Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  But the rogue housing lottery (which was not a lottery at all) had seen to put Elise—the sleepy artist from Kentucky—in my dorm too, in her own single three doors down the hall. She had been Linley’s roommate, so she too was now on her own. I didn’t know Elise well. None of us did. But her serious boyfriend from the year before had now graduated, and because we were the only two of our larger group of friends to be living in this part of campus, we took to each other immediately. Elise modeled a form of independence that thrilled me. She dismantled her bed, stacked the frame in our dorm’s basement, and made up a futon on the floor. The carpet around it was strewn with sweaters and long socks, and the air smelled of linseed oil and turpentine from her advanced art studio. Her hair was often unbrushed. She carried books in her arms rather than in a woven tote like the rest of us, and when you read their spines you saw she was reading things not assigned for class. At the beginning of the year she took on Simone de Beauvoir in the original. I’d stick my head in after soccer practice, before classes had properly begun, and find her lying on her stomach on her mattress, with Le Deuxième Sexe and a French-English dictionary open in front of her and an uncapped blue Bic in her hand.

  “Want to walk to eat?” I’d ask.

  “Nope,” she’d say kindly but without apology. “I’m dining with Simone.”

  Around Elise I felt saccharine and young, sporty and painfully earnest. She’d never have worn soccer shorts. Instead of cleats, she glided around in hemp sandals. Instead of holding crushes, she returned to Brewster House in the evenings trailing boys she occasionally deigned to date. Early in the fall term, a classmate of ours, Scotty Lynch, started turning up. He was distinguishable anywhere on campus for his pouf of curly brown hair and impish grin. When he smiled, his eyes narrowed dramatically and held a twinkle of sincerity that was unexpected, given the rat’s nest and the slouchy cords. He was a true buddy, usually faintly redolent of marijuana and, like all his kind, masterly at affecting indifference to any form of authority or routine. I suppose Scotty went to class, but I never saw him in the Schoolhouse. I never heard him complete a sentence—he’d just scratch at the back of his hairy head and say, “Yeah, cool.” Elise played modern blues on her stereo and kept her room dim by tacking scarves over the windows. She spent closed hours with Simone and open hours with Scotty. I, running stairs, running to the fields, running to the chapel for choir rehearsal, felt like a windup toy beside her feathery, breathy, French-philosophy wiles.

  Within a few weeks of the new school year, I was fretting about whether to drop honors calculus for regular calculus. The decision felt monumental. Has a world ever been so small? The choreography of our curriculum and activities was, even in the early 1990s, tailored toward college acceptances—add Stanford and MIT, and one-third of my class would matriculate at Ivy League schools. As a junior I was already a year ahead of where the standard math sequence would have me, but would it demonstrate a failure of ambition to drop an honors class?

  “Alternatively,” said Mrs. Fenn, my fifth-form adviser, “would it be good to give yourself a little break somewhere?”

  Easy for her to say, I thought. She taught regular calculus and was master of our dorm, living in the largest apartment, the one with a door that opened onto our common room, from which the smells of dinner cooking and the sounds of her children playing could sometimes make me weak. How could she understand how hard I had to paddle now? Academically, fifth form was a step up. Even if we hadn’t felt the ground beginning to shudder with the approach of college, we all had a full year of Religion class, including the two dreaded exegesis papers; English electives that sent us deep into texts; conversational foreign language and literature classes; lab science; and so on. The only way to be high-achieving was to do everything, and because we never went home, there was nobody stopping us from working all night long, working through breakfast, studying flash cards in Chapel, rehearsing physics equations by the grassy defensive end of the soccer field, conjugating the passé simple while waiting for the alto line to enter Fauré’s Requiem Op. 48.

  “But Princeton,” I said.

  Mrs. Fenn pressed her lips together and puffed out her cheeks. My father had gone there. My grandfather had gone there. My uncle had gone there. My great-uncle had gone there. Dad liked to joke that I was welcome to attend any college I wanted, but if I went to Princeton, he’d pay for it. I did not experience these expectations as privilege; they terrified me. Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination. The world of my adult life existed on the other side of a keyhole, and the shape of that lock was Nassau Hall. I could imagine no other.

  “Princeton will be fine,” said my adviser. “I’m more concerned about you.”

  I hung on to honors calc. There were ringers in that room, kids snapping their fingers before calling out answers, already chafing at their confinement to single-variable equations. I felt the chill of confusion, of being left behind, and it panicked me.

  For English that term I’d chosen Modern Novel with Mr. Katzenbach, because as a debater I had watched Coach Katzenbach stand at a lectern and coolly prove to a student that he was not actually sitting in the chair he was sitting in, ontologically speaking. I’d had no exposure to rhetoric (only etiquette, brittle pretender). Mr. Katzenbach worked logic like a rope and used ordinary words to give the world the slip. The feeling of watching him do it was similar to the few times I’d been almost drunk, but better, because it was clear and cold. His coaching had been so good that the first time I’d traveled with the debate team to compete, back in fourth form, I’d returned with a trophy, a small personalized gavel with a metal plate bearing my name and FIRST PLACE, SECOND NEGATIVE. I’d gone on a lark. Mr. Katzenbach told me to consider law school. By fifth form I couldn’t fit debate in my schedule alongside varsity sports, but I could take Katzenbach’s English class.

  For Modern Novel, he assigned Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. On the first day, we settled around the lacquered round table—humanities classes at St. Paul’s were taught at “Harkness Tables,” in expectation of discussions, not lectures—and set our thick blue paperbacks like dead birds in front of us. Mr. Katzenbach hitched up his huge stained trousers and said, “All right, what’s this? They call me Ishmael.”

  We looked around the room. Blanks.

  He shook his head. “Really? Okay. All this happened, more or less.”

  More blanks.

  He growled. “Okay. Come on. All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  We were sinking into our shoulders.

  “Argh! Are you there? Are you in there?” He shuffled around the room, panting, periodically tugging at his pants. “It was love at first sight.”

  Nobody breathed.

  “JESUS! Can you READ? Can you SEE? Open the BOOK!”

  Fumbling pages. There it was, the first line of Catch-22: “It was love at first sight.”

  “So,” said Mr. Katzenbach. “Who can tell me about love?”

  Now, Mr. Katzenbach, by the time I had him in class, had been teaching at St. Paul’s for decades, and in those decades he had touched several girls inappropriately, struck up unacceptable relationships with a few, and harassed many more. I knew nothing of this, and I include it because its presence in the generally aseptic report issued much later by a law firm hired by the school to investigate the history of teacher-student abuse on campus embitters my memories of him, as well it should. Among other incidents, the report details how, after he pawed one girl’s breast beneath her sweater, she went directly to an administrator and coach she trusted, John Buxton, to complain, and Mr. Buxton replied by asking her what she had done to cause Mr. Katzenbach to behave in this way. This happened the year before I was born, sixteen years before I had him in class. Mr. Buxton had risen to vice rector by the time I was there, and Mr. Katzenbach seemed to me a very brilliant, very overweight and unhealthy man. Some combination of diabetes and dissipation ga
ve him potent body odor, and his scalp was always running with sweat.

  “A true jolie laide,” said my mother, as I described him to her (I no longer cried into pay phones), which was not quite right, but I was happy to have a new phrase for this new character in my life. He made us talk about love. I didn’t know what it meant to him, of course. I had no idea what it meant for anyone, but I was damned ready to learn. We spent that entire class on the first line. The first line. Nobody had ever directed me to read closely before. Nobody had ever been driven to yelling by words on a page. We opened all the windows and let him billow, like a sail.

  I wanted to take Modern Novel all day long. Like Elise, I began checking out fiction and poetry collections nobody made me read: Alice Munro, Adrienne Rich, Ellen Gilchrist, Isak Dinesen. Here was a force to temper the lockstep urgency of the college-prep process. It was so simple: pleasure, the idea that I might find things I wanted to learn about, and follow in that direction. This momentum gathered fast. I dropped honors calc and, with an approving arm around my shoulder, Mrs. Fenn welcomed me into her regular calculus course, where I could plow through problem sets without much trouble. I was grateful for this bit of ease, and gratitude made me feel generous, particularly toward the few sixth formers in my new math class who were anguished and looking for help. I answered the pleas of hockey-playing Declan Brophy not least because my friend Maddy, still devoted to him, wanted to hear what his room looked like. For several weeks that fall I’d hike the wooded path to his dorm after Seated Meal, nights I didn’t have choir rehearsal, and sit on the floor, back to a sofa, leading him through integral equations. I wished Maddy could have come with me—I don’t think there exists a better way to untangle a girl’s admiration for a boy than to try to coach him through calculus. Brophy squirmed and swore. His roommates laughed at him, which I took as an implicit expression of solidarity with me. His thighs were barrels on the floor. Neither of us could read the pencil scratches in his notebook. He tugged at his hair. “God, I fucking hate this stuff,” he said.

  I’d had no idea you could be at St. Paul’s and have such a rough time with coursework.

  “This is probably like cake for you, isn’t it?” he moaned.

  From the movies I had learned the popular archetype of the well-born dolt, whose pink sweater, tied over his shoulders, is the brightest thing north of his balls. You know, the one named Trip, whose loafers pass unchallenged through every door? The truth at St. Paul’s was that plenty of high-born kids were terrifically smart. Students on scholarship were in my experience extraordinary too. Many athletes excelled as well, but by fifth form, it was becoming clear which of them would never again be part of an institution as esteemed, at least in certain circles, as St. Paul’s School.

  I thought of boys like Declan Brophy with equal parts derision and sympathy. I didn’t know where the derision came from. I’d like to think it’s because these boys christened my friend’s breasts the big guns, or because they seemed unable to relate to any girl except to ogle her or screw her (or to have her as a tutor, I suppose). But I envied my friend her shape; I wanted to be ogled too. So I was grateful for the invitation to Brophy’s room, even if it was only to run through problem sets.

  Also, he was nice to me. We high-fived in the halls now. He nodded, passing me in lunch line or on the stairs, and after a little while his roommates started doing this too. It was perhaps a path to friendship, and I might have defended against my hope for it by deriding him, secretly, in my mind.

  These were the last days before a teammate of his made the late-night phone call to my dorm, asking me to come over. September and half of October, 1990. They were beautiful days on campus, as autumn days in New England always are. Wet salmon leaves on the redbrick walks. Marigold trees in the ponds. Sky so blue your eyes made orange. I loved how the slate steps of the Schoolhouse were scooped at the middle from years of feet. I loved the carillon in the chapel tower. Around Halloween every year, certain older masters told stories of a devil in a stained-glass window that was rumored to ring the bells at an off hour, in some homage—I can’t remember the details—to Samuel Drury, the fourth rector of St. Paul’s. The dorm where I tutored Brophy in calculus was named for Drury, and set off by itself in the woods, beside an open field. At night, when I left to head back to my room, the stars above this field were fantastic. I remember pausing to look up, and not being afraid.

  I’m going to call him Rick.

  He was tall, almost a foot taller than I was. Three varsity sports, including, of course, hockey. He skid-shuffled his feet down the hall like he was clearing a path. His girlfriend was one of the most beautiful human beings I had ever seen—fleet, fun, an excellent athlete in her own right. I didn’t know her and I didn’t know him, though he sat a few rows ahead of me in math class, crammed into the chaired desk like a caged pterodactyl. One day, after breakfast, he said, “Hey, maybe you could help me with calculus sometime.”

  I didn’t know he was talking to me.

  “Hey, Red.”

  He was so tall that his voice moved above me, on a different plane. This was in a high-ceilinged corridor. Gothic vaulting, shining glass.

  “Hey.”

  He had caught up with me and matched my pace, so I understood he was actually talking to me.

  “Yeah?”

  “I said, maybe you can help me with math too.”

  “Oh. Sure. What’s going on?”

  “Just heard you’re really good at it.”

  I didn’t deny it.

  “Sure, let me know.”

  “Maybe you could come over sometime,” he said.

  I didn’t think of my problem sets in Brophy’s room as “coming over sometime.” There was a rounded feel to this expression of his, but it made no sense, because of the beautiful girlfriend.

  “Sure.”

  “I just heard you’re the best,” he repeated.

  “Um, not really.”

  “Do you mind being called Red?”

  Nobody ever called me Red.

  “It’s fine, I guess.”

  “Or Lacy. Lacy.”

  “Yeah.” I wished I had a more ordinary name, like Liz or Jen, so it wouldn’t feel so personal, almost private, when he said it out loud.

  “Cool.” His smile was as big as the rest of him. My body felt uncertain, awake. In my mind was something like an electrical storm, fizzing across surfaces. I had no idea what he intended. He would not flirt with me, I thought, because of his girlfriend, and also because I was just me. But what he was doing didn’t feel quite like flirting anyway. It felt like he’d issued me something that he might try to take back later.

  Then, for several weeks, he left me alone.

  The call came late on a Tuesday night. I have already described who was calling, and what followed—the ordinary cataclysm. Why don’t victims bite or kick or scream? Because we aren’t in a horror movie, we’re in our lives. I was ready for bed when a third former named Stacey knocked on my door. “Phone’s for you.”

  This was frightening. My parents would not call so late unless there was a problem. But, I reasoned, heading down the three flights of stairs to the basement, if there were truly an emergency they’d call Mrs. Fenn and have her collect me. So this was something else.

  I passed younger girls coming dejectedly up. The line for the phone was long in the fall. To manage this, each girl would reserve her spot as next in line with the caller currently engaged. When the caller finished, she’d replace the receiver to sever the connection and then immediately lift the receiver again and leave it hanging by its silver cable so no new calls could come in while she pounded up the steps to alert the next in line that her turn had come. (The stairwell, far from affording privacy, magnified the speaker’s voice, so we were careful to leave one another alone down there.) My call must have come in as a surprise the moment Stacey ended her conversation. This sometimes happened, and it drove us all nuts. She had answered, and because I was an upperformer, she’d had no choi
ce but to come up and tell me the phone was for me.

  I held the phone to my ear. It smelled of tears and morning breath. “Hey, Lacy,” said a deep male voice that was not my dad.

  “Yes?”

  “I need your help tonight.”

  I searched the sound. Nothing came to me.

  “Who is this?”

  Did he laugh a bit? “It’s Rick.”

  “Oh. Hi.” It was strange, but maybe he wanted to go over a problem set on the phone. There was no compelling reason to do so before tomorrow. But that was okay—I was diligent too. I could run up to a new girl’s room on the first floor to borrow notebook paper and a pencil to help work things out. “What is it?”

  Then he made a sound in his throat, like a sob or a cough, I couldn’t tell. So that hadn’t been a laugh that I’d heard before. I pressed the phone tighter to my ear. “I really, really need your help,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s—I’ll tell you. Not math. I need to talk to you. I need you to cruise. Please, will you come?”

  “Now?”

  “Please.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I know that.” He added, “It’s a thing with…” and then his voice got very small and shivery. “My mom.”

  The way he said it, I just knew the diagnosis: either she was dead or would be soon. It was terminal. She’d just told him. And now he was this huge strong man about to lose his mom. I felt a surge of longing for my own mother, and then I settled back into an awareness that she was fine and I was her daughter, also fine, in a tiny way restored.