The Lake of Dead Languages (25 page)

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like I’d been caught impersonating my betters—a serving girl found trying on her mistress’s fine shawl. I guess it was a shock for the old lady to find her maid’s granddaughter attending her school. But wasn’t that what the Iris Scholarship was supposed to do? Give us poor town girls a chance? I looked up at Mrs. Crevecoeur, prepared to offer some explanation, an apology even, but her eyes had drifted to a spot two inches above my head where, no doubt, she’d been accustomed to focus her gaze when talking to servants such as my grandmother.

I must have been overtired, because what I said wasn’t very polite. “Well, here I am. Better late than never.”

That wrenched her eyes down to meet mine. She gave me a curt nod and a tight smile. “Yes,” she agreed, as Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade each took a thin arm—suddenly she looked frail and very tired—and herded her off toward the Lake Lounge. I heard her as she left muttering to herself, “Better late than never. Ha!”

The door to the Music Room opened; Deirdre came out and, without looking at me or Lucy, hurried out the front door. Miss North came out of the Music Room and told Lucy that it was her turn to come in. Left by myself, I got up and paced the hall. I tried to distract myself by looking at the old photographs on the wall, but there was little in the dour faces of the Crevecoeur ancestors to hold my attention. At least
not until I came to the picture directly above the chair where I had been sitting. There was India Crevecoeur again, in a smaller copy of the family portrait that hung in the Music Room. Yes, I could see the resemblance, the square jaw and haughty tilt of her chin. Both her older girls had it, too, only the youngest, Iris, skulked in the shadows. I moved closer and looked at the servant who hovered over Iris fixing her bow and for the first time recognized her. It was my grandmother, Jane Poole. That’s what old Mrs. Crevecoeur had been looking at over my head—her old servant who’d unexpectedly spawned an interloper to her precious school. “Well,” I thought, settling back in my chair to await my summons to the Music Room. “I might not be here long.”

N
ONE OF US WERE EXPELLED THOUGH.
T
HE HARSHEST PUN
ishment for the May Day affair, as we later referred to it, fell on Matt. What Lucy hadn’t figured on when she’d tried to persuade her to take the blame for the wine flask, was Deirdre’s history of boarding school expulsions. Heart Lake was her third boarding school in six years. Each successive school had been a little less prestigious, a little shabbier, than the last. Heart Lake was, at least, still a reputable school, but Deirdre knew that if she admitted that the flask was hers she would be kicked out of Heart Lake. What kind of school, on what frozen outpost, she might go to next Deirdre had no desire to discover. She might even end up on the Canadian border at St. Eustace’s—or St. Useless, as the girls called it—known as the school of last resort—where they sent you when no other school would have you.

She told the dean the flask belonged to Matt.

“After all,” Deirdre explained later to an enraged Lucy, “he doesn’t go here. What can they do to him?”

Heart Lake, of course, couldn’t do anything to Matt Toller, but
Domina
Chambers, as his mother’s old friend, could. True to her word,
Domina
Chambers had let us take the consequences of our actions without intervention from
her. But when she heard that Lucy’s brother had brought drugs onto the campus, she stepped in. She went to Hannah Toller and told her, in no uncertain terms, that Matt mustn’t be allowed to compromise Lucy’s chances of making something of herself. Obviously, Heart Lake wasn’t far enough away to protect Lucy from her brother’s bad influence. And since Lucy couldn’t be sent farther away, there was only one solution. Matt must be sent away.

When Lucy told me what she had overheard in her house, I reassured her that nothing would happen right away. After all, there were only six weeks left to the school year. Surely they wouldn’t send Matt away until the fall. And by then the whole incident would have died down and the Tollers might relent.

But
Domina
Chambers was adamant. On May 4, Matt took the train south along the Hudson to Cold Spring, where he was to attend the Manlius Military Academy for Boys. I didn’t even get to see him before he left.

As miserable as I was at Matt’s expulsion from Corinth, Lucy was inconsolable. In fact, the aftermath of May Day seemed to leave her physically sick. She lost her appetite entirely and grew thin. Mrs. Ames, frantic to “put some meat on those twigs of bones” as she put it, stuffed Lucy’s book bag with freshly baked biscuits, which Lucy promptly tossed into the lake.

“An offering to the Lake Goddess?” I asked her one afternoon when I found her standing on the Point lobbing biscuits into the water.

She turned to me and I saw that besides how thin she had grown, there were dark blue circles under her eyes and her skin had a greenish, sickly pallor. Her hair, once bright and shiny, hung lank and tangled around her face. She looked like someone three feet underwater, like a drowned person.

“Don’t you think we’re getting a little old for that stuff, Jane?” she asked me. Then she turned and walked into the woods.

Even though she said she no longer believed in the Lake Goddess, I heard her praying to someone in the night. The first time it happened I thought I was dreaming. I awoke to an incessant whispering and when I opened my eyes I saw something crouched at the foot of Lucy’s bed. The figure was so small and compact I imagined for a minute it was a succubus, like the demon in Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” which Miss Beade had shown us in art class. No wonder, I thought groggily, Lucy has looked so worn out: that thing is sucking the life blood out of her.

That thing,
though,
was
Lucy. With her knees drawn up to her chest and Matt’s old hockey jersey pulled down to her ankles, she was rocking back and forth, muttering something I couldn’t make out.

I wondered if I should go to her, but there was something so private, so naked, about her grief, I felt I would be intruding.

I didn’t know whom to go to.

Deirdre and Lucy weren’t on speaking terms since the wine flask incident. Nor did Deirdre seem upset by what had happened on May Day. She ate heartily and had put on weight in the last few weeks. She’d thrown herself into her schoolwork, anxious to redeem herself after the threat of getting thrown out. When I tried to talk to her about Lucy she answered brusquely, “Miss prima donna should get over it. She’s just pissed I took her boyfriend on May Day.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know? I was with Ward, which means she ended up with Roy. I’ll tell you this: Ward wasn’t sorry. He told me Miss Ice Princess—that’s what he called her—would hardly let him touch her all those nights we were taking turns in the icehouse.”

I thought about the scene I had witnessed in the icehouse. I’d always hoped the masked boy had been Ward. I told myself that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Matt and I had been together on May Day.

I even tried talking to my mother about Lucy when I went home for Memorial Day weekend.

“If I were you I’d quit worrying about that Toller girl,” she told me. “She’ll land on her feet. You ought to be thinking of how you can help out around here. Charity begins at home.”

I expected the lecture to go on, but it ended abruptly with a coughing fit. My mother had been running the carpet sweeper over the threadbare living room rug while we talked. She kicked at its unraveling hem and muttered through her coughing, “Damned sawdust.”

I looked at the rug. I couldn’t see any sawdust, but my mother’s hand on the sweeper’s handle did look yellow. I looked at her and noticed for the first time how sallow and worn-out she looked, as if after a lifetime of living in the paper mill’s shadow the sawdust had crept under her skin.

“Are you feeling all right, Mom?”

She put her hand on the back of her hip and leaned back. “I could use a little help around here.”

My mother had told me what to do my whole life, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her asking for help.

“School will be over in two weeks,” I said. “I’ll be able to help out then.”

I waited to see if she’d mention any summer job. For the last three years she’d gotten me a baby-sitting job with one of the West Corinth families.

“I think your father could use you around the house this summer,” she said, and then resumed sweeping up the invisible sawdust.

I
FINALLY WENT TO THE ONE PERSON WHO,
I
WAS SURE,
would share my concern over Lucy—
Domina
Chambers.

I waited for her after her last class and walked back with her to the mansion.

“Yes, I’ve noticed she’s lost weight fretting over Matthew. She’s got a sensitive nature, not unlike myself. I can never
eat in times of sorrow. Not like your other roommate, eh? Nothing seems to interfere with Miss Hall’s appetite.”

I smiled nervously, unsure of how I was supposed to respond to comments about a fellow student’s eating habits. It seemed, somehow, inappropriate. I steered the conversation back to Lucy.

“She doesn’t sleep either. I’m worried about her.”

“Yes, I am, too. I have a plan, though. Don’t worry, Clementia, I’ll take care of Lucy.”

We’d gotten to the mansion steps. Sitting on the bottom step, hugging her books to her chest, was Albie.

“Ah, Alba, I’d nearly forgotten it was your tutoring day.”

Albie glared at me as if
Domina
Chambers’s forgetfulness was my fault.
Domina
Chambers turned back to me. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about Miss Toller?”

I saw Albie curl her lip back and I realized it sounded as if I had been telling on Lucy. I blushed, not only because I looked like a snitch, but because I had a sudden, unbidden image of all that there was to tell: Specifically, the picture that came to mind was of the masked and horned figure in the icehouse.

I shook the picture away. Why had I thought of it? But then I realized what had reminded me of that night. It was Albie’s sweater, a blue Fair Isle cardigan several sizes too big for her. It looked just like the one I’d borrowed from Lucy; the one I’d left hanging from a branch on the side of the path.

“Miss Hudson?”
Domina
Chambers repeated my name. “Are you satisfied?”

I tried to think of something to say that would make it clear to Albie that I was only looking out for Lucy. “Well, school’s almost over and Matt will be home for the summer,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll feel better then.”

“Oh, no.”
Domina
Chambers shook her head so hard some strands of silver hair came loose from her chignon. “The military academy has had such an excellent effect on Matthew his parents have enrolled him for the summer program. As for Lucy, I have other plans for her summer.”

*    *    *

I
T TURNED OUT THAT
D
OMINA
C
HAMBERS
’
S PLANS FOR
Lucy involved taking her to Italy for the entire summer break, where she had a grant to study at the American Academy in Rome. Lucy would accompany her and have the opportunity to see the art and architecture of ancient Rome firsthand.

“She says it will be excellent for my classical studies when I go on to college. Of course, I’ll major in classics. I’m also supposed to study Italian. On the weekends we’re going to Florence and I’m supposed to memorize like every painting in the Uffizi.” Lucy was packing her suitcase. I was sitting on her bed looking out the window at the lake. We’d started swimming classes these last few weeks of school and I’d thought about coming back out to the lake over the summer and swimming, but now I wondered if I would do it alone, without Matt or Lucy.

“Do you have to go?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t your parents let you stay if you asked to?”

Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make? Matt’s not here anyway.”

I’m still here, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Lucy did rouse herself enough to realize she might have hurt my feelings.

“And you’re always so busy over the summer anyway, Jane. Hasn’t your mother hired you out as an indentured servant?”

I shook my head. “No. She seems to want me to stick around this summer.”

“Gee, that’s a change. Well, think of it this way, at least you’re not being shipped off to some other boarding school, like Deirdre or Albie. Your summer can’t possibly be as bad as theirs is going to be.”

But Lucy was wrong. When I came home after the last day of school I found my father home from work in the middle of the day. He sat me down in the living room and told me that my mother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had six to eight months to live.

O
VER THE SUMMER
I
WATCHED AS MY MOTHER LOST
thirty pounds and most of her strength. By August she was barely able to get out of bed to use the bathroom. She lay, sunken and yellow, waiting for me to bring her meals she couldn’t eat and complaining about the way I prepared them or how long it took me to bring them. She never complained about the cancer or the pain, which I knew about from the way she sometimes drew her lips back from her teeth, but if I had hoped that sickness would put an end to my mother’s endless complaining about me, I would have been sorely disappointed.

She complained about the way I dressed and the way I wore my hair. “You look like a deranged old maid,” she told me one day. My hair was pulled back in a sloppy bun, which was as close an imitation of
Domina
Chambers’s chignon as I could manage, and I was wearing a plaid gym kilt and a salmon-colored button-down shirt that Matt had given to Lucy and Lucy had given to me. “Is this why I sent you to that fancy private school, so you can look like a freak?”

I could have pointed out that she hadn’t
sent
me anywhere; I had earned the scholarship for Heart Lake on my own. But then I looked at her. She had lost most of her hair to chemo by then and her arms had grown so thin that they fell back
from her shoulder bones and disappeared under the covers, making her look like a double amputee. Her legs, on the other hand, had swollen to twice their normal size. Ballooning under the covers they looked like one bloated appendage. A mermaid’s tail. That’s what she looked like: a bald, yellow, armless mermaid. This was the person calling me a freak.