Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  “Oh, Iris, but you won’t go out,” calls Henrika from her worktable. Her fingers are stained with ink, and she curses in a manner acceptable for well-bred goodwives.

  “I want to take her to Saint Bavo’s,” says Iris. “We might be able to find the Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies, or the dwarf with the arms of an ape.”

  “Clara doesn’t go out,” says Henrika. “Well, in the walled garden, for some air, of course.” Now she appears at the doorway, fixing Iris with a stern look. “She hasn’t been away from home for three years. Not since a housemaid once shared some gossip: A changeling child had been born to a glass-blower’s daughter. Clara so pestered me to go look at it! I was worn down at last and, covering her with hood and cloak, I agreed to take her there and back again.”

  “A changeling?” says Iris. How can Henrika say such a thing so openly?

  “By the time we got there, the thing had died, and crows had borne its body away.”

  “Oh,” says Iris. Maybe Henrika doesn’t know the gossip about her daughter Clara. “What did the crows do with the changeling’s body?”

  “Dropped it in the Haarlemsmeer, where all children without souls swim until the Judgment Day.”

  “But I hear they would like to drain the Haarlemsmeer,” says Margarethe, bringing cheese from the kitchen and placing it where Clara can reach it. “What will happen to all the drowned soulless babies then?”

  “I suspect they will be channeled out to sea,” says Henrika calmly. “I don’t really know. I have my mind on my figures.”

  “We could go look for a changeling, I suppose,” says Iris craftily, peering at Clara to see if any interest is piqued. Clara looks curious but wary.

  But Henrika holds out her quill like a finger, wagging it at Iris. “This is entirely forbidden. You may go out into the garden, or into any room of the house if you knock at the door first. But you may not bring Clara out the front door or out the side gate. Nor may you climb like an urchin over any wall or drop out of any window. You may not slither up the chimney nor burrow through the cellars. Do you understand me?”

  “We are prisoners?” says Iris.

  “Clara isn’t fit for the world. She trembles so and breaks into chills. Visit the garden and the sheds beyond. Clara knows where she’s permitted to go.”

  Up until now van den Meer has been bathing his face in the steam from his boerenkoffie, which combines the smells of the warmed beer, sugar, and nutmeg with the mattressy odor of his beard. But he tilts his chin parallel to the table and says, as if the next installment in an ongoing argument, “Do you remember hearing that in Delft the clergy banned gingerbread men at the feast of Sinter Klaas? And the children rebeled. They ran shrieking through the streets and wouldn’t do their tasks. Children will rebel eventually, my dear.”

  Henrika settles her hands at her side and lowers her eyes. In an apologetic tone, addressing the tabletop, she replies, “I am speaking to Iris. I am not speaking to you.”

  Van den Meer nods affably and says no more. But Iris sees the truth in Margarethe’s observation: Although Henrika wears a guise of pretty deference, she acquiesces to no one, least of all her husband.

  When Clara, who has appeared to pay little attention to this, finishes nibbling, Iris says, “I’ll get my sister and we’ll go outside into the garden. We’ll wait for you there. Come out when you have dressed.”

  Iris finds Ruth. Iris hates using her sister like this, but huge Ruth may be a more likely attraction than Iris. After all, it was Margarethe’s tussle with Ruth that caused Clara to lean out the window and scrutinize the ox girl. Perhaps, being disappointed in never seeing a changeling baby, Clara had seen the howling older Fisher girl as the next best thing: a grotesque.

  The back of the house opens out onto a sizable lot, bricked and gated and those iron gates locked. To one side, a kitchen yard for washing and food preparation, for the growth of herbs and vegetables. To the other side, opening off the salon, a small garden, Italianate in design, with pebbled paths and orderly plantings, and pilasters at regular intervals surmounted by granite balls. Behind both kitchen yard and formal garden stands a huge shed, and beyond that is a farmyard, where the chickens and a cow are kept, and maybe other animals as well. The shed door, opening off the kitchen yard, has been locked so far.

  Iris sinks onto the grass in the garden. Ivy crawls up two walls, making a green rustle when the wind pushes through. Ruth collapses next to her and moans in gentle hunger, for she adores gingerbread and the mention of it has likely made her mouth water. “No gingerbread,” says Iris firmly.

  When Clara emerges, she looks sly, but less truculent. Probably she’s remembered that, after all, this is her home. It’s her world. She pads across the grass to where the Fisher sisters are waiting. A cat, nearly lemon-colored, follows.

  Iris decides that the problem of teaching English to Clara can wait. She lies with her head in the grass and doesn’t look at Clara, but says, “Why did you want to see the changeling so much?

  “Tell me about the Queen of the Gypsies,” says Clara. “Is she the Queen of Changelings too?”

  “What is your interest in changelings?”

  “Can’t you tell? I am a changeling,” says Clara.

  “I’ve heard that said. But of course you’re not,” says Iris. “Changelings can’t speak and run and think as people can.”

  “Maybe changelings in England can’t,” says Clara calmly. “Changelings here can.”

  Iris thinks of the face at the upmost window that first day—was it Clara in shadows, or Henrika in veils, or van den Meer himself, bearded and browed—or someone else?

  Or something else?

  “The devil himself will send out a whiskery hound to snuff us out!”—

  Iris rushes on, to keep away from that notion. An imp here, knowing all things, lodged since before their arrival, awaiting them? “Did you ever see a changeling? I mean, other than yourself?” she says.

  Clara shrugs. Her eyes slide over to Ruth and then slide away.

  “Ruth is a big girl, a bit stupid, that’s all,” says Iris. “She’s not a changeling.”

  “How do you know for sure?” says Clara. “Isn’t she older than you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she would have been changed before you were born.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “I won’t. It’s foolishness.”

  “Ask your father.”

  The wind blows the ivy for moments while Iris watches it. Eyes narrowed, Clara then says, “What?”

  Iris doesn’t answer.

  Clara crawls a little closer. She studies Iris, as a small child will study a bug before smashing it with a stone. “Where is your father? Is he a changeling? Did he fly away?” There’s no caress of tenderness in her words, but some unrefined brutality. But when Iris won’t speak, Clara sighs, moves on, bored. “Well, then, tell me something else. Tell me about yourself. You aren’t a changeling, just a child. I hardly ever meet children. Why are you called Iris?”

  “It means a kind of flower,” snaps Iris, angry at herself for the tears.

  “Oh,” says Clara in a superior voice. “Flowers. I know flowers. All we ever hear about is tulip flowers. We have a lot of plants growing under a glass roof behind the sheds, and somewhere to the south of town, a well-guarded plantation in the polderlands. Shall we look in the sheds?”

  “Later,” says Iris. “I’ve told you about my name. Now you tell me why you think you’re a changeling.”

  “Because this is all the world I have. The greater world is poison to a changeling; I would die. So I am kept, for my own health and good, merely here: in the pretty prison house, with this small room of outside adjacent to it.” Suddenly Clara hoists her skirts to her knees and races back and forth across the sheltered space. She touches each of the three walls of the garden that cage them. “What is mine? These are mine: the song of birds, though you can’t always see them. Pouncer the cat,
when he wants to stay with me. Sometimes he doesn’t. Look, the flat sky that sits on the garden walls like a leaden roof. Some snails. The same old bushes. Soon there will be enough dead leaves to have a fire, and then smoke will be a rope up into the sky. That’s mine. It’s all I have.”

  “There’s a linden tree,” says Iris.

  “Where?”

  “You can just catch sight of the crown of it. It must be growing on the other side of your garden wall.”

  “A bird in it. A green finch. That’s mine. And that’s all.” Clara smacks her lips angrily. “At least it’s not a crow.”

  “A green finch in a linden tree,” says Iris. “Is it a magic finch?”

  Clara looks suspiciously at Iris, as if afraid of being thought gullible. Clara’s next question is partly taunting and partly hopeful. “Did you really meet a Queen of the Gypsies?”

  Iris feels a bit guilty. Any old hobbled dame isn’t an ancient angel; old women are just old women. Iris shrugs, noncommittal.

  Clara responds with sass, as if to prove she doesn’t care. “Let’s go look at the tulips. We own many of them, to grow, to show, to sell. Since I’m not allowed to go outside of these walls, I can go to the shed and look, and the gardeners don’t mind.”

  “My mother may mind.”

  Clara gives a shrug. “But my mother doesn’t care, and it’s her house, not your mother’s. It doesn’t matter if your mother minds. Come, Iris. Come, you too, Ruth.” Ruth prefers to stay where she is.

  The tulip shed is beyond the herb garden, reached through the kitchen door. Sided to shoulder height with rough-milled boards, it’s open to the elements for a foot or two above. The boards of the roof aren’t all fixed with nails. Some boards can be shifted so that in warm weather sun can come in, while the shed’s walls protect the plants from the worst of the wind.

  The plants are arranged in terra-cotta trays with porous bottoms. The trays stand on rough tables, and the soil of the nursery floor is dank. The plants appear in ranks, the bulbs apparently having been sunk at intervals of two or three weeks apart. Here are the newest trays of plantings, where nothing shows yet through the reddish-brown soil. Beyond, trays in which plants send up their shoots, trays where the plants grow taller, and then develop a head and some leaves. Finally, near where Iris and Clara stand, the flowers begin to show some color and to open up their petals.

  Iris doesn’t know how much Clara comprehends the world, but she does take part in her family’s concern for the flowers. There are many different varieties of tulip, she tells Iris in a teacherly voice, and new fashions are being imported from the East on a monthly basis. The family’s plantation beyond town is immense, but even within this small nursery there are eight varieties in full or near flower, not counting a few ranks that have passed their prime. Perhaps a hundred and twenty blossoms now? Some are all red and pink and orange, a study in burning colors; many are striped with red and white. Iris doesn’t like the tulip’s inelegant stem, which seems thick and lacking in grace, but the flowers have heavy heads, something like roses, and maybe those stems need to be strong as cane stalks.

  A gardener comes through a door at the back and makes a remark that Iris can’t hear, but she understands the tone. Gardeners don’t want girls to be playing in the shed. Iris begins to back away, saying, “Come, come, Clara, let’s go back to our small garden, where we can run without risk of damaging these things.”

  Clara doesn’t speak at first. Iris doesn’t know what is on her mind. Then Clara says, “Aren’t these the finest of treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds and more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begun to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time?”

  “Like changeling babies?” says Iris, regretting the words almost the moment they’re out of her mouth. More forcefully she says, “Let’s talk about it away from here.”

  “Semper Augustus, Viceroy, the yellow-red of Leiden, I know these better than I know my Scripture verses,” says Clara in a singsong manner. “The white crowns, the Admiral de Maans, the General Bols. The Pope’s Head! They bloom and wither in a month’s time. Here Papa tries to force the bulbs, for purposes of exciting investors, but out in the polderfields, they grow only once a year, and bloom in the early spring, never to return.”

  Clara sighs. She stands, a young thing with a heavy adult thought in her mind, as Iris backs away. It’s almost a dark thought, though Iris can’t quite name it. A sudden slide of light comes through a shifting of clouds, slanting between two roof boards that have been pulled aside. Clara’s hair blazes, white fire; suddenly Iris can’t see her, just a glare of light, a child in an inside garden. For an instant Iris believes Clara really is a changeling.

  Small Oils

  Canvases, blocks of wood, varnished planks. Mounds of white powder, and blue, and red, and ochre. Stands of brushes in chipped clay pots. The smell, both intoxicating and vile, of oils and turps, and of minerals in their little heaps. Caspar, for the Master and for himself, sorts the ingredients, grinds, sifts, dampens, and seals them in small bowls with wax lids. Painting has come to the strict brick house on the western edge of the Grotemarkt.

  Iris watches. It takes a long time for the Master to compose his painting. He moves Clara here, he moves her there. He sits her, he stands her. A hand on her waist, a hand at her bonnet strings, a hand on the table, a hand on her chin. Should she wear an apron and a cap, or her mother’s rare jewels? This pose too dainty? This too coy, this too womanly? “No single position catches all of her grace,” says the Master defensively when, after a week of hanging back, van den Meer looks in.

  “This must be your masterpiece,” says van den Meer. “But if you wait a year to decide on a stance for your model, the market for tulips may have softened and I won’t have the money to pay you.”

  That day the Master decides.

  It’s a conventional pose, the Master tells Iris. Clara stands a few feet in from a window on the left. A spray of tulips lies cradled in her left hand, which falls in a soft curve onto a well-appointed tabletop. She holds a tulip bulb in her right hand and studies it as if entranced at the mystery that such imperial blooms can be generated from so humble a bulb. The sunlight, see, will sink at a noontime angle, and it will drop only on the edge of Clara’s face, and on one tulip fallen out of the bouquet. The rest of Clara’s form will be done in softer colors, set off by the shadow of the room, its costly dark-framed mirror, its chest of drawers, its tiles arranged around the corner of the mantelpiece.

  But the color of the tulips? Van den Meer fusses about this. He wants the Master to use the exact color and pattern of the tulip that will be shipped in bulk the following month, and not available for growing and subsequent blossoming till the spring, if that. What color and pattern is that? “It’s red,” says van den Meer vaguely, “with a white stripe, a sort of pantaloon-ish look.”

  “Red,” says the Master witheringly, “red? And how does the stripe go, exactly? I’ll paint from nature or not at all.”

  Van den Meer scowls and scolds, while Iris huddles with her arms clapped around herself. She hears about how hard it is to fund such a commercial venture, and the financial risks that are run, especially by the weavers of Haarlem, who are very involved this year. The Master pays little mind. Calmly he continues to sketch the form of Clara in the elegant room, swiping the canvas with a rag reeking with linseed oil, correcting a mistake.

  “Of course,” says van den Meer, looking out the window and stroking his beard, almost as if talking to himself, “I could always, at this late date, decide to solicit the help of your rival, Bollongier.”

  “Damn you, damn damn damn,” says the Master. “If I go back to painting my catalogue of God’s errors, I paint you next, you brute. The worst flaw in God’s plan: the henpecked husband. The unnatural in nature—”

  At van den Mee
r’s glance, the Master stops. He sighs. He agrees to paint whatever wretched variety of striped tulip van den Meer requires, as long as multiple plants are forced into bloom for the Master to examine during the preliminary studies and the final painting. Van den Meer accedes to this.

  After a week, Clara refuses to sit for the sketches anymore. And Henrika seems ready to permit this drastic change of plans. But—maybe shamed by the Master’s coarse remark about him—van den Meer puts his foot down and takes Henrika aside into her small office. There are loud words from both sides, and even with the door closed, everyone on the ground floor can hear about guilders and florins, risks and rewards.

  Iris listens to all this. When Clara is pouting upstairs that evening, Iris murmurs to Henrika, “Why doesn’t Clara want to sit for sketches?”

  Henrika looks annoyed at this remark. Van den Meer says, “Clara insists that the Master is rude and doesn’t want to talk to her, only to look at her.”

  “It is tedious to sit so still,” says Iris. “If you like, I can come in and engage her with tales told in English. She can listen while she poses.”

  Van den Meer says, “A charitable offer. So you’re growing fond of our precious Clara?”

  Iris wouldn’t put it like that. She thinks: I am growing fond of these good meals. But the truth is that though Clara is willful and timid at once, grander-than-thou while still sucking her thumb, Iris feels at least a grudging regret for the girl. Never to go out beyond the house or garden walls!

  Clara likes tales, so she agrees to return. Iris spins out fanciful episodes of her own design, peopled by talking animals, thwarties and household imps, fairies and saints, and the occasional magic comb, cooking pot, or horsehoe. Iris often weaves her tales around a poor benighted girl who is afraid to stray from home, but who is constantly tricked into leaving, or expelled, or jettisoned by force of earthquake, or blown out a window by a huge wind. Clara is made to smile, at least.