by Amelia Gray
“Paris might feel himself in the same position.”
“That man is bound to us with stronger stuff, Patrick saw to that.”
It’s strange to hear her say his name. “I’m sorry you never got to meet the children, Mother.”
She starts to cry a little but sees my strange expression and stops, touching my hand. We stay like that awhile, looking at ourselves in the mirror.
“Did I tell you about Elias, my dear friend back in Oakland?” she asks. “A fine man, a man of science. Every year he runs an auxiliary luncheon that funds the school for the entire year, and then he dresses up as Santa Claus and gives out gifts, sometimes during Christmas but sometimes in the middle of July, just for fun. And everyone does laugh!” She goes on like this for a while as I brush and plait her hair. “He reminds me of Paris. A kind man and well read. You owe quite a debt to Paris in the literal sense, in cash I mean.”
She must hope against reason that Paris is the father of this child. I consider the many and varied ways I might correct her. I could start with the story of the moment of conception, stripping to the waist to act the scene out. Elizabeth could come and play the part of the bathing machine.
“I went swimming every day in Viareggio,” I begin, working a strip of velvet through her hair. “It was a morning ritual.”
“Too cold,” she grumbles, as if she’s put one toe in the Mediterranean since her honeymoon forty years ago.
“I liked it, though. I met such fascinating people. One man in particular—”
“I found Viareggio to be very dull, and the shops were all closed. Of course, we were there in November, because your father wanted to save on the passage.”
“There was a real community of artists. Eleonora says the painters enjoy a special kind of light that comes off the water. And there is such a sentimental feel to the region. They cremated Shelley on the beach, you know. And there was one man—”
“How awful!” she says, reaching back to check my work. “A bonfire dirtying the sand. You always did have a knack for finding the least romantic image. Listen, I’ll tell you about romance: picture your tall, handsome father walking down the passeggiata in Viareggio.”
“Mother—”
“He would step the length of a lesser man with every stride.” She dries her tears with her own braid, which makes me see her first as a young married woman and then as a child, then as a baby placed on a parcel of dried grass on her daddy’s land, the world a marble blur to her infant eyes. “Poor Shelley, though,” she says. “Poor Shelley!”
Romano Romanelli
cura di Raffaello Romanelli
Viale Alfredo Belluomini, Toscana
R—
How can I put this delicately? Isadora is suffering from a condition she picked up on the road that will show its symptoms for a few more months before depositing a tumor on the rest of us to raise. She has been very vague about her season after Greece but Penelope writes to report she converted a suite at the Pera Palace into her personal harem. I know that otherwise she’s been running around with Duse, in Florence last I knew, and good riddance to them all.
I’d like to start showing myself a better time. I paid my own fare to the Jardin des Plantes first, in which they have a lovely series of animal exhibits. The girls are all saving their pocket money for the promised tour and said they would come with me only if I paid their way, a trick they must have learned from my sister, which didn’t work on me. Max said he was too tired, I can’t take Mother anywhere, and Paris has locked himself in the library. They’re all a fantastic disappointment, but I decided I would still like to go and be my own best company.
It was a jungle scene at the Jardin des Plantes, kept very warm with torches. I saw glass-walled houses of great blooming trees fawning to the floor and rows of flowers I could never have imagined even if I were given a trunk of colored pencils and a long weekend.
The animal enclosures were even more fascinating. At the center of the park is a series of great walled pits, and in each pit, an animal stalks the ground: a black bear or buffalo with his snout in a trough, a pair of lions, a tiger. All in separate pits of course, or else they would have all torn each other to pieces. I can think of a great many political events that could have found rousing success from this method.
I spent most of my time watching a great-maned lion, in a pit broader and more deep than the others and surrounded by heavy iron bars. Though I stood in a large crowd of ladies and gentlemen a few meters above him, he kept his eyes trained on mine. The creature paced, fixed on me all the while, making his displeasure known with roaring that vibrated the bars I clutched.
Standing over him, I felt an insane urge; I wanted to climb over the gate and drop down into the pen with him, to take his mane up in my fists and hold him before he slaughtered me and feasted on my body. They might write about me in the paper and some mild woman would lose her appetite over breakfast. In a thrilling moment, I knew my life’s true purpose.
A policeman standing by mistook my desire for trepidation and assured me that the lion’s teeth had been removed long ago, and even if he got hold of me, his jaws would only gum and suckle like a cub. I burst into tears and the officer turned and walked away, satisfied. Life will defeat us all!
* * *
Elizabeth folded and sealed the letter and addressed it in her wavering script before tucking it into the stack with the others. None of her letters to Romano had come out quite right, and she decided to wait until she had precisely expressed herself before making her thoughts official by mail. It had been almost a year since she last saw him, and she certainly wouldn’t send anything less than the best.
Isadora entered as she was putting away her supplies. “You would not believe,” she said, her eyes darting strangely about the room.
“Believe what?”
“Oh, only Mother.” She waved it off. “I meant to read the paper, but Paris said you had them all.”
Elizabeth pointed to her bedside table, where the whole collection was stacked, a month’s worth, with extras on the floor.
Isadora picked one from the top of the stack. “Have you memorized all the rapes and murders?”
“Some of us would like to have a fuller sense of life than what we experience firsthand. The fact that it’s mostly horrors is tangential.”
“It all makes for a fine distraction, I’m sure.” She tossed the page onto the bed. “Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking. We’ve spent so many years together, and countless hours of labor. We manage a business, and both of us contribute equally. Isn’t it time to call a truce and allow a friendship to grow between us?”
“I wasn’t aware we had been feuding,” Elizabeth said, trying to sound casual. Was her sister accusing her of some betrayal or questioning her commitment to the school, or was there some other complaint, far more insidious? There was no way to know the angle Isadora would take in an attack, and this idea of truce was a new strategy, one she didn’t know how to defend against.
“I’m extending an olive branch. All my life you’ve been older and wiser, and in my own way I’ve always followed your lead.”
“Mother must have really worked you over.”
Isadora didn’t respond. She was standing over the desk, flipping through the envelopes addressed to Romano and the humiliating drafting pages underneath.
“Romano,” she said vaguely.
Elizabeth held back the impulse to run to the desk and throw herself over the letters, an action that would only implicate her further.
“Yes,” she said. “Actually, you’re right. Let’s be dear friends.”
Her sister looked up. “Something is changing.”
“What’s changing? What are you talking about?”
But Isadora left without another word, walking briskly in a way that struck Elizabeth as very uncharacteristic, seeing as how she never seemed to care if she was late for an appointment. It was only after she left that Elizabeth realized she had walked out with the most recent l
etter to Romano, as if it were her own.
Isadora loses her temper with the girls
The worst thing is their preoccupation with their own bodies in the mirror. Irma looks as if she is plotting out her memoirs, and the others skip from one side of the room to the other, not even skipping in the right way, putting all the weight on their heels as they stare at themselves. The silly ribbons they’ve wrapped around their wrists and ankles make them look like marionettes clipped from their strings.
I have to knock on the piano lid to get their attention, rousing the pianist from her nap.
“Focus! Nobody will pay to see six girls playing pretend onstage when they can look out their windows and get the same show for free. You are tasked with sensing and describing with your bodies the very future of the world. Gather round, I have a new lesson for you.
“A mother dies of sadness. The only proper way to understand it requires a long evening, after six hours on the floor, a bottle of wine tethering each hand to reality. But I will do my best to give you the sense of it regardless. Fraulein?”
The pianist looks up from her gloved hands, which have been resting in her lap.
“Play ‘Death of Ase.’”
“We’re not doing the Schubert?”
“‘Death of Ase,’ Fraulein.”
“Which key?” she asks. I can already picture her waiting to board the train back to Darmstadt, looking at her cheap watch, a costume piece fashioned after a Moser and affixed on dyed pasteboard.
“I don’t care which key, the original key.”
She watches as I crouch and then sit, then lie flat against the floor.
“The original key is C minor,” she says once I’m settled.
“Nice and slow, please.”
She begins the movement. From a flat back I roll to one side, lifting my spine bone by bone and twisting subtle against the ground, as slow as the movement of the earth itself. At the fourth phrase from the end, my cheek presses to the ground. As the next phrase opens, I release the tension in my body, allowing it to move subtly closer to the floor. Breathing out, I find an utter stillness for the last two notes—an ominous sound, the very last on earth.
The piano’s hammers thump as she lifts her foot off the pedal. We take residence in the blank silence that follows, until someone sighs and the moment is over. I open my eyes and see with satisfaction that the pianist is crying; this will serve as my lesson to the girls.
“Listen well, all of you.” I address them still resting on my side. “In order to express grief, you have to physically enter the emotion. One way in is to recall some moment of loss from the past, but such a tactic only produces a result the size of your body, and nobody more than ten feet away will feel it. In order to affect the room, therefore, you must seek out the grief in the room and draw it into your body. It won’t destroy anyone else until it threatens to destroy you. Your audience should be made afraid, they should wonder on the walk home whether they have been drugged and transported to a foreign land. This”—here I point to the pianist, who removes her gloves to wipe her eyes, humiliated—“is the purest experience of art, and it is your only goal.”
Irma raises her hand but lowers it without asking a question.
“In order to understand the greatest joys of life, you must do more than open yourself to its greatest sorrows,” I say, “you must invite it to join you in your home and beguile it to stay. You can live well enough, strolling by the shopwindows of grief and going in before the rain. But you will never know the true beauty and brutality of life, and you cannot be a true artist.
“If I were your mother, I would want to shield you from these things. But as your teacher, I want you to experience it all. Protecting you would be doing you a disservice, and you would grow to hate the protection I tried to give you out of love. Do you understand?”
The girls sway like tethered airships. “May I use the restroom?” one of them asks, the one without good sense.
“You needn’t ask. Do you need to be shown the way?” After she goes, I turn to the rest. “I will bear us a child,” I say. “When I was beaten down by the waves, a man came to me and together we made a child, a son. My body is nothing less than an act of faith in the loving world. You will care for this child as your own, for he will be your very own; I have created him as a gift to our movement. Through him you will come to know the joy and agony of motherhood as I have known it. You will meet in flesh the new era set to burst over these dark and ordered days. Even now I can feel it building. Come, approach me.”
They queue up to receive a kiss on each cheek. As I hold each of them in turn, I finally come to know them. These girls are precious to me: born in this century to die in the same, these are the girls who will dance at my funeral. These little ones will carry my message to every part of the world.
The gentlemen enjoy an argument
“Well now, that’s too much,” Max said, but when he looked up to remark further to the group, he found that only Paris remained in the library. Max had been so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t notice that the women had gone up to bed. Paris looked up, waiting to hear what was supposedly too much, in order to speculate on what could be done about it.
Max would have preferred to have a larger audience, but the other man was waiting patiently, and so he continued, annoyed. “It says here that the gale last week in Lyon destroyed aircraft hangars worth eighty thousand pounds. What is that in marks? That can’t be right.”
“Hangars are an incredibly expensive proposition,” Paris said, closing the book he was reading without marking the page. “I happen to be an expert.”
Max settled uneasily in the chair and accepted the teacup presented to him by the butler Paris had hired that morning; a large, silent man who returned to his position by the window.
“Consider your standard barn-size object,” Paris said. “Simple enough, yes? But this is no standard structure. First, you must make all of it using steel, which should be double- or triple-layered to prevent and control moisture. That’s going to be heavy, and will require bracing and support strong enough to bear the weight, along with specialized bracing. The roof needs to be layered and insulated, and that doesn’t even take into account the ingress, which will be a nonstandard height and placed on casters, like this.” He set down his scotch so he could demonstrate with two hands. “Then of course, if you’re keeping more than one craft, you’re dealing with an additional expense in expanding both your ingress and your floor plan. At that point it’s almost simpler to build a second hangar, and then you have multiple pieces of property and multiple contractors, most of whom have to be trained. So then, naturally, the structures themselves are divorced of any binding logic. They take on individual personalities.”
Max considered taking on another personality to stop the man’s speech. He couldn’t decide if it would feel more natural to interrupt with political conjecture or to stand and run from the room.
“Distinctive characteristics,” Paris said. “And plenty can go wrong. One has walls that sweat in the cold, and the other harbors ants that will destroy your instruments. And you have to keep up with all of this, or else you risk the loss of your larger investment, the aeroplane itself, which has its own troubles—”
Max held up his teaspoon as if to interject, but there was nothing he could possibly add. He tried to remain engaged as Paris launched into a history of industrial construction along with a colorful sidebar on the labor habits of the residents of Paignton.
“Have you toured the field at Johannisthal?” Paris asked at last, and Max was so distracted by his own boredom that he almost missed the question.
“I have not,” he said, just in time.
“You really should. It’s fascinating. Unparalleled construction and workmanship.”
“I haven’t spent much time in Berlin.”
Paris moved his head and neck in a way that made him look rather like a startled bird. “Why, it’s the jewel of your empire,” he said. “I h
ave to admit I didn’t quite understand Berlin myself at first, but a fellow convinced me to pay a visit to the Wertheim department store near the Potsdamer Platz before I made any decision.
“I arrived on a Thursday afternoon to find a temple to commerce, pardon my sacrilege, strung with pneumatic tubes and dressed for the Christmas season as a gold-gilt fairy kingdom. The very sight of it immediately expanded the bounds of my imagination, doubled it at least. I passed many pleasant hours in the winter garden and bought a few things here and there for my girls. This was when I was a younger man, you see.” He narrowed his eyes, as if the younger man in question might be leaning against the far wall. “They had an extravagant display devoted to our sewing machines, with a seamstress there assembling a gown from scraps of fabric, a patchwork of silver and silk. It was something else entirely. I asked my host to sketch the seamstress and went off to wait. Hours later I woke in a display of feather coverlets. It was embarrassing, but the man they sent to watch me assured me it happened all the time. I bought him a pint, good man. He had a wife in Rostock.”
“You’re saying, your opinion on the entirety of Berlin is derived from a department store.”
Paris took up his scotch. “It is no small feat to work in the retail sector, you know. You have to romanticize for people the act of buying fine things. Not the things themselves, but the act of purchase. Very tricky indeed. It requires the invention of desire and the placement of that desire in physical bounds. It’s very difficult to reliably house desire. It requires serious work, particularly during the Christmas season.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t much care for Berlin,” Max said.
“Now I doubt that sincerely. Other than the Zionists, I found it to be a deeply inclusive and modern place.” He had the easy assurance of a wealthy man. Max couldn’t place it in the moment, but he realized later, while draping his socks over the radiator to warm them before bed, that Paris had the same tone of voice of a certain boy Max remembered from school who would recite his multiplication tables while administering beatings behind the gymnasium.