* * *
Ramona, whose mother was Chinese, was so tall she seemed stretched like a shadow in the evening. She had been kicked out of her home for the sin of Greed. She had been gambling with her friends one night. She kept winning. Could she help it if she was lucky? She knew how to count cards. “What’s the point of being good with numbers if you don’t use it to make money? Gambling is what makes fortunes. They sent me here to teach me a lesson, but also because no one wanted to pay their debts to me.”
“And did you learn your lesson?”
“You can’t learn a lesson if it doesn’t make any sense.” She held out her two fists to Sadie. “Would you like to bet your hair ribbon on which hand a stone is in?”
* * *
Siobhan, who swore she wasn’t Irish, was guilty of Pride. She rejected the advances of men too succinctly. She was honest and explained why she could not imagine herself married to them. I’m too intelligent to spend my days with you, she told one. I have to have someone I can converse with. Someone who is my intellectual equal.
“I went to a museum and I looked at the paintings of all the nudes. And all the statues. I realized none of them have breasts as beautiful as mine. Do you want to touch them?”
Siobhan held both breasts in her hands like she was offering two glasses of brandy.
“All right,” said Sadie.
“Hold them,” she whispered hoarsely.
CHAPTER 27
Mary Robespierre Has Balcony Seats
Mary Robespierre was not interested in making obscene amounts of money. She was content. She had so much more than she had ever dreamed of having. She got to do something she loved instead of going to the factory every day. She had come up with a harebrained scheme, and it had actually come to fruition. She had been insulted every day of her life. The freedom that came with not being emotionally abused was exhilarating. It made every day seem like the most perfect day on Earth. She supposed, because of human nature, she would begin to desire something more in life. But she had trouble imagining it. It was like trying to plan what you want to eat the next day after eating an enormous meal.
She worked happily in her bakery. There were piles of dough on the counter. They looked like older women sitting naked on the side of a public bath. Mary picked one up in her hands and threw it on the table. The flour lifted up all around her, and at that moment, a light snowfall descended all over the city.
* * *
When the bakery first opened, because of its proximity to the factory, the factory manager had Mary bring cakes and pastries to their offices at lunchtime. She didn’t have to make the cakes so pretty. They would have ordered from her anyway, since she was right next door. She made them beautiful for her own pleasure. She found it satisfying. She was obsessed with creating works of beauty. She sat with her pastry sleeves and knives, and nothing else in the whole wide world existed.
For many of the factory operators, the arrival of Mary’s cakes was their favorite moment of their workday. They gathered around the cakes deciding which one caught their fancy. Looking at the cakes made odd, hidden parts of themselves come to light. One wondered why, at sixty-five, he was suddenly so drawn to a cake with pink icing and a cherry on top. Why did he feel like a shy little child at a birthday party?
Mary loved when the operators spent time perusing her cakes. When they had to take a very long moment before biting into one because they were about to destroy a work of art, Mary was delighted. It filled her with a pride no other feeling could compete with. Everybody has addictions to different feelings. They end up shaping the course of our lives. Those feelings become our north stars. Mary’s north star was pride.
* * *
When Mary heard Louis Antoine had died, she was taken aback. A cake she had been making lay on the kitchen table. It had fallen and resembled the belly of a woman who had recently given birth. Was she sad about Louis’s death? No, how could she be? Louis had ignored her as a child and had spent no more than two hours of his life with her, both of which had made him squeamish and uncomfortable. She’d had to trade one of her fingers to see her father. She really couldn’t afford to meet with him many more times. And yet he had given more to her than anybody else in the world ever had. She knew her protection was now gone. She wondered if Marie would come to the factory often. She knew Marie would notice their physical resemblance. She felt a perverse desire to show her face no matter how dangerous it turned out to be.
When Mary walked into the factory for the first time after Louis’s death, she felt the current of anticipation running through the crowd. Everyone had stopped working and stood on the floor together beneath the balcony, waiting. And then Marie emerged above. Everywhere that Marie went, she glowed and attracted attention. But never nearly as much as she did when she was in the Squalid Mile. The sordid background threw the pink in her cheeks and the rich blond of her ringlets into relief. Her fingertips had a touch of pink at the ends of them. Her breasts were perfect globes that would never fall, as she would never be forced to breastfeed.
It was as though Marie were standing in a sketch for a painting but she was the only part that had been colored in.
They had never seen an outfit like the one she had on. She was in mourning and was dressed in black. But the black material of her dress was so expensive that it seemed to have different colors swarming around inside of it. They could never afford black like that. The black of their clothes was flat. It wasn’t luminous. It wasn’t a color. This black was a color. It was like looking at the river at night. There were beluga whales moving underneath the water. You couldn’t see the sea creatures, but you could sense their shadows. You could feel their presence. There were mermaids twisting in the waves.