The Painted Girls (22 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
Marie. Already I did not accompany her to the exposition of Monsieur Degas and snatched the money she was planning to pay to Madame Théodore and shoved her to the ground and slapped her face and forgot about her examination and accused her of not showing loyalty. Already she did not love me all the way through. And now this. Such a blow. I want a chance to explain, before she frets and fusses and decides she don’t love her sister in the least. I want to go backward in time and be there for comfort when there is no statuette and remember her examination and fix her hair and say she showed me loyalty a hundred times. She don’t know I whispered in her ear about being my best friend.
ABADIE IMPLICATED IN MURDER OF WIDOW JOUBERT
Michel Knobloch has confessed to the murder of the widow Joubert, the rue Fontaine news seller bludgeoned to death the eleventh of March 1880. As accomplice, he named Émile Abadie, who was granted a stay of execution by President Grévy late last year and is currently slated for the sunny shores of New Caledonia.
For a moment it appeared Knobloch’s confession was false. The widow Joubert was murdered on a March evening when both he and Abadie were marked present at one of the final performances of
L’Assommoir
at the Ambigu Theater. In the third tableau, which took place between eight thirty and nine o’clock, both appeared among the procession of workmen heading to their labors. They next appeared shortly after ten o’clock, in the seventh tableau, drinking in a pub. On Monday, though, Chief Inspector Monsieur Macé walked the distance between the Ambigu and the rue Fontaine, ascertaining for himself that there was in fact ample time between nine and ten o’clock for Abadie and Knobloch to commit the crime.
Surely Monsieur President will think twice about saving the hide of a scoundrel such as Émile Abadie a second time.
I
go to see my sister at the Saint-Lazare, a prison for women. The tribunal ordered her locked up for three months for stealing seven hundred francs from a gentleman as he slept. It happened at the house of Madame Brossard. A brothel, not a tavern. I asked the girl Colette, who came to our lodging room after Antoinette did not come home for three days. I stood in the doorway, not sure, until I said, “My sister Antoinette, she worked at this house as a servant or a coquette?” and Colette looked away to the wooden threshold at our feet.
She looked up after a while, set her eyes on my own. “A respectable house,” she said. “We are registered. No
fille clandestine
at the house of Madame Brossard.”
I stood there, across the threshold from Colette—her low, overflowing neckline; her pouty, glistening mouth—grasping that Antoinette was not dead. And there was some amount of joy bubbling up, but the bubbles were bursting faster than they were being made. Antoinette was a coquette, jailed for robbing a gentleman. The truth of it was like the sharp point of a pin.
But still, even now, walking to Saint-Lazare, I say to myself, “Wake up, Marie. Wake up from this ugly dream.” But I do not wake up. No, I put one foot ahead of the other, taking a step, peering into the fog cloaking the lampposts, the carriages, the shops not a half block away. Again, I step, swallowed up in a blanket of murk.
T
he visitors’ parlor at Saint-Lazare is a square room split in two by a partition of iron bars, with chairs on either side, an ugly place I never hoped to see. Three jailers, all leaning up against the walls, keep watch of the six visitors, sitting, waiting, like me, or already talking in low voices to the prisoners on the other side of the bars.
What should I have done to stop her slide, her fall away from the girl who told me not to linger in stairwells, to walk quickly on the way home from the Opéra? She blamed quitting the washhouse on raw knuckles and chapped skin, and maybe they were enough to push a girl from laundress to tavern maid, but rough hands were not the cause of Antoinette giving up on a life of honest work. What was? Did she mind the four bouquets that brightened our lodging room for a week, the flash of happiness every time I remembered the soft thud of my ankle being hit?
When she finally came to see
La Korrigane
, she sat in the fourth balcony, squinting to see the gold bands of my Breton peasant skirt, the fine lace of my apron, collar, and cap. And afterward she said I ranked in the top five of the second set of the quadrille and that my dancing was superior to that of a half dozen girls in the first. She kissed me on the brow, and I lay my head on her shoulder. We stood like that a long while, and I felt the calm of a caterpillar inside his cocoon. But was her mouth, the mouth I could not see, sneering bitterness?
The Opéra, it is what I have that she does not. And, yes, it is something—all the moments when I am lifted above the grind of climbing the stairs and the strain of laboring at the barre and the boredom of holding still upon the stage. “To seek grace,” Madame Dominique says. “To dance is to seek grace.” Is it what I have found? For upon the stage, sometimes in the practice room, I close my mind to the worry of Antoinette, the coolness of Maman. Sometimes a shimmering moment of crystal clearness comes.
I am not happier than I was in Sister Evangeline’s classroom, back when Papa would get me laughing without bothering to cover up my teeth. But no point in thinking about all that. It is what came afterward—Monsieur LeBlanc rattling our door, demanding what was owed—I need to remember when tabulating how I am getting along. As things are, with the arrangement I have with Monsieur Lefebvre, we have pastry for breakfast, thick soup at the end of the day, sometimes a few sous left over for a sweet. Monsieur LeBlanc does not come, or did not come, not with Antoinette contributing, too.
Still, the flesh alongside my thumbnail is picked raw, more raw, I think, than it was before I was elevated to the second set of the quadrille, and Monday nights, I find myself begging for sleep to come or waking up to blackness and filling with dread that with the first light arrives a Tuesday and then a morning at Monsieur Lefebvre’s apartment. Twice Maman barked for me to stop thrashing and put her hand upon my brow. “No fever,” she said, and in the blue light of the moon, I watched her pull a small bottle from beneath her mattress. Rim upon my lip, she tilted the bottle and I swallowed licorice so bitter that my tongue grew hard as a knot. But afterward sleep came, and three times since I have spread my hand flat, seeking Maman’s bottle for myself.
I caught Antoinette watching me once, a Tuesday morning, while I combed out my hair. She just stared, her head tilted to one side. “Everything all right, Marie?”
I almost said about the wooden clogs, the opened up knees of afterward, but her eyes were red rimmed and puffy underneath. She had her own sorrows and I was not sure I should add to her load a second heavy heart, not when already I was fifteen. “I’m tired,” I said.
“You called out in the night. You called out two times.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
She shrugged.
“That Charlotte sure knows how to sleep,” I said, putting brightness in my voice.
“A gift of innocence.” Our eyes met, clung, and for a flash, it was like she already knew about the wooden clogs, like I already knew about the house of Madame Brossard.
“The way it should be for a girl of ten.”
“Yes,” she said. And we nodded, so grave, and a feeling came over me, like our nodding had sealed the most solemn of pacts.
S
ometimes I think how I could make a change.
In the rue de Douai, on my way home from Madame Dominique’s class, it is not unusual to see Alphonse in his baker’s apron and cap, smoking on the stoop of his father’s shop. Always he bothers to dip his chin. Sometimes I stop, and he says, “Ah, the ballet girl,” and I smile. A week ago, he said, “One moment,” and disappeared into the shop. Quickly he was back, holding out in one hand a vanilla sable and in the other an orange Madeleine. “Which do you prefer?” I picked, and we stood there, me nibbling at the orange Madeleine, him brushing sable crumbs from his lips. It gave me the courage to ask if his father was happy with the girl he had taken on to knead the dough for the eighty baguettes.
He gave a little laugh. “Twice a week I listen to him complain about that girl not having half the strength of you. She doesn’t hum, neither,” he said.
“Hum?”
“You always hummed. Sweetly.” His eyes fell.
I felt my cheeks growing rosy. He gave my arm a little punch with the side of his fist, and even if I did not work up the nerve to ask about his father giving me work again—maybe I could train myself to rise early, even after a late night—I knew there was a chance.
That evening I thumped Monsieur Degas’s heavy door. He had not called me to the workshop in nine months. Sabine answered and, wiping her hands on her apron, said, “Well, look at you, Mademoiselle van Goethem. Almost a lady, now.”
The workshop was dim, lit by a handful of lamps, but still Monsieur Degas stood in his painter’s smock, one arm across his ribs and the other propped on top, holding up his chin, as if, after a moment of considering, even with the late hour, he would get back to his work.
“I’ve come about modeling,” I said. If Alphonse’s father would give me a few hours, if Monsieur Degas wanted me steady again, if I went around to the pork butcher, the watchmaker, the crockery dealer and any one of them saw his way to a few hours more, I could get by without Monsieur Lefebvre’s thirty francs. The trick would be finding the hours to sleep.
Monsieur Degas looked up, his eyes meeting mine.
I lifted my arms from my side. “I’m not so skinny anymore, no longer a petit rat.”
I saw him every few weeks at the Opéra—in the wings, in the orchestra stalls, in the practice room. Usually he greeted me by name, and once he said, “Your allegro is improved.” Always he wore his blue spectacles, and always his gaze was steady, burrowing. But that evening in his workshop, without hardly bothering to look, he said, “The statuette, it troubles me.”
He waved a hand, and I followed with my eyes to his statuette, two-thirds the size of me in real life, and my breath quickened that he had not given up. I walked closer, taking in the canvas ballet slippers, the tarlatan skirt, the leek-green ribbon tied in a bow around the thick plait of what looked to be a wig of real hair. The skin was smooth or rough, uneven in color—deep honey on the face, reddish brown on the legs—all of it formed from a substance neither polished nor dull, opaque nor clear, soft nor hard.
Wax, I decided, thinking of the way it bled down the sides of candles, hardening as it cooled, always changing shape, even, on a hot day, without the heat of a lit wick. There was a thin film of the same covering the hair; tinted yellow, covering the bodice; tinted red, covering the slippers.
No stone. No bronze. No porcelain. Only wax. Temporary. Second-rate.
And what was Monsieur Degas meaning, dressing up the statuette in real clothes and, worse, a wig of real hair? Was it woven together from the sold tresses of a starving girl? The clipped locks of the dead?
That freakish doll’s body—the skinny limbs, the too-large elbows and knees, the ridges of muscle sticking out from the thighs and the collarbones jutting below the neck—was no longer like my own. But in the face—the low forehead, the apish jaw, the broad cheekbones, the small half-closed eyes—the statuette was the mirror of me. The only mercy—Monsieur Degas hid my teeth behind closed lips.
What was the story, the story of a heart and body, Monsieur Degas was trying to tell? What was I thinking as I stood those long hours in fourth position? I was craving the stage, a position in the second set of the quadrille, a kind word from Madame Dominique. Muscles aching, stomach rumbling, I wanted the four hours to end, to find a scrap of sausage left for me at home. But I held still, dreaming up glory—a real ballet girl, captured in pastel and chalk, even oils, and then after he said, “A statuette,” my desire swelled. I dreamt of Marie Taglioni, wings spread, hovering above the earth.
I looked into the statuette’s face, and I saw longing, ambition, pride. Her chin was tilted up, and it seemed a mistake, too hopeful, on such a face. Such an ugly, monkey face. I turned away, still feeling small half-closed eyes upon my back.
Monsieur Degas was not looking my way, awaiting some comment from me. No, he was lost inside his own head, and so I stood there, quiet, wishing I had not come.
Eventually he turned to me, saying, “Perhaps. Perhaps.” He took up the pose I had held for so long, the pose of the statuette—feet in fourth position, fingers laced together behind my back. “Would you mind?”
I slipped off my shawl and, knowing his impatience, let it fall to the floor. I arranged myself, easily. Memory, Madame Dominique said, was not only the domain of the mind.
For a moment he was gleeful, almost clapping his hands, but then he paused. “No,” he said. “You’re not teetering between rat and sylph anymore.” He touched me on the shoulder lightly, and in the touch I felt sadness that girls grow into women; that men crumple, hobbling over walking sticks; that flowers wither; that trees drop their leaves. The graceful, childish back Monsieur Lefebvre, more than a year ago, felt driven to touch was gone and with it Monsieur Degas’s interest in me modeling for him. He wanted only the heart and body of a little dancer, aged fourteen.
“All those sketches,” I said. “They won’t change.”
He straightened his glasses, turned away from me to a notebook, one I knew to hold drawings of me.
I
wrap my fingers around the iron bars, give a little tug, but the grate is firmly lodged, and there is no more chance of rattling it than the brick floor beneath my feet. Monsieur Lefebvre is my protector, and there is no other way, especially not now, not without Antoinette.
I want to put my face in my hands, to howl, for me, for Antoinette, for all the women of Paris, for the burden of having what men desire, for the heaviness of knowing it is ours to give, that with our flesh we make our way in the world. For there is a cost. But would Antoinette agree, or would she say there was no cost other than what a girl decides to believe in her own head? I look from one jailer—bored—to the next, idly fingering a brass button on his coat. Would they say there is no cost, not so long as a girl takes no more than what a man decides her flesh is worth? Could I put my mind over to that way of thinking? Would it mean I could stop wishing for Antoinette to be different than she is? Could I sleep Monday nights?
I look from the long face of one visitor to the wringing hands of the next. Are any of them saying why? Why take up the life of a coquette? Why steal seven hundred francs, especially when it meant hiding, running away from all she knows? From Charlotte. From Maman. From me. And now, before the iron bars, my face falls to my cupped hands. She was leaving behind nothing, only Charlotte, who is selfish; Maman, who drinks; me, who calls the boy she loves a murderer, a coldhearted slitter of throats.
But, oh, it is true. I swallow hard, a trick I learned in the company of Monsieur Lefebvre for clearing tears, for switching my mind to some detail—the laurel wreaths of the carpet, the pinkness of his scalp. And eyes still dry, I put my hands in my lap. On Wednesday, the same day Antoinette went to Saint-Lazare, the newspaper said a boy confessed to the widow Joubert’s murder and swore under oath Émile Abadie took part in the bludgeoning.
I am grateful for the grey silk dress I am wearing today, even if before I opened the beribboned box Monsieur Lefebvre put in my lap, I hoped for a dress not as lavish as those worn by the ladies at the Opéra but maybe with a neckline opening across the shoulders, maybe with a bit of lace, even a single rosette. But, no, my dress is high-collared, grey, stern, something a banker’s daughter wears to Mass, something a coquette’s prideful sister puts on to visit her in jail. On opening up the box, I know my face fell. The air took on a chill, and Monsieur Lefebvre said, “You are only a girl.”