Unbecoming (11 page)

Grace,

I saw Riley yesterday. He was at the hardware store with his father buying potting soil. I could hardly believe it, I practically fell on him hugging him, but I don’t think he wanted to see me. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s been through since I saw him.

Here is the Graham’s address in case you want to send a letter.

429 Heathcliff Ave

Garland, TN 37729

As if Grace didn’t know that address better than she knew her own name.

Why
did her mother send her these e-mails about Riley? Just to punish her? To gloat that Grace’s other family lay in shambles? Because she suspected that Grace was somehow responsible? Because she’d hoped that Grace and Riley would marry and make Grace’s family Graham-adjacent? Because she was pretending, now that Grace was half a world away, to be a different kind of mother?

Riley was walking around Garland now. She could see him walking by their old college house on Orange Street and knowing that other people lived there now, boys the same age he’d been. She imagined the sun in his eyes, a car’s steering wheel in his hands, the way a grocery store would look when he hadn’t been inside one in so long, the newly sharp smell of the home that hadn’t been his home in years.

 • • • 

When Grace got home that evening, Mme Freindametz was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and doing a word search in a Polish magazine. Grace smiled quickly and put her pot of water on the stove to steam rice and green beans.

“What are you going to put in your nice box?” Mme Freindametz asked.

“My box?”

“Yes, your new box, the silver one.” She smiled approvingly.

At first Grace did not understand. She pointed to the tin breadbox she had bought a few months prior, which was yellow and had a picture of a topiary on it. “That? That box?”

Freindametz shook her head. “No, the one in your bedroom, the new one!”

“You were in my room?”

“Yes,” she said. “The vent was clogged, the vent behind your desk.”

“Why would you—” Grace began, but Freindametz jerked the handle of her teacup so that the tea sloshed against the side. Grace realized that she had raised her voice. “How did you know it was new?” She tried to keep her voice even, to stay calm or to sound calm. “Have you been in there before?”

Freindametz opened her mouth but did not speak.

“How often? Every week, every day?”

Freindametz looked as if Grace had slapped her. “This is my house,” she finally said.

“It’s just a pretty box,” Grace said slowly. “You don’t put anything in it.”

She turned off the stove and emptied the simmering water from the pot into the sink. She set the pot back on the burner, where it hissed, and then she went up to her room and shut the door.

 • • • 

Hanna was working exclusively on the centerpiece, and Grace was to help her whenever Jacqueline didn’t have anything else for her. On Tuesday morning, all there was for Grace to do was fix a botched seam on a clumsy ceramic patch. They were often called upon to redo the shoddy guesswork of new clients who tried to repair their lesser antiques themselves and only worsened the damage. They brought these mutilated things to Zanuso et Filles, as helpless and embarrassed as people who have just tried to cut their own hair for the first time. When the beloved artifact was returned to them, they would run their fingers over the invisible repair, disbelieving. That moment often awoke some dissatisfaction, and they began to notice, in the antiques their families had passed down, flaws they’d lived with for decades. Suddenly, these marks of time were unbearable to them.

But because restoration could hurt the value of some antiques, Hanna, Amaury, and Grace had to be good enough that their work was undetectable to the human eye. Their clients wanted it that way, of course. Grace wouldn’t ruin an Austrian compact with an American hinge, or gum up a two-hundred-year-old music box with an adhesive that had not been invented until 1850. For private collectors, they restored antiques that needed to look perfect only within the safe space of the home; for dealers, they restored antiques that would be sold to the public with little fuss—an old bureau improved from very good to mint. Grace seldom knew exactly where the pieces went after she finished with them. As long as Jacqueline’s clients kept their valuables close, away from carbon dating and fluorescent spectroscopes, no one would be disappointed.

Hanna was telling Grace something about the antique linen she’d found to re-create the shepherdesses’ dresses so they could convincingly herd the woolen sheep in the spring quarter of the centerpiece. Grace hadn’t been paying attention. Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, yelling already, at ten in the morning, and Grace strained to hear her over Hanna. Grace was worried: The little patch job, which had taken her an hour at the most and was now drying, was the only non-centerpiece work she’d had since she finished the birdcage. There had been slow periods before, but usually because pieces were held up in freight or customs—they knew the work was coming. Grace couldn’t think of anything coming.

The trouble at work had started when their most frequent clients, a cluster of four dealers from Clignancourt, had closed their shops after an export tax scandal. Grace didn’t know how Jacqueline would make up the business. Grace had been at Zanuso the shortest time. She would be the first to go.

“Julie, are you listening to me?” Hanna looked over her glasses. “I need you to start on the orchard, in the summer quarter. You have to make the peaches.” She held up a magnifier to one of her photographs. “These peaches are a little whimsical,” she said. “More pink than is natural, and with a deeper groove. There are only two that are salvageable.”

Grace nodded. “You need how many more, nine?”

“Eleven, and in different stages of ripeness.”

Hanna handed Grace the photograph, a close-up of the peaches. Each was no larger than a pea, made from wax and painted in variegated shades of orange, yellow, and a rush of pink. Their stems were green-painted wire.

“Two should be broken, like this.” Hanna said, handing Grace another picture. In this one, the peach had a bite missing, exposing the pit.

Grace knew the broken peaches alone would take her all morning, quite possibly longer. Like needlework, the centerpiece was intended to display skill. She and Hanna had to do the work even better than the eighteenth-century artisans who’d created it, if their work was to pass. Grace had begun here with easy things, learning on jobs too simple for Jacqueline to waste Hanna’s or Amaury’s time with: vases with cracked feet, jeweled compacts with bent clasps. She had since worked up to broken filigree, chipped enamel, and even, once, a reliquary with several slack gemstone settings that allowed the stones inside to rattle around like loose teeth. This week she would make pea-sized peaches; next week she’d be painting Bible verses on grains of rice. If there was a next week.

She rolled a ball of wax in her fingers, measured it, and recorded the diameter so that all the future peaches would match. She pinched and rolled and pinched and rerolled ten copies. When she had eleven equal balls of wax, she dug out her veiner, a plastic stem with a tapered end that cake decorators used to carve marzipan, and began to push a cleft down the side of the first peach. When all the peaches had clefts and pin-sized pits for the stems, Grace cut bites from two of them with her knife’s narrowest blade and held her breath as she sculpted the round pits. She wheedled a few winding veins into the pits with the eye end of an upholstery needle.

Grace carved and painted peaches all day, stalling toward the end. She scumbled their shoulders with dry paint while she waited for everyone to go home. Hanna was last to leave. When she had finally gone, Grace pulled her James Mont box from the brown paper grocery bag under the bookcase where she had hidden it that morning. First, she removed all the hardware, and then she began to sand. Mont’s gilding process required sanding each layer of paint or leaf down to nearly nothing before adding another. Grace worked softly down through the layers, pausing to take photographs as each hidden layer of color was revealed.

The studio computer had broken speakers, so Grace brought Jacqueline’s laptop out of her office to listen to NPR while she worked. During the day, they tended toward Chopin, Schubert, and the news on the radio, but alone at night, Grace often craved American voices. She didn’t care what they were talking about. Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s voice, in particular, had a fatty American timbre that eased her expat melancholy. Grace snapped her goggles on and started melting powdered enamel with a torch while Lynne discussed the attributes of farmer’s cheese. Minutes ticked by behind the tiny flame until Grace heard a door slam.

“I decided not to leave it uncovered overnight,” Hanna said. “Even to dry. The dust.”

Grace watched Hanna taking in Grace’s secret project, their boss’s computer.

“Please don’t tattle,” Grace said.

Hanna rolled her eyes and came over to look. “It is pretty,” she murmured, running her fingers over the chip where Mont’s gilt receded in mica-like layers. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Sell it, of course,” Grace said. “I need something going when this place collapses.”

“How much do you think you’ll get?”

“Three, maybe four hundred.”

Hanna giggled. “Is it even worth it?”

“He’s worth more in the U.S.,” Grace said, defensive. “You must make a lot more than I do here, if that’s so paltry to you.”

“How much does she pay you?”

“How much does she pay
you
?”

“Just under three a month,” Hanna said. “Half what I made in Copenhagen.”

“Three thousand?” Grace knew that Hanna made more but she had not known how much more.

“How much does she pay you? I know you get cash.”

“
One
thousand,” Grace said.

“My God, how can you live on that?”

“I barely do.” Grace covered her eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose this job.”

“I didn’t know you were so worried about it,” Hanna said.

“Look around,” Grace said. “You and Amaury have got the only work.”

“Valois will open up again under some other name. He always does, and Lemoine too. The work will come back.”

Grace nodded, uncertain.

“I’ll talk to Jacqueline,” Hanna said. “I’ll make sure she knows how valuable you are.”

 • • • 

Grace hardly slept that night, and when she did, she dreamt that she and Mrs. Graham were pulling weeds in her herb garden, and then Grace dug up some teeth and tried to hide them from Mrs. Graham, but she grabbed them out of Grace’s hand and ran inside. Grace couldn’t go back to sleep after that.

In the morning, when Grace got to work, Hanna was already hunched in a corner like a dead spider, her fingers bunched around a thread of beads. Grace sat down across from her and picked up a peach stem.

They worked silently until Hanna stood up and went to the sink. It was half past eight. When she came back with her mug of tea, she gently took the tiny peach from Grace’s hand and held it up. “These were all finished last night,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing now is going to ruin them.”

Grace tried to think of something she could say that would make sense. She was too tired to reason. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, as though that answered a question.

“Me neither.” Hanna had switched to English. They’d never spoken English together.

They were the only ones in the studio. Hanna put her hands on her hips and looked toward the transom windows. “You know, today I have been away from Copenhagen for nine years. My anniversary.”

“You want to go back,” Grace said, now speaking English too. It felt strange and private, as though she’d suddenly shed her clothes.

“Doesn’t matter if I do or not,” Hanna said.

For a minute they were quiet, which was unusual only because neither woman was working. They were accustomed to long stretches of silence, but not idle ones. Hanna looked at Grace. Grace rearranged some of the tools in her jars.

“What was he in prison for? I don’t think you told me.”

“Robbery. Antiques, actually.” Grace felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “He and some friends looted an estate.”

“An
estate
?”

She didn’t know how to describe the Wynne House, the likes of which did not exist in Paris. The nearest example she could think of was Versailles. “A big old house where no one lives anymore, and now it’s open to tourists, but they almost never come.”

Hanna raised her eyebrows. “Daring,” she said. Grace couldn’t tell if she was sincere.

“They were caught in five days. They hadn’t sold anything yet. The estate got it all back.” Except for the painting.

Hanna began to flip through her notes, but Grace could tell she wasn’t really looking at them. “When did this happen?”

“About three years ago,” Grace said. “Just after I first came to Europe.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Now they’re out and it’s just got me a little . . . unsettled.” She shrugged hopelessly.

“This is the one you’re afraid of,” Hanna said.

“Yeah,” Grace said, her throat growing hot. She shifted uneasily in her seat. “I never broke up with him. I was afraid to. I went to Prague for a summer college thing, and a week later, I read in the local news that he and his two best friends had been arrested.”

“I didn’t know you’d been in Prague. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?

Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. Never came up.”

Hanna frowned. “What did you do when you found out?”

“Nothing,” Grace said quickly. “I never talked to him again. I was so shocked and horrified, I just—shut down.”

Hanna held a line of tiny beads threaded along a needle. She tipped her hand and Grace watched the beads slip off the needle and down the thread like drops of water.

“I never went home. I was supposed to go home after, but I didn’t. And I never wrote, never called. Not even to his family.”