The Painted Girls Read online

After that Maman gets all quiet and thoughtful-looking, and I wait for her to scold me about stealing or the house of Madame Brossard. But she puts her hands in her lap, draws in a breath and says, “Marie’s been bawling like the world is coming to an end. She said you two had a squabble, that you’d be leaving Paris, your heart all full of hatred, and I said to her, ‘Now, Marie, enough with the blubbering. Your sister isn’t going anywhere. She isn’t so tarnished as that. There are other houses for Antoinette,’ but she just stared, those puffy, swollen eyes of hers as hard as glass, and then she pulled the linens up over her head.”

  Marie deserves to bawl, and I won’t allow sorrow for the girl holding in place the neck of Émile. What I feel instead is the burn of bitterness about being born to a mother who don’t appear disappointed with her jailed daughter, a thieving coquette, one she assumes will go back to the same line of work, a mother who is not promising to speak to Monsieur Guiot about the possibility of him taking her daughter back. I should not care, not in the least. There is no chance of me again breathing the soapy, steamy air of the washhouse. Already, in recreation hour, I prod the other girls. What houses do they know? Which madams take too large a cut for nothing more than owning a velvet sofa and a polished-up chandelier? Which beat a girl? Which know the trick of bringing a stingy gentleman to opening his wallet? The girls are careful, dropping few crumbs about this house or that, almost never giving away much about the places she will call on once she is free of Saint-Lazare. But I gather up those crumbs, and already I’ve got myself the names of three houses.

  “Now, Antoinette, you got to be nice to your sister,” Maman says. “She isn’t cut from the same cloth as you and Charlotte.”

  “And what cloth is that?”

  She pulls her lips into a tight ring, focuses her eyes on a high corner of the room. “I would’ve said silk; it don’t tear, but it scorches even if the iron isn’t hardly hot. Cotton is too soft. Linen’s got strength. Course it wrinkles, but it’s nothing to iron it out flat.”

  “You’re thinking, I got myself cut from linen?”

  Brightness comes to her face. “No, Antoinette.” She shakes her head. “You are cut from jute. Strong enough for hauling potatoes and making rope, and no chance of finding it in the washhouse, no matter how hard you look.”

  My mind flits away from the lying finger of Michel Knobloch, the betrayal of Marie, the looming trial of Émile. And for a second I wonder about the usefulness of jute in keeping the starlings from pecking the ripening fruit of the cherry trees—if there are such things in New Caledonia as starlings and cherry trees.

  Maman yammers on, so-and-so lifting her skirt for Monsieur Guiot behind the washhouse and always getting assigned the easy work of ironing, so-and-so complaining and Monsieur Guiot assigning her to the wringing machine, and then after that so-and-so drawing a heart with Guiot written inside on the steamy glass and him flying into a rage. I pass the time thinking about Marie, about whether she is more like flannel—soft, worn through easier than most. Or knit wool—eaten up by moths, unraveling when a single strand is broke. I been harsh. Too harsh? Maybe. Probably. Stop.

  Once every bit of washhouse gossip is spilled from her mouth, Maman says, “Well, got to get back. Monsieur Guiot said any more than two hours and he was docking me a full day.”

  She puts a hand deep into the pocket of her skirt and pulls out a tatty scrap of newspaper. She is reaching through the iron bars, holding it out to me and saying, “It’s for you. From Marie,” when one of the jailers snatches it away.

  “It’s nothing,” Maman says to him.

  He looks it over, front and back, before handing it to me. “Once caught a madam passing the answers a girl was to give in the court,” he says. “Stuffed them inside a walnut shell.”

  The newspaper is creased and soft with handling, like it was carried around in the pocket of Marie, even brought to Saint-Lazare those two times I said no to visiting with her. I make out Emile spelled in bold lettering across the top, but not the word that comes first, long and starting with a J. Still, I know what all those words say, why Marie sent it with Maman. That hateful girl, she is still working to turn me against Émile. “Don’t want it,” I say, crumpling the paper, flicking the wad through the bars to the feet of Maman. “Tell Marie I don’t want nothing from her. None of her arguments. Nothing. Never again.”

  “No need to raise your voice,” Maman says, eyes racing about the parlor, from prying ear to gawking eyes.

  And in that moment it is clear to me she came for a lark, a laugh, a bit of gossip, a morning away from her arms up to her elbows in suds. Me heading off to New Caledonia, it might bring on tears, but only a few and wiped away easily with the back of her hand.

  LE FIGARO

  23 FEBRUARY 1881

  JURISPRUDENCE AND ÉMILE ABADIE

  In a few short weeks the court will decide the guilt of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch in the beating death of the widow Joubert eleven months ago. Knobloch has confessed to the crime and named Abadie as his accomplice.

  Knobloch, if found guilty, could be condemned to death. The same, however, cannot be said for Abadie. By virtue of jurisprudence, any individual sentenced to the maximum penalty cannot be pursued for a crime committed before the offense that brought about the sentence. And for Abadie that means the verdict of the court in the Montreuil tavern owner murder has whitewashed his whole past. The widow Joubert was slain before the Montreuil tavern owner, and Abadie’s sentence of forced labor in New Caledonia will stand no matter the findings of the court.

  Is not jurisprudence lovely?

  Marie

  Three weeks ago I read the story about Émile Abadie not going to the guillotine no matter what, and then I read it again. He was heading off to New Caledonia, and there was no more dreaming up a fairy tale of Antoinette rid of him and staying put with us in Paris, her heart full of loathing, but after a while growing rosy toward me again. But there never was comfort in dreaming a dream of the old Antoinette curled around me on our mattress, her fingers in my hair, not from the start, not when the dream was not a sliver true. I turned my back on Antoinette, who never once groveled in her life, except to ask her sister to deliver a calendar to Monsieur Danet. But by the time she was pleading on her knees, it was too late. The calendar was burned. And whether Antoinette went to New Caledonia or stayed in Paris, the ending was the same: She was lost to me, a sister who did not love her sister anymore. Such a stupid thing, striking that match.

  Antoinette combed out my hair, like she had all the time in the world. She raised her voice against Monsieur LeBlanc, with Charlotte and me shuddering as far from the doorway as we could get. She was not paying interest, she spat, not when the stink of the courtyard was so strong, not when the health inspector should be issuing a fine. She walked in a slow circle, studying the attitude I held, the same one Madame Dominique earlier said made me look like a pissing dog. “Gorgeous,” Antoinette said. “Her bellyaching don’t mean nothing more than it’s her time of the month.”

  It is like a broken rib, the way I miss Antoinette.

  How puffed up I was in the moment the match and then the calendar caught, flickering ablaze. In my mind I was altering Émile Abadie’s fate, saving Antoinette from him, saving her for me. But, oh, how I duped myself. Imagine the trickery, the weak-mindedness in thinking a lowly ballet girl of the second set of the quadrille could switch the court’s verdict from innocent over to guilty and in doing so, wrench a murderer from boarding a ship to New Caledonia. That kind of magic was for presidents and abonnés and the high-minded men of the court, not a girl spending hours each day as a prop, a girl with filth clinging to her skirt. My true and only feat in striking the match was never anything more than filling Antoinette’s heart with loathing for me.

  But with a newspaper picked out of the gutter, where it waited like a gift, there was new hope, printed in Le Figaro. The men of the court said it was not Émile Abadie’s fate to fall upon the guillotine. He would go to New C
aledonia, and that meant Antoinette would, too. I waited for swelling panic, rising dread, but it did not come. I sighed the greatest of sighs, bigger than meat in the belly, a door closed against a bitter wind, Monsieur Mérante announcing the end of rehearsal when already the twelve peals of midnight had rung. With the words in Le Figaro, proving Émile Abadie’s life was never in my hands, might Antoinette forgive my lie, my treachery? Might I get my sister back, maybe only for a bit, snuggling close under the linens? It was better than a sister forever lost.

  Twice I tried, and twice Antoinette said no to seeing me. For two weeks after that I badgered Maman. “She’ll want her mother,” I said. “You should go.” Then, just this morning, Maman rolled over on her mattress and, staring up at the ceiling, said, “Old Guiot’s got me on the wringing machine today. How I hate that wringing machine.”

  “Take the morning for calling at Saint-Lazare,” I said. “A nice little break.”

  She pushed herself onto an elbow. “I just might.”

  “I have something for you to give to Antoinette.” I held out the folded-up story of “Jurisprudence and Émile Abadie” in one hand and in the other fare for the omnibus. Any one of the sisters would be able to tell Antoinette what the words said. Quick as lightning, Maman snatched.

  I stand at the barre, bending and arching and thinking I was ridiculous to have taken to bawling and lolling upon my mattress, getting up so late it meant running to reach the Opéra before the practice room door was shut and twice, shrinking under the harshest glare from Madame Dominique when, even with the rushing, I brushed past her, already pulling closed the door. Three times, too, I had stood at the barre with the booming headache I deserved after taking more absinthe than I should. Today, though, the routine of the exercises, the way ronds de jambe always follow battements tendus, is like liniment upon my frayed nerves and the narrowing of my thoughts to just the exercise called out, like salve upon my jumpy mind. In center, the allegro is full of grand jetés en tournant, and I feel myself lifted up, landing with a lightness that dodged me for weeks. Afterward Madame Dominique calls me to the front of the practice room. Once the girls are gone, she says, “A better effort today.”

  I nod, wait, one arm across my ribs, fingers gripping the elbow of the other. Always she says dismissed when a girl is free to go.

  “The Opéra,” she says, “it’s your chance.”

  I put a hand upon my heart and mean it when I say, “I want to dance. I’ll do better. No more being late.”

  She gives me a hard look—her lips pulled in tight, her head tilted to one side—intending to show me she is not a bit sure. I tell myself not to glance away or lick my lips or shuffle my feet, nothing a liar would do. After a while she sucks in a breath, puffs it out through her nose, and says, “Monsieur Lefebvre was in the other day.”

  Seven Tuesdays have come and gone since Monsieur Lefebvre gave me the grey silk and snapped that I paraded around, indecent, luring him into blundering. I wore the dress each visit, but still, each week meant more of the usual from him—the stepping behind the easel, the swaying knees—except that he started letting his trousers drop to the floor instead of holding them up so we could pretend that behind the easel he was doing nothing more than drawing. Last week the panting and moaning jerked to quiet, and like rotten meat spit from his mouth, he called out, “You’re flushed again, all steamy.” He shoved the easel, as if he had no taste for drawing such a lustful girl. Still, like a beekeeper hardened to getting stung, there was far less quaking from me than seven Tuesdays earlier.

  Madame Dominique rubs her thumb hard over the palm of her other hand. “He asked me to teach you the slave dance,” she says. “Monsieur Mérante needs six more girls, and they have agreed you are to be one of them.”

  Le Tribut de Zamora was opening the first of the month and the nerves of half the opera were ready to snap. Nearly thirty years ago Monsieur Gounod gave the world the pretty song “Ave Maria” and then he went and followed it up with an opera called Faust that Madame Dominique says is the finest to ever grace the Opéra stage. And now we have Monsieur Vaucorbeil saying every chance he gets that Le Tribut de Zamora will bring glory to the Opéra once again. But we all know the opera was to open at the beginning of the year, that it was pushed back on account of Monsieur Gounod’s desire to perfect the score. All of us heard the rumblings about him having the nerve to beg Monsieur Vaucorbeil, a second time, for another three months. “Enough fussing” is what I heard he said back. “Le Tribut de Zamora will open the first of April.”

  The opera tells the story of Xaïma, a maiden stolen from her fiancé as one of the hundred virgins owed by the Spaniards to the Moors after Zamora was sacked. I have been doing nothing more in the rehearsals than posing as one of the virgins, which means crossing the stage twice in a series of glissades and filling out the scenery in act two when the virgins get auctioned off. At first I used up the time by marveling at the set, which they say was copied from a place in Spain called the Alhambra, but mostly the rehearsing was boring and dull, and my mind wandered to Antoinette, working herself into a lather of hatred in her cell, forgetting about the feast atop Montmartre, the Savoy cake on her name day, the orange Madeleines that Alphonse sometimes gave me but said he did not mind me saving for her. I told myself I did not care about getting such a measly part. It was an opera, not a ballet. Only ten girls from the quadrille—not a single one from the second set, not even Blanche—were picked for the dancing, a divertissement, put into act three. And all of the ballet—the slave dance; the Georgian, Tunisian, Kabylian and Moorish dances—even if the story tells us it is performed for the purpose of the maiden’s new owner winning over her heart, everyone knows the whole divertissement was only put into the opera for the sake of the abonnés.

  Monsieur Mérante had taken to saying the absence of so many ballet girls would leave the abonnés sulking in their seats and Madame Dominique to thwacking her cane and holding her head like it might come off and raising her voice to shriek that all of us should be watching the rehearsals more closely and learning the steps, just in case. After a while there were whispers among the quadrille about how Monsieur Mérante always got his way, and pretty soon ballet girls pressed into the wings during rehearsal, trying to see, and afterward, swapped the steps they picked up. “I’ve got the Tunisian dance figured out.”

  “I’ll show you the Moorish dance. I know all the steps.” Then the two would go off to some nook where the others could not too easily spy.

  Not me though. I slouched against a pillar of iron scaffolding, wondering if we might be dismissed early enough for me to get to Saint-Lazare, if today would be the day Antoinette would come to the parlor.

  But now with Maman delivering “Jurisprudence and Émile Abadie” to Antoinette, I pull myself up tall and say to Madame Dominique, “I won’t let you down.”

  “Monsieur Mérante doesn’t tolerate tardiness. He dismisses girls for tardiness.”

  I bob my head.

  “There are a dozen girls more deserving, even in the second set of the quadrille. Blanche has most of the slave dance worked out for herself.”

  My eyes fall from her unblinking gaze and, oh, how I regret all the moments slouching against the scaffolding. There would be huffs, lifted eyebrows, talk, more than if I was deserving or at least among the girls struggling to learn the steps. How will I look Blanche in the face?

  “Tomorrow, then,” she says. “You’ll come to class an hour early.” There is more of me staring at the floor and her waiting, holding off on saying dismissed. Finally she says, “It’s good of Monsieur Lefebvre to take an interest.”

  Was it a chance to say about the zinc tub and the opened-up legs and the trousers pooled at his feet? I lifted my eyes to a face not soft but hard, her mouth set, daring me to gripe. Madame Dominique, what she really wants is me in her practice room, upon the stage, like a nymph, a sylph. No tatty slippers. No hollow flesh. No mark of the gutter to spoil the trickery. “I do a bit of modeling for
him.”

  “Good.” She brushes her hands, one against the other, like she is getting rid of dirt.

  Crouched at the hearth, I stir into bubbling broth two carrots and a potato and scraps of roasted chicken plucked from the bone. Maman comes in, all cheery with the news of visiting at Saint-Lazare. “Our Antoinette, she’s enjoying her little rest.” She sniffs at the air. “Is that a bit of chicken boiling up?”

  “You gave her the story from the newspaper?” I say.

  She squats down beside me, holding her hands up to the warmth. “I did, Marie. I gave it to her, just like you asked.” Then her hand is upon my cheek, all tender like. “Now, you promised, no more bawling.”

  I stir the soup, wonder if I should add a bit of salt. “No more sleeping late,” I say and give her a little smile back.

  She takes a picked-clean thigh bone from the small mound collected on the hearth and snaps it in half. “Don’t want yourself chucked out of the quadrille.” She puts a splintered end in her mouth and sucks hard. She reaches for a second, then a third, and I know she will clean out the lot, that I should have, earlier, put aside a few bones for Charlotte. “Nothing wrong with being able to buy ourselves a little meat.”

  She did not ask me to tell her what the newspaper said or why I wanted it brought to Antoinette. Plenty of times she had nipped across the street from the washhouse midmorning to cuff my ear, to pluck at my linens, to holler “Get up” into my face, but she did not want to know what kept me from facing the day. Why clutter her head? Why cloud the picture when all she really wishes for is me to stay put at the Opéra, earning wages enough to keep the richness of marrow in her mouth.

  “Now, Marie, just smell that cooking up nice.” She moves her face closer to the steam rising over the pot.

  Antoinette

  Maybe refusing to see Marie was a mistake. The trial of Émile started early in the week, and still I have no word. I asked Yvette, then Simone, both prisoners of section two, who sometimes got picked to read the stories we listen to in the evening time. But Yvette shrugged and then thought to ask if it was true, what the girls said about me being the lover of Émile Abadie, to which I answered, “He is my half brother and the favorite of my maman.” Simone only said, “You know we aren’t allowed newspapers inside,” and gave me a look like I had two noses upon my face.