by Deb Elkink
“What choice have I got, Naomi? If she wants to fly to France, how can I stop her?” At least, she rationalized to herself, Lou wanted to spend time with her—that was a compliment. And as a seasoned traveler, Lou knew her way around Paris. Aglaia would be giving up her cherished solitude but she could be gaining valuable assistance in her hunt for François. It was a trade-off. She might as well accept Lou’s decision and get the most from it. Naomi would consider her a pushover, but being misunderstood by her was a minor price to pay for the benefits of Lou’s friendship. A girl had to have her priorities straight. “Besides,” Aglaia added, “you were the one stressed about me going solo to Europe for the first time.”
Naomi flared her nostrils and changed the subject. “Well, I should be hitting the road. As you said, Zephyr will be yowling. Call me when you get back.” She hugged Aglaia and muttered that she’d pray for her, but left without stopping to wish Lou a safe journey.
The security line was short and Aglaia passed through the frame of the metal detector as her phone in her bag on the belt rang inside the X-ray machine. She didn’t get to it in time—the guards refused to be hurried—but when she flipped the cover open, she recognized the missed number and hit “send” as she and Lou walked to their gate.
“Eb, you called?”
“Lass, I wanted to see you off—at least with my voice.” He laughed. “How’s that ankle of yours?”
“Much better, thanks.”
“I don’t want you to be nervous about the delivery, now. You know that you can get hold of me if any questions come up at the museum.”
“I’m not nervous, exactly,” Aglaia said.
“I suppose you’re out of your element already—a bit like a sheep among the wolves? You’ll be fine,” Eb reassured her. He must have heard the reservation in her voice—but she could hear his smile. “Just be your lovely self. And eat as much of that heavenly French food as possible.”
Eb hung up the bedroom extension and saw he had enough time for a shave and a spit-bath before the Sunday morning service. He could hear Iona humming in the kitchen, brewing tea and steaming his oatcake—to which he’d add some “unhealthy” marmalade when she turned her back. Their son, Ian, had been converted to toast and packaged cereal as a schoolboy, but last time they were home the grandkids sat on Eb’s lap and sampled his breakfast. Maybe they were too big for that now, he thought, and he sniffled a bit as he ran hot water into the sink. Well, anyway, he anticipated a time of blessing at kirk today. It always brought his whole perspective back into focus, and he needed that after the work week he’d just survived.
Now that Aglaia was on her way to Paris, he’d be able to give full attention to the overlapping project, which he admitted would have been less onerous with her input. The public call for bids had come across his desk just as Aglaia was getting into the meat of her museum assignment, and he’d locked himself into his own office for long hours, strategizing procedures and estimating costs. He’d have loved to include her in the process, even if only for her professional edification; the next movie contract might very well be negotiated under her guard. This current film was a major undertaking. If Eb were able to win the contract for Incognito as the on-location costumer for RoundUp Studios—and assuming Aglaia’s success in Paris—headquarters would be left without any grounds for closing the Denver branch.
He was awaiting the best time to discuss the subject in full with Aglaia, when stress levels were lower. Eb had no doubt that headquarters would love to transfer her to their offices, but if that happened she’d lose all seniority and be devoured in the dog-eat-dog environment. She was just too tender yet. Worse still, it would be the death knell for her sense of artistic fulfillment, as Montreal’s machine required lock-step compliance very different from the flexibility of Eb’s own department. So the turf war was his to fight until he could define his own territory without further challenge, and position Aglaia more securely. Then maybe he could retire in good conscience.
Eb lathered up with his badger-hair shaving brush and began to scrape his jaw clean of whiskers, lifting one side, then the other of his moustache in turn. He’d heard through the grapevine that Incognito faced some stiff competition, but in his assessment Platte River University’s theater arts department had eyes that were too big for its stomach. That was often the case with institutions of higher learning, where the academy’s overweening philosophies couldn’t keep up with the demand for applied knowledge in the workaday world.
Not that he was contemptuous of education! In fact, Eb esteemed scholarship, having himself earned from St. Andrews an interdisciplinary degree in arts, literature, and theology before emigrating. That was back in the day when academics still valued the record that came down through faithful writers, before the resurgence of arcane philosophies by postmodern advocates who worshipped the gods they made rather than the God who made them, who boasted of erudition but didn’t know about providence and redemption.
Eb shook his head at his reflection in distress over the state of education today. Wisdom wasn’t confined to the classroom and foolishness wasn’t barred from it, he thought as he toweled off the pudding bits of shaving cream from his jowls.
Aglaia seemed naïve of this fact, judging by her avarice for certification. Going back to school and completing what she began would do her good, but only for the right purposes—not, for example, to impress that professor whose name she dropped into the conversation now and again. In Eb’s view, education wasn’t an end in itself but was only a way to an end. The pursuit of truth was disappointing without the attaining of truth.
Aglaia, now, was a picture in contrasts about the process of attaining truth. It looked as if she used her emotions, her impressions, to feel her way through life, but had shut down on expressing them so that Eb couldn’t get a handle on what they were. He believed she was waging an interior war between the purely intellectual and the generously sensual. He saw the two flicker across her face at odd times of the day—say, when she first methodically sorted through his office shelves for a title and then subsequently lost herself in the ecstasy of its pages. But a person couldn’t find truth with one and not the other. If the brain knew God, it was the heart that felt Him. Rationality and faith must walk hand in hand, as Blaise Pascal had written so long ago.
Call a truce inside her, Eb suggested to God as he made his way into the kitchen with his Bible in hand, ready for the Sabbath and for his marmalade. Bring the factions into harmony so the lass might find her way to serenity.
Aglaia boarded the aircraft and followed Lou down the narrow aisle and found her seat. She wedged herself in beside an obese man, but at least she was by the window. Lou’s travel agent couldn’t arrange for them to sit together until the second leg of the journey and that didn’t displease Aglaia. After the flurry of activity these last two days, she needed some quiet time to acclimatize to the new situation.
The flight attendant served breakfast, and the man beside Aglaia was eager to engage in chitchat with her over his scrambled eggs. To forestall that possibility she retrieved the Bible, which she’d decided this morning to carry in her shoulder bag, and opened it to the beginning.
She’d been speculating over her motivation for deciding to take the book. She declared to Lou that she’d ignore her mother’s request and leave the Bible behind, and intimated the same to Naomi. Yet here she was, with the Bible on her lap and the man next to her leaning away as though she were some religious nut ready to launch into a sermon.
Well, she hadn’t told the whole truth to either of the other women about the writing in the margins and the memories that bound her up—hadn’t even told the whole truth to herself, she admitted. Even if delivering the Bible to François might be impossible, she wanted to investigate his thoughts. How could she leave the book behind when she wanted so badly to study those enticing scribbles? How could she be free in her soul until she faced her memories once and for all? She was embarking on a new phase in her vocation and getti
ng ahead in the social world. It was high time for a sweeping change in her life, a sweeping out of her life. It was time to open the closet doors and air the linens, and the place to start was with a thorough reading of François’s notations and a fearless remembering.
She leafed through the first few pages, rereading the notes in the margins in order and turning over the corner of each marked page for future reference (as she had done with the story of Artemis in the book of Acts) till she found the first missed one. He’d scrawled le baptême beside the crossing of the Red Sea, where the chariots of the enemy army had been hurled into the waters, the whole brigade sinking to the depths like a millstone. The eddies of her memory drew her in.
The water in the baptismal tank is not as cold as Mary Grace expects. How is she to know? This is the kind of thing, like marriage, you do only once. The white gown clings like pond weeds to her legs as Pastor Reimer preaches to the congregation on the meaning of the ordinance—the putting to death of the natural and the birth of the spiritual.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he finishes, and plunges her backward and under and up again so fast it doesn’t matter that she hasn’t plugged her nose. Then like the others before her, she climbs dripping up the baptistery steps, clean and new and full of light. They’ll all be watching closely—Mom, Dad, Joel. And François, of course. What will François think of all this?
Afterwards they eat in the church basement to celebrate—molasses cookies dipped in coffee and (though it isn’t Christmas) Päpanät, the peppery, nut-sized goodies even the younger kids pop whole into their mouths. Elderly ladies with their hairnets and chin whiskers congratulate her on the testimony she gave before the whole congregation that evening, about needing forgiveness for her sin.
François doesn’t mention anything about sin but tells her later, when they’re alone after everyone else has gotten out of the car, that she looked like Aphrodite rising out of the ocean, born of the sea foam that boiled up out of the immortal flesh of the cast-off genitals of a castrated god, Father Sky.
François’s graphic, provocative words make her stomach flip—it’s too personal, too masculine for her to bear!
But then Dad, coming back out to see what’s taking them so long, opens the car door and fractures the darkness.
Then here, in the pages of the Torah, after the disobedient children of Israel had wandered for forty years because they broke the commandments of the Lord, as Moses broke the tablets of stone upon which they were engraved, as she had been breaking that indelible law of grace written on her once-soft heart—here, where the High Priest stood with his censer of coals amidst the fragrant smoke of the incense before the blood-spattered atonement cover in the Most Holy Place—Aglaia read branding and remembered the day at a neighboring ranch.
“Sit tight! We’ll make a man of you yet.” The stringy old cowboy is wielding the metal pole with his outfit’s brand still smoldering red.
“But monsieur, the cow’s moving!” François’s eyes water as he squints up from the ground through the acrid smoke of seared hair, laboring to hold the animal still.
“Of course the calf’s moving, son. You’d be moving, too, if that hot iron was burning your hide, which it will be if you don’t sit heavier. And this is no cow, that’s for sure. A bull calf about to become a steer, in fact.” Mary Grace notes the flick of a knife, the bawling of the calf, and the commiserating grimace of a city boy.
She laughs at him, satisfied that he’ll have another story to take back to his homeland, another incident that ties him to her country, to her. He catches her laughter in his eyes and bounces it back at her, smudges of dirt on his cheek and cow dung on his jeans.
Where Aaron burned an offering as an aroma pleasing to the Lord, François had jotted camp-out.
The coyotes are just over the closest dune, yipping and lamenting to a full June moon that is brighter even than the bonfire. She and the two boys have wriggled their sleeping bags into the sand and are roasting hotdogs, the flames slapping at the dripping fat.
“You eat this with moutarde?” François is leery but lets Mary Grace squirt it on liberally. It squishes from the bun as he bites, and she reaches out and wipes the yellow smear off his cheek. He grabs her wrist, holds it fast, and turns his mouth towards her hand to lick her fingers clean one by one.
Joel ignores them—at least, he pretends to, though this last while he’s increasingly been finding ways to interrupt. François’s flirtation is becoming more brazen each day. Perhaps soon her parents will see it, too. For now, she lets François pull on her fingers like a suckling lamb orphaned by the ewe, and his adoring gaze is as intense.
In this manner, sitting in the plane on her way to Paris, Aglaia buried herself in the Scriptures—or rather in the coffin of memories made by François’s words—and the time passed unnoticed.
Thirteen
Lou returned to her seat from the airplane toilet—filthy cubicle!—cursing silently that she hadn’t insisted on an upgrade to first class, for herself at least. She was owed the higher quality of service, considering her frequent-flyer points. What with her recent belt-tightening, she couldn’t justify paying the extra herself and, though her university research fund covered some travel costs, she doubted PRU’s admin department would let her get away much longer with her refusal to itemize expenditures. She shook her head; Aglaia hadn’t even thanked her for the sacrifice she was making.
The coup at the airport in Denver went off better than Lou anticipated and Aglaia, out of sight now behind the bulk of her seatmate several passengers ahead, had recovered her balance nicely. She’d be in top form by the time they landed for their connection in New York City within the hour, left alone for the whole flight while Lou gave herself over to one of Colette’s novels. The girlfriend Naomi, however, had appeared disapproving about her accompanying Aglaia.
Lou was apprehensive about that Enns woman. She could be problematic, with her simplistic take on life, her either/or thinking processes. Naomi was obviously a literalist without any symbol system in place to help her nuance imaginal discourse, unlike Aglaia who always had her head in the clouds.
Naomi treated Aglaia like a younger sister, and Lou recognized the suffocation because she’d put up with her own older sister’s wheedling ways for too long.
The latest e-mail Lou received from her sibling, which she deleted as usual without reply, said something about Mother starting to fail. She didn’t know what Linda expected her to do with that information anyway. It wasn’t as if she could change all her arrangements on a whim and fly out there every time Mother had another little health scare. One of these days it would be over, and they’d be planning a funeral.
Given Linda’s shyness and her own facility as a speaker, Lou expected to be asked to say a few words. What eulogy might she give Mother? She wouldn’t lie and pretend filial affection, and she couldn’t very well tell the truth—that she’d been waiting for the day so that she could collect her inheritance and ease the strain of her overextended lifestyle.
Linda might challenge her claim to the estate; she was a do-gooder and, when both sisters had received a bequest upon their father’s death four years ago, Linda donated hers to charity, critical of her sister’s spending habits. So Lou wasn’t looking forward to the details of dividing Mother’s assets.
There was some mercy in death, she granted, at least for the dying one who slipped into the void of nonexistence. But it was rather more difficult for those left behind, sweeping up the ashes of a life gone by.
Lou looked down at the postcard of Pradier’s carving clipped to her sheaf of papers. She was withholding it from Aglaia, saving it for the right moment, as it seemed to have some effect on her. Lou wasn’t clear yet in what capacity she could employ it, but she was always on the alert for that teachable moment, using whatever educational tools were at her disposal.
Lou was curious about how her young friend was coming along with her assigned reading.
She probably began with the article on mythology that first caught her eye. The subject also fascinated Lou, with its epitomization of woman as sexual goddess, and fed her theories on pluralism in the current ethos. How better to further the harmonious meshing of today’s plethora of worldviews than with a unifying narrative constructed upon the polytheism of ancient oral traditions?
All myths sought to explain the origins of the universe in emblematic form, and she’d found the application of the goddess as a type helped shake loose the postulations of more orthodox scholars who saw the arts as a reflection of some greater creation by one omnipotent Creator—an outmoded idea.
Take the Three Graces, Lou thought, glancing again at the card. As a literary person, she’d known about them generally and their place in Greek literature long ago. But since Aglaia’s interest in them became apparent to her, she’d undertaken some of her own research.
The Titans of antiquity, elder gods ruling the universe, were said to have been overthrown by the twelve Olympians, who took over the affairs of man and of all other creatures such as nymphs and centaurs and gorgons that resided above the earth or on the earth or in the underworld. Up in the elementary aether, the lesser gods cohabited with the twelve in a cacophony of dissonance, with the Three Graces applying their soothing ministrations as they were able.
Now, the Graces were often mistaken for the Muses, those goddesses who inspired the poets and stimulated the creative process of all the arts, written about by Homer and Chaucer and extending even to the Puritan writings. Some mistook the Graces for the Three Furies (who were daughters of Mother Earth and who took revenge on crimes against conscience) or the Three Fates (who wove the web of life, measured its length, and cut it off at the predetermined point).
