The Painted Girls Read online

  I stood there, across the threshold from Colette—her low, overflowing neckline; her pouty, glistening mouth—grasping that Antoinette was not dead. And there was some amount of joy bubbling up, but the bubbles were bursting faster than they were being made. Antoinette was a coquette, jailed for robbing a gentleman. The truth of it was like the sharp point of a pin.

  But still, even now, walking to Saint-Lazare, I say to myself, “Wake up, Marie. Wake up from this ugly dream.” But I do not wake up. No, I put one foot ahead of the other, taking a step, peering into the fog cloaking the lampposts, the carriages, the shops not a half block away. Again, I step, swallowed up in a blanket of murk.

  The visitors’ parlor at Saint-Lazare is a square room split in two by a partition of iron bars, with chairs on either side, an ugly place I never hoped to see. Three jailers, all leaning up against the walls, keep watch of the six visitors, sitting, waiting, like me, or already talking in low voices to the prisoners on the other side of the bars.

  What should I have done to stop her slide, her fall away from the girl who told me not to linger in stairwells, to walk quickly on the way home from the Opéra? She blamed quitting the washhouse on raw knuckles and chapped skin, and maybe they were enough to push a girl from laundress to tavern maid, but rough hands were not the cause of Antoinette giving up on a life of honest work. What was? Did she mind the four bouquets that brightened our lodging room for a week, the flash of happiness every time I remembered the soft thud of my ankle being hit?

  When she finally came to see La Korrigane, she sat in the fourth balcony, squinting to see the gold bands of my Breton peasant skirt, the fine lace of my apron, collar, and cap. And afterward she said I ranked in the top five of the second set of the quadrille and that my dancing was superior to that of a half dozen girls in the first. She kissed me on the brow, and I lay my head on her shoulder. We stood like that a long while, and I felt the calm of a caterpillar inside his cocoon. But was her mouth, the mouth I could not see, sneering bitterness?

  The Opéra, it is what I have that she does not. And, yes, it is something—all the moments when I am lifted above the grind of climbing the stairs and the strain of laboring at the barre and the boredom of holding still upon the stage. “To seek grace,” Madame Dominique says. “To dance is to seek grace.” Is it what I have found? For upon the stage, sometimes in the practice room, I close my mind to the worry of Antoinette, the coolness of Maman. Sometimes a shimmering moment of crystal clearness comes.

  I am not happier than I was in Sister Evangeline’s classroom, back when Papa would get me laughing without bothering to cover up my teeth. But no point in thinking about all that. It is what came afterward—Monsieur LeBlanc rattling our door, demanding what was owed—I need to remember when tabulating how I am getting along. As things are, with the arrangement I have with Monsieur Lefebvre, we have pastry for breakfast, thick soup at the end of the day, sometimes a few sous left over for a sweet. Monsieur LeBlanc does not come, or did not come, not with Antoinette contributing, too.

  Still, the flesh alongside my thumbnail is picked raw, more raw, I think, than it was before I was elevated to the second set of the quadrille, and Monday nights, I find myself begging for sleep to come or waking up to blackness and filling with dread that with the first light arrives a Tuesday and then a morning at Monsieur Lefebvre’s apartment. Twice Maman barked for me to stop thrashing and put her hand upon my brow. “No fever,” she said, and in the blue light of the moon, I watched her pull a small bottle from beneath her mattress. Rim upon my lip, she tilted the bottle and I swallowed licorice so bitter that my tongue grew hard as a knot. But afterward sleep came, and three times since I have spread my hand flat, seeking Maman’s bottle for myself.

  I caught Antoinette watching me once, a Tuesday morning, while I combed out my hair. She just stared, her head tilted to one side. “Everything all right, Marie?”

  I almost said about the wooden clogs, the opened up knees of afterward, but her eyes were red rimmed and puffy underneath. She had her own sorrows and I was not sure I should add to her load a second heavy heart, not when already I was fifteen. “I’m tired,” I said.

  “You called out in the night. You called out two times.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  She shrugged.

  “That Charlotte sure knows how to sleep,” I said, putting brightness in my voice.

  “A gift of innocence.” Our eyes met, clung, and for a flash, it was like she already knew about the wooden clogs, like I already knew about the house of Madame Brossard.

  “The way it should be for a girl of ten.”

  “Yes,” she said. And we nodded, so grave, and a feeling came over me, like our nodding had sealed the most solemn of pacts.

  Sometimes I think how I could make a change.

  In the rue de Douai, on my way home from Madame Dominique’s class, it is not unusual to see Alphonse in his baker’s apron and cap, smoking on the stoop of his father’s shop. Always he bothers to dip his chin. Sometimes I stop, and he says, “Ah, the ballet girl,” and I smile. A week ago, he said, “One moment,” and disappeared into the shop. Quickly he was back, holding out in one hand a vanilla sable and in the other an orange Madeleine. “Which do you prefer?” I picked, and we stood there, me nibbling at the orange Madeleine, him brushing sable crumbs from his lips. It gave me the courage to ask if his father was happy with the girl he had taken on to knead the dough for the eighty baguettes.

  He gave a little laugh. “Twice a week I listen to him complain about that girl not having half the strength of you. She doesn’t hum, neither,” he said.

  “Hum?”

  “You always hummed. Sweetly.” His eyes fell.

  I felt my cheeks growing rosy. He gave my arm a little punch with the side of his fist, and even if I did not work up the nerve to ask about his father giving me work again—maybe I could train myself to rise early, even after a late night—I knew there was a chance.

  That evening I thumped Monsieur Degas’s heavy door. He had not called me to the workshop in nine months. Sabine answered and, wiping her hands on her apron, said, “Well, look at you, Mademoiselle van Goethem. Almost a lady, now.”

  The workshop was dim, lit by a handful of lamps, but still Monsieur Degas stood in his painter’s smock, one arm across his ribs and the other propped on top, holding up his chin, as if, after a moment of considering, even with the late hour, he would get back to his work.

  “I’ve come about modeling,” I said. If Alphonse’s father would give me a few hours, if Monsieur Degas wanted me steady again, if I went around to the pork butcher, the watchmaker, the crockery dealer and any one of them saw his way to a few hours more, I could get by without Monsieur Lefebvre’s thirty francs. The trick would be finding the hours to sleep.

  Monsieur Degas looked up, his eyes meeting mine.

  I lifted my arms from my side. “I’m not so skinny anymore, no longer a petit rat.”

  I saw him every few weeks at the Opéra—in the wings, in the orchestra stalls, in the practice room. Usually he greeted me by name, and once he said, “Your allegro is improved.” Always he wore his blue spectacles, and always his gaze was steady, burrowing. But that evening in his workshop, without hardly bothering to look, he said, “The statuette, it troubles me.”

  He waved a hand, and I followed with my eyes to his statuette, two-thirds the size of me in real life, and my breath quickened that he had not given up. I walked closer, taking in the canvas ballet slippers, the tarlatan skirt, the leek-green ribbon tied in a bow around the thick plait of what looked to be a wig of real hair. The skin was smooth or rough, uneven in color—deep honey on the face, reddish brown on the legs—all of it formed from a substance neither polished nor dull, opaque nor clear, soft nor hard.

  Wax, I decided, thinking of the way it bled down the sides of candles, hardening as it cooled, always changing shape, even, on a hot day, without the heat of a lit wick. There was a thin film of the same co
vering the hair; tinted yellow, covering the bodice; tinted red, covering the slippers.

  No stone. No bronze. No porcelain. Only wax. Temporary. Second-rate.

  And what was Monsieur Degas meaning, dressing up the statuette in real clothes and, worse, a wig of real hair? Was it woven together from the sold tresses of a starving girl? The clipped locks of the dead?

  That freakish doll’s body—the skinny limbs, the too-large elbows and knees, the ridges of muscle sticking out from the thighs and the collarbones jutting below the neck—was no longer like my own. But in the face—the low forehead, the apish jaw, the broad cheekbones, the small half-closed eyes—the statuette was the mirror of me. The only mercy—Monsieur Degas hid my teeth behind closed lips.

  What was the story, the story of a heart and body, Monsieur Degas was trying to tell? What was I thinking as I stood those long hours in fourth position? I was craving the stage, a position in the second set of the quadrille, a kind word from Madame Dominique. Muscles aching, stomach rumbling, I wanted the four hours to end, to find a scrap of sausage left for me at home. But I held still, dreaming up glory—a real ballet girl, captured in pastel and chalk, even oils, and then after he said, “A statuette,” my desire swelled. I dreamt of Marie Taglioni, wings spread, hovering above the earth.

  I looked into the statuette’s face, and I saw longing, ambition, pride. Her chin was tilted up, and it seemed a mistake, too hopeful, on such a face. Such an ugly, monkey face. I turned away, still feeling small half-closed eyes upon my back.

  Monsieur Degas was not looking my way, awaiting some comment from me. No, he was lost inside his own head, and so I stood there, quiet, wishing I had not come.

  Eventually he turned to me, saying, “Perhaps. Perhaps.” He took up the pose I had held for so long, the pose of the statuette—feet in fourth position, fingers laced together behind my back. “Would you mind?”

  I slipped off my shawl and, knowing his impatience, let it fall to the floor. I arranged myself, easily. Memory, Madame Dominique said, was not only the domain of the mind.

  For a moment he was gleeful, almost clapping his hands, but then he paused. “No,” he said. “You’re not teetering between rat and sylph anymore.” He touched me on the shoulder lightly, and in the touch I felt sadness that girls grow into women; that men crumple, hobbling over walking sticks; that flowers wither; that trees drop their leaves. The graceful, childish back Monsieur Lefebvre, more than a year ago, felt driven to touch was gone and with it Monsieur Degas’s interest in me modeling for him. He wanted only the heart and body of a little dancer, aged fourteen.

  “All those sketches,” I said. “They won’t change.”

  He straightened his glasses, turned away from me to a notebook, one I knew to hold drawings of me.

  I wrap my fingers around the iron bars, give a little tug, but the grate is firmly lodged, and there is no more chance of rattling it than the brick floor beneath my feet. Monsieur Lefebvre is my protector, and there is no other way, especially not now, not without Antoinette.

  I want to put my face in my hands, to howl, for me, for Antoinette, for all the women of Paris, for the burden of having what men desire, for the heaviness of knowing it is ours to give, that with our flesh we make our way in the world. For there is a cost. But would Antoinette agree, or would she say there was no cost other than what a girl decides to believe in her own head? I look from one jailer—bored—to the next, idly fingering a brass button on his coat. Would they say there is no cost, not so long as a girl takes no more than what a man decides her flesh is worth? Could I put my mind over to that way of thinking? Would it mean I could stop wishing for Antoinette to be different than she is? Could I sleep Monday nights?

  I look from the long face of one visitor to the wringing hands of the next. Are any of them saying why? Why take up the life of a coquette? Why steal seven hundred francs, especially when it meant hiding, running away from all she knows? From Charlotte. From Maman. From me. And now, before the iron bars, my face falls to my cupped hands. She was leaving behind nothing, only Charlotte, who is selfish; Maman, who drinks; me, who calls the boy she loves a murderer, a coldhearted slitter of throats.

  But, oh, it is true. I swallow hard, a trick I learned in the company of Monsieur Lefebvre for clearing tears, for switching my mind to some detail—the laurel wreaths of the carpet, the pinkness of his scalp. And eyes still dry, I put my hands in my lap. On Wednesday, the same day Antoinette went to Saint-Lazare, the newspaper said a boy confessed to the widow Joubert’s murder and swore under oath Émile Abadie took part in the bludgeoning.

  I am grateful for the grey silk dress I am wearing today, even if before I opened the beribboned box Monsieur Lefebvre put in my lap, I hoped for a dress not as lavish as those worn by the ladies at the Opéra but maybe with a neckline opening across the shoulders, maybe with a bit of lace, even a single rosette. But, no, my dress is high-collared, grey, stern, something a banker’s daughter wears to Mass, something a coquette’s prideful sister puts on to visit her in jail. On opening up the box, I know my face fell. The air took on a chill, and Monsieur Lefebvre said, “You are only a girl.”

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “And an ungrateful one at that.”

  I bit my lip, like I should have my tongue. Always, the minute an abonné was in sight, Perot put on a sultry pout. When I started to tell about modeling and Monsieur Lefebvre not being an artist at all, Blanche rolled her eyes and snapped, “The price of roses at your feet. Tell him I won’t be nearly such a prude.”

  I stroked the smooth coolness of the silk. “So beautiful,” I said. I kept my chin tucked in but dared to lift my eyes. “I never dreamt of such softness against my skin.”

  “The way you parade around—buttons missing, neckline gaping, underclothes threadbare or not there at all—it isn’t decent.” He said it all curt, hateful, like I sat there in the evenings, plucking off buttons and fiddling with the drawstring of my blouse until it was worn too thin to hold anything in place, all of it with a mind to luring him into blundering the next day.

  Antoinette sits down across the iron bars, and I want to close my eyes to the prison gown of brown coarse wool, the faded cape of dusty blue, the tatty cap of threadbare cloth, the half-moons the color of dusk underneath her eyes. A shyness comes over me, a feeling I do not hardly know Antoinette. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she says.

  She reaches through the bars, and I take her hand. “Oh, Antoinette.”

  Her shoulders fall. She shakes her head, but she does not explain about taking up the life of a coquette, about stealing seven hundred francs. No, her eyes fall to my dress, and she tightens her grip. “That dress you’re wearing, where’d you get such a dress?”

  “A gift.” She eyes me, her gaze sorrowful, her brow lined, but she says nothing more. I had imagined urgent whispers, our heads leaned in close, and sobbing and wiping away each other’s tears. I take a breath and, wanting to erase the gaping quiet, I leap into explaining how Colette—your friend from the house of Madame Brossard is what I say—came to the door. I wait for her face to change, for her to speak, but there is nothing to show her grasping that I know it was not a tavern she headed off to all those evenings. “She said you took seven hundred francs. But why, Antoinette?” I sound like Charlotte, whining for a piece of barley sugar, a second egg when we only have four.

  “That dress?” she says.

  “It’s me who should be interrogating you.” I say it quiet but hold my gaze firm.

  “All right,” she says. “You’re right. First though, I got a favor to ask.”

  I nod.

  “I need you to let Émile know I’m here, at Saint-Lazare.”

  Like always, I bristle at the mention of that boy, but I do not let go of her hand. If we fight, if she stands up and leaves, the iron bars would hold me back from following her. I lean in. “Tell me,” I say. “Tell me why you worked in such a place.” When she only presses her mouth into a tight line, I go on, “
There was enough for meat twice a week.”

  She rubs a thumb over the back of my hand. “You don’t want the answer.”

  “I do.” Again, Charlotte’s whimpering voice.

  She blinks, and even with her face toward me, her gaze upon me, she is staring clear through me to the wall at my back. “I need money for passage to New Caledonia,” she says.

  “Antoinette?”

  Her eyes drop to the brick floor at her feet but only for a flicker. Then they are back upon my own.

  My vision blurs, and there is nothing to be done about the tears rolling onto my cheeks. “You can’t.” I tug my hand free.

  She drops her face into her palms. Her shoulders quake. She is sobbing, without making noise. I lift up a bit from my chair, but the iron bars, they keep me from putting in my arms a girl who does not make a habit of tears.

  What to say? Do I explain about the equator, about one hundred and eighty degrees reaching the other side of the earth? She cannot know. “A tunnel drilled through the center of the earth will end in New Caledonia,” I say. “But there is no drilling of such a hole, no such thing as a tunnel stretching that long.”

  Her head bobs slightly, and she takes her hands from her face. “Six weeks, maybe more, on a ship, sailing from Marseille.” I see in her steady gaze the willfulness that led her to the house of Madame Brossard, that allowed her to lift her skirt, the pigheadedness that says she will one day set foot in that faraway place.

  I wipe at my eyes, lick my lips, lace my fingers in my lap. “You love Émile Abadie. I know it. I’ve seen you happy. I’ve seen you on his arm in the rue de Douai. But sometimes you despair.” She opens her mouth to speak, and I hold up my hands, soft though, a gentle hush. “I’ve heard you sorrowful. More than once I heard you argue with that boy about a dead dog, about letting another boy slap your face, about the money he wasn’t saving up. You have a darkness under your eyes, and that boy, he put it there.”