Twenty-nine

That idiotic girl! Lou was furious as she scrambled to redeem the desperate situation Aglaia placed her in by walking out, even leaving behind her diploma. What would the studio representatives think of the goings-on? Aglaia’s inexplicable indiscretion towards the homeless couple—or had that been her mother, Tina, whom she’d met in Aglaia’s apartment?—surely snuffed out any chances Lou still had at tenure, judging by the scornful glare Dayna Yates leveled at her upon exiting. That was twice in two days Yates literally and physically turned her back to chase after Aglaia.

Lou told the audience another canned joke she had on hand for awkward moments, and invited them to continue mingling at the close of the evening. But she could see that Oliver was apoplectic despite his polite words of farewell at the microphone.

Lou would suffer his vituperation as soon as they were alone, and she wished she’d never arranged for him to consider Aglaia for the position of theater wardrobe consultant in the first place. She’d perceived Aglaia’s lack of malleability in Paris, but Lou’s earlier boasting of the girl’s stellar reputation had already convinced Oliver of her worth, and he just had to have her. His resulting praise for Lou’s commendable introduction of Aglaia into the university arts world would bring shame on his head now—and, consequently, on Lou’s. If he did hire Aglaia, Lou would get no credit. She prayed that any damage from the girl’s gauche deportment could somehow be alleviated or Lou might find herself without a job at all.

She caught Whitney’s arm as the student was leaving in her hideous outfit. She just didn’t shine up like Aglaia, but one took what one got, Lou supposed.

“Oh, Dr. Chapman, that was a fabulous evening! You’re so good at public speaking.” The girl was a moron, but Lou pasted a smile on her face.

“Don’t rush off,” she said. “Maybe after our guests leave you’d like to have a drink with me in the lounge?”

Whitney was the chancellor’s granddaughter, after all.

Aglaia turned into the parking lot of her apartment block. “No, Mom, it was good that you came to find me at the hotel,” Aglaia said, meaning it. “But I can’t believe the hospital let you check yourself out like that, Dad. You’re not strong. Why didn’t you at least call me instead of taking a cab?” It was a rhetorical question; her cell was shut off during the banquet anyway.

Aglaia’s choice tonight to stand beside her parents in their neediness had been a defining moment for her. She appreciated Dayna’s support—her friend had waited with Henry and Tina in the lobby while Aglaia fetched her car—but the mechanics of getting her parents back to the apartment and even the bolstering Dayna offered were only secondary in importance to the internal change that took place when she saw sick old Dad leaning on frail little Mom in the presence of all those eminent movers and shakers.

Something broke in her then, she thought—or maybe mended in her.

The thrill of holding the MFA diploma in her hands lasted about as long as the heartbeat it took for her to recognize that she hadn’t earned it. It was worth only the paper it was printed on. Someday she’d get a professional degree the honorable way and complete her schooling, knowing now that it didn’t complete her.

The drive home to Aglaia’s apartment had been quick, Tina talking all the way to her place about how nietlijch Aglaia was dressed and how sheen the hotel was. Henry tried to coerce her into driving him back to the farm right away, but she put her foot down and called Byron, and they arranged to meet halfway in the morning. Dad was in no shape to travel farther tonight.

Aglaia made up the couch for herself. After her parents were quiet in the bedroom, sleep still eluded her. She got up and heated some milk, wincing when the microwave timer went off. As she feared, it awakened Tina, who padded out to the kitchen with her hair straggling around her shoulders.

“Making cocoa? I’ll have en Bätje too.”

The coziness of sipping hot chocolate at bedtime with her mom reminded Aglaia of all she’d left behind. How could she even begin to tell the truth to her mother, who’d suffered so much in this life because of her children? How could Aglaia start to explain the sorrow in her own life—the loss of face tonight, the bereavement over a brother in childhood and over François just days ago, even her own repeated rejections of Naomi’s friendship? But she had to start somewhere.

She followed her mom back into the bedroom and sat down on the mattress so that her father opened his eyes.

“Dad, I’m sorry.” Her tears started up again. “I’ve been so angry at you for so long. At you and at Joel.”

He nodded as if he knew what she was talking about.

“It was my fault,” he said, pushing up into a sitting position. “I should have taught him better to always leave the tractor in park and not in gear when he boosted the battery. I should have made sure he knew not to stand where the tractor could run over him.”

“But if Joel had gotten more sleep, if he hadn’t had to, you know, drive so late in the night on my account…”

Tina looked befuddled. “Joel was driving late the night before he died?”

Mom never did get it about François, Aglaia thought, and it was just as well. But Dad understood, and he drew her into his wonderful fatherly arms and he hugged her and rocked her. “We have a lot to catch up on, Mary Grace.”

When her parents were settled again and the mugs were rinsed, Aglaia made another decision. Despite her implicit agreement at the gala tonight that she’d submit her resumé and set up an interview, she changed her mind. She booted up her computer and typed in the e-mail address from Oliver Upton’s business card, followed by a terse message:

Oliver, thank you for your tribute tonight. However, I hereupon withdraw my name from consideration for the position of theater wardrobe consultant in your department. My loyalty lies with my current boss and my real calling.

On a Saturday afternoon several weeks later, Aglaia stood in front of the farmhouse stove, transferring a batch of Rollküake from the pot of hot fat to an antique platter. Kneading up a bowlful of the rich dough from Great-Grandma’s recipe all the way from southern Russia had been Aglaia’s idea, the craving strong. Tina stood beside her dusting the crullers with powdered sugar, and Henry sat at the table munching celery.

“You have chokecherry syrup, right?” she asked Mom, since the usual accompaniment of watermelon was out of season.

“Na jo,” Tina affirmed, taking a jar out of the fridge. “I always have Soppsel for dipping, dear.” She spooned a taste into her daughter’s open mouth.

Today marked Aglaia’s third visit from the city since the night of the university dinner. This morning she’d helped Dad inspect the combine parked in the shop for the winter, Henry instructing her on loose bearings and cracks in the belts.

He asked her now, “So when are you going to tell us about this movie you’re making costumes for?” Aglaia almost dropped her ladle.

“How did you know about that?” She herself had just learned last week about RoundUp’s awarding the contract to Incognito, and she hadn’t told her parents about it yet, sensitive to their bias against the cinema. “And since when have you been interested in movies or in costumes?”

He grinned at her. “I’ve been reading the weekend arts section of the Denver Post for years, watching for your name.”

He hadn’t been the only one congratulating her. Dayna telephoned the day after Incognito’s win was publicized and mentioned by-the-by that she was holding Aglaia’s diploma at her university office, rescued from Lou’s maniacal plan to have it rescinded. Aglaia picked it up, more to see her new friend than for the item itself, and stored the royal blue folder on the top shelf of her bedroom closet along with other deferred memories.

Lou’s office had been cleared out by then, Aglaia saw when she passed its door, and the buzz around campus was that she’d been let go a day or two after she found out her aged mother died in New York. Dayna didn’t offer particulars about her associate’s dismissal other than mentioning how, out of revenge, Lou took a young arts student with her to the funeral and that her grandfather, Chancellor Wadsworth, was fuming over the impropriety.

Of course, Aglaia had heard directly from Lou herself sometime after the formal affair but before Incognito’s status as bid winner became public. Lou had called her at work.

“Oliver just let me know he’s found a new wardrobe consultant,” Lou said, her voice full of wrath. “What about our agreement?”

“I guess you could say I rejected the terms.”

“Oh my God, what were you thinking?” Lou demanded.

Oh my, what was I thinking, God? she asked silently. Where has my head been all this time? She said aloud to Lou, “It’s not a good time for me to talk right now.” Or ever, she thought.

“So that’s your modus operandi. You suck up to a prominent person to bask in her glory and then run when the heat’s turned up.” Lou’s voice rasped. “Well, you’ve missed your chance, Aglaia. If I can help it, there won’t ever be employment for you at the university—or for Incognito as a subcontractor, either—once PRU wins the tender for Buffalo Bill’s Birthday.”

The threat didn’t faze Aglaia and she answered as graciously as she could, “I don’t believe the boss will mind. He’s received encouraging news on that front.”

Before Lou slammed the receiver in Aglaia’s ear, she shouted, “You’ve burned your bridges behind you, girl. That was your first big mistake!”

No, Aglaia thought now in her parent’s kitchen, her first big mistake had been entering her name incorrectly at the vital statistics office all those years ago.

The Enns family arrived en masse, stamping the first snow of the season off their boots and crowding into the kitchen. Henry and Tina didn’t have enough chairs, but kids doubled up on adult laps and the older boys—typical teens—hoisted themselves onto the countertop, one of them holding a very fat Zephyr who now made his home on the farm.

Aglaia still couldn’t get over how much Silas looked like his shirt-tail relative, Joel, and how closely Sebastian resembled his birth father, François.

Aglaia was able to think about François without a visceral reaction, now that she understood she’d only been in love by proxy anyway. She’d used François Vivier as much as he’d used her, with a second-hand love having the wrong object in view, and ended up twisting her view of herself.

Across the room, Naomi beamed at Aglaia as she bounced her baby on her knee. Their first conversation after discussing François’s true identity had been difficult for Aglaia as she asked forgiveness from someone who, she felt, had wronged her in the first place. Aglaia called her own wrongdoing “naïveté,” but Naomi wouldn’t let her get away with that. “Nobody’s innocent,” Naomi had said, and the truth cut deep.

Aglaia turned off the stove element and took her place at the table. Tina’s kitchen was a vortex of all that Aglaia had once known and knew at this moment and would know in the future. Her brittle loneliness was being assuaged.

And as if her pleasure was to be without limits, she heard her cell phone ring. It was Eb.

“Sounds as though you’re in the middle of a party, lass,” he said. “Here’s something else to celebrate—put me on speakerphone.” He announced that, as reward for the U.S. branch’s performance of late, Incognito headquarters had promoted Aglaia to managerial status as the new creative director, coordinating and executing all Denver projects and having artistic veto over anything leaving the workshop. “They’ve taken my advice to streamline,” Eb said. “I’ll stay beside you as a part-time consultant until my full retirement. And in the meanwhile, I’m taking Iona to Hawaii for Christmas.”

“I propose a toast,” Byron said when Aglaia hung up. He lifted his coffee cup; Naomi and the kids followed suit with their glasses of juice, and Tina and Henry could have been drinking wine, they were so jovial. “To Mary Grace, traveler to Paris and beyond!” Everyone cheered and she raised her mug to them—the cup of communion—and slaked her own thirst.

“Speaking of Paris,” her mother said to her, “did you ever deliver that Bible?”

It was the question Aglaia dreaded from the moment she took on the challenge from her mother over a month ago, the question that marked the end of her roving down dusty, dark paths of daydreams.

The dry old bones of lost love and death were finally being put to rest. Now every morning, in the pool of light cast by her bedside lamp, like a parched wayfarer coming home to the well, Aglaia opened that Bible and soaked in its message.

Just yesterday she’d taped up the torn pages, carefully lining up the edges as she hummed in practice for her upcoming duet with Naomi: He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock, where rivers of pleasure I see.

She’d clipped out and thrown away the message Lou had so imperiously penned: SEE ME. LOU. The three words had served their purpose; she’d seen Lou, all right—seen her for what she really was. And then Aglaia had kneaded her art eraser, warming up the grey putty and shaping it into a pointed tip so that she could lift all the penciled words off the paper and take François out of the book, leaving only the indelible ink behind.

“Deliver the Bible?” she asked. “No, Mom—at least not to François.”