The Wives of Bath (9 page)

Tory weakly raised her head and somebody cheered, and then two prefects carrying the tray of oranges pushed me out of their way and back into the crowd. On every side of me, women’s bodies shut out the sky. My head was barely higher than the rows of breasts bulging out of their blouses—some pairs large and jolly as pumpkins; others, in the stiff, pointed cups of their bras, narrow and sharp, like dangerous instruments that could slice open your skull.

Across the field, a skinny fair-haired woman with a face like a minnow’s was hurrying toward Tory. One of the school nurses and a doctor accompanied her. All the girls and the thickset phys-ed women turned to stare. She was what Sal called “a looker.” Even Morley would have been impressed by her tight navy suit, high heels, and lean legs sheathed in the russet gossamer of Haines stockings. I guessed she was Tory’s mother. She stood watching silently as Willy the janitor and Lewis lifted Tory onto a stretcher and carried her off.

A crowd of girls began to follow them, but the Virgin called everyone back. She stood quietly for a second, the skirt of her old chalk-stained suit fluttering in the breeze. Finally she said, “The game’s over, girls. There’ll be doughnuts and soft drinks in the cafeteria for everybody.” The school’s crullers were my favs, but nobody asked me to join them so I walked off slowly, my head down, hoping one of the girls in the stricken crowd would call me back.

I sat down in the long grass near the ravine fence. It was just the spot Virginia Woolf would have picked if she’d gone to Bath Ladies College. Granted, it wasn’t real countryside, like the windy beaches and pine-fringed islands where Morley and I come from; but at least milkweed and wild asters grew there, and the fence around this part of the grounds was made of fieldstone, not wire. The rumour was that Sir Jonathon had paid a dollar a stone to the farmers who brought them to him from their fields. At one time there’d been 250,000 stones in the fence, and a dollar was almost what those farmers made in a week.

I liked Sir Jonathon’s extravagances—not just because it would shock Sal, but because I was starved for news of somebody who could get away with doing what they wanted. I checked to make sure nobody could see me, and then I lay back in the grass and pulled out a pack of Sweet Caps. Oh, Mouse, aren’t you wicked, I told myself as I lit up. I was barely into my first exhale when I jerked up with a little cry. Lewis, the grounds boy, stood grinning down at me. I couldn’t help noticing his missing front tooth. Paulie’s teeth were in better shape, but the family resemblance was more obvious now that I knew the two of them were brother and sister. He squatted down beside me, his bum touching the backs of his ankles.

“You could get expelled for that.” He looked impressed.

I nodded. “I wouldn’t mind that,” I said.

Lewis began to roll a fag from a package of Drum tobacco. He seemed to know I was watching him and didn’t mind. I’ll have to be careful, though, I thought, not to make him think I’m interested in him sexually. I wasn’t, was I, Alice?

“I saw what you did.” He deftly lit his fag from a match inside a rolled-up match cover. “Nice work.”

“Will she be all right?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He stared sullenly at the school rising from the lawns to the west like a prison. “Maybe she’ll get to go home and get out of this joint. By the way,” he said, “I have a favour to ask of you.”

“Oh?” If he wants my body, I thought, he’s got another thing coming. I waited nervously, in case I had to deny him.

“Give her this, will you?” He handed me an envelope covered with weird little stick drawings of a girl and a monkey with a long tail. On the front, in big block letters, I read the words, “To my girlfriend, Victoria.” I saw more drawings and some initials on the back. At first I thought they spelled out something like
SWAK
(sealed with a kiss). But when I looked closely, I made out the phrase “
KONG LIVES. LONG LIVE KONG
.” He laughed at my face. “Don’t worry, kid. She understands my jokes. We’re two of a kind.”

“And what kind is that?” I asked, carefully putting his letter in the breast pocket of my school blouse.

“Free spirits. Like James Dean. You know who that is, don’t you?” I nodded, and he spat and then squashed his cigarette with the heel of his shoe. I looked down at the butt; it was totally demolished. Then I did the same thing—squashed out my cigarette with the heel of my big, heavy oxford. My butt kept smoking.

“Filters take longer to burn out,” he said, and stomped on it. He stared at me as if he wanted to kiss me, so I put out my hand for him to shake, and instead he kissed it with a mocking laugh.

I watched him walk away down a path through the trees. At the bottom of the ravine, he turned and waved. He looked like the stick figures he’d made in his doodles: two legs, two arms, and a head. A boy. There goes the person Tory loves, I thought. She has Lewis, and I have nobody. And I felt terrible again.

“Bradford, make it fast,” Pauline hissed as I crawled behind her into the dumbwaiter. Paulie pulled down the door with a scary bang and we sat crouched together, knees up to our chins, in a space no bigger than the inside of an old icebox. Now Paulie began to pull on the heavy hemp ropes, watching me suspiciously, as if she expected me to cry out and give us away. So I stared up into the darkness at the top of the shaft, trying not to notice the way the platform swayed slowly from side to side like a subway car. I heard little rattling sounds and squeaks, and then the platform stopped and something clicked into place. Paulie pried open the outside latch with a screwdriver, and we stepped out into a dark hallway whose windows looked down on the ratty little space behind the school where we weren’t allowed to go. Nobody except the tradesmen used it.

Paulie put her finger to her lips, her hooded eyes measuring me as she pointed toward a closed door. I recognized it as the door to one of the infirmary bedrooms. She opened it cautiously, and I followed her into a large dormitory. A girl with frizzy blond hair lay sleeping in the second bed. It was Asa Abrams, the only Jewish girl in the school. Poor Asa spent most of her time in the infirmary. We crept past her slowly breathing body. Ahead of us, the night sky in the narrow window beyond the beds glowed pink from the lights of the city. Luckily for us, Tory was awake. She was sitting
up in a pair of polka-dot pyjamas and a pink Viyella housecoat. When we got to her cot, Paulie put her hand on Tory’s arm, and the two of them stared and stared at each other. At last, Tory motioned to me to come closer.

“I asked Paulie to bring you, Mouse,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping me Saturday.” Tory never called me by my last name, the way the other girls did. I hoped it wasn’t because she felt sorry for me. Now she nodded at Paulie, who hadn’t taken her eyes from Tory’s face. “Mouse will help you with your essay, won’t you, Mouse?” I whispered “Yes” without knowing exactly what Tory meant, but I realized she was making me a substitute for herself. I felt pleased. I was finally being included. “My left leg is broken in two places.” Tory threw back the covers so that we could see her legs stretched out stiffly in plaster casts that looked like giant white pupas. “I’ve torn the ligament in my right ankle, which is almost as bad. I’m being sent home for the rest of the term.” I felt my pleasure shrink. The idea of boarding school without Tory made me feel lost. Paulie must have felt the same way, because her dark head sagged a little, too. Then I remembered Lewis’s note.

I handed it to Tory, and Paulie and I watched her read it. “Lewis wants me to give him a picture,” Tory whispered. She handed the note to Paulie, who put it in her pocket without reading it. “And he wants to know why I’ve got a photo of a boy on my dresser,” Tory said. “How does he know I have my brother’s photograph there?”

“Lewis has the run of the school,” I whispered, to their surprise. Then I told them about seeing Lewis in the bathroom on the first day. They both listened carefully. Particularly Paulie.

“Oh, that’s so nervy!” Tory said. “Going into our washroom like that, right under Phillips’s nose!” She grabbed my hand. “Do you think he lay on my bed, Mouse?” She started giggling uncontrollably. “Maybe he looked in my laundry bag!” Suddenly, at the
end of the room, Asa coughed twice, very pointedly. “Get on the floor!” Tory hissed. Paulie and I flattened ourselves under Tory’s cot and listened. The coughing stopped, and now a door squeaked open.

“Is everything all right in here?” the nurse asked. “I thought: I heard voices.”

“You did,” Tory said. “I’m afraid I was talking in my sleep.”

“Well, settle down now, Victoria.”

The door closed, and I happened to look over at Paulie. She was watching me again—no longer with hostility but with an expression I didn’t understand.

In my heart of hearts, I knew that Bath Ladies College wasn’t a school but a time machine that trapped you for good. The outside world kept changing, but inside the boarding school nothing ever altered. That’s why the matrons and teachers looked the same as they did in the yearbooks twenty years before. And why girls like me didn’t have a hope in Hades of going home in one piece.

I was sure old Sir Jonathon never intended things to turn out like this—i.e., for his nice home to be used as a prison for six hundred girls. His original plans, before he ran out of money, called for a large Scottish tower (besides the mock-Norman tower I lived in), a bowling alley, a stable for one hundred horses, and a deer park exactly like the Queen had at Windsor Castle.

The Virgin tried to make a little extra out of the old place by opening the reception hall and foyer to the public over Christmas and the summer holidays. The board didn’t think she worked hard enough at this, but their charge was unfair. She did the best she could, under the circumstances. As it was, we all had to set up chairs in Sir Jonathan’s mammoth library for old girls’ weddings.

The older girls who acted as tour guides on public occasions passed on to us information about what a fanatic Sir Jonathon was for cleanliness. He’d installed gas-fed fireplaces because he considered wood-burning fires too dirty. And he put the coal furnace outside the castle for the same reason and built an underground
heating tunnel to connect it to the house. He’d even installed a central vacuuming system, which depended on a water-suction machine in the basement. The system cost too much to run now, but you could still see the brass fittings over the suction holes on the walls of our classrooms.

Sir Jonathon was a bachelor. Maybe, like me, he didn’t think much of girls. What would he say if he knew how we sweated and cursed old Hammerhead under our breath when she made us hang from ropes and jump over the horse in his conservatory? It used to be the showroom of his castle: he’d installed a vast stained-glass dome in the ceiling and run special steam pipes through the dirt in the planters to keep his exotic flowers warm. Now only a few rubbery houseplants grew there. And how would he feel about the wastebasket in his grand bathroom stuffed to the top with little brown bags containing used sanitary napkins—the bathroom with a shelf cut into his white Carrara marble for the first telephone in Toronto? He couldn’t have had much fun with the women who went to his tea parties. In the photographs of gatherings on the castle lawn, they wore dresses that looked like heavy coats, and hardly any of them smiled except for one or two and only then in such a vague kind of way that it was hard to tell if they were really smiling at all.

I couldn’t help thinking how different they looked from President Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, in her snug Dior coats and pillbox hats. I may have been wrong, but I didn’t think Jackie would enjoy herself at a party like that. Of course, I didn’t know Jackie personally. My relationship was with her husband, the president, and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.