All Is Beauty Now Read online

  They had been about to leave Brazil—did any of them need excuses to be unsettled? It was her daughter’s temperament to be dreamy, distracted. How many times had Luiza forgotten the kettle until it boiled dry, or left a bathtub to overflow? She lived in a near-constant reverie, so careless with herself. Only because she was so beautiful did people fail to notice, or pretend not to: torn stockings, missing buttons. Two holes in the back collar of her dresses from where she’d hastily torn out the labels, rather than simply asking one of the maids to use the seam ripper. Thoughtless, headstrong girl. But Dora had been grateful, in some ways, for her daughter’s pretenses, her solemn air and lost buttons. She was too beautiful and the awkwardness tempered it a little, put men off.

  And yet, for years, Dora’s stomach contracted, bathed in acid, waiting for the injuries, the ruination of Luiza’s lovely body: the fall off a cliff’s edge when she had wanted to smell the sea air; the car crash after something roadside and gleaming had caught her eye. She was that kind of person. Surely it was just a terrible accident.

  Dora has to once again hold back images of Luiza afraid, choking on water, reaching out. She knows her eldest daughter tried to be responsible that day, catching Mrs. Buchanan’s eye, making sure someone was watching the girls. But some days she finds herself almost blaming Luiza. For being so sure of herself, so cocky, for always swimming too far out even when they called to her from the shore.

  Come back!

  Once, when Luiza was little, Dora slapped her for not listening, for swimming too far. The child stood there with water streaming down her face and over her red cheeks. ‘Those aren’t tears,’ she said. ‘I’m not sorry.’

  I am sorry, I am sorry. The words repeat in Dora’s head. Maybe they should have waited for one more day. What if Luiza were to come back today and see that they are trying to bury her? Today might be the day she finds her way home. But that is what Dora has told herself every day for the past eleven months. So her mind practises: She is not coming back.

  Dora looks at her family, trying to will herself to adjust to Luiza’s absence. Whenever they’re all together, her mind fills in the ever-widening aperture where Luiza used to be. Unconsciously, she projects Luiza into that space, several inches below Hugo, smiling in a way that Dora recognizes as strained, preoccupied. (Yes, something was different before she vanished. Something about her had altered.) Now she struggles to see them as they are, without Luiza: three and not four; a man and two young, graceless girls; the other, most beautiful one erased. But again, the excision fails; her brain won’t submit. Luiza is there, in partial shade, indistinct at the edges but not gone.

  No, the ceremony must be today because they can’t stay here much longer. For years, a great momentum has been building beneath the surface of their lives, pushing them inexorably toward elsewhere. Away. And it had begun long before Luiza disappeared.

  In some corner of her mind, a petulant voice asserts that anyone not here today will be scratched off any future list of invitees. But when she scans the blurred faces in front of her (oh, she is nearly crying again!), she realizes they have all come. Even Carmichael, who she hasn’t seen in almost a year. And they’ve all dressed beautifully, and brought flowers.

  ‘Having an English mother has conditioned you to expect too little from people,’ Hugo used to tell her. And it’s true that Brazilians—warm and demonstrative—still surprise her. Cab drivers will weep upon hearing your sad story, servants will embrace (and chastise) you. Even in this transplanted, anglophone community, people are good and affectionate and kind. This community of friends and neighbours who have all come to offer up their memories, clasp hands, embrace them. Even a few satellite acquaintances, like the dentist from Santarém who held Dora’s hand when he told her what Luiza had said about the Romans and how she kissed Evie on the forehead before she went in the water. This is what they’ll be leaving behind when they move to Canada.

  The truth is, Dora knows that Luiza would never have wanted to be buried here at Campinas Cemetery; she said it was a hate-filled place, marked by suffering.

  ‘Well, it is a graveyard,’ Dora had said, barely suppressing the vague, ironic smile that she knew incited Luiza’s accusations of condescension.

  ‘No, not just illness and death. Murder—’ Then, once again, Luiza told the story of Colonel Asa Thompson Oliver as though she alone had safeguarded it these hundred years: how his wife died after the journey over from America, his two daughters soon after from tuberculosis, and then Oliver himself, bludgeoned with a shovel by a slave he caught stealing potatoes. In revenge, three Confederados loyal to Thompson lynched the slave and left him hanging from a tree on the property for days. A warning.

  ‘And they’re all buried there, in that horrible place where you make us take flowers. Except the slave, I’m sure.’

  ‘A place can’t be everything it ever was forever and ever,’ Dora argued as she always did. ‘It’s a symbol. It can mean something else to us than it did to them. It’s just a place to remind us where we came from.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want to remember?’

  And yet here in a foot-deep hole, among the graves of the Confederate settlers and their descendants, Dora places a wooden box with some of Luiza’s things, some cheap trinkets because her sisters should be given the better things: a pair of broken earrings, some photos. The snapshots of Luiza are all small, blurry: as a girl, next to Mother’s birdcages, awkward in a white sunbonnet. Luiza hanging upside down by her knees from a swing in their old backyard on Colonial Drive. As an infant, pliant and pale and alien. (Dora had been happiest then, when Luiza nursed all day, it seemed, sending currents of heat through Dora’s breasts.) On her sixteenth birthday, her nose buried in the journal written by her grandmother, frowning even though Dora warned her the crease between her eyes would become permanent, like her own. Now they begin to sing. Dora forgot she had asked for some hymns, knowing they’ll be mostly Baptist, but she also requested one from her Catholic school days. She told the minister it was Luiza’s favourite, though really it’s hers.

  Star of the sea, pray for the wanderer. Pray for me. As Dora had tried to snap the photo—‘Look up, darling, look up!’—Luiza asked, unsmiling, ‘What do you think it does to a person, to be owned by someone?’ ‘I’m sure I couldn’t presume to know. Look up, my love. You’re so much prettier when you smile!’ ‘Then what does it do to the person who owns them?’ ‘Oh, do stop scowling!’ Oh, gentle chaste and spotless maid. Virgin most pure, star of the sea. Pray for the mourner, pray for me. Dora has to wrench her gaze away, count the trees, read the tombstones—anything to keep from crying. Luiza would be so angry, her things mixed in among the bodies of soldiers; even the inscriptions on their tombstones are martial and defiant: Soldier rest! Thy warfare over. Once a rebel, twice a rebel and forever a rebel! Died in perfect peace.

  How had Luiza become so distant from her? While the girl forgave Hugo everything.

  The maids had taken over Luiza’s care when she was still so young. Dearest links are rent in twain. But in heaven, no throb of pain. It occurs to her now that Luiza grew up alongside her, maybe in spite of her. Meet me there. They fed and washed her and read to her, but Dora still lifted her sleeping from her cot and brought her into bed with her at night. All those times Hugo was away; Dora hated being alone, though she’d always taken pains to hide it. Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? If her daughter were still here, she would be almost the same age as Dora was then. Luiza would have begun to understand. Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? Understand how hard it was to be so young and alone, with a husband you sometimes couldn’t recognize. Maybe. If she were still here. Pray for the children, pray for me. An awful sound rises over the hymns, hoarse and deep, like wailing. Her throat strains, her chest vibrates. Why? she wonders. Why does her body ache? Because the sound is coming from her.

  Afterwards, there is no reception. Everything was planned so quickly, she tells their friends, and the house is
still half packed from the last time they were about to move. But soon, she promises, soon there will be a party.

  ‘We’ll do something to kick off Carnival, like we always do, and then a proper goodbye party at the Copacabana too!’

  She tries to sound gay, then blushes—false cheer and talk of parties at a funeral. Surely it’s improper. She promises to let them know. They kiss her cheeks and clutch her hands, these friends she’s known most of her life. Of course, they say. Tchau, tchauzinho.

  In the car, on the way home, Hugo is mostly silent, the skin over his knuckles tight and translucent against the black leather of the steering wheel. She tries to say something, ask what the matter is, but nothing comes. Ridiculous question. Finally, Hugo says, ‘We’ll have our own ceremony.’

  When they arrive home, the house is empty. She had allowed the maids to go home to their families for the night. Now she wishes they were here to make Evie change her clothes, which were dirty before they even left the house earlier that morning. Dora had literally trembled with rage when she found her playing out in the garden in her best dress before they were meant to leave. She led Evie to her bedroom, her hand a talon fixed on the child’s shoulder, and commanded, absurdly: ‘You stay in there and think about how you want to treat your things!’

  She then went to the bar in the dining room, made herself a Scotch and soda, and drank it down in two swallows. She went back to Evie’s room a few minutes later. Her youngest child was red-faced, splotchy about the neck (that tender ginger complexion), and bleary-eyed, but already recovered and undressing an old china doll.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, and when Evie came Dora kneeled before her and clutched her waist. She let Evie play with her hair for several seconds before standing and straightening both their dresses. ‘You have to change your dress.’

  ‘I like this dress.’

  ‘Fine. Rinse your hem in the sink.’ Better wet than dirty. Better weak than cruel. Dora was becoming the kind of mother who lets her children go to funerals in dirty clothes.

  When Magda comes to her now to say that Evie won’t eat her bologna sandwich, Dora sighs and again looks around, waiting uselessly for the maids to appear. And Evie used to be the easiest of the girls, the dreamy and docile one. The Nice One.

  ‘Just take her outside and help your father,’ Dora says, suddenly desperate to lie down.

  Later, when she goes out into the garden, Hugo is still cutting flowers and placing the long stems across Evie’s outstretched arms. Then Magda takes the flowers and places them into a bucket filled with water. They are a grim little assembly line, but they are together, and soon three buckets overflow with all of Luiza’s favourites: gladioli, birds of paradise, lilies. Finally, Hugo decides there are enough and binds together four large bouquets with some old fishing line from the garage.

  ‘So many,’ Dora says when he hands her an enormous bouquet, careful to inflect the comment so that it’s a statement rather than a question, and to sound pleased. In truth, the flowers verge on obscene—everything too tall, too much. This is who he is: excess.

  Hugo gives both Evie and Magda a bouquet to carry, hands his own to Dora, then leads the girls by their free hands along the winding dirt road toward the beach. Dora follows closely behind, watching the girls struggle to hold their flowers with just one arm, though neither wants to let go of their father’s hand. None of them has been back to this beach, or any other, since Luiza disappeared; Dora and Hugo have not been able, and they forbade the girls from going near the water by themselves. There’s no prayer by the water, no poem or elegy, which is unlike him. Hugo always has some scrap of verse he’s committed to memory, ready to recite. But today he remains quiet, clutching the bouquet she handed him, and all of a sudden Dora feels his sadness more acutely than her own. She studies him closely, maybe for the first time in months, and sees his face has somehow contracted: deeper lines, new hollows. Now, with an awkward, jerky movement, he flings the flowers into the surf. They land just a foot or so in front of him, then catch in the sand, carried ashore by an abject little wave. If they were in a film, he would gather up the wet stalks, his tie flapping behind him in the breeze, and walk into the waves fully dressed. The sea would swallow up the blooms like it swallowed Luiza, and some dreary circle would be complete. Then he would walk out of the ocean drenched and severe-looking, and lead the girls back home by their hands. But instead he turns away, leaves the flowers mashed in the sand, and crouches. He gathers the girls to him and sobs into Magda’s hair until Dora worries he might choke. Evie, always eager for affection, seizes him back, grabbing the fabric of his suit jacket in her pale, dirt-streaked hands. Magda stiffens and leans away at first, but then she too melts into him, and Dora is struck by how seldom she sees the body of her stern, middle daughter—normally taut, hyper-vigilant—relax in this way. As much as he can sometimes tire people out, his gift is that he can always draw them back in.

  ‘Angel! She will be our angel.’ Part of Dora wants to break up this embarrassing infliction on the girls, realizing that Evie has now had both parents prostrate before her in one day. But their small grey faces brighten as he speaks. ‘No, no—angel is too maudlin, too common. She will be our seraph. And who has that? Who has their very own seraph to watch over and protect and listen to them? Not just some sentimental wisp from a painting but a real girl, a girl we know with a face and voice we’ll remember, and who will be loving but mighty also, with six wings instead of two, like the highest order of supernatural beings from …’

  As if losing energy, he trails off, which is a relief. She knows she should listen closely to his monologues, remain watchful for the signs. But today she’s grateful to Hugo for rearranging the moment, giving it order and grace. Giving them all a fragment of God. Maybe in Canada she could love him again like she once did.

  And yet she suddenly feels ill. She can’t possibly endure for another minute such sweet, ridiculous notions as heaven and angels. She once envied those with unambiguous ideas about the afterlife, who imagine their dead in tender, pastoral settings, still themselves but in shades of only grey and white, unspoiled by loneliness or decay. But it all seems mawkish and insufficient to her now. She drops her flowers to the sand, unzips the back of her dress, scratches imaginary sandflies in her hair.

  Hugo removes his shoes and walks into the water, not bothering to roll up the cuffs of his pants. The girls, of course, do the same, and soon they are all standing in knee-deep water, staring out at the sea. The ocean is always there, so vast and so close, and standing at its edge for the first time in almost a year, Dora’s heart hammers her ribs. He could so easily continue out into the sea, toward Luiza. Walk underwater until his clothes were too heavy and his body too tired and his lungs too full. If he believes in an afterlife, an actual place where he could find Luiza, what’s to stop him from wanting to join her there?

  Sometimes she tries to imagine Hugo and Luiza together in some airborne place, drained of vibrancy, like clothes left too long in the sun. But she sees them mostly as heat, an exchange of thrumming atoms, confusion, vibration. Maybe their consciousness would dissolve altogether and become taut cords of fear. Or maybe they will end up somewhere together but not know it, and still feel lonely and afraid. And when she dies, will Dora be the connecting thread, or will she, too, be scattered, confused, disembodied and without thoughts, just remnants of these worst days?

  The sun is setting behind them now, and though the air remains hot, they all seem to shiver on the dull sand. Dora picks up her bouquet from the sand and carries it to the water’s edge. She tries to say goodbye, but it feels false and lodges in her throat, so she takes a few steps into the sea and lays her bouquet on the surface of the shallow water. Then she walks back to her family—diminished, tractable—and turns them toward home.

  EVIE

  On her way to the garden, Evie passes her mother lighting a cigarette as she reads on the veranda. Mama’s hair is curled and pinned up on top of her head, and she’s wearin
g a smart, straight skirt and a blouse that ties in the front. Even though she often complains about how she’s getting old (almost forty-five), people still speak about how beautiful she is, which makes Evie proud. Mama is so pretty, so elegant, thinks Evie, whereas there is a stain on her shirt from when she drank her pink lemonade too quickly, the juice flowing in thin rivers down her cheeks. The stain is edged in red and touches some dried jam; that’s from looking out the window when she ought to have been paying attention to her breakfast, but as she bit into her toast a thrush clattered through the branches and landed, and its head turned this way and that and its breast heaved, and Evie wondered, Had it just come from America where their cousins live? So eating was forgotten and the jelly slid from toast to shirt, from shirt to table.

  ‘Soak it right away,’ Maricota had said, going into the laundry room. ‘So the stain doesn’t set.’

  Three times she called this to Evie and three times Evie called back, ‘I’m just about to!’

  But there was a honeybee trapped on the windowsill, its wings glinting in the sun, and she wanted so badly to set it free but couldn’t think how without getting close enough for it to sting her, until she remembered how Papa does it with a glass and something to slide underneath (though Mama just swats them with a rolled-up newspaper). By the time she finished running all over the kitchen to find a glass, Maricota had come back in the room and started crying. She said it was because the stain had set, but she stared and stared at the glass in Evie’s hand. Evie couldn’t understand why she’d cry over a dusty old glass with a flower design until she realized it was Luiza’s glass. A fist gripped inside her stomach and she peeled off her shirt as fast as she could right there in front of Maricota, but she was right. It was too late.