The Third Grace (6 page)

“Wins everyone over like that,” Joel answers, “and he's only been here for a couple of weeks. I should have listened to Mom and Dad, and thought longer before arranging for a student exchange. I mean, when will I ever go to Paris in return anyway?”

He sounds envious of François. Joel's never been popular, mostly because of his slight birth defect, but Mary Grace has repeatedly assured him that no one even notices the thin scar on his upper lip anymore, largely hidden by his sparse and tidy moustache. His pronunciation is flawless now, but his classmates haven't forgotten that he was excused every Thursday afternoon through sixth grade for speech therapy sessions.

“Well, François is pretty cool,” she admits. She must have hit a nerve because Joel is silent. “Didn't he get you an invitation to that party last Friday?” she asks. “I mean, that group never invited you to anything before.”

It wasn't Joel's crowd until François showed up. Somehow, in the short time he's been here, François's gotten in good with the new principal's niece, who's visiting for the summer before going off to college. Dayna's a wild child, from what Mary Grace can tell—rumors of the party she threw haven't died down yet. But the girl's hospitality didn't extend to mere high-school kids, and Mary Grace is still pouting that she couldn't go, couldn't watch out for François. He smelled like perfume when he came home.

Her brother looks back at the kids hanging around the church steps. He plants his booted foot on the bumper of the truck and crosses his arms over his knee.

“Yeah, the party,” he says with a frown. “Not really my thing, Sis. I'm glad you didn't go. I don't think François Vivier is all he seems to be.” And he pats her arm in the brotherly way that always makes her feel so safe, but François walks up and she doesn't want to feel safe right now.

Aglaia tugged herself back to the moment, stitching too aggressively on her costume on a Friday afternoon at work, incensed all over again at being high-jacked by her daydreams into psychological territory she feared. She had a few questions to ask François if she found him again.
When
she found him again, she corrected herself.

O
ver at the university, Dr. Lou Chapman's feet pinched in her new pumps as she stood on the podium and lectured her classroom of sophomore women, three token males garrisoned in the back corner. She gestured towards the overhead screen and wished she had her art slides in electronic format. Maybe she'd allocate that job to her teaching assistant, she thought, who was a lazy worker and needed to pick up on his responsibilities.

“This painting of the Annunciation depicts what theologians have sometimes called the ‘seminal conception,' ” she said. “We see the messenger angel Gabriel before the kneeling Mary in a typical example of the Renaissance domination of masculinity over femininity. Can anyone identify the symbolism of the artist?”

No one offered a comment. Lou continued, “The white lily indicates his belief in Mary's virginal purity, and the descending dove of the Spirit is the instrument by which the girl is about to be impregnated.”

One of the young men made a lewd comment and the other two sniggered. Lou presumed they were engineering students enrolled in her course as an elective, more to socialize than to learn. Their tomfoolery elicited the reaction of several girls sitting close to them, who either grinned along or rolled their eyes.

Lou perused the audience. Most of her pupils were consumed with taking notes, recording her monologue word for word. Perhaps that irritated her more than the rowdiness of the few boys who signed up each semester for her courses. That is, the girls these days blindly worshipped her pedagogic authority even when it came to the balderdash behind religious art, not entertaining an original thought but taking everything she said as gospel. It was a paradox: She deserved their full attention, but in their ignorance they didn't even understand what they were idolizing.

In contrast to their immaturity, Aglaia was almost erudite despite her quirky upbringing and her deficiency in formal education. She was, after all, several years older than any of the undergrads and fairly well read, though she retained a naïveté that Lou found beguiling. She turned back to the painting.

“If you could read Latin, you would know that the letters issuing from the mouth of the angel proclaim, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee.' The words themselves were able to ‘enflesh,' as it were, the Word of God.”

A tentative hand was raised. “What is Mary reading?”

“Excellent question. She's studying the hallowed Scriptures, humbling herself before the literature of her fathers,” Lou said, wondering how many of them caught her sardonic intent. “In point of fact, as a lowly female in that day she wouldn't have been able to read at all. But the artist's imagery is obvious—Mary is the conduit between the written and the spoken message, and as a result of her submission brings forth the Son of God into our world.” She paused and then in qualification emphasized, “But keep in mind that this biblical myth of incarnation is preceded by, and resonates with, the equally valid tales of earlier cultures.”

At that, a couple of students squirmed in their desks, likely preparing to blurt out some Sunday school verse to prove the Bible's eclipsing pre-eminence. That should provoke discussion. Ah yes, one girl was collecting herself.

“Are you saying the Bible is just fiction?”

“What do you think?” Lou asked.

The student prevaricated. “Well, I know some people who believe it's true.”

“But truth isn't the antithesis of fiction, is it?” Lou asked, playing the devil's advocate. “Fiction isn't a lie, but rather a form of truth. Jesus Himself told parables—hypothetical stories meant to illustrate a profound reality.”

This simple argument always stumped the Bible thumpers, fewer in number now than even a decade ago. A pity, as the religious pupils always brought up the most contentious issues and always fell the hardest when given correct thinking skills. Her goal in the classroom was dissonance, and controversy her subversive teaching tool.

Lou allowed her logic to register before continuing. “So Christian writings parallel other philosophical literature. For example, we all know every fable carries a moral. ‘The Tortoise and the Hare' by Aesop teaches us that slow and steady wins the race. This sounds remarkably like the biblical injunction to run the race of faith with perseverance to the finish line, doesn't it?”

Blank stares faced Lou. Her patent rejection of the Bible as a unique source of truth was lost on them. She tried again.

“Take another of the Greek fables, ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper,' identical in theme to the command in the book of Proverbs that says, ‘Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise.' These virtues, whether told through Aesop or the Bible, all hold our society in good stead. All were situated as well in the mythology of foregoing and ensuing civilizations.”

Lou doubted her students were catching the concept. If they were unfamiliar with Greek fables, there was little use in her alluding to lofty literary tragedies like
Agamemnon
, so she forwarded through several screens and stopped at the enlargement of Aglaia's postcard. The nudity perked up the backbenchers. Men were so predictable. “Mary subjected herself to the rule and words of Gabriel,” she continued, “but in our course material we will explore alternative expressions of response to male prerogative.”

Lou thought how necessary it was to provide her students with an example of church-sanctioned art like the Van der Weyden painting of Mary so they could grasp the monumental and demoralizing effect of patriarchy. Greek society provided a proper foil.

“You see on the screen a sculpture portraying the
Charites
, commonly known as the Three Graces. These goddesses presided over the banquet, the dance, and all the arts. They attended the most regal deities and garbed them in magnificent apparel.”

No wonder seamstress Aglaia was taken with them, Lou thought.

“They granted talents to mortals. Perhaps you've read Spenser, who said about them, ‘These three on men all gracious gifts bestow.' Homer wrote about them as well, in both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, as you'll no doubt know, having completed your assigned readings.” She noted panic in some of her students, who madly paged through their papers. Of course, the syllabus didn't schedule that reading until next week, but she liked to keep them on their toes. “The influence of Grecian narrative upon our world cannot be overstated.”

Lou picked up her pointer and directed its shadow over the photo from Aglaia's postcard. “Pradier's carving is merely one depiction of the Graces—a favorite theme in European art. The stance of the subjects shows them in communion with one another, a leisurely camaraderie at odds with the stiff, hierarchical formality we saw between Mary and Gabriel. The Graces help us understand the freedom that the pre-Christian ancients—those happy pagans—celebrated in conjunction with womanhood. Refer to my article, ‘Women and Myth: The Enunciation of the Feminine in the Rhetoric of the Sages.' ”

To the rustling of the handout, Lou considered how well received the title had been by the editor of a journal in which the piece was published last year, and how she'd hoped in vain that this paper would be the one to put her over the top with the tenure committee. The class probably didn't appreciate her word play between “enunciation” and the “Annunciation” of Gabriel just discussed, but it hadn't been lost on Aglaia when she read the article. Despite her abysmal lack of schooling, Aglaia was sharp. She had clarity of eye, a directness of gaze, that was more than intellectual and almost moral in nature, perhaps as the legendary Eve might have had before her fall into sin. Aglaia, too, must be hiding something shameful. Everyone does, Lou was sure.

One student who sat in the front row was trying to make eye contact with Lou, flicking her hair with a pen. She looked vaguely familiar. What was her name—Winona? Willow? She was another example of the trite stereotype increasingly evident around the university in the past several years despite the establishment of feminism in the general and scholarly populace. Too much makeup, white t-shirt stretched tightly enough to show off the vibrant print of her padded bra. In the formative days of the women's movement when Lou was just pubescent, her older sister had dropped out of the elite Manhattan prep school to burn her own bra in the streets, to Lou's envy. Later on in university, and thanks to a girlfriend, Lou got caught up herself in a street demonstration parading for gender rights. Soon she decided the publicity of activism wouldn't suit her academic image and she now kept her preferences concealed for the most part, unless it was to her professional or personal advantage to associate with any particular cause.

Lou went on with her lecture. She related the dying of the gods to the corresponding seasonal death of the crops and vegetation, and supported the thesis that the redemptive rituals performed to assure vitality were based upon the female reproductive cycle. One could see a reflection of this abundant fertility in the first of Pradier's Graces—Thalia, if she recalled the name correctly—who clutched a garland of flowers and encircled her sisters with it. Religious ceremony was cosmic and magical, she told them, with an angry deity requiring conciliatory sacrifice from terrorized humanity or from one another.

Lou stifled a yawn and decided her lecture needed more peppy illustration—for herself as well as her students. She flipped through her support material and exhibited another painting with a colorful story behind it.

“
The Return of Persephone
by the Victorian Frederic Leighton captures the idea. Hades, the god of the underworld whose land is named after him, desired Persephone. While she was picking flowers in a field with other maidens, he burst forth from a crevice in the ground and”—she inserted a suggestive inflection—“
plucked
her like a bloom herself. He carried her off and the abduction grieved her mother, goddess of the harvest, who appealed to Zeus. He decided Persephone must return to the land of the living to restore its verdancy, but unfortunately Persephone had eaten a pomegranate, the food of the dead. This required her to revisit the underworld throughout the year, and since then the seasons of growth wax and wane with her presence and absence.” Lou finished the lecture with a final comment: “Even the ancients attributed to woman the power to influence her environs.”

The class ended and the hall emptied as she gathered her papers together, ready to head back to her office on the east side of the social sciences wing. In front of her, seven or eight girls swarmed the few males leaving the room, vying for favor. So much for feminine autonomy!

Minutes later Lou was in her office, shutting down her computer and tidying her desktop in preparation for a meeting with Dr. Oliver Upton, head of the theater department and co-author of her recent paper promoting women's studies through the arts. He was one of her few academic proponents and a conspirator with her in a venture Platte River University might not officially approve, as it wasn't strictly educational even though it would be advantageous to the institution.

Months ago, before the media got hold of the news about the movie to be shot on location in Denver and area by a subsidiary of one of the big Hollywood studios, Oliver nosed it out through his film studio contacts.

It was a prequel to
The Life and Times of Buffalo Bill,
a western starring Brad Pitt, which had
made enough profit to warrant the film company's return to the area for a second serving.

From what she'd read about the first movie—Lou hadn't bothered to see it herself, though all of her students raved about it—
Buffalo Bill
wasn't just a “duster” reeking of testosterone. The director shone favorable light upon frontier women of the Wild West, such as Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, and Lou had even referred in her classes to the film as an object lesson for early suffrage.

With his information about a prequel coming to town, Oliver directly approached Lou, conjecturing correctly that she'd be interested in his idea, as they'd pooled information to their mutual benefit at other times. Lou and Oliver clarified their prospects and agreed to work together for ostensibly altruistic ends, although Lou figured Oliver was as interested in his advancement as she was in hers. He wanted a piece of the movie action for his own monetary reward hidden under the banner of publicly funded arts (she'd leave the ethics of that for him to defend). Lou, on the other hand, wanted primarily to secure her university tenure, which offered its own compensations.

So Lou and Oliver had waited for the movie company to call for bids by local trades in the Denver area, including costumers, and the announcement was made a fortnight ago. Incognito was certain to be the main competitor of PRU's theater department, but Lou was bound and determined for the name of Platte River University instead to appear in the credit roll of the film. And she, Dr. Lou Chapman, wanted to be known as the one to snag the competition's head designer—none other than Aglaia Klassen, highly visible emerging artist and personal friend of the tenure committee's Dayna Yates, associate head of sociology. If Aglaia were to accept the job Lou was arranging for her and thus disable the competition, Dayna might look more highly upon Lou's value to the school and validate her for the effective amalgamation of the arts and sociology departments.

To top it off, there was always the possibility that Aglaia might be privy to Incognito's bid for the costuming contract, but Lou was treading carefully when soliciting information from her new little friend, who could very well balk if she surmised that Lou was using her as a drawing card. Lou might be able to leak the right numbers through Oliver and ensure that the contract would be granted to the university—not that they would admit to using insider information. Either way, whether through access to Incognito's bid or only that company's handicap in losing Aglaia, Lou's influence in procuring a movie deal that gave continent-wide publicity to the school was sure to be recompensed and result in her tenureship by PRU. It was a brilliant plot.