“Well,” she says. “You can explain it to me while we’re photographing.”
*
“The Madonna?” Eldon turns from his library window where he has been looking out at the frosted garden and thinking of the sea. “But you’re not a believer.”
“It’s not about believing,” says Isabelle, exasperated. Doesn’t anyone understand the notion of artistic freedom? “The Madonna is a symbol.”
“Of Christianity,” says Eldon, not convinced. “I thought you were with me on Charles’s new theory. You seemed just as excited by an idea of evolution. Don’t tell me you have succumbed to the allure of an all-knowing being.”
“All I’m trying to do,” says Isabelle, “is to traffic more in what is there.”
“The Madonna?”
“A mortal woman at the point before she is the mother of the Saviour. A working woman.”
“Working?”
“An ordinary woman,” says Isabelle, wishing she’d never bothered to tell him of her new idea, to tell him anything of what she thought.
Eldon crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you know of an ordinary woman, Isabelle?” he says.
“Annie Phelan.”
“As Mary?”
“Of course. She is my…” Isabelle wants to say model, but instead says the obvious, “servant.”
It irks Eldon precisely because he can see the fit. He truly believes in his friend, Charles Darwin, and his theory of a slow progression of sea creatures to ape to man, a long parade towards walking upright. Yet he can perfectly believe that Annie Phelan could be a Madonna. There is still something achingly desirable in the notion of the Lord’s will, of things just appearing on the earth. A flash of lightning and Eve tumbles from Adam’s chest. A nod and the Red Sea splits down the middle. All the absolutes in religion seem preferable to the tentative steps of science. A long, slow, tedious journey to the upright man. Or, a wave of the hand and it’s done. Believe and anything is possible. A woman as a pillar of salt. A child called to heaven.
“You don’t need my approval, Isabelle,” he says. “You do things your way.”
Isabelle looks at the wall of him, in front of the window, arms crossed to ward her off. “Eldon,” she says. “I didn’t come here for your approval.”
“What then?” He feels a wave of jealousy. He doesn’t like to think of Annie Phelan as the Madonna. She had been a much better member of the expedition. Isabelle was wrong about her maid, about who she was, about who she should be. There was a strength in Annie that deserved better than this religious symbolism. “What then?” he says again, with real anger in his voice.
“Nothing,” says Isabelle, turning to leave. “There is nothing I came here to say to you.”
Annie thinks of her family all the time now. The sudden possibility of a new story of them. All this thought has somehow washed them up from the great ocean of the past onto the shores of the living world.
Annie has not seen Eldon Dashell since the day he set off after Franklin. She does not know if he remembered what he’d promised her, if he remembered to write letters on her behalf. He has been sick this past week, hidden away in his bedroom. She can hear him coughing sometimes when she’s passing by in the hallway. But this morning she was required to light the fire in the library, so she knows he must be well enough to be considering working again.
Annie has thought of telling Isabelle about this new idea of hers, this decision to find out what happened to her family. But Isabelle has never expressed an interest in Annie’s life outside the moments of her modelling, and Annie is not sure how to go about explaining everything, like Franklin and the march with Eldon in his frozen boots over the back field.
All day Annie has tried to go to Eldon in his library, but her work has been at the other end of the house and there hasn’t been a moment to squeeze away for herself. Added to this Isabelle wanted to sit on the outside steps and talk about Annie’s hands. Finally, though, she has managed to run down the hallway and is hurrying along to Eldon’s library.
“Annie!” The call skids her to a stop. She spins around and sees Cook at the end of the hall.
“Yes, missus?” It takes all her self-control not to keep running, not to open the door to Eldon’s library and fling herself inside. She has no doubt he would give her safe harbour.
“Mrs. Dashell wants you in the studio,” says Cook. “She’s been looking for you,” she adds, which means that on not finding Annie she has sent Cook out in search and Cook is not pleased to be taken away from her kitchen.
“Yes, missus.” Annie walks back up the hall towards Cook. “Sorry.”
“You must be where you’re supposed to be,” says Cook. “I don’t have the patience to be chasing you all through the house. Nor the inclination,” she says.
“Yes,” says Annie. She is more sorry that she wasn’t able to get in to see Eldon. She considers pleading with Cook, but the stern look on Cook’s face makes her change her mind.
When Annie gets to the studio, Isabelle is sitting on the bench, staring at the camera. “Ma’am?” says Annie, after she’s entered the room but Isabelle hasn’t seemed to notice this. “Ma’am, I’m here.”
“I was imagining being you,” says Isabelle. She says it with such sincerity that Annie feels tears start to her eyes. It touches her that Isabelle would want to do this, even if Isabelle is imagining being Annie while sitting in the studio, and not on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor.
Isabelle sees the tears in Annie’s eyes. I did that, she thinks. I can do that. She had been sitting here, in the sunny studio, thinking of Annie Phelan, thinking that Annie reminded her both of what she’d lost and what she’d never had. Ellen. Her children.
The afternoon light gentles Isabelle. She lifts her face and the sun cups her chin in golden hands. Her sharp cheekbones soften, and she looks beautiful.
Annie sits down on the bench beside her. Isabelle takes her hand and Annie looks down at their entwined hands, the ugly red of hers, the ugly black of Isabelle’s. She feels as if she is floating away, as if the only thing tethering her to earth is the pressure of Isabelle’s hand in her own. “How do you imagine being me?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think of?” says Annie. “That makes it about me?”
Isabelle is quiet for a moment. She can feel the strength of sun through the glass. Spring’s slow returning. “I was thinking of you sitting here and looking up at me.” She waves her hand at the camera, the solitary stillness of it like a heron standing stiffly in a marsh. “How I would seem to you. From here. How I would look.”
Annie thinks of the photograph of Sappho that she took in Isabelle’s bedroom. How even as the model, Isabelle controlled the scene. How even when Annie was looking at her through the camera Annie wasn’t sure how much Isabelle was allowing her to see. Isabelle could never be Annie. To be me, thinks Annie, to really be me, is to not be in control of the moment. I don’t know what is going to happen. She does.
Mary Madonna wears the grey cloak with the hood up. She doesn’t hold flowers or feathers. She has no children—yet. Unadorned and unaccompanied, she faces her world. Too humble to look straight at the camera, she is in profile, her working hands clutching the cloak around her as though she is out in a bitter north wind.
The Madonna has no idea what lies in wait for her. She does not see herself as special in any way, certainly not as an exalted figure. She does not know she has been born free of original sin, that she has been the immaculate conception. She will treat the baby Jesus in exactly the same manner as she would any child of hers. This is how great a goodness she possesses. How humble she is, how much a creature of the Lord’s will.
Mary Madonna sits at first, but because there’s no child to bend over, to tend to, she looks too lonely like that, the sculpting of her cloak a hollowed-out tree, the husk of it hunched forward around the part of it that is missing. No. Mary Madonna stands by the wall of glass with a curta
in of muslin pinned across it. She stands in profile, head slighdy bent forward. She would never look directly at the camera, that is too challenging, too intimate, that makes the assertion that she is entirely present. Also, her overt beauty might detract from her religious virtue. Better to stand in profile in front of diffuse light, light that is spongy and vague. Better to look down to show natural humility, but not at any specific object, that would indicate too much focus on one thing which would close down a general openness to the wonders and sorrows of the world. Mary Madonna can look down at her hands, but not to examine the intricate petals of a flower, not to have scientific, or even undue, curiosity about the natural world as that would imply a lack of faith in God’s grand design and plan for all living things.
The hands.
The gaze downwards to the hands will pull the viewer’s eyes down as well, down to the thick, strong fingers of the Madonna’s hands. She scrubs floors and blackens grates. Hers are working hands. They indicate an ordinary woman. The mother of the Lord could be anyone. No, the mother of the Lord has to be someone like this Mary Madonna, someone whose sense of her own greatness, her own self, won’t conflict with the greatness of her son. She is there for the Lord to make use of, but she cannot get in his way.
“Ma’am?” says Annie, looking up from the contemplation of her hands and these thoughts of what she is doing, standing by the soft filter of window light. “Is this a graven image?” She has remembered the companion order not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
“No,” says Isabelle quickly. “Graven means to engrave. This is not engraving.”
“Yes, but,” says Annie, doubting that the Bible advocates complete fidelity to the wording of the command.
“No,” says Isabelle, before Annie can finish her sentence. “It’s the Lord himself that shouldn’t be graven, and this is only Mary. It’s not the same.”
Annie can see the weak logic in this. She looks down at her hands again, and then back up at Isabelle. Sometimes she thinks the perfect photograph is Isabelle standing beside her camera, as she is now.
This is the perfect image, Isabelle thinks. Annie Phelan as Mary Madonna. The softness of Annie’s face, sharpened a little by the intelligence in her eyes. How her strong body looks ready to bear the Christ child, to carry that burden, that expectation. She can be an ordinary working woman, and yet she is so thoroughly herself as well. And she is destined for greatness, by association, but greatness just the same. She is destined to become the mother of the Saviour and she has no knowledge of this whatsoever. She is oblivious to her destiny.
It suits you, thinks Isabelle. Because Annie is familiar with the story of Mary there is an ease to her portrayal. She isn’t straining hard to get the right sense. She knows what to do. She’s also wary of playing the mother of Jesus, and this hesitancy comes over as humility and makes the portrayal that much more convincing.
“Did Mary fall in love with Joseph, or did God select him to be her husband?” asks Isabelle, moving the camera back so she can get the full sculptural effect of the cloak.
“I’m sure she was in love with him,” says Annie, though she really has no idea and has never thought much about it, but she feels a certain responsibility towards this story, towards knowing it, lapsed as she has been lately about believing as thoroughly as she used to.
“I mean,” says Isabelle, looking through the viewfinder, “would Mary have been the mother of Christ if there had been no Joseph?”
“Joseph was the father, ma’am.”
“Wasn’t God the father?”
“Perhaps there had to be two fathers.”
“Why? So the child is of the Lord, but the act of making the child is still mortal?”
Annie wipes her forehead. It’s getting hot inside the cloak. It seems as though any time she feels certain, Isabelle says something else to confuse her. “I don’t know,” she says, finally.
“Every child is divine. I suppose that’s it. We all have the chance to make a little Jesus.” Isabelle stands back. There’s something wrong with the light. It’s making everything too blurry, as if it’s formed from smoke. “I couldn’t bear to think like that,” she says with bitterness. “Step back. The light’s not good where you are.”
“What were your children called, ma’am?” Annie has obediently moved back a few steps. The light is not so strong here. She feels the relief of shadow on the side of her head. The coolness of it like a hand.
“How did you know I had children?” Isabelle stiffens. She puts out a hand and touches the top of her camera. The wood is reassuringly smooth, warm from the air.
“Mr. Dashell told me.”
“What was he doing telling you that?”
“I don’t know. He just told me.”
Isabelle goes back behind the camera. “He has no business telling you that, Annie. You must not speak of it again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Annie looks down at her hands, pushes them together into a peak, as if she’s praying. She wishes she hadn’t asked Isabelle about her children. “I didn’t mean any harm by it,” she says.
Isabelle likes the way the praying hands look on the Madonna. It makes them even more the focus of the photograph. Such a lovely contrast between the act of prayer and the physical state of the hands doing the praying. “I know,” she says. The half light at the side of Annie stiffens the cloak into a geographic landform—a cliff, a bluff. “Only the first one,” she says.
“What?”
“Only the first one had a name.” Isabelle looks through the camera at Mary Madonna, her cloak in shadow, her praying hands tented under the light. “Rose,” she says. “My first baby was called Rose.”
Eldon is reading when Isabelle flings open his bedroom door. He sits propped up against a wall of pillows, book in hand. Isabelle’s sudden entrance startles him. He jerks his head up in alarm when she comes into the room and his reading glasses fall onto the eiderdown.
“Isabelle,” he announces needlessly.
She comes straight over to the bed, moves to sit down and Eldon quickly grabs his glasses before she squashes them. He feels slighdy guilty, as though he’s been caught out at something. “I was reading,” he says.
“I can see that.” Isabelle taps his open book with her forefinger. “Do I need permission to enter your room?”
“No, of course not.” But Eldon does feel he has wanted some warning of her arrival. He carefully puts his glasses down on the nightstand by his bed and pulls himself higher up on the pillows to give his wife more room.
“You haven’t been in to see me for a long time,” says Isabelle. “Why not?”
“I’ve been busy,” says Eldon quickly.
“Reading?”
“No.” Eldon looks down at his book. “Yes.” He closes it and puts it on the nightstand next to his glasses. “Reading, and other things.”
“Ah,” says Isabelle. “Other things. Like telling my maid about the babies.” She looks hard at him. “Why would you do that? Is that not our private business?”
Eldon feels like a cornered animal. Annie Phelan. He’s been thinking of her. Reading this logbook of a whaling captain and thinking of their voyage over the frozen grounds of this house.
“You have no answer?” Isabelle is angrier than she thought she was. She is not sure if she is angry because Annie knows this about her, or because she suspects that if Eldon told Annie such a thing he has more of a relationship with her than Isabelle had supposed. “Why are you telling my maid such a confidence?”
“Your maid.” Eldon sees the flush on Isabelle’s face. “I thought she was our maid. Yes,” he says. “I did tell her about the babies. We were having a conversation.” He doesn’t mention the walk, or that Annie has been borrowing books from him. Or the brandy by the fire while they were recovering from freezing to death. “She was telling me about her family, how they all died in the famine, and I mentioned our children.” He has a sudden recollection of the last baby being hurried from t
he birthing room, the small covered bundle of it, taken from Isabelle before she’d even seen its face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Sometimes I cannot help but think what they might have been like. How our lives would have been different.” He means better, and Isabelle knows this. She knows, too, that Eldon’s regret for the dead children is for the selves they might have become. He has probably already imagined them as adults and misses the conversations they might have had with him.
Isabelle reaches behind her neck and undoes the clasp of her dress. She stands up and steps out of it. “Move over,” she says, and slips down beside her husband in the bed. His body is surprisingly cool. He slides down the pillows and they lie side by side. “You could touch me,” says Isabelle, but the moment she says it, half plea, half order, Eldon loses all inclination to do this.
The flame from the oil lamp beside the bed casts a moving shadow on the ceiling above them. It nods and dances, nods and dances. Isabelle waits for Eldon to move his hand the few inches it would take to touch her. He used to trace the contours of her body as though she was a shore, his hands the waves, the moving line, as though he could not help himself, the constant toppling joy he felt at finding himself where she was.
Eldon does not move. His body feels shipwrecked, heavy and immobile, grinding to bits on the rocks. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Is it anybody’s fault?” Isabelle rolls onto her side. “Look at me.” She puts a hand against his cheek, pushes it down so his face is next to hers, so his eyes stare into her own. “Is it mine?”
“No.”
“Is it?” Isabelle has never imagined conversations with her dead children, never saw them married or with children of their own. She has never even thought of them as children, really. Babies. They were babies. She made room for them. They took up space inside her and she gave them this space willingly. She felt them there and then they were gone before she could make room for them in other parts of her life, before she could know what she would feel for them when they were outside of her body, when they were not her.
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 15
