6

Years later, whenever Isadora remembered her childhood, she would always refer to it as “the strange paradise.” It always irritated Duse to hear those words, to catch the way Isadora said them. Duse would snap at Isadora that there had been nothing strange about her early life in the least, that the only possible truth to that statement was probably the paradise part, and she wouldn’t listen when Isadora tried to disagree.

Isadora’s first memories were of the enchantment surrounding her mother. Every birthday Martin took several rolls of film, never snapping anything but Isadora, never letting anyone or anything else get into the frame. He developed all of the prints, even the blurred ones, and Duse hung them in the picture gallery, right beside her own. Duse threw Isadora parties, inviting everyone she could think of, and afterward, when everyone left, she would take those pale, freckled hands of Isadora’s and settle them into her lap, palm up. Isadora could really have her palm read anytime she wanted (she usually made Duse read it three times a week, right before she was tucked into bed, and whenever she fell, scraping some skin from her hands, she would worriedly race those marred hands to Duse to see if anything had changed, she would let Duse’s voice skim the worry from her own), but birthdays were special, those readings were textured with extra detail. Duse would let Isadora touch her starred palms, and she told Isadora, too, that Isadora probably inherited a star, that it would erupt one day, suddenly, unannounced. Sometimes when Isadora played with the neighborhood kids, she would take their hands clean out of their pockets and would pretend to be able to read their palms, her small pale face serious against their grins. She never saw how they giggled behind their sleeves at her, how they shied away from Duse when Duse tried to touch their sweaters to see if she could pick anything up on them—Isadora wouldn’t see any of that for a while yet.

Right from the start, Isadora wore outlandish outfits. Duse insisted that clothing expressed your sense of self, and even when Isadora was a baby, she let her choose her own clothing, bringing her up to the racks and letting her pat her hands against something. Duse didn’t care about price or colors mixing with colors or lengths; she never had anything altered. Other mothers always gave Isadora amused smiles—they talked about Duse among themselves—but other kids were envious of the bizarre colors, the costumy effects Isadora created. Martin, too, wasn’t worried. He always figured that soon enough Isadora would develop a sense of style, and in any case, clothing was never important to him.

Isadora saw how it was with Duse, how she was always touching things people wore, fingering their jewelry, stooping right in the street to pick up a crumpled Pepsi can and rub the shine of it with her fingers, with her eyes clamped shut. “What are you doing?” she said over and over, repeating it until Duse opened her eyes again and saw her daughter. “Objects have identities as much as people do,” Duse told her. “The only difference is that people simply are, but objects have to become, they have to get their identity from the people using them.” Isadora didn’t really understand, not then, but still, she liked to bring home things for Duse to do readings on. She would sit curled by Duse’s knees, listening to the stories, imagining the faces of the people concerned in her head. Sometimes she kept the object itself—she had a whole shelf of old cola cans, of scraps of material, of old book covers—and she would sometimes take them down and handle them, remembering their stories as if they were books. Duse gave her that sense of wonder about things; she would never be able to look at anything without knowing it had a history to it.

Even her own illnesses were sometimes magical. When she had fever and was delirious with pain and visions, Duse told her she was going out of her body, that she was visiting another plane, and it somehow comforted her.

Isadora remembered, too, Duse’s experimenting, how Duse would sit for hours in her rocker, eyes closed, fingers closed around an object. She’d slow her breathing down, she’d become so motionless that she wouldn’t start when the phone suddenly rang, she wouldn’t rise to stop the sharp rapping of someone on their front door. Even the pressure of Isadora’s own hand wouldn’t seem to wake her up, to open those eyes of hers.

Isadora got used to seeing Duse that way; Martin, she knew, was ruefully amused, because when he told Duse she was putting herself into hypnotic trance, she just looked at him blankly and then said that no, it wasn’t the same thing at all, what she did was quite different, something completely her own. As Isadora got a little older, she knew to leave Duse alone when she sat in her rocker, but still, Isadora liked sitting beside her mother, just watching, all the time feeling as though she was on the edges of something very wonderful.

She was only frightened once. Duse suddenly began to speak, but the voice coming out of her was garbled, not her own, and her eyes remained shut. Isadora bolted upright, her feet skittering on the slippery patches of bare floor. Isadora watched Duse, but when Duse’s hands started moving, forming shapes from the air, Isadora pushed right out of that room. She stood against the far wall and clapped her hands to her ears so she wouldn’t hear. She didn’t come back until she heard Duse’s startled voice asking for an aspirin. “My head,” said Duse.

Duse wouldn’t believe Isadora when she heard what had happened, she was upset at what she felt was a lack of control. Duse immediately wrote Olya, who wrote back that it sounded like a spirit had come through Duse, and that such a thing was a gold mine. She invited Duse to come back to work, she offered to pay her train fare, to pay for her baby to come along with her. “Anything, anything,” Olya wrote. “I could double my clientele in two days.” Olya said she had only known one medium herself, a very old woman in Russia, who used to bring back the spirits of the dead. Sometimes, too, loose spirits—spirits who wandered the earth—came through her, just to talk. “Not that I believe any of it,” Olya wrote.

Duse didn’t know if she believed it either, but she didn’t like the idea of someone else using her. She didn’t tell Martin, and for a while she wouldn’t put herself into a trance state, she sometimes tried to do readings on objects just by touch, and when she failed, she let it go for a week or so. In all, she would wait two months, and when nothing came through her again, she began sitting in her rocker again, her fingers pulled around a sweater, a book, a keyring. She continued to watch her palm.

Duse always made Isadora feel that both of them were somehow different from everyone else, somehow special, protected. She kept tracing out her stars for Isadora, calling them vaccines. “Like a disease?” Isadora wanted to know.

Duse laughed. “Baby, it’s to protect you from being swallowed right up. The only sickness is being like everyone in the world.”

It wasn’t a thing to tell a child. Isadora had no reason to doubt anything Duse told her; in fact, she was always trying to remember everything Duse ever told her, as if those words were a passkey into the secret world Duse seemed to inhabit, as if they would give Isadora passage, too. She couldn’t stop thinking about the vaccine; she carried it inside her head right up into fourth grade when she had to line up with the other children to drink a paper cup of sweet polio vaccine, a solution grainy with sugar. She had refused, had clamped her mouth shut against it. She wanted Duse’s vaccine, not this. The school nurse scolded her and asked her roughly if she was always this much of a baby, and then she tilted the paper cup up to Isadora’s mouth herself, she tipped Isadora’s head back. Isadora spat what she could on the floor.

She was sent home with a note. “Leave it go then,” Martin said, sighing. “We’ll take her to a private doctor. She was probably just embarrassed or something.”

“I wasn’t,” Isadora said.

“You have to have it,” Martin said. “You don’t want polio, do you? You want to stay healthy.”

“I want her vaccine,” Isadora said, looking to Duse.

“What?” said Martin, his face baffled. “What are you talking about?”

Duse narrowed her eyes at Isadora. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s part of my vaccine.” When Martin continued to look baffled, she laughed at him, she said that he was to trust her too, that she would fix everything.

Isadora drank the sugary vaccine at a private doctor’s. But it wasn’t really over, not yet anyway. When Isadora ran a high fever later that year, Duse began to doubt the vaccine herself. She lay Isadora across a rubber sheet and packed her in ice cubes, trying to cool the heat in that body. She sat for hours by the bed, sometimes putting herself into a trance and placing her hands right on Isadora’s chilled skin, trying to get a reading. She held Isadora’s hands in her own, searching the lines, plumbing them just as if they had depths.

It was Martin who took Isadora to the doctor. The doctor was evasive; all Duse heard was that the doctor was going to help Isadora. Martin heard the words “spinal tap,” but he heard, too, that it was a way to make sure Isadora didn’t have polio, that she was safe.

The two of them waited while the doctor led Isadora into the other room. She was still feverish and cranky and she didn’t like the limp moist palm of the doctor. He perched her up on a black leather table and asked her quite solemnly if she liked fishing. She shrugged, but he really didn’t seem to care one way or the other about what she did or didn’t like, he said that fishing was exactly what they were both going to do. He helped her undress and then he draped a white cloth about her body. “Lie on your belly now,” he told her. She stretched out and shut her eyes, she waited for the briny smell of the sea to slick up into her nostrils, for the fish to flap up against her, when the doctor shouted that he had a bite. She felt something piercing her, stinging down into her spine. “Jellyfish!” she cried out, but he ignored her, he kept shouting that he was pulling a big one in now, and that it was really a whopper, with a gleam of teeth, just like kitchen knives, he said. Isadora screamed and tried to wrench herself free of him, but his hands were on her, pressing her face down into the leather so that the air she took in was filled with it.

When he was finished, he turned her over and helped her sit up. “Where’s the fish?” she said, swiping at her tears. The doctor shook his head. “Too small,” he said. “Had to throw that thing right back into the sea.” She stared at him. When he took her outside, she wouldn’t look at Duse and she tried to weakly fight them when they put her coat about her shoulders.

She was half listening, but when she heard them talking about the polio vaccine, about the spinal tap procedure, she stiffened. She was suddenly infuriated that they hadn’t told her the truth. She was nine; that wasn’t so young, she could have been told. She would have preferred knowing about what they were doing, would have even wanted to see that needle before it was thrust into her, deep, touching parts of her that she herself couldn’t reach.

“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 couldn’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.