Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  The wind that strikes last autumn’s leaves out of gutters and hedges is a warm one. The stars shimmer in their fastenings, and a moon releases a bruising pinkness upon the world. The houses seem to draw away from the carriage as it passes, as if huddling behind their shuttered windows. The streets of Haarlem are curiously empty. Citizens either have been invited to the ball and are on their way, or they haven’t and so are keeping close to home out of disappointment or even shame.

  Iris peers from behind the curtain. Now, how does Margarethe intend to pay for this carriage, these clothes? She’s mortgaging their future, betting as outrageously as she had goaded Cornelius van den Meer to bet, only now on a different commodity.

  Iris slumps against the backboard. Margarethe is mad to think that Iris might hope to attract the attention of a visiting French prince. Is this the maneuver of someone who’s been driven to the abyss by worry? Or are there yet deeper currents of strategy at work in Margarethe? At any rate, a ball is something Iris can study, coolly, without fear of being noticed or hope of attaining advance.

  Iris finds that she notices the way things look outside—the rooflines, the twitching limbs of trees—rather than noticing herself and her sister inside this carriage, on this evening of all strange evenings. She lectures herself to attend. How do you see that girl called Ruth, how do you see the girl called Iris? Look at them as if you are to draw these young girls. Not what you know of them, how you think they go, but how do they appear? Caspar has taught her the lesson of the Master: Don’t approach something to draw as if you know what it is; approach it as if you’ve never experienced it before. Apprehend it by surprise. Startle it into liveliness.

  Iris glances at Ruth and then, quickly, glances away. What has she seen? A solid face with a knotted expression. No, don’t presume that it’s an expression of stupidity. What if it’s a look of earnest effort? The brow furrows. If her nose is a little weak, her jaw is strong. The passion in the eyes that still gleams with the last of her nervous tears is nonetheless passion. Among the stolid Dutch passion is often put down to too much ale. But there are the few who think it an essential element in a person’s humors.

  Ruth’s skin is smooth, as if it’s stretched to capacity to cover the area that her large bones require. She wears her clothes awkwardly, and her hair is, to put it mildly, seditious. Her hands clutch each other without comfort.

  Still, her clothes are something of a success, a generous gown of blue folds, billowing to hide the softly bowed shape of her legs, and a blouse and waistcoat to match the skirt.

  And Iris herself? Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one’s self as one is.

  She can only look for a minute, with her eyes closed, at Iris Fisher van den Meer. She sees herself as if in a memory, a distant and unchangeable figure.

  The girl sat in a corner of the carriage. She wore a neatly pressed cap of bleached linen—white with a blue undertone. From beneath the turned-up edges her hair showed in the briefest of scallops; three or four fringey loops of field-mouse brown laid against her cheek like the papery scales of a fish. Though her nose was long and unregenerate, and her lips thin, pursed like a minister’s mouth, her color was good. Her cheeks were flushed—well, wasn’t she on her way to her first ball? Her eyes were cast down, perhaps even closed, and the lashes that sealed them were too thin to notice, and the brows that overarched them drove inward, a gesture of contemplation. So perhaps she was an intelligent thing, despite her lack of education.

  She was thin and rangy rather than full; she resembled a boy more than a buxom Holland maiden. Yet her clothes weren’t ill-suited: a gown of shimmering lavender intercut with a lace the color of whipped eggs. Her hands didn’t fiddle with the pleats at the gathered waist of her gown. She seemed, if not at peace with herself, then at least interested in developing herself, whoever she might be.

  Is this the main thing that painters of portraits care about? The person on the verge of becoming someone else? Changing isn’t just the province of the young, Iris thinks, imagining Margarethe with her mad eye—Papa Cornelius in his stupor—even Caspar, glowing with more fervent beauty than either Ruth or she possesses.

  Or Clara, Clara turned Cinderella turned Clarissa Santiago of Aragon, becoming someone new by turns, escaping away from something, or toward something else.

  Before Iris turns away from herself, she has one last glimpse and thinks: Were I to paint myself, that would be what I would try to capture: a person intent on seeing, even if what is to be seen isn’t yet fully comprehended.

  The carriage makes its way out the city gate and into the countryside. The grand home of the Pruyns is said to be the only estate that rivals any of the civic buildings of Haarlem. As the carriage wheels along a broad avenue of elms and the buildings begin to come into view, Iris can only gasp. Not like any structure she has seen before, not the rough brick and timber buildings of the lowlands in England, with their heavy brows of thatch, nor like the more rectilinear Dutch homes of Haarlem streets. Not like the imp-empty house of the van den Meers, broad-shouldered and severe. There has been some struggle between the Pruyns, the Coeymans, and the Beverwijck families as to which family would host the Dowager Queen and her godson, but the Pruyns have won the honor because their estate is the most ample and bucolic.

  And there it is, as the carriage pulls in a drive shaded by copper beeches on either side. The carriage passes ivied walls surmounted by stone urns, and enters a courtyard through an elegant gatehouse. “Venetian, and in limestone,” murmurs Iris to Ruth, parroting what she’s heard. But she likes the strong triangle of the gatehouse roof and the broad, flat stretch of facade.

  They alight with as much grace as they can manage. “You know your instruction,” says Iris firmly to the driver, who rolls his eyes but nods. He is returning to the van den Meer house in Haarlem for a third time, now to collect Clarissa of Aragon. In ordinary circumstances he might hardly be trusted, thinks Iris, so Margarethe must have dreamed up sufficient reward for him to accept the increase of his duties. He clicks the reins and hurries the carriage off—there is a line behind him—and Iris and Ruth turn to survey the Pruyn manor house from close up.

  The stone is a golden pink, lit by several well-trimmed torches giving an even, ample light. Servants suited up in a French fashion stand in two ranks, one on either side of the door. Ruth stumbles on the steps and barks a wordless curse, but a servant reaches out and steadies her elbow. By the time Ruth lifts her head and smiles she has already had the strength to blink back the tears of shame.

  Because the air is nice and the crowd already substantial, the double doors of the Pruyn manor are thrown open. The melodies from a small orchestra can’t pretty the atmosphere as much as Iris might have expected, for the nervous chatter spilling from within drowns out much of the music.

  Iris and Ruth pass into the hall, and see that women are handing in cloaks at a small room off the atrium. Arriving without cloaks, the girls stand on the side until some more confident-looking townsfolk have prepared themselves for entering the main ballroom. Iris is too shy to announce their names, so she just pokes Ruth in the ribs, and they sail along in the wake of a prominent landowner from the east edge of town. “Heer Ochtervelt and family,” announces a manservant, and Iris and Ruth play the part of country cousins of the Ochtervelts, trailing like an afterthought down the three steps into the broad ballroom. The Ochtervelts look as terrified as Ruth, and they never notice that their party has swollen in number by two.

  Iris glances about for Margarethe, but she isn’t to be seen. Instead a devil’s garden of blossoms: women in high color, flaming cheeks and gowns, fantastical combinations that war against each other like the worst patch of summer weeds. All the town regents: portly men in black with colored sashes and ceremonial swords and chestsful of ribbons, medallions, and lace. The ruffs are so high and stiff that the goatees look ready for harvesting.

  The room is the loftiest Iris had ever seen excep
t for the Grotekerk of Saint Bavo’s. It stretches up two and a half flights, with a balcony one level up supported by marble pillars all around the perimeter. Many of the partygoers have taken refuge in the relative anonymity along the margins of the room, underneath the balcony. They’re packed like fish in a crate.

  On either side of the main room, doors lead to other salons, in which food is arranged on tables. Peacocks baked in crusts. Crabs nestled in each other’s arms. Prawns, turkeys, oysters, and chestnuts. Pies, golden lemons, hams studded with cloves. Beans, cider, ale. A whole table of cheeses, brown, white, and yellow. Fish, venison, rabbits, as well as yeasty bread and flat bread and pots of butter. No guest has yet dared approach the tables, though rural children stand by with glazed, disbelieving looks, waving flies away.

  Iris takes Ruth by the hand, and they weave their way through the crowd, scrutinizing the guests, who are as colorful as the food, and almost as delicious. “Master Schoonmaker!” says Iris in her most cordial voice, and the Master turns. His face broadens and brightens.

  “What a surprise, some real people here,” says the Master. “Can you guess how many of these people have asked my prices for portraiture and then have gone to hire my competitors instead?”

  “Always working,” says Iris. “What’s this evening to be like, do you know?”

  “Never seen a tenth of this splendor, and hope never to see it again. I think we have about an hour of waiting for the great she-elephant to come in,” says the Master. “Her royal majesty is in a reception room upstairs with the Pruyns and with the other guest of honor, her godson. Eventually someone will tell us it is time to eat and drink ourselves into a stupor. Then music must whip us into a frenzy of anticipation until she sees fit to grace us with her presence. Near to the midnight hour the Dowager Queen and her godson will be escorted into the next hall, where there are eighteen paintings on display. I think we’re expected to follow in devotional silence and look on the paintings ourselves. She will yawn and slip out through a side door, and I suppose that will be the sign for all of us to race away and undo our girdles and belch ourselves comfortable again.”

  “Only eighteen?” says Iris. “I thought there were to be forty!”

  “The Dowager Queen asked the Pruyns to make a smaller selection. She’s a noodly old thing, and she has a romantic attachment to moonlight. She wants to look at the paintings as they appear in the dusk of lamplight. That’s when she’ll enjoy her portrait most, as she claims many hours of insomnia to her credit. But she’s also a crotchety old woman, and she has said she’ll be tired of paintings if there are too many. So after all that fuss, this afternoon seven painters were eliminated entirely, and of the rest, only one painting for each artist was permitted.”

  He’s too glib and sanguine to have been rejected, guesses Iris, though she hardly dares suggest so. “The Young Woman with Tulips is in, isn’t it,” she says.

  “It is,” he admits. “You’ve helped keep me in the consideration by your sage advice, little girl.” He looks pleased, guilty, and sullen all at once.

  “It’s the most beautiful painting of the year,” she says.

  “Hah!” he replies. “What do you know of paintings?”

  “Enough,” she says.

  “Not enough,” he answers. “You only know mine. It may be my most perfect work, but it needn’t be the best painting of the year or of the exhibition.”

  “I am confident of you,” says Iris. She smiles at him, and he colors slightly, and in that moment she realizes she is very near to being an adult, for he needs her approval as much as she needs his.

  “My friend,” she says, and reaches out and takes his hand. “It’s an important night for you.”

  “It’s a social affair, nothing more, and I hate social affairs,” he says.

  “You’re embarrassed, so you’re avoiding what I’m saying: Your painting, Young Woman with Tulips will be seen by everyone tonight. If even a little local fuss for you isn’t enough, by the time the night is over you will be recognized as a major painter by guests from Holland, Utrecht, as far away as Gelderland.”

  “True enough, everyone will see,” he groans, slightly mocking himself but somewhat in earnest too. “And then what? Either I get the commission or I don’t. If I don’t, the more public failure I become. If I do, I may be unable to surpass Young Woman with Tulips. It may be that my best work is behind me already. In a way, I wish I had never done it. I wish I had ruined it and still believed myself capable of better. Now I am not sure I can ever do better. I look at it hanging on the wall, and I wish it were gone.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  Ruth reaches out and pats the Master’s shoulder. She’s never touched him before; in fact, she rarely reaches out to any person, only animals. Iris says, “Look, even Ruth knows how silly you are being.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” he says. “If it’s a kind of madness, it goes with the work of painting. I wish Caspar were here.”

  Iris doesn’t speak of Caspar to the Master. She merely says, “Have you seen Margarethe?”

  “No. Didn’t you arrive together?” says the Master. He looks as if he’s trying to control himself from making a further remark, and failing, for he goes on, “Perhaps Margarethe is off relieving herself in the outhouse. She’s no longer the person I would care to engage in conversation in an evening of pleasantries.

  “She is my mother,” says Iris with dignity.

  “Indeed she is, and welcome to her,” says the Master.

  “You’re annoyed because she wouldn’t marry you,” says Iris.

  “I’m relieved that she wouldn’t marry me,” says the Master. “I’m annoyed because I think she drove her husband to ruin.”

  “She’s not responsible for the crash in tulip values,” says Iris.

  “Why are you defending her?” says the Master. “Because she’s your mother?” He peers at her as if seeing her for the first time, and then relents. “Oh, well, I forget; you’re still young. Come, let us speak of something else. Which fresh new thing will sweep this Philippe de Marsillac off his feet?”

  “The wealthiest, whatever she looks like.”

  He laughed. “So you’re not all that young, to view the world in such terms!” he says. “Then, if you were a man, what woman would you fancy, in all this flump and finery?”

  “How can you compare one beautiful thing to another?” says Iris the Ugly.

  “Good question. Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence—fleetingness—a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color—the lilies of the field!—more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women’s grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures.”

  “But words endure too,” says Iris. “You quote the Bible text about the lilies of the field. Those very lilies that Christ taught about are dead for centuries, but His words live. And what about the kind act, as my mother said? My mother the crab, the irritant in the oyster, what about what she said? The small gesture of charity? Isn’t that sort of beauty more beautiful than any other?”

  “And equally evanescent,” says the Master, “for small charities cannot this wicked world amend. But perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.”

  They look out over the swaying garden of beauties, rustling in their silks, pattering with their slippers, glinting in their jewelry, sweating finely in the press of the crowd. They look for charity, which is hard to see; they find much handsomeness instead.

  * * *

  The music has gone from being a novelty to being faintly repetitious when suddenly the strings and woodwinds are augmented by the leveling notes of some golden cornets. The noise of the guests increases for a moment, and then drops to a hush, as the doors at the far end of the hall are thrown open, and
liveried footmen march out and stand flanking the doorway.

  The Dowager Queen of France comes in on the arm of her host, Heer Pruyn. She looks bored by the ceremony of it, and nods grumpily left and right. Heer Pruyn escorts her to a chair—simple yet suitably ample—and he settles the guest of honor in it. There is the sound of wood taking some weight on it, creaking, as well as more than a mumble of human complaint. “Never heard of cushions, what, you think I’m supplied enough with my own natural cushions?” she is heard to bray. “After all these decades they tend to wear out, you know.”

  Cushions are found. She is elevated by several of the servants, cushions inserted beneath her, and then she is replaced. She smiles wanly, as if a little human comfort for her rear end is the best that she can hope for in her old age. It’s only when she’s been supplied with an Oriental fan and a small table supporting a crystal goblet of port—which she never sips the whole night through—that she looks about and says, “Philippe!” and it becomes apparent that her nephew or godson or whoever he is has been proceeding behind her with tact and discretion.

  “The Prince of Marsillac!” cries the Dowager Queen of France, and raises her glass. The good people of Haarlem freeze, as they don’t know the protocol.

  “To the Prince!” exhorts Marie de Medici, waving her right arm about in an enthusiastic motion.

  “To the Prince,” weakly reply those nearest her, and others farther away say more boisterously, “To the Prince!”

  He steps forward four or five inches, gives the tiniest little bow, which might as well have been a stretch to aid in the digestion of some lumpen bite of pork pie. All heads crane, including Iris’s, to see the catch of the day.

  He is strong enough to look at, a bit willowy in the thigh, but perhaps that’s the odd French cut of the trouser or the unmasculine shade of the material—or is that kind of green a royal color? His nose has the Gallic lift and heft, like the rudder of a boat. His fleshy upper lip puckers in a way that will cause hours of argument—some say weak, others say winsome. But his eyes make up for any other deficiencies; the irises are stone-gray and brilliant, like marbleized paper lit from behind.