a retrofit in the cold season has been an incredible expense. The electrician is working his way through the attic right now, and you had better believe he’s charging by the hour day and night until the moment the path is cleared enough for me to kick him out. Last week I called on my contacts to enroll their daughters, but they were turned away, informed that you’re taking only six girls this year. How do you expect to turn a profit?”
He never loses his strange smile, as if financial ruin is thrilling f
or him. Of course, the money talk has its usual humiliating effect, but if he notices my shame he doesn’t attempt to ease it.
“And that’s all before I hire a single staff member beyond the skeleton crew,” he says. “None of the maids in this city will come to an interview for fear of a curse on their children. Everything has really spun out of control. That bastard Merz has the girls running the world’s fastest mile, your mother follows you around like a blind shadow, and I really do think your sister is sneaking laudanum into her room for how she’s behaving.”
“I would love to see you try to prepare a meal yourself.”
“Of course, it’s fine,” he says. “Do whatever you wish. You always have and always will. Only you have a hell of a way of showing gratitude.”
“You were done with me! I thought certainly I wouldn’t see you again—”
“Casting about Liguria like a bitch in heat—”
“—I wouldn’t see you again, and you would have cast me out for entertaining the thought of another child with you, so it can’t be helped that I went elsewhere. Also, it was Tuscany.”
“Do you remember Lillie’s eyes?” he asks.
That one sets me back. “Who the hell is Lillie?” There was a girl in Athens who made us each a crown of laurels and laughed like the villain she was when Paris consented to bow low enough so that she might pin it to his hair. She would have climbed onto his back the moment he offered his hand.
“Lillie,” he says, “my wife.”
His wife! Of whom he has not spoken unprompted in years, of course. A party guest mentioned her acquaintance once, and Paris turned the conversation to architecture so quickly that everyone assumed she had died, and a week later he found himself puzzling over a set of condolence cards from everyone in earshot.
Trying to recall Lillie’s eyes, I think of our first and only meeting, at a party before there was any weight between us.
“They are gray,” he says. “Like a dark sea.”
At the party, she plucked a grape from a vine decorating the bar and excused herself to the other side of the room to sit and eat it. “I remember them being rather blue.”
“I know the color of my own wife’s eyes.”
He must be readying himself to return to her in Florida, perhaps to take residence nearby, to begin courting her again in the respectful manner she would want and deserve; or maybe he only wants to remind me in insinuation of his living children, his girls, each as lovely and serious as her mother, four silent reminders of happier days. He has an easy avenue of escape while all I have are the little dancing plays I can fund with the last of my allowance.
“Go to your wife if you wish.”
“What are you talking about?”
I glare at the whites of his eyes.
“You think you can dismiss me,” he says. A slick of oily hair aggrandizes his ears. “I’ll remind you, this is my property.”
“This school bears my name, not yours. You may walk the grounds but the movement is mine. And I may occupy only one line in your obituary, but you will not appear in mine at all.”
That sneering smile. “You don’t suppose what will happen once I withdraw funding from this venture one month into its restoration?”
“I don’t need a building to house an idea.”
He sighs, returning to his desk. “Most women make an attempt to become more charming with age, Isadora. Did you consider that your own potential as an investment might not exactly appreciate over time?”
“I existed before you, and I will live long after your death. I will find new life for centuries to come!”
He picks up the finance book again. “Try not to be so predictable,” he says.
There’s nothing so promising as a chastening tone after a good bridgeburner. If he’s still telling me what to do, he has to care enough to do it.
“You should try harder to be interesting,” I say.
He grunts, turning the page.
“Darling,” I say, “I’m tired of fighting.”
“You’re tired of it.”
“Come here and kiss me. You’re so handsome and easy to get along with.”
“Stop it,” he says, but he puts down the book. “Don’t you have an afternoon class?”
“They’ll be all right, they’re afraid of Mother and the pianist is there too. Come and kiss me.”
“Wasting an afternoon is no way to build a legacy. You’ve already invested”—he glances at his watch—“twenty minutes into this argument alone, and for nothing.”
Hardly nothing! Rolling from the chaise, I find that the tendon has grown to bind my hips, wound tight from my spine. Crouching down, I rub the sore spot on my hip.
“You’re out of practice,” he says, offering his hand. He is most striking from above, a monolith of a man, a vertical field. “I would hope you would dance again for me sometime, if your condition can bear it.”
Taking his hands and pressing them onto my hip bones, I show him where to apply a massaging touch. I wonder if he could squeeze me tight enough to unhinge my bones from where they lock together like thick wooden puzzle pieces. Patrick as a baby would take great pleasure in gumming a puzzle piece before throwing it clear into another room and, crawling for it, would cry the whole distance he had made; I know the feeling.
Paris pulls me close. My body shifts in contrast to his, shoulders and arms arching forward. My hips bear up under, guided by his hand. He could change the very course of my blood, damming the channels here and forcing its flow there, sending life through switchback veins. I hold myself painfully against his thumbs, which push into me so firmly it’s as if he means to hook them into the scooping bone of my pelvis. If I were a mountain, he would set the drill to fix eyebolts for his hands and feet. I would shudder and drop a season of snow.
Releasing me, he turns away. “Tell your sister I need an invoice written for costuming and sundries.”
“If you could just—”
“Thank you, dear.” He’s done it on purpose! The awful man. He waves me off, work to be done.
But I’m obedient about it, thinking of the gift he has given me in simply staying, though later I recall that the storm has locked us all in. He couldn’t leave if he tried.
Paris watches her go, thinking of simpler biblical times and envying Job in the ash heap, his whole life around him a smoldering ruin
At least it would have been warm.
Isadora is surprised by Mother sitting patiently in the hallway, smiling at all who pass
“You should marry him,” she says, speaking in the blithely pleasant manner of the insane.
“I told you to stay in the rehearsal room.”
“He wants to support you.”
“Were you spying on us?”
“And he loves you, despite your tendencies and everything you’ve done to him.” She takes my offered arm and we walk together. “Think of it as a way to thank him for his service.”
“Mother, I am not a war. If anything I am a lighthouse, beaming a—”
“You are such a war that I’m surprised there isn’t a draft, but that’s not my point. Look at how unhappy your sister is. Her friend Max is more interested in training the girls to lift barrels over their heads than in making her the center of a happy home. Moreover, he’s pursuing the pianist. You two have it backward: a happy home lays the foundation for good work. And now she’s preoccupied with lucky fortune and you’ve come to think that readers of La Revue can change your life.”
“You’re saying it’s not possible?”
“If it were, your father would have dropped dead eating an ice-cream cone.”
The sound of footsteps pounding through a far hall must mean the girls have been released early. Turning away from the sound, I guide us toward her room. Mother will want a rest before dinner.
“The press has changed me.”
“The press makes too much of your affairs,” she says. “They comment on your physique and coloring like you’re a plucked he
n in a shopwindow. Do you enjoy that treatment? Do you think it enhances your legacy?”
“If only I had a simple old mother who would only pray for me.”
She laughs heartily. “I’ll pray to whatever god you like if you’ll keep a good tall man. I’m sure Paris would be happy to intimidate any reporter if you only let him. He told me so himself.”
“Could you stop consulting with him? I’m not a child.”
“You are my child, though. They say you’ve gained weight, you know, they speculate on your diet.”
“There’s plenty meat to go around.”
“And larger by the day,” she says firmly, flicking my stomach. “I only want them to adore you as much as you deserve to be adored.” At her bedroom door, she takes my hand. “Come and brush your mother’s hair.”
At her mirror, she removes the pins and bands and thin ribbons holding together her chignon, plucking each one out by memory and arranging the tiny arsenal on her dresser. Her hair eases out of its confinement and falls well past her shoulders. “It’s tender,” she says, handing me the cushion brush. “Now tell me, what do you think of Max? Don’t you agree he’s wasting her time?”
“I’ll miss you when you’ve gone home, I really will.”
“He’s a sneaky little man. I thought I was alone in the library for upward of ten minutes before I realized he was in there with me.” She grits her teeth as I work the brush through. “He was sitting in one of the high-backed chairs, staring straight ahead as if waiting to be called. Do you think he is mentally balanced?”
“Somewhere along the way he picked up the idea that he could alter my curriculum.”
“He wasn’t even reading a book, just gazing at the wall, a strange look on his face—oh, I said that’s tender—there’s something about him, don’t you think? All his funny ideas. I liked him at first but he wears on me now. If our family could be collected into one breathing body, he would be an extra thumb somebody tried to sew on near the wrist. It looked well enough for a time, but it’s not a healthy bond, and likely to infect.”
