Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Iris. “You don’t want to be caged in the shell of some stupid marriage, Clara, but don’t be caged by your own limited experience either. You must be able to see my plight. I’m not as pretty as you; I don’t stimulate interest as you do.”

  “Caspar is very friendly to you,” says Clara in an even voice, taking no offense. “You aren’t a dull person, Iris, and for all your plainness you’re interesting to look at. Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key? Why not learn a skill while spending time with people you care about? Just say what Margarethe would say: Give me room to cast my eel spear, and let everything else follow as it may.”

  Iris isn’t fond of this sentiment. She retorts, “I can’t leave you to manage the kitchen by yourself, Clara.”

  “Ruth can lend a hand when I need help,” says Clara. “If you don’t ask your mother for permission, Iris, I’ll do it for you.”

  Iris slowly puts her face in her hands. Is there sense in what Clara is suggesting?

  “You ought at least to know,” says Clara. “What if you’re wrong and Caspar could find himself in love with you? What if you lost this chance to learn?”

  There is a grunt. Iris looks up through wet eyes. Ruth has come to the doorway, and perhaps she’s listened to the conversation. She is nodding at Iris and grinning in an encouraging way.

  “Ruth will help me when I need help, won’t you, Ruth?” says Clara.

  Ruth nods, puts the cat on the floor, and rolls her sleeves as if to begin scrubbing a floor.

  “All right, then,” says Iris. “I’ll see if I can summon the courage to ask Mama.”

  “You do that,” says Clara. She puts down the small hearth broom and suddenly, with a chuckle, dips her hands in the ashes. She smudges her cheeks and her forehead. “I am no beauty anymore, I’m a simple kitchen girl, a cinderlass, at home in my ashes and char.”

  “Don’t do that,” says Iris, “it makes me shudder. In England we had a child’s game about flowers and ashes—Ring a round of rosies, a pocket full of posies; Ashes, ashes, ashes, and down we fall. It is a simple ditty for toddlers to play, to walk and tumble and shriek with, but someone told me once it’s a game that derived from fear of the plague, and the ashes are those that we crumple into if the plague should overtake our lives. So don’t be the girl of ashes, not even in play; you’re too good.”

  Iris thinks about Clara’s offer and amends her remark: “You are far too good.”

  Clara purses her lips. “No, you are good, but what a simpleton! You don’t even see that I’m merely looking after myself, as usual.” Iris doesn’t know if this is strictly true. Clara has been sad, bitterly severed from the possibilities of her life, but is she incapable of kindness? That would make her a sort of beautiful monster.

  Clara shrugs as if she can see these thoughts on Iris’s face. She continues, “I don’t care if you’re happy or not, not really. But if you’re gone from the house, I’m the more secure in my kitchen. The more needed, the more private. Call me Cinderling,” says Clara, standing up straighter behind her mask of ashes. “Call me Ashgirl, Cinderella, I don’t care. I am safe in the kitchen.”

  Finery

  “So rude an onion as I can be made to look like a rose,” says Margarethe with pleasure. “What do you think of me now?”

  She parades up and down the black and white tiles in her new garb. Iris holds her hands together to keep from wringing them. Her mother looks less like a rose than like a heap of unsold flowers at the end of market day, thrown together with no regard for effect. Iris has always thought that Margarethe is possessed of a sober good taste. Now she realizes, with a start, it is poverty that kept Margarethe in appealing browns, blacks, and whites. Left to her own devices and granted a decent purse, Margarethe would rather look like a strumpet.

  But Margarethe doesn’t notice Iris’s disapproval. And Ruth is clapping her hands in appreciation and chuckling at the transformation. Clara, who has come from the kitchen with a basket of turnips in her arms, says merely, “This fills me with a strange joy,” and turns around again.

  “I should imagine it did,” says Margarethe, missing the irony in Clara’s tone.

  “The colors,” says Iris, because she can’t think of another remark.

  “And the finishing touch—I daren’t wear them through the streets,” says Margarethe. She unfolds a length of cloth and takes out a pair of dainty white shoes, in leather pounded so smooth as to fit like a skin. The leather shines with an oil so it’s like looking at shoes of porcelain or cloudy glass.

  “Hardly useful in the streets of Haarlem,” says Iris, despite herself. “No matter how well the Dutch clean up after themselves and their horses.”

  “To be worn when I go forth in a carriage, door to door. Do I hear some disapproval in your voice?” says Margarethe. “Why shouldn’t I be well turned out?”

  “Please,” says Iris, “I don’t mean to be rude. They are soft as gloves, aren’t they? Where will you wear them?”

  “These shoes will open doors for us, as yet still closed,” says Margarethe.

  “That would be a sight,” says Iris. “You mean, they can kick doors open?”

  “Oh, the comic airs of the young,” says Margarethe, but without rancor. “Put these away in the wardrobe, and wrap them carefully again so as to protect against marks and dirt. You still don’t know what your mother is capable of on your behalf.”

  “And on your own,” says Iris in an even voice.

  “In a family, the good of one member advances the good of all members.”

  “Well,” says Iris, “then may I propose the good of this member by asking for your permission to take up a position—for a few weeks only perhaps—as an associate in the Master’s studio? He thinks I can learn some rudiments of drawing, while I help him with the preparation of colors and varnishes and the stretching of canvases and linens—”

  “I should think not,” says Margarethe, admiring herself in the mirror at the end of the room. “He’s been filling your head with notions, and I disapprove.”

  “It does a girl no harm to learn a skill—” begins Iris.

  “I won’t have you being an assistant to anyone,” says Margarethe. “Not when we can afford for you to learn the things that wealthier girls learn. A little French perhaps, some Italian—you’re just as bright as Clara, though you didn’t start so young, and now there’s time for you to advance. Clara can mind our Ruth.”

  “I want to go to the studio,” says Iris, “not just to assist him, but for what I can learn there. I am being selfish, Mama. I want to learn something I care about. I don’t want to prattle in French.”

  Clara calls from the kitchen, in a pleasant voice, a long declarative sentence—in French. Perhaps she knows what she is doing, for Margarethe blushes—unable to understand—and she stands there for a moment, at a loss. Finally, in reply, and equally loudly, “If Clara really is willing to do the household chores that you might have done together, perhaps I can spare you.”

  “Merci,” says Clara, and they all understand that. And Iris sees that she is the beneficiary of Clara’s desire to stay home, whether Clara means to be helpful or not.

  * * *

  The next day Iris wraps a cloak around herself and takes a basket of bread and a pot of conserves, and makes her way through wet, sun-scrubbed streets. Haarlem is seeing to itself with its usual pride. Doorsills are swept, brasses polished, windows washed, gardens tended, loaves of bread cooling on sills. Iris realizes that there’s a purpose in her step, and it has something to do with her heart, but, as well, it has something to do with her hands—they’re eager and ready to grapple with a little red chalk, to try a few early lines on paper.

  The Master and Caspar are busy arranging paintings in a sloping pile, smaller paintings nearer the wall, larger ones propped carefully at an angle over them, each one a few inches out from the last so that there’s a protective edge of air between them. Caspar’s face br
ightens at the sight of Iris in the doorway, but the Master is frowning and seems hardly to notice.

  “If it’s bread as a present, put it in the kitchen,” he says. “Caspar, let’s get the Annunciation next, the one in golds.”

  “I’ve come to the studio, not the kitchen,” says Iris.

  “Then you and Caspar shift these larger paintings, and let me get back to the portrait of Burgher Stoutbelly before I fully wake up from last night’s ale. It turns my stomach to think of the time I spend on glorifying insignificant people, and I can only bear to do it when I am partly asleep or partly drunk, and at the moment I’m both. And don’t talk to me. I’m in no mood for silly gossip.”

  “One piece of gossip a day is enough, eh?” says Caspar, winking at Iris.

  She realizes the wink, though directed at her and meant to draw her in, is an observation about the Master. “What piece of gossip is this?” she says, dropping her cloak and her basket and following Caspar into a side room, where more paintings are slanting in the gloom.

  “Gossip for painters and social climbers alike,” says Caspar.

  “Fortunately, I’m neither one, so I can hear the, news without overexciting my heart,” says Iris, whose heart is well excited as it is, to be in a dark, narrow space with Caspar leaning conspiratorially to whisper to her.

  “At a party last night the word was bruited about that Marie de Medici is to spend a fortnight in Haarlem. She is the widow of Henry IV, and she’s the Dowager Queen of France. She recently set up a house in Amsterdam, where she shocks the local shopkeepers by going right in and arguing their prices down. She’s an old bull.”

  “I suppose even the very royal must travel sometimes,” says Iris. “This hardly seems worth a sour mood.”

  “She’s reported to have two aims,” says Caspar. “She’s called for an exhibition of the finest of living Dutch painters so that she can choose someone to do what she deems her last portrait—she’s sixty-five years of age and faces the grim specter of death. So the painters are in a stew to select their best two or three works and submit them to the Haarlem governors. Everyone hopes to get invited to exhibit and maybe even to meet the Queen. She’s holding a similar exercise in Amsterdam, and perhaps again in Rotterdam or Utrecht, though Rotterdam doesn’t boast the native ability in painting that Haarlem does.”

  “Thus—Annunciations?” guesses Iris.

  “She’s from Florence, which is quite Catholic,” says Caspar, heaving at the edge of a huge panel and motioning Iris to do likewise. “She won’t have the aversion to devotional subjects that we friendly Calvinists do. But is the Master ruining his chances of being included in the exhibit by submitting work that’s so out of fashion? After all, he has to gain the approval of the Haarlem fathers first.”

  “Surely they have in mind the Queen’s taste too,” says Iris. “As hosts they’ll hope to make her happy.”

  “To the contrary, as hosts the Haarlem patriarchs are proud of thriving mightily without much of a royal family,” says Caspar. “We Dutch all merely nod to our Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. Still, since the word is that the French she-elephant is coming, the Master is willing to gamble. Let the Haarlem judges decide. The best commission of his life may hinge on this.”

  “I didn’t think the Master was a social climber,” says Iris.

  “The painters don’t necessarily thrill and puff up at that aspect of it,” says Caspar. “Anyway, word also has it that the Queen has a secondary aim. She will preside at a ball, or perhaps a series of them, to introduce one of her relatives or godchildren to Dutch society. He may even be looking for a bride among the assembled ranks of young women.”

  “Surely not!” says Iris. “Members of royal families don’t select spouses from the crowds who assemble to gape at them!”

  “I should have thought the same,” says Caspar. “But those who pay attention to the fortunes of nations remind us that there isn’t any eligible young woman in the House of Orange-Nassau. Suppose Holland is to have a long, fruitful existence as a republic? For a foreign nobleman on the rise, a bride from the class of men who govern Holland through these prosperous years might be a wise course of action.”

  “And what about this nobleman’s affections?” says Iris. “Isn’t he to have some say in a choice of bride?”

  “You ask me how these things work?” says Caspar, winking at her again. “What do I know of young men and their affections?”

  They don’t speak for a while. They heave eight of the Master’s Annunciations out of storage. Once the paintings are set up around the room, a family resemblance can be seen among them—not only in the subject matter, but also in the choice of colors that the Master favors. When he finally throws his brushes down in disgust, cursing at the likes of Burgher Stoutbelly, he turns to study the Annunciations.

  “Tripe,” he announces at the first two. “The colors thud. They are painted with dung and piss. Take them away.”

  “They are heavy to carry,” says Caspar, still breathing heavily.

  “They muddy the light and stink up the room. Take them away.”

  Iris and Caspar carry them back to the side room.

  Of the other six the Master says, “In this one the Virgin appears already pregnant. Not appropriate for the Annunciation. Take it away.”

  “She isn’t pregnant,” says Caspar. “She’s merely well fed. So is Marie de Medici, they say.”

  “Take it away, but watch the frame on the doorway. This is one of the larger ones.”

  “This is hard work,” says Iris in a whisper. “Am I going to get to draw at all today?”

  “Stop whispering! You annoy me and cloud my thoughts,” shouts the Master. “As if I’m not annoyed enough by my own obvious lack of talent. If you can find a knife in there, come in and slice my eyes out, as I clearly don’t use them much in the production of paintings anyway. What was I thinking of?”

  There are, in the end, only two pieces deemed worth considering. Iris admits that they are fine paintings, and as much good could be said about one as about the other. “No decision needs to be made immediately,” says the Master. “But if you had to choose one on my behalf, Caspar, Iris, because I had just tumbled into a ditch and brained myself, which one would you choose, and why?”

  “I wouldn’t send an Annunciation,” says Caspar, which enrages the Master so much that Caspar is forced to go outside and occupy himself well beyond the reach of the Master’s fists.

  “Well, you tell me, then, Iris,” says the Master.

  “For one reason alone, I prefer the squarer panel to the higher one,” says Iris, thinking hard, but requiring herself to be as truthful as she is kind. “In this the Virgin has darker hair, and more tightly curled, the way I imagine the hair of Florentine women might be. Perhaps it would make Marie de Medici think of herself—”

  “—Idolatrous idea!” says the Master.

  “Like the Virgin, the Dowager Queen of France is also named Marie, remember,” says Iris.

  “—but fascinating and pertinent, to be sure,” he continued. “Well, we’ll see how that thought sits with us for a while. I’m not sure—”

  “I assume you don’t want to think about one of your portraits of the maimed, the evil, the fallen?—”

  He doesn’t even answer that.

  “Then there’s another possibility,” says Iris cautiously. “Your best painting is Young Woman with Tulips. Why aren’t you thinking about that?”

  “The subject is a coarse one, however beautiful the model,” says the Master.

  “The way you painted it is superior, and you know it,” says Iris. “Even I, who know nothing about painting, can see it.”

  “It will offend the Dowager Queen to see such a splendid young woman in her prime, and celebrated for just that. It will make her realize how much time has passed in her life—”

  “Doesn’t she realize that already, and isn’t that why she’s commissioning a final portrait?”

  The Master strokes his be
ard and idly fingers a few breakfast crumbs from it onto the floor. “Well, I’ll take the advice and ponder it in good time. It would mean asking van den Meer to borrow it. On the other hand, think of the people who would see it! Always hunting for investors as he does, he may realize this is the most public reception the painting can ever have. And even if Marie de Medici didn’t give me the commission, many wealthy guests would also see it there. Things to think about. Hmmmm.”

  He ponders for a while, curses, and then remembers Iris. “Now that irritating Caspar has removed himself for a few moments, tell me why you’ve come to call.”

  “You asked me to be your assistant, don’t you remember?” says Iris.

  At this the Master turns and looks at her as if for the first time that day. “There are many items of gossip today, then,” he says tenderly. “This is as important an announcement as the prattle that a foreign queen comes to dance her ancient feet on our republican floors. First things to be done first! Why didn’t you tell me when you arrived? And you’ve been doing nothing but carting paintings back and forth!”

  “What is an assistant expected to do?” she asks eagerly.

  “Cart paintings,” he says. “Get Caspar from outside and take these paintings out of my sight before I succumb to the temptation to coat them with a muddy oil wash and erase all my hopes of immortality. Work comes first, and drawing later. But drawing will come, my Iris. Before you leave today, you will draw.”

  Spine and

  Chamber

  And draw she does.

  She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deeply inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known?

  Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

  She pecks at the paper with small lines. She smudges them and begins again. She holds back, waiting for the paper to instruct her. She beats it with her hand. It won’t deliver up its expectations. Perhaps it has none. The Master has said, “Observe the simplest thing and render it.” She hoped for an apple, a chestnut, an egg. Instead he found her a porcelain seashell from some Afric strand.