Afterimage (19 page)

Isabelle holds her own black hands up to the window light. They keep the record of all the photographs she has taken. They are a logbook of the flesh, each voyage into light written onto them as darkness. They are the true negative of what she does. Who she is.

“The Madonna?” Annie is on her hands and knees, scrubbing the front steps and walk, when Isabelle comes to tell her of her new idea. Annie rests back on her knees, pushes a stray bit of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.

Isabelle crouches down beside Annie, takes her hand in hers. “She was a woman much like yourself,” she says, bending over Annie’s hand to inspect each nick, each smooth rind of scar.

“I don’t think so, ma’am.”

Isabelle looks up at Annie. “You know the story, then?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Annie likes the feeling of her hand in Isabelle’s. Isabelle’s skin is soft, warm. “This is a story that I am particularly familiar with.”

“She was an ordinary, working woman,” says Isabelle, still thinking that she must explain the Madonna to her maid.

Annie stares incredulously at Isabelle. “Ma’am,” she says. “She was the mother of the Lord.” She falls hard into the last word, a place to land, a place to push off from.

“Not yet,” promises Isabelle. “Right now she’s just an ordinary woman who makes a living from her hands.”

“I don’t know,” says Annie. She doesn’t feel right about this. I will not take the Lord’s name in vain. What about his image?

Isabelle’s knees are wet from the stoop. “Please,” she says. The stone against her flesh, her bone, as unyielding as Annie. “Trust me,” she says.

Annie sits back. She still holds her scrubbing brush in one hand, lays it down on the steps. Isabelle looks scared, she thinks. No, perhaps it’s sadness. Isabelle spends so long studying Annie’s face she must be able to read it perfectly by now, all the emotions and subtlety. Annie wishes she knew what Isabelle was feeling. She takes her hand gently away from Isabelle’s. Her skin stings from this loss. “Ma’am,” she says. “I’m not sure that you completely understand the story of the Lord.” It would help Annie if she could read Isabelle’s face, help her to know what she might and might not say. Instead of being angry, Isabelle seems relieved at Annie’s words.

“Well,” she says. “You can explain it to me while we’re photographing.”

*

“The Madonna?” Eldon turns from his library window where he has been looking out at the frosted garden and thinking of the sea. “But you’re not a believer.”

“It’s not about believing,” says Isabelle, exasperated. Doesn’t anyone understand the notion of artistic freedom? “The Madonna is a symbol.”

“Of Christianity,” says Eldon, not convinced. “I thought you were with me on Charles’s new theory. You seemed just as excited by an idea of evolution. Don’t tell me you have succumbed to the allure of an all-knowing being.”

“All I’m trying to do,” says Isabelle, “is to traffic more in what is there.”

“The Madonna?”

“A mortal woman at the point before she is the mother of the Saviour. A working woman.”

“Working?”

“An ordinary woman,” says Isabelle, wishing she’d never bothered to tell him of her new idea, to tell him anything of what she thought.

Eldon crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you know of an ordinary woman, Isabelle?” he says.

“Annie Phelan.”

“As Mary?”

“Of course. She is my…” Isabelle wants to say
model,
but instead says the obvious, “servant.”

It irks Eldon precisely because he can see the fit. He truly believes in his friend, Charles Darwin, and his theory of a slow progression of sea creatures to ape to man, a long parade towards walking upright. Yet he can perfectly believe that Annie Phelan could be a Madonna. There is still something achingly desirable in the notion of the Lord’s will, of things just appearing on the earth. A flash of lightning and Eve
tumbles from Adam’s chest. A nod and the Red Sea splits down the middle. All the absolutes in religion seem preferable to the tentative steps of science. A long, slow, tedious journey to the upright man. Or, a wave of the hand and it’s done. Believe and anything is possible. A woman as a pillar of salt. A child called to heaven.

“You don’t need my approval, Isabelle,” he says. “You do things your way.”

Isabelle looks at the wall of him, in front of the window, arms crossed to ward her off. “Eldon,” she says. “I didn’t come here for your approval.”

“What then?” He feels a wave of jealousy. He doesn’t like to think of Annie Phelan as the Madonna. She had been a much better member of the expedition. Isabelle was wrong about her maid, about who she was, about who she should be. There was a strength in Annie that deserved better than this religious symbolism. “What then?” he says again, with real anger in his voice.

“Nothing,” says Isabelle, turning to leave. “There is nothing I came here to say to you.”

Annie thinks of her family all the time now. The sudden possibility of a new story of them. All this thought has somehow washed them up from the great ocean of the past onto the shores of the living world.

Annie has not seen Eldon Dashell since the day he set off after Franklin. She does not know if he remembered what he’d promised her, if he remembered to write letters on her behalf. He has been sick this past week, hidden away in his bedroom. She can hear him coughing sometimes when she’s
passing by in the hallway. But this morning she was required to light the fire in the library, so she knows he must be well enough to be considering working again.

Annie has thought of telling Isabelle about this new idea of hers, this decision to find out what happened to her family. But Isabelle has never expressed an interest in Annie’s life outside the moments of her modelling, and Annie is not sure how to go about explaining everything, like Franklin and the march with Eldon in his frozen boots over the back field.

All day Annie has tried to go to Eldon in his library, but her work has been at the other end of the house and there hasn’t been a moment to squeeze away for herself. Added to this Isabelle wanted to sit on the outside steps and talk about Annie’s hands. Finally, though, she has managed to run down the hallway and is hurrying along to Eldon’s library.

“Annie!” The call skids her to a stop. She spins around and sees Cook at the end of the hall.

“Yes, missus?” It takes all her self-control not to keep running, not to open the door to Eldon’s library and fling herself inside. She has no doubt he would give her safe harbour.

“Mrs. Dashell wants you in the studio,” says Cook. “She’s been looking for you,” she adds, which means that on not finding Annie she has sent Cook out in search and Cook is not pleased to be taken away from her kitchen.

“Yes, missus.” Annie walks back up the hall towards Cook. “Sorry.”

“You must be where you’re supposed to be,” says Cook. “I don’t have the patience to be chasing you all through the house. Nor the inclination,” she says.

“Yes,” says Annie. She is more sorry that she wasn’t able to get in to see Eldon. She considers pleading with Cook, but the stern look on Cook’s face makes her change her mind.

When Annie gets to the studio, Isabelle is sitting on the bench, staring at the camera. “Ma’am?” says Annie, after she’s entered the room but Isabelle hasn’t seemed to notice this. “Ma’am, I’m here.”

“I was imagining being you,” says Isabelle. She says it with such sincerity that Annie feels tears start to her eyes. It touches her that Isabelle would want to do this, even if Isabelle is imagining being Annie while sitting in the studio, and not on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor.

Isabelle sees the tears in Annie’s eyes. I did that, she thinks. I can do that. She had been sitting here, in the sunny studio, thinking of Annie Phelan, thinking that Annie reminded her both of what she’d lost and what she’d never had. Ellen. Her children.

The afternoon light gentles Isabelle. She lifts her face and the sun cups her chin in golden hands. Her sharp cheekbones soften, and she looks beautiful.

Annie sits down on the bench beside her. Isabelle takes her hand and Annie looks down at their entwined hands, the ugly red of hers, the ugly black of Isabelle’s. She feels as if she is floating away, as if the only thing tethering her to earth is the pressure of Isabelle’s hand in her own. “How do you imagine being me?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think of?” says Annie. “That makes it about me?”

Isabelle is quiet for a moment. She can feel the strength of sun through the glass. Spring’s slow returning. “I was thinking of you sitting here and looking up at me.” She waves her hand at the camera, the solitary stillness of it like a heron standing stiffly in a marsh. “How I would seem to you. From here. How I would look.”

Annie thinks of the photograph of Sappho that she took in Isabelle’s bedroom. How even as the model, Isabelle controlled the scene. How even when Annie was looking at her through the camera Annie wasn’t sure how much Isabelle was allowing her to see. Isabelle could never be Annie. To be me, thinks Annie, to really be me, is to not be in control of the moment. I don’t know what is going to happen. She does.

Mary Madonna wears the grey cloak with the hood up. She doesn’t hold flowers or feathers. She has no children—yet. Unadorned and unaccompanied, she faces her world. Too humble to look straight at the camera, she is in profile, her working hands clutching the cloak around her as though she is out in a bitter north wind.

The Madonna has no idea what lies in wait for her. She does not see herself as special in any way, certainly not as an exalted figure. She does not know she has been born free of original sin, that she has been the immaculate conception. She will treat the baby Jesus in exactly the same manner as she would any child of hers. This is how great a goodness she possesses. How humble she is, how much a creature of the Lord’s will.

Mary Madonna sits at first, but because there’s no child to bend over, to tend to, she looks too lonely like that, the sculpting of her cloak a hollowed-out tree, the husk of it hunched forward around the part of it that is missing. No. Mary Madonna stands by the wall of glass with a curtain of muslin pinned across it. She stands in profile, head slighdy bent forward. She would never look directly at the camera, that is too challenging, too intimate, that makes the assertion that she
is entirely present. Also, her overt beauty might detract from her religious virtue. Better to stand in profile in front of diffuse light, light that is spongy and vague. Better to look down to show natural humility, but not at any specific object, that would indicate too much focus on one thing which would close down a general openness to the wonders and sorrows of the world. Mary Madonna can look down at her hands, but not to examine the intricate petals of a flower, not to have scientific, or even undue, curiosity about the natural world as that would imply a lack of faith in God’s grand design and plan for all living things.

The hands.

The gaze downwards to the hands will pull the viewer’s eyes down as well, down to the thick, strong fingers of the Madonna’s hands. She scrubs floors and blackens grates. Hers are working hands. They indicate an ordinary woman. The mother of the Lord could be anyone. No, the mother of the Lord has to be someone like this Mary Madonna, someone whose sense of her own greatness, her own self, won’t conflict with the greatness of her son. She is there for the Lord to make use of, but she cannot get in his way.

“Ma’am?” says Annie, looking up from the contemplation of her hands and these thoughts of what she is doing, standing by the soft filter of window light. “Is this a graven image?” She has remembered the companion order not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

“No,” says Isabelle quickly.
“Graven
means to engrave. This is not engraving.”

“Yes, but,” says Annie, doubting that the Bible advocates complete fidelity to the wording of the command.

“No,” says Isabelle, before Annie can finish her sentence. “It’s the Lord himself that shouldn’t be graven, and this is only Mary. It’s not the same.”

Annie can see the weak logic in this. She looks down at her hands again, and then back up at Isabelle. Sometimes she thinks the perfect photograph is Isabelle standing beside her camera, as she is now.

This is the perfect image, Isabelle thinks. Annie Phelan as Mary Madonna. The softness of Annie’s face, sharpened a little by the intelligence in her eyes. How her strong body looks ready to bear the Christ child, to carry that burden, that expectation. She can be an ordinary working woman, and yet she is so thoroughly herself as well. And she is destined for greatness, by association, but greatness just the same. She is destined to become the mother of the Saviour and she has no knowledge of this whatsoever. She is oblivious to her destiny.

It suits you, thinks Isabelle. Because Annie is familiar with the story of Mary there is an ease to her portrayal. She isn’t straining hard to get the right sense. She knows what to do. She’s also wary of playing the mother of Jesus, and this hesitancy comes over as humility and makes the portrayal that much more convincing.

“Did Mary fall in love with Joseph, or did God select him to be her husband?” asks Isabelle, moving the camera back so she can get the full sculptural effect of the cloak.

“I’m sure she was in love with him,” says Annie, though she really has no idea and has never thought much about it, but she feels a certain responsibility towards this story, towards knowing it, lapsed as she has been lately about believing as thoroughly as she used to.

“I mean,” says Isabelle, looking through the viewfinder, “would Mary have been the mother of Christ if there had been no Joseph?”

“Joseph was the father, ma’am.”

“Wasn’t God the father?”

“Perhaps there had to be two fathers.”

“Why? So the child is of the Lord, but the act of making the child is still mortal?”

Annie wipes her forehead. It’s getting hot inside the cloak. It seems as though any time she feels certain, Isabelle says something else to confuse her. “I don’t know,” she says, finally.

“Every child is divine. I suppose that’s it. We all have the chance to make a little Jesus.” Isabelle stands back. There’s something wrong with the light. It’s making everything too blurry, as if it’s formed from smoke. “I couldn’t bear to think like that,” she says with bitterness. “Step back. The light’s not good where you are.”