Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  Henrika is quiet and pretends to be busy, but Iris notices that when Caspar or the Master are in the house, Henrika is never more than one room away from Clara. Henrika hovers like a bee over a flower, thinks Iris; then she remembers the painting of Henrika in her black-and-yellow bumblebee silks.

  When he is not assisting the Master, Caspar does quick studies of his own. They are sketches in oils rather than completed paintings. Caspar has a gift for line but no strong eye for color, so for the time being he roughs out domestic scenes on boards. Using reddish outlines, he lays in washes of ochre, highlighted with white when the underpainting is dry. He studies scenes of domestic labor with a certain mad joy.

  Though Iris is bewitched by Caspar’s small oils, she won’t allow herself to be drawn—not after Ugly Girl with Wildflowers. Never again. But Ruth has no pride. Ruth doesn’t compose her features to close him out.

  A small cartoon of Ruth. The big girl is sitting almost elegantly, on a stool in the kitchen. She clenches the black kettle between her knees. She holds a spoon with two hands, in the true way Ruth does, stirring with the whole strength of her upper body. Her bowed hump of soft shoulders is rendered honestly but not with scorn.

  Margarethe, looking over Iris’s shoulder at this sketch, observes sharply, “You’d think the kettle is filled with limestone cement, the way Ruth seems to be applying such force to that spoon!”

  “But that’s how she looks,” says Iris, marveling.

  “I believe I was having her stir a respectable pottage,” says Margarethe. “This painting implies am incompetence in the kitchen. Throw it out.” But she’s only teasing. Iris wonders: Is Margarethe pleased that Caspar had the charity to paint Ruth without correction of her features? Does Margarethe feel for her older daughter in some way that she rarely shows? Well, of course she must, or why endure such troubles of taking her children across the sea?

  Ruth herself crows and claps to see Caspar’s cartoons. She doesn’t seem confused about the nature of the image on the board, and grins in her splay-toothed way at herself stirring dinner. She smiles at Caspar and lurches off to the kitchen to find him a strip of salted fish as a present, which he accepts with a bow.

  Caspar’s portrait of Margarethe is equally benign. Here she is in the herb garden, in the act of rising: one knee still to the ground, one foot planted in its muddy wooden shoe. She has a basket of simples across one forearm, articulated, Iris sees, by broken scratchy lines, parallel at one end for the stems, and fretted at the other to suggest all manner of seeds, leaves, and dried flowers. The delight, though, is in Margarethe’s expression. It almost makes tears stand in Iris’s eyes. Her mother as a laborer, at peace for once, for there’s nothing lovely or unlovely about herbs, and they behave and they don’t bother her.

  Iris examines this study with delight. The well-regulated house looms up, brick and ivy and shutters and copings. Only on the third viewing does she notice that Caspar has painted a head of Henrika, looking down with a scowl out of an upper window. Henrika is never seen with any such scowl, and yet it is demonstrably she.

  “Her head is too big for the window frame,” says Iris helpfully.

  “Yes,” says Caspar.

  She’s embarrassed. She’s tried to critique the sketch, and he’s refused her stupid opinion. She rushes on, more generously. “Caspar, what you can do! A portrait of Mama and Henrika!”

  “Not at all,” he says, “I’m merely illustrating the old adage: Two dogs and one bone will rarely agree.”

  Iris bows to look again. Is this what she had seen on the day she’d arrived at this house? Had it been Henrika peering from the window that day?

  Or is this clot of dark in Caspar’s sketch, in a window even higher up, the last square of glass under the roof beam, actually a squinting, hunched creature of some sort? Is it just scrawled darkness, scribbled in, or can she make out tiny, leering features?

  “Have you drawn an imp in this house?” says Iris, looking up.

  “I didn’t know you could see it too,” he says, but then will say no more.

  The

  Masterpiece

  The painting of Clara grows more and more like her—thus more and more beautiful. Though Iris still has never trespassed in the gallery of God’s blunders, the Master s locked studio on the other side of town, she’s sure that no painting in the Master’s house can be anywhere near as compelling as this one. True, saints are inevitably good-looking. All the Master’s portraits of the holy populace have been wreathed in light, their eyes crazy with vision. And the Master’s brutes must be as wretched as the saints are sacred. The extreme edges of human possibility.

  But Clara is merely splendid. Splendid as a human being. Not only a heartbreaking concoction of blonds, cherry blushes, and blue-ochre shadows, but a real girl, with an airy hesitation that seems as much about her good looks as anything else. The tulips that languish in the bow of her left arm look up toward her as a baby one day might.

  Iris studies the painting in the late afternoon when the Master has denounced the light for being fickle, as he does daily, and stalked away. Caspar, who still makes his home with the Master but eats better in the van den Meer kitchen yard, brings Iris in to see. “He would have preferred a commission to do the civic guards. But he has always wanted to paint this legendary perfect child. Can you tell what he has done?” says Caspar. “Do you see how he’s intensified the orange in this fold of carpet, so now the blues of her eyes blink three different ways at you instead of two?”

  “I don’t,” says Iris. “But I see that it is more wonderful.” And she thinks the Master has painted a kinder expression in Clara’s eyes than is strictly warranted.

  “Do you see the composition, a series of boxes, look, nine of them of different sizes—here, and here, and here—” Caspar points them out. “And broken in two places only, by this large curve that, since it is shadowed, only hints at a surprise, and then this tulip in full light, here? See how it seems about to fall off the floor?”

  “I want to catch it,” says Iris, laughing. “I want to save it.”

  “He teases, and pleases, and makes you stare, and slowly you come to realize that this isn’t just any child, but a bloom as perfect as a tulip.”

  “She is looking at the bulb,” says Iris. “She doesn’t notice that the tulip is about to fall. Doesn’t it make you uneasy?”

  “She is noticing one thing and not noticing another, all happening at once,” says Caspar. He chuckles; he’s just realizing the cleverness of the Master’s composition. “Look, and also this: It is about beginnings and endings, for here in the one hand is the hideous bulb, just as well lit as the tulip on the table. He has thought of how to catch us again and again! There are so many things to see! And not only his brush techniques, which bewilder me and make me think I will never learn.”

  “You learn a lot and you see a lot,” says Iris. “Remember that sketch you did of my mother in the herb garden, and Henrika in the house behind her. You caught as much there as the Master has here.” She continues, “Only what you caught isn’t as pretty to see.”

  Caspar slides her a sideways glance. “You’re observant as a painter yourself, then, if you perceive that,” he says in a confiding voice. Iris shivers with the compliment as if with a sudden chill.

  Another thing that Iris notices about the Master’s painting of Clara and the tulips is that its increasing perfection doesn’t seem to make him elated but rather despondent. He won’t talk to Iris about this—in fact, he has little use for her at all now that he has earned the commission. But he mutters to himself. Iris knows this. When she and Clara have tired of English, and fall into a sleepy state, Iris likes to hear the Master fret even as he adores his own work. Soon the day comes when he no longer needs Clara except once in a while, to assess skin tones relative to fabric or background. Still he mutters all the more.

  His worry seems to revolve around how well the painting is going. He knows that it’s sublime. He doesn’t know if it will
do the job that Cornelius van den Meer and cronies require of it—to work the viewing public into an even more hearty appetite for the very strain of tulip bulbs they are importing from Vienna and points east—but he no longer cares about that. He sings, not to Clara but to the painting of Clara, to the blue-brown shadows behind the open window, to the highlights in the silver salver on the mantel, to the folds in the apron, the bonnet, and the linen cloth on the table. He fusses over the glints in the diamond pendants, the mirrored gleams of the three ropes of pearl. He sings, and then he hisses in between his teeth as if in pain.

  He touches the canvas with strokes more and more gentle and hesitant. “I am going to ruin you yet,” he says once, and Iris, listening, thinks: Ruin who? Ruin you, exquisite painting? Ruin yourself, Master Luykas Schoonmaker? Ruin you, Clara van den Meer, real girl at the edge of childhood?

  So he works more and more slowly, as if the tiniest touch of a brush might suddenly turn his masterpiece into a laughingstock. He stands back farther and farther from it, studying it for long stretches. He approaches the painting as a farmboy approaches a bull—gently, wishing it does not need to be done. He takes the troublesome jewels back to his studio, to do further studies, and get the rich highlights right.

  Iris picks up another side to his unhappiness too. It seems that the more wonderful this painting becomes, the less chance there is of the Master’s ever surpassing it. The more perfect every succulent detail, the more devastating. He weeps over his painting. He looks an old man, or, thinks Iris, like the old man he will soon become. Is that merely the contrast with Clara, so fresh, so young, so beautiful on the canvas? No. The painting itself is making him old, for he is struggling, as if he’ll never have courage again to try to love the world in oil and varnish, canvas and light.

  Rue,Sage,

  Thyme,

  and Temper

  The day comes when the painting is done but for the caresses of varnish needed to protect against the ravages of centuries. All varnishes can’t go on at once; some can be applied only after the painting has dried for months. It amazes Iris that the Master can think about the painting surviving for longer than his lifetime, but when she makes a joke about it he snaps at her. “And what makes you think beauty should go in and out of fashion like—like a rage of eating with forks, or an obsession with the music of the virginal—or a madness to adore tulips, for that matter? Will future generations look at this child and not be stunned by her perfection?”

  “They’ll be stunned by Schoonmaker’s capturing of her perfection,” intones Caspar, and this time it’s not a poke but a compliment.

  “And why not?” says the Master, unable to be humble now. He has no energy.

  “I suspect,” says Margarethe, passing through with a clutch of humble roots in her hands, “that they’ll think you’ve flattered the child. They won’t believe she looked so angelic.” She says this with a measure of—what? Something that Iris can’t name.

  Henrika and Cornelius van den Meer plan a feast for their friends in Haarlem and Amsterdam, for those who have staked sums of capital on the tulip cargoes, and also for those whose tongues are waggish and whose wallets are heavy. It takes a number of days to arrange, to borrow benches from neighbors, to clean the strict house from front to back, from attic to cellars. Margarethe begins to sulk at Henrika and, from time to time, to disagree pointedly, even noisily, over methods of housewifery.

  Iris helps, and turns out drawers and pokes in attic corners, looking for something magical here, a dragon’s claw, the skeleton of a dead boggart, a fragment of the True Cross with which to work miracles. She finds nothing of the sort. She can’t shuck off the feeling that the house is hiding something from her, though. The high, narrow place is haunted somehow, possessed by something fierce and potent, something gifted at disguise. She whirls about, trying to catch sight of it in the edges of the house’s many looking glasses. Whatever it is—imp or else-thing—it’s deft. It eludes her.

  When the day of the party arrives at last, so too does autumn’s first really biting cold weather. Late in the afternoon Iris and Ruth sweep fallen linden leaves off the paths in the garden. That is, Ruth pretends to sweep them first, and Iris follows up doing the actual job. The idea of a banquet makes the sisters giddy. Van den Meer has said they might sit in the kitchen and peer in from the doorway, as long as they make no noise, and remove themselves to their pallets in the cranny if Henrika tells them to go.

  “It’ll be night, and tapers will be lit, and there’ll be music,” says Iris, as much to herself as to Ruth. “And we’ll look clean and smart, even though no one will see us.” Margarethe has laundered their best aprons, and attempted some clumsy stitchwork upon the pockets. She pricked her finger and cursed and kept on, no matter how tired she became or how low the light guttered, and Iris and Ruth are thrilled with the idea of wearing clothes made pretty for a feast.

  Clara, however, is cross. Van den Meer has told her that she may not sit in the kitchen with Iris and Ruth. Clara has to dress like an adult and dine with the rest of the guests. Clara applies to Henrika, expecting her to intervene as usual. But Henrika’s face goes strangely aggrieved, and she won’t even discuss the subject.

  So Clara sulks in the kitchen while the Fisher sisters perform their chores.

  “It isn’t fair,” says Clara. “I don’t want to be snapped at and stared over like a new statue from France or a brass vase from Persia. I want to be in the kitchen with you.”

  “The perils of being the child of rich parents,” says Margarethe smugly. “Suffer.”

  “What?” says Clara. Iris swivels her head at the edge in Clara’s tone, but Margarethe is too busy to notice the danger.

  “The changeling has to change herself again, this time into an adult,” says Margarethe, as roughly as if Clara were her own daughter. “Live with what life brings you, young one, or you stay young and stupid forever—”

  Clara starts up like a cat whose tail has been trod upon. It is one thing to play at being a changeling, thinks Iris, quite another to be teased about it! By an adult, no less.

  Holding her fists an inch or two on either side of her ears, Clara begins to scream. Margarethe looks up guiltily. Clara yells that she won’t dress to please her mother or her father, she won’t speak nicely to the guests, and she won’t come out of the kitchen. And besides that, she hopes the painting of Young Woman with Tulips will explode into flames. And she hates her mother and her father.

  Iris and Ruth are frozen, not knowing what to do.

  Margarethe takes to churning as a way of blocking out the noise. Iris is guilty: Too many stories about poor, timid girls who learn to have brave hearts? “Hush, Clara,” says Iris, “you’ll wake the imp!”

  With her soft step, Henrika arrives. She insists that there’s no more to discuss about it and that Clara is being wicked. Clara apparently intends to stay being wicked, for she won’t stop screaming. Not until Ruth bursts into tears and sinks to her knees at Clara’s hems, and wraps her awkward arms around the girl’s hips. “Go away, you ugly ogre,” says Clara—in passable English, Iris has to note. But Ruth has no faculty for shame and she doesn’t budge, and eventually Clara collapses into her arms, mewing.

  “No child of mine ever screamed like a hellcat,” observes Margarethe to the butter churn.

  “That’ll do, Clara,” says Henrika, but it’s clear she’s speaking to Margarethe.

  Clara sprints out to the walled garden, and Ruth lumbers after her. They leave the door open. Clara flings gravel at birds. Ruth runs her hands through the ivy. The air in the kitchen grows dank, though nothing has changed in the weather. The wind is still brisk, the sea air bracing. Beyond, rooks still caw and squabble over the tulip sheds. The light still seeps its thin yellow through the open door onto the gray flagstones.

  Henrika turns her back to Margarethe. By habit Iris glances into the mirror, hoping to snatch a view of some peppery household spirit, but instead she sees the corner of Henrika’s face. Henri
ka is vexed: both angry and anxious. The beautiful brow is furrowed, and Henrika pinches her lower lip between her teeth, thinking.

  “A good dose of chamomile will settle her down,” says Margarethe nonchalantly.

  “Don’t lecture me on the management of my own child,” says Henrika in a cold voice, and she sweeps from the room.

  “I was trying to assist,” says Margarethe after her, with exaggerated politeness.

  “Mama,” says Iris, “you’re not minding your tongue.”

  “Who are you to tell me to mind my tongue?” says Margarethe, languorously.

  “What’s gotten into you? You always say that we might be tossed out of here if we’re not well behaved. There are others who can do the work we do!”

  Margarethe puts aside the butter churn. She folds over a cloth to reveal a pair of dead hares roped at the ears. “There are few certainties in our lives, to be sure, but we won’t be turned out for a moment’s honest remark,” says Margarethe.

  “This isn’t like you,” says Iris. “You’re the one who worries in August if the spring will come soon enough next March.”

  Margarethe beckons Iris near and whispers, “Haven’t you noticed that queen-bee Henrika is with child?”

  Though Iris thinks herself clever, she hasn’t noticed this.

  “Oh, it’s early yet, but at the moment Henrika can’t abide the look of food staring up from the kettle or spit. She can’t afford to turn me out now. I’m too well trained in the ways of her household, and this feast is very important.”

  Iris doesn’t answer. She doesn’t like her mother to be fawning, but for her mother to be impertinent is equally upsetting. “She’s our hostess and our protector,” says Iris at last. “Can’t you like her?”

  “Like her? And what is there of her to like? That her father did handsomely in business? That she has pretensions toward a well-shaped mind? That she coddles her daughter and swaddles her into an unusual infancy? That she does the girl no good? The girl is rotten, or can’t you see it?”