The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  In her first week at Haddan, Betsy spent most of her nights at Eric’s apartment in Chalk House. It made sense to take the opportunity to do so now, for when the students arrived, they’d have to monitor their own behavior as well as that of their charges. And there was another reason Betsy had avoided sleeping at St. Anne’s. Each time she spent the night in her own quarters, she was wrenched from her slumber in a panic, with the sheets twisted around her and her thoughts so muddled it was as if she’d woken in the wrong bed and was now fated to lead someone else’s life. On the night before school was to begin, for instance, Betsy had slept at St. Anne’s only to dream she’d been lost in the fields outside Haddan. No matter how she might circle, she went no farther than the same parcels of uncultivated land. When she wrested herself from this dream, Betsy staggered out of bed, disoriented and smelling of hay. For an instant, she felt as though she were a girl again, left in someone’s strange, overheated apartment to fend for herself, which was exactly what had happened when friends of the family took her in after her parents’ accident.

  Quickly, Betsy switched on the lights to discover that it was only a little after ten. There was a thumping coming from the direction of the stairs and the radiators were banging away, gushing out a steady stream of heat, even though the evening was unusually warm. No wonder Betsy couldn’t sleep; it was ninety degrees in her bedroom and the temperature was still rising. The orchid she had bought that afternoon at the Lucky Day Florist, a bloom accustomed to tropical climates, had already lost most of its petals; the slim, green stem had been warped by the heat and was now unable to hold up even the most delicate flower.

  Betsy washed her face, found a stick of gum to ease her dry mouth, then pulled on her bathrobe and went to call on the senior houseparent. She assumed people at Haddan exaggerated when they called Helen Davis a selfish old witch, the fitting owner of an ugly black tomcat who was said to eat songbirds and roses. Clearly judgments were harsh at this school, for weren’t many people already calling Betsy a kook after the fiasco at the welcoming lecture? Wasn’t Eric referred to as Mr. Perfect by those who failed to measure up to his standards of excellence and forever after resented him? For her part, Betsy was the last to accept anyone else’s opinion, but when she knocked at Miss Davis’s door no one answered, even though there was clearly someone on the other side. Betsy could practically feel Miss Davis’s displeasure at being disturbed as the older woman peered through the peephole. Betsy knocked again, more forcefully now.

  “Hello! Can you help me out? I just need some advice about my radiator.”

  Helen Davis was tall and extremely imposing, even when answering the door in her nightgown and slippers. She carried herself in the manner women who were once beautiful often do; she was standoffish and confident in equal measure and she certainly did not feel the need to be civil when an unwanted visitor came calling at such a late hour.

  “My radiators,” Betsy explained. Having come directly from bed, Betsy’s choppy hair was sticking straight up and her eyes were ringed with mascara. “They simply won’t turn off.”

  “Do I look like a plumber?” Helen Davis’s smirk, as many of her students might confirm, was not a pleasant sight. Her disapproval could turn a person’s blood cold, and there had been several occasions when a tender freshman had fainted on the floor of her classroom when asked the simplest of questions. Miss Davis had never tolerated smart alecks nor the practice of chewing gum, nor did she invite guests into her private quarters.

  The administration had failed to mention to Betsy that none of her predecessors had lasted more than a year. So she dove right in, asking for assistance when anyone else would have slunk away. “You must have experience in dealing with the heating system,” Betsy said. “Surely, it can’t be classified information.”

  Miss Davis glared. “Are you chewing gum?” she asked sharply.

  “Me?” Betsy immediately swallowed, but the gum clogged in her trachea. As she was doing her best not to choke, a horrible squalling creature ran by. Instinctively, Betsy drew herself against the wall to let it pass.

  “Afraid of cats?” Miss Davis asked. Several junior houseparents who’d left claimed to be allergic to her pet. Although Betsy herself was not a fan of any sort of wildlife, cats included, she could tell that life at St. Anne’s would be bearable only if she won Helen Davis over to her side. Eric had often made fun of Miss Davis’s habit of quoting Ben Franklin whenever she wished to prove a point, and now Betsy used this information to her advantage.

  “Wasn’t it Ben Franklin who said the best dog of all is a cat?”

  “Ben Franklin said nothing of the sort.” Still, Miss Davis knew when she was being flattered, and no one ever said flattery was a crime. “Wait in the hall and I’ll get you what you need,” she directed.

  Standing in the dark, Betsy felt an odd elation, as though she’d just aced an exam or been named teacher’s pet. When Helen Davis returned, Betsy could see a slice of the apartment behind her; these quarters had remained constant for the past fifty years and included a collection of clutter that had surely taken that long to amass. In spite of the high-backed velvet love seat and a good rug from Afghanistan, the place was in serious disorder. Books were everywhere, along with half-filled teacups and forgotten crusts of sandwiches. There was the foul odor of old newspapers and cats. Helen swung the door closed behind her. She reached out and deposited a quarter in Betsy’s open hand.

  “The secret is to bleed the radiators. Turn the screw at the rear with this quarter and be sure to keep a pan underneath to catch the drips. After the steam’s released, the radiator will cool down.”

  Betsy thanked the senior houseparent, then with her typical ungainliness, she dropped the quarter and was forced to retrieve it. Seeing her from this angle, crawling about on hands and knees, Helen Davis at last realized that her caller was the same individual who had made a scene in the auditorium during Dr. Jones’s speech.

  “You’re Eric Herman’s girlfriend,” Helen declared. “That’s who you are!”

  “Hardly a girl.” Betsy laughed.

  “Yes, hardly. Far too old to be taken in by him.”

  “Oh, really?” Betsy stood, quarter in hand. Perhaps people were right about how nasty Helen Davis was. It was said she graded on a negative curve, deliberately failing as many students as possible, and that she had never once changed a grade, not even when self-mutilation or nervous breakdowns were threatened ened. The last houseparent to share duties with her at St. Anne’s had quit midterm to go to law school, reporting back that torts and constitutional law were a breeze after dealing with Helen Davis.

  “Eric Herman is the most dishonest man I know. Just take a look at his ears. A man with small ears is always dishonorable and stingy. All the great men had large ears. Lincoln was said to move his at will, much like a rabbit.”

  “Well, I like a man with small ears.” Regardless, Betsy made a mental note to take a closer look at Eric’s physiognomy.

  “He’s after my job,” Helen Davis informed Betsy. “You might as well know right now, he’s a whiner and a complainer. A man like that will never be satisfied.”

  “Oh, he’s satisfied, all right,” Betsy said, although she had already been privy to Eric’s many complaints about the history department. Helen Davis, he liked to joke, ought to be fired first, then guillotined, with her head displayed on one of the posts of those iron fences on Main Street. At least then the old woman would finally serve a purpose as she scared away crows rather than students. “He’s happy as a clam,” Betsy reported.

  Miss Davis chortled at that. “Look at his ears, my dear, they tell the whole story.”

  Betsy peered down the hallway; again there’d been a noise on the stairs. “What is that awful thudding sound?”

  “It’s nothing.” Helen’s tone, which had been warming as she critiqued Eric, now turned sharp. “The hour’s a little late for these shenanigans, I might add.”

  When Miss Davis closed her door, Betsy heard
the lock click shut. At least Helen Davis had bestowed a quarter; no one else at Haddan had offered Betsy so much as a helping hand since she’d arrived. Even Eric had been so busy preparing for his classes that he’d been, it was true, stingy with his time. Still, he was a good man, and Betsy could hardly fault him for being as focused as he was dependable. Tonight was hardly the time to reassess her own opinions in light of Miss Davis’s observations, which were surely self-serving at best. It was most likely the emptiness of the dormitory that now set Betsy’s doubts to work, but there’d soon be a cure for that. By tomorrow, the hallways would be filled with girls and it would be Betsy’s job to soothe the homesick and shore up the meek and manage the wild as best she could. It would be her responsibility to make certain each and every one slept tight beneath this roof.

  As Betsy returned to her apartment, she became aware of the scent of roses drifting down the stairway, richly fragrant in the overheated corridor. She found the odor in her own rooms, fainter yes, but disturbing enough so that she hurried to bleed the radiators, scalding her hands in the process. When she went back to bed she expected to toss and turn, but for once she slept deeply. In fact, she overslept, and needed to gulp down a quick cup of coffee in order to be ready for the first arrivals. It was then Betsy noticed the green vine outside her window. A few of Annie Howe’s prized white roses were still blooming; they were as big as cabbages, as white as snow. In the early morning sunlight, their innermost petals appeared to be a pale, pearly green. Betsy laughed at herself then; what a fool she’d been to be nervous last night. For every odd occurrence there was a rational explanation, or so she had always believed. She tidied up, then went to get dressed, comforted by the sight of the roses. But if she’d only paused long enough to open her window she would have discovered that Polar roses have no scent whatsoever. Even the bees avoid these creamy buds, preferring thistles and goldenrod instead. Take a scissors to the stems of these roses and they’ll fall apart at the touch. Try to pick one barehanded, and every thorn will draw blood.

  * * *

  THE TRAIN TO HADDAN WAS ALWAYS LATE, AND this day was no exception. It was a spectacular afternoon, the fields rife with late-blooming asters and milkweed, the sky as wide and as clear as heaven. In the pine trees along the railroad tracks, hawks perched in the tallest branches; red-winged blackbirds swooped across the distance. Stands of oak and hawthorn made for pockets of dark woods where there were still plenty of deer, as well as an occasional moose that had wandered down from New Hampshire or Maine. As the train passed slowly through the neighboring town of Hamilton, several boys ran alongside the cars; some waved cheerfully to the passengers on board, while others rudely stuck out their tongues and pulled their faces into freckled smirks, the grimaces of wild angels unafraid of the gravel and dust that was always stirred up as the train rolled by.

  Today, there were more than a dozen Haddan students on board, ready for the start of the term. Girls with long, shiny hair and boys in freshly pressed clothes that would soon be torn and stained in soccer games congregated in the club car. Their good-natured rowdiness drifted through the train when the conductor opened the doors, but the racket didn’t reach as far as the last car. There, in the farthest seat, a girl named Carlin Leander, who had never before left home, gazed out at the countryside, appreciating every haystack and fence that came briefly into sight as the train rolled on. Carlin had been planning to get out of Florida all her life. It had made no difference that she was the most beautiful girl in the county where she’d been born, with pale ashy hair and the same green eyes that had gotten her mother into trouble at the age of seventeen, pregnant and stranded in a town where a traveling carnival was considered a cultural event and any girl with a mind of her own was thought to be an aberration of nature’s plan.

  Carlin Leander was nothing like her mother, and for that she was grateful. Not that Sue Leander wasn’t pleasant and warm, she certainly was. But to be agreeable and kindhearted was not Carlin’s goal. Whereas her mother was pliant and sweet, Carlin was obstinate and opinionated, the sort of girl who went barefoot in spite of all warnings to watch out for snakes. She never paid the least bit of attention to the boys who followed her home from school, many of them so moony and stupefied by her beauty that they rode their bikes into ditches and trees. Carlin was not about to get trapped, not in a locality where the heat continued to rise after midnight and the mosquitoes were a year-round annoyance and most folks chose to celebrate a girl’s weakness and ignore her strengths.

  Some people were simply born in the wrong place. The first thing such individuals searched for was a map and the second was a ticket out. Carlin Leander had been ready to leave Florida since she could walk, and she’d finally managed her escape with a swimming scholarship to the Haddan School. Although her mother had been reluctant to let her go all the way to Massachusetts, where people were bound to be dishonest and depraved, in the end Carlin won the battle, using a plan of attack that included equal amounts of pleading, promises, and tears.

  On this beautiful blue day, Carlin had a single battered suitcase thrown beneath the seat and a backpack crammed with sneakers and bathing suits. She had very few other belongings left at home, only some threadbare stuffed animals on her bed and an awful coat her mother had bought as a going-away present at Lucille’s Fine Fashions, a fuzzy acrylic monstrosity Carlin had hidden in the utility shed, behind some retreaded tires. Carlin planned to keep her plane ticket as a souvenir, forever and ever, if it didn’t dissolve first. She’d handled the ticket so many times that the print had worn off on her skin; she’d washed and she’d scrubbed, but there remained little gray flecks on her fingertips even now, the marks of her own ambition.

  All the while she was on the jet traveling north, and then again as the train sped through Boston’s endless construction sites, Carlin had felt little knobs of doubt rising beneath her skin. Who was she to think she could forge such a completely different life for herself? Here she was, dressed in a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt she’d purchased at a secondhand store, her blond hair pinned up haphazardly with metal clips that were rusty from the Florida humidity. Anyone could see she didn’t fit in with the other well-dressed passengers. She didn’t own a decent pair of boots, and had never had her hair cut by a professional, always snipping the ends herself when too much chlorine took its toll. She had swamp dust on her feet and nicotine stains on her fingers, and came from a universe of hash and eggs and broken promises, a place where a woman quickly learned there was no point crying over spilled milk or bruises left by some man who claimed to love a little too hard or too much.

  But in spite of her history, and all she believed she was lacking, Carlin felt hopeful once they were out of the city. They passed acres of goldenrod and fields where cows were grazing. It was the season of the warbler migrations and huge gatherings skimmed over the meadows, wheeling back and forth as if of one body and mind. Carlin struggled to open the sooty window in order to savor the September air, and was caught off guard when a tall kid toting a huge duffel bag approached to help raise the jammed window. The boy was far too skinny, with a shock of unruly hair that made him seem elongated, even storklike. He wore a long, black coat that hung like a sackcloth on his spindly frame and his work boots were unlaced, leaving his feet to slop around as if they were fish. An unlighted cigarette dangled from his wide mouth. Even with the fresh air streaming in through the open window there was no way to disguise the fact that he stank.

  “Mind if I sit down?” Not bothering to wait for an answer, the boy took the seat directly across from Carlin, setting his duffel bag in the aisle, unconcerned that it might cause a navigational problem for anyone wishing to pass by. He had the sort of luminous skin that can only be achieved by spending hours in a dark room while recovering from a migraine or a hangover. “God, those idiots in the next car from the Haddan School were driving me crazy. I had to escape.”

  Carlin noticed that he was nervous in her presence, she could tell from the flutter
of a pulse beneath his eye. A very good sign, for a boy’s apprehension always set Carlin at ease. She repinned a stray lock of loose hair with one of the silver clips. “That’s where I’m going,” she informed her fellow traveler. “The Haddan School.”

  “But you’re not an idiot. That’s the difference.” The ungainly boy searched through his gear until he found a Zippo lighter. When Carlin pointed to a no-smoking sign, he shrugged his bony shoulders and lit up anyway. Carlin smiled, entertained for the first time since she’d set off from home. She leaned back in her seat, waiting for this oddity to try to impress her again.

  He introduced himself as August Pierce from New York City, sent to Haddan by his overburdened father who hadn’t had a moment’s peace since the day Gus was born, shouldering the burden of raising his son after the death of his wife. The old man was a professor of biology with high expectations for his one and only boy; there were those who insisted upon rooting for loved ones long after they’d been thoroughly disappointed, and such was the case with Gus Pierce’s father. Having failed again and again, Gus believed he owed his father one last try. Not that he himself anticipated the least bit of success. Why should Haddan be any different from the other schools he’d attended? Why should anything good ever happen to him? He had been born on the seventh day of the seventh month and he’d always had bad luck. He could cross his fingers, he could knock on wood, and he’d still hit his head upon every ladder; he’d take every wrong turn possible. While everyone else progressed on the flat, straight road toward the future, Gus fell into manholes and gutters face first, with no visible means of escape.

  He viewed his own life as a prison sentence and experienced his existence much as a condemned man might have. If anything, the beauty of the world confounded him and made him more despondent. It therefore came as a pleasant surprise that a simple encounter could fill him with such optimism. He’d thrown himself into the seat across from Carlin in a fit of jitters, half expecting her to call for the conductor and have him bodily removed, and now here she was, talking to him. A sparrow flying out of his mouth would have been more anticipated than a beautiful girl such as this offering him a piece of gum. Girls like Carlin usually looked right through him; he existed in a sub-universe, a world of losers, a world of pain, located in the basement of reality, several levels beneath the realm of pretty faces and possibilities. If Carlin was leaning forward, listening to his falsified life story without laughing in his face, anything might happen: Blackbirds might turn into ginger cakes. Willow trees might burst into flame.