The Third Grace (12 page)

A
glaia's temples throbbed as she dead-bolted the door after Lou, never so relieved as now to see her go. Her apprehension about Lou meeting Naomi had been fully warranted, and she blamed herself for not following her first inclination to intercept Lou before she made it up the apartment steps in the first place.

“What was that all about?” Naomi asked. “What did she mean about the special delivery? And what's up with her magical voodoo herb talk and the papers she gave you? You don't actually read that stuff, do you?”

Aglaia ignored the questions she least wanted to answer. “The articles are helpful in defining artistic expression in my costuming.”

“Right, your sewing.”

Aglaia closed her eyes for a moment against Naomi's breeziness that managed to make her career sound like a hobby, a pastime to keep her occupied until she got married or found her real calling. Naomi might be excused for not realizing the acclamation Aglaia was receiving in her profession by arts reviewers, but didn't she at least recall how hard Aglaia worked as a teen making their matching skirts for church duets? Or the outfits she put together for the two of them to tell the story of King Solomon to the five year olds in the Vacation Bible School class they co-taught one week that summer?

“Magnifique!” François blurts as he comes upon her pirouetting in her new costume.

“It's nothing.” She knows she's blushing. The Queen of Sheba's skimpy chiffon scarves don't cover an undergarment as insubstantial as her bikini.

“Nothing?” He touches the filmy fabric and then runs his palm over her back. “Something from heaven, I think.”

The warmth rushes past her face down her neck to her chest, her breasts. Mary Grace sucks in a cooling breath. To distract him from ogling her body, she finds herself babbling, describing the royal caravan of Sheba—its camels carrying a treasure-load of spices and gold and jewels bound for the wisest man in the world as a gift from the queen for all his answers to all her questions.

“A
pot-de-vin
?” he asks her. “A bribe?” She thinks it's more of a peace offering but François continues, “Do you know about Hera, the queen of heaven, and her
pot-de-vin?
”

The prospect of another of his stories drives the biblical account out of her mind. He draws her down to sit on the floor next to him and tells her about Hera, the goddess of marriage, who was tricked into wet-nursing the orphaned baby Heracles; when she discovered the hoax, she jerked him from her breast so that her milk flowed out into the sky to form the Milky Way.

Hera, François tells her, was a powerful and angry deity who meddled in the affairs of men and seduced the gods to get her own way. The Three Graces were favorite companions of hers, yet she found them dispensable—a kind of currency for her own pleasure, as his tale goes on to prove.

“Zeus was the greatest of kings—like your Solomon, perhaps,” François proposes, and Mary Grace disagrees but doesn't interrupt his story to say so.

Hera was Zeus's sister, constrained to marry him because of his unbrotherly lust for her, and she was filled with malice over the requirement. In revenge against him, she plotted to put her husband-brother, Zeus, into a deep sleep and solicited the soporific help of Hypnos in return for the favors of one of the Graces. Hypnos, greedy to possess his own goddess, inspected the trio with lecherous intent.

“Which of the three did Hera give to Hypnos?” he asks in his creamy voice, his hand reaching again for her body “The Grace of
croissance,
the Grace of
beauté
, or the Grace of
bonheur
?”

Growth. Beauty. Happiness. Which one did Zeus prefer?

“So what is it about Lou's articles that help your deep artistic expression, exactly?” Naomi hadn't let the subject drop during Aglaia's mental absence. How long had she been waiting for a response?

“The reading Lou provides is a free education,” Aglaia replied. “She's an expert in her field, you know. Art takes many forms as it communicates truth, which is the sum experience of culture from the prehistoric times to our era.”

“Truth is the sum… ?”

Aglaia couldn't expect her to get it. “My work is the same as any poem or painting. It's an outward and visible reflection of inward and emotional beliefs.” She heard her own accommodation, a blending of Eb's sacramental vocabulary and François's pantheistic elaborations and Lou's high-and-mighty philosophy. It sickened her slightly. “Besides, I love to sew and I'm good at it.”

“I'm good at cooking meals for the branding crew,” Naomi said in a lighter, teasing tone now. “Does that qualify as art? Or what about my artistic expression of wiping a drippy nose?”

“People often trivialize what they don't understand,” Aglaia answered. The strike at Naomi's intellect hit the mark and the woman shut her mouth and flinched as if in pain. Aglaia tried to diminish her insult, which sounded too much like something Lou might say. “It's just that you haven't got a complete picture of me and my life. You weren't watching when I scraped my way up, barely keeping body and soul together.” How could Naomi have seen? Her head was already in a diaper pail when eighteen-year-old Aglaia was struggling to pay her rent by taking in piecework alterations in her first, dingy basement suite, hemming trousers late into the night before cramming for exams that never paid off. “I was dying to finish my schooling, but Dad never could find it in his heart to lend me tuition. Every cent went into keeping that farm afloat.”

“That's not fair, Aglaia. You know he did his best, given the circumstances.”

“He's never valued learning and Mom doesn't, either. They bury themselves in their grunt work. I'm lucky to have found Lou, who's a real friend,” she said, in spite of her earlier questioning about the nature of their affiliation. “She's taken me under her wing and introduced me to some very important people. She's a complex person, sophisticated and intelligent.”

“Since when have those been the qualities of a friend?” Naomi countered, as if she could read Aglaia's doubt. Naomi went on, ruthless. “I don't mean to sound judgmental, but Lou isn't your type. I don't trust her.”

“She probably doesn't trust you.”

Naomi added more sugar to her cup, clinking her spoon against the pottery. “You were embarrassed by me in front of Lou.”

“I wasn't embarrassed,” she said, her objection weak.

“You were sticking up for me. Pitying me, even.”

“It's not you, Naomi. Rural life just isn't my context anymore.”

“So what is your
context
?”

This had to stop, Aglaia thought. “I don't want to get into an argument when I'm boarding a plane early tomorrow for my first trip to Europe.”

Naomi was quiet for a minute and fiddled with the spoon in her hand, likely sorry for her churlish words, as Aglaia reprimanded herself for her poor deportment as a hostess.

“Well, anyway, tell me about this mysterious delivery Lou mentioned,” Naomi said.

They had to discuss something, Aglaia thought. At least this subject shouldn't incite another argument. So she motioned for Naomi to wait while she tender-footed her way out of the kitchen and scooped up the Bible from her bed, hoping she wouldn't regret her rashness.

“It's a logistical problem.” She dropped the book with a smack onto the kitchen table but kept her hand on top in case Naomi had thoughts of opening it. “Mom dug this out of storage and has the crazy notion that I should return it to its owner—in Paris, of all places.” It was Aglaia's idea to look for François all along—not Tina's, as she intimated—but she might as well try out the blaming technique she could be forced to use when she handed the Bible to him.

Naomi stared at the leather cover. She stammered, “Paris? Who's the owner?”

“Well, you remember that guy, François Vivier, who came as an exchange student?”

How calmly she pronounced his name and reduced him to a couple of words,
that guy
. As if anyone in Tiege could ever forget him; he was the first non-Germanic foreign student the town had ever welcomed. In fact, his reputation spread to the surrounding area, to Imperial and Holyoke, and even some girl all the way from Sterling had asked Aglaia about him months after he left. That really bugged Aglaia, the interest he aroused, and even now the thought that he had held other girls' hearts in captivity made her wonder who
she
was to him—or who she was, period.

Aglaia went on. “I guess he left this behind and it was lost in the rush of the funeral. Now I kind of promised Mom I'd try to get it to him.”

Naomi's mouth hung open. “You kept in touch with him?”

“No, he never wrote.” That still disturbed Aglaia, too. Sure, he had good reason, considering the way Joel treated him at the end, and it wasn't like François could send her an e-mail because no farms around Tiege had Internet access back then. Maybe he lost her phone number, her mailing address, but could he really just forget all about her like that? “Anyway, Naomi, locating him is only part of the problem. What's really getting to me is that I
want
to see him again.”

Her confession sounded inane, spoken aloud like that, and she hadn't even mentioned anything about the notes François had written into the Bible. She was loath to admit the extent of her involvement with François and her deep feelings for him. Naomi would just say that all the girls had a crush on him—except she herself, of course. Everyone knew that Naomi had eyes only for Byron, her sweetheart since childhood.

“So then, it's just that you don't want to let Tina down, right?” Naomi pressed.

Under Naomi's intensity, Aglaia slipped back into evasiveness. “It'd be like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack, I suppose.”

“You'd never locate him after so many years,” Naomi stated flatly, underscoring the irrationality of the whole idea.

But Aglaia didn't answer that one. Her burgeoning craving to see François again made her invincible to Naomi's dissuasion and, besides, she was becoming more convinced than ever that the way to exorcise the memories was to confront her demons. That is, she
needed
to find François and divest herself of the burden of this ruinous book and her sorrowful past if she ever hoped to regain a sense of self.

The two women cleared away the dishes and prepared for bed. Naomi, washing up in the bathroom, purred the words of another familiar hymn—“When peace like a river attendeth my way”—and it made Aglaia want to yell through the door at her that she would get her own peace, that she would find lost love and expunge herself of the confusion once and for all. But Naomi wouldn't understand. She hadn't been the one stricken, smitten, afflicted with love for someone forbidden. She hadn't been the one suppressing this secret for so long, held in its sway, unable to look any man in the eyes without seeing François Vivier.

By the time they were in bed under their own sides of Aglaia's queen-sized duvet in a grown-up parody of their old pajama-party days, the Bible was zipped back into the suitcase.

Naomi slept like a child, her mouth open and the light from the streetlamp luminescent on her teeth. But forty-five minutes later, Aglaia was still awake despite knowing she needed to get up in five hours. Her legs were jumping, restless, as though she'd had caffeine. Lou's strange baiting of Naomi tonight, Naomi's lack of awareness, Aglaia's own efforts at averting a clash between the two—to say nothing of the internal conflict aroused by her reading—hadn't amounted to a relaxing preflight day, but only riled up angst.

She could wake Naomi and talk it out, since the whole thing had its origins back when the two of them were still reading from the same page. She could explain the harassment she'd been suffering because of her mishmash of memories, could tell about her desire to make a name for herself in the arts circle, could even hint at her regret over losing something fine when she turned her face from God.

But talking about it wouldn't give substantial answers to her tenuous queries. What she needed was to find balance. Better to keep her emotions under wraps and retain the reserved exterior she projected to others. Not that she was known to be heartless; she just wasn't known. She hardly knew herself anymore. Somehow she must get rid of the burdensome Bible and, along with it, the rags of any faith that still hung from her. Perhaps by some stroke of luck she might even find François in person, peer into his eyes again, touch his cheek.

At the very least, the trip would bring blessed reprieve from all these nagging people in her life—her mother and Naomi and even Lou. She bunched the pillow up under her neck again and turned towards the corner of her bedroom where Moses' staff was propped. Dear Eb and his impulses to help her!

She willed herself to fill and empty her lungs deeply and slowly, and had the sensation of falling into a vast and dreadful desert, where she came to the bitter well called Marah and grumbled to Moses about bringing her up out of Egypt to let her die in the dry, thirsty land. And she dreamed of a man in linen with a voice like the roar of rushing waters calling to her—
Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters
—and she drank from a sweet, deep well that never ran dry. But she awoke in the morning to the shrieking of the radio clock, her tongue sticky and swollen.

T
wo hours before her international flight on Sunday morning, Aglaia stood beside Naomi in the queue that inched towards the airline check-in counter. Even the canned recording over the terminal loudspeaker reignited her excitement, as did the din and the anonymous jostling of travelers.

During the drive over, Naomi had fretted. She warned Aglaia that the costume box was too bulky as a carry-on, and she worried about Aglaia traveling by herself with the strained ankle—perhaps she needed a wheelchair? The fussing was not merited. Aglaia supposed that Naomi had unspoken concerns on her mind.

“Thanks for the help with my bags,” she told Naomi now, dismissing her.

“I'll stay with you till you get assistance with them.”

“It might be a wait,” Aglaia warned. “Zephyr will be lonely in the car or might decide he needs to pee. Which reminds me…” She glanced past Naomi, looking for the ladies' room for herself.

Instead she almost staggered when she spotted, against the sunshine streaming in through the elevated terminal windows, the outline of Lou Chapman striding up the wide passageway, nose high as she scrutinized the crowd.

Naomi turned to find out what had caught her eye. “Why is she here?”

“I have no idea, but she has luggage,” Aglaia said.

Lou spotted them and butted past several disgruntled passengers waiting their turn.

“Surprise, you've got company,” Lou said drily.

Aglaia was dumbfounded and didn't comprehend her meaning.

“I'm coming along with you to Paris, Aglaia. I've been wanting to dig out some of the resources in the excellent Sorbonne libraries for a paper I'll be presenting in San Francisco later this year, and what better reason to dip into my academic funds than for research?”

“But—”

“My travel agent had to scramble to get me a seat at the last minute,” Lou said, speaking over Aglaia's weak protest, “my online agency having let me down. I don't know why you didn't book a direct flight, instead connecting through La Guardia. Money, likely. That made it all the more difficult for the girl, who finally got the ticket ready for me last night. I didn't want to tell you in case it didn't work out.”

“I—”

“Then with your injury and my fluency in French, I knew you could use a tour guide on your first trip over.” She paused but Aglaia was too bemused to formulate a sentence before Lou went on. “My ruse yesterday of dropping off reading material at your apartment for the flight disarmed you, I see—as I planned. It was worth waiting for the look on your face right now.”

Lou dropped her Louis Vuitton suitcase on the floor with a soft plop. “Don't worry, I'll pay for half the room costs. That should free up shopping cash for you.”

Naomi came to Aglaia's rescue. “We were just going to visit the restroom. Will you stay with her stuff till we get back?” She gripped Aglaia's arm and led her out of the line-up.

Uncaring that her mascara wasn't waterproof, Aglaia splashed her face at the ladies' room sink and patted it with paper towel. She'd had three minutes to acclimatize to Lou's announcement of her travel intentions and was steadying herself already.

“The gall of that woman, prancing right in and forcing herself on you like this!” Naomi, usually charitable, was venting. Aglaia groped around in her bag for her peach gloss and smudged it over her lips with her index finger before she spoke up.

“It might not be such a bad idea, after all,” she said, trying to convince herself more than Naomi.

“This was
your
adventure. She's manipulative, treating you like a puppet.”

“She has a point about the finances and the language, though,” Aglaia reasoned.

“I can't believe you're going along with this.” Naomi's mouth was a grim line.

She wouldn't understand, Aglaia thought, since she didn't know about the university job that hung in the balance. On one level the turn of events dismayed Aglaia, her fantasies casting her as a solitary adventurer, but she was determined to make the best of it. Lou hadn't been this domineering before, but Naomi's strong reaction propelled Aglaia towards moderation. Anyway, the last thing she needed right now was a catfight, the other two women tearing her apart like some unfortunate mouse.

“What choice have I got, Naomi? If she wants to fly to France, how can I stop her?” At least, she rationalized to herself, Lou wanted to spend time with her—that was a compliment. And as a seasoned traveler, Lou knew her way around Paris. Aglaia would be giving up her cherished solitude but she could be gaining valuable assistance in her hunt for François. It was a trade-off. She might as well accept Lou's decision and get the most from it. Naomi would consider her a pushover, but being misunderstood by her was a minor price to pay for the benefits of Lou's friendship. A girl had to have her priorities straight. “Besides,” Aglaia added, “you were the one stressed about me going solo to Europe for the first time.”

Naomi flared her nostrils and changed the subject. “Well, I should be hitting the road. As you said, Zephyr will be yowling. Call me when you get back.” She hugged Aglaia and muttered that she'd pray for her, but left without stopping to wish Lou a safe journey.

The security line was short and Aglaia passed through the frame of the metal detector as her phone in her bag on the belt rang inside the X-ray machine. She didn't get to it in time—the guards refused to be hurried—but when she flipped the cover open, she recognized the missed number and hit “send” as she and Lou walked to their gate.

“Eb, you called?”

“Lass, I wanted to see you off—at least with my voice.” He laughed. “How's that ankle of yours?”

“Much better, thanks.”

“I don't want you to be nervous about the delivery, now. You know that you can get hold of me if any questions come up at the museum.”

“I'm not nervous, exactly,” Aglaia said.

“I suppose you're out of your element already—a bit like a sheep among the wolves? You'll be fine,” Eb reassured her. He must have heard the reservation in her voice—but she could hear his smile. “Just be your lovely self. And eat as much of that heavenly French food as possible.”

Eb hung up the bedroom extension and saw he had enough time for a shave and a spit-bath before the Sunday morning service. He could hear Iona humming in the kitchen, brewing tea and steaming his oatcake—to which he'd add some “unhealthy” marmalade when she turned her back. Their son, Ian, had been converted to toast and packaged cereal as a schoolboy, but last time they were home the grandkids sat on Eb's lap and sampled his breakfast. Maybe they were too big for that now, he thought, and he sniffled a bit as he ran hot water into the sink. Well, anyway, he anticipated a time of blessing at kirk today. It always brought his whole perspective back into focus, and he needed that after the work week he'd just survived.

Now that Aglaia was on her way to Paris, he'd be able to give full attention to the overlapping project, which he admitted would have been less onerous with her input. The public call for bids had come across his desk just as Aglaia was getting into the meat of her museum assignment, and he'd locked himself into his own office for long hours, strategizing procedures and estimating costs. He'd have loved to include her in the process, even if only for her professional edification; the next movie contract might very well be negotiated under her guard. This current film was a major undertaking. If Eb were able to win the contract for Incognito as the on-location costumer for RoundUp Studios—and assuming Aglaia's success in Paris—headquarters would be left without any grounds for closing the Denver branch.

He was awaiting the best time to discuss the subject in full with Aglaia, when stress levels were lower. Eb had no doubt that headquarters would love to transfer her to their offices, but if that happened she'd lose all seniority and be devoured in the dog-eat-dog environment. She was just too tender yet. Worse still, it would be the death knell for her sense of artistic fulfillment, as Montreal's machine required lock-step compliance very different from the flexibility of Eb's own department. So the turf war was his to fight until he could define his own territory without further challenge, and position Aglaia more securely. Then maybe he could retire in good conscience.

Eb lathered up with his badger-hair shaving brush and began to scrape his jaw clean of whiskers, lifting one side, then the other of his moustache in turn. He'd heard through the grapevine that Incognito faced some stiff competition, but in his assessment Platte River University's theater arts department had eyes that were too big for its stomach. That was often the case with institutions of higher learning, where the academy's overweening philosophies couldn't keep up with the demand for applied knowledge in the workaday world.

Not that he was contemptuous of education! In fact, Eb esteemed scholarship, having himself earned from St. Andrews an interdisciplinary degree in arts, literature, and theology before emigrating. That was back in the day when academics still valued the record that came down through faithful writers, before the resurgence of arcane philosophies by postmodern advocates who worshipped the gods they made rather than the God who made them, who boasted of erudition but didn't know about providence and redemption.

Eb shook his head at his reflection in distress over the state of education today. Wisdom wasn't confined to the classroom and foolishness wasn't barred from it, he thought as he toweled off the pudding bits of shaving cream from his jowls.

Aglaia seemed naïve of this fact, judging by her avarice for certification. Going back to school and completing what she began would do her good, but only for the right purposes—not, for example, to impress that professor whose name she dropped into the conversation now and again. In Eb's view, education wasn't an end in itself but was only a way to an end. The pursuit of truth was disappointing without the attaining of truth.

Aglaia, now, was a picture in contrasts about the process of attaining truth. It looked as if she used her emotions, her impressions, to
feel
her way through life, but had shut down on expressing them so that Eb couldn't get a handle on what they were. He believed she was waging an interior war between the purely intellectual and the generously sensual. He saw the two flicker across her face at odd times of the day—say, when she first methodically sorted through his office shelves for a title and then subsequently lost herself in the ecstasy of its pages. But a person couldn't find truth with one and not the other. If the brain knew God, it was the heart that felt Him. Rationality and faith must walk hand in hand, as Blaise Pascal had written so long ago.

Call a truce inside her
, Eb suggested to God as he made his way into the kitchen with his Bible in hand, ready for the Sabbath and for his marmalade.
Bring the factions into harmony so the lass might find her way to serenity.

Aglaia boarded the aircraft and followed Lou down the narrow aisle and found her seat. She wedged herself in beside an obese man, but at least she was by the window. Lou's travel agent couldn't arrange for them to sit together until the second leg of the journey and that didn't displease Aglaia. After the flurry of activity these last two days, she needed some quiet time to acclimatize to the new situation.

The flight attendant served breakfast, and the man beside Aglaia was eager to engage in chitchat with her over his scrambled eggs. To forestall that possibility she retrieved the Bible, which she'd decided this morning to carry in her shoulder bag, and opened it to the beginning.

She'd been speculating over her motivation for deciding to take the book. She declared to Lou that she'd ignore her mother's request and leave the Bible behind, and intimated the same to Naomi. Yet here she was, with the Bible on her lap and the man next to her leaning away as though she were some religious nut ready to launch into a sermon.