The Third Grace (26 page)

She stuffed her laundry into the washing machine and watched the foam rise, the agitator chew and swish. If only purging herself of the grime ground into the fabric of her being were so easy.

Since downloading her photos from the Paris trip last night, especially the ones taken in the Louvre, she'd been thinking a lot about the Three Graces. The statue grouping she'd examined up close in the museum was carved from the stone of the earth—the essence of grime, really—and came from the same dust she'd return to someday, as Joel had done. In Pradier's rendition of the Greek goddesses, her namesake Aglaia stood with sightless eyes raised to the heavens—albeit to the god Zeus—as flesh-and-blood Aglaia used to worship the God of the Bible. But for a long time now, Aglaia's own eyes had focused not on the heavens but on François who, like some thwarted King Midas, had turned her to common stone through and through, and her eyes had been fixed on him for what seemed an eternity.

Aglaia sifted through her mental store of myths for some escape from her doldrums, but only Niobe came to mind, the tragic figure of mourning who cried inconsolably over the loss of her children so that Zeus turned her into a statue that wept forever. And Echo, the mountain nymph rejected in love, who pined away till just her voice remained. Hollow consolation they were—two more sad goddesses who offered no hope but only admonished her for her inability to shed her own tears, to raise her own song in praise. All her daydreams had deteriorated since meeting François again. All her myths had lost their luster.

When the washing machine splashed Aglaia in its agitation, she came back to herself and closed the lid. The jet lag must still be getting to her. The telephone rang, but the number was blocked on the call display. She'd better pick up.

“I know you don't want to talk to me yet, but I need to update you on Henry's situation.” It was Naomi, and remorse stabbed Aglaia;
she
should be the one doing the calling about her dad. “Byron will be at the hospital with your parents by two-thirty. He'll book Tina into the nearby facility for visiting relatives. I hope you don't mind our making the arrangements.”

“That's fine, thanks.” She didn't sound grateful.

“I suppose you'll be meeting Tina and Henry for the appointment with the specialist, then? Because someone should be there for them when Byron leaves.”

“I'll make sure they're taken care of.” Aglaia wanted to brush her off, but that'd be the height of discourtesy in light of Naomi's altruism.

“Well, since I have you on the line, let's talk for a couple of minutes,” Naomi said, pressing her advantage. “I mean, you left in such a state yesterday.”

Aglaia might as well get it over with, tell Naomi straight out that she wasn't interested in trying to patch things up. How could Naomi expect friendship when she didn't even deserve forgiveness? Aglaia plopped down on her couch in the living room to tell her so, but caught the Bible as it bounced open to the book of Revelation, and from that point on she didn't hear another word Naomi said. Her full attention was taken up by handwritten words she hadn't seen before, recorded in two distinct scripts.

First, François's pencil had written in extensive and complicated French:
Idée de génie! Des biblots, des joyaux, y graver “Kallistei,” en combler mes Grâces, et leur donner la pomme!

Then beside it, a bold blue ink command read: SEE ME. LOU.

“I've got to go,” she blurted to Naomi, and slapped the telephone receiver onto its cradle. When had Lou snooped into the Bible, and how much had she read of François's notes throughout? How dare she write her own dictum into the margins, like some divine commandment—“Come unto me, all you who are unable to read the language”—assuming that Aglaia was helpless without her?

But maybe she was. Aglaia comprehended a few of his French words: “idea” and “apple” and, of course, “Graces.” But try as she might using her phrase book, her dictionary, and even an online translation tool, she couldn't decipher his meaning as a whole, and it was time to leave for the hospital if she didn't want to be late. She despised François Vivier now and wanted to put an end to the whole, humiliating debacle. The quickest way to see it through was to ask Lou what the phrases meant; evidently she had some knowledge after all that Aglaia needed. It galled her to be at Lou's mercy, but she'd better make nice to the professor before tomorrow night's function anyway. Calling on her to ask for translation of the passage was as good an excuse as any.

Aglaia fitted the Bible into her purse, first taking out her travel documents and the incidentals she'd carried on the plane. She determined to stop by the university as soon as she was done with her parents and ask Lou what the writing in the Bible was all about. She wanted to tie up the loose ends, maybe even throw the cursed book into the trash on her way home, as she'd done with her own Bible when a teen. It would be symbolic of her renunciation of François, and even of God.

“D
ad, you can't just discharge yourself.” Aglaia stood beside the bed and looked towards Tina and the cardiac specialist for support, but her father's chafing was nothing new to her. “Besides, Byron's left for home and can't come to fetch you until Monday.”

“The doctor said my color is better.” Henry elbowed himself up on the bed. “Didn't you say that, Doc?”

The specialist, a petite redhead wearing heels, paused from scratching on her clipboard. “I said we want to observe you through the weekend,” she corrected Henry. “The beta-blockers seem to be doing the trick, and the test results should confirm your status. But you need to get your energy back before we discharge you. You're a lucky man to have lived through that heart attack, Mr. Klassen.”

Tina thanked the doctor as though her husband had been given a stay of execution. When she was alone with her family again, Tina said, “Don't think about escaping this time, Henry. Let's celebrate with take-out from some fancy restaurant—maybe pizza.”

“I don't think he's up to it,” Aglaia said. For all his bluster, he was pale and nodded in agreement.

“Tomorrow then?” Tina asked Aglaia. “You have the day off from work, don't you?”

“Tomorrow I'm busy. I won't be back till Saturday.” The disappointment in her parents' eyes prompted Aglaia to explain further. “I have a formal engagement and I can't get out of it.” The dinner wouldn't occupy her earlier in the day, but she didn't mention that.

“A date?” Tina asked.

“Don't pry,” Henry said.

Aglaia laughed in spite of herself. “No, I'm going with an associate to a business dinner at the Oxford, downtown. You know, it's that expensive historic hotel right across from Union Station.” Aglaia might have gone on to say something about the professional connection with the university and the likelihood of a new job, but Henry had something else on his mind.

“Sit down, Mary Grace,” he said. “We want to talk to you.”

Henry motioned for his wife to bring out a ledger from the bag by the window. The sight of the slim journal evoked in Aglaia's mind the many evenings she worked on math homework beside her dad at the kitchen table while he transferred numbers from sales receipts into an identical book.

He opened it now and traced a column with his finger.

“What is it?” Was her dad worried about finances? That'd be the predictable response to his brush with death. Was he wondering how Tina would manage someday without him? Aglaia didn't have time for this now. It was already late afternoon and she wanted to catch Lou before she left her office. “If this is about your will,” she began, but he shook his head.

“No, that's all taken care of.” He turned the ledger towards her. “But the farm's not doing too well,” he said. “Right now the price of wheat is going up, but ever since Joel died…”

Aglaia hadn't heard her father speak Joel's name since the day she left home.

Tina filled in the rest of his sentence. “We miss him so much.”

They were both watching her, waiting for her to say something—to offer them her verbal denouement of Joel's death. If Dad had withheld Joel's name from her, she'd withheld her feelings from them.

“Don't you?” her mother asked.

“Don't I what?” Aglaia lamented their timing; she had to run. And why did they have to bring up the subject after all these years anyway, just when she was struggling through it herself?

“Miss him. Don't you miss Joel, Mary Grace?”

Now both of her parents were openly weeping so that she crossed the room for a box of tissues.

“We know how close you were as kids,” Dad said. “I always thought, since he was dead and gone, there was no sense in talking about it, digging up old pain.”

Aglaia agreed; they should all shut up about it now. This emotionalism of theirs must be coming from Dad's health scare, but knowing that didn't alleviate its effect on her. It was difficult to observe her parents' sorrow.

Tina chimed in. “You know, when you were just a
Bäbe
, he loved you already.”

“The youngster said he wanted to marry you when you grew up.” Henry chortled, then swiped at his dripping nose. Aglaia remembered promising Joel that they'd be best friends forever, and yet—the thought ripped at her heart—she had discounted the value of such brotherly love in allowing François to turn her head away with his own faithless version.

“My doctor told me I need to get some stuff off my chest.” Henry rubbed at the front of his hospital gown and grinned wanly at his own joke.

Then he began to talk as Aglaia hadn't ever heard him talk before. He admitted he shut his daughter off for a long time because it was so hard to see her leave after Joel was killed. He told her of his loneliness out in the fields as he worked the land without his children beside him. Tina made damp noises of agreement as he explained his love for working the soil, his grief over dashed plans for the family farm, and, mostly, his regret over losing both his kids.

“Won't you come back home to us?” Tina interrupted, cutting to the chase.

Henry nodded. “That's what I'm saying, Mary Grace. Won't you come back?”

She was rendered speechless by the outlandish request and only stared at them.

Henry clarified the question. “We don't mean you should
move
back to the place or anything like that. I need your help to run the place during harvest and seeding for a couple of weeks, like you helped this year.”

“We'd never have done it without you,” Tina added. “Byron said so.”

“I need you to become a partner, Mary Grace, so when Mom and I get too old to run things anymore, you can manage it for us from your home in the city. When we die—” Aglaia's hands shot out, palms open, in reflex, but Henry started again. “When we die, you can rent it out for income, maybe to Byron. There'll be good money in it someday. It's all we've got to leave to you, girl. It's your inheritance.”

Overcome by the deluge of their generosity and the sodden load of their expectations and the buoyancy of her own unanticipated joy, Aglaia fled.

Lou heard the tentative knock and almost ignored it, taken up as she was in drafting her remarks for her stint before the microphone tomorrow night. But her office door creaked open and Aglaia peeked in with something like contrition written on her face. She hoped the girl wasn't planning to renege on their engagement and had come instead to collect the item Lou was retaining for her. Her advantage might yet garner the cooperation of the seamstress regarding the plan she and Oliver had concocted.

“Come in, sit. Nice to see you again so soon,” Lou said, generous despite Aglaia's cold shoulder during their long drive back to the city yesterday. “I thought I wouldn't have the pleasure until tomorrow.”

“I'm not interrupting you?”

“Not at all.” Lou put aside her speech notes and clasped her hands in front of her. “What can I do for you?”

Aglaia blushed. “I have a problem.” She pulled the black leather Bible out of the bag on her lap and deftly turned to the back, to the page on which Lou had penned her summons that night in their Paris hotel room.

Now Lou was certain the girl was not in her office to break their date but had finally read far enough in the book to discover Lou's own message written beside the lover's script. She suppressed a smile of triumph.

Since first reading François's French notation in the margin, Lou had put some time into research. She investigated the context of the Bible passage using commentaries in the religion section of PRU's library, and brushed up on the myth referred to by François—the myth she tried in vain to tell Aglaia in front of the statue of Venus de Milo in the Louvre nearly a week ago. Lou found her study uplifting; it suggested that François possessed some literary intelligence and understood the rudiments of cultural analysis in Greek mythopoeic literature, current French linguistics, and biblical hermeneutics. Perhaps she was crediting him with too much acumen, but she felt an affinity with this faceless François Vivier.

Aglaia was showing her the familiar notation now, which began
Idée de genie
(though Lou had already transcribed its translation from memory—she wouldn't easily forget his words). Beside it, the underlined biblical passage read:
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.
The girl was running on, explaining how she tried to figure out the French for herself, and Lou nodded absently as she mentally reviewed her own findings.

In her research, Lou had first considered the textual passage of the Bible, in which allegedly the author was writing to the early Christ-followers living in Pergamum. The city still stood in modern-day Turkey near Troy's ten-level ruins and, as the birthplace of parchment, it was an ancient center of learning with a library of two hundred thousand books. Theologians, she read to her amusement, designated Pergamum as the “throne of Satan” because of its temples dedicated to Zeus, Asclepius, Dionysus, and Athena. The Christian acolytes under discussion in the passage were being taken to task for tolerating the immorality and idolatry surrounding them, and for compromising on their own doctrines. Those who held fast to the purity of the church's teaching and resisted assimilation into the world systems, the author promised, would be rewarded by God. The “hidden manna” spoken of was Jesus Christ, Bread of heaven sent down like desert food to the church today, she read, while the “white stone” stood as a pledge of Christ's affiliation with them. Lou supposed this was a reference to the white stone given at the ancient games of Olympia as a token of honor, or the pebble of acquittal awarded by the Greek courts to declare the accused “not guilty.”

The quality of scholarship existing at the theological level surprised and impressed her.

After understanding the milieu of the apocalyptic passage, Lou then reviewed the details of the Greek myth only hinted at in François's writing in the margin. That story began with a great wedding feast to which all the deities but Eris, the goddess of strife, were invited. Eris was the daughter of the primordial goddess of the night, and bore her own shadowy children—the personifications of toil and trouble, quarrels and lies, concealment, ruin, and folly. As retribution for being left off the guest list, the troublemaker Eris lobbed a golden apple—engraved with the word
Kallistei
—into the nuptial celebrations, proclaiming that the one who possessed it would be named the most desirable in all the heavens.

Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite converged upon the apple and claimed it as their own, arguing among themselves in what Lou thought must have been a magnificent catfight. A tie-breaker was called and the prince of Troy chosen as the judge of the three deities who convened before him.

Each goddess offered the prince a bribe. Hera promised political power, and Athena military prowess. But Aphrodite, goddess of love, knew the weakness of the prince and the potency of sexuality. With the charms of the Three Graces to heighten her own allure, Aphrodite bribed the prince with the love of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman. Helen was already married to the mighty king of Sparta. The prince's lust perverted his judicial wisdom, and he chose beauty over skills of battle. He gave Aphrodite the apple in exchange for Helen, stealing her away from Sparta and triggering the Trojan War.

With her biblical and pagan research in order, Lou understood much better François's meaning in his impulsive message, his idea inspired by the fancy of Scripture. Now Aglaia was finishing up her own explanation of how she'd come upon his writing herself and wondered if Lou would, indeed, be of assistance as promised.

“So, you're asking me to… what, exactly?” Lou knew why Aglaia had come to her, but she wanted her pound of flesh.

“Well, I hoped you'd give me the translation.”

“You're unable to read it? But Aglaia, your grasp of French was excellent in Paris,” Lou said, toying with her. Aglaia wasn't oblivious to the sarcasm; she frowned. Lou knew she was treading on thin ice. Now was the time to court Aglaia's favor in preparation for the job offer Oliver would formalize at the banquet. It was an opportunity to show Aglaia that she'd walk alongside her. But Lou continued her baiting. “You really couldn't decipher it?”

“You wrote in the margin to come see you.” A muscle in Aglaia's jaw flexed.

“Don't panic. I have the translation already written out for you on your picture of the Three Graces I borrowed for my class lecture. Remember this?”

Lou withdrew the well-traveled postcard from her purse, keeping it an inch or two from Aglaia's reach and in no hurry to hand it over. Lou read it to herself, again parsing and analyzing each French phrase in her mind:
Idée de génie! Des biblots, des joyaux, y graver “Kallistei,” en combler mes Grâces, et leur donner la pomme!
François's opening remark conveyed youthful confidence, and his following choice of nouns implied his motivation to give satisfaction in the affairs of love—very sexy. His use of the Greek word was masterful, particularly in combination with his reference to Eve's temptation of Adam.