Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  It is quirky, both glazed and porous, a surface complicated by reflections, depths, stains. The shell stands at an angle like a mace. She hates it. She can’t figure out its humblest tip, much less how it crowds its space with spikes, ribs, volutes, a stem or spine that curls like paper, a circlet of tiny points more ornate than any tiara that the she-elephant, Marie de Medici, might wear at a ball.

  The Master pays her no attention, but moves to the other side of the room, where he shingles a canvas with broad strokes of charcoal green. She weeps a little to see his vigor and her own fear. When she spies Caspar moving about the back room, hanging a pot over the coals to boil some water and bruise some roots into a soup, she wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “Look,” says Caspar, coming in after a while. “Look how prettily you’ve smudged your cheekbones with that red chalk. You have a fine bone here and here—”

  He touches her face. She casts her eyes to the floor. The paper is a wilderness of indecisive strokes, looking nothing like a seashell. Looking only like failure.

  “And they give your face color too,” says Caspar, lifting her chin.

  “I’m not here to paint myself,” she says, more fiercely than she has meant to. “I am to sketch an irritating accident of nature. Look how it brandishes its tips at me! I want to kill it.”

  “It’s not alive,” says Caspar. “Draw it, and you make it live.”

  “Let her be,” says the Master in a good-humored, abstracted tone.

  “You have to look before you can lift a crayon,” says Caspar. “Isn’t he saying so to you?”

  “She knows how to look,” says the Master.

  Caspar pays him no attention. He pulls up a three-legged stool and perches on it. His shoulder is a few inches below Iris’s, and it rolls in toward her. Any moment it might touch her. She’s afraid that if it does, she might recoil, not out of horror but just physical shock, the way an invisible bright bug sometimes leaps out of bundles of clean, sunny laundry and crackles on the tips of her fingers. She wills herself to attend to his words and not to the achingly sweet turn of his shoulder, how it swells just so into the cords of his slender neck.

  “It’s a brutish thing to draw, to be sure,” Caspar is saying. “Think what the shell is like.”

  “It’s like nothing I ever saw before,” says Iris.

  “Is it like nothing in nature or in the house or barn of man?”

  “It’s not like a cat, a flower, a table, or a cloud,” says Iris.

  “Isn’t it like a big flower blossom,” says Caspar, “snapped off a thick stem and laid on its side?”

  “I never saw blossom so huge and garish,” says Iris, and then, with a sinking heart, remembers what her mother looked like in the new finery that morning.

  “Isn’t it like a wheelbarrow, then?” says Caspar. “It balances on one point at this end, and its bulk rests so, and if you could imagine two stems instead of one to be the rafters of the shaft . . .”

  “I never saw a seashell with wheels attached, and this isn’t one either,” says Iris.

  He tries again. “Don’t look at it, then, for what it reminds you of. I take that idea back. Look at it for its own set of proportions. Here. Squeeze your eyes closed, or nearly closed. So you can merely make out a blur of seashell. Can you do that?”

  She closes her eyes entirely and thinks of Caspar, more boy than blur, skin more porcelain than a seashell, hair more spiky, voice more soothing, rhapsodic . . .

  “Attend,” he says, a bit impatiently. She obeys.

  “Don’t think of particulars,” he says. “Think of general shapes. If you can make two motions of your hand across the paper, and you need to spend those motions on the most significant lines of this blurred shape, what motions will they be?”

  She shrugs, but is able first to ball her fist, then to sweep it out, to represent the bulk of the seashell chamber on one end and the tapering stem on the other.

  “And there you have your first lesson,” he says. “Now make those two marks, without fear of how they relate to each other or to the seashell before you. Just sweep those marks on the page as if you’re drawing in the flour on the bread-baking table.”

  “Don’t forget to tell her to breathe, and blink, and swallow from time to time,” says the Master, somewhat jeeringly.

  “You taught me all this,” says Caspar to the Master, though his eyes don’t leave Iris’s hands or the paper. “You just didn’t know you were teaching it.”

  “I should have taught you to drown yourself in the ditch,” says the Master.

  “Keep at your work and we’ll keep at ours,” says Caspar. Iris waits for an irate response, but the Master only chuckles and, she sees, behaves.

  She has a sloppy knob and the tentative stroke of a spine on the page. “Not bad. They speak to each other. A natural gift for the appropriate weight in the mark,” Caspar muses. “Now it’s simply a matter of looking at the details and seeing what you see.”

  “I don’t know how to draw the other side of the seashell,” she says.

  “It can’t be seen from where you sit,” he says, “so never mind it.”

  “You can see it, though,” she says, “you can tell me.”

  “Drawing is the only honesty,” he ventures. “Don’t interpret. Merely observe. Don’t think about what you see. Merely see it.”

  She draws the spine, she draws the chamber. She curses the paper, the chalk, her fingers, herself, the seashell. She can’t curse Caspar. But, momentarily, once in a while, she can forget him. Slowly the seashell comes forward. It is a joke of a seashell, an abomination of a seashell, a curse of a seashell. It is still a seashell.

  She walks home in the dusk. Many more hours have passed than she intended to spend. The lights are up in the house at home. There is the sound of caterwauling from the kitchens. Not more mischief, not a return of—

  She stops herself. She has tried to put aside her tendency to be fanciful. She tries to think in terms she is sure of.

  Not more plague, thinks Iris, hurrying.

  But it isn’t the plague.

  Collapses

  “Don’t carry on so, just tell me!” says Iris, throwing her cloak aside.

  Papa Cornelius sits slumped on a bench. One shoulder lifts higher than the other; at first Iris thinks he is in tears. But his face is sallow and his eyes apparently drained of tears, and his expression seems blanker than anything else. “We are ruined,” he says, “the curse of our greed has been our undoing.”

  “Don’t sit there and moan,” screams Margarethe. “There are avenues to explore, surely; there are gullible fools beyond the reach of the information you have! Go sell your shares while you can instead of shivering like a ninny!”

  “I can’t take advantage of my neighbors and fellow citizens like that—”

  “Of course you can, what else had you meant to do?” says Margarethe. “Your scruples didn’t keep you from importing a new stock of tulips to tease the marketplace with! Why this sudden attack of conscience now?”

  “Any moment we can be struck down, by plague if not by insolvency,” says van den Meer. “I won’t put my immortal soul in peril—”

  “So you’ll put the mortal bodies of your daughter and your new wife and your adopted family at risk instead? When we have nothing left to eat, we’ll thank you for saving our souls?”

  “Don’t blaspheme, Margarethe,” he says, “it doesn’t beautify you to do so.”

  “What’s happened?” says Iris. “For the love of God, tell me!”

  “It is her greed,” says van den Meer. He has had his ale. “She is the fisherman’s wife: always wanting something more, and more than that besides, and then still more.”

  “Who taught me greed?” says Margarethe. “Who is my tempter and my tutor?”

  “Stop,” he roars, “I taught you nothing!”

  “Well, I teach you courage in adversity, and you are to march out there—”

  But he is not taking lessons fr
om his wife. He is in no mood to march. He puts his head in his hands and mumbles some tale of investments. “I can’t understand this,” says Iris, turning to her mother, looking quickly at Ruth and Clara, who are huddled, arms locked around each other’s waists, in the doorway to the front room. “Don’t spare me! I’m not as young and ignorant as I once was.”

  “The spring is here, the notion of a visiting monarch has spread,” says Margarethe, with a gleam in her eye that shows the courage that comes from desperation. “For the last several years the value of the newest variety of tulip has risen, and risen, and on the street and in the halls the same lots of bulbs were being sold again and again, for ever higher prices, wave after wave of profit. Everyone knows this; everyone has invested. I alone didn’t see it, for what do I know of money beyond the single coin a sharp woman can hide in her shoe? But this is the game that Papa Cornelius has been playing with Henrika’s dowry, investing in a stock that others can speculate upon.”

  “That’s not the misfortune! That s merely commerce, supplying what’s in demand!” says van den Meer.

  Margarethe continues. “One man could pay a fortune for the future value of the bulb crop, and turn around and sell his share for two fortunes an hour later. Men were buying not to own the tulips but to sell them again to the most aggressive purchaser. And the value of the lot of tulips, over which we all worried these months, has risen eightfold since arriving in port! A man who never invested in them, never saw them, never sweated over their possible loss in the storms at sea, never trod the dunes watching and praying, could make eight times in an hour what husband made in six months! Why should we have been denied income like that? Is it our low birth that keeps us ineligible?”

  “Born high or low, we are low now,” he groans.

  “So I told him to do the same as his neighbors,” says Margarethe grimly, “not just to import the bulbs and sell them, but to hazard a guess that there would be buyers to spend even more on the lot than he could! So I told him to buy back his share and sell it again in a while, and build up our coffers, and make us worthy guests to the ball! So I told him to do better in my time than he had ever done in Henrika’s, lowly though I am!”

  “And what has happened to the tulips? Did they burn? Are they infested with worms?” says Iris, beginning to understand.

  “The tulips are the same tulips as ever they were,” says Margarethe, “not more beautiful or less beautiful. Simply less desirable. Who knows why. Just as he stood, having paid the highest amount yet offered, and as he began to negotiate to sell for an even higher amount, news about sickness on the far side of town began to filter in. One of the purchasers who has a farm out that way excused himself from the bidding and went to check on relatives. Another merchant stroked his chin and said he couldn’t afford to bid. And suddenly the mood had changed, and one by one the burghers and merchants began to offer their own lots for sale. The bulbs had, in an instant, become less valuable, though they are still the same bulbs, still ready for planting, still offering the same amount of beauty. And of future value—vanished like smoke. The tulips don’t offer the same amount of return, and, like a wind suddenly veering from the east when it has blown from the west, the appetite for investing in tulip bulbs has become, in an afternoon, a frantic desire to unload them, to sell them for whatever could be gotten. The prices dropped precipitously all day.”

  “They’ll surely rise again tomorrow?” says Iris, though with doubt.

  “I’ve already sold them for a thirtieth what I paid,” says van den Meer. “I had to. Tomorrow they may be worth a ninetieth what I paid.”

  “So they’re sold,” says Iris. “What does that mean to us?”

  “It means,” says van den Meer coldly, “I owe in cash and financial instruments many, many times more than my holdings are worth. I am bankrupt and have no resources. It means we lurch into poverty.”

  “It means we must find ourselves a chance to be bold, to reclaim ourselves and our fortune,” says Margarethe.

  “We don’t have a foothold,” says van den Meer.

  “We have an invitation to one of the balls,” says Margarethe. She withdraws from her sleeve a fold of creamy paper. “Perhaps you sold with an uncharacteristic lack of shrewdness, Cornelius. But the safe arrival of your shipment last month must have reached the ear of the household of Marie de Medici. Grand ladies in the court of her son, they say, arrange tulips in their bosoms—the rarer the bloom, the more exquisite the woman. The old war horse may be estranged from her son, but she’s not insensible to style; she’s a queen mother. Your notoriety as a major importer has brought you to the attention of the Pruyns, or whoever is proposing the guest list. No one is going to retract this invitation. We are going to the great hall and we are going to meet the Dowager Queen of France and her godson. We’ll simply apply our wiles to a different marketplace. Now, take your salty chin out of your hands and stop your sniveling. There’s much to be done, and precious little time in which to do it! Give me room to cast my eel spear, and let follow what may.”

  4

  THE GALLERY OF GOD’S MISTAKES

  Campaigns

  Papa Cornelius is a limp puppet of himself, a rag without a manipulating hand inside. He lies on a bench under a blanket. He shows no interest in going back to the tavern where the college that oversees the buying and selling of tulip futures had met, drunk, and prospered. Margarethe plies him with reliable tisanes. Her skill fails her. She calls in the doctor.

  “A bad case of humors, nothing more,” the fellow snaps after a perfunctory examination. “I abhor malingerers. They waste my time. This is a house that’s had more than its share of bad luck this year. One would almost think it were possessed.”

  “And what are you suggesting?” says Margarethe frostily.

  He shakes his head and changes the subject. “The ailment will last its own course. There’s nothing to be done. At least it isn’t the plague.” Nor, the doctor reassures Margarethe, is it contagious.

  As van den Meer sinks deeper into lassitude—at times he won’t even open his eyes and answer questions that his wife puts to him—Margarethe grows more determined not to buckle under the pressure herself. “I will manage this house, and I will recover our fortunes,” she says to Iris. “He blames me, but he’s the one who dithered about. Had he repurchased the lot of tulips a week earlier, when I proposed, he would’ve sold them long before the crash. I take no responsibility for his cowardice. I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can’t hurt you the way the future can.”

  “Not if you have survived it so far,” says Iris grimly.

  Margarethe and Iris walk back from the well in the Grotemarkt with basins of water. “Be fair to me, and listen,” says Margarethe. “The collapse of the tulip market seems to have happened in many places at once. If Papa Cornelius had been less steeped in ale, he might have picked up on the news—apparently the fall in tulip futures happened in Amsterdam a few days earlier.”

  How terrible these times, thinks Iris. She sees that many sober citizens are ruined. Some families disappear under cover of darkness, leaving their entire houses and much heavy furniture to be repossessed. Inevitably it’s only a small amount of what the unlucky investors are deemed to owe. There are rumors of suicides. Shame! Scandal! So governors and regents meet to see if there’s a way to enforce a schedule of payments, a way to stem the swamping tide. Margarethe reports what she hears on the street to Iris. Though Iris follows little of it, she listens as closely as she can.

  When Iris has spent only a couple of weeks in the studio, Margarethe calls her into the small room once used by Henrika for household governance. A ledger is open. A candle gutters. Dead flies in wiry clumps dot the windowsill. “This is no time for genteel hobbies,” her mother says. “Your stepfather is ailing, your sister is a bother, and your weary mother is busy trying to clothe herself and her daughters suitably for the upcoming ball of Marie de Medici and her eligible godson. Your stepsister has taken ref
uge in the kitchen and refuses to answer the door when a knock is heard. Weak thing. I can do nothing with her. I need you—to speak to creditors when they come to the door, to be both fawning and sly. Are you up for the task?”

  “No,” says Iris bluntly. And she’s not. She has been trying, with a pencil, to be honest and unashamed. Besides, her time with Caspar is becoming, at least temporarily, lovely. He is full of a very household sort of joy, like the kind that abounds from ripe grapes, from big-bellied lutes. In the morning, when she approaches the Master’s studio, Caspar will hear her coming to the door and rush, eager as a puppy, and meet her several feet out of the building, as if he wants to say his first hellos beyond the hearing of the Master. Caspar is a simple sort—is it true to say that? Simple, yes, and also firm and solid. Simple doesn’t mean shallow.

  “I can’t leave the studio,” says Iris. “Mama, how can I? Now?”

  “That I phrase it as a question is merely courtesy,” says Margarethe. “If all should go well, you’ll have time enough for drawing in days to come. You must obey me now. I have no time to argue.”

  “Everything is a campaign with you,” says Iris bitterly. “Did you ever love anything without the need to subdue it?”

  “Never,” says Margarethe, with a measure of pride.

  “I’ll obey you, of course,” says Iris, somewhat ashamed. “But I can’t imagine, after only these few days, how I can live without the attempt to draw. And I haven’t even lifted a paintbrush yet!”

  “You must lift a washbrush first,” says Margarethe. “I want the front room to shine bright as gold. I’m having an interview with the clothier this afternoon—van Antum, who made my marriage gown. We van den Meers must look proper, stuffed with hidden coin. We must have tulips, even in the house, as if they don’t make us gag.” Margarethe points at Henrika’s tulip vase, a porcelain pillar that stands two feet high and tapers like a model of a church’s steeple. “Every spout must hold a perfect blossom. We are proud, Iris, and pride will see us through this devil’s maze. Do you understand?”