The Painted Girls (14 page)

A man with dirty fingernails and a painter’s shabby smock sits at a table made out of a wooden plank upon two crates. Not a bit sure—no one else has come in to show us about exhibition-going—I set upon the plank the pair of one franc coins owed for admission. Charlotte shifts closer. “The two of us are petits rats with the Opéra,” she says, bolder than a rooster. “And my sister here is a model for Monsieur Degas. It’s his artworks we came to see.”

“I should have guessed it,” says the man, eyes glinting with the same light Charlotte draws from the pork butcher, the watchmaker, the crockery dealer in the rue de Douai, and from Monsieur LeBlanc, who Antoinette says we will see no more of with her again earning a steady wage. The man slides the coins back to our side of the plank. “Third salon,” he says.

The first salon is large with some twenty pictures hung upon the walls or perched upon the easels in the center of the room. A good half of the frames are purple, with yellow mats. It is what I see first, and this noticing of the trappings ahead of the artworks does not put my mind at ease. “So much filth,” says Charlotte. At the far end of the room, two women clutch at their skirts, their attention less on the walls than on keeping their hems clear of dust. With each blow of a hammer, heads turn, noses wrinkle, shoulders flinch. A few of those gathered in the room study the pictures—a woman with a knit brow, a gentleman stroking his beard, another two in top hats, leaned in close, muttering into each other’s ears.

In the third salon, right away I see the paintings upon the walls belong to Monsieur Degas. My eyes sweep the room, seeking the statuette—a fourteen-year-old dancer in fourth position, arms clasped behind her back, hands nestled in the tarlatan of her skirt. It is the way I have thought up the statuette a hundred times. But it is not here.

There is the girl in the blaring red shawl, hunched over upon a bench, and beside it another picture, new to me. Two dancers sit collapsed upon a bench, their bent knees parted, their tired legs turned out from the hips, even as they catch their breaths. In the next picture, a dancer bends forward at the hips to straighten her stockings; and another, with a shock of red hair and a face turned to the floor, looks like she is stretching out her toes, but it is impossible to know because a good half of her foot is chopped off, and this time, the top of her head, too. Behind the dancers, fluffing the tarlatan of her daughter’s skirt is the mother, with the puffy face of an old concierge, and her friend, rough with her raw nose and plume of feathers bristling from her hat. These girls, Monsieur Degas is saying, do not be tricked by the grace of their backs. These girls are of common stock.

After that, portraits. I barely look. And last, a washbasin and a pitcher and a woman in black stockings and nothing more, pulling a dress over her head. Her backside is plump, soft, spread beneath the fleshy folds of her waist. She is no laundress or concierge, no milliner or wool carder. The shadow of her stockings lurches the mind from decent work, and only a whore slips on a dress with her backside still bare. I have looked away from such pictures in Monsieur Degas’s workshop. But today I stay and gawk, wondering. Why does he make such things? Why is it on display, when he has so many pictures, some even a little bit pretty if you ignore the cutoff feet, if you do not mind a girl sweaty upon a bench. Why a fleshy backside instead of me in fourth position, a ballet girl sprouting wings?

“It isn’t here,” Charlotte says, flippant, like nothing ever mattered less.

“No.” I give her arm a little tug. “Let’s go.”

And then my eyes fall upon Monsieur Degas, coming through the doorway of the salon, and the man from the table, pointing a paint-stained finger in the direction of Charlotte and me.

Monsieur Degas’s face is grey, tired. Still, the slightest crinkles come to the corners of his eyes. “Mademoiselle van Goethem,” he says. The hammering of the roofers swells in our ears, and he raises his eyes to the ceiling. “It’s not what I hoped. The building was to be finished. I was told—promised—yet we shudder in the din.”

“You have visitors,” I say and lift a hand to the salon.

“Some.” His shoulders inch up.

“Oh.”

“I sold the painting of you fanning yourself.”

Never was I made to ask for my six francs. Always I felt the heaviness of coins in my pocket before I pushed my feet back into my boots. Even when Monsieur Degas’s eyes could not bear the strain and he cut a modeling session short, never once did he dock me a single sou. My spirits should lift at the news of the sale. Still, without the statuette not so much as a flutter.

“Monsieur Lefebvre bought it,” he says and rattles his weary head.

“They went to the sweet seller,” Charlotte says. “I only got a sugarplum.”

“The statuette?” I hold myself down from floating on a tiny crest of hope, the gutter of afterward.

“I can stand very still,” Charlotte says.

“A failure,” he says and takes off the blue spectacles meant to protect his sight. With his other hand, he makes a tent covering his eyes and then rubs the troughs of his lids. I think about the world fading—orange becoming tan, blue disappearing to grey, red waning to nothing more than blush.

There is no statuette, nothing for the ladies and gentlemen to admire. There will be nothing in black ink upon pages of
Le Figaro
,
Le Temps
, even
L’Illustration
, nothing about a statuette, the captured story of a heart and body, a petit rat called Marie van Goethem destined for the Opéra stage. I will not tear, straight as straight, a square of print from the newspaper and find some clever way to leave it in Monsieur Mérante’s path, Monsieur Pluque’s. It is the lofty place my imagination had soared to, the high rim of a precipice.

There is only Monsieur Lefebvre, who has the ear of the ballet master, the ear of the director of dance, a picture showing me holding a fan.

Antoinette

A
Monday morning and I pull open the door of the washhouse, same as every Monday morning for the three weeks since Monsieur Guiot took me on. Two weeks have passed since the ruined shirts, since the night of the dead dog. He never did know about the linens I plucked from those awaiting delivery, not when the Monday afterward, I was back at the washhouse early, all those linens tucked up under my skirt, seeking a chance to return them—the three shirts to the neat stack with threads the color of leeks knotted into the collars, the reeking camisole to the heap being sorted for the tubs.

Upon leaving the house of Madame Brossard, I did not go looking for Émile at the storage shed of the father of Pierre Gille or the Brasserie des Martyrs. I was wretched in the morning, vomiting into the bucket Madame Brossard put beside the spare bed in Colette’s room after pulling the linens up under my chin. Midday, my head still throbbing, my belly still heaving but churning up nothing more than spoonfuls of gleaming yellow sludge, I got to my feet. Marie would be half out of her mind. I tottered back to the rue de Douai only to bear the flogging Maman delivered in the stairwell with the borrowed broom of Madame Legat. This, after Maman asked for payment toward a meat pie and I told her my week’s pay was gone, spent in a cabaret. “Eighteen francs gone in a single night,” she hollered, but her heart was not much in beating, and soon she was slumped upon a step.

“In truth I spoiled two shirts and got docked.”

She looked up. “Such a liar I never before seen.”

“Ask Guiot.”

She tugged a flask from the folds of her skirt but did not take a drink. No, she held the flask high up, offering it to me. I thought of Émile taking the smoke, siding with Pierre Gille, of me siding with Maman and the absinthe and batted away the flask.

Maman had the broom of Madame Legat to put back, and I watched her take the stairs like an old woman—one foot reached down a single step, the other moved to beside it, all the while gripping the rail.

Wishing for nothing more than to collapse upon my mattress, I opened up the door of our lodging room onto Marie stroking the curls of Charlotte. “You’re home,” she said, the words coming out like a great sigh, but the worry never left her face. No, Charlotte was slumped in a chair, her eyes glassy, her face pale. “She isn’t feeling herself,” Marie said. I touched the warm forehead of Charlotte, and without a mother there to say “Into bed with you,” I said it myself.

The fever broke in the early hours of the morning, and I was back at the washhouse on an hour’s sleep, restoring filched linens and wondering about the way Madame Brossard scolded but bothered to send me home with a pork cutlet and two tangerines, only a bit overripe.

All day at the washhouse, I ached for Émile. I went so far as to imagine a shadow passing over the steamy glass of the window was his broad shoulders, his scrub-brushy hair. When the day’s slaving was finally done, I fled across the street to our lodging house, thinking to change my blouse and check up on Charlotte before finding that boy off somewhere, tilting a glass.

Well, that girl was wearing her practice skirt and balancing with one foot held high up over her head in her hand. After missing a class, Marie would be worrying about her muscles growing tight. She would be limbering up, too, but Charlotte was only doing what her body craved and, of course, chose the spot where her pose was prettily framed in the looking glass. I took my spare blouse from the gaping hole of the sideboard, pulled it over my head, dreaming up mauve silk and the dropped jaw of Émile to see me gleaming before him with heaved-up breasts, a frame of curls. I took a minute, plopped down at the table, and felt a weight, like a zinc bucket so full with water it slopped onto the floor. Only forty winks, I told myself and made a little pillow of my arms. Forty winks and the searching would begin. But when I woke up, the streets were quiet, and I knew my chance to find Émile was gone.

On Tuesday when I got home from a long day of cranking the wringing machine, Marie and Charlotte were waiting in the doorway of our lodging room. Their faces gleamed. Charlotte was bouncing on her toes. Marie took my hand and said, “We forgot to say thank you about a hundred times but not tonight.” She had the zinc bucket packed with three roasted chicken legs, two pears, a pork terrine, and a baguette. No chance would I make some excuse and go off looking for Émile. They took turns holding my hand and carrying the bucket, while we climbed Montmartre to a patch of trampled grass in front of the basilica being built on the top. The sun set while we stuffed ourselves, and it really was pretty, all the rooftops of Paris cast in a rosy glow and the sky beyond, the bands of dusty yellow and orange and red. After that we lay back and watched the nighttime sky get lit up with pinpricks of light, and Marie said she was going to list twenty nice things I’d done for her so I would know that she knew. She counted them off on her fingers: combing out her hair, arguing with Monsieur LeBlanc, remembering her name day, saving her the larger sugarplum, buying the salami she preferred, stroking her to sleep, collecting wages from Maman, showing her about buying pears, on and on. Then Charlotte did the same, except she listed twenty-one. I swallowed tears and put an arm around each of their necks and pulled them in tight to my chest, and I knew they could hear my thumping heart.

On Wednesday I left the washhouse, wanting nothing but to find Émile, and there he was across the rue de Douai, leaning up against our lodging house, looking more sheepish than a sheep. I nudged the neckline of my blouse lower, folded my arms over my ribs, squeezing like that corset that made my flesh swell above the mauve silk. I crossed the street and passed by him, feeling smug that I did not go chasing and telling myself I’ve got to work on being a haughty girl.

“Antoinette,” he called up the stairs.

I took two more steps before turning around. “Don’t want a boy full of swagger and meanness, a boy who don’t mind another slapping his girl.”

“You and Colette were screaming, carrying on.”

I lifted up my chin.

“It was Colette who struck the first blow,” he said.

“Pierre Gille murdered a dog.” Émile Abadie, you watch me turn away. You watch me on the stairs, hips swaying no different from Colette’s.

“She was taunting, Colette was.”

I climbed a further step, then another.

“Can’t bear Pierre Gille saying I got the guts of a flea,” he said, his voice hushed as dew, and when I looked back, his head was hanging low.

“Pierre Gille is full of bluster.”

“Isn’t just bluster.” He sat himself down sideways on the lowest step, and leaning his head back against the crumbling plaster of the wall, I saw him look so much like that boy I knew from the early days at the Ambigu.

B
efore the week was done, I hatched a plan to sew into the corner of a fine handkerchief—no one would miss a single one—the letter E, something for him to keep in his pocket, to pull out and be reminded of me. I was getting along just fine at the washhouse, figuring out about whether a stain was wax or fruit or tree sap and knowing to use a warm iron or boiling water or turpentine. It turned out the bearded woman—Paulette—liked nothing better than telling a good joke, except maybe hearing us laundresses cackling; and sometimes there was singing, especially Justine, whose voice was strong and clear, like a tolling bell, and we scrubbed those linens counting out the beat. And Marie said three times already about appreciating the way I was slaving to keep Monsieur LeBlanc from our door. She did her best to make up for Maman, who only said it was a surprise every day I bothered to get up for the washhouse, and Charlotte, who saved her sweetness for the pork butcher, with his held-out scrap of crackling, and the fruiterer, with his pyramid of apples soon to turn soft. Oh, the days were long, tiresome, and Monsieur Guiot thought nothing of keeping us past seven o’clock. Any one of us was welcome to leave, to find work as a housemaid, bowing and curtseying and curling up with the rest of the servants at night and never again seeing a café; or as a textile worker, choking in dingy, cramped quarters and getting cooked by the heat and working alongside the snotty-nosed urchins who brought the wage down to two francs a day. A seamstress could do better, milliners, too. But any of us laundresses with a knowledge of needle and thread and hems and embroidery would’ve left the washhouse ages ago. We were fit only for the boredom of scrubbing, the brute strength of cranking the wringing machine. And so I was careful about the handkerchief, having the sense to jam it into my pocket before Monsieur Guiot even had it marked in his book.

B
ent over my tub, feeling the heaviness of the beater gripped in my hand, I pound away at a tablecloth. I am taking a minute to wipe my brow, when who should come hurtling into the washhouse but Michel Knobloch, wild-eyed, looking right, looking left. Last time I laid eyes on him, it was at the Brasserie des Martyrs, the evening Émile called him a liar and he pushed himself up from the bench and stomped off.

Monsieur Guiot scrambles down from the perch of his overseer’s booth and makes chase. Is it bare arms Michel Knobloch has come to see? Is he dodging laundresses, dashing along a row of zinc tubs on a dare? I look to the window but glimpse not a single face pressed up against the steamy glass, not a single pair of roving eyes. My attention goes back to Michel Knobloch, to his flitting gaze, bouncing from one laundress to the next, to his coiled-up legs, ready to spring. Monsieur Guiot reaches, aiming for the collar, and I open up my mouth to call out a warning, but I cannot. Monsieur Guiot has not yet forgot the burned shirt, the knocked-off button, the hole left behind. Michel Knobloch ducks, darts, tears deeper into the washhouse, his eyes no longer flitting, but steady, set upon me.

I let go my beater, wipe suds from my hands, ready to shove him away, to say “Leave me to my work,” but a step from me, his silent mouth moves through the shape of a word:
Abadie.
I wait, arms hanging at my sides, to hear he is dead, but the hands of Michel Knobloch become a tunnel around his lips, and I shift my ear to the receiving end. “The constables took him to Mazas, Pierre Gille, too,” he says. “They’re accused of murdering that tavern owner over in Montreuil.” No doubt Michel Knobloch is lying or proving once again how he always jumbles the facts. Still, my heart pounds in my chest.

I don’t say a single thing, not until I step around Michel Knobloch to face Monsieur Guiot. Loud enough for the account to spread, I say, “My sister fainted at the Opéra, hit her head. She is asking for me.”

Maman is there, crowding close, taking in my words. I think about sparing her the greater pain of the wounded daughter being Charlotte. But Marie don’t have the sense to back up such a story, not without a hundred questions, and so I have no choice. “It’s Charlotte.”

Maman will be coaxed to sitting down, fussed over, offered a cup of strong tea. In my mind’s eye, I see her pat her chest and dab at her eyes, dredging up the consternation of a waiting mother. “My cross to bear,” she is saying. “Two daughters at the Opéra dance school. The effort they put in, enough to make a girl faint.” She wrings the linen handkerchief Monsieur Guiot passes to her. “Those girls, like swans.” She raises up her chin. “Mark my words. Each will dance upon the Opéra stage.”

Monsieur Guiot looks from me to Michel Knobloch and back to me, a cloud upon his brow, and so I undo the strings of my laundress apron, making the decision to let me go on his behalf.

“You’ll be docked,” he says.

I hand my balled-up apron to Maman and flee the sweltering, smothering steam. I set out, running like the dickens, even if Mazas is in the eastern reaches of Paris. A sharp pain wells up beneath my ribs, but I keep at it, one foot flying in front of the other, panting and puffing and doubling over every couple of blocks.

After an hour of people staring and making way, I come upon the back of Mazas, the hefty, towering wall. There is little to see, only mortared stone reaching for the sky and higher up the roofs of six blocks of cells and the central watchtower.

I lope around to the front, take in the massive archway of the entrance, the four navy-cloaked jailers, each standing, leaning his weight onto a rifle fitted with a bayonet of cold steel. I step closer, close enough that one of those scowling jailers lifts up the butt of his rifle from a paving stone. “I come to speak to Émile Abadie,” I say, setting my jaw to look fierce. “They brought him in today.”

Another of those jailers bothers to look up from cleaning yellow fingernails. “You need an appointment for visiting,” he says. “Come back in the morning to put in your request and then again the next day to see if the warden put down a time for you.” He pats the pocket of his trousers. “Won’t hurt none to sweeten the pot.”

“Not above gorging yourself on the bread snatched from others?” I say, jutting my chin to the swell of his belly, fat like a woman’s in her ninth month. Two other jailers look my way, mouths twisting to keep down their smiles.

“Might think better than to insult the fellow passing along the visiting requests.”

“Might think better than to steal the sous of an honest working girl with a dead father and a drunken mother and two baby sisters aren’t capable of feeding themselves.”

He plumps his bottom lip, don’t retreat in the least from my hard stare. The pork butcher, with his fondness for Charlotte, he will put up with waiting for his money a further week.

“Don’t even know if he is truthfully here,” I say. “It’s only what I heard.”

“Wouldn’t know,” he says, going back to his nails.

“He come in with a devil looks like an angel, all blond locks and milky skin.”

Another of those jailers, one with the cherry nose of someone too often seeing the bottom of a glass, says, “Those boys that slit the throat of the tavern owner?”

“Can’t speak for Pierre Gille,” I say, “but Émile is gentle like a lamb.”

He folds his arm, drawing the muzzle of his rifle tight against his cloak. “You his sweetheart?”