Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  In the courtroom of fiends, the gallery of God’s mistakes, Margarethe squares her shoulders and answers him. “Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us. That we in our sinful souls can even imagine charity—” She can’t go on for a moment. “We may not always be able to practice charity, but that in this world we can even imagine it at all! That act of daring requires the greatest talent, greater than any you possess—”

  The Master is humbled by shrill Margarethe. “As you like,” he says. “So be it. We all do what we can. My job is to see, and testify.”

  The clamminess in the room becomes apparent. There is no imp here, however hard Iris looks.

  “What can have brought you to such a perverse obsession as these!” says Margarethe.

  “I look with regret, not prurience,” the Master says hotly. “And I’m not the first to do so.” He pokes about in a slope-shouldered wardrobe hunched in a corner, and he takes out a panel about two feet square. “This one is the starting point. It’s not mine, I hasten to add. Strange panel of mysteries and miseries, isn’t it? By one of the Flemish men. I bought it from the studio of Arentsz when I was an apprentice in Amsterdam. One of the Boschs, I think. A study, incomplete on the top left. Take it up in the light if you want to look at it.”

  “I don’t think I do,” says Margarethe. “Who could?”

  “It’s fabulous and unsettling. A portrait of a magic world. I avoid looking at it for years at a time, and then every now and then I scrutinize it as if I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It makes my eyes ache,” says Margarethe.

  But she and Iris drag it to a table and set it in the spring sunlight. “I’m not sure that these things are suitable for you to see,” says Margarethe in a dull voice, but she’s so curious about the busy painting that she forgets to nudge Iris away, so they both examine the panel. If this is the magic world!—or is it a dream, or a prophecy of some sort? The landscape is pink and blue, and broken out with strange mountains shaped like towers. But each part of the landscape is equally near, and every part is home to creatures, birds, flowers, and human beings, in ridiculous and shocking conjunction.

  A naked woman with the head of a bird is trapped in a glass bubble. Two men without clothes blow trumpets whose crowns disappear into one another’s smooth behinds. A girl looks out over the lip of a huge sunflower, trapped there. A man shits gold coins onto a hunk of bread that a woman is busy trying to cram into her mouth. A baby with a bishop’s miter pushes a man backward into a well. Demons cavort carnally with men, women, bear cubs, and plants. A sweet girl on her hands and knees seems to have a vine growing out from between her legs, and from the vine dangles a pear, an apple, and a violin.

  “This is a painting by the devil himself,” says Margarethe.

  “Look, Mama,” says Iris. “Up in this corner.”

  There’s a dead man floating in a broad field of water. He’s naked, gray as the flesh of old fish. Above him a black bird hovers on spread wings. The bird has pecked out the eyes of the corpse. You can see both eyes in the bird’s beak, one next to the other, staring from the insignificant corner of the canvas right out at the viewer. Out of all the dozens of creatures in situations of distress, or perhaps wild delight—it’s hard to tell—these are the only eyes that peer at the viewer.

  “I can’t look at this any longer, my own eyes ache,” says Margarethe. “They boil with small ghosts. What in the world are we doing here, anyway?”

  “You are coming to understand that I have no money to lend,” says the Master. “And nothing from this gallery would interest the householder of Haarlem.” He doesn’t sound pleased to turn her down, nor does he sound sorry. “Put the painting back where you found it.”

  “I won’t touch that vile thing,” says Margarethe. “I’m a good Christian woman.”

  “Oh, I see,” says the Master. “Well, leave it there; Caspar will replace it where it belongs when he returns.”

  “Caspar,” says Margarethe. “I suppose you’ve given him all the money you might have given me.”

  “He’s my apprentice, not my banker,” says the Master. “Are you going to try to annoy me into loaning you money? There’s none to loan. I have my own problems. Perhaps you should leave.” He begins to wave them away, as if he’s sorry he has let down his guard. “I’d thought you might learn some sympathy. But it’s more of the same: The unfortunates of the world exist only to shore us up in our own high regard of ourselves.”

  “Sententious fool, let God’s judgment be on you and me both, and see how we fare!” cries Margarethe. “Iris, come.”

  On the way home Margarethe rubs her eyes. “Damn! These eyes are bewitched. Caspar, and paintings like that in the house! They should be burned. Ruining a young man like that. Who probably deserves to be ruined. Oh, I see how Caspar has looked at you. Don’t be fooled. His attentions are all to distract us from his real tastes. I’m no ninny in the world, you think I don’t know?”

  Even more than the Master’s catalogue of God’s errors, the old, scratched painting of people in a magic world has alarmed Margarethe.

  Iris says, “Mama, this is a hard time for you; I don’t want to talk about Caspar. Let’s just worry about the ball, if indeed we’re going to go. Isn’t there enough on our minds without berating other people?”

  “Beauty has no use at all,” says Margarethe, following her own thoughts. “It has no consequence. It lends nothing to the world. You’re better off without any, my poor daughter.”

  Cinderella

  Even safe in the cozy nook, Clara’s becoming more and more inward. She twists her head away from the front rooms as a matter of course, ducks her eyes when Margarethe arrives at the door to complain, demand, or, once in a while, mutter appreciation. Iris watches, first with the eye of an artist and then with the grudging heart of a sister. Could a beauty like Clara nonetheless be one of God’s mistakes?

  “Clara,” she says one day, “you’re becoming a nun before my eyes.”

  Clara looks up from the churn. Her face is white and glazed with the effort, but she won’t hand the job over to Iris to help. “You can call me Sister Cinderella,” she says. “I’d be happy to take vows and live under a promise of silence, if I got permission for solitude.”

  “We haven’t yet begun to starve, there’s no need of that,” says Iris with a proper horror.

  “What choices have we, with Papa in his collapse and a madwoman at the helm of this household?” says Clara.

  “Don’t say such things,” says Iris, and then, despite herself, is forced to clarify by adding, “I’m sure Papa Cornelius will recover.”

  “So you don’t argue about your mother’s madness,” says Clara. Her acid tone contradicts the supplicating position of her shoulders and bowed head over the churn.

  “Don’t ask such betrayals of me,” says Iris. “Please!”

  “She is mad,” says Clara. “Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last.”

  “Madhouse or poorhouse, what is your choice?” says Iris, but she can’t put her heart into the argument, and she doesn’t know why she is defending her mother.

  Clara just looks up. “I don’t propose that anyone’s path in this life is easy,” she says. “Why do we argue, Iris? You and Ruth are all that’s left to me of my old life, the, life that seemed would be troubled only by an excess of happiness.”

  “Your father will recover,” says Iris, a bit more kindly. She looks in the larder for flour so that she might prepare some dough for bread, but there’s only the merest dusting of flour in the earthenware jug. She comes out to ask Clara where the day’s flour has gone, has the bread dough been set to rise already, but she forgets her task when she sees Clara’s shoulders shaking. “Oh, dear sister,” says Iris, moving across the room to her, “your father will recover!”

  “He hardly knows me!” says Clara. “His whole lif
e is wiped away; it is as if his eyes have been bled of their memories, and they stare without seeing!”

  “I know what that’s like,” says Iris. She struggles over what to say next. “Grieving and worry take many forms. It’s simply a kind of sickness, but unlike the plague or the pox, it’s not fatal. He’ll recover. He will! You’ll see! And you must do what you can to help him.”

  Clara blinks at her. In her life she hasn’t often been asked to help. It’s a proposition she doesn’t seem to comprehend. She moves beyond it. Wipes her eyes. “He’s there but gone. His body is warm and smells of him, but no more than a heap of garments retains the aroma and the heat of the body when you step from them to bathe. He hasn’t given you much mind or much time, so how would you know, but I know: He isn’t the man he was. He’s hardly a man at all—just a collection of bodily habits, eating, breathing, relieving himself, muttering in his sleep. Don’t you see how he’s been reduced to nothing?”

  “This is an indulgence, this pity and horror,” says Iris coldly. “You do what needs to be done, and he’ll return to you. He s a good man and he’s broken by worry, but he’s not dead, Clara. Not the way my father is dead.”

  Iris pauses, the thought of the floating dead man, his eyes in a bird’s beak—

  —and goes on. “Give him time to rest and all will be well.”

  Clara says, “You’re older than I am, Iris, and you’ve seen sadness in your time, but you don’t know everything about the world. Leave me to my grief.”

  “I’ll find the biggest key I can and lock you in your cloister if you want,” says Iris. “While you mope, at least the madwoman is at work, hard as ever, to fix the dilemma we are all in! If you were less critical you might be more help!”

  Clara loses her patience at last, and calls out, “Ruth? Are you there, Ruth? Will you come and sing to me as you so prettily can? Ruth? There’s an annoying gnat in the kitchen, saying things I can’t understand. I need to be distracted. Ruth, come sing to me.”

  Ruth appears from some garden chore that has been given her, appropriate to her attention and her manual skills. She smiles at Iris and she sinks down on her knees before the butter churn. She hums a string of nonsense syllables, long ocean sounds unfettered by the pops and thuds with which real words start and close. Still, the unfocused noise is, in some vague way, musical, and Clara begins to thump the churn again, in time.

  Iris tries to say, “And what of me, what about what I’m sacrificing, now that I’m ordered to abandon the studio?” But the start of her sentence is lost in Ruth’s noises, and she can’t finish it anyway, for her thought is just as self-pitying as any Clara has expressed, and Iris is ashamed.

  Van Stolk and

  van Antum

  “Take them! Take the lot! Good riddance to them!”

  Creditors come and cart away the entire stock of tulip bulbs—sacks and sacks of bulbs, each bulb rustling as if in its own paper parcel. Creditors also take those flowers planted in sets of a dozen and twenty to the tub. Margarethe complains of sores in her eyes—“Ever since seeing that devil’s painting of the magic world, all those immoral beasts and flowers!”—and she paws at her eyes in frustration as if to clear them of a film, a crust. Nonetheless, she oversees the proceedings. She watches with a grim mouth, and she orders Iris to make a record on paper of every exchange. The language in which the commerce is carried out is salty or apologetic, but Margarethe never lowers her chin or her voice. Surely poor Papa Cornelius, slowly calcifying in his stupor on the bed, can hear through the bed curtains how Margarethe is dismantling his estate. Whether he understands what he’s hearing is, of course, another matter. He speaks little or not at all.

  But one day he does emerge, half dressed and slovenly-looking, at the sound of the raspy voice of Nicolaes van Stolk. He’s the man who approached Clara at her mother’s burial, the barrel-chested citizen who had cried the bad news on the night that the storm had threatened the delivery of the tulip bulbs. Van Stolk has arrived with four sturdy lads to wander through van den Meer’s house and look at the furnishings. It seems that van Stolk has paid off the brewers’ loan to the van den Meers, and now the van den Meers are in debt to him. He intends to make a proposal to Margarethe about what he might take away in exchange for what is owed him.

  “You would harvest the very bones out of our skin, would you?” hisses Margarethe.

  “They would do me little good, for I couldn’t resell them for a profit,” says van Stolk jovially. “Good day, van den Meer. Hard moments come to us all.” He doesn’t look as if hard moments have come to him any time lately.

  “You needn’t bother with this tiresome visitor,” says Margarethe to her husband, in what passes for charity, but is really an attempt to hurry up her negotiation without interference. “Go back to your couch and I’ll have Ruth or Iris bring you something warm to drink.” The girls try to urge van den Meer away.

  “Why you wandering through my house?” says van den Meer to van Stolk.

  “I fancy a few of the paintings,” says van Stolk. “They aren’t all of the highest caliber, and paintings have lost their value this season since the market is flooded with them. But I’ll offer you a fair price for a few lovely items, and deduct that from the amount that you owe me.”

  “Paintings,” says Margarethe, interrupting what is bound to be her husband’s objections, “they come and go, as quickly as the styles of clothes and the taste in predikants. We may as well make room for better-quality work, which we’ll soon be able to afford. Why not relieve ourselves of a lesser grade of goods while we can—”

  “Silence, you harpy,” says her husband. “Get out of my house, van Stolk, before I force you out with my fists!”

  “I will look at the painting of Young Woman with Tulips,” says van Stolk calmly, ignoring him. “To my mind it’s the only good piece here.”

  “You won’t even look at it!” Van den Meer steps forward, and the step becomes a run. Even Margarethe shrinks from the expected crash of two full-grown male bodies. But the four youths lock their arms and hold van den Meer back, and van Stolk crosses the hall and flings the door open as if he owns the building.

  “Here it is, a major work by a minor artist,” he cries. “Splendid as I remembered it. The subject inspired the artist to heights of achievement he’ll never again match. It’s hard to distinguish which is more magnificent, the beauty of the girl or the sensitive skill of the rendering—but I suppose it doesn’t matter. This is what art does, confuses the senses so to magnify the appreciation of the heart.” He peers at it fondly, avariciously. “Those jewels the girl is wearing, aren’t they Henrika’s? They would fetch a pretty price.”

  “I believe she was buried in them,” says Margarethe. “Don’t think I haven’t searched the drawers and cabinets. If you care to dig up her corpse, you’re welcome to them, provided our accounts get the proper credit.”

  Van Stolk laughs, almost admirably. “You are a fiend. Now, young fellows, scramble up on this table and unhook the work from this wall.”

  “It’s the most valuable piece in the house,” says Margarethe shrilly, repeating for the fiftieth time the phrase with which she’s ushered all recent visitors through the house.

  “Since the house has been denuded of most of your husband’s fine possessions, you’re not saying much when you say that,” says van Stolk.

  “I won’t have it!” roars van den Meer. Clara comes in from the kitchens at the noise. She claps her hands on her cheeks. Her first response is joy, to hear her father address a visitor, but when she sees who the visitor is, and how agitated her father has become, she flings herself at him.

  “Let it go from this house, Papa,” murmurs Clara. “Let him take it; he’s only a scavenger. Besides, I hated it. It’s a painting of vain hopes, and does me no justice.”

  “You’re already changed from the girl in the painting,” cries her father. “Look at you! A kitchen maid! Margarethe, what are you doing to my child?”

  Margareth
e, arguing with van Stolk about the cost of the painting, pays him no mind.

  “Come away,” says Clara, “come away, Papa; you’re hardly dressed.”

  “My Clara,” says her father, but when he reaches out his hands, it’s toward the smiling, beautiful child in the painting, not to the paler version of the same daughter who now holds her arms about him. “Clara, don’t leave me as Henrika did!” He begins to sob.

  “I already have a potential buyer for this piece,” says van Stolk as he organizes the painting to be maneuvered out the door into the spring sunlight.

  But van den Meer has rallied. He steps before the work and says, “I’ll see about selling it to you in a few weeks’ time, if I have to. You criticized me for engaging in speculation, and I see you are one of the first to profit in this decline. Don’t think me fool enough not to notice. But the painting isn’t mine to give you right now. If you take it from my house without my permission, the law will accuse you of theft. I’m informing you about this loudly and in the presence of witnesses.

  “What are you speaking about?” says van Stolk.

  “Luykas Schoonmaker the painter came to me last week and asked me for permission to borrow the painting to show in the exhibit for the visiting Queen.”

  “You never told me this!” says Margarethe.

  “You were out on some scheme. He came to the door and Clara showed him into my bedchamber,” says van den Meer. “It is my house, Margarethe, and my daughter, and my painting, and I agreed to the terms of the loan.”

  “What terms are those? What is he paying?” says Margarethe. “Iris, write this down.”

  “He is paying nothing. Those are the terms,” says van den Meer. “Charity requires no less, and when we give up charity, we give up our souls. Do you think I haven’t learned anything in this hard year? There, I’ve said what I have to say. Remove the painting forcibly from these premises, van Stolk, and you violate the law. I’ll have the schout and his deputies on you at once.”