by Deb Elkink
“Look deeply, Aglaia. Most of the time they just think they know. Use that inquisitive mind of yours to expose the true personality trying to get out. That’s what costuming is all about—not hiding under a false identity but exposing the true one.”
That was advice from years ago she was still learning to apply in her job and, at the same time, still trying to avoid applying personally.
The steamer hissed and she lifted it off its hook, the hose a hot snake, and she was back on the farm again.
“Get it away from me!” François recoils from the garter snake like a girl, and she can’t help but laugh at Joel’s prank, surprised as she is by François’s reaction.
“It won’t bite,” she reassures him.
Joel grins. “In fact, we grill these and eat ’em for snacks.”
Maybe François buys that one—his lips sour with disgust but even then look kissable.
And later, perhaps to redeem himself for his weak fright, he tells her the story of Asclepius, god of healing who not only saved lives but also brought back the dead, and of his descendent Hippocrates, whose snake-entwined rod became the symbol of rebirth.
So she tells him about Moses, who set up a pole with a bronze snake fixed on it to heal his followers bitten by vipers of judgment, to heal those grumblers who detested the lifesaving manna that was sweet as wafers with honey, as cakes baked with oil. And when they gazed upon that pole-borne snake in submission to the Great Physician, they lived.
But François stares at her, incredulous, as if to ask, “Who would believe such a story?”
The fabric let go of its wrinkles and she allowed it to cool before she folded it in layers of tissue paper and packed it into the traveling box, just the right size to fit in the plane’s overhead bin. She hitched it up by its sturdy handle; it wasn’t too heavy and felt secure in her grip—like the little overnight bag she used for pajama parties as a girl.
“Where are you going with that valise, ma petite?” He’s leaning against the weathered wood of the house as though waiting for her, the brim of his baseball cap pulled low and a piece of grass between his teeth in a parody of the country boy.
“It’s Naomi’s birthday, so I’m spending the night at her place.”
He scowls at that. Why would it bug him? “You are best of friends, non?”
“Have been for years, François.” Is it that he’ll miss her for the evening? Mary Grace could hope.
“You tell each other secrets, then?”
“We talk all about you,” she teases. He turns from her without another word and she’s hurt.
When she tells Naomi about François’s reaction, her girlfriend quickly changes the subject, and soon after that she’s gone off to the city, leaving Mary Grace stuck in the sticks. But she doesn’t pine too long because François is around to keep her company. Oh, what company!
Aglaia set the package back on the table and sat down again to rub her temples. The chaotic flood of thoughts was going to drown her if she didn’t find some way to contain them and sort out their meaning. There was a pattern she couldn’t put her finger on.
This latest resurgence was in all likelihood due to the stupid idea of her mother’s to take that Bible back to François. Aglaia’s own decision to look for him might be slightly far-fetched, especially after all this time, and slightly frightening. But upon meeting him, to push a Bible on him like some soapbox fanatic earning brownie points with God—now that was just downright humiliating.
However, on second thought, maybe packing the Bible along to Paris wasn’t such a bad idea after all. It would give Aglaia a pretext—should she actually find François—for tracking him down in the first place. If he wasn’t glad to see her, she could smooth it over by telling him that she’d been sent by Tina, who implored her to make the delivery, and what could he do then but thank her? Aglaia might still look the fool, but she could blame it on her doddering mother.
Maybe the delivery wasn’t impossible. Maybe, with luck, she could track him down and—as an added bonus—get that Bible off her hands and out of her sight. The one action would have the double effect of putting to rest the question of François and faith, and giving her some peace about the whole affair. At the very least, taking the book along with her wouldn’t do any harm.
Aglaia stood up and switched off her tabletop lamp. As she pivoted to reach for the costume box, her ankle turned and she stumbled against the chair, sending it clattering.
Seven
Searing pain ripped through Aglaia’s ankle and she sprawled on the floor, unable for a moment to stand up.
Eb scurried into the room. “Are you hurt, lass?”
In spite of the pain, Aglaia let out a short giggle when she saw him. Over his usual sweater and slacks, Eb wore a burlap monk’s robe with attached cowl and scapular, conjured up for the annual Renaissance fair, just past. The robe suited her boss, whose blue-grey eyes, misty as a crystal ball, were topped with a set of bushy brows once gold, now silver—a backward alchemy. He stooped to help her stand.
“Can you put any weight on the foot?”
“I’m okay,” she said, but he led her to the couch in his office, raised her foot onto a cushion, and tapped a tablet from a white bottle. Then he served her a cup of tea and a cookie.
“Good to keep a tin of shortbread at hand for emergencies like this,” he said, helping himself to one. “My dear wife disapproves because of my diabetes, but I just say to her, ‘It’s only a body, Iona.’ ”
“I’m so sorry to put you out,” she said. He was fussing over her.
“No, no—it’s not a bother. I can see it’s swelling. You bide here and I’ll trot off to the grocer’s next door and fetch a bag of frozen peas for you.” He bustled out, still wearing the mediaeval attire.
Aglaia nestled back into the quilt. Who kept a quilt in his office? Perhaps Eb’s wife crafted it by hand back in the old country, piecing the plaid and paisley blocks, outlining each thistle blossom with fine stitches. Aglaia’s ankle throbbed, so she concentrated on her surroundings instead.
The whole of the room was a tumultuous clutter. The desk was loaded with files, fabric samples, patterns, and books—so many books! They spilled from the ceiling-to-floor shelving and piled up in drifts in the corners, beside the settee, behind the door. It was a madman’s library. Aglaia never ceased to be amazed at how Eb MacAdam could so quickly answer her queries with a quote or put his hand on the very volume she needed for a design. She often saw him in here alone, lost in a story world, engrossed in Pilgrim’s Progress while reaching for Gulliver’s Travels.
There was some order he alone could decipher. Illustrated manuals of contemporary and historical costumes of the world were mixed in with theological tomes and novels—the Brothers Grimm snuggled up to Dostoyevsky, Thomas Aquinas visiting Narnia. Four full sets of encyclopedias, bound in various colors, were seeded now among Arabian Nights and Knights of the Round Table and Dark Night of the Soul—the wheat and tares together.
She set down her tea and eased a green-jacketed copy of Hesiod’s Theogony from the closest, teetering column of books. She opened it to the first page and familiar names leapt out at her: Cronos, Hebe, Oceanus. They hadn’t always been known to her. She remembered the first time she saw them in print, in an illustrated children’s book of mythology that François found in the foreign language section of the bookstore in town and bought, just for her.
“It’s in French. Maybe you’d like to practice?” François’s English is improving daily, becoming more natural.
“I can’t read these words, François.”
“But I’ll help you,” he promises, “as you’re helping me with my learning.” So she flounders her way through the first few lines and François fills in background information about the primordial god who swallowed his children whole upon birth. They admire the drawings of Poseidon and voluptuous Demeter and, of course, the picture of the Three Graces that accentuates the details of their sexuality.
Readin
g romantic prose with François behind the haystacks, with the sun setting in the west, while munching carrots tugged from garden soil is her idea of a perfect summer evening. But it gets better.
As the stars come out in the growing blackness above and a chill falls like dew on her skin, François removes his denim jacket and places it around her shoulders, letting his arm linger. Mary Grace stiffens and he hugs her closer, outlining the constellations with his finger in the sky. He tells her how the boastful vanity of Cassiopeia led to her daughter Andromeda’s being stripped naked and chained to the ragged cliffs as a sacrifice to a hideous sea monster.
Then, pointing over there, he relates the adventure of Zeus, in the form of an eagle, snatching the most comely youth Ganymede and transforming him into the constellation of Aquarius, the Water Carrier. And can she see the stringed lyre of the grieving young Orpheus, who lost his lover to death and whose dirge echoes for all time? Yes—there, with its crowning star, Vega.
Mary Grace hears Joel calling and she makes François run with her all the way back to the house, forgetting the children’s book outside to get ruined by the elements. She prefers François’s verbal edition better anyway.
“You’ve finished your biscuit,” Eb said, re-entering the office.
He had the robe slung over his arm now; perhaps a child on the street had pointed the monk’s garb out to his amused parents, or Eb found suddenly that he was still wearing it at the store till as he fumbled for his wallet in his pants pocket. While he hung it on the coat rack, Aglaia swapped the book of myths she held for The Count of Monte Cristo; she didn’t want Eb to notice the moodiness she knew would be dimming her eyes.
“Oh, you’ve found one of my favorites.” He motioned to Dumas’s book on her lap. “Nothing like a story to take you out of yourself.” He pressed the pack of peas against her ankle with gentle pressure.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you something, Eb,” she said, thinking fast and blinking away that last memory. “About your fiction. I understand the encyclopedias and the picture books for costume ideas, but why do you have all these novels with no illustrations at all?”
He was frowning over the swelling ankle, maybe concerned it was a bad enough sprain to interfere with travel. He served himself a cup of tea and answered her question.
“In this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words. Illustrations are useful tools, but they change over time and with different artists. Compare an early drawing of Peter Pan by this artist,” he said, grunting as he stretched for a 1915 edition, “with one based on the movie release forty years later.”
She inspected the pages in the two books Eb opened for her. “I get it. It’s like the Pinocchio costume I designed as my first major assignment from you. You made me study a lot of pictures first.”
“And you ended up with a style distinctive from all of them,” Eb said, nodding, “even more recognizable to our clients—a longer nose on the mask, limbs more obviously jointed, the addition of marionette strings. A caricature, almost.”
“But you liked the costume I came up with.”
“I’m not criticizing you, lass, but simply noting that your own expression was yet another interpretation of what the writer had in mind to begin with, several versions back. Looking at other artists’ pictures is a good way for a baby designer to start off.” He stirred his tea and sipped. “But I find going to the source—the original story, that is—much more reliable when I desire exact representation for our designs.”
The ibuprofen was kicking in now, and Aglaia flexed her ankle as Eb continued.
“I view the costume as a three-dimensional re-creation of the two-dimensional page,” Eb said. “You see what I’m getting at? The words of a story themselves, in turn, only illustrate a larger idea underneath—the principle of an inanimate, wooden puppet becoming a flesh-and-blood boy, for example.” He warmed to his analogy. “So the seed of the writer’s internal truth sprouts into the tree of the word, which produces the fruit—that is, the illustration of the costume.”
A relaxed silence fell on them as they drank their tea. Aglaia speculated upon the difference between the two characters they were discussing, Pinocchio and Peter Pan—one who wanted to be a real boy through and through, and one who aspired to never growing up. Conversations with Eb often took such a contemplative turn; it seemed her boss, as usual, was discussing a subject that went beyond costume design. Was he giving her some covert message now? He was prone to wax numinous on theological issues. At times it made her nervous that he might break out into a religious furor like some televangelist, but he never did.
Eb mentioned not long ago that she might soon have a stronger role at Incognito, letting him take a back seat and even finally retire. Perhaps today he was using a teachable moment to pass on more of his own wisdom surreptitiously—not that he ever hid his convictions. Rather, he administered them to his staff like Eucharist wafers, in tidbits over lunch break or through a memo commending them for their good effort on behalf of the company. He talked about “transcendence” and “resonance” and “vestiges, the thumbprint of the Creator.” Very mystical.
“What is the chief end of man, after all?” he asked her now, out of the blue. Did he expect her to answer? She munched on another cookie. “We’re all longing for that one true love, that great romance,” he said. She knew he wasn’t talking about Iona, whose photo commanded the only clear spot on his walnut desk. Eb saw the direction of her glance and grinned. “No, I mean the search for purpose and significance. Now, temporally speaking, I’d like to think the purpose of my costumes has been to reveal the real in this masked and disguised generation. But on a grander scale, I myself am being unmasked and my failures laid open to my own view. So many of my years I spent fearing to be discovered for the fraud I really am. Yet here it is the autumn of my life and I stand naked, as it were, before a Judge more kindly than myself.”
He held his tongue until she felt compelled to say something.
“Everybody wants to put on a good face, though.”
“That’s it, lass. We call it ‘civility’ or some such nonsense. We want to ignore the big questions. As an old friend tells us,” and here he placed his hand on a time-worn book by Dante, “we all wake one day, midway the path of life, to find ourselves in a dark wood where the right way is wholly lost and gone. Perhaps trying to look good is the first step homeward.”
She brushed crumbs off the blanket, wordless under Eb’s scrutiny and under the condemning words written in Italy a thousand years ago. She’d encountered Dante’s writing for the first time right here in her boss’s office. At home in her growing-up years, the Klassen family subscribed only to Our Daily Bread; they didn’t own a library card and most of her secular reading was confined to school texts. Otherwise, she chose her books by their cover, like most kids, and she never chose Dante. When she left home, her newly stimulated hunger for reading took her further back than the Christian classics of Europe.
“But come, it’s getting late. We must get you home.” Eb collected the teacups and plate. “Why not leave your car parked here overnight and let me drive you? I’ll have one of the staff take it over to your place in the morning, unless you feel you can’t go to Paris after all.”
“Oh no, Eb. It’s my left ankle. I can still drive.” She pulled herself to her feet and took a few tentative steps. There was no way she’d let a little fall threaten her chance to see François. “I promise I’ll consult a doctor if this ankle doesn’t feel better by tomorrow afternoon, and I have a visitor coming to stay overnight who’ll keep watch over me. Besides,” she quipped, “your car’s trunk isn’t roomy enough for our French lady’s baggage.”
Eb retrieved the documents from the office safe and picked up the costume box to carry them out to Aglaia’s car for her. But he stopped abruptly before closing the door. “You need a cane,” he said, and disappeared into the stock room, re-emerging with a tall, crooked rod. The tips of his moustache were twitching. “Moses’ staff. B
ut don’t go beating on any rocks demanding water or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Aglaia gone, Eb shook the droplets off his car cover and folded it into the boot of his ’62 MGB. He’d bought the Roadster for a song several years ago. It was in a horrid state then, but now its reconditioned interior—black leather with red piping—was as supple and smooth as when it left Abingdon, he’d wager. Most of his labor was hidden under the bonnet but there was much yet to accomplish, and he’d love more time to tinker. It was just as well that Aglaia didn’t accept his offer of a ride home, he thought as he eyed the grey sky and shifted into reverse. The lass would likely have gotten drenched, adding insult to the injury of her swollen ankle.
Eb worried about more than Aglaia’s physical health. He saw in her a twistedness not confined to her ankle, a digression in the soul he found was not uncommon in creative dispositions. It was there when she first came to Incognito but he couldn’t explain its specific source, though he knew it involved her imagination, and he had compassion for her suffering.
This imagination of Aglaia’s helped make their business productive, and Eb was indebted to her sheer ingenuity in costume design, which he’d been fostering all along. He saw the Creator in Aglaia’s creativity. In the whole sphere of the universe, only man had the conscious impulse of art, Eb thought—no animal painted a portrait, no vegetable drafted a blueprint, no mineral narrated a story. The exercise of art, like worship, was a human response.
But Eb discerned in Aglaia an unnatural, occult curiosity. Maybe it was her reading, he thought as he reflected on her interest in his collection. “You are what you eat,” the saying went, but Eb believed one was what one read, and feeding the imagination with the wrong sustenance was worse than reaching for a bag of crisps instead of a carrot stick. What a person borrowed from the library bookshelves was as telling as what she loaded into her grocery trolley.
