The Lake of Dead Languages (5 page)

“We shared a suite, yes. Lucy Toller and I shared one room and Deirdre Hall had the single.”

“I believe there was an unsuccessful suicide attempt first.”

“Yes, Lucy slit her wrists over Christmas break. She and Deirdre were alone here on campus. It could be pretty bleak.”

“The notes I have from the school nurse at the time indicate that Deirdre Hall was particularly upset by the event, especially since Miss Toller chose to slit her wrists in Deirdre’s bed.”

“Deirdre had the single. I guess Lucy wanted privacy. But yes, I think Deirdre was upset about that.”

“Upset enough to make her own suicide attempt. Only hers was successful.”

“Yes, she fell from the Point and broke her neck on the ice.” I can’t help but look up at the outcropping of stone as I speak. Dr. Lockhart follows my gaze. And there we are, both staring at the forty-foot cliff as if we expect to see Deirdre Hall appear on its height and perform her last swan dive. For a moment a picture does appear in my mind: Deirdre standing on the Point, her face contorted with rage and fear. I blink away the image and turn my gaze away from the window and back to Dr. Lockhart. “Some people thought it was an accident,” I say.

“According to my files her journal indicated otherwise.” She flips open the folder on her desk and reads silently for a moment. A breeze from the lake stirs the pages and I can tell they are of the light onion skin we used to have in typing class, not the smooth sheets that people use nowadays in computer printers.

“And then Lucy tried again. She drowned in the lake?”

“Yes, she went through the ice….”

“That could have been an accident as well?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t. I was there.”

“I see. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

I look out at the lake. A fog is rising from the water, whitening the surface of the lake. I can almost imagine it is winter and the lake is already frozen.

“She had a terrible fight with her brother,” I say. The words come tumbling out before I can consider whether I really ought to relate this information to Dr. Lockhart. Maybe it is because they are words I rehearsed and repeated so many times. “And then she ran onto the ice, which was breaking apart….”

“What was the fight about?” she asks.

“I only heard part of it and I didn’t understand it all.” I’m amazed that the well-rehearsed lines are there, tripping off my tongue as if the twenty years that have elapsed since I
first delivered them had never passed. Like my Latin declensions, they’d stayed in my memory all these years. “But it had to do with a teacher here.”

“Helen Chambers.” I notice that Dr. Lockhart doesn’t need to consult her notes to produce the name.

“Yes, Helen Chambers. She taught Latin and Greek. She was an amazing teacher. She had us all reciting Greek plays. Our senior year, she put on an aquatic version of
Iphigenia in Aulis
in the lake.”

“In
the lake?”

“Yes, in the lake.”

“She sounds remarkable. But why would Lucy and her brother have been arguing about her?”

I shake my head. “I don’t really know, but Lucy idealized
Domina
Chambers. We all did. It was thought that Lucy had an unhealthy obsession with her.”

“
It was thought?
What do you think?”

The question is eerily like one that Helen Chambers herself would pose. If you tried to hide behind someone else’s opinion—the introduction in your Penguin edition of
Antigone,
say, or some predigested litcrit babble from Cliff Notes—she would nail you with those icy blue eyes of hers and ask you—no, demand of you—
What do you think?
And if your answer failed to measure up to her standards for original thought she would look heavenward and shrug her elegant shoulders. “Perhaps you really haven’t thought at all, Miss Hudson. Come back to us when you have.”

“She could be a bit harsh,” I tell Dr. Lockhart.

Dr. Lockhart smiles. “Don’t you ever find, Jane, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh?”

“Yes, I agree,” I say, but I wonder if I do. I’ve never been much good at the “tough love” school of teaching. “But it was thought—
I thought
—that she sometimes went too far.”

“Well, then perhaps you should think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students. As I’m sure you remember, she was let go.”

*    *    *

A
FTER MY MEETING WITH
D
R.
L
OCKHART
I
WALK TO THE
lodge for my first-period class. The rain has cleared and the girls who run past me have tied their regulation navy school windbreakers around their waists so that they stream out behind them like shiny, rustling tail feathers. A raucous crowd of eighth graders parts to make way and then regroups behind me never losing the thread of their shouted conversation. I might be a stone parting a stream for all the notice they take of me. It makes me feel good. Like a part of the geography.

It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To feel a part of something. I wonder if this was how Helen Chambers felt, when she came back to teach at Heart Lake. I know that to me she always seemed the defining spirit of the place.

On my way to my class I pass the art room. I stop just outside the door and watch Tacy Beade setting up for her next class. The room hasn’t changed since I went here—the girls say Beady deducts points from your grade if you don’t put the art supplies back in their proper places—and neither has Miss Beade. She moves around the room, arranging palettes and easels like a nun performing the stations of the cross. Is this what I want, I wonder, the comfort of teaching in the same place for forty years? To be one of the
old girls?

My first class is Language Discovery for Sixth Graders. I trade off with the Spanish and German teachers. It’s a new idea of Dean Buehl’s. This way the kids will have a basis for picking which language they want in seventh grade.

“Think of it as a recruiting opportunity,” Dean Buehl had told me. “Make Latin fun. Build up the Latin program and you’ll have a job for life.”

When I went to Heart Lake Latin was mandatory. The idea of Helen Chambers recruiting is absurd and slightly offensive. I can’t imagine Helen Chambers spending two minutes worrying about how to make Latin fun. And yet we all loved her. We would have done anything for her.

I wonder what Helen Chambers would think of how I teach this class. I use a textbook called
Ecce Romani.
Here are the Romans. The title always makes me think of a TV sitcom. Oh, those goofy lovable Romans, with their charming villa in southern Italy and their colorful, perky slaves. There’s even an episode in which one of the slaves escapes. When he’s caught, he’s beaten with a stick
(virga)
and branded on the forehead with the letters FUG, short for
fugitivus,
runaway.

When Dean Buehl first showed me the new books my mouth went dry. All those nights studying declensions and memorizing Catullus hadn’t prepared me to talk about the weather in Latin
(Quaenam est tempestas hodie? Mala est.)

I spent hours in front of the mirror practicing conversational gambits like a nervous teenager preparing for her first date.
Salve! Quid est praenomen tibi? Quis es?

Now, when I enter my first-period class, I am greeted by a dozen loud voices.
Salve Magistra! Quid agis?
And though I know that
quid agis
means, idiomatically, how are you, this morning, after my meeting with Dr. Lockhart, I hear instead its literal meaning: What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell her about what you saw last night? And I have to stop myself from telling my cheerful, beaming,
prepubescent
sixth graders,
“Nescio.”
I don’t know. I have no idea.

I
N THE ADVANCED CLASS THAT DAY
I
TRY NOT TO STARE AT
Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite, but I find myself stealing surreptitious looks while they read their translations. I think I can detect blue circles under Athena’s eyes, but then I know that the girls often affect this sleepless look by smudging kohl under their eyes, which matches the shade of blue lipstick they all favor.

She fumbles, though, in her translation, which is not like her.

“How are you translating
praecipitatur
in line six?” I ask her.

“She fell under the water.”

“She?”

“It’s the light, not she,” Vesta interrupts. “But I don’t get it: The light throws down its head under the water? Doesn’t
praecipito
mean, like, to fall on your head?”

Aphrodite giggles. “I think you must have fallen on your head last night, Vesta.”

Vesta and Athena exchange dangerous glances with Aphrodite, and I find myself, of all things, blushing, as if it were my secret that was threatened. Maybe it is. If they knew that I was there last night, what does that say about my authority as a teacher?

“Tace,”
I tell Aphrodite.
“Praecipitare
means to cast down headlong. In the middle sense it can mean to cast oneself down headlong. In this case it means the light casts itself below the water, or, more idiomatically, the light sinks beneath the waves.”

“That’s a lot of English words for one Latin word,” Athena points out.

“Well, Latin is an economical language, especially when it comes to destruction.”

Athena gives me a smile that chills me like a rush of lake water. “That’s exactly why we like it,” she says.

A
FTER CLASS,
I
WALK TO THE PRESCHOOL TO PICK UP
Olivia. I am early, so when I come around the corner of the building and see the children on the playground I step into the shadows of a large sycamore so Olivia won’t see me yet.

I look for Olivia in the brightly colored knots of children playing together in twos and threes, running and climbing in the mottled shade of the playground. And then I see her, apart from the others, dancing and singing to herself under the pine trees.

She doesn’t look unhappy, but the sight of her alone worries me. It reminds me of something I can’t at first put my finger on. Maybe, I reason, it’s just that she reminds me of
myself at her age. Until I met Lucy Toller in the ninth grade I had no friends.

Olivia’s dance is punctuated now with little swipes to the ground, as if she were picking flowers, only I can see from here that her fingers barely graze the pine needles. It’s a charade of flower-picking, no doubt part of some make-believe. She is so absorbed in her game that she is wandering farther and farther from the playground, into the deeper woods that surround the school grounds and slope down to the lake. And that’s when I realize what she reminds me of: Persephone, straying from her companions to pick flowers on the shores of Lake Pergus, where she was snatched by Hades.

I step out of the shadows to call her, but just as I open my mouth I hear one of the student aides call her back to the playground. It takes a minute for the sound of her name to penetrate her daydream, but then she skips toward the older girl eagerly. I see the aide lean over to tell Olivia something and Olivia nodding. I can tell by the way Olivia’s eyes slant away from the aide that she is being reprimanded for straying away. Good, I think. But I’ll have to talk to her myself tonight.

I follow the children as they leave the playground. Dismissal is from inside and I’ll have to wait while they sing their good-bye song and collect their artwork. I find myself wandering under the same trees Olivia had been playing near. I can see why she likes the spot. It is cool under the pines and the ground is golden with dried pine needles. I kick the needles and unearth something thin and gold and metallic.

Stooping down to pick it up, I am reminded again of Persephone picking her flowers, only it isn’t a flower I retrieve from the pine needles, it is a hairpin, or, rather, several hairpins linked together. When I lift them up into the light I recognize the pattern. Two U-shaped hairpins linked together with a bobby pin bisecting the top one. It looks like the head of a horned animal holding something in its mouth. I shiver, not because of the shade now but because I’ve seen this particular configuration before, but not for twenty years.

W
E CALLED THEM
CORNICULA,
WHICH, AS
L
UCY
found in Cassell’s
New Latin,
meant little horned ones. Deirdre used to say she had invented them when she found Helen Chambers’s hairpin in the love seat in the Lake Lounge. I have always thought, though, that they were a truly cooperative endeavor, product of a tripartite genesis.

We were in the suite’s one single room, Deirdre’s room, studying for our Latin midterm, fall semester, junior year, drinking Deirdre’s tea to stay awake. She had the single in our suite because of a note from her mother’s psychiatrist saying Deirdre had boundary issues and severe migraines. Lucy used to say it was overkill, that she ought to have stuck to one thing or the other: boundary issues or migraines.

Deirdre’s habits, which Lucy viewed as affectations, could be annoying. Her parents had something to do with foreign affairs and she’d spent her childhood in various remote corners of Asia. She wore an antique kimono to the shower room instead of the frayed and stained terry robes the rest of us shuffled around in. She liked to dress in outfits composed entirely of silk scarves clinging provocatively to her welldeveloped figure. It used to make me nervous looking at her in class because I always thought some piece was about to
slip off, but the only time they came off was on our nocturnal swims, and then our path down to the lake would be strewn with her discarded silks.

She kept two large China tea tins on her bureau, one filled with pot, the other, and this was considered odder by Heart Lake standards, filled with loose tea. She was as particular about her teas as she was about her marijuana. Sometimes, listening to her rattle on about estate provinces and curing processes, it was difficult to know which she was talking about. I suspected she mixed more than her talk about the two, and there was many a morning I spent dazed and light-headed after drinking a cup of her dark smoky tea and many a night I spent sleepless after smoking one of her exquisitely rolled joints.