The Third Grace (7 page)

Lou heard a knock on the half-opened door and called, “Come in, Oliver.” But it was a student instead who stuck her head into the office—the attentive girl from the front row of her lecture.

“Can I talk to you for a minute, Dr. Chapman?”

Lou rose to intercept her. “I'm expecting someone for an appointment momentarily,” she said, just as she saw Oliver Upton plowing down the hallway towards them. “It shouldn't be long. Why not wait out here for me?” Lou motioned her colleague in and closed the door on the student with a thud as Oliver took a chair.

“How's your progress with that young designer?” he demanded, getting right to down to business. He crossed one leg over the other and jiggled his foot. “You know I want the guarantee that she'll be on my team before I submit the bid to RoundUp Studios. The sooner, the better.”

“I'm massaging her,” Lou replied. She felt the time pressure herself.

“Closing date's coming up. They're not cutting us much slack, but since they're bringing the bulk of the wardrobe and their own costume supervisor with them, I suppose they think of us merely as back-up support.” Oliver retied his shoelace and smoothed his sock. “But I'm just not confident that we have anyone currently on staff who can handle the artistic demands, especially since we'll have to depend on student input for much of the labor. It's a managerial nightmare, if I ever imagined one.”

“I think she'll bite, Oliver. I've inferred to Aglaia that you'll give her a lecturing position in the arts program.”

“That's outrageous. My M.A. students, who are clamoring for teaching time themselves, would riot—to say nothing of the stage designers we hire on contract for only a season or a particular production. It would be viewed as nepotism, pure and simple.”

“Yes, of course,” Lou said, thinking that nepotism was nothing new in their profession. “But I wanted to sweeten the pot, even if it's with an empty promise. At any rate, you do have the school's authority to hire her away from the competitor and that's—”

“Wait a minute,” Oliver cut her off. He rubbed his pointy beard between thumb and forefinger. “Your suggestion of Aglaia as a lecturer has given me an idea. I might be able to call in a few favors after all and facilitate a special honor that should grease the wheels of our plan.”

Lou admired the craftiness of Oliver's mind as he outlined his idea and concluded. “I'll let you know if I make any headway. In the meanwhile,” he said, rising from his chair to leave, “speed your end of the process up, Lou.”

Oliver's supercilious manner befitted his seniority but irritated her. She didn't comment and Oliver said, “Now, I see you're keeping the university chancellor's granddaughter waiting in the hall, so I'll let you go.”

Chancellor Wadsworth's granddaughter? Lou castigated herself for failing to recognize the student, and this time she ushered her into her office with deference.

“Dr. Chapman, I've been reading your book about women regaining power.” Her obsequious flattery left Lou unmoved; she expected to be read. But she assumed false appreciation and tried to recall if they'd ever met.

“How can I help you?”

“Well, um, you might not remember me from winter semester, but I had a, like, session with you here in the office.”

At that Lou examined her more closely. Funny she couldn't recall the meeting, particularly in light of the girl's connections. There'd been so many encounters in this office, with so many girls who needed “consoling,” that she sometimes got them mixed up.

“Certainly, Ms. Wadsworth.” She guessed that the girl went by the chancellor's last name.

“Whitney,” the girl reminded her. “Could we maybe talk? If you have, like, a few minutes?”

“I always have time for a student.” In truth Lou was impatient to get back to her condo; she had a lot to do in the next few days. But she was always mindful to keep her options open when it came to potential alliances, and a plum like this didn't fall into her lap every day.

“It's about the quiz last week. I've got it here,” Whitney said, rifling around in her book bag. “I was so busy with my poetry assignment that I didn't have time to study.”

“I don't review marks given on examinations, and I can't start making exceptions now. But given your obvious aptitude,” Lou exaggerated, “you might bring up your grade by writing an extra paper for me.”

“I can do that. What topic should it be on?”

Lou was thoughtful, wanting to set the tone for future interactions. “Perhaps you could merge women's issues with your predilection for verse by focusing on the lyrical style developed by the Greek poet Sappho, who was exiled from her beloved island of Lesbos.” Lou withdrew a key from her desk drawer and swiveled her chair to face the wall of streak-free glass-fronted bookshelves. “You strike me as a reliable person, Whitney. I'll lend you a resource that might start the juices flowing, and then we can meet to discuss the subject further.” Lou often found Sappho stimulating to more than the intellect of her students.

“Thanks, Dr. Chapman.”

“Call me Lou,” she said. The girl smiled at the floor. “Let's set a date, then,” Lou said as she consulted her electronic calendar. “I'm clearing my schedule for next week and am unavailable, but we can meet in the week following.”

As Whitney left, Lou pondered the state of young women these days. Something about them always got to her, maybe their vulnerability or their awe. She wasn't fooled into thinking that Whitney was intrinsically different, although her family tree set her apart. But all these girls began to look the same, all voiced the same shallow thoughts with a cloying dedication to quoting her out of context. She admitted some personal benefit from the relationships she cultivated—a consciousness that she was making a difference, having a small influence on lives in a fashion lecturing and publishing could never quite accomplish. An emotional impact.

Of course, Whitney Wadsworth's lineage changed the scenario slightly, and their interaction might go well beyond the one-on-one mentorship that was Lou's signature. Chancellor Wadsworth was merely a figurehead in the structure of the university, but one could never foretell all the repercussions of bridge building when it came to social contacts. She'd keep Whitney as the ace up her sleeve.

Lou had no close acquaintances in her own age group, just academic associates and those she met at conferences. The classroom had become her social pool. She'd tutored countless girls exactly like Whitney Wadsworth, insecure and transparent—needy girls who molded themselves beneath her supervision in compliance, so eager to please for the moment, for the grade. Clay she could remake in her own image.

Perhaps that was another reason for her attraction to Aglaia, Lou thought, returning to her best prospect for success in the issue of tenure as she walked out to her car in the parking lot. Aglaia, older and slightly wiser, was a fascinating proselyte who didn't throw herself at Lou. There was an enigma about her, a recalcitrance even. Introspective with a bittersweet melancholy about her, Aglaia needed someone to rescue her from the banality of her life. Lou hadn't quite figured out what got Aglaia's blood up, but she was enjoying chipping away the exterior to expose the heart that beat beneath.

A
glaia bit off the end of the knotted thread after her last stitch on the costume despite the proximity of her scissors lying within arm's reach on her office worktable. She'd been role-playing her arrival—how to catch the train to Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport, how to ask in French for directions to her hotel. And, of course, how to find a guy in Paris! This trip was a coming-of-age thing for her, and Paris was the ultimate escape into glamor.

Even aside from her hopes to look up François, she needed a diversion from the humdrum of her life.

There! She admitted the city wasn't all she hoped for back when she was fresh off the farm, dazzled with the lights and a long way from gravel roads. When she first moved, it was enough just to hop a bus to a mall full of name-brand jeans she could never find in the Sears catalogue. That catalogue was the best shopping she got before she acquired her license, if Dad or Joel wouldn't drive her the ninety miles into Sterling or—even better—all the way to Denver.

The village of Tiege, population 392, was where the paved road began, three miles from the Klassens' gate. It offered only a small general store that sold wilted lettuce, stale candy, and pails of udder balm. The village's chief attractions were the post office, church, and K-12 school—oh, and the service center for tires and fuel.

Her intentions even then, when she first moved, were farther reaching than the shopping mall. Once she'd found an apartment and part-time work doing alterations at a local menswear store, she enrolled in her first university courses and thought her future was set. She got to know a small group of fellow students but, when the cash ran out and she had to get a full-time job, she dropped out of the loop. Aglaia was lucky to find employment at Eb's shop ten years ago, and she never left. Now this position Lou talked about might offer her another step up.

So, all in all, the move to the city had been good for her, a springboard to bigger things. She was ready for the challenge of international travel, and this week in Paris would nourish the inner woman, as Lou might say. Sometimes Aglaia doubted there was anything alive in there, other than her art and her memories and her hopes to one day meet François again.

Until recently, she'd held that daydreaming was creative—a lubricant to her design process, the oil of imagination. But lately she felt as though she were drying up and her voice becoming muted—her own physical voice if not her interior dialogue. People were asking her more often to speak up because they couldn't quite make out what she was saying.

It wasn't timorousness; she was daring enough. It was as if she were being shuttered, closed up within her own skin, calcifying from the outside inward like a hardening mask at the aesthetician's. Would she even bleed anymore if she pricked herself?

Aglaia rolled the needle between her fingers, thread tickling the palm of her right hand. It was an idiotic notion, but she couldn't recall the last time she'd jabbed herself. She squeezed the tip of her left thumb till it was a dull red and poked at it with the needle. Too thick.

She pushed harder against the resistance of the toughened skin until, with a slight release of pressure and a sting, the needle slid past the barrier. A crimson bead welled up; she was ridiculously relieved. Maybe it was the relief that made her drop her guard for a minute, so that a fragment of prose snuck into her mind:
The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Aglaia shook the words from her head, along with the picture of the preacher waggling his finger at the congregation—at her—as he held his Bible high above their heads and admonished them against the sins of Cain. Years of memorizing Scripture had left the shrapnel of rogue verses to trouble her, the Word never returning void, always hitting its mark. Only other thoughts could displace them, so she deliberately remembered a different scene from that summer—something disassociated from the Bible.

They're skeet shooting.

“Pull!” Joel calls to her, and the clay pigeon gyrates crazily above the field in front of them. A shot rings out, and a chip flies from the saucer.

“Pull!” François this time. He blasts the skeet, which explodes into shards. With each shot Mary Grace flinches, the sound an assault to her ears.

François ignores her, consumed with this new task, and Mary Grace observes him with an intensity she grants herself only when she knows no one else is watching. They're a quarter of a mile from the house out on the prairie, and she squats on her haunches behind the two young men, poised to release the catch on their verbal commands, poised to recoil. François has tossed his shirt to the ground and his torso gleams with sweat and bulges with muscles newly acquired by riding, shoveling grain, lifting bales. His profile shows the strong line of his clenched jaw. He cradles his shotgun between arm and ribcage and rakes his hand through his hair, pushing it off his forehead. Then he reaches for the jug, gulps greedily, and flashes her a smile.

“Pull!” Joel yells.

The precious fabric was still draped over Aglaia's knees, her thumb was bleeding, and she was stunned at her own carelessness. She had no time to deal with stains on the costume! She sucked on her thumb, the metallic taste reminding her of rusty well water, and then bound it with a scrap of muslin tied into a clumsy knot.

Aglaia scraped her stool back from the workbench and let the folds fall out of the gown and hung it up for steaming. She knew the source of her problem well enough. It was the farm. It plagued her—the memories of that summer, the religious confusion, the unfulfilled prophecy of what her life was meant to be. Mom and Dad tried to reconcile with her after she left Nebraska for Denver, haranguing her to at least see a pastor for counseling, but she stopped answering their phone calls until they let her be. The internal stress wasn't so easily diverted. She thought running from it would give her space but it shadowed her and accompanied her, just outside of her direct line of sight, and she wouldn't look at the issue squarely as if it had the power—like Medusa's writhing locks—to turn her to stone.

She had no intention of going to a shrink but she'd end up there if she didn't watch out.

Aglaia heard a file drawer close in an adjoining office and realized that her boss was still on the job, waiting for her to be done so he could lock the shop and enjoy his weekend off. She was anxious to get home, too, and go over her last-minute list so she could officially close up her suitcase.

Aglaia plugged in the steamer and topped up the water level. While it heated, she shuffled through some drawings for a future project waiting on her desk. For the first time she detected that her sketches of the models resembled the statues on the postcard pilfered by Lou—heads poised, mouths closed, eyes glazed and blind. The difference was in how dressed her fashion figures were compared to the smooth nakedness of the Graces wearing only the sunlight filtering onto them from an outside source. Her work was about covering up, not uncovering. It wasn't quite the take her boss had on their occupation, though. She recollected a conversation that took place near the beginning of her training.

“Lass,” Eb had said, “you want to behold the eyes of your customers.”

“Why's that?” She'd gotten used to his meaningful observations after the first couple of months working the retail counter out front, filling orders for Halloween costumes from drop-ins off the street before she'd been allowed to even pick up her drafting pencil and prove how much she was learning by watching Eb. The work at the beginning seemed so simple, a matter of flicking through the rotary card files for “Merlin” or “Rapunzel” and notifying the stock boy to bag the item.

“The eyes are the window to the soul,” he answered. “You can find out what costumes they really need.”

“But the customers tell me that,” she argued.

He laughed at her, a rumbling chortle that shook his belly and blew his sandy moustache out from his mouth like a curtain in the breeze. How could she take offence? Eb's laughter was never a put-down. She heard he once dressed an octogenarian as Little Bo Peep and a burly biker in a sailor suit—and both came back the next year for more. His inventory was loaded with literary and fairytale characters, hardly anything dark or oppressing—fairies and mermaids and unicorns, the Little Gingerbread Man and the Steadfast Tin Soldier. Even his witches had a sweetness about them.

“Look deeply, Aglaia. Most of the time they just think they know. Use that inquisitive mind of yours to expose the true personality trying to get out. That's what costuming is all about—not hiding under a false identity but exposing the true one.”

That was advice from years ago she was still learning to apply in her job and, at the same time, still trying to avoid applying personally.

The steamer hissed and she lifted it off its hook, the hose a hot snake, and she was back on the farm again.

“Get it away from me!” François recoils from the garter snake like a girl, and she can't help but laugh at Joel's prank, surprised as she is by François's reaction.

“It won't bite,” she reassures him.

Joel grins. “In fact, we grill these and eat 'em for snacks.”

Maybe François buys that one—his lips sour with disgust but even then look kissable.

And later, perhaps to redeem himself for his weak fright, he tells her the story of Asclepius, god of healing who not only saved lives but also brought back the dead, and of his descendent Hippocrates, whose snake-entwined rod became the symbol of rebirth.

So she tells him about Moses, who set up a pole with a bronze snake fixed on it to heal his followers bitten by vipers of judgment, to heal those grumblers who detested the lifesaving manna that was sweet as wafers with honey, as cakes baked with oil. And when they gazed upon that pole-borne snake in submission to the Great Physician, they lived.

But François stares at her, incredulous, as if to ask, “Who would believe such a story?”

The fabric let go of its wrinkles and she allowed it to cool before she folded it in layers of tissue paper and packed it into the traveling box, just the right size to fit in the plane's overhead bin. She hitched it up by its sturdy handle; it wasn't too heavy and felt secure in her grip—like the little overnight bag she used for pajama parties as a girl.

“Where are you going with that valise,
ma petite
?” He's leaning against the weathered wood of the house as though waiting for her, the brim of his baseball
cap pulled low and a piece of grass between his teeth in a parody of the country boy.

“It's Naomi's birthday, so I'm spending the night at her place.”

He scowls at that. Why would it bug him? “You are best of friends,
non
?”

“Have been for years, François.” Is it that he'll miss her for the evening? Mary Grace could hope.

“You tell each other secrets, then?”

“We talk all about you,” she teases. He turns from her without another word and she's hurt.

When she tells Naomi about François's reaction, her girlfriend quickly changes the subject, and soon after that she's gone off to the city, leaving Mary Grace stuck in the sticks. But she doesn't pine too long because François is around to keep her company. Oh, what company!

Aglaia set the package back on the table and sat down again to rub her temples. The chaotic flood of thoughts was going to drown her if she didn't find some way to contain them and sort out their meaning. There was a pattern she couldn't put her finger on.

This latest resurgence was in all likelihood due to the stupid idea of her mother's to take that Bible back to François. Aglaia's own decision to look for him might be slightly far-fetched, especially after all this time, and slightly frightening. But upon meeting him, to push a Bible on him like some soapbox fanatic earning brownie points with God—now that was just downright humiliating.

However, on second thought, maybe packing the Bible along to Paris wasn't such a bad idea after all. It would give Aglaia a pretext—should she actually find François—for tracking him down in the first place. If he wasn't glad to see her, she could smooth it over by telling him that she'd been sent by Tina, who implored her to make the delivery, and what could he do then but thank her? Aglaia might still look the fool, but she could blame it on her doddering mother.

Maybe the delivery wasn't impossible. Maybe, with luck, she
could
track him down and—as an added bonus—get that Bible off her hands and out of her sight. The one action would have the double effect of putting to rest the question of François and faith, and giving her some peace about the whole affair. At the very least, taking the book along with her wouldn't do any harm.

Aglaia stood up and switched off her tabletop lamp. As she pivoted to reach for the costume box, her ankle turned and she stumbled against the chair, sending it clattering.