The Lake of Dead Languages (18 page)

It was then that I started to cry, not, as everyone assumed, out of happiness at winning the scholarship, but because I knew how much
better
she was. Test or no test, she was the one who deserved to go on to Heart Lake and Vassar, not me. I would tell them all that she should have the scholarship. I would tell them all that I had cheated. Hadn’t I? If not on the test, then on Lucy?

But then Helen Chambers raised her hand for silence.

“Since the days when India Crevecoeur invited millworkers into her home for educational symposiums, the Heart Lake School has always tried to preserve a friendly relationship
between town and gown.” There was a smattering of polite applause, which I waited through impatiently. I was wondering if I had the courage to turn down the award in front of the assembly or if I should do it quietly after the ceremony.

“But never has their generosity so overwhelmed me as it has tonight.” There was a hush in the audience as we all wondered what she meant. “I’ve been informed by the Board of Trustees that because of the outstanding performance of another student, this year the Iris Scholarship will be awarded, for the first time since its inception, to two students: Miss Jane Hudson
and
Miss Lucy Toller.”

I turned to Lucy and threw my arms around her. Mixed with my genuine joy that we would be at Heart Lake together was craven relief. I wouldn’t have to turn down the scholarship. I’d been taken off the hook. Pressing my cheek to hers I could feel that she, too, had begun to cry.

L
UCY AND
I
WERE ASSIGNED TO A THREE-PERSON SUITE,
called a “trip” by the Heart Lake girls. All the dorm rooms at Heart Lake were triples. My mother had always warned me to watch out for threesomes. “One always gets left out,” she told me in a way that made me understand that the
one
was likely to be me. India Crevecoeur, the school’s founder, thought differently. She believed that pairing girls off in twos encouraged “exclusionary friendships inconducive to the goals of community and cooperation.”

“They’re afraid we’ll turn lezzie,” our new suite-mate, Deirdre Hall, told us. “Apparently India Crevecoeur never heard of a ménage à trois.”

Deirdre Hall came as a surprise to me. She didn’t look anything like the Heart Lake girls I’d admired trying on lipsticks at the Corinth drugstore. She arrived in torn, bell-bottomed jeans and a sheer gauzy top through which I could see her nipples.

“They’ve stuck the scholarship students together,” Lucy explained to me. “Although I can’t imagine what she won a scholarship for—unless it was for being fast.”

“You mean like in track?” I asked.

“No, I mean like in bed. Can’t you see the girl’s a slut?”

Most of what we heard from Deirdre Hall had something
to do with sex. She pulled from her army green duffel bag a veritable library of sex tomes: the Tantra Asana,
The Sensuous Woman
by J.,
The Joy of Sex, Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong, even a huge tattered copy of the Kinsey Report appeared Mary Poppins-like from the inexhaustible duffel. She decorated the walls
and ceiling
of the single with Balinese tapestries depicting enormously endowed men performing acrobatic sex with pointy-breasted, jewel-encrusted women. Even her seemingly innocent collection of oriental tea tins proved sexual in nature.

“This tea is an aphrodisiac,” she informed a horrified Lucy. “Of course the real aphrodisiac is in here.” She opened up a large cask-shaped tin that was decorated with a landscape of golden mountains. Inside was a pungent-smelling brownish herb. “Does pot make you horny, too?” she asked us.

Lucy wasn’t the only one offended by Deirdre’s sexual references. She drove Helen Chambers to distraction by finding sexual references in every other Latin word.

“Domina?”
she said on the first day of class. “As in do-minatrix?”

When
Domina
Chambers told her that the translation of
praeda
was booty, Deirdre asked, “Booty? As in ass?”

“No,”
Domina
Chambers replied, “as in loot from a conquest.”

I am sure that Helen Chambers regretted that the second-year Latin curriculum devoted so much attention to the poet Catullus.

“His girlfriend’s name was Lesbia?” Deirdre asked incredulously. “As in …”

“No,”
Domina
Chambers interrupted, “as in the island of Lesbos, home of the Greek poetess Sappho. Catullus was acknowledging his literary debt to the Greek lyric poets.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t Sappho like a famous dyke?”

“Sappho did write some beautiful love poems to women. We don’t know that her sentiments were expressed … er … physically.”

I had never seen Miss Chambers so rattled.

“I bet she’s one,” Deirdre told us when we were translating our Latin together that night.

“One what?” Lucy asked.

“A lezzie.” Deirdre held up her right hand and wriggled it like a fish. She was wearing a silk hand-painted kimono that her parents had sent her from Kyoto. It was patterned in pale blue and turquoise waves through which swam beautiful red and gold carp. There were slits under the wide sleeves through which I could see Deirdre’s bare breasts, like two fish escaped from the kimono’s pattern.

“Domina
Chambers is not a lesbian,” Lucy had responded coldly, looking away from Deirdre’s exposed breasts. “My mother went to school with her and she says that Helen Chambers was one of the most popular girls at Vassar. She spent almost every weekend at Yale.”

“So why didn’t she marry one of those Yalies?” Deirdre asked. I could tell that Lucy had piqued her interest. We could all picture, I think, Helen Chambers, in a sweater set and pearls, riding the train to New Haven. A boy in a tweed jacket—or maybe a letter sweater—would meet her at the station.

“She devoted herself to scholarship,” Lucy answered, “to the classics.”

“Then why isn’t she a professor at some college? Or an archaeologist digging up Etruscan artifacts? I mean teaching high school Latin is hardly an exciting career.”

I could tell that Lucy was troubled by this question. There
was
something about Helen Chambers that didn’t quite add up. Even though there was a tradition of alumnae returning to Heart Lake to teach, Helen Chambers stood out just a little from the other old girls. From Lucy’s mother, we knew that after Vassar Helen Chambers had gone to Oxford. She had lived in Rome for several years at the American Academy on the Janiculum Hill and published articles in learned philological journals on Etruscan vases and lacunae in ancient
texts. Then she’d come back to New York to complete her doctorate at Barnard. Unlike our other teachers, Helen Chambers was embarked on an illustrious career, but just when it seemed that she had broken free of whatever gravitational pull the school exerted on its alumnae, she had abandoned the doctorate and taken the job at Heart Lake.

“Maybe she was broke,” Deirdre said.

“No.” Lucy shook her head and wrinkled up her nose. The idea of Helen Chambers’s life being determined by base financial considerations was distasteful to her. “I think it had something to do with a failed love affair. I think she was in love with a married man and in order to break it off she had to leave the city.”

I remembered the yearbook picture I had seen on the kitchen table. The handsome blond man smiling at Helen Chambers and Hannah Toller. The man who looked like Lucy. It occurred to me that the story Lucy was telling might be Hannah Toller’s story. Perhaps she was the girl who left her married lover, bore Lucy in secrecy and shame, and came home to Heart Lake.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. I could tell she liked Lucy’s story. She was beginning to be won over by the mystique of Helen Chambers. “Maybe they still meet when she goes into the city. She can’t spend all her time shopping and going to the ballet.”

Lucy considered. “Perhaps they meet, just once a year, for drinks at the Lotus Club.”

“For old time’s sake,” Deirdre said.

Lucy smiled at her. After weeks of her offending Lucy, I was alarmed to see that Deirdre Hall might also be capable of charming Lucy. But then, as usual, Deirdre went a bit too far
(overkill,
Lucy would say).

“Yeah,” Deirdre said, “and then, for old time’s sake, they go upstairs and get laid.”

T
HROUGHOUT THE FALL SEMESTER OF THAT SOPHOMORE
year Lucy and Deirdre vied with each other like dancers
pulling back and forth in some elaborate tango. Although they seemed to hate each other, they couldn’t stay away from each other. I understood how Deirdre might be won over by Lucy. Everybody was. At the lower school, where Lucy worked as an aide, the younger girls all adored her. When we met her there after our last class, the children followed Lucy out the door, begging for another story, a song, a hug. One girl, a pathetic-looking creature with pinched features and hair as colorless as dried straw and with the sadly apt name of Albie, used to follow us back to the dorm. It was unnerving the way she’d materialize in the woods. Deirdre would yell at her and stamp her foot the way you would to scare away a stray dog, but Albie wouldn’t even flinch. Only when Lucy would go up to her and whisper something in her ear would she leave, vanishing behind the pine trees as quickly and silently as a cat.

“Poor kid,” I said one day, more because I saw that Lucy had been gentle to her than because I really felt sorry for her. “What an awful name.”

“Thanks,” said Lucy, laughing, “I gave it to her. I told her it would be her Latin name when she started Latin next year, so now she insists everyone call her that. She just needs a little attention. Her dad died when she was little and Albie says her mother’s nervous, which I think means she’s in and out of mental hospitals. Every time Albie’s not doing well her mother thinks it’s the school’s fault and she switches her to another school. She’s only ten and this is her fourth school.”

“Please, I’m gonna bawl,” Deirdre said, lighting a cigarette. “The kid is creepy and she’s getting in our way. It’s like she’s spying on us.”

This was a concern because we had begun to roam the woods when we were supposed to be in evening study hall. Our first forays into the woods were Deirdre’s idea. She wanted to find a place to smoke, cigarettes at first, and then pot. I was surprised that Lucy went along with these expeditions—Lucy refused to even try a cigarette or a joint—but I
soon realized that Lucy felt confined by the regimentation of Heart Lake. She had grown up wandering the woods with Matt, eating when she wanted, sleeping late and missing school if she wished to. She hated, she told me, having to be around people all the time. She hated
the goals of community and cooperation
.

Deirdre, an old veteran of boarding schools, proved to be an expert at subverting and eluding the rules. “Sign into study hall and then excuse yourself to go to the head. We’ll meet in the bathroom next to the Music Room and slip out the back door. They’ll never miss us.”

It seemed to me that we could have done that without Deirdre, but if we were caught, Deirdre always came up with a quick and reasonable cover.

“Jane just got her period, Miss Pike,” she explained to the swimming coach one night when we were discovered in the woods behind the mansion. “We’re going back to the dorm for a sanitary napkin.”

“We’re looking for tadpoles, Miss Buehl,” she told the science teacher when she found us sneaking down to the swimming beach. “Your lecture on metamorphosis was
so
inspiring.”

She had a flair for the dramatic. After we heard the story about the three sisters at the Fall Bonfire she immediately said we had to get out to the farthest rock at midnight under a full moon and say a prayer to the Lake Goddess so we would be spared from the Crevecoeur curse.

“How can we?” I asked. “You can’t get there by jumping from the other rocks. Can’t we make our sacrifice from the first rock?”

“No, it has to be the third one,” Deirdre said.

Lucy agreed.
“Domina
Chambers says that three is an enchanted number. And that the hero must always undergo a series of difficult tests, like the labors of Hercules, to prove himself.”

“We’ll swim to the rock,” Deirdre said. “We do it all the time in swim class.”

“But at night? We don’t even have suits.” We were issued swim suits for class, thick cotton one-pieces that billowed in the water and made all but the slimmest girls look hideous.

Lucy laughed. “Who needs suits? Gosh, Jane, you’re so
conventional
sometimes.” I saw Deirdre smile. I remembered what my mother always said: “In a threesome one always gets left out.”

“If you’re scared you can stay in the room,” Lucy said.

I was scared, but I wasn’t going to stay in the room. For this expedition we needed more time than study hall allowed. Deirdre planned it all. After lights out we would each, one by one, go down the hall in our nightgowns to the bathroom and then we’d leave by the bathroom window, which was at the back of the dorm, facing away from the lake. We’d cut through the woods behind the lower school, and then climb over the rocks on the Point to avoid being seen by Miss Buehl, who lived in the cottage at the top of the steps leading down to the swimming beach.

“But then how will we get down to the swimming beach?” I asked. “The entrance to the stairs is right across from her front door.”

“There’s a way to climb from the Point down to the swimming beach,” Lucy said. “Matt and I did it a couple of years ago when we sneaked onto the campus to go swimming.”

“Why doesn’t he sneak onto the campus now and join us?” Deirdre asked. “I mean, you miss him so much and all.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Lucy said. “Maybe another time.”

That first night we went out to the rock was unseasonably warm and curiously still for mid-October. I was sure we’d still be cold, so I wore my heaviest flannel nightgown. Deirdre wore the hand-painted kimono, which shimmered like water in the moonlight. The red and gold carp seemed to swim under the tall pines. Lucy wore a plain white T-shirt
that came down below her knees and probably had belonged to Matt originally. The two of them, walking ahead of me on the path, looked like figures on a vase. I felt absurd in my stiff flannel gown with its print of teddy bears and hearts.