These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  If Maman could’ve seen me touching a naked stranger! Better or worse that I didn’t know him from Adam? Thinking it made me laugh aloud.

  Monsieur’s gaze fixed on me — on my cheekbones and less than forthright chin, any surliness there inherited from Maman’s side of the family. His eyes moving to my blouse, I could almost feel them turn back my collar. His breath whistled. He smelled earthy, less of clay than of poorly digested meat.

  A voice whispered, a voice rather like yours. It was the passing praticien, the wispy young man from our school, breaking from his task. “Monsieur loves his women, in all shapes and sizes.”

  The Master himself rambled, “Ah, Mademoiselle, what are we but muscle and bone — what, if not our bodies? More to us than that, you think?”

  “Ask my brother.” And I laughed.

  “What does he know?” Monsieur pressed my hand, playful as Papa. He clumsily capped my shoulder and gestured to his work. “You see? You mustn’t worry about shadows. They take care of themselves. It’s how things look in profile that concerns us — surface variations. Think of the river reflecting sunlight: the inward transposing itself outward.”

  A voice more pressuring than his fingers whispered, the inward what?

  “Beauty,” murmured Monsieur, pleased with himself, his indulgent tone like Papa’s.

  His lingering hand compelled me to see things better unacknowledged. No longer Michelangelo instructing me, but a middle-aged goat with a river of beard and wearing a coat that might’ve been the target of many pigeons. My ears played tricks, surely, when he said I must know how lovely I was — that a girl like me would know beauty beyond the kind blinking from a mirror.

  “If you don’t mind my saying it,” — his voice was gruff — “you’re a pupil anyone would be glad of.” His grip lightened. “Have I offended you?”

  I tell you this, believing that it will help you to know.

  Monsieur moved toward a statue so lifelike the model could have been cast in plaster. “Pay attention,” said the praticien’s voice, distant but clear.

  “My Age of Bronze: true perfection,” the Master flattered himself. “It can’t be helped, with the Greeks and Florentines preceding us. What’s to be done?” He cursed the Salon, the monocle-wearing dinosaurs for whom I had no love either, who’d accused him of casting his piece from life. “But people want what looks real. The government has bought a copy of it, after all, for its collection at the Luxembourg!”

  “So things turned out in the end,” I said, refusing, unlike my friend, to flaunt my awe. Though his achievement was, apparently, hard won.

  “If one persists,” he said, shrugging, and invited me to walk some time with him through the Gardens and to the Musée. But then he was off on a tangent. “You know Nietzsche?” Our brother would. “‘The awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else.’ ‘Soul is just a word for something about the body,’” he recited. “True, would you say, Mademoiselle?”

  Abandoned, the Italian snorted. Monsieur clapped his hands and the model stepped down, winding himself in his sheet, eyes slithering over my dress.

  “Montmartre teems with people like you, Giganti,” grunted Monsieur. And to me? “To work, Mademoiselle. We can’t afford to have you languish, can we.”

  ***

  A KIND OF graveyard, the Dépôt des Marbres, as crowded with chunks of marble as the Cimetière du Montparnasse with tombs.

  But for me it was a place of conception.

  We modelled busts of the Italian, my friend and I. Hers replicated a wholesomeness that didn’t exist; I captured youth and a rude bravado, as if a lewd remark was on the tip of his tongue. Head of a Bandit, I called it. My friend was dismayed. “But why make him ugly?”

  Monsieur defended me. “What is art if not honesty?” He mocked her English fascination with toenails and nose hairs, details one didn’t need replicated to know they existed. “Less is more. Why include what adds nothing? Aren’t I right, Mademoiselle?”

  He ordered me back to work on the heads I was doing, maquettes for a series of characters for his commission — not just any commission, of course, but one to seal his fame. He trusted me to help.

  By then I’d had a wealth of practice, toiling away nights in our own petite, cramped atelier, modelling busts of our brother and, yes, the one of our sister who would only sit if my friend and I let her bring a piano. (How could we object with Papa footing the rent?) You can imagine: little Louise tickling the ivories while our brother yawned and stretched, and my friend worked her safe, pretty portraits. The warmth of my hands softening clay hard as iron, making it as malleable as Paul’s future. He talked about his plans. Mused about them. To be France’s worldtravelling Shakespeare was his dream; what I dreamed was to capture the glittering ambition coiled inside him. Never mind the dimness around us, the shadows — for there were shadows — or his impatience, as bad as a child’s needing to pee. Forget Papa’s conviction that he’d make a great statesman. I stifled his whining by labouring over a cowlick.

  ***

  ONE NIGHT AFTER these sittings, I was alone casting the bust in plaster — God knows where you were — when who appeared at the door but the fellow from Monsieur’s, Criteur, with whom I’d become a bit more acquainted. He generously helped prepare the mould; when I went to thank him, he’d already disappeared into the dawn lighting the street.

  “Brava!” said my friend, there to watch me tap and loosen the mould and, expert as a midwife catching a baby, lift the final product free. It had our brother’s gaze exactly, even in profile. Sightlesseyes fixed on godly visions, not earthly ones.

  When Paul came to view it I blindfolded him. His arm, when I gripped it, felt scrawny as Criteur’s, who stayed away. A pity, since he might’ve enjoyed watching our game of blind man’s buff. “Try to see yourself through your fingers!” I teased.

  Taking his Lord’s name in vain, our brother tore the scarf from his eyes. Paul — who suited the priesthood but loved the world, who would travel to China when anybody who was anybody favoured Japan, land of Hokusai, style, inspiration, the destination on art’s spice road — had the nerve to question how I made him look: “A smart young stud teetering on the cliff above an adventure — aren’t I right?”

  Difficult not to jeer a little, though our day-to-day lives paralleled each other as closely as the rue de Babylone and the rue de Sèvres. As he lived and breathed poetry, so did I live and breathe sculpture, the wriggling joy inside me emerging in one creation after another.

  “If you believe in yourself you can’t fail,” our brother preached to the converted.

  OF COURSE FAME was our due, no reason or room to think otherwise. With the right connections, the right teacher — Monsieur was a patient guide to the texture of a model’s skin, the tensing of hidden parts — the only way for me to go was upwards.

  Monsieur’s hand was as rough as pumice on mine. “Take time to feel. Don’t be shy.”

  He was as hungry to teach as I was to learn — I would be stupid to deny him the pleasure, my only fear being that of running out of time. The making of work plays tricks with calendars and clocks, coupling urgency with a stillness that mimics inertia. In your childishness, would you know about this?

  “Your little friend,” he said, “perhaps she lacks your passion?” What besides passion enabled me to go on day and night, pressing, pounding, pummelling, scraping, spruing, chiselling, polishing?

  ***

  “IT’S HARDLY LADY’S work,” Maman observed. We’d run into each other on the sidewalk, Maman and I, my friend (for once) waylaid. She ogled the putti above the entrance to our building which someone, undoubtedly someone with a penis, had been paid to sculpt.

  “Praise the god of necessity, Maman — and the city’s love of decoration.”

  “That god you work for,” she started in, riding the creaky little elevator to our floor. “I hope he’s proper. Never mind how famous he is. A decent girl has no business being there, if I’m allowed
an opinion.”

  “No business?”

  She removed her hat in the hallway. “I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve heard what goes on. Your brother —” she said as Paul, just home from school, skulked to his room.

  “Piss on you both,” I murmured into my glove. Neither were supposed to hear but Maman had the ears of an owl.

  “Not only have you a fishwife’s nails, but you’ve got the mouth of one, missy!”

  Curtseying (how would my friend have behaved?) I went to kiss Maman’s cheek. She pushed me away, calling out to our sister to cheer her with a melody.

  “How can I, with nothing decent to play on?” petite Louise wailed. The piano they’d bought to replace the studio’s refused to stay in tune.

  ***

  PERHAPS, DEAR C, what follows might not surprise you. One dim afternoon, Monsieur ushered me into his cubbyhole of an office. A torn green blind covered the door’s windowpane, a dim light illuminating the clutter. Sketches strewn over the desktop showed women’s parts: breasts, rumps, and places more private rendered with painstaking grace. The nub between a pair of thighs was a tulip bud, shy of opening. Like a doctor, he sat facing me. “How old are you?” he asked, running his fingers over the little sculpture I’d brought for his approval. “You see how the light plays with it — draws out the feeling as if it’s there inside.” He repeated his question.

  “Old enough,” I said. Nineteen.

  Running his hand over his bristly hair, he reminded me of a hedgehog or a pot-bellied pig or, more aptly, a boar. He sat gazing at me, his patient with no complaints. “There’s nothing more beautiful than the female body, you must agree, Mademoiselle?” Reaching out, he stroked my cheek. “Good structure, the planes of your face. A pity such beauty ages. A tragedy, really.”

  I pushed his fingers away. Silly old man.

  Still he praised me. “What you have is gold, Mademoiselle. I’m only here to help you mine it — of course, inspiration is a twoway street. Pose for me.”

  “Why,” I said, “when you have the Italians?” That answer would have made you laugh.

  ***

  MONSIEUR’S ADORATION OF the dark-eyed sisters, Anna and Adèle, was no secret, no mystery, reciprocated in how they gave themselves to him. They did it for art, those girls.

  The haughtiness of Adèle’s expression, captured in my maquette, pleased him as much as it pleased me. The bust showed a woman spurned, eyes closed, lips parted to receive a kiss forever withheld. Lingering over my study, Monsieur admired the jut of its chin, the curl of its hair. The model, adorned only by wavy black hair and giving off a healthy whiff of kerosene — poverty’s perfume — barely blinked at her half-finished portrait. She stalked off when he told her to get dressed and not return till he needed her.

  “But, Monsieur — I need more time with her,” I objected. Warmed to my gouging and slapping, the clay was no longer material resembling the model’s profile but a shape to be filled with her spirit, a cup waiting for milk yet to be poured.

  He found another girl to pose for him, and made Adèle mine to use as I pleased. Such kindness came with a price, as you might expect. “Mademoiselle. Have you considered my request?” he persisted. But hours posing would disrupt my schedule, be a terrific waste of time. I was frantic to complete Buste de jeune femme aux yeux clos, fresh ideas all the while kicking and screaming for attention.

  Criteur marvelled at Adèle’s completed terracotta. “So true to life, she looks about to speak!” he said. I suspect you’d have thought the same. One compliment whetted my appetite for more.

  Monsieur gave my subject a playful slap and made her squat so all of her showed. Indecent, Maman would’ve said, and her voice in my head made me blush, no matter how I pushed it out. Yet in my mind’s eye, the girl’s butterflied backside turned to marble.

  Flitting about the periphery, my new friend Criteur chanted stones bones crones drones thrones, or something equally insensible, as could be his wont. Understandable though, for the praticien’s lot grew tedious, chiselling not his own but the Master’s grand ideas out of stone, scaling his rough little maquettes into larger-than-life plasters, making the moulds to cast the plasters in bronze. Chasing, dressing, and spruing copies; making and testing ceramic shells; polishing, patinating, replicating every dimple to win acclaim, not for himself, but for Monsieur!

  Sighing, my model folded herself into a gentle contrapposto, bending one shoulder and arm forward to half-conceal a breast.

  “Give her your best, Mademoiselle. Show me what you can do with her!” coached Monsieur in a choked voice. Too soon, he impatiently pulled Adèle from her platform and took her behind the curtain. No need to explain what went on.

  I blissfully devoted myself to modelling the torso and thighs caught in my imagination, was at it still when Adéle emerged in her shabby cape and, leaving, gave me a diffident look. In defiance, or defeat?

  Monsieur reappeared in the blush of late afternoon, a tired little man in his dusty suit. “Pose for me,” he begged, “or is there someone else you sit for? I’ll pay you — whatever you wish.” He muttered inanely about men who’d happily eat out of my hand, how Adèle’s beauty couldn’t hold a candle to mine. Posing would show me how inner feelings could be brought to the surface and made eternal, he seemed to plead, forgetting the piece on my worktable. Headless, it would be my own Torso of a Crouching Woman. If he could do one, why couldn’t I?

  “Your father needn’t know,” he said, and that “any arrangement” would be “in the strictest confidence.”

  Barely listening, too busy to, I imagined Adèle’s hands, compliant and pale, hatching into doves that I would free — I was thinking, of course, of you.

  Monsieur breathed through his nose and smelled of cigars, like Papa after riding the train. Tenderly, awkwardly, he touched the curve of my jaw. When he kissed me his tongue felt chalky, and his mouth tasted of tobacco. “With talent such as yours, Mademoiselle, you’d best spare no effort.”

  ***

  TO LANGUISH OR not to languish? Anguish with an l is all. A word for waiting while already captive. Like a girl on the seashore given up to the surf, drowning or riding the tide to freedom?

  I leave it to you to decide, C.

  7

  … AND TO PRACTISE

  MY PROFESSION FAITHFULLY …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  4 SEPTEMBER 1943

  23H45

  On a break, the first possible chance, I took it upon myself to hand-deliver, hand-surrender, Mademoiselle’s letter, hoping to catch the directeur before his day ended.

  Admin was all gunmetal-green filing cabinets and pebbled glass — notwithstanding the odd effort to make it welcoming, the secretary being one of them, tapping away at her typewriter in her scarlet dress and matching heels, and yes, a bunch of poppies wilting on her desk. Contrived, I imagine, to reassure those forced to place loved ones.

  Unpleasant-sounding voices spilled from the directeur’s inner office — a bit of a shock, given his demeanour my first evening here, one not unappealing if one likes reedy, balding men in suits. It was a dispute, apparently. A grilling by some unsuspecting family member? Unsuspecting, I say, because if most had a clue what our work entails they might think twice about complaining. Thank heavens it’s his job and not ours to field requests and complaints.

  I was on pins and needles, anxious to return before Head noted my absence. Waving the envelope, I mouthed “bonjour.” Expressionless, the secretary — a girl who evidently fancies herself more glamorous than she is, not to be unkind — rose and tottered over. Where do you get your lipstick? I would’ve liked to ask.

  “The directeur’s occupied,” she said, between grabbing a quick puff of the cigarette in the ashtray perched on her desk, and adjusting her belt. She gave the envelope in my hand a perfunctory look.

  Though the angry voices dropped by a decibel or two, I heard enough to know it couldn’t be a meeting between Admin and a relative. “You’re obliged by law, Mon
sieur,” one of them said. “Work, you say yourself, is of the utmost value. All patients of that persuasion are required to contribute, under order.”

  A thankless job, the directeur’s — no argument here — ensuring all are kept happy, from doctor to patient and family, and each and every one of us in between. He’d been sufficiently patient explaining to me the hospital’s probation period, three months for new employees, a formality. His job was frying much larger fish, of course: seeing that fees were paid, payees apprised of guests’ conditions, and expenses held in check — all the more difficult with Vichy forcing France to go hungry while handing over food to les fritz.

  “You’ll have to come back later,” the secretary said, speaking above what sounded like his protests.

  Where does Miss Scarlet buy her makeup? I dearly wanted to know, but didn’t want to appear rude or overly familiar. She was more dolled up than anyone had a right to be, squeezed as we were by the Maréchal’s austerity measures.

  “The directeur’s busy,” she repeated, as if I were mentally deficient. “I can book a spot with him tomorrow. For yourself?” This threw me, slightly. “If necessary,” I hedged, because a curiosity had seized me, if seized wasn’t too strong a term. On a whim, I wondered if I might take a peek at Mademoiselle’s file, though I had only minutes to spare before evening chapel — my turn to play escort.

  “Excuse me?” The secretary seemed surprised, but also relieved by a request easily handled. She rooted for a key, then clomped in her heels to a cabinet hemmed in by a number of cardboard boxes, which she gracelessly dragged aside.

  The dispute in the office, meanwhile, had hit a lull; in the quiet I pictured my chapel-goers lining up, Head Nurse already miffed. I checked my watch. Hôtel-Dieu and the nuns were so distant, Mass felt as specious as a lesson on bandaging, something to be sat through — which was how it had felt for a fair part of my life.