The Lake of Dead Languages (36 page)

I tell the girls
Domina
Chambers’s theory about the language being a maze. “After all, he’s about to take us into the underworld …” I notice that the girls always perk up when I mention the underworld, the way a toddler might at the promise of a trip to Disneyland. “… and that’s not supposed to be easy. It’s like a secret he’s not supposed to reveal, so he has to disguise the instructions.”

“Like they use five-five-five phone numbers on television,” Athena suggests.

“Exactly.” Excited, I write a passage on the board and have them take turns linking up the adjectives and nouns, the nouns and verbs, the relative clauses with their antecedents. When we are done the lines we have drawn between the words do look like a maze.

“A maze with no exit,” Vesta points out. “Where’s Ariadne with her thread when you need her?”

“The thread is the way the words link up,” Athena says, raising her hand in her excitement even though I have long dispensed with such formalities in this little class. “When you see which words go together you solve the puzzle.”

I look at her with amazement. Not only because of how she has caught on, but because of how suddenly beautiful she looks. The light coming in the classroom window touches her straggly, multicolored hair, and where the light brown is showing through the dye I see flashes of red. Her green eyes shine back at me with the pleasure of getting it right and for a moment it’s as if we were alone in the classroom, teacher and student sharing that rare flash of illumination that comes after slogging through the muck. But then she notices how in raising her hand her sweater sleeve has slipped down her arm, revealing the tangle of scarred flesh. She sees Octavia staring at her wrist and whispering something to Flavia. She looks away from me and tugs the unraveling cuff down over her knuckles.

The next day Octavia is absent and Flavia explains to me, apologetically, that her sister is dropping the class because every time she looks at Ellen Craven she thinks about the suicide legend. “Our grandmother says that the ghost of a murderer is never at rest.”

I ask Flavia if she shares her sister’s superstitions. “Nah. Besides, Octavia has a good shot at a tennis scholarship, but my backhand sucks.”

I am so concerned with preparing the girls for Book Six that I forget how Book Five ends. It’s only while Athena is reading aloud the part where Aeneas’s boat is approaching Italy that I remember this is where Palinurus, the helmsman, drowns.

As she reads I tell myself that it’s not going to be so bad. After all, we can’t ignore every reference to drowning just because Melissa Randall drowned. This is about the helmsman of a boat, not a seventeen-year-old girl. But there’s something in the way the god of sleep tricks Palinurus into
falling in the water that makes me uneasy. I look around my dwindling class and see it’s making everyone uneasy.

“Datur hora quieti,”
Athena reads. “The time for rest has come?”

I nod. “Yes, you noticed the passive.
Bene.”

“Pone caput fessoque oculos furare labori
—put your head down and rest your eyes?”

“Basically,” I say.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Flavia says, putting her head down on her desk and closing her eyes. Athena reads on, alternating between Latin and English, her words barely audible above the hiss of the steam heat and the gurgling of the radiators. I can tell from Flavia’s breathing that she is asleep. I’m certainly not supposed to let the girls fall asleep in class, but I don’t have the heart to wake her. Before class she told me she hasn’t been sleeping because of bad dreams.

“I keep thinking about Melissa Randall in the lake,” she said. “I know they found her body, but I keep thinking she’s still there. Octavia says she can hear her voice coming from the lake.”

“It’s just the ice buckling,” I told her, but I know what she means. The noise has been keeping me up, too.

“Mene huic confidere monstro?”
Athena reads. “Would you have me put faith in such a demon?”

The noise the ice makes sounds like a monster trapped under the ice.

“Ecce deus ramum Lethaeo rore madentum vique soporatum Stygia super utraque quassat tempora …
Look! The god shook a branch at Lethe who was sleeping.”

She has totally mangled the translation, but I say nothing. The God of Sleep coaxes Palinurus into forgetfulness as the drip of the radiators lulls my students into a drugged stupor. Forget the past, Dean Buehl said, drink deep of Lethe’s water and forget.

Palinurus falls headlong
(praecipitem,
from
praecipitare,
my favorite Latin verb) into the Mediterranean Sea and Aeneas
sails on to Italy, narrowly avoiding the Sirens’ rocks, “… which once were hard to pass and whitened by the bones of many men,” Athena translates. “Far out we heard the growl and roar of the stones where the salt surf beats unceasingly.”

Even my eighth graders have noticed the sounds coming from the lake. “They come from where the rocks are and isn’t that where that senior fell in?” one of them blurted out in the middle of a lesson on the passive periphrastic today.

Athena finishes her translation and there is a moment of silence when we all listen to the sound of the steam hissing in the pipes and the incessant crackling that comes from the lake.

“I think it sucks that Aeneas went on without Palinurus,” Vesta says. Vesta hasn’t liked Aeneas since he ditched Dido in Book Four.

“Yeah, but what else was he supposed to do? Stop the boat and go back? I mean, he had to get past those Sirens and found Italy. Right,
Magistra?
It was his duty. Like you gotta go on.”

I am so grateful for this reading of the
Aeneid
that it is all I can do to stop myself from hugging Athena. We’ve navigated another minefield, gotten through another day of Latin. Aeneas is within sight of the Italian shore. Outside the lake has quieted down. But then Vesta pipes up, “Yeah, but Palinurus’s death comes back to bite him on the ass.”

“Vesta!” Athena says so loudly that Flavia wakes up. They look at me to see if I’ll reprimand Vesta for inappropriate language, but instead I commend her for reading ahead.

“That’s right, Palinurus meets Aeneas in the underworld and tells him the truth about his death and begs him to give him a proper burial.”

“The dead sure are a whiny lot,” Vesta says just as the bell rings. There’s not much I can do but nod my agreement, but I notice Flavia turns pale at such a cavalier dismissal of the demands the dead make upon the living, and the next day I learn that she has dropped out of the class.

Now it’s only Athena and Vesta and me. I have the feeling,
when the three of us convene in the drafty classroom overlooking the lake, that we are the last survivors of some monstrous ice age. Each night it snows, and although Dean Buehl has asked the board for extra money for plowing, the footpaths grow narrower and narrower between the rising walls of snow that guard the edges of the woods.

One Friday afternoon the snow accumulates so fast I’m unable to get my car out of the faculty lot and I have to call Olivia and tell her I’ll be late for our weekend together. She seems unconcerned enough at first—wrapped up in some television show she’s watching with Mitchell, but when I call her Saturday morning to tell her I still can’t get my car out she cries. Mitchell complains that he’ll have to pay the baby-sitter overtime because he has plans for the evening. I try not to wonder what plans. We haven’t talked since Christmas break about the possibility of getting back together and I sense that particular window of opportunity has closed.

All weekend the snow falls and I shovel my car out only to watch the snow fill in the space I’ve cleared. I feel like one of those tortured souls in Hades condemned to perform some meaningless task over and over again. Beneath the soft snow the wipers are frozen onto the windshield. I spray chemical de-icer on the windshield and then reach inside to turn on the wipers. They quiver under the snow, like small animals trying to break free, and then, when they do break free, they sweep a handful of slush and de-icer into my face. The chemical burns my eyes and I have to scoop up handfuls of fresh snow to flush the de-icer out of my eyes. My vision remains blurred for the rest of the weekend, making it impossible to drive to West-chester even if the roads were cleared. When I call, Olivia is calm and tells me she understands in a voice so uncannily grown-up I am simultaneously proud and grief-stricken.

I stay in bed that Sunday and have to cancel my classes on Monday. Gwen Marsh stops by to check on me and bring me some soup and a stack of papers she’s collected from my students. I’m touched by the soup, but wish she hadn’t bothered
with the papers. My eyes hurt too much to read or grade papers, so instead I watch the snow mounting in the window frames, depositing layer upon layer of white and gray sediment like the cross sections of mountain ranges Miss Buehl used to show us. Above these miniature ridges, large lofty flakes cling in clumps that look like cumulus clouds—a dioramic landscape to make up for the fact I can’t see the real world behind the falling snow. It’s the same sense of enclosure I had the January of my senior year that I spent in the infirmary.

L
UCY NEEDN
’
T HAVE BEEN CONCERNED THAT
I’
D STAY IN THE
infirmary. As it turned out, I stayed longer than she did. When Miss Buehl and
Domina
Chambers picked me up off the floor after I lost consciousness they discovered I was burning up with fever. I guess all those hours roaming around the campus in wet clothes had done their trick. They kept me in the same room with Lucy because, Miss Buehl later informed me, Lucy insisted I stay with her.

“She wouldn’t let you out of her sight,” she told me.

I remembered sometimes waking up and seeing Lucy in the bed across from me, lying on her side facing me. I tried once to talk to her about what had happened. I wanted to know if they had believed our story—if Deirdre had gotten rid of the bloody sheets, if anything had been discovered in the lake. But each time I tried to talk about it, Lucy shushed me. I heard her tell the nurse once not to bother me or try asking me questions.

“You should leave the poor kid alone,” I overheard her say once to Miss Buehl. “After all, her mother just died.” It seemed as if Lucy was the only one who remembered that. Even my father, who came to visit me only once, spoke about his new job at the glove factory with such enthusiasm that I thought I had dreamt up the hospital room in Albany and the funeral afterward. And if I had imagined that, maybe I had imagined everything that followed, the overheated dorm room, the baby in the tea tin …

But then I woke up one day to find Deirdre standing next to Lucy’s bed. They seemed to be arguing about something in angry whispers and I knew then I hadn’t imagined any of it.

Domina
Chambers came often and I heard her questioning Lucy about what had happened, about why she had tried to take her own life.

“I don’t think I really meant it,” she told
Domina
Chambers. “I think I knew Jane would find me and save me.”

I was touched by the story even though I knew it was a lie.

Then one day I woke up and found the bed next to me empty. I was so alarmed I managed to get out of bed and walk out into the hall where I found the nurse. “Where’s Lucy?” I asked as I was led back to bed.

“She’s been discharged, honey,” the nurse told me, “and if you want to be you’d better stay in bed.”

Lucy visited me that day. She brought me my Latin homework. I was amazed to think that classes had started. I’d had a feeling, in the whitewashed infirmary room, its windows filled with snow, of suspended time, like in a fairy tale when the whole world goes to sleep with the heroine. But then if anyone were the heroine, I thought, it was Lucy, and she looked as if she had rejoined the world of the living. Her cheeks were pink, her hair shiny, and she was wearing one of the nice outfits she had gotten in Italy. She hadn’t looked this good since October.

“I’m trying to impress them that I’ve regained my mental health,” she said when I complimented her appearance, and then, leaning closer to whisper, “If I’d had any idea what a bother this suicide thing was going to turn out to be, I think I’d have done it for real!” She giggled. “But I don’t think I hate it nearly as much as Deirdre.”

“Deirdre? But she didn’t try to kill herself.”

“No, but they’ve called in this psychologist from Albany who says that suicide is contagious. And since Deirdre’s my roommate and they think she acted funny about the sheets they’re giving her the third degree. They’ll probably start bugging you once you’re well enough.”

“Well it serves her right,” I said. “If she’d just told someone she was pregnant in the first place …”

Lucy frowned. “I guess she was too scared,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s over now.”

“I hope she doesn’t tell anyone,” I said, “I mean with all this psychiatric interrogation. Then it might come out that you and I got rid of … the thing.”

Lucy turned pale and I was immediately sorry I’d reminded her of what we’d done. “She’d better not tell,” Lucy said. “Get better soon, Jane, I might need your help with her.”

I wasn’t released until the next week. I still felt wobbly but I convinced the nurse that I was all right and pleaded that I was afraid of falling too far behind if I didn’t go back to class. I walked back to the dorm on a bright, sunny day, half-blinded by the glare of the sun glancing off the frozen lake. Girls passed me on the path and greeted me, but I felt like they were all moving at a sped-up rate and I became conscious of how slowly I was walking. It made me feel apart to see them all, with their shiny hair swinging against their down vests, their pastel shetland sweaters bright in the sun. These were the girls I had admired in the town drugstore; they were the reason I had wanted to come here, but I was no closer to them—no more like them—now than I had been when I was still a townie. I hadn’t made any friends at Heart Lake. I hadn’t tried to. Lucy had always been enough.