DORA

Dora stands outside Luiza’s bedroom, her hand hovering over the door handle. It’s only noon and somehow the maids have nearly finished all the preparations for tonight’s cocktail party, so she feels like she should try to accomplish something before the guests arrive. Will anyone think it’s too soon, she worries, just a little over a week after Luiza’s ceremony? But she and Hugo have held this party to kick off Carnival every year since they were married, and this will be the last one. Of course, with so many things already packed, the house won’t look nearly as lovely as it had for the goodbye party they threw last year, when their house was still a real house with everything in it, and there were flowers everywhere and Luiza was still here.

But the house is tidy, at least. It’s good enough. Except for this one room. Dora closes her hand on the knob now, determined. It’s up to her to sort through all her daughter’s things and decide what to keep. Every little barrette and postcard from a friend, all her books and journals, those pages and pages she used to write. (Unkind thoughts about her mother?) Each thing touched by her, smelling of her. It will take hours, of course—does she really have enough time to make any progress today? But it’s too much to ask of the maids, and Hugo would want to keep everything. It has to be her. Without warning, Dora’s hand falls to her side, her remaining energy smothered by thoughts of everything she still has to do in preparation for the move.

There were once practical reasons for why they had to leave. Rational reasons. Hugo had condemned the way President Kubitschek spent like a madman. New industry, new roads, new city blocks. New city. But soon, her husband predicted, the money would run out, inflation would rise sharply, the Brazilian currency would become worthless. And now, a new president, Goulart—practically a communist! So officially, they are moving to avoid the impending collapse of the Brazilian economy; they want to be closer to Hugo’s family, have the girls get to know their grandparents. Unofficially, they have no choice—they can no longer afford Hugo’s treatment if they stay. Florida was a choice. A terrible one in hindsight—but how could they have known? Officially, there are better facilities in Canada, and talk of free health care. Unofficially, everything in this house is coated with the residue of what little their daughter left behind.

She can’t put it off any longer. She reaches for the handle again, and the door opens now, though not by her. The unseen hand of a ghost? Please, yes—come back to me. No, a real hand. A fat, brown hand. The door creeps open and then Maricota is coming out of Luiza’s room slowly and carefully, her eyes trained on her feet, as though the very act of staring down at them can stifle any noise she might make.

‘O que você está fazendo aqui?’

The maid jumps a little and pats at her pockets without thinking, immediately betraying herself. ‘Nada. Não estou fazendo nada, Dona Dora. I am cleaning because you have to be packed soon.’

‘O que você tem nas mãos?’

‘Nada.’

‘What were you doing in her room? What do you have?’ Dora means to be encouraging, to show that she trusts Maricota to have a good reason for being in her daughter’s room, but she cringes at her ugly tone. She extends her open hand as slowly and calmly as she can manage. ‘Me dá, por favor.’

Maricota places into Dora’s palm a rosary, a bracelet, a pair of kid gloves. Sentimental things—cheap things. There are far more valuable items she could have taken.

‘Por que?’

‘To remember. Something to remember her by when you leave. We are all so sad,’ answers Maricota without meeting Dora’s eye.

‘You know I would have been happy to give you these things,’ she says to this woman who has been with the family since Luiza was a baby. ‘Why are you sneaking around?’ Dora feels almost ashamed to ask her these questions, as though it’s a betrayal of Maricota’s privacy, of her private relationship with Luiza. The daughter who they both know was more the maid’s than the mother’s.

‘My mother has a shrine for her, at home. We put candles and flowers and photographs, and I want to make her spirit peaceful. I need something of hers and I know you don’t believe in these things.’

But Dora wishes she did, wishes she could light some candles and arrange a few objects and believe she could be allowed something like peace. She takes Maricota’s hands in her own. ‘I still would have given them to you. You know that.’

Maricota lowers her head and says nothing, and Dora doesn’t have the patience right now to keep scrutinizing so she changes the subject. ‘Have you heard back from everyone about the party tonight?’

‘Sim, Dona Dora.’

‘Good. Obrigada.’ Dora watches Maricota walk away, back bent with deference. Or is it pity? A kind of regretful disappointment in Dora from this so-called servant who wept openly when she learned the family was moving because, she said, she loves them so much it hurts. Or maybe it’s really because Maricota has another woman’s insufficiencies to atone for.

But enough of remorse, recriminations. Dora shivers as she turns away from Luiza’s bedroom, trying to shake off the draining gravity of everything to come—the parties and the goodbyes. The last transcribed over everything she imagines. She can’t deal with Luiza’s bedroom today when there’s so much else to do.

She knows she should be getting dressed but instead walks downstairs, where she mixes herself a gin and tonic. As she takes a sip of her drink, she’s careful to avoid her reflection in the windows. She dreads looking in the mirror these days, where the once-fine lines have etched themselves deeply around her downturned mouth. The only way to hide them is to smile. Half their things are still missing, just as they have been this past year. Although they were only days away from leaving Brazil last year, she had insisted they keep the house exactly as it had always been right up until the day of the goodbye party, and only afterwards could the packing and dismantling begin. The next day, Luiza took the girls to the beach to get them out of the house while the adults packed and movers came to take the first, non-essential things away. But then Luiza vanished and everything stopped. The house was frozen for weeks in its half-packed state as they searched and held their breath and waited for news. Over the months that followed, some effort was made to put things back as they were; the maids redecorated with what was at hand in nearby boxes. But some things had already been sent ahead to Canada, leaving ghostly spaces throughout the house: the set of lacquered Chinese tables that fit inside one another in descending size like nesting boxes; the brass sculpture of a stern horse that reminded her of Magda; the rosewood sideboard and all the pretty matching teacups and saucers it held. These were all now sitting in a warehouse in Toronto.

She must really get ready for the party, because the guests will be arriving soon. Because it’s been almost a year since Luiza disappeared and everyone says life must go on. Because they want things to seem normal for the girls. Because their friends insisted. Because it’s what they’ve always done and they don’t know what else to do. No one has told them what to do. Tonight they’ll sing songs and try to laugh. Maybe she’ll dance with Williamson (the best-looking of the husbands after Hugo), briefly forget the coming move to Canada, and feel not unhappy for a little while. But the moment will be brief and she won’t be able to retrieve it. And then still more parties to come: tonight they’ll go on to Cassino da Urca, and then on Tuesday, the night before Lent, the ball at the Municipal Theatre. Then, in two weeks, one last night at the Copacabana, the official goodbye. Because they promised. Because she has to.

She takes her drink outside and sits on the veranda, where Hugo is asleep. He hasn’t been sleeping well—she heard him up walking the halls these past few nights. She still can’t shake the sense that she has exposed herself in some irreparable way in front of Maricota, and she’s momentarily glad they are leaving—and leaving the maids behind—so that all her shame, her weaknesses, will be hers alone and unwitnessed by those who are better at love. She hasn’t yet bought Evie and Magda new socks for the trip, or mailed the cheque to the school in Canada. She hasn’t learned how to cook or clean properly, or sew little dresses for the girls’ dolls, which they’re getting too big to play with anyway. She’d meant to. The truth is, she’ll be lost without the maids. Our Help, she once wrote on the back of a picture of them holding Evie and Magda in front of the house. Worth their weight in gold.

And as though she conjured them, Dora now hears the girls’ shrill, agitated voices bickering away long before she sees them. She watches them clamber up the embankment through the tiny flower-petal holes in the straw hat she has pulled down over her face. They are sunburned and filthy, their small eyes—bent toward her now—are intense and darting like their father’s. Eyes incapable of stillness, always expectant and demanding something of someone—usually her. Evie’s full of longing; Magda’s full of reproach, because she thinks Dora doesn’t notice her own daughters coming in an hour later than they were meant to. But she sees them. Sees them taking out the croquet game, knowing full well there was a time when the threat of mallets or balls near the windows would have sent her shouting, when they were expected to inhabit the margins, to play far enough away from the adults that they could be gazed upon from a distance: a happy, tranquil domestic scene. She often hasn’t had the patience for all their exuberant clatter, the intrusion of their physicality, their bodily needs. But right now Dora finds their energy reassuring, a sign that they are still intact. And insistently, guilelessly alive.

Evie and Magda begin to wrestle for the only green mallet, which Magda argues should be hers, even though green has always been Evie’s colour. Magda is ferocious, unrelenting. With Evie she’ll never give in, and yet with some people she’s the softest among them. She always gives money to beggars asking for alms because she empathizes with the maids and says she’s embarrassed by all that the family has. Once, Magda actually scolded her parents for being spoiled, so Hugo half-heartedly spanked her as punishment. Of course she forgave him but never Dora because the child knew the punishment was at her mother’s urging. There have been no spankings lately, no punishments of any sort. And though Dora still sometimes yells, she apologizes immediately afterwards, implicitly begging their forgiveness. Has it taken Luiza’s death to make her into the kind of mother her other children could like? Maybe they’ll love her better soon, in Canada, unfettered and alone. And there goes Magda screaming after Evie with a mallet. Hugo doesn’t stir. She should really get up and stop them.

Now Evie clutches her mallet with both hands while Magda tries to wrench it away.

Darlings, please don’t quarrel over such silly things.

But they don’t answer, don’t even turn their faces toward her. They continue playing their game. Because they haven’t heard? Or because she hasn’t said it? These days, she keeps catching herself talking to someone in her mind, pleading for little mercies, and apologizing too. For what’s been lost, for what she’s failed to save. Gone are their sweet, daily rituals, their family habits and pilgrimages. The girls in their tidy, pressed school uniforms feeding scraps to the birds, the trips to Ipanema to visit her parents and to their little summer house in Petrópolis, outside the city. Trips to church with the maids, where she imagined they found—as she had once—warmth from a peripheral god. All the things that shape a child’s life, make them believe that the world is safe and predictable. She catches herself promising to no one in particular—to them she supposes, or her not-God—that they first just have to do this one thing, just get there, and then things can go back to how they were before everything changed. But things have been changing for so long, which point on the chronological line of their lives is really before? And what was it like?

Yes. There was a before. She looks again at Hugo and thinks of that pristine and hopeful time when they glowed and were beautiful—in all the old pictures, they wore nothing but white. Once, they went up into the sky together. She can’t quite remember now how they had ended up in the balloon with his colleague, an engineer and sometimes hot air balloon pilot. It was in those early, heady days when it seemed like Hugo could do anything, and convince her to come along. Sometimes that meant they ended up in a scandalous club with cracked plaster in Lapa, sitting on the bent knees of cross-dressers, everyone reeking of cachaça, though she’d sworn she’d never go to such a place. But that day it meant holding her hands over her ears as a large stainless steel fan filled the silk of a giant balloon with air. He kept saying how beautiful it would all be: gliding away from the earth with no sense of elevation or even movement, just the shrinking of the world beneath you. This was how he liked to seduce her, impress her, dazzle her: with new worlds. Things she had never seen. It was, at that point, still thrilling. Not yet exhausting.

‘Think of it,’ he kept saying. ‘This is how we have our first accounts of what industrial Victorian cities looked like, what the Civil War battlefields looked like. We take it for granted, but before airplanes, they couldn’t have known. These balloons changed the world, helped incite the French Revolution.’

And he told her that balloons were, by their nature, democratic because for the first time there was a spectacle in which no authorities could intercede, that ascension could not be sequestered for the private, privileged few. It belonged to the many. For the first launch, rather than risk human lives, they sent up a duck, a chicken, and a goat from Versailles and more than a hundred thousand people watched. And when that famous citizen balloonist, the physician Pilâtre de Rozier, launched himself into the air only to have his balloon swallowed by blue flames, he shattered on the rocks of Croy.

‘Fifteen hundred feet, he fell. A foot separated from a leg. He swam in his own blood, I read.’ As de Rozier’s balloon came down, the gathered crowd reached up, extended their arms, as though by this involuntary movement they could, as one, halt the fall, push him back into the sky. Here Hugo’s monologue slowed and he looked at her, rapt by the images he had summoned. ‘He died so that we could experience this, so the populace could gather, spontaneous, ennobled, witnessing en masse a republic foretold.’

How beguiling these dense stories were to her then; his excitement and bravado punctuated by moments of fleeting but such earnest empathy. How large and capable and fearless he had once seemed to her. All his knowledge, the warmth of him, of his convulsing mind, radiating outward—his great strength, his muscles contracted and taut beneath her as he lifted her easily, pulled her up onto his lap, onto dance floors. So many expansive ideas, so much knowledge compressing inside him. Everyone was falling in love with him—her parents, her friends, waiters at the casinos, Bola de Nieve, the deviants of Lapa. The wayward and the divine. All eyes turned toward him and he seemed to emit a low blue light that sometimes flared, sometimes even threatened… not violence, but turbulence, rapid shifts in emotion. When had she realized that there was something more, something corroding his magnetic charm? Not then. Not when he danced one night with a mestiço man in a dress, all thin red limbs and thick, painted lips, then wept on his shoulder at the bar. He later told Dora that it was merely an act of compassion, and that he sometimes cried to disarm those around him so they might trust and feel connected to him.

‘Isn’t that a lie?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is a kindness. They feel less alone, less peculiar.’

And she, too, after enough drinks, enjoyed the company of misfits.

But as the balloon filled with air that day more than twenty years ago, she fell silent and thought how loud the fan was and how long it took for the fabric to inflate, and how everything being tipped on its side—the basket, the balloon—gave the impression of haphazardness, and all the many ropes appeared to be tangled as they trembled in the wind, and surely it wasn’t safe the way the pilot kept wandering into the balloon, trampling on its altogether too-thin skin that would lift them into the atmosphere. And as Hugo gently pushed her forward, she could not bear to walk in, to further bruise the fabric. So they watched from the threshold, shoes in the damp grass, and he said how it resembled stained glass, the fabric billowing and translucent, the rising sun bleeding in from behind; and she thought how that was true and how beautifully he always put things. Flames propelled into the centre of the balloon through a narrow opening, licking maliciously at nothing. She thought for a moment of the Hindenburg on fire. How did the fabric not ignite? Tipped upright, the balloon was a fat upside-down tear shivering around a blue flame. She allowed Hugo to help lift her into the basket, but when she asked how they would come down and he answered that there was an anchor on board, she grimaced. He held each of her arms and brought his face down to hers and said, ‘If you really don’t want to go, we won’t.’ She was struck once again by the size and the strength of him, towering over her—Six-foot-four? Six-foot-five? She was too embarrassed to ask. Her father had been a slight man and she had no brothers—she’d never been so close to such a large, strong man, and the force of his body and his words seemed to physically repel the possibility of disaster.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

It was true what he’d told her—there was no bumping along the ground or feeling of surging suddenly, violently upward. Just a gliding, and the falling away of the earth, the shrinking of relative distance, and the disorienting knowledge that they were leaving the ground without feeling any movement. Gas roared above them, releasing and burning at intervals. His arms around her vibrated, giving off heat, and she thought about how the songs were all wrong: you do not fall. In love, you are aloft. Lifted away.

They have a photograph from that day, after they landed, the two of them standing in front of the basket of the still-inflated balloon. You look like Fitzgerald and Zelda! someone had once said upon seeing it, and Dora had been flattered—it mattered to her that people found them beautiful. But maybe it was an augury: they, too, were doomed.

She wonders now if there was something more in that story about de Rozier. Had Hugo tried to warn her? The balloon ride happened before there were any signs, before they even had children. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough for the stress and pressure and worry of being a parent, her sometimes-fourth child. She should have saved him too—lifted him back into the sky. Or maybe it would have happened no matter what, no matter who he was with, no matter where or how he lived. How will she manage him, get him on the boat, if anything happens between now and then? How will she keep them all together, pointing north? Stop it. She must think of the girls now, not him. How to help them through this. But he takes up so much space—in a room, in her mind. The sun to all their lesser moons. The girls still look at him as though he’s the smartest man who ever lived. She wants to shake them, tell them he steals half of it from books and the other half is made up. But who could say which half? That’s what he counts on. And then their little necks would hinge, deadheads on a stem, hearts broken like she broke Luiza’s. Her tongue grinds at the back of her teeth, and now who’s making that awful noise? Evie protesting, whining shrilly like a little girl.

‘I don’t care about the rules, I just want to try hitting. The. Baaaall!’ She streaks across the lawn in front of Dora, grasping a mallet tightly to her chest and heading for the house, while Magda follows, brandishing her own mallet like a tomahawk. Poor Evie. Without Luiza to protect her, Magda is always after her, to torment her, to fix her clothes, to inflict some ‘game’ on her.

Dora calls out to them, ‘I see you!’ She really says it this time, out loud but too late; the side door to the house is banging shut behind them.

When they see her approaching, they freeze, startled by her attention. It catches Dora behind her ribs, how they sometimes stare at her, as though she’s of some other, unwelcome species who lives only to frown and rebutton the backs of their dresses. But she musters herself and wipes their dust-streaked faces with her skirt. She wants to tell them she loves them, wants to gather them to her and say, I am your mother and I have shattered on the rocks of Croy, but I’ll put myself back together, and your father is still the strongest, most brilliant man who ever lived and we will deliver you from limbo, we promise, and your sister isn’t gone, she is alive inside each of us. Forgive us, we love you. Forgive us, please.

But there are no florid little speeches, no oaths of love. Instead she cries, brightly, and too loudly, ‘I had a call from Judeetchy. Lambretta had her calf today!’

The neighbours in Petrópolis who want to buy their country house, their refuge. The place Luiza loved the best, where Dora can’t bring herself to return. Where, in those early days after Luiza was born, they were almost innocent. That little house surrounded by owls and waterfalls and people they’ve known for decades; the neighbours with all their animals, which she never let her children have.