These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  No matter — Maman’s drawing led to studies, inspiring me to capture age (we won’t say ugliness) in ways useful to Monsieur’s employ. I continued to work on his characters, little figures representing the tortured and damned in his overwrought Gate to Hell. But the studies in Maman’s likeness aided the piece taking shape in my mind. The only problem was finding the time to begin it while facing other demands.

  “I show you where to find the gold,” he insisted, “but the gold you find is all yours, Mademoiselle.” What else to call his flattery but artful manipulation, its intent clearly to spur me into giving him my best work, an indirectly brazen request?

  Of his more brazenly direct one, I wondered: what harm, posing? What harm, if it placated him enough to give me more time with Adèle, whose fees I couldn’t afford? What could be wrong with letting him do my face? Working strictly, as he promised, from the neck up? At the end of one long day I said yes. A logical barter, expeditious for us both, he agreed, beside himself with delight — and fear? A master chameleon even then, I was only beginning to see.

  I have to ask you. To what end, your silence? Why? You might’ve spoken up!

  His palms were cold and rough, but masterful enough. He turned me every which way. Fingers like calipers. He stood so close his beard tickled me. He pressed on my neck, cradling my skull. He tugged and tilted my head this way and that, like a dummy’s. Grunting, dissatisfied, he instructed, “Don’t smile. Close your eyes, if you would be so kind — no, open them, but relax. Try to look as if you’re daydreaming — that’s it! No, no, you’re much too stiff. Are you choking for air inside that blouse?”

  Mademoiselle this, Mademoiselle that.

  My God, C, if you’d been there! But maybe you were too young to understand.

  His fingers pushed against my collarbones, his breath swarming my ears, his eyelashes brushing my cheek. The man was terribly myopic.

  “If you undid a button or two, Mademoiselle, you’d find it easier to breathe.”

  To hasten things I obeyed. Opened my blouse, but only to the lacy edge of my chemise.

  “Better,” he breathed, and then I was in his hands again. One palm cupped the back of my head, the other my ear. “This way, so the light strikes your brow. No, a little to the left. It’s not a corpse I wish to sculpt!” Such an actor — he trembled, even his hands, his gaze so intent.

  The entire atelier was watching. It was hard not to laugh and shout at them all to mind their business. My friend, though, did not once glance up from her chiselling.

  Finally, he worked the clay. His fingers rolled, pinched, fondled: the flying parts of a machine. A head grew from nothing. A face with my likeness, right down to the pout that bowing to Maman perfected — you know it. Wilful, she called it. Here, it appeared less wilful than meek.

  Young Girl in a Bonnet, Monsieur named the piece, which showed my eyes downcast, a gloomy meditation. I detested the weakness of its chin, its sulkiness. “It’s heavenly — you must be thrilled,” my old friend gushed.

  “If the work is fine, it’s only because I’ve shown what’s there,” said Monsieur. Such unusual modesty. Monsieur thought little of words, I had come to realize, their clumsiness stacked against the certainty of touch.

  ***

  LACK OF TRUST in words made sense to me, then. But not to our brother, who loves words because they don’t dirty the hands.

  “And what besides a clear head and heart is more important than clean hands?” I’d tease him at the supper table, picturing Adèle’s oval ones, works of art of a divinity Monsieur was only too glad to have me create. Adèle enjoyed having only to flex her fingers, spared shivering naked. While I modelled the wrists, my former friend watched, unimpressed: what possible meaning could they have, hands detached from the body? Calling herself an artist, she should’ve been more open. Value fragments for what fragments say, the beauty of less being more. The Master treasured fragments. His huge inventory enabled rapid groupings, his largerthan-life statues an endless repurposing of copied parts, effects tried and true. Commissions rolled in as proof that he excelled at made-to-order art.

  Monsieur, having just returned from a day’s jaunt visiting the cathedral in Chartres, unveiled my hands himself, as he did many of my creations, pulling the wet rags (rumpled cuffs?) from their wrists. The first glimpse of them startled even me, so graceful, their gesture. He was all agog. “You did these yourself, Mademoiselle? Bourdelle —” Bourdelle, a favourite among his praticiens, maker of things oppressively massive! “— must have helped. While the cat’s away the mice will play.”

  Only the feline reference lessened its offence, since, like you, I’ve always been partial to cats. Still, anger simmered as he inspected each digit. I wish you could’ve seen them. Fingers fluid as coral, the hands splendidly offered themselves, my work a gift of perfect form reaching upwards and out! His look resembled that of Papa’s when, in a rare fit of temper, he won an argument, and Maman was forced to place her hand on his. A similar satisfaction lit Monsieur’s eyes. His cheeks flushed above his beard and, with a galling lassitude, he gripped the pieces by the base, held them high.

  “Look closely,” he shouted for everyone’s attention, “here’s what you aspire to.” He started clapping, applause echoing when the others joined in — all but my friends, one busy with her work, the other nowhere in sight.

  Louder than anything was the sound of my pride swinging open, my heart telling my head to forget Maman’s petty, proper ways. Yet a voice more humble, and cannier by far than hers, leapt from me: “If I’ve managed anything, it’s thanks to your instruction, Monsieur.” It was a voice that Maman would approve of, nonetheless, stickler for form that she was, or could be.

  It bears repeating that the benefits of Monsieur’s acquaintance were many. His work was often interrupted by visits from the cream of society, arriving to take him to lunch, dinner; soirées with men in the government, men writing for the papers. All of Paris wished to rub shoulders with him by then. Why wouldn’t I?

  You do see my point, my darling C?

  ***

  BUT I WAS also greedy for time. Things with Maman only chafed. At night, while “sleeping,” I perused my sketches of her, searching for erstwhile recollections — sweet ones — of you, safe in her lap. Imagined her attention poured out on you in her arms, though the details of such memories are fuzzy. But you know how things escape us. Our child’s memories so selective, I’ve heard, that the saddest times, not the happiest, push forward. I dwelt on this, not the grudging snores drifting from her room, knowing that every woman loves her child. It’s the way we are made, most of us.

  So I would redeem our Maman, working from these studies. I would create a maman in marble. A mother with a child, showing a tenderness to make the academics spit in their wine: So sentimental, so gauche! A cardinal sin to sculpt such homely feelings, pompous old men would dictate. As if I cared.

  “Let them laugh,” said Monsieur, all for it when, alone with him in the atelier, I divulged my idea. Stupid, stupid.

  “It’s just between you and me,” I emphasized, withholding more. Talk only jinxes things before they can thrive. The last thing I needed was our brother hearing through his writer friends (that gnarly grapevine) and telling Maman of the statue I would make to win her over; she mustn’t know a thing till it was done.

  I thought Monsieur was only teasing when he asked, “What do I get in return for keeping quiet?” Gliding his thick fingers over my sculpted ones, he started: “My dear. Don’t you see what you’d gain, my muse? I can’t be happy knowing just your face.” Eyes lingering on a group of figures, their gestures those of people in a dream, he waxed philosophical. So much more to the body than even the eyes conveyed, the eyes the window to the psyche, and on and on. “The way the spine curves; isn’t that a clue to the life within, Mademoiselle?”

  “You speak in curves.” I laughed, to test his patience. “Please, make your point.”

  “I want to sculpt you, all of you. O
ne isn’t lovely forever, my dear.”

  You might well have gagged, if you’d been there. “You would know,” I said.

  “I can help you,” he repeated — feigning weakness? Something more than disquieting about his tone, alarming. A puppet’s, it was, one looking to be danced and jigged. Just as disquieting was the cramp in my belly, the sudden, scratchy feel of lace at my chest.

  Monsieur asked if I was religious. “What stupid question —?”

  “No, no. You misunderstand. To see as you do, so knowingly, you must … imagine the Creator making us, his little clay pots.” Wheezing a little, he mocked me! “Am I pompous to suggest that what the world takes for arrogance in you is humility?” His remark found a waiting nest in me. Would Maman have made this allowance? Given me the benefit of her doubt?

  Monsieur was reaching for my waist when we were interrupted by my old friend, returning to drape a terracotta perilously close to drying out. “I saw nothing. Not a thing. I promise,” she said with an embarrassing stammer, hurrying out into the street.

  ***

  IT’S NOTHING MONSIEUR hasn’t seen a thousand times before, I told myself. Nothing his eyes haven’t already caressed. As a courtesy, he gave me privacy to undress, to lament, briefly, my slightly turned foot, and our family’s righteousness. I wound myself in the sheet; otherwise, in such a draft, I’d have kept on my clothes.

  Monsieur is the doctor; you have a fever. So reason spoke, as did the need to feel for myself the movement behind our creed. To sculpt it one must know it. To know it one must break rules, certainly the kind of rules that ruled Maman. I was young but not naïve. I was curious but not foolhardy.

  At his knock, the twinges inside me — similar but less certain, less consoling than menstrual ones — grew urgent. He smiled, his a bumbling warmth, a modest charm. For a man his age he wasn’t completely unattractive.

  Good things come to those who wait, Maman always said; focusing on Monsieur, I perceived how it could be true. The sheet fell away, and it seemed a curtain rose, a curtain as grand and sweeping as Opéra Garnier’s, rich red velvet, storeys tall. Except Monsieur’s eyes were blue. Light blue unlike mine. My nakedness reflected there. His silent approval. Boisterous applause. I might’ve bowed, but our inner Maman made me slouch and hug myself. “Imagine, Mademoiselle,” he said, “that a beam of light links you to heaven.”

  His finger pressed the crown of my head. He tugged my shoulders back, bringing me into perfect alignment.

  “Look at you, my dear. You’re nothing but grace.” Stroking my skin.

  Yet once again he sculpted only my face, framed this time by a bonnet. My disembodied head emerged from a marble block like a guillotined one on a plate, as if my body did not exist. Thought, Monsieur titled the work. “Think Medusa,” he said, “all that power in her head.”

  At least his wealthy patrons would know my face.

  But as you might imagine, things did not stop there. Posing meant working twice as hard to keep up in the studio. Not enough to have me doing faces for his little vision of hell, I became his chief provider of hands and feet. No one could render them more finely.

  Nothing like praise to win admiration, and admiration, devotion.

  ***

  HOW DIFFERENT IT would’ve been if things had remained from the neck up. Our arrangement, and what, alas, became mutual admiration. Late evenings. Our workplace emptying … Do I need to tell you, this was impossible?

  He’d chosen me, above all others. His favoured model and praticien and more than just a muse: he said not in words but by touch.

  His lips, his thumbs pressed my nakedness. A different manipulation. His beard brushed my collarbones, my breastbone, my ribs. Too soon, or not soon enough, he was touching me all over. Parts of my body were doors being opened, as though with notes tucked inside. Reminders to keep my eyes on the star, my rising one shining down from everywhere. In reaching for it I reached for him, weak with determination.

  I suppose you think I make excuses. But in my reeling imagination (what endures like the imagination?) a muscularity, quite statuesque, had led me past the curtain, laid me down on its mouldy divan, unbuttoned itself. Behind my eyes a dancer — smooth-skinned, tall, erect — flitted. It was a dancer who pushed his way inside, not this gnome grunting with exertion. A live version of his Crouching Man had entered me, a transaction sealed with a brief stinging warmth, then softness.

  Afterwards, kneeling, Monsieur thanked me. His ear was to my chest while he railed against God for the “tyranny” of loving an idol. He spoke as if I wasn’t there, but, touching my face, said, “Mademoiselle, you feel it too.” A statement, not a question.

  I had no idea, really, what he was talking about.

  ***

  SO IT WAS in our artist’s universe. Life arched its back and curled its toes, straining towards a climax. Some elusive timelessness, a fleeting immortality.

  Weeks, months, passed before my English friend spoke to me, her silence borne of self-interested caution? Then, out of the blue, she offered cigarettes, chocolate. “Your smile is more frustrating than La Joconde’s,” she said slyly. Eyes bright with envy, she blushed the blush of a transparent rose. She found a use now for our friendship. “He’s in love with you, isn’t he.”

  “Not in my dreams or yours.” I suggested she take up with one of the Salon’s whitebeards if she hoped to get ahead. Not being rude, simply speaking the truth.

  “No need to get owly,” she huffed, when I was the one offended by her prying.

  Good reasons for keeping things with Monsieur mum. Maman’s finding out would’ve set off a war not of words but arrows and knives. But then the papers ran a little note about one of my statues, which made Maman smile. Knowing nothing about art, she took as much pride in my creation as she would’ve in her own, a crewel-work cushion, a pillowslip daisy. She ordered Cook to make a celebratory meal: use fresh fruit, mind, and no bruised ones in the tarte tatin.

  I wish you’d been there to enjoy it. Apples, butter and sugar never tasted so good.

  X

  9

  I WILL ABSTAIN FROM WHATEVER IS DELETERIOUS AND MISCHIEVOUS …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  5 SEPTEMBER 1943

  20H50

  Freedom! Well, freedom once I’d got through a night of insane dreams featuring Head Nurse in an officer’s cap, shouting the schedule from a podium: “Poitier! 06H00 patients’ doors unlocked; patients washed, dressed; hair combed, skin examined, state of evacuations noted 06H30 lunatics to laundry 07H45 to chapel 08H15 breakfast 08H30 clean & open windows 09H00 patients outside/inside till 12H00 lunch 13H00 bed-rest 15H30 outdoor exercise (walk stumble strut stalk) 17H00 quiet time (hush) 18H00 chapel (hush) 19H00 supper: clean up, count, lock up forks knives spoons, not soon enough 19H45 bedtime (clothes removed from rooms, wrapped, placed outside wards; windows, doors locked; do not forget a single one or OUT GOES Y-O-U! 20H00 night nurse comes on. But don’t think for a second that you’ve earned leisure time.”

  I woke up still wearing my uniform, and much too early — 05H20 — for a day off. That voice of hers was still echoing. A sign of my dedication that I felt more tired than rested? I managed another hour of shut-eye — much appreciated, I must say.

  Mademoiselle’s envelope was still in my pocket, but I wasn’t about to waste a minute fretting over it or anything else. The day ahead was a sterile pack to be unfolded, contents fresh from the autoclave, hot and germ-free. Peeling off my uniform, I put on a sundress and some lipstick — just the cure for the piqued look staring from the mirror. The letter I popped into my purse, the better to safeguard it from the curious, prying eyes of Novice and any other dorm-mates looking to borrow a nail file or eyelash curler.

  I was passing Admin when the secretary flagged me down, beckoning me inside. Being there on a Sunday, did she have no life? “I forgot to show you these,” she said, waving a thick folder.

  Fortified with twine, it was bursting with envelopes addressed in Mademois
elle’s hand, each containing a letter, none of them postmarked. The secretary watched me rifle through them. It felt a little odd, awkward, browsing through the correspondence of someone all but dead. Addressed to various people in Paris, its dates were all over the map, some as far back as the ’20s.

  “Not that Monsieur Directeur’s behind in his screening” — the secretary gave a breathy laugh — “it’s just that we assumed most of these people were deceased.” With a dismissive shrug she said, “You can add the latest to the pile or destroy it, your discretion.” She tottered off to replace the file and return to her typing.

  The gateman barely grunted as he buzzed me through. Straight ahead and all around me, the perfect morning yawned: soft sun, fields leavened with blue, and the snow-capped gold of Mont Ventoux in the distance. Blissfully quiet, the road was empty of cars and pedestrians — still, I looked both ways while crossing to the opposite shoulder. Deeply shaded, it hugged the tiny Canal Crillon, which watered the farms which raised the cows which gave the milk, cream and butter which went to the Nazis. Feeling rather like a soldier on leave, I was glad once more of the canal flowing greenly past the woods en route to the village. If its surroundings were parched from the heat they didn’t show it, not this early. Ivy choked the trees. Birds tweeted. A fox darted from the underbrush, something in its mouth, and disappeared again.

  It wasn’t far to the train station. Its presence was signalled by the overpass where I’d sought shelter so recently — if time could be trusted, the weeks dissolving into a blur. This time I was glad of its dank shade, grateful, except for the motif splashed on it, the crushed black spider ringed with red and white. Best to ignore it, though as I emerged I was unable to.

  The quiet was shattered by shouting, voices barking orders. Achtung. Of course it brought back the train ride, all of us passengers hauling out our IDs, not to mention Sister Ursula and the other nuns seeing me off, their odd, foolhardy fearlessness. “No one can steal your devotion,” Sister had said, and no matter what shape or form it takes I believe this is true.