Read Online The Third Grace by Deb Elkink - Free Book Online Page A

the most regal deities and garbed them in magnificent apparel.”
    No wonder seamstress Aglaia was taken with them, Lou thought.
    â€œThey granted talents to mortals. Perhaps you’ve read Spenser, who said about them, ‘These three on men all gracious gifts bestow.’ Homer wrote about them as well, in both the Iliad and the Odyssey , as you’ll no doubt know, having completed your assigned readings.” She noted panic in some of her students, who madly paged through their papers. Of course, the syllabus didn’t schedule that reading until next week, but she liked to keep them on their toes. “The influence of Grecian narrative upon our world cannot be overstated.”
    Lou picked up her pointer and directed its shadow over the photo from Aglaia’s postcard. “Pradier’s carving is merely one depiction of the Graces—a favorite theme in European art. The stance of the subjects shows them in communion with one another, a leisurely camaraderie at odds with the stiff, hierarchical formality we saw between Mary and Gabriel. The Graces help us understand the freedom that the pre-Christian ancients—those happy pagans—celebrated in conjunction with womanhood. Refer to my article, ‘Women and Myth: The Enunciation of the Feminine in the Rhetoric of the Sages.’ ”
    To the rustling of the handout, Lou considered how well received the title had been by the editor of a journal in which the piece was published last year, and how she’d hoped in vain that this paper would be the one to put her over the top with the tenure committee. The class probably didn’t appreciate her word play between “enunciation” and the “Annunciation” of Gabriel just discussed, but it hadn’t been lost on Aglaia when she read the article. Despite her abysmal lack of schooling, Aglaia was sharp. She had clarity of eye, a directness of gaze, that was more than intellectual and almost moral in nature, perhaps as the legendary Eve might have had before her fall into sin. Aglaia, too, must be hiding something shameful. Everyone does, Lou was sure.
    One student who sat in the front row was trying to make eye contact with Lou, flicking her hair with a pen. She looked vaguely familiar. What was her name—Winona? Willow? She was another example of the trite stereotype increasingly evident around the university in the past several years despite the establishment of feminism in the general and scholarly populace. Too much makeup, white t-shirt stretched tightly enough to show off the vibrant print of her padded bra. In the formative days of the women’s movement when Lou was just pubescent, her older sister had dropped out of the elite Manhattan prep school to burn her own bra in the streets, to Lou’s envy. Later on in university, and thanks to a girlfriend, Lou got caught up herself in a street demonstration parading for gender rights. Soon she decided the publicity of activism wouldn’t suit her academic image and she now kept her preferences concealed for the most part, unless it was to her professional or personal advantage to associate with any particular cause.
    Lou went on with her lecture. She related the dying of the gods to the corresponding seasonal death of the crops and vegetation, and supported the thesis that the redemptive rituals performed to assure vitality were based upon the female reproductive cycle. One could see a reflection of this abundant fertility in the first of Pradier’s Graces—Thalia, if she recalled the name correctly—who clutched a garland of flowers and encircled her sisters with it. Religious ceremony was cosmic and magical, she told them, with an angry deity requiring conciliatory sacrifice from terrorized humanity or from one another.
    Lou stifled a yawn and decided her lecture needed more peppy illustration—for herself as well as her students. She flipped through her support material and exhibited