The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  She touches a dusky half-moon.

  “Again, he is in trouble,” I say. “This time for the beating death of the widow Joubert.”

  She puts her arms over her ribs, clamps her jaw tight, closing herself to me. Still, maybe because of habit, words lurch from my mouth, a cart loose on a hill. “A boy confessed and said Émile Abadie took part in the bludgeoning.” The flesh of her face falls. She forgets to breathe. Her arms wrap tighter, fingertips digging into her ribs. And my words come faster. “The inspector says the widow Joubert was murdered the eleventh of March, in the gap when Abadie and the other boy were absent from the stage at the Ambigu.”

  Her lips part. “What gap?” she says.

  “Between the third tableau and the seventh.”

  Antoinette claps a hand against her thigh, and the half-moons beneath her eyes fade. “I never told you about the storeroom and getting adored,” she says. And then before I say a thing she is telling how the gap was the exact hour she spent with Émile Abadie in a storeroom most every day, about the calendar where she marked it all down. “Nine days out of ten, printed on that calendar you’ll find the tiny x, proving his innocence.”

  She keeps up her rosy, rushed blathering, asking when the trial will take place, and once I say, “It’s two months away,” telling me to find the calendar, wedged into the opening between the chimneypiece and the wall, and to take it to Monsieur Albert Danet, Émile’s attorney. She says I am to explain the meaning of the tiny x I am sure to find marking the eleventh of March. “I won’t be out in time,” she says. “You got to do this one thing for me, this one important thing.” And there is such hope in her glowing, pleading face, such trust, that I nod.

  “Now tell me,” she says. “Was the boy did the confessing Michel Knobloch?”

  “Yes.” Again she claps her thigh, her face alive with happiness.

  “He’s the biggest liar Paris has ever seen. People will line up to say so in court.”

  “No one lies about murder,” I say, fingernail digging into the raw patch of my thumb. “Why would anyone lie?”

  “He only wants to get to New Caledonia,” she says. “The land of milk and honey.”

  Such joy. From a girl leaving me behind. How my heart aches.

  I lay my cheek flat against the wall of our lodging room and peer into the gap behind the chimneypiece and sure enough, there are two small brass rings holding together what has to be Antoinette’s calendar. I fish a knife into the gap, catch one of the rings and lift the black leather covers and the pages sandwiched in between from their hiding place.

  I put the calendar on the table, and stand there, hands on my hips, just staring and wondering where Antoinette found such a pretty thing. I step backward, take in from the side the scalloped edges of the stacked pages. Quickly, with a single finger, like it is hot, I tip open the top cover and come upon a bookplate reading Property of William Busnach. Without a minute of wondering why Antoinette has the calendar of L’Assommoir’s playwright, I flip to the month marked March, see two birds, green with yellow breasts, their red beaks tipped together in a kiss. A single glance tells me there is an x in every box but three, that each of the empty boxes falls in the final week of the month.

  Antoinette called Charlotte’s easy sleep a gift of innocence. We made grave nods, and I remember the feeling of a solemn pact to keep our sister from the harshness of the world. Not for a flash did I think Antoinette meant for me to work out just how all on my own. I could not. Would not. It was not something I knew how to do. Even putting Charlotte aside, if it was just me, I could not get along without Antoinette, could not work out the living and breathing, the haggling with Monsieur LeBlanc, the hollering for Maman to get up.

  She lifted her skirt on behalf of Émile Abadie, a boy who was rude and ugly, a boy who let another slap her face, a boy who would never provide a roof over her head, a boy who slit a woman’s throat. Such a boy, she would follow to the ends of the earth. The hold he had on her, it was like a sickness. And the blade of the guillotine upon his neck was the cure, a gift to Antoinette. And if I was truthful, a gift to Charlotte and me.

  I find a match, pull pages from the book, twist them into crumpled bows and toss them to the stone floor of the fireplace. Match struck, a blaze flares. Red hot along the edges, paper turns black, and then it disappears, nothing more than soot, ash, air.

  Antoinette

  Through the puny window in the oaken door of my cell, I catch sight of the wimple and pimpled, ruddy cheek of a sister. I hear the sliding shut of the iron bolt locking me in until daybreak, a sluggish twelve hours away. The bell of the Angelus in the courtyard rings out seven times. Then there are the cries of a sister calling out gibberish—Latin words about the angel of the Lord speaking to Mary—and after that, all the prisoners answering back. More Latin, this time about the child inside of Mary being put there by God. At least it is what the Superioress said yesterday when I was sitting before her on a hard bench, repeating and repeating until I knew the opening lines of the Angelus by heart. Fallen girls is what they call those of us holed up in section two of Saint-Lazare—all coquettes without the good sense to follow the rules. It gets tedious, those dreary sisters announcing the virtue of Mary three times a day. “Maybe this old prison should have took its name from Mary,” I said to the Superioress once she was satisfied with my reciting of the Angelus. “I expect she was fallen herself.”

  “Hold your tongue, Mademoiselle van Goethem.” I been spared knowing a single Superioress in my life, but this one, she looked exactly like she should—jowly, droopy neck, eyes like a wolf.

  “Can’t help but wonder what you sisters were meaning, naming this place after Saint Lazarus. Wasn’t he a lowly beggar with the open sores of a leper upon his skin?”

  Oh, how she clenched her lips, the Superioress.

  The walls have ears, and so behind my oaken door, I stoop to my knees, to the stubbly brickwork of the floor. Fingers laced, knuckles lining up, I move my hands to under my chin. But after mumbling the first chorus, my mind drifts to thinking that, doomed to an evening of prayer, I should at least be asking for Marie to take my calendar to Monsieur Danet like she said. Of course some snitching sister has an ear pressed up against my door, and there comes the sound of chalk scraping over oak. In the morning I will find a blaring white slash marking the outside of my door, the sign instructing me to report to the Superioress for more lessons upon her hard bench. This, instead of a free hour, walking the pathways of the courtyard with the rest of the fallen girls.

  It is not so bad here, even if I miss combing out the locks of Marie and sharing a bit of custard from the pastry cook with Charlotte. I have a bed, an entire cell to myself, also a little table and chair. The problem is I need to count on Marie to get my calendar to Monsieur Danet, and I cannot go to Émile and put his mind at ease or get back to saving for New Caledonia. Every day I wake up hopeful of being called to the parlor, of Marie coming with some news, but doubt is creeping into my mind. Marie, she nodded yes to taking my calendar to Monsieur Danet. But with a month come and gone, my mind slips to thinking that pigeon-hearted girl does not come because her dipped chin was a lie. Oh, but she won’t let me down, not Marie, who bothers to notice when I give her the better shawl, the larger piece of mutton, who said thank you about a hundred times for a pair of stockings I bought from the pawnbroker for a good price, who put her hands on my cheeks once, after I combed out her hair and said, “I love you, Antoinette van Goethem, best friend of mine in all the world.”

  At half past seven in the morning, we fallen girls of section two rise and make our beds, tucking in the linens just so, pulling tight the brown woolen coverlet, the single bit of housework we are expected to accomplish in a day. A maid comes later, sweeping up after me, and another after that, to take away for scrubbing the brown earthen porringer I use to collect my meals. I wait on my tidy bed, listening for the sound of metal on metal, a bolt scraped open. Then we are off to the sewing workshop to sing a hymn a
nd say the stinking Angelus before we get down to our prison work of stitching underclothes. Every day my stitches get neater, faster, and not once did a sister work up the nerve to stand over my shoulder, clicking her tongue, telling me to pick undone the stitches of my work. At the breakfast hour we walk single file to the refectory, a large room with tall windows spilling light onto the flagstones of the floor, to collect our day’s ration of brown bread—a full loaf—and get our porringers filled with a soup of vegetables, unless it is Thursday or Sunday, when they add meat to the broth. We pray, then eat—our soup, a portion of our loaves—at long, gleaming tables or in the courtyard adjoining the refectory when the weather is fine. Girls with chalk slashes upon their doors are told to gulp their soup and hurry off to the Superioress. Myself, I blow on each spoonful, leave the bowl of the spoon lingering in my mouth, wait for the tapping of the presiding sister’s foot to begin.

  At five o’clock we put down our needles only to pick up rosaries and begin more reciting, stopping only at the end of each decade for a hymn about getting freed from the tyranny of Satan or dispersing the gloomy clouds of night. Plenty of the singing girls have their glowing faces lifted up, their lashes lightly resting upon their cheeks.

  After the singing comes the evening meal and a second period of recreation. Some of the girls make a habit of complaining about the sameness of the fare—Sunday, beef and dried peas; Monday, red beans; Tuesday, rice; Wednesday, potatoes; Thursday, beef and pulse; Friday, white beans; Saturday, potatoes. And once I was close to blurting out to those sniveling girls about the vegetables being cooked in fat and there being less gristle than lean in the meat, but the Superioress was loitering close enough to hear. They are not stingy with the portions neither, and I have a layer was not there before, filling up the troughs between my ribs.

  Bellies full we head back to the workshop for the part of the day when sometimes my mind is coaxed away from worrying about Marie and the calendar, Émile and his suffering at La Roquette. While we stitch—drawers, camisoles, petticoats—one of the sisters reads from a book. Each of the stories has some lesson we are meant to learn, and usually it is easy to figure out. The girl, who sat by the cinders after slaving, was humble and good. Her stepsisters were haughty, and in the end those haughty sisters were begging for the mercy of the sister who was not. There was another one, about a girl with a red cap making the mistake of telling a wolf where she was headed one day. At the end of the story, that wolf, he ate the girl up whole. It took a while to work out why we were read such a tale but finally I knew. It was a warning, about speaking to men we did not know, about finding ourselves tricked into their beds, about getting too close to their sharp teeth. Those sisters, they are blinkered like those mares pulling the hacks. If it was not for another day passing, another day without hearing from Marie, I would have snorted good and loud about such a tale.

  The Superioress, she says to me, sitting on the hard bench, “Now, Antoinette, you know the opening of the Angelus, and yet you are not joining in.”

  “My heart is heavy, Mother.”

  She nods, almost smiles. “On Sunday, Father Renault will hear confessions.”

  Imagine the job of listening to all that the girls of section two have to tell. The confessional booth here at Saint-Lazare must be the most interesting place Father Renault ever sat doling out Hail Marys in his life. Those girls spilling their guts to him, the same ones singing with rapture upon their brows, I can guess how they are going to make out once they are again feeding themselves. “The thing is, Mother, I saw a sister picking her nose and right when she was handed the body of Christ, too.”

  “Willfulness, such as yours, is exactly what a girl needs to raise herself up, to do something useful with her life.”

  “I got that chalk slash for thinking about the herd of little ones holding their empty bellies at home, now that I been stopped from doing something so useful as filling those bellies up.”

  Slow as a snail, she turns the pages of the large black book spread open upon her writing desk. “You have two sisters,” she says, tapping midway down a page, “both on the payroll of the Opéra, a mother employed as a laundress.” She puts folded-together hands on top of the book, her knobby knuckles bulging but not in the least showing the white of strain. “We make exceptions from time to time and release a girl’s earnings to a family in need.”

  I know about the earnings, the share of the profits from the sewed underclothes that are doled out to the fallen girls. It was explained my first morning upon the hard bench. So long as we work, we are given a weekly eight francs to spend on wine or candles or white bread here at Saint-Lazare or to put aside, a nest egg, the Superioress called it, for when a girl is finished her time. I listened to the little speech, arms crossed in front. I would not fall for trickery meant to keep us working day and night. But then, my first time in the refectory for the evening meal, I saw glasses of wine and those maids handing them out marking strips of paper with ticks.

  “Shall I make arrangements for your earnings to go to your sisters in the rue de Douai?” the Superioress says.

  Émile needs me saving, even if it is a measly eight francs a week, and not saving feels like giving up on the court declaring his innocence in the murder of the widow Joubert. But I think of Charlotte, despairing over a limp skirt, the frayed tails of a ribbon, also Marie, boiling the bones of a chicken a second time, fretting about a pinch of salt. I don’t have my mind quite made up when the Superioress, she has the nerve to pick up a fountain pen and get herself poised to write a note about wages going to the rue de Douai. “Don’t you send them a single sou,” I say.

  She clutches the pen tighter, her knuckles turning white.

  But afterward in the sewing workshop my mind is on Marie, the grey silk, how she acquired such a dress. In the visitors’ parlor after I called New Caledonia the land of milk and honey, her sobbing was such that I could not bring myself to ask about the dress again. I still my needle and call over Sister Amélie—a nervous mole with beady eyes and hairs sprouting on her chin—and she scuttles off to the Superioress with the changed instruction of my earnings going to the rue de Douai.

  Two days later Sister Amélie, or Mole as I like to call her, crosses the workshop and says to me, “Your sister is waiting in the parlor.” It gets me hoping and holding my breath that Marie is here with good news. But in the parlor, Marie is looking jumpy, fidgeting and sucking on her lip. “Well?” I say, feeling the slithering coldness of that dipped chin—her promise to take the calendar to Monsieur Danet—meaning nothing at all.

  She shrugs, opening up her hands like she don’t understand.

  “The calendar?” I say. “The calendar that is going to save the neck of Émile?”

  “I brought you some barley sugar.” Her eyes dart. She scrapes away at the flesh of her thumb.

  “Marie.” I move to my knees, put my locked-together fingers beneath my chin. “Please. I beg you.” It is not possible that I should be betrayed by my own flesh and blood, by Marie. It is not possible in the least. She is fretting so only because her shins have started aching when she leaps, because Maman did not get up for the washhouse, because Charlotte lost her scarlet sash.

  “The sisters took it, the barley sugar. To inspect.” Her bottom lip quivers. She clamps it still with her ugly teeth, and I know.

  “You got to get that calendar to Monsieur Danet.”

  “It wasn’t there, behind the chimneypiece,” she says in the meekest little voice.

  “Don’t believe you. I know you saw an x on the eleventh of March.”

  “I told you.” Her eyes flit to mine, flit away. “It wasn’t there.”

  “Look at me. On my knees. On my knees, Marie.” Never before have I begged. Never before have I begged on my knees.

  She tilts her chin up, the faintest little bit, and, voice dropping to a whisper, she says, “Like I said, it wasn’t there.”

  Sure enough she saw that x. Otherwise she has no reason to lie. I hop to m
y feet, leaning forward, onto my toes, puffing out my chest. “Liar.” I huff it out good and loud, and then a jailer grabs at my shoulder, pushing me back down into my chair.

  Marie shifts her arms to tightly wrapping her ribs. Her eyes take on a gloss. The cords of her neck grow taut, then, with swallowing, slack. I want despair spilling onto her cheeks and again hop to my feet. I spit hateful words: “Upon your hands, the blood of an innocent.”

  She wags her ugly jaw slow, and the dampness welled at her lower lashes disappears.

  A jailer nudges his chin toward Marie. “Best be going,” he says.

  She stands, eyes dry, jaw set, and appearing a harder girl than ever I saw her look in her life, she turns away.

  She comes again in three days, but I have no wish to see a sister with a heart so cold as hers. I tell Mole, sent to fetch me, that if I went to the parlor now, I would miss the singing, that without the singing my mind slips to devilish thoughts. Marie comes again in a week. I look up from a camisole, from the straight line of slip stitches holding the ribbon of the neckline in place, and say to Mole, “That girl, the one with the habit of sucking on her lip, she is not my sister but a girl sent from the house of Madame Brossard, one I no longer wish to see.” I think of Émile, the guillotine, his thick neck held to the lunette by the hands of Marie.

  Maman comes after that and is aflutter with the happy news of Monsieur Mérante singling out Charlotte and another petit rat called Jocelyn, telling them that on Wednesdays they are to take class with Marie and the others of the second set of the quadrille. “Imagine,” Maman says. “Some of those girls are a full head taller than our Charlotte.”

  “You got to tell her no showing off.” Marie would be the better one to say about no one, including Madame Dominique, thinking much of a petit rat without the good sense to take a spot at the back of the barre, but I will not give Maman a message to deliver to Marie.