The Third Grace (2 page)

“Mom, I have no idea where he lives,” she said, but in her heart she wanted to shout,
If only I knew where he lived!

Tina responded, “He said he was going back to that famous school. What was it called?”

“The Sorbonne, but that was years ago.” Aglaia kept her voice curt, not wanting to give Lou—who was openly eavesdropping—any reason to suppose she'd put up with the nonsense of taking a Bible along to France. “Who knows what's happened to him since? It'd be impossible to find him.”

Aglaia doubted her mother would yield to the argument. Once she got a bone in her teeth, she was stubborn. Aglaia wouldn't mention that looking for François had been her daydream all along. Hoping her own voice didn't reveal her desire, she quickly added, “Besides, I'm in Paris for only a few days.” Only a few days allotted to explore the world's most elegant city, an impossible few days to run an old heartthrob to ground.

Tina's wrinkles deepened as her forehead puckered. True to her nature, she persisted, “I just know he'd want this precious
Büak
.”

As if François would care about that Bible, Aglaia thought.

Tina fiddled with the cover, thumbing the gilded edges that on her own Bible had long ago lost their shine. A museum postcard slipped from between the pages to the floor, image facing up, immediately recognizable to Aglaia. She hadn't seen the postcard for fifteen years and she stared at it, transfixed all over again by the sculpture of the three nude women. Helpless, she plummeted into the memory of that first viewing like a pebble into the pond behind the barn, once again sitting with her family around the table with François on the warm May night he came to them—seated close to him, touched by his breath.

Tarrying together, the three marble nudes stand silken in the light, immortal young sisters polished with the ages—arm encircling waist, head on shoulder. Mary Grace is intoxicated with them, captured on one of the many glossy cards he brought to show off Paris to his American host family. She doesn't pay attention to his descriptions of the Eiffel Tower or the bridges, but only to the timbre of his voice, the poetry weaving through his hesitant English.

He turns to her for a moment and says, “They have your name,
non
?
Les Trois Grâces
—Mary Grace.”

Her brother grins and kicks her under the table but she ignores him. She's consumed with the statues and with François's fingertips tracing the two-dimensional outline, caressing the nymphen forms as though they're warm and living flesh. She's disconcerted because her own womanhood is so new. Does he mean to excite her?

Lou stepped forward to pick up the card before Aglaia shook her reverie.

Tina squinted at it. “I hope that French
Jung
didn't take such a picture into church with him.”

“Perhaps he was using it as a bookmark,” Lou said. She turned the card over and Aglaia saw it was blank except for the museum information printed on the back. “Pradier, 1790-1832.
Les Trois Grâces—
the Three Graces,” Lou read aloud. “Your François appreciated the female form, I see—good taste.”

Aglaia attempted to change the course of conversation. “Mom, it's too bad I didn't know you were coming tonight or I'd have gotten you and Dad tickets for the play.” Not that they ever attended the stage.

But Lou, looking at the photo again, continued in spite of Aglaia's red herring. “Pradier sculpted in the neo-classical style and used the ancient Greek myths as subject material. The Three Graces, companions of Aphrodite, were very popular, and you can see that Pradier included their signature themes of fertility, beauty, and hospitality in this work. Note the way he utilized plants and jewels to get his idea across.” She stretched her arm out so that mother and daughter could see what she meant, but Aglaia knew Lou's point would be lost on Tina. “The mythology of Greece made its imprint throughout history along many avenues,” Lou said. “For example, the plot of
The Phantom of the Opera
may well have had its origins in the story of Europa, the beautiful maiden who was stolen away by Zeus disguised as a bull.”

Tina scrunched her face in confusion.

As for Aglaia, she'd first heard the Greek tale whispered into her eager young ear by François's impassioned young lips, and then read it again in
Bulfinch's Mythology,
a text she discovered in twelfth grade on the shelves of the school library after her curiosity about the gods had been aroused. Her reading matter since her childhood days might surprise and even disturb Tina if she understood its content; it was nothing like the holy pap Aglaia was brought up on. But Tina's disapproval wasn't her concern at the moment, for Lou—satisfied with her examination of the postcard—was now craning towards the Bible as though she wanted to get a good close look at it next.

“Mom, I'll take that,” Aglaia said. She reached for the book.

Tina handed it off to her readily. “Then you
will
return it to the boy? I knew you'd agree that it's just meant to be.”

Aglaia intended only to get it out of sight—out of Lou's sight, especially. The thought of delivering it was preposterous. But she zipped it into the front pouch of her suitcase, packed and ready on the entry table. There was time enough to deal with it later, after she got rid of her mother and recouped her image with Lou, who probably thought she was totally incompetent about now.

L
ou's nose itched with a suppressed sneeze. She should have taken her antihistamine before coming to Aglaia's apartment but hadn't guessed the girl owned a mangy cat. From her spot on the couch, Lou watched her hostess lock the door behind Tina's ample posterior and then detour into the kitchen.

Overall she was amused with the evening's events—with the onstage showcasing of Aglaia's outstanding costumes, her nervous hospitality in bringing Lou home, her crippling embarrassment over Tina and the Bible, and her ambiguity regarding the mysterious French boy. This last point was evidently the reason for her pestering inquisition about how to locate someone in Paris. Aglaia Klassen was more complex than Lou had previously detected and worth investigation, if for that reason alone.

But Lou had other reasons for grooming Aglaia, and she waited impatiently for her young recruit to return to the dialogue. She mustn't rush the girl, she reminded herself. The mood was almost right for Lou to bring up her idea of employment, and a bit more dallying should ease Aglaia's tension, soften her guard, and allow the topic to spring up naturally.

Aglaia deliberated in front of the open refrigerator, taking deep, slow breaths to regain her self-possession after the interference of her mother. She rinsed a cluster of seedless grapes and patted a dampened hand over her face.

Aglaia sizzled with humiliation. Tina had terrible timing, dragging the stink of the barnyard back into her life just as she was making headway into civility and shirking emotions she'd been smothering since leaving the farm so long ago.

That
had taken some doing—setting aside the meaning of rural family to consort with urban strangers, pretending she preferred the noise of traffic to the solitary whistle of the wind, even walking past a church without reading the week's sermon title. Now she bristled against her mother's intermittent reminders of what life used to be like.

Desperation tonight had made her jam the Bible into her bag as if she were going to take it along to the airport on Sunday, but she did it only to shut her mother up—and not only because of her lack of refinement when it came to consumption of alcohol. If allowed, her mom would have gone on about the writing in the Bible, and Aglaia had already glimpsed a second notation unseen by Tina, shocking words that leapt off the page:
Naked and we felt no shame
. She gouged the hull out of a strawberry, fearing what else François might have written.

Aglaia had not held a Bible in her hands since the morning after her high-school graduation, out by the burning barrel so early that the screen door hadn't yet clapped shut behind her father on his way to milk the Holstein. The memory drew her in.

“Presented to Mary Grace Klassen from Dad and Mom,” the front page reads, her father's compact penmanship filling in the blanks. The front cover curls up at one corner, bonded leather letting loose, the ribbon marker fraying. Years of her own childish notes fill the margins, the latest thread all in purple ink from the youth group's study of the main themes. “Chaos to cosmos to covenant,” she's written on the first page. “Freedom from slavery… Possessing the land… Judgment and mercy… Praises…” It took the full summer before twelfth grade to get through to Revelation, and she's hardly looked at those words in the year since.

She douses the book along with yesterday's trash in diesel fuel from the green jerry can to be sure of a good, hot burn, then strikes a match and tucks it in through the jagged hole near the bottom. In minutes her crime of sacrilege is spent—dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the Word cremated.

Aglaia blinked back to the present. What must Lou think of her—all manure, no demure? She tipped her chin down towards the kettle on the counter to check the smoky liner around her prairie-sky eyes, her delicate nose bulging comically. She fingered her ragged blonde bangs into place and then carried the fruit-and-cheese plate into the other room, suddenly unsure of her calculated composure.

“Oh no, I wouldn't want to ruin the finish of the wine—with cheddar of all things,” Lou said, waving away the plate, and Aglaia criticized herself for another
faux pas
. As she stood undecided about whether to set it down anyway or take it back to the kitchen, she could see Lou was appraising her from head to heel. “Before tonight I'd never have guessed you were raised in the country,” Lou said, “and by such conservative church folk at that.”

“You can't pick your family, as they say,” Aglaia said in self-defense, keeping the plate after all and reclaiming her place on the couch. Her eyes focused on the postcard, now lying on the coffee table. Maybe she could minimize the damage done by Tina's intrusion. “My mother's old school—just plain old, for that matter,” she said. “In fact, people often mistake her for my grandmother.”

Lou didn't blink, as if waiting for more information. Aglaia tried again. “My father won't be able to keep farming much longer. It's all he can do to harvest the crop and get seed back into the soil again, never mind the livestock he used to keep. Not a profitable enterprise.” Farming was a dicey occupation undertaken less for the money than for the lifestyle—if that's how one chose to live. The identity of the farm girl was one Aglaia consciously rejected when she took up her new life in the city. There was no compromise, no choice but to make a clean break of it, and no going back. “Besides,” she added for good measure, hoping her tone of finality would satisfy Lou so they could move on, “my family history is water under the bridge.”

“Don't be so quick to dismiss your genealogy,” Lou said. “We're all just products of our environment, Aglaia—you of yours and I of mine. And Tina of hers, after all.”

She topped off her wine glass and splashed a bit more into Aglaia's. “We must embrace the influences of our past and make peace with them to truly become complete and free women within our individual selves. Only then will we contribute positively to the narrative of the larger community.” Aglaia supposed Lou used the same delivery style in her lectures at the university—chin raised, tone pompous. She was being patronized but ignored the insult; Lou
was
a patron, after all. In the months since they met, she'd already asked Aglaia to two university functions—three counting the one coming up in a couple of weeks.

Lou continued, “Take your mother as an example. She's intriguing. What's her background?”

That was a loaded question! How could Aglaia even begin to explain her parents' ancestral roots as strangers in a strange land, in but not of the world, perpetually seeking asylum?

Every honorable Mennonite home instructed its children on the events of the displaced pacifistic denomination, begun by Swiss and Dutch Anabaptists in the late 1400s and taking to the road under persecution. By the seventeenth century, one group had already made its way to Pennsylvania, but Aglaia's great-great-great-grandparents had been born in Prussia, and their children on the steppes of southern Russia.

The Empress Catherine was to this day lauded for her gift of religious freedom—Aglaia had three cousins named after the tsarina—but, with the threat of militant nationalism, another wave of migration washed her forebears onto the shores of North America in 1874. Trains and boats and wagons carried them far inland, where they tamed the wilds and lived in huge families, settlements swelling and fanning westward.

Her parents were born, married, and still lived in an isolated community in southwestern Nebraska—Tiege, a village that kept its Mennonite flavor longer than some. The Klassens were not from the stricter nonconformist sects that insisted women wear head coverings in and out of church—though a couple of Ohio relatives had married into bonnets—yet Aglaia survived without a television until she was thirteen years old. Her parents still didn't own a computer.

How could Aglaia even begin to encapsulate her background for Lou?

“Well,” she began, “since Dad was the first-born son, he ended up with the homestead.”

“I didn't ask about your father,” Lou interrupted with a sniff, chastising her. “Tell me, were you close to Tina as a girl? She's your matrix. Her story becomes yours.”

Close to her mother? She didn't think about that any more, about the closeness when the family was whole. Lou's words swept her back to the vegetable garden on a warm morning, when the new potatoes were the size of marbles and the bright green feathers of dill tickled her pudgy arms.

“Mary Grace, hold the plant before you pull the pea off, like this,” Mom instructs, placing work-reddened hands over her own small, soft ones and helping her pinch a pod off the vine. “That's a good job, dear. We'll make a fine
Supp
for lunch.” Mother and child pad their way back to the house over the turned-up earth between the even rows, and Mary Grace reaches up to hold onto the edge of the basket. They sing the chorus she's learning for her part in the Sunday school recital: “There shall be showers of blessing: This is the promise of love…”

Lou touched her knee. “You're antagonistic about discussing your relationship.”

“Antagonistic? No, it's just that there hasn't been much of a relationship to discuss since I left.” Aglaia nibbled on a slice of apple.

She recollected her own haste to get away then and wished she could escape the conversation now. “Leaving was natural for me to do. All country kids head for the big city the minute they're released from school, you know.”

“Do you carry guilt over that?”

“Not at all,” she said too quickly.

“Guilt is the domain of the church,” Lou said. “Women like Tina have forgotten the essentially feminine nature of goodness, of god-ness. True spirituality is not paternalistic but puts us beyond the pejorative grasp of hegemonic teachings.”

“I'm sure my mom hasn't questioned her faith to that degree.” Tina wouldn't even know what “pejorative” or “hegemonic” meant. Aglaia wasn't sure she knew herself.

“She's quaint,” Lou said. “I've spent a great deal of time, as you know, studying women from ancient traditions. We all speak in different voices but there is a unity among us, a strong bond that, once acknowledged, brings solidarity. This is how we articulate our message.”

Aglaia wondered what message that would be. She considered quizzing Lou about her own mother, but hesitated. She wasn't quick enough to turn the topic, could hardly turn her own mind from that poignant image of her mom in the garden.

“Let's explore your inner response to Tina.” Lou sat forward, her nostrils flaring as though she'd caught a scent. “Why do you reject her truth?”

“You think I should believe what she believes?” If only Lou knew the extent of her mother's religious practices, or of her own keen involvement as a girl.

“Of course not. Belief isn't synonymous with acceptance. One must respectfully allow others to hold to their own truths. Just let her be who she is, Aglaia.”

“She didn't strike you as, well, backward?” Aglaia's conscience twitched over criticizing her own flesh and blood out loud. Lou was right—she couldn't escape the omnipresence of that built-in, handed-down, bred-in-the-bone guilt.

“Not everyone attains the same level of gentility. Our responsibility is to build ourselves up on the corpus of our own aptitudes and on one another's, to learn from our mistakes rather than fall by them. Your mother holds power over you, Aglaia. You need to reclaim your autonomy.” Lou reclined and directed a piercing gaze over her uplifted goblet.

Aglaia didn't know what she was expected to say. She looked away and swallowed thickly, realizing how parched she was. It was as if she couldn't get enough to drink these days, though she carried a water bottle with her everywhere. Tonight the wine didn't quench her thirst, either—didn't quell her memories.

“Speaking of women's empowerment, this postcard is almost iconic,” Lou said. She picked the card up and Aglaia fought back a grimace, annoyed that she hadn't slipped it under the plate before it caught Lou's eye again. “Pradier's rendition of the Three Graces from Greek mythology represents quintessential womanhood. You must view the sculpture when you're in Paris. You're intending to tour the Louvre, aren't you?”

Aglaia nodded. “Of course.” Pradier's work was to be her first stop, with the sculptures in room thirty-two of the Richelieu wing. She'd spend the good part of a day in the palace museum, with the Three Graces as her focus. She'd already mapped out her course using the Louvre's website to find several pieces picturing the trio, which included painting and drawing, carving and fresco.

Aglaia may not have had that postcard in hand for the past fifteen years, but nothing could curtail the growth of her interest in the underlying subject matter all this time. That insidious interest germinated by François sprouted quickly and grew persistently over months and years, like a vine curling itself into her thoughts and habits. Even her decorating tastes were affected. She let her glance skip over her apartment—over the potted palm by the window, the curtains of fine linen, and the walls painted Aegean blue and lined at the top with a stenciled border in Greek key motif. It was a stage set for her imagination.