Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  So Iris goes to work. She fills the tulip vase with orange-headed flowers. Then she pulls a brush across the floor instead of a charcoal stick across a curl of paper. She sweeps soapy water across the brick and watches how the gray lye dries in patterns. She admires the patterns before she rinses them away. It’s the best she can hope for.

  But all at once she can’t remake the form of Caspar in her mind; she can’t remember what he looks like. Strong tears fall like drops of brewed tea—she’s surprised at the heat of them.

  Clara sometimes refuses to mount the step from the kitchen. Iris has to change the buckets of water from time to time, and to find other supplies. When entering the kitchen, Iris watches Clara turn a shoulder to her. “Surely you haven’t forbidden yourself to look at me too?” says Iris crossly.

  “I’m busy with the stew,” says Clara, though there’s nothing but water being brought ponderously to a boil.

  “I’m working hard to help Mama restore our fortunes,” says Iris.

  “She’s done enough to ruin them,” says Clara. “Can you really think her capable of anything but ineptitude so colossal it borders on malice?” Clara stirs a big spoon in the air, miming a witch at work over a vicious brew.

  Iris is aghast. “You think she was malicious in her advice to your father?”

  “I think,” says Clara, “her greed blinds her.”

  “She’s become your mother,” says Iris, “when you had none.”

  “Once I had a mother,” says Clara. “Now I have no mother, not even a stepmother. I have a big embarrassing crow who speaks in English and Dutch, and who like a crow snatches up every shiny thing, one after the other, until the accumulation of glitter is fanciful at best and a wicked scandal at worst. To say nothing of ugly.”

  “Let’s leave this topic. You’re distraught, and I’m exhausted,” says Iris. “The clothier will be here momentarily and I have to finish cleaning the room. Mama is trying to borrow dresses for us to go to the ball.”

  “I,” says Clara, “am not going to any ball.”

  Though Iris doesn’t really know her mother’s plans, she says stolidly, “The invitation is addressed to the family van den Meer. If she says you go, you go.”

  “Nonsense!” says Clara. “Look at me! My hair is limp, my back is aching, my knees are raw. My hands are cracked and unlovely. I have a father to tend to and a kitchen to clean. It’s all I want. Nothing of the outside, please. Especially not parading myself like a strumpet.”

  “You can’t be that perverse,” says Iris. “Even I am willing to shame myself, to mortify myself with finery and take myself off to some hideous event, if it might improve our lot here. I, the monstrously ugly among us—”

  “Oh,” says Clara, “mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it’s my beauty that’s monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character. And why are you so sure that Margarethe wants me to attend? Now listen, a knock on the door.”

  “Let him in while I finish the lace runner!” breathes Iris.

  Clara brays in a half whisper, “I will not. I’m not going to the door, I’m not entering the hall, I’m displaying myself before no one, ever again, not even in the privacy of this very house.”

  Not in the privacy of my own house, Iris notes, but this very house.

  As if Clara doesn’t even live here anymore.

  “You are so selfish!—to deny my request for help!” snaps Iris, and throws down her work to race to the door.

  Van Antum the clothier comes in, a man Iris recognizes from the street. As planned, Margarethe is sitting in a shadowy back room, keeping him waiting. “Please, settle yourself in comfort,” says Iris. “There’s tobacco if you’d like to smoke, and I can bring you a glass of something to refresh you.”

  “I would like nothing at all,” says van Antum. He is plump and fussy, and smells of limes and spilled beer.

  Margarethe struts into the room. She has borrowed a set of clothes from Henrika s wardrobe. She’s stouter than Henrika every was, and Iris’s careful eye catches the skirt fabric straining at the seams around the midriff. But Margarethe has developed a coquettish flutter that leads eyes away from such details. “How very good of you to come,” says Margarethe in an affected air, almost as if she has a duke instead of a merchant in her parlor. “I shouldn’t entertain you alone, for it isn’t proper, but my husband is”—she pauses, beautifully, theatrically—“indisposed. Iris, before you leave to see to your sister, will you please—?”

  She makes a motion with her hand. Iris obliges, though it makes her feel foolish. She turns about like a child being inspected for cleanliness. Then she curtseys at the paunchy old fellow and makes her way out of the room with as much dignity as she can muster.

  “A standard size for a young woman. Perhaps a bit more like a beanpole than some,” Margarethe is saying. “And her sister the opposite, a veritable ox. A lovely ox, but an ox just the same. Can you help us?” The voice goes up teasingly at the end, almost in a French manner. Iris has to grip the edge of the wall as she turns the corner to keep from crying out in disgust. Profanity that she has heard bantered by the Master and Caspar rises to her lips; it’s an effort not to blurt it out. “I’m sure you can see your way to outfitting two belles. The reward,” her mother is saying, “could, in time, be considerable.”

  What reward is that? There isn’t enough coin in the household to cover the bottom of a pot.

  “Clara?” calls Margarethe. “Can you come for a moment to the door?”

  At first Iris thinks that Margarethe means to have van Antum take the measure, mentally, of Clara’s lovely form—to prepare an outfit for the ball that Clara firmly is declining to attend. But when after Margarethe makes several requests Clara finally appears, sullen and covered in ashes, Iris puts her hand over her mouth, perceiving such a dreadful thought that she’s ashamed of it.

  “Isn’t she truly a treasure?” Margarethe is saying.

  Van Antum mouths his approval in wordless baby syllables. He folds his hands one over the other as if washing them.

  “I’m sure I can do something that will flatter you, something to your satisfaction,” he manages, at last, to say.

  “Something grander than what I am wearing now,” says Margarethe. “Something very grand is called for.”

  “Something very grand indeed,” says the clothier, eyes clapped on Clara until she slips away into the shadows. His chin begins to tremble. “I think the very grandest I can muster.”

  The

  Gallery of God’s

  Mistakes

  Every day Margarethe comes back from the market with more stories about the Dowager Queen of France, Marie de Medici. It seems that most of Haarlem relieves its worry over financial panic through gossip about the great she-elephant. Iris is addicted to every scrap of opinion and news.

  The Dowager Queen is ancient—perhaps as old as sixty-five. She is doughy, blowsy, and stupid, as well as highly strung and stylish. People whisper that her husband, Henry VI, had a different concubine reserved for every day of the year. “I’d have poisoned him for that,” says Margarethe blandly. “But no wonder she dabbles in affairs of state.”

  The great Marie put in years of service as the regent during her son’s childhood. Then, when little Louis XIII grew old enough to embrace his mother with a knife in his hand, Marie raised armies against him. Cardinal Richelieu—whom she considered no more than an elevated domestique—spoke out publicly against her. With frustrating regularity he was able to sidestep her assassination attempts. “How annoying for her,” says Margarethe. Now Marie is in her dotage, safely exiled to the Spanish Netherlands, though reputed to be enjoying some sort of sweet reconciliation with her son.

  As if courtly intrigues are as regular to Haarlem tongues as herrings, crones buzz that in her late years Marie de Medici has become tired of matters of government. She’s begun to indulge in the affairs of courtiers, cousins, and syc
ophants instead. Death is staring her in the face, and she intends to meddle with the world as much as possible before Death gets up its nerve to strangle her. Meddle in the world, and leave a record of her meddling. “Why do geese walk barefoot? Because they do; that’s why geese walk barefoot,” say the crones of Haarlem sagely. Why does the Dowager Queen of France meddle in the affairs of her godson? Why, what else are godsons for? What else is the good of life?

  The proud stoics of Holland find the stories of Marie’s exploits silly and entrancing. Though she’s laughed at as a fool, she’s still a powerful fool and a captivating one. The Dutch can be sullenly tolerant of their own House of Orange in the Hague—but royalty of a different stripe, be it Stuarts or Bourbons or Hapsburgs, carries a different prestige. Hasn’t Rubens already memorialized Marie de Medici in the Palace of Luxembourg as a figure of history, someone grand as Charlemagne or Joan of Arc? And still the Queen Mother persists on the stage of the world, shrieking, conniving, orchestrating her entertainments, fussing with the available material. “She’s no different from your Schoonmaker,” says Margarethe at one point to Iris, whose eyes open wide at tales of such intrigues. “She paints with real lives instead of with brushes and livid colors. We won’t live to see her like again.”

  “Tell about the Prince,” says Iris. “The one she is hoping to marry off.”

  “He is a distant cousin, or the son of such,” says Margarethe vaguely. “That’s right, a godson. I can’t learn much about him, as he isn’t a part of the regular court and little is known of him. He’s called Philippe de Marsillac. Maybe he’s one of the last links that the Dowager Queen has with her son, as Philippe is said to move freely back and forth between the court of Louis XIII and the court in exile of the Dowager Queen. Perhaps she means to marry her godson off to someone demonstrably not in any royal family of Europe as a way to break any possible use of him as an agent against her. Who can know how the crowned heads run their households? But her aim is clear. She’s no more and no less than a marriage broker to this youth, the same as any conniving aunt or gassy old dame at a hearthside.”

  “She sounds heartless,” says Iris. “Heartless and monstrous.”

  “I like her zeal,” says Margarethe blandly. “Why shouldn’t she arrange the world to suit herself? Wouldn’t we all, if we could?”

  “What wouldn’t you do to comfort yourself?” says Iris.

  “Precious little,” says Margarethe, lifting her chin.

  So I fear, says Iris, but to herself.

  * * *

  Her fears are borne out one afternoon when Margarethe takes herself off to the Master’s studio. She insists that Iris join her; perhaps Margarethe wants to make sure that no impropriety is reported by canny-eyed neighbors. She intends to approach the Master for a loan. “That painting of Young Woman with Tulips restored his fortunes,” she reasons to Iris as they hurry along. “Cornelius and Henrika revived Schoonmaker’s career for him. He owes them something. He owes me.”

  “I owe you nothing,” says the Master when asked. “Besides, it would make no difference if I did. You aren’t the only ones struggling at the moment.”

  “You invested in tulip futures?” cries Margarethe.

  “Oh, not I,” he answers. “When do I have time to leave my studio? Though other painters did, and suffered for it. Caspar, my spy in all things, tells me that Franz Hals has lost a fortune, and the young Rembrandt in Amsterdam about whom everyone keeps chattering is also in a bad situation.” He chuckles meanly. “I’d have lost the money if I could have managed to concentrate on doing so. As it is, since all my patrons are hugely in debt, I’ll be lucky to be paid for existing commissions, let alone secure new ones any time soon. So it’s all the more important for me to exhibit for the grand Marie.”

  “But I had wanted to borrow some money,” says Margarethe again, hardly believing.

  “I don’t have the world spinning on my thumb. Wanting will get you nowhere.”

  He’s looking for a study as he talks, shifting aside old paintings. The place has been a mess since Margarethe left for the van den Meers. By habit Iris goes to help him, and even Margarethe lends a hand, as if her kindliness will cause him to remember some hidden stash of florins. “You don’t know how we are poised to suffer,” she says.

  “Suffering can make you strong,” says the Master. “Look what it’s done for me.”

  “Can’t you sell something here you haven’t yet sold?” Margarethe purses her lips at three Flights into Egypt, where holy mother Mary is variously demure, brave, and sleepy, but always a model of the perfect human form. Margarethe staring at Mary is like a stork scowling at a swan, thinks Iris.

  “You know the market for religious painting is soft,” says the Master.

  “Can you sell Ugly Girl with Wildflowers and give us half the fee?”

  “I painted over that,” says the Master, “since it made Iris distressed.”

  “What about those others?” Margarethe has never showed interest in the Master’s catalogue of misfits, but she’s desperate. “Moods are grim now! Maybe you’ll have a rush of offers—”

  “You want to see those?” The Master’s eyebrows lift. “Judge for yourself whether they’ll stir the prospective buyers? I’ll show you if you like. But you, Iris? After all this time?”

  “I saw the plague take our Rebekka,” says Iris, “more horrible than that can hardly be imagined.”

  But Iris wants to see if he has painted the imp of the van den Meers’ household. She’s not sure she believes in such a thing now, but she’d recognize it if she saw it. Wouldn’t she?

  With a stout key the Master unlocks the door to the gallery of God’s mistakes. It’s another high room, originally maybe a storage shed for farm implements. One wall is stone, and three have been daubed with mud plaster and whitewashed. The Master pulls the tattered end of a curtain covering a high window. Light rushes into the mildewy space. From paintings high up near the rafters, from paintings racked waist-height on lengths of raw-milled timber to protect them from the damp floor, faces blink, or seem to. They come into the light again.

  Reluctant, grimacing, pathetic, and beastly.

  “Mercy!” says Margarethe, her hand on her heart.

  Iris winds her fingers into her apron strings.

  “I think of them as friends,” says the Master, “for aren’t we all this bruised?”

  The dwarf that Iris had met, there he is, captured on canvas. The Master had painted him after all, or had he invented him?

  “God created these errors,” says the Master, as if reading her thoughts. “I merely took dictation.” For all the bravado the dwarf had shown, he seems leery of being seen. He holds one splayed hand over his groin, though his other hand lifts aside the tunic to show a mysterious scar painted on his torso, a red bruise the shape of a ship’s anchor.

  “A dragon!” says Margarethe, looking further.

  “A ewe with an extruded womb,” says the Master. “Look more carefully. Was already dead when I saw her.”

  “Surely that’s a dragon!”

  “If you’re sure,” says the Master.

  A child with the face of a parrot. Another dwarf, and a third—a whole family series of them. There’s the Girl-Boy of Rotterdam, painted nude, all its disgusting punishments in view. A dog with a goiter that looks like a loaf of bread. A pair of siblings who sit so near that only one skin is needed to cover them both—an affliction of the sort Iris and Ruth had played at when they were being the Girl-Stag of the Meadow.

  The joined siblings look at Iris and say, Sorry. The Girl-Boy looks at Iris and says, I don’t know why I’m like this, but forgive me. The parrot-faced child is too young to speak, but squawks and bawls for pity.

  “The Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies,” says Iris, finding her.

  “Old Dame Goos called herself that?” says the Master, amused. “To you? Sometimes she says she is so old, she is Bertha, the mother of Charlemagne. She is the Queen of Sheba. She even boasts, bl
asphemously, that she is God’s own grandmother.”

  The Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies fixes an even gaze on Iris. Her look is neither remorseful nor angry. She’s uglier than Ruth or Iris herself could ever be, shriveled and pocked, horny of hand, brown of tooth. She leans on her canes as if she’s been walking the same road these thousand years. She says to Iris, And what will you make of yourself?

  But before Iris can answer, Margarethe is interrupting her thoughts. Margarethe has had enough. She’s backing away from the frog-footed, the beasties, and the damned. “You are a fiend, Luykas, to study these sinners so,” she says. “Look at your work! In one room, holiness so perfectly portrayed that it borders on idolatry—in the next, venomous evil, incarnate and walking among us. You paint the beautiful and the ugly, but what of the in-between?”

  She’s looking for herself in a painting, as we all do, thinks Iris. Margarethe is trying to locate herself in the world. She has been badly scared.

  “Young Girl with Tulips is in between,” says the Master, “the here, the now. Clara, a real girl of Holland, rendered truthfully.”

  “What is the use of beauty? What is the consequence of this?” says Margarethe.

  Iris thinks: For once Margarethe has forgotten her goal. She came to look at these paintings to remark on their interest to buyers. But she’s gotten caught up in the ideas of them.

  Margarethe steams on. “The beauty of flowers, the beauty of girls—even the beauty of painting, that’s the subject of your work. What about the beauty of goodness? What about the splendid act? The question of Parcifal, the gesture of the Samaritan on the road? What about the widow who gives her only penny?”

  The Master says, softly and in challenge, “And what would you know about that?”