All Is Beauty Now Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Faber

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York NY 10104

  littlebrown.com

  twitter.com/littlebrown

  facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany

  First United States Edition: August 2017

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Excerpts from “The Armadillo,” “Arrival at Santos,” and “One Art” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  ISBN 978-0-316-39494-9

  E3-20170711-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  OUTSIDE RIO DE JANEIRO: MARCH 1962

  — I — FEBRUARY 1963

  DORA

  EVIE

  HUGO

  DORA

  LUIZA

  — II —

  DORA

  MAGDA

  EVIE

  DORA

  HUGO

  LUIZA

  MAGDA

  DORA

  EVIE

  DORA

  LUIZA

  DORA

  EVIE

  HUGO

  DORA

  — III —

  MAGDA

  DORA

  HUGO

  EVIE

  HUGO

  DORA

  LUIZA

  DORA

  HUGO

  — IV —

  EVIE

  MAGDA

  HUGO

  LUIZA

  DORA

  HUGO

  DORA

  EVIE

  LUIZA

  DORA

  MAGDA

  DORA

  LUIZA

  DORA

  — V —

  EVIE

  HUGO

  LUIZA

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  NEWSLETTERS

  For Oisín, Fianan, and Neva,

  my three great loves

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP, “ONE ART”

  Her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much.

  —LUKE 7:47

  OUTSIDE RIO DE JANEIRO

  MARCH 1962

  The day Luiza disappeared was as bright and hot as any other that summer, and although most of us were at the beach, no one saw anything, even if many of us would later claim we had. Such a curious thing—everybody wanting to be a part of it. We thought she was swimming out awfully far, and said so to one another afterwards. We were sure we heard splashing. Why didn’t we do anything at the time? She was such a strong swimmer, and it was so calm. She was twenty years old, no longer a girl. We thought—

  The air changed, became heavier, suspending the gulls above us. Water roared in our ears, muffling the sound of someone calling out. This is what we would say, most of us, whenever we told the story. Even the sky was different. Not storm clouds, grey-gathered in warning, but silver, brighter than any of us could remember, flashing off the water almost painfully. Mist reflecting the white sun. We squinted against it and finally made out a voice, more insistent—her youngest sister, Evie, calling out again from the rock pools, the stick she held still jammed in the sand, and she ran toward us, pointing. We all followed the child’s gaze out to sea, then had to turn our eyes away, blinded briefly by the scattered light.

  But there’s no one there! someone said finally.

  I can’t see a thing.

  My god. She’s right. Luiza’s not there.

  Some of us waded out into the water, then swam toward the empty horizon, while the rest stood on the beach, unsure of what to do. Evie ran to those still asleep on towels and bleached beach chairs, fell into a crouch, and shook them awake, still calling her sister’s name. It was strange to hear her voice, so loud and piercing, because she was the shy one, always lost in her own little world. She soon gave up on us and sprinted back to the rocks, crying out for her other sister, Magda, sharp and angular, always scowling.

  Luiza’s not there anymore!

  Magda leapt down from the boulder, spraying sand. Soon they were both crying. A few of us ran the length of beach to see if maybe Luiza had been pulled along by the current. We stared out over the water, imposing a tiny dark shape onto the brilliant haze, the arc of diminutive arms. But there was nothing, just empty, dazzling space.

  Eventually, her parents arrived and Hugo fell to his knees, his great body heaving in the sand. Dora remained standing, resting her hand on his shoulder; we always said she was his buttress against himself. In the hours that followed, she stayed calm and asked questions, but her lovely face was warped by fear. Then the police and an ambulance came, just in case. And us, murmuring, hearts thudding, shaking sand from our towels to cover their warm, trembling arms.

  Later, someone would say they saw a vulture circling in the distant sky.

  We sent our maids with food to the family’s home in Villa Confederação, and we visited for a time, embracing them and clasping their hands. But then we stayed away—surely, we whispered, they needed time alone. But the truth was that Hugo frightened us. His tall, wasting body, his feral stare. Yet we continued to drive past their house, surrounded like our own by eight-foot stone walls embedded with broken glass and barbed wire; its gate locked, doors bolted, the windows with bars, decorative and invulnerable, because like us, they had once found footprints in the flower beds outside their bedrooms.

  We imagine walking through their gardens as we had at their parties so many times before, and there we see Luiza leaning against the trunk of a schefflera. We follow her, weaving through firs, hibiscus, the pink-studded branches of the silk-floss tree. She was always a bit odd, too serious—she sometimes seemed to swallow anxiously at nothing, then look around quickly, hoping no one had noticed. Or maybe hoping they had? At parties, she was more comfortable with children, braiding tattered flowers into their hair. So earnest! we said, fatigued by her affectations: her scribbling in journals and her mannered speech, the way she wore her grandmother’s ratty white gloves everywhere. But some of us thought we loved her for them. For others, it was Hugo—the handsome Canadian expat, once all limbs and laughter—whom we loved for his easy charm and inextinguishable energy, whipped up and transmitted through us like light. Others among us have loved Dora all our lives,
and admired her proud beauty, even as she drove around the neighbourhood in that noisy little Simca. She was one of us, a descendant of the Confederados, who fled in defeat from Alabama after the American Civil War to Brazil, where they licked their wounds and prospered. Our ancestors, Baptists and Methodists, brought clean churches to this superstitious place and woke the echoes with their hymns. Peasants here farm with ploughs now, which they never would have had in this backward country if not for our people.

  Together, Hugo and Dora were the golden ones in our small community. Ever since those early years when they wore nothing but white and danced at the Copacabana, Hugo pulling her up onto the tabletops to join him, and Dora shaking confetti from her hair while we watched them dance aloft. Him, laughing easily, his fist crammed with bills won from the Jockey Club. Her at the beach, lacquered nails against the lichen of craggy seaside rocks, looking out at the white sea shedding haze. He brought out the best in her, warm flickers of joy, and somehow it mattered to us that she stayed with him through everything, haughtily selfless. That remarkable family. Not so golden anymore.

  They had been scheduled to sail for Canada within days when Luiza disappeared. Would Dora still move her family away? Theirs had been the life—such a life! Until the vultures circled the shore, and seeing something, they dove…

  —Why say such an unkind thing?

  —Yes, stop that! Why must we always try to make stories about dead girls into something lurid.

  —It was a terrible accident, nothing more.

  —But was it really? An accident? My maid swears she saw her all alone on the tram. And this was the day of their goodbye party. And she was crying!

  —Oh, everyone but her parents knew she was up to something.

  —It’s true. Such troubled people.

  —What a dreadful thing. What awful people we are.

  But some of us can’t stop ourselves. We say it’s retribution for too much shine, too many flowers. So much fruit. We heard Luiza was ashamed of us. All her mother’s money from diamond mines and sugar plantations, and her ashamed of us! Drunk once at a party (her parents had always indulged her), she said we might as well still be slaveholders for what little we paid them—our chauffeurs and maids, the babás who raised our children—as though condemning herself as well made it all right. Her mother, embarrassed, apologized and took her home. But things soon got worse. She gets it from him, we whispered. It was bound to happen. When people are that beautiful, the rot is on the inside.

  And yet sometimes we walk along the beach, searching for a sign, imagining we will be the ones to find her. Each time, we are frightened and a little hopeful that maybe we could ease their pain. We pity them, wondering which hell is worse—knowing, or not knowing. Finding, or not finding.

  We loved them—we still do. But they’ve long been lost to us. They stepped outside themselves for a time, just long enough to let us in, to subdue our bristling need, before retreating back into their family’s embrace, and behind their walls. We were not enough for them. Fallen, they are still our betters.

  And if we found Luiza, would she be bloated and blue, face eaten away by sea animals? Or by now would she be nothing but a bleached heap of frail bones, sun-stripped? Who among us could stomach it, to wrap some part of her in fine cloth and take her home? Something to lay to rest, we would say in hushed, ragged tones. We couldn’t bear it, to be the ones to mark the end of their age. But then we could truly embrace them, even the men among us, because we do that here. We feel that much.

  Yes, they belong here, with us: the embodiment of our brightest selves flashing in the night. If they go, we dim and grow smaller. And they become mortal after all.

  — I —

  FEBRUARY 1963

  DORA

  There has been no funeral because there is no body. The police searched and telephoned and apologized and were kind, but no trace was ever found. And yet Dora needs to bury something, some object of Luiza’s, so they’ll have a place to return to someday, to clutch at the soil and pretend she is there, beneath them.

  Now, finally, almost a year later, she and Hugo stand on one side of the empty grave while everyone else stands on the other, facing them, as though they might have some idea of what to do next. Evie and Magda are with the maids, who have come—of course they have!—despite being given the day off. And yet Dora finds herself staring meaningfully at Maricota, who is openly weeping, too upset to notice how Evie, seeming so much younger than her twelve years, is peeling apart the lily she was given to hold for the ceremony. She rubs the petals between her thumb and forefinger, then holds them up to the sun, peering through their crushed, now-translucent segments.

  How much will they suffer? Please, not too much. Evie in particular, with her clear, deep feelings, has been afflicted in some ineffable way. Already dishevelled though it’s not yet midday, with her plaits too loose, dirty fingernails, legs mottled with different-hued bruises. Reckless, like Luiza. Always feathery and odd, lately she’s been running off, looking almost hunted as she disappears into hidden corners of the garden and creeps along its walled perimeter. She’s virtually skinless, inchoate; her little magpie heart still seeking out something shiny in this sad place. She might ache forever, Dora supposes. Yes, she will suffer the most.

  Though a year older, Magda is shorter than Evie, and compact, muscular. Neatly dressed and rigid as a cadet, she moves only occasionally and deftly to snatch some inappropriate diversion from Evie—the macerated lily, a thread pulled from her hem. Dora knows Magda will suffer too; she is unyielding, and hasn’t yet learned to pretend for others’ sake. She doesn’t permit even well-meaning lies. She’s difficult for adults to like, though children usually fear her, which is something. At thirteen, she is all switches and thorns. And she’s the better for it.

  But Hugo—he feels more than all of them.

  Dora stands beneath the canopy of palm trees and soft-needled pines, vaguely grateful for their shade, her eyes skimming over the complicated root network of a nearby fig tree. Luiza would have said it was like something out of a fairy tale. Off to the side, rows of weathered grey tombstones in marble and soapstone, sprouting moss and etched with names like McKnight, Thomas, Baird. An anemic ceremony at the Campinas Cemetery, even though Hugo thinks it’s meaningless because they don’t go to church, and shouldn’t God disdain those who only seek him out in times of grief?

  And it’s true that even Dora has never cared for this cemetery, for its annual festival when descendants of the Confederados come dressed in hoop skirts and Confederate uniforms to gaze out upon the sugarcane fields and rows of tombstones, disgorge some dour Revival hymn, then lay out dishes of fried chicken and cornbread, peach pie and sweet tea, conjuring Alabama. Regret, nostalgia—so much longing for a place that never was.

  ‘Why?’ Hugo asked a few days before when she had announced her plans for the ceremony, and he had objected, with almost mechanical disdain, to the location. ‘We don’t believe in all that nonsense, and Luiza certainly didn’t. That place is poisoned.’ He couldn’t even look at her, his long body seeming prematurely caved in, readied for blows.

  She knows that the ceremony means little to him, that a few graveside hymns won’t change anything: he hasn’t accepted that Luiza is gone. None of them has. But there has to be somewhere to put all this confusion, still unexpressed. Inexpressible. A ritual that can give it shape. Maybe the ceremony will ignite in her the strength she needs to unshutter her family, gather them up, take them away. They had been so close to leaving for Canada last year, and then—. Now, for the second time, Dora must organize useless items into meaningless piles, contact old friends, arrange more goodbye parties, get on a ship at last. Go. For his sake. For all their sakes. Still, Luiza presses in upon their every thought, whispering in their ears. They have to have a place to put her. To find her.

  No one actually saw Luiza disappear in the water, even though there were several people at the beach: the McMullans, the Dawseys, the dentist and his siste
r visiting from Santarém. The Dawsey boy said that Luiza had helped him bury his father in the sand and laughed when he added ‘girl parts.’ Someone else said she ate half a sandwich quickly, then offered up the rest. She read a few pages of her book but told the kind dentist that she couldn’t get into it.

  ‘Tacitus,’ she said rather sadly, he thought. But then she laughed. ‘Who wants to think about Rome burning in this heat?’

  Soon after that, she drifted off to sleep while Evie and Magda turned their attention toward her, entombing her twitching feet again and again. She started a little when she woke, smiled at them, and thanked her sisters for being so good, for not going in the water alone as they’d promised. She caught the eye of Mrs. Buchanan, who winked and said, ‘I’ll watch them, querida.’

  Dora knows all this even though she wasn’t there. (Why wasn’t she there?) Others have described the scene to her and Hugo over and over, as though it were some mystery that could be solved through repetition. As though perhaps Luiza had simply drifted away, carried out by the tide and all these stories. For months, Dora collected these varying accounts, telling herself that maybe the details would accrete, eventually shaping a whole story. Tell them where Luiza would wash up. She might be exhausted from fighting the tide and trying to swim back in, maybe a little bruised from tumbling ashore, the crotch of her swimsuit filled with sand the way it used to when she was a girl. But Luiza would come back to them with the waves that broke on the shore, terrified but otherwise unharmed.

  Blood roars in her ears now. At least, Dora tells herself, it all happened quickly. She’s heard that drowning is a peaceful death, once you let go. (But how could that be? And who would know? And who would ever really let go? Not Luiza.) But something else plagues her. Had there been signs, unusual behaviour? Dora sometimes thought so. Luiza grimacing as she pored over new books, as though hoping to extract something vital. Going out more often and alone, then shutting herself in her room for hours. Was she worried about the move? Lonely? Or maybe the opposite—was there a boyfriend? Boys often called the house for her, but she always told Dora she was bored by them, that they were too immature. It hurts too much to think of her being lonely. Alone in the water. No. Push it away.