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“You will look at them later,” he says, “and you will see how far you have come. You can draw objects very well. But as yet you cannot draw life. God first made the bowdy out of dirt, and after he breathed in the soul. Both are necessary. Dirt and soul.” He gives me a brief smile, squeezes my upper arm. “There must be passion.”

I look at him uncertainly. What he says is a trespass: people don’t talk about bodies unless they’re discussing illnesses, or about souls except in church, or about passion unless they mean sex. But Mr. Hrbik is a stranger, and can’t be expected to know this.

“You are an unfinished voman,” he adds in a lower voice, “but here you will be finished.” He doesn’t know that finished means over and done with. He intends to be encouraging.

Chapter 49

I sit in the darkened auditorium, downstairs at the Royal Ontario Museum, leaning back in the hard seat covered with scratchy plush and breathing in the smell of dust and airlessness and stale upholstery and the sweetish face powder of the other students. I feel my eyes getting rounder and rounder, the pupils enlarging like an owl’s: for an hour I’ve been looking at slides, yellowy, sometimes unfocused slides of white marble women with flat-topped heads. These heads are holding up stone entablatures, which look very heavy; no wonder the tops of their heads are flat. These marble women are called caryatids, which originally referred to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae. But they are no longer priestesses; they are now ornamental devices doubling as supporting columns.

There are many slides of columns as well, various kinds of columns from various periods: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Doric columns are the strongest and simplest, Corinthian ones are the lightest and most ornate, adorned with rows of acanthus leaves giving rise to graceful volutes and helices. A long pointer, emerging from the area of no light beside the screen, rests on the volutes and helices, indicating which is which. I will need these words later, when I have to regurgitate them for exams, so I attempt to write them in my notebook, bending my head down close to the paper in order to see. I spend a lot of time now writing obscure words in the dark.

I expect things to be better next month, when we’ll get away from the Greeks and Romans and into Mediaeval and Renaissance. Classical has come to mean, for me, bleachedout and broken. Most of the Greek and Roman things have body parts missing, and the general armlessness, leglessness, and noselessness is getting to me, not to mention the snapped-off penises. Also the grayness and whiteness, although I have learned to my surprise that all these marble statues used to be painted, in bright colors, with yellow hair and blue eyes and flesh tones, and sometimes dressed up in real clothing, like dolls. This class is a survey course. It’s supposed to orient us in time, in preparation for later, more specialized courses. It’s part of Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto, which is the only sanctioned pathway that leads anywhere close to art. Also the only thing I can afford: I have won a scholarship to university, which was no more than expected. “You should use the brains God gave you,” my father is in the habit of saying, though we both know he thinks this gift was really bestowed by him. If I left university, threw over my scholarship, he would not see his way clear to putting up the cash for anything else.

When I first told my parents I was not going into Biology after all but was going to be an artist, they reacted with alarm. My mother said that was fine if it was what I really wanted to do, but they were worried about how I would make a living. Art was not something that could be depended on, though all right for a hobby, like shellwork or wood carving. But Art and Archaeology was reassuring to them: I could veer off in the archaeology direction and take to digging things up, which was more serious. At the very least I will come out of it with a degree, and with a degree you can always teach. I have private reservations about this: I think of Miss Creighton, the Art Appreciation teacher at Burnham High, pudgy and beleaguered, who got routinely locked into the supply closet where the paper and paints were kept by some of the greasier and more leathery boys.

One of my mother’s friends tells her that art is something you can always do at home, in your spare time. The other students in Art and Archaeology are all girls but one, just as the professors are all men but one. The student who is not a girl and the professor who is not a man are considered strange; the first has an unfortunate skin condition, the second a nervous stammer. None of the girl students wants to be an artist; instead they want to be teachers of art in high schools, or, in one case, a curator in a gallery. Or else they are vague about their wants, which means they intend to get married before any of these other things becomes necessary.