Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  Is this all that business is? A few remarks about cost, some calculations, a worry about rival shipments, a quick agreement in principle? Before another quarter hour has passed, van den Meer is ushering his investor friends out of the salon and toward a dining chamber somewhere below. When the room is nearly empty, he turns to the Master and says, “So, are you agreeable?”

  The Master is turning the color of the tulips. He doesn’t speak.

  “Of course,” says van den Meer, “there isn’t any room for you to live here. Nor would my wife allow it. And I can’t send my daughter out to your studio. She doesn’t leave the house at all. But you can ship your materials into this salon, and do with the beauty of Clara and the tulips what you’ve managed with lesser materials. You’ve convinced us of your invaluable talent. And you’ll be well paid.”

  Deliberately the Master says, “I had thought, that is, I had hoped to be commissioned for a portrait of the company of civic guards to which you belong.”

  “One thing leads to another; nothing happens all at once,” says van den Meer. “I can’t be absent from my guests for long. Are we agreed, or shall I send out for Bollongier? He’s within a brisk walk of this room.”

  “We haven’t even talked about the size of a payment,” says the Master.

  “It’s only money,” says van den Meer, “and aren’t you an artist in need of money? If not, there are others in the Guild of Saint Luke who are eager for the work. Will you take on the assignment or no?”

  The Master, struggling for time to think, says, “But why did you ask me to bring Iris here? What has she meant in this negotiation? I’d thought that your friends might judge my skill by comparing the model and what I’ve done with her. I’d hoped that if they approved of my work—”

  “Oh, your girl,” says van den Meer, “well, the girl. It’s not a serious matter. But my wife is concerned for our daughter’s education. My little Clara is so cloistered, she needs a companion, and it might occupy her mind and her time to learn English. She’s already more than capable at French, and she has a small grasp of Latin as well. We only wish for her the best. Look—you want to see beauty,” says van den Meer, a proud father, “look at her. Have you laid eyes upon a more pleasing figure? She’ll grow to be a fine woman.” His appreciation of his daughter makes Iris’s eyes sting.

  “Iris has a mother and a sister,” says the Master. “They eat like horses.”

  “Bring them too,” says van den Meer casually. “You forget that I can pay for what I want. We must keep the wife happy, isn’t that so? Isn’t that always the way?”

  The Master strides out of the room without answering. Caspar shrugs in Iris’s direction and then follows his mentor. The door to the street slams shut behind them. The slamming is the Master’s loud opinion about van den Meer’s suggestion.

  Iris isn’t sure what’s expected of her. She’s alone in the room with Clara and her father. Clara looks down at the tiled floor. Her face is shuttered and boxed; she pinches her lower lip with hidden teeth. She doesn’t bother to look at Iris again. “Papa,” she says, “may I go now?”

  “I’ve bought you a new friend,” says van den Meer. “But first she’s needed in the dining hall to help the guests. Come, you, what’s your name?” Iris holds out the pastry to him and remembers that she should curtsey, but she doesn’t trust her knees.

  2

  THE IMP-RIDDLED HOUSE

  The

  Small Room

  of Outside

  Much to fear, in this rigid house, but much to admire too. And Iris loves to look. What’s best about van den Meer’s house is its skins and glazes, and how each rare thing accepts daylight or candlelight or shrugs itself against it. Iris wonders: Has looking at the Master’s paintings developed in her this taste for surfaces and textures?

  Look at the bowl on the polished table. A bowl from the Orient, van den Meer has told her. But it’s not just one thing, a bowl. Look at all the effects that make it up: Deepest in, a lace of purple-gray hairline fractures. Covered by an eggshell wash, through which blue painted lines form blowsy chrysanthemum blossoms. The flowers are suspended in some thin distance of—for lack of a better word—shine. Inside the curve of the bowl, a reflection: a distorted Iris, too blurred to be perceived as ugly.

  If she peers harder, will she catch something magical at her shoulder? Something intense and potent coming from behind, stealing up through the highly polished gloom of wealthy rooms?

  It was Margarethe who had said it: “The devil himself may send out a whiskery hound to sniff us out, but we’ve no choice! Come, girls, come.” Margarethe had announced their torturer—as they fled England—she had called it to them, she had worried it into being—

  But no. Look. Look.

  She pays attention. The varieties of Turkey carpet, on tables and walls. The crisp edges and rectangles of white linen. The ringed muscles of candlesticks, their glossy, bulbous reflections. The fur, the inlaid wood, the mementos from faraway places: Venice, Constantinople, Arabia, Cathay.

  Schoonmaker’s rooms had been sloppy and energetic. These van den Meer rooms are composed. The orderliness of them—their spanking cleanliness, for one thing—is a matter not just of pride but of mental clarity and rightness. A chair out of place?—no one in the house can think straight. Flowers left to stand in a vase until there’s a reek of ditch water?—you’d think the bellicose Spaniards were banging at the city gates again.

  Some hours after the party Caspar had arrived at the van den Meer’s for Iris; he ushered her back to the studio to collect her things. There she found Margarethe arguing with the Master, and Ruth weeping. Schoonmaker didn’t want them to go, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for them to stay. “You have your boy, use him as you were wont to do,” said Margarethe tauntingly, as if trading on a secret meaning that Iris couldn’t be privy to. “And why not? You asked us for three things, and those we gave you: domestic help, a delivery of meadow flowers every day, and a face to paint. We’re grateful to you for your hospitality, but we aren’t beholden to you.”

  “When that peculiar van den Meer girl has tired of her new playmate, or learned whatever English she can pick up, you and your daughters will be out on the street,” says the Master darkly.

  “Watch,” said Margarethe. She wore that expression common to cats making the acquaintance of baby birds. “Watch and see if that happens, Luykas Schoonmaker.”

  Iris and Ruth both turned to see if the Master would answer to this informality of a Christian name. How had their mother the right? Even Caspar seemed surprised.

  But Luykas Schoonmaker pointed at the Fisher girls and said, “Ruth won’t know enough to appreciate how she is being treated, but Iris will. She’ll be slighted there. She won’t make good on the talent for drawing that she possesses.”

  “And how do you know she possesses any such talent, and what good is it to her if she does?” cawed Margarethe. “She isn’t a lady of leisure, to paint scenes of sunny gardens as the mood strikes her! Have you ever seen her as much as pick up a charcoal?”

  “She’s looked at drawings, even at some cost to her,” said the Master. “Her hand clenches an imaginary stub of charcoal while I work my own charcoal across a page. There’s nothing in her at all but possibility; but that is rare enough.”

  “You’re as trapped in your conceits as you are in your over-labored drawings,” said Margarethe. “You make the world to seem a story, as if anything could happen. Like most men, you are blind to our fate.”

  “Don’t go, Margarethe,” said the Master.

  “Pay us a salary to stay and we’ll stay,” said Margarethe, her chin high.

  The Master looked at her as if she were offering to sleep with him for a fee. It was a look of disgust, but love and need crowded in too. Margarethe met his eyes just as intently, and continued, “Girls, bring your aprons from the hook, and your shoes from the doorsill. If I understand correctly, Luykas, what with your new commission, you’ll be a regular visitor to
the van den Meer household. We’ll enjoy your friendship there, should we want it.”

  So, with Caspar to chaperone them, they had crossed the streets of Haarlem at dusk. Their settling in at the van den Meer household was less noisy but no less swift. And Iris had slept that night at the hearthstones, uneasily, feeling the building lifting above her in capable bones of brick. She remembered the face at an upstairs window, disappearing. This is a house of magic, she thought as she drifted to sleep, and she thinks the same on waking up there for the first time.

  The family is small. Cornelius van den Meer is a warm but distant fatherhead, and he leaves to his wife, Henrika, the business of managing the household. From a public house beyond the Stathuis, van den Meer and his partners conduct a business of investments and merchant marinery. When he returns, reeking of pipe smoke, blusteringly good-natured because of ale and the flattering company of his peers, he sleeps. Iris peeks at him, sitting in the sunny garden, his head back against the wall and his mouth open. He’s older than his wife. His beard is as much silver as brown, and his temples and thinning pate have gone entirely gray. His wife won’t let him sit on the bench in the front of the house. In full view of the pious on their way to services, or the hungry buying their evening meal? She thinks it looks common, and says so.

  Henrika believes in good manners. Her cheekbones are high and knobby, her wrists thin, her scent flowery and bewitching. But mostly it’s her coloring that Iris admires, coppery pink blushes and white flushes playing under flawless skin. When Henrika comes to the door of a room, it’s on silent feet, as if to make a floorboard creak would be to command more attention than she deserves.

  Yet this is just a little drama, a masquerade, for though Henrika’s step is silent, it is nonetheless heavy. Margarethe, in the privacy of the hearth, is quick to point out to Iris that Henrika’s portrait, not her husband’s, takes pride of place in the reception room. The lady in yellow and black silk, a bumblebee humming to herself. The queen of the family hive. And doesn’t she know it! Henrika is happy to tell the provenance of each piece of furniture, each item of decoration. The house, whole and entire, was part of Henrika’s dowry. “If the marriage should dissolve, she has the right to appeal to the law to reclaim all her assets,” says Margarethe incredulously. “The wealth of this marriage rests on what she inherited from her father. Her husband brought to the holy union only business sense and good humor.”

  Iris, yawning, says, “What you learn in three or four days! How can you know about this? She’s far too private to be confiding in you.”

  “Schoonmaker has lived in Haarlem all his life; he knows everything, though he pretends to be bored about it,” says Margarethe. “He tells me that Henrika holds the purse strings.” She twists her lower lip, an expression of reluctant approval at Henrika’s power. “Do you see how Cornelius and Henrika disagree about their daughter, Clara? The henpecked man must leap to respond to every complaint that Henrika makes.”

  “Oh, Clara,” says Iris. “Clara,” she says again, biting her lip, for it’s Iris who has the main worry now. It’s Iris’s job to befriend the distant, suspicious child, to gain her trust, to teach her English, to vary her days. And she hasn’t made such a good start of it.

  If Clara is indeed a changeling, there’s no word spoken about it by her parents. She’s considered a stroppy child—sullen, secretive, and ordinary. Her carrying the tulips into the parlor to show the visiting bear-investors must have been taxing on her, for she doesn’t show up to meet the new household members. In fact, Iris sees very few signs of Clara’s existence in the house at first, though she hears some: a soft footfall, the sound of a dropped or a thrown plate crashing on the floor, a cry of alarm such as a small child might utter when in the throes of a bad dream. Still the obscure child even when Iris is living under the same roof

  After several days of Clara simply refusing to appear at all, Henrika brings Iris to the door of Clara’s room and calls in to her daughter, “Please, my dear, I want you to meet your new friend.”

  “No.” The sound comes out like a little smothered yelp, as if even in the middle of the day Clara is huddled beneath bedclothes. She won’t come out of her room.

  The next day, Iris says loudly, “I am very lonely.” She draws a deep breath in the gloom of the upstairs hall, and she leans her breast against Clara’s door. She tries to make her voice wedge itself through a crack between the planks. “You were kind to my sister once. You let her take your little toy. So I want to talk to you.”

  “Go away.”

  Henrika’s smile at Iris is brief but forgiving. “She’s an unusual child, and I’m patient with her strange ways,” she confides. “You have to be patient too.”

  “But how can I teach her English if I can’t even see her?”

  “She comes around. Go and help your mother, then. If I can coax her out with the promise of something special, I’ll come and find you.”

  “What does she want more than anything?”

  Henrika purses her lips. “She wants to be alone and to play by herself.”

  Well, thinks Iris, I’m not going to be the most welcome thing ever to enter her life, then. But there’s not much that Iris can do about it, so she wanders downstairs. Margarethe says, “If you can’t pry Clara out of her room, then take Ruth out for some exercise. Your sister the ox is banging into things again, which means she’s not stretching her limbs as she ought.”

  They wander up and down the streets. Haarlem is becoming an easy place in which to feel at home. In the street next to Saint Bavo’s, women hustle baskets of cloth on their backs. Men trundle wheelbarrows with kegs of ale. The window shutters, which drop down during the day, serve as ledges for the display of wares. Iris and Ruth inspect the goods, a pastime that costs nothing and annoys the shopkeepers. But if the Dutch find Ruth as grotesque as the English did, they keep it to themselves. Only a few children run after her and taunt her.

  There is always Saint Bavo’s to slip into if the hubbub of the streets gets too frantic for Ruth. Iris doesn’t have strong feelings about churches one way or the other, but she remembers what the Master has told her about Saint Bavo’s. Built as a Catholic cathedral, it’s now in the hands of the Protestants. In foul weather it serves as a kind of indoor public park, where men and women and dogs go to shake off the wet. People stroll for exercise, conversation, and to view the decorations set against whitewashed walls. Iris listens to everything—she imagines bringing Clara here one day and saying all this in English to her. Look! The colored-glass window on the church’s west wall, and how one panel of it was removed because it celebrated too gloriously some Catholic bishop of long ago. The slabs in the floor to remember the dead. The lozenges, mounted on pillars, to remember the dead. The dead, the dead, always with us!

  There’s no memorial to her father, of course, not here or anywhere; there weren’t even prayers mumbled in his memory—

  To notice something else quickly—she can’t help but notice, having listened to the Master all these weeks—there’s very little in the way of religious painting. Not a crucifixion in sight. Not a Virgin as far as you can see. Not even in the most shadowy corners. No wonder the Master feels so useless. For a moment Iris imagines how he must suffer, for she’s feeling useless too, wandering about a church instead of performing the task for which she and her mother and sister are being given food and lodging.

  Ruth knows nothing of the gospel story, so far as Iris can tell. Her attention, such as it is, is caught by things seen, rather than by things heard. “Look!” says Iris suddenly. “The Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies!” It’s that palsied old woman with the sticks, the spider woman poking along in the shadow of the apse. But when they draw closer, she’s gone. Slipped out a side door? Or scurried in spider form up a pillar of Saint Bavo’s, where she crouches, drinking in the news of people’s murmured secrets?

  Iris isn’t accustomed to befriending children her own age. Having Ruth in the family has always meant that other child
ren kept their distance. But maybe Iris can entice Clara with the appeal of the supernatural—especially if Clara is a supernatural child, a replacement creature left behind by thwarties when they stole the real Clara-baby away.

  The next day, Iris pitches her voice to carry up the stairs, and she calls out, “Ruth, do you remember yesterday when we saw the Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies? And how she changed herself into a spider and fled from us?”

  It takes only a minute to work. Clara appears at the head of the stairs.

  Iris glances into the upper hall, which in its walnut paneling seems, even at noon, nearly dusky. She’s amazed and a little frightened. Clara is almost like a ghost, a lambent thing with one hand out against the wall, a shimmeringness in the gloom, like a candle in a midnight forest. She is stunning to look at, with her immaculate skin and her dried-wheat hair. She comes forward, her eyes are hooded and sulky, and her lower lip protrudes in a way that can only mean trouble.

  “Come down, some milk and bread, and a little honeyed fruit. It’s time to meet this Iris,” says Henrika calmly through the open door of her private office. At her table, in grey mid-morning light, she hunches working over a ledger book, an inky quill in one hand, rapid counting on the fingertips of the other.

  “Ruth, the old Queen had legs like a spider’s, but they were as huge as the hoop of a wagon wheel, weren’t they?” says Iris.

  Clara ventures down the stairs, close to the wall, but even behaving skittishly, she moves with poise.

  “Have your breakfast, we’re going out when you’re dressed,” Iris says to Clara with a nonchalant bossiness she doesn’t quite feel. Clara slips into a chair and grabs some bread. Her father smiles and nods at her.