And naturally, I in turn rehashed the mortification of being an old face after a few years in the limelight; though I’d never exactly been a top model, I’d had my share of magazine covers.
Well, a few, anyway.
The second novel I’d shakily put together in my steadily increasing leisure time had actually gotten a very long letter of rejection from one publisher. As I explained to Mimi what a good sign that was, and she grew excited about that rejection, I realized how much I had needed her.
The evening was just a little cool, courtesy of a light breeze that puffed the curtains inward. My furniture had been arranged with Mimi’s sure hand around the huge (by New York standards) living room. Mimi had given me the ground floor bedroom I had requested. It lay off the hall running from the living room to the kitchen.
Celeste’s was not a grand house but a large old family home. All the rooms were big, with the original high ceilings. When Mimi mentioned having to turn on the furnace in a few weeks, we thought of the probable heating bill and exchanged grimaces of dismay.
Mimi yawned, crumpled an empty cigarette pack, and pitched it toward the wastecan. Siamese Mao intercepted the pack with a lightning paw and began batting it around between my rugs. Those rugs looked beautiful against the hardwood floor, I noticed with pleasure.
‘Want to hear about Cully?’ Mimi asked.
‘I guess so.’ I kept my gaze carefully fixed on Mao. ‘Rachel’s consented to live in little old Knolls?’
Cully’s wife had strong and strange ideas about the South and small towns. Rachel was from New York. I’d seen them a couple of times when they’d come up to visit her family.
‘He and Rachel just got divorced, too. The Houghton children don’t have a very good batting average when it comes to staying married.’
So Cully was divorced. I set my teeth against asking why she hadn’t told me before. But there were some questions I couldn’t repress.
‘Why did Cully come back here? Weren’t they living in Memphis? What happened?’
‘He was living in Memphis. And he came back here to lick his wounds, like me. Except I have so many, I have to stay here all the time.’ Mimi laughed halfheartedly. ‘There’s nothing like living in a town with a college, street, and library named after you. Anytime you have an identity crisis, you can just turn around and there’s your name. Your generic name, anyway.’
I pitched her a cigarette when she looked around to see if another pack was within reach. She caught it as gracefully as Mao. Mimi is always deft and quick. She is small-boned and dark, with black hair she wears like a lion’s mane. She looked fragile that evening, and vivid, in a brilliantly patterned caftan. Mimi has never been afraid of strong colors.
‘As to what happened, to answer your second – or third? – question. My theory about Rachel is that she was just doing an anthropological study about southern tribal customs. When she had enough material, she gave Cully the old heave-ho. I never understood that marriage, anyway. Of course I have a theory about that too. I think Cully was searching for Mother’s opposite.’ Mimi squinted at me through her smoke and jabbed the air to point out her own wisdom.
‘Expound?’
‘Oh. Well, Mother is still beautiful, resolutely unintellectual, committed to the social graces, and she’s as conventional as they come. Her religion is being gracious. Rachel was – plain, to put it nicely. She’d gotten heavy into stuff like The Dialectics of Sex. And her idea of fancy entertaining was to pour some wine in the spaghetti sauce.’
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. Mimi’s thumbnail sketches were an element of our intimacy. She had always sworn that no one else would remain her friend after hearing how nasty she could be.
‘What Cully missed seeing,’ she said, carried away by the flow of her theory, ‘was that they are both bitches.’
‘Shame on you, calling your mama that,’ I said out of duty, though my mouth was twitching.
Mimi tried to look properly ashamed. She had weathervane reactions to her mother. There would be truces, sometimes for months, during which the two thought alike and got along very well; but inevitably an explosion would come – always when the partisan in Mimi was ascendant. The warfare never came completely into the open; it was a suspenseful guerrilla variety.
‘By the way,’ Mimi said more soberly, ‘the college has hired Cully as a counselor for the students, and he’s setting up a private practice. Don’t holler nepotism, or at least not too loud, okay? A full two weeks before Cully decided he wanted to leave Memphis, our last counselor had some sudden health problems and told us he’d have to retire.’
I was having my own thoughts. ‘Maybe Cully thinks I’m like your mother, and that’s why he’s always had such a thing about ignoring me,’ I ventured.
‘Why didn’t that occur to me before? I’ll bet that’s it. I can see a strictly superficial resemblance. Now there he is, a psychologist; and he’s never figured all this out. Here we are, mere amateur analysts, and we have the whole thing solved in seconds. You’re beautiful, and the image of the model is that she’s a brainless nitwit. And you were brought up to have social graces, even though you may have lost them up north, I don’t know.’ Mimi gave me a very wicked look. ‘So that might very well be.’ She picked up Mao and tickled the cat behind the ears. Attila, who had come back in, glared at this favoritism from behind a plant stand.
‘I think you’ve just had this thing about Cully all these years because he’s different around you.’
‘It is very true, Mimi-my-friend,’ I said heavily, ‘that your brother has always been “different” around me.’
When other boys were going to absurd lengths to bump into me accidentally, when other males were calling every dorm at Miss Beacham’s until they found mine, when men were generally behaving like fools in my presence, Cully had stood resolutely untouched by The Face. Even worse (though less surprising) was his matching lack of interest in what lay beneath that face.
So I had had a mission since I was fourteen. My mission was to make Cully Houghton notice me. Since I am in most respects a normal healthy person, that ache of piqued vanity had subsided in recent years. I had recognized it for the childish thing it was. But the ache wasn’t entirely gone. I had just begun to assess my power, and use it, when I met Cully Houghton. He had been my first – and for a long time, my only – failure.
‘More power to you, if you’re still attracted,’ Mimi said suddenly. ‘He needs someone. He really tried with Rachel. It just didn’t work.’
‘Do you remember the expression on Rachel’s face when I walked into your rehearsal dinner in that dress?’ I asked.
‘Are you still brooding about that?’ Mimi said incredulously. ‘That was years and years ago.’
‘You can say that. You’ve never been on the receiving end of the polite freeze.’
‘Water under the bridge,’ Mimi said grandly. ‘And we’d better go to bed. You’ve got an appointment with your faculty adviser at eleven-thirty tomorrow morning. Barbara. Dr Barbara Tucker to you, lowly student.’
‘Faculty adviser?’
‘You’ve forgotten the ropes. She’ll be your shepherd. Help you pick your schedule, approve your courses, et cetera. I zapped you through admission, but you have to pick out your courses and times, and Barbara should know by tomorrow how many of your hours from Elbridge have transferred.’
‘Look, Mimi, did you have to ram me down the college’s throat?’ I had known Mimi could get me admitted in time, but I had worried that scrambling in under her wing might make my presence resented.
‘No, ninny. You had good grades, very good grades. Don’t worry so much! There’s been a slump in enrollment, so there was room for you. Even with the slump, there’s no extra dorm room or parking spaces – those have been at a premium for years. Since you don’t want either, they were practically panting. You’ll like Barbara. I do. She’s been here several years, and she’s really fitted in well. She just got tenure. By the way,’ Mimi added del
icately when I was halfway to my room, ‘you have to pay your fees this week. How’s the money situation?’
‘I’m a well-to-do woman,’ I told her firmly. ‘Don’t even think of filthy lucre. I’m chipping in on the house expenses, of course. We’ll have to sit down and work that out tomorrow.’
‘I think you have a fan,’ she remarked dryly.
I looked down to see Attila sitting before me, great green eyes fixed on my face in an unnerving stare. When the big cat was sure I was watching, he flopped over to expose a wide creamy belly and said, ‘Rowr.’
‘Don’t be surprised if you have company tonight,’ Mimi warned me. ‘He’s been sleeping on your bed ever since I set it up.’
I observed Mao as she slept curled on Mimi’s lap. Mao was a fancier’s cat, fine-boned and graceful and purebred. I looked back at huge tawny Attila, who had the glow of mockery in his eyes and a generally self-satisfied expression. Since I didn’t bend to scratch the proferred expanse of stomach, he rolled to his feet and began rubbing himself against my legs. I hoped there wasn’t any unflattering significance in the cat’s preference.
But I told the bathroom mirror that birds of a feather flocked together, before I crawled into bed with the cat.
I lay awake for a while, mulling over my good fortune. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought about poor little Heidi Edmonds. I couldn’t even recall the face of the dead woman on the sidewalk in New York. I could lose her in the city. But in little Knolls, I couldn’t forget the tragedy of a girl I’d never seen.
I sent a wish for her recovery and well-being out into the ether, drowsily tickled Attila behind the ears, and blanked out with my hand still resting on the cat’s broad back.
3
I’D ALWAYS REGRETTED that Celeste’s house didn’t actually face the campus, whose landscaped gardens made a beautiful view; but the house stood only half a block away from the college’s southwestern corner.
I borrowed Mimi’s car for this first trip to the campus, since I didn’t want to arrive for my appointment dripping with sweat. I should’ve realized the unfamiliar strain of driving would make me even more anxious than I already was. I bit my lip until I turned safely into the college’s main drive. The campus was fully as impressive as I’d remembered – green and welcoming, if slightly frazzled near the end of the fierce summer.
With a glance I checked the campus map spread on the seat beside me, to verify the location of the English department. The college grounds were empty and quiet – in a dreamy calm before the storm of freshman students soon due for orientation. I saw the occasional parked car, so a few staff members had to be tucked away somewhere. But workers on the grounds crew were the only living souls I glimpsed.
I slid the Chevrolet awkwardly into the first parking lot I saw. I’d walked about ten feet when I realized, from a further study of the map, that I could have parked much closer to the English building. I hesitated for a moment, but it didn’t seem worth the extra strain of maneuvering the car again. The gardens were always worth a visit, anyway. I shrugged to myself and set off down the concrete path.
Houghton’s gardens were quite famous. When Mimi’s great-grandfather had founded the college, he had planted them as a combination public service/tourist attraction. Photographs of the camellias and roses in bloom were always prominently featured in Houghton publicity material. It was easy to see why Houghton was a popular site for outdoor weddings. The sidewalk I now followed led through the heart of the gardens and emerged to one side of the library, crisscrossing other paths.
The foliage was dusty but lush, and the grass had been trimmed to a carpet texture. The day lilies were blooming, their rich orange flaring brilliantly against the dark green. It was good to see so much flora after New York. I bent to run my finger lightly over the curve of a petal. I felt a sort of grateful relaxation deep inside me. I knew the name of almost every plant; my mother had been an avid gardener before she turned to drinking.
I recalled all the times Mimi and I had sauntered through these gardens as teenagers, pretending we were real college coeds. At least that part of Mimi’s dream had come true, though she’d been unfortunate in other ways. Now I was going to make it happen for myself. A real Houghton College coed. How young those kids were going to seem to me.
Thinking of the young faces that would soon surround me reminded me again of one Houghton student I would never meet: Heidi Edmonds, achiever, whose adventure had ended in getting raped and going back home defeated. As I strolled around a curve and arrived face to face with the library, I realized I was on the path where she’d been attacked. I turned to scan the camellias, the sidewalk; and then snorted at my own stupidity. But it did seem such agony should have left some mark. I saw only the lazy charm of the gardens, and heard only the whir of a bee touring the day lilies. Somehow that was more unnerving than a commemorative plaque would have been.
For the benefit of the bee, I suppose, I glanced down at my watch and stepped out a little faster.
* * * *
The immense double doors set in the center of the ground floor led into a vaulted central cloister, cool and very dark after the glare outside. As I peered through the dimness, searching for some sign of stairs to the second floor, I wondered if the original Houghton architect had toured medieval monasteries right before he’d been commissioned for the job.
There were halls leading off to the right and left; they were empty. After some fruitless searching, I became absurdly frantic. Where the hell had they hidden the stairs? I wasn’t going to impress Dr Barbara Tucker if I turned up late. I took a few tentative steps forward, peering from side to side. My wooden heels made little tap! tap! echoes on the stone floor. The building was quite silent otherwise.
To my heartfelt relief, one of the enigmatic doors in the corridor to my right opened. A man came out and walked in my direction. (I’d been quite prepared to bellow for help if he’d turned the opposite way.) As he drew nearer, I saw he was about thirty-eight, with a slight belly preceding his legs and a tonsure fringed by blond curly hair.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, louder than I’d intended.
He jumped. I felt embarrassed.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked politely, after he’d located me in the gloom.
‘You’re going to think I’m awfully stupid, but I just can’t find the stairs.’ I winced. I was simpering. I hadn’t simpered for years.
He laughed and came closer. I could make out a patrician nose and the slight suggestion of a double chin. I mentally prescribed laying off the sweets and starches for a few months.
‘I think the architect wanted to hide something as mundane as stairs,’ he said. ‘I’m Theo Cochran, the registrar. Don’t feel stupid. I tell an average of twenty people a year where the stairs are. There, see?’ He pointed to the right. After a second, I was just able to discern the balustrade. It was composed of the same stone as the wall, and blended into it perfectly in the pervasive gloom.
‘Oh,’ I said flatly. ‘Well . . . thanks a lot.’ Come on, Nick, manners. ‘I’m Nickie Callahan. You probably just processed my transcript.’
‘Oh. Mimi Houghton’s friend.’
Distinct lack of enthusiasm. Having an influential friend is not always a plus.
Theo Cochran stirred himself, probably remembering that influence. ‘We’re glad to have you with us here at Houghton, Miss Callahan.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again. ‘I’m sure I’ll be in and out of your office in the next week or so.’
‘So will the entire student body. The first week is always hell,’ the registrar said more pleasantly. He seemed to look forward to hurling himself into the fray. ‘Goodbye, now.’
‘Goodbye.’ I started climbing the stairs, my heels clattering. I resolved to remember to wear rubber-soled shoes to classes in this building.
I looked down the stairwell and saw the bare tonsure of the registrar moving away down the hall into the darkness. His progress was relatively silent. He must have
made the same resolution.
It was impossible for me to blunder any more, since room 206 was just a few feet to the right at the head of the stairs. I checked my watch again. On the dot. I twitched my skirt and gathered myself in general.
‘Come in,’ called a midwestern voice after I knocked.
‘I’m Barbara Tucker,’ said a slim auburn-haired woman as she rose from behind a desk covered with every imaginable form of printed material: books, notebooks, forms, memoranda, catalogues. I blinked. The office seemed dazzling with light after the cavern below.
‘Nickie Callahan,’ I said too heartily. I shook Barbara Tucker’s hand and took the only scarred wooden chair that wasn’t overflowing with books and papers.
The woman sat down, pushed her glasses up on her slight nose, and smiled at me. Her features were plain, but her skin was beautiful. I decided I liked her on the spot. I liked her smile, I liked the books stacked everywhere, I liked the plants that flourished in the two slitlike windows. I beamed back at Barbara Tucker in approval. There are some women who dislike and distrust me at first sight, on principle. She was not going to be one of them.
‘So, you decided to leap back into the academic battle, Miss Callahan.’
‘Call me Nickie. I decided it would be a good idea to finish, and the time was right.’
‘Good decision. I remember Mimi told me you were a model, but I think I would have figured that out anyway.’
I had to make it clear I was not a dilettante. ‘I used to be a model,’ I said carefully. ‘Now, I hope, I’m an English major.’
‘Okay, we’ll start you on the road to a degree today,’ Barbara Tucker said briskly. She pulled my file from a crammed metal tray. ‘What’s your goal? Do you want to teach?’
I took a deep breath and plunged. ‘No, I’m going to be a writer,’ I said, and couldn’t stop myself from making a deprecating face.
A Secret Rage Page 3
