City of Light
Page 2
“On Mondays a lower-school girl named Grace Sinclair comes to the Crèche,” Millicent said. I felt my body tense, and willed myself to relax. I mustn’t show Millicent that I had any special concern for the nine-year-old named Grace Sinclair.
“She draws for the little ones,” Millicent continued, oblivious to my reaction, “and she’s good at it. Today she drew elephants that looked so real. Most of the children had never even seen a picture of an elephant! Then she imitated an elephant roaring—Grace is a fine mimic,” Millicent assured me, “and everyone gathered round to hear her.”
Of course I knew Grace could draw well. Of course I knew she was a fine mimic.
“Anyway, Miss Atkins always comes with the lower-school girls, and to keep an eye on us older ones too, I guess.” For the first time Millicent smiled, shyly acknowledging my subterfuge for the supervision of older girls who wanted to believe that they needed no supervision.
“Today,” Millicent said in a thrilled whisper, “Betsy Pratt got sick. She threw up in the cloakroom! It was disgusting! No one could go in there, the smell was so bad. Even after the custodian came to clean it. Miss Barrett—a man went into the girls’ cloakroom! And—”
“Millicent,” I interrupted. Girls this age switched from childhood to adulthood and back again as quick as lightning. “Everyone gets sick at one time or another. There’s no need to make a fuss about it.”
“Sorry, Miss Barrett.” She pouted.
“All right, go on.”
“Well, the matron was upset in case Betsy had a sickness that the little ones might catch, and so Miss Atkins decided to take Betsy home early, right away, even though her frock was still wet because of the”—she glanced at me guiltily—“because of what happened, and even though …”
As Millicent talked on, I felt myself slipping into the suspended animation that was my refuge whenever a young person began to tell me a long and complicated story.
“… and this made a problem because Miss Atkins usually takes Grace Sinclair home herself, because Grace lives near school and Miss Atkins comes back to school after the Crèche. So Miss Atkins asked me if I would take Grace home when we finished at five and I did. We took the electric streetcar partway, and then we walked.”
Now here was something important: entrusting a nine-year-old to a thirteen-year-old. Had Millicent been an Anglo-Saxon girl, Miss Atkins never would have done it. Instead she would have made a telephone call from the Crèche office and arranged for a housekeeper to pick Grace up, or called Grace’s father downtown and asked him to send a sleigh for her. Or, if there’d been no other choice, she would have asked the favor of one of the many girls who lived closer to Grace than Millicent did. But because Millicent was colored, Miss Atkins felt free to treat her like a servant, trusting and exploiting her as she would a servant, by asking her to go blocks out of her way to take another child home.
The city—our neighborhood, that is—was quite safe, but in other parts of town—in the area where the Crèche was located, for example—there had been so many labor strikes, so many layoffs, so much hostility among the foreign groups, I suddenly feared that Millicent was trying to tell me that she and Grace had been assaulted on their way home. A young man roaming his neighborhood, on strike or laid off from his job, or unemployed since leaving school, had seen an opportunity to attack a daughter of the bosses who was out with only a dark-skinned servant girl to protect her. That’s how it would have seemed to him. Or perhaps Millicent herself had been the target, because in our city the only work many colored men could get was as strikebreakers at the factories.
I asked, “Did something happen on your walk home, Millicent?”
“Yes.”
I sat forward, gripping the armrests of my chair.
“Oh, nothing like that, Miss Barrett,” she said, laughing nervously. “I mean, no one bothered us. But Grace said something … strange. So strange, I thought you’d want to know about it. It bothered me.” Millicent’s voice was breaking; all at once she was about to cry.
“It’s all right, Millicent.” I rubbed the back of her hand as she struggled against her tears. “Tell me when you’re ready.”
Finally she began. “Well, we were walking down Chapin Parkway and looking at the lamps coming on—it wasn’t snowing yet—and I said how beautiful it was, to see the lamplight on the snow. Even the old and dirty snow looks beautiful with the light on it. I said how lucky we were, to be out at sunset, the most beautiful part of the day, and”—there was a sudden shrillness in Millicent’s voice, as she stumbled over her words—“and then Grace looked at me and said she wanted to kill herself.”
Millicent stared at me, expecting a response. But as shocked as I was, I had learned long ago to withhold my reactions to what students told me until I was certain I’d heard everything. I didn’t want to make snap judgments and perhaps miss the most important facts.
After a moment Millicent resumed. “She wasn’t excited. She said it like it was the most natural thing she could think of.”
She paused again, and I knew I must speak this time. But I mustn’t frighten her, even as I was alert to every nuance of her words. “And what did you say, Millicent?”
“I said, ‘You mustn’t say that, it’s a sin,’ and she said, ‘I can say it if I want, and I can do it too,’ and she was mad at me, and I said—”
At this point Katarzyna carried in a silver tray holding the cocoa in a silver pot, a plate of shortbread cookies, and the flowered china she knew I liked to use for company. In spite of my upset, I was pleased that Katarzyna was trying to make up for her behavior in the hall. She placed the tray on a small round table, which she moved between Millicent and me. While I poured the cocoa, Millicent ate the cookies with intense concentration.
After she’d finished several, I asked, “You were about to tell me what you said to Grace?”
Millicent brushed the cookie crumbs from her skirt. “I—well, I didn’t want to have a fight with her, so I tried to think of what you would say.”
“Thank you, Millicent, that’s very kind.” My tone was more dismissive than I intended. I hated flattery. But I reminded myself that Millicent was unfailingly sincere. “And what was that?” I asked more gently.
“I said everything was so beautiful in the world—she should just look around at the snow and the lights, and listen to the sleigh bells, and she would realize. Was that the right thing to say, Miss Barrett?”
Her earnestness made tears smart in my eyes. “Yes, Millicent, you said exactly the right thing.”
“Then Grace said everything was beautiful, she knew that, but she was a bad girl. ‘A bad evil girl,’ she said, and ‘I want to be dead, so I won’t be bad anymore.’ I never heard anyone talk like that, Miss Barrett. I don’t know Grace very well, but I remember helping to teach her to read, when I was younger. Remember how the girls in my class used to help the first graders with reading and math?”
Yes, I remembered.
“Remembering gave me an idea, and I said that if she killed herself, who would draw for the little children at the Crèche? Who would imitate elephants? The children would miss her. But Grace only said they would find someone else to draw for them. I didn’t like it, when she said that. Oh, Miss Barrett, it was scary—she was so quiet about it. Like she’d really thought it through and knew exactly what to do.”
I could see them clearly in my mind, making their way between a winter’s-worth of snow mounds: Grace with her blonde hair flowing in ringlets beneath her hat, the rabbit fur of her high-collared coat touching her jawline, her hands in a fur muff, her high-buttoned boots; Millicent beside her, wearing a coat expensive and well made, but plain-looking compared to Grace’s, so as not to draw attention to the girl who wore it. So as not to elicit jealousy in someone who was capable of acting on that jealousy, because he was white and his daughter did not have as fine a coat as the daughter of a colored man.
“Then I remembered that Grace’s mother died last year.”
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Less than a year ago, it was. At the end of September. On a pristine early autumn day, yellow just beginning to touch the green on the trees outside her window. Margaret Sinclair had been my best friend, and I missed her terribly.
“I know about things like that”—Millicent’s reference to her own family was confident and matter-of-fact—“so I put my arm around her, and I said, ‘Your mother would be sad if she heard you talk like this.’ But Grace said, ‘That’s not true. Because when I’m dead, I’ll be with my mother, and I’ll be able to tell her that I’m sorry for everything bad I did, and she’ll forgive me and she’ll take care of me again, and that’s why I’m going to kill myself, so I can be with her in heaven.’”
Millicent stopped.
“And then?”
“All of a sudden she made a snowball and threw it against a tree, and asked about—well, some gossip about one of the teachers, and she was giggling about it. That made me mad because I didn’t know if she was just playing a game with me, about killing herself, or if she really meant it. When we got to her house she asked me to come in for cocoa and cake, but I was still mad so I said no, even though I wanted to, and then I came here.”
For a long time I stared into the fire. One image filled my mind: Grace Sinclair as a baby. Her chubby cheeks, her silken hair, the delicate white bonnet her mother had knitted for her. How had Grace come to this dreadful point in her life? How and when had we adults allowed her to go astray?
For Millicent’s sake, I roused myself. “You did well, my dear. Very well indeed. You’ve been splendid. Grace is lucky to have you as a friend.”
Millicent’s eyes lit up. “What will happen to Grace now, do you think?” Something occurred to her, eliciting a perverse, thrilling curiosity. She whispered, “Do you think they’ll send her to the state hospital?”
The hospital, more formally called the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, was several blocks from school. With its two brooding towers that could be seen from almost every part of town, it was a specter that haunted the edges of children’s minds.
“No, Millicent,” I said evenly. “She won’t be sent to the state hospital. She’s only nine. As you thought, she’s probably playing a game with those words about killing herself.” I didn’t believe it, but what else could I tell her? “She probably heard a grown-up talking, and she’s imitating what she heard without understanding it. That’s why a moment later she was throwing snowballs and giggling about her teachers. Well”—I clapped my hands lightly, my signal to students that meetings were coming to an end—“I think it best that you not discuss this with your friends. We don’t want anyone teasing Grace, do we? Of course you’ll want to tell your family. But at school, it will be our secret.” I squeezed her hand, knowing the hint of conspiracy would encourage her to keep quiet.
She looked toward the windows. “Miss Barrett,” she said carefully, “does anyone really do that? Kill themselves, I mean. Is that something people do?”
Society’s accepted answer would have been, “No, of course not.” That was the answer her family and her minister would have expected me to give. Suicide was an unmentionable, shameful sin that reflected upon an entire family. But I couldn’t lie to Millicent. Instead I said, “Grown-ups sometimes, but rarely. People have to be very misguided to do that; ill in their minds in some way.”
“Never children?”
I said nothing. I was at a loss. I’d never known a student to commit suicide or even threaten it. Nonetheless, I’d had suspicions more than once among the upper-school girls … a senior whom I knew to be terrified of boats was said to have died alone in a sailing accident; a junior once died between evening and morning from what was labeled an “overwhelming fever.” However, people did die in sailing accidents and did die of overwhelming fevers, so how could I know the truth?
“Never children. I’m proud of you, Millicent.”
She smiled broadly, and perhaps feeling that a smile was inappropriate under the circumstances, she raised her cup and finished her cocoa. When she had also finished the cookies, I telephoned her aunt to send a sleigh to pick her up.
And then I was alone, with nothing but Grace Sinclair’s face to fill my mind.
CHAPTER II
There is a nightmare I have: I fall asleep at the end of a productive day and suddenly find myself trapped within the frothing, seething waters beneath the cataract of Niagara. The struggle is long. No one can help me. Black cliffs loom around me. Waves of mist blind me. Rainbows flash. Trout leap. My legs lock within the wet vise that is my skirt. Emerald-green covers my face, blocks my throat, until finally, I let the vortex take me. This dream comes to me two or three times a year, without warning. That is, with no attachment to any specific event that might inspire it. Nevertheless I do know why I have the nightmare.
My mother died of diphtheria when I was two years old, and my paternal grandmother came to live with my father and me at our home in Williamstown, Massachusetts. My father was a professor of geology at Williams College. He had married late in life, after years of complacent success, and he idolized my mother. Her early death left him forever with an expression of puzzled surprise, as if he were taken aback by a treachery he dared not define.
When I was seven, my father took me with him on a trip to Niagara. He had been to the Falls many times, but this was my first visit. With the acute focus of a child, I listened to my father explain the landscape: First there was the Niagara River, which divided America from Canada. About a mile above the Falls, the river was transformed into the rapids. At the Falls, the sixty-three-acre Goat Island divided the rapids, creating the American Falls on one side and the vast, curving Horseshoe Falls, which belonged to Canada, on the other. At the bottom of the Falls was the steep-walled gorge, which the water itself had carved through the soft rock. The gorge was seven miles long, and the river continued some seven miles farther, into Lake Ontario.
I insisted on these details because we weren’t visiting Niagara as tourists. We had work to do. My father had come to study evidence of glaciation, and I was eager to help him. On Goat Island, we climbed down the long twisting stairway that led to the base of the American Falls. Following narrow wooden walkways, and soaked in spite of our rain gear, we made our way to the Cave of the Winds, behind the surging sheet of water. In the cave we took samples of limestone and shale. Then we climbed up the stairs, nearly a hundred steps. My legs ached by the time we reached the top. After I rested, we crossed the stone bridges leading from Goat Island to the small Three Sisters Islands—Asenath, Angeline, and Celinda Eliza, far into the Canadian rapids. These islands were called the Three Sisters, my father explained, in honor of the daughters of General Parkhurst Whitney, a hero of the War of 1812. In their day, the bridges hadn’t yet been built, and early one spring, when the rapids were mostly ice-bound, the girls had bravely walked to these small islands and become the first females to visit them.
I could be brave too. I imagined myself, like Asenath, Angeline, and Celinda Eliza, tiptoeing through the shallows. The waters around the islands were calm and lovely, with gentle inlets and small cascades. My father and I visited in June, when the islands were a wilderness of rocks, flowers, bushes, and trees. Branches arched down to touch the water. Mallard ducks swam contentedly from cove to cove. Red-winged blackbirds flitted among the foliage, their yellow and red shoulder patches dense as velvet in the sunlight. A butterfly—a Painted Lady, my father said—lit upon my hair. Apart from the roar of wind and water, there was no sense—no hint, even—of the cataract nearby.
We picnicked along the tree-lined shore of the third Sister, Celinda Eliza. The stony ledge where we sat was magically smooth, for the rocks had once been underwater, my father explained: The unrelenting flow had polished them slippery as glass. Out beyond the sparkling shallows the rapids were like a green blanket, solid, thick, and strong. Yet here on Celinda Eliza, all was peaceful. The undersides of the leaves were lit with the rippling reflections of sunlight on water.
A ripple of water carried the stone a bit farther down the shoreline. Another took it a bit nearer the rapids, but I had to have it. I took a step toward it, the water touching the tips of my boots. I bent down, and reached….
“Louisa! Freeze!”
My father was grabbing my arm, pulling me back, making me stumble on the slick rocks, kneeling before me screaming, “Don’t you ever do that again! That was a stupid, stupid thing to do! Don’t you know how strong the current is? You could have been swept over the Falls in an instant!” And then, as I stood stunned within the circle of his arms, he began to cry, hiding his face against my shoulder, his rough gray beard scratching my cheek.
There had been no danger. I know that, now. Five or six steps would have been needed, at least, to reach the pull of the rapids. I have learned that many people—rational people—wade along the shores of the Three Sisters, cooling their feet in the bright shallows. I have come to understand that my father cried more because I was his only living link to my mother than because of any real danger. But when I was seven, his terror swept through me and became my own. Over and over I replayed the scene in my mind, but no longer was I standing in the reality of a half an inch of water. I was wading—ankles, knees, waist, farther and farther into the rushing mass—until the soft blanket enveloped me.
After our visit to Niagara, my father came to believe that he could protect me only if he kept me near him, so when I completed the local elementary school, he decided against sending me to boarding school, which would have been customary for a girl in my position. Instead I was tutored for three hours each day by a succession of Williams College students. Under my grandmother’s watchful eye, these young men taught me their areas of concentration—Roman history one day, Chaucer the next, in a disorganized jumble nonetheless imbued with intellectual passion and rigor. In the summers, instead of spending peaceful days in Williamstown with my grandmother, I went with my father on expeditions to Colorado and Wyoming. When I was ten, we were stranded for two days by a frightening summer blizzard in the Togwatee Pass, in Wyoming, but because I was with him, my father thought me safe.