Thomas thumped me on the head, and I exploded. “Don’t act like you’re the biggest toad in the pond!”
“How can I be?” he shouted back. “When I’m standing next to you!”
Nan wiggled between us in alarm, but it was Mary’s tired face of concern that hushed us. She looked too much like our mother.
I drooped in despair. I was letting them down. I was letting them all down. But it couldn’t be helped. How could I explain what Sister Greeley did? How could I make them understand the fury I felt? Not only at her, but at myself. The fear that I couldn’t control myself. That I never could.
“She . . . pitied her . . . us . . . Higginses.” I shook my head. I couldn’t let it out. The pressure was too great. And it wouldn’t go over well in this crowd, anyway. A Higgins did not engage in tears and temper. We managed. Like my mother in her bed, managing her constant sickness. Her constant loss.
“Yes,” Joseph sighed. “Higginses. Her. Us. And him.” He nodded toward our father in his chair in the living room. But by the end of his sentence, he was wearing a smile.
“Spawn of the Devil,” John added. “Or at least Thomas is.”
We laughed . . . even me.
Inside, Arlington cried for attention, and we all wandered back into the house where we had left the babies. Thomas plucked Arly from his high chair and the baby immediately pulled Thomas’s rough knuckle into his mouth and began to suck.
“Are we ready to listen to Nan’s plan?” Mary asked. “I’ve heard it, and it’s good.”
I didn’t want to hear the plan. Even if it was one that Mary believed was good. But I sat, like the rest of them and kept my mouth closed, though my mind wasn’t exactly open.
Nan became instantly chirpy. She placed both her hands flat onto the marble-topped table and said one word.
“Claverack.”
None of us responded.
Mary took over, like they’d rehearsed this. “Founded by Dutch Protestants, Claverack College and the Hudson River Institute is a distinguished coeducational high school that accepts exceptional girls.”
She recited it from memory, obviously from an advertisement of the school.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The boys need to pay for Mother and the children. But Mary and I have figured it out,” Nan said. “We can afford the tuition if you are willing to wash dishes for the room and board.”
“I’ve contacted them and sent your records. It’s all set,” Mary announced.
“You are an exceptional girl,” Joe laughed.
“Or at least,” said Thomas, “Mary has fooled them into thinking so.”
Thomas’s light jab undid me, and I fell into a puddle on the table, covering my head with my arms, not wanting any of them to see. They were sending me to school? I couldn’t raise myself from the table. Even when Mary began clearing the dishes and I heard Joseph head out to feed the dogs. Maybe it was having all my brothers and sisters home again. Or maybe it was another dead baby. Or my mother being so sick, or my father and his whiskey, or Sister Greeley and the rottenness of this town. But truly it was none of these things. I knew exactly why I couldn’t face them. Any of them.
It was because of the word exceptional. And how so very much I’d always wanted it to be true.
March 1, 1899
“Go study,” I tell Ethel. “I’ll finish cleaning up.”
And with these simple words, I truly join Mary and Nan. But what better company? All my older siblings have sacrificed so much. It really is my turn.
“Thanks, Maggie,” Ethel says.
She’s about to say something more but stops herself, although we both know what it is she was going to say . . . that she’s glad I’m home. Instead, she dries her hands on a fresh rag and heads upstairs.
My hands are full of grease from scraping the stove when I hear a crash in the next room followed by Arlington’s loud whining. Father is in there, along with Joseph and Clio, so I keep cleaning.
Arly’s high-pitched complaining continues, and I grit my teeth while I wait for someone to soothe him. What did they do before I got home?
Arlington’s fretting finally stops but my anger stays. How quickly I bounce from respecting my siblings to despising them. The anger is so much easier. It pulses through me, hot and alive. Without it, disappointment creeps in, making me feel like one of those dried out husks the citizens of Corning once pelted me with the day Bob came to town. Maybe this is why they were angry—better to holler and howl than to sit quietly in the shadow of pine trees hearing how wonderful life could be, but never ever seemed to be.
Oh how I’d love to despise them all . . . Joseph, Mary, Thomas. Why should it be me here? But of course, why should it be them? And it is them. And me. Except for John, we are all here.
Feet pound across the floorboards toward the bathroom. At least we have indoor plumbing. My heart pinches thinking of Henry and his plumping. If the world were right and good, he would be in there with them right now. If only I were right and good, I wouldn’t be such a selfish thing.
All I’ve done since dinner is move the battle from the outside of me to the inside, and this waffling back and forth between accepting my duty and despising it is exhausting. I embrace acceptance with a long, slow breath, and head upstairs to make quick work of the boys. I leave them rolling around like puppies in the dark where they’ll eventually wear themselves down. My only rule is they do not set a foot out of bed or I caution them they will “suffer the torments of hell,” since I’ve washed their feet and am not repeating the labor.
Downstairs I dry and put away the rest of the dishes, wash down the table, and begin to ready the kitchen for tomorrow. Clio says good night next. And then finally Joseph heads to bed as I’m grinding tomorrow’s coffee. “Night, Mary,” he jokes.
“It won’t be so funny in the morning,” I say. “When you wake up to lukewarm coffee and burned biscuits instead of oatmeal with sweet cream and warm bread.”
He groans.
My father is asleep in his chair, his whiskey glass empty and his book overturned on his lap. From the look of him there, it seems it’s where he now sleeps. Good. Perhaps Mother’s body will receive real rest without him, or his babies, needing it.
Michael Higgins. He reads and thinks and drinks and lives his life the way he’s decided to live it. And no one calls this selfish. They just call him a man. Always think like this, Margaret, he’d told me. For yourself. Always. I’m given permission to think my own thoughts, just as long as I think them standing in front of a sink full of dirty dishes. A place where all these thoughts can do is smolder and seethe, hollowing me out from the inside. I wish I could stop thinking like this. Because I can’t be Michael Higgins. I can’t even be Margaret Higgins.
And . . . I’m back to despising.
A Good Girl
The morning was so new the dew hadn’t yet dotted the sugar maples. I stared out the train window into the grainy dawn at my two older sisters standing on the platform. Nan was smiling, but it was her scared smile. She was afraid for me. Mary was being Mary, so she wasn’t smiling, but I could tell by the way she breathed in through her nose how pleased she was. And she should be. Because just as surely as they stood on that train platform, I was standing on their backs. I would not be heading to Claverack if it weren’t for them.
The engine released a burst of steam and the train lurched forward. The three of us leaped to attention. But it was just steam. I wasn’t leaving. Yet.
Early that morning the three of us had crept out of the house without waking anyone. I’d said my good-byes last night. Father took the opportunity to expound on the demerits of formal education, quoting Bob: “ ‘It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.’ ” I took it to mean he would miss me. My mother worked harder than usual over dinner, yet looked less tired, which was truly a parting gift. Thomas announced how peaceful the Higgins household would now be wit
h me missing from it, and little Ethel just looked stunned, as if she didn’t know whether she should be excited or distraught. Tonight would be the first night in my memory in which I did not have her cold feet stuck to me, and when the train began to roll I pressed both my feet to the floor as if I could stop it. I wanted to stop it. I belonged here. In Corning. With them.
Mary and Nan raised their hands in the air.
“Stop the train,” I whispered.
It didn’t stop. And I knew I didn’t want it to. Not really. Just like Nan, I was scared to death. But there was nothing I wanted more than this. To be leaving Corning, New York. To be heading toward . . . a future? Could it be possible I might actually become the doctor my father always promised I’d be? The train picked up speed and my sisters were gone.
We chugged through the outskirts of Corning, and then dove into the woods. I sat limp in my seat allowing myself to be hurled east. It was a five-hour trip with two changes in trains, but there wasn’t enough time to open my book or eat the boiled eggs Mary packed me. There was only enough time to wonder where I was headed, and to revel in the fact that in this very moment, everything felt possible.
* * *
My first sight of Claverack, along with the day and night that followed, were like blurry paintings in my head. Trees glowing with a tint of yellow. The windows of College Hall reflecting the September sunlight. The night’s strange darkness in the dormitory where I thought I’d never sleep, only to wake up an instant later to the rising sun.
I stumbled about campus numb with exhaustion the first few days, overwhelmed by the buzzing of five hundred young voices, the routines of the gigantic kitchen where I worked in the evenings, trying to remember everyone’s name, finding the location of my next class, and making a thousand new little choices I wasn’t used to making. When Betty, who was in charge of the kitchen staff, found me leaning over a hot sink of dishes staring into the bubbles, I readied myself for a scolding. Instead, she laughed.
“You’re a marvel, Margaret Higgins,” she said. “Go back to the dormitory and rest.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am?”
“You’re a good girl,” she said, patting me on the back with her warm, wet hand. “You’ve worked hard these first two weeks. Harder than any of them. We’re very happy to have you here. Now get to bed.”
Being praised for clearing tables, washing dishes, sweeping and mopping . . . this was new. And very nice. I was a marvel!
In the kitchen and dining hall, I mostly felt like myself, other than the heaps of praise Betty and the women in the kitchen piled on me every day just for setting the silverware straight. I worked the evening shift, laying tables and preparing dinner, along with serving my fellow students and the staff and cleaning up afterward. Just like home, it was a world of familiar tasks where one followed the next, followed the next.
Betty had all of us in the kitchen eat our dinners in the same order each evening during the setup, serving, and cleaning of the meal. My position came third, right after Marion, at about the same time the first diners entered the hall. I looked forward to my twenty tranquil minutes alone in the back of the kitchen. I’d never eaten a meal by myself before. There was a comfortable joy in gazing off into the clamor of the kitchen while shoveling in my mashed potatoes and ham. By the time I rejoined the kitchen team, I was refreshed and ready to jump into the fray of my duties.
But I hadn’t come to Claverack to work in the kitchen, I’d come to study in the classroom, where I did not feel comfortable or joyful. Inside the classroom I was quiet and withdrawn. If Thomas could have seen me he would have insisted I must surely be dying of some heinous disease.
It had nothing to do with my teachers, who were all gracious and giving. A shock, I admit. The entire teaching staff was brimming with older, more knowledgeable versions of Miss Hayes. They allowed new students like me time to grow accustomed to this humane treatment by calling on the older students and using them as examples. The seasoned students answered questions, gave their thoughts on the assignment, and even asked questions of the teachers in return. To which the teachers responded with delight. It was all very odd and communal and I liked it.
My reservations had nothing to do with my qualifications as a student. Shockingly, my public education in Corning delivered superbly by Miss Hayes, and begrudgingly by Sister Greeley, more than passed muster here. Miss Hayes especially had promoted my love of mathematics and Mary, my love of theater, and I found I was quite on top of these subjects. My history was on solid ground thanks to my father. And botany, my science class, had been so very interesting that I’d not noticed whether or not anyone else was silently panting inside at all the incredible mysteries of the world. It was my initial class of the day, and had my brain whirring by its end.
Likewise, the dormitory was a bright and civilized place where the girls were thoughtful and kind. If you dropped your washrag, the closest girl would quickly pick it up for you. If you stopped to mend your bellows for a moment on the stairs while carrying your laundry up from the basement, the first to appear would ask if you needed a hand. I bunked with three other girls in their first year—Minerva, Hazel, and Vivian. We were all so very generous to one another that almost no conversation went beyond haltingly spoken statements of apology for wrongs not committed, or quick smiles upon entry or exit from the room so as not to disturb anyone’s studying with a more time-consuming facial expression. All four of us desperately attempted not to get in one another’s way so much so that after three weeks of sleeping across the room from these girls, I did not know what their individual voices sounded like. Strangely, they even slept to themselves, as none of them snored, an interesting tidbit I wouldn’t be sharing with Nan lest she believe she was the only girl who did.
Yet even among all this helpfulness and happiness, it was in the classrooms and dormitory where this strange feeling overtook me and wouldn’t let go. It was a heaviness that kept me from raising my hand to expound excitedly on my burgeoning knowledge of the reproductive mechanisms of mosses in botany, and stopped me from mentioning the interesting fact that none of us assigned to room 128 snored. Unless I snored. Which I’m sure I didn’t. This new emotion pulled at my shoulders, sealed my lips, and weighed on my heart.
It was loneliness.
I’d heard of it but had yet to experience it. Surrounded as I’d been by my brothers and sisters, lonely was something I’d aspired to. Now I understood why most viewed it negatively. It hurt to see so many people I could reach out and touch, but no one waving me over when she spotted me across the classroom or linking her arm through mine while traversing campus. I had become used to missing Mary and Nan, but here in the first weeks of school, I actually missed Ethel.
I worked hard at my studies all day, and even harder in the dining hall each night. My grades and praise were adding up. It was extremely pleasing. But I did wish I’d make a friend. Her name was Esther Farquharson, and I’d been trying to capture her heart since I first saw her.
Esther was a third year. Waiflike. Light of foot. Charming. Intelligent. And beautiful. She pranced about campus saying very clever things. Everyone adored her. I adored her. She was dramatic, and left her long brown hair free to fly down to her hips. Her clothes were fashionable, and she wore them as though they’d grown on her each morning after first enquiring as to her mood and the events of the day. She moved the way I imagined a dancer must move, knowing every step before she took it.
I wanted so badly to be her friend but I’d forgotten how to make one. Or maybe I never knew. Thoughts of Emma dampened my spirit for friend-making even further and kept me far away from Esther.
Amusingly, it was laundry that brought us together when early on a Monday morning she popped in on me in the basement soaking my dresses. She explained how she sent her wet-washing out without her stockings on Friday—like so many of the girls at Claverack, she did not do her own laundry—and now she needed to clean them herself.
“It’s Maggie, right?” she
asked.
I wanted to correct her, have her call me Margaret because it sounded more mature. But I just nodded.
“Can you show me how to use one of these?” She picked up the washboard with two fingers, as if she didn’t want to actually touch it.
“I certainly can,” I told her, swallowing my surprise that anyone could not know how to use a washboard.
She smiled. She truly was beautiful.
I rinsed and wrung my dresses, hanging them on the rack out of the way, and then gave Esther a tutorial in what most people referred to as the weekly affliction . . . laundry. However, in the Higgins household, it was a daily one.
“You are such a good girl, Maggie.” She laughed when I demonstrated how to use the wringer. Her laugh—as was her comment on my character—was meant kindly. Though both laid me low.
She was right in her assessment of me. Since I’d arrived at Claverack, I had been a good girl. Quiet. Smiling. Existing for others. Like my father’s Lady Liberty, I was revealing only my ideal self. The self I’d worked so hard to become.
It was amazingly easy to be this better me at school. Partly it was fear of a new place, and partly being separated from my family for the first time. Although there was something else to being this good girl. It was this something else that depressed me. Here at Claverack I was not a Higgins. I was not spawn. I was not my father’s daughter. Here at Claverack I’d been given a chance to make myself into whoever I’d like. Now Esther Farquharson had gone and identified who this was. And though I’d worked hard to cultivate this exact person, I wasn’t sure I liked her all that much.
I hid all this from Esther, and she changed the subject from clean stockings to her declamation for chapel the next morning. She was to declaim from Sophocles’s great tragedy, Electra, taking on the role of Electra at the moment she angrily confronts her mother, Clytemnestra for murdering Electra’s father.
What Every Girl Should Know Page 11
