I had been blooded, as they say in fox hunting of a novice rider who was in at the kill. First kill, first nightmare—they all landed you at the gateway to Hades, the nether regions. Proud as I was of being an initiated dreamer, I rather hoped this business of dreaming would not become a nightly habit. I was attracted and repelled by the prospect, as the maiden Persephone must have been while she was being abducted. I did not share Adele’s enthusiasm for the sport of dreaming, or my sister’s either. They had come to believe you could “get good at it,” play a more and more active role, learn the answers to questions, program yourself to dream the solution to a problem. I’d have to say they were pretty far gone in that department, given their recent very similar dream. They were beginning to think that the action was right in the room with them, like a 3-D movie with surround-sound.
I was pretty far gone myself, feeling sleep come upon me, when one last idea sneaked across my darkening field of consciousness. Both Hannah and Adele had heard footsteps accompanied by a “swishing” or “whooshing” sound. I myself had heard slapping and gliding—not exactly the same, but near enough. All of us had dreamed of being crushed by a weight that seemed to have gender. What if we had “caught” the dream from each other like a flu virus—in other words, were “giving” it to one another? Perhaps Adele or Hannah was sending tonight, and I was receiving? In that case, there was nothing to be frightened of. All we were doing was using telepathy, which was nothing more than an undeveloped power of the human mind. I could hear Henry breathing deeply and regularly, with a slight rasp at the end of each exhalation. If I had been able to keep awake for another sixty seconds, I would have summoned my latent telepathic powers and started sending him nightmarish images of an overweight female pressing down on top of him, trying to suffocate him.
PART V
Christ Above Us
Chapter Twelve
Two days later, on June 23, I drove over to Burridge Academy with a trunkload of party foods for the graduation reception the following day—boxes of sesame wafers; five hundred cheese puffs frozen into marble-sized balls and stored on plastic-wrapped cookie sheets; mushroom caps stuffed with mussels, shallots, bread crumbs, and parsley, stored ditto; the makings for curried stuffed eggs—whites and yolk mix packed separately. Burridge’s kitchen staff took care of the assembly and cooking, although I often hung around to make sure they baked the cheese puffs while they were still frozen and remembered to dot the mushroom caps with specks of anchovy butter before running them under the broiler. The staff also set out platters of ham, turkey, breads, and mustards, as well as the inevitable baskets of raw vegetables served with the head cook’s sour cream-and-onion dip. I liked old-fashioned foods at parties, onion dip and all, and would hold out as long as I could against newfangled items like miniature quiches, caviar eclairs, and deep-fried brie nuggets. Because of the heat I had driven over the Sinkhole Road too fast. I made the four miles in seven minutes, honking my way past Arnold Crowley, who was driving his tractor with the manure spreader attached. Mary Fran Rawls, who earned extra money working at Burridge functions, helped me unload the car and rush my trays and boxes to the nearest source of refrigeration. “You ought to take a look before you go,” whispered Mary Fran, who had been educated by nuns. “They’re out by the rose garden rehearsing in their bathing suits.”
The founder, Miss Nancy Burridge, had planted the rose garden herself, with an able-bodied helper standing by. She did not dig the serpentine beds (that took a crew of four), but she made deep holes in the well-prepared earth with her own spade, hilled up the soil to support the bare roots and filled in the holes, watering at intervals with rich manure tea. Every spring she had the beds mulched with chopped corn husks. Her garden helpers did the work of protecting forty bushes for the winter, hauling earth to mound it up into cones around the base of the plant, wrapping the cone of earth in several layers of burlap.
Miss Burridge had taken it into her head to grow old Bourbon roses, which should, by all rights, have found winters in Maine too harsh. Did Miss Burridge grow roses because they had so many traits in common with her adolescent pupils—softness, dewiness, sweetness, occasional thorniness? Or did she start a school for girls because they bore a resemblance to her beloved roses? The Burridge mansion, whitewashed brick with dormer windows and a raised brick terrace in back, was the academy’s main building now, used for offices, receptions, concerts, lectures, prize day, and, in case of rain, graduation. Beyond the terrace ran the upper lawn, and down a flight of steps dividing a fieldstone retaining wall lay the lower lawn, where beds of roses flanked the wall in staggered triple rows.
I smelled the roses before I saw them, flourishing in the heat, which reminded them of their ancestral home in the Indian Ocean. Their branches arched to the ground with heavy clusters of blooms, a predominance of white, pink, and magenta. As plain and compact as a sparrow, dressed likewise in grays and browns, which made her skin colorless and her small features more insignificant, Miss Burridge was drawn to roses with extravagant coloration—marbled, spotted, striped, variable, or unstable; roses with contrasting centers, edges, and reverses. Her allegiance to the Bourbon roses lasted all her life, although she had a brief, unrequited fling with the modern hybrid teas, especially color innovations in the orange area of the spectrum—beiges, apricots, and coppers.
The human counterparts of Miss Burridge’s favorite flower—twenty graduating seniors ages seventeen and eighteen—were standing in line in order of height, waiting to rehearse the processional. Well-formed, fully rounded, creamy white flushed with pink, they added charm to the landscape, pearling with sweat as roses bead up with dewdrops. I saw redheaded Mercy Locke, one of the girls Henry rescued from the cemetery, wearing a smaller bikini suit than any on her classmates, the smallest bikini, I think I may venture, ever to be seen inside the Dry Falls town limits. Mercy’s cohort, Helen Akers, the tallest girl in the class, brought up the rear of the line. Since she was lame, she was the only one to whom the processional gait (step/slide/pause; step/slide/pause) was natural. The others teetered on the pause, as girl graduates and bridesmaids have done for generations, adding an element of suspense to an otherwise predictable ceremony.
Now the young ladies were filing toward their seats, white wooden folding chairs set up on either side of a speaker’s platform, which tomorrow would be draped with a Persian rug and decorated with pots of Madonna lilies. They remained standing for the last chorus of ’Tis June: “Lift up your voices clear and strong / Hope guides the future’s wa-ay / Love lights the path we’ve known so long / Hail to Commencement Day!” They sat down decorously, as if they were actually wearing coronets of white roses and long white dresses.
Before Miss Leatherbee, the art teacher, could say “Well done!” they had broken ranks, slumping down in their chairs, leaning across one another, taking off sandals or tennis shoes to inspect their feet for blisters, whispering, laughing, beating time on the tops of their thighs to some unsung tune. “Anarchy is in the air,” said Miss Leatherbee, whose own frizzy white curls had declared mob rule, breaking out of the net she wore to keep hairs from falling into the art supplies. “This group is precocious,” said Myra Littlefield. “They began misbehaving back in March.” Myra was wise enough to turn a blind eye to most outbreaks of senior restlessness—oversleeping, cutting classes, keeping food in their rooms, which attracted mice. When she smelled smoke wafting through the spring nights, she confiscated the cigarettes but imposed no other punishment.
It was not Miss Littlefield, however, but bashful Miss Burridge who had started the tradition of lighting a bonfire on graduation eve. After supper, at twilight, the girls would build a fire in a sand pit near the edge of the woods, where the full-moon celebrations were held. It was an amateur bonfire, started and fed with lumber scraps, twigs, and the students’ report cards. Lecture notes and term papers also went on the fire, depending, I suppose, on how the papers had been graded. Miss Burridge, and Miss Littlefield, drew the line at boo
ks of any kind, even textbooks. Every so often a girl threw her gymsuit into the flames before anyone could stop her. Of course, copies of their report cards were on file in the secretary’s office, but symbolically, at least, the fire wiped their slates clean, giving good ones, naughty ones, brainy ones, and lazy ones the feeling of escape from the stereotypes that had dogged them all through their school days. Some years it rained; then they burned their report cards in the dining hall fireplace—an anticlimactic alternative in spite of the fact that they turned the lights off and did it in the dark. Even outsiders like me had heard the rumor, pooh-poohed by Myra Littlefield, that “bonfire girls” did better in college than “fireplace girls.”
In the old days bonfires were lit all over Europe on St. John’s Eve to celebrate the summer solstice. Priests asked the gods to protect the ripening crops and increase their yield, while lovers wandered into the forest away from the firelight to act out private fertility rites. Miss Burridge, who was a student of mythology, must have known all about these beliefs and practices, but the Burridge seniors seemed unaware of the importance of this night. I watched Mercy Locke absentmindedly biting the skin around her thumbnail and Helen Akers shoving two girls out of their chairs so she could put her bad leg up. The two girls, snub-nosed and pigtailed, began to practice headstands. All the girls were waiting for Myra Littlefield to dismiss them or begin another run-through, but she was talking to a tonsured, fat-cheeked, plaid-trousered father of one of the seniors, a chunky brunette who rushed forward to claim him.
I turned and saw a group of mothers, aunts, and sisters coming down the upper lawn, a healthy, homogenous group, with their tanned skin and their pastel dresses, looking cool and appropriate despite the heat. Young and older, their faces were defined by deep crow’s feet, caused by squinting too often into the sun to track the progress of a golf or tennis ball. Every female among them wore her hem at the middle of the knee. As they drew close enough to see the bikini-clad graduates, their facial expressions became even pleasanter and more noncommittal. I could picture them emerging from the water at the yacht club in their one-piece suits with modest skirts or shorts attached. In any case, the bikinis on the seniors would be gone by late afternoon. The students were required to be fully clothed as they capered around the bonfire.
Therein lay the difference between a ritual and a tradition: in the latter the clothes stayed on while in the former they might all be shed as the spirit dictated. If events took their natural course, young animals, perhaps even young girls, might be thrown into the fire. A tradition, if you like, is an expurgated version of a ritual. I would classify Holy Communion as a tradition, although I would think twice before saying so to Henry. With its sweet wine and its gluey wafers, the Lord’s Supper was the palest shadow of the ancient Greek mysteries, where raw flesh was eaten and blood was sprinkled on the initiates. People came out changed after a ritual. The function of traditions was to guarantee that nothing ever changed.
I believe Miss Burridge truly intended to create a ritual, a rite of passage to adulthood. Why else would she have chosen such a powerful day for it? The summer solstice was not only a time when Nature holds our fate in her hands, when she can blight the tender crops that will see us through dark winter, or make them flourish. It was also the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, Christ’s herald and understudy, whose life ended in a sacrifice, the same as any bullock on a bonfire. In paintings John was depicted as a head on a golden charger, eyes staring open, the neck cords played up or played down according to the style of the period. John the Baptist was a medicine man who lived in the desert outside the walls of Jerusalem, dressed in animal skins and subsisting on locusts and wild honey. He was Jesus Christ’s rival for the people’s allegiance, about whom Jesus sometimes spoke in a tone of irony, “What went ye out in the wilderness for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?” There was a time, just before he was sent to prison, when John the Baptist pulled larger crowds than Jesus. He was a wild version of Christ, who could make Our Savior come across like an establishment smooth-talker. A roll of the dice, a spin of the wheel, a piece of soot in God’s eye, a sandbag falling from the fly gallery—and St. John might have found himself playing the leading character. All the millions who might have been Christians would instead be called Johannites.
Like All Souls Eve, or Hallowe’en, St. John’s Eve was one night of the year, according to legend, when supernatural beings came out in the open. All the nature spirits were about—elves, trolls, wood nymphs, and water nixies, and some which must not be named because naming them summons them. These spirits were the survivors of a fairy race who inhabited the earth before men began usurping their territory. I like to think of John the Baptist as a Nature spirit, more empathic than Christ to forms of life other than humanity. At solstice time, the veil between the upper world and the underworld was thin and permeable. Miss Burridge would have been better advised to plan graduation ceremonies at a more neutral period, one without so many echoes of the primitive past.
The very first year several graduates went to extremes, breaking out of the circle to jump across the fire pit while the flames were still knee-high, lifting their skirts above their under-britches. The second year, a girl ran across the glowing coals in her bare feet and received her diploma in a wheelchair. Miss Burridge grew frightened of the ritual she had established. She began to impose rules and regulations, trying to keep it in bounds: proper attire—shirt and trousers; long hair tied back or braided; no bare feet; no jewelry; no food allowed, with the exception of marshmallows; no chemical fire starters WHATSOEVER; a faculty member present at all times.
Miss Burridge whittled it down until it became a tradition, and still it had an atavistic tendency. Each year the proceedings slipped out of gear in some unpredictable fashion. I wondered what would happen at this year’s bonfire. What could possibly top last year’s, when Flora Hamlin, Miss Burridge’s own grandniece, had a group of girls trying to brand initials in one another’s biceps with metal skewers smuggled in for the purpose?
As I was walking back to the car I heard shrieks and cheers, an indication that the rehearsal was breaking up. I turned around and saw the entire class, except for Helen Akers, making a running dash across the lawn and around the far side of Main Building, headed in the direction of the pond. Even Helen was moving faster than usual, and I wondered if the hot weather was good for the pain in her bones and muscles. Heat and exertion had heightened her color, so that her flat cheekbones looked more prominent and her slanted eyes seemed wider. I waved to her and she acknowledged my wave, unembarrassed, as if my knowing about her antics in the churchyard made her feel more at ease with me rather than less so. I called out a greeting and she began limping toward me. I walked over briskly to spare her the detour.
“You’re off for a swim,” I said. “Don’t let me hold you up.” “I only want to dunk my feet,” said Helen. “I never go all the way in. There are fish and turtles in the water.” “How’s your leg?” I asked. “You seem to be walking better.” “I am, really. It’s not the break any more; it’s a nerve or something.” “I’d like to congratulate you, Helen. I wish you success.” “Thanks a lot, Mrs. Lieber. I’ll be glad to get out of this place. I don’t think I like the country.” “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “It’s too isolated,” she said. “It makes me jittery.” I smiled at her. “Is this the person who decided to spend a night in the cemetery?” “You don’t understand,” she said earnestly. “People frighten me more than spirits. There was a break-in at West Dorm last night. The kids next door saw a shadow and screamed, so whoever it was ran off. I think it was the handyman, but Mercy and the others are sure it was some local boys.”
We were standing at the edge of the lawn near the parking area. A car pulled in and three young men got out—brothers, cousins, friends, or beaux—trim, square-jawed fellows wearing faded polo shirts and khaki trousers, varsity athletes, from the breadth of their shoulders. Instead of going directly to Main Building to requ
est an audience with their female relations through official channels, they crossed the driveway and strolled past the dormitories toward the woods. The freckled one was whistling a tune, while the buck-toothed one kept leaning over to pick something up—a stone, a wildflower—and show it to the towheaded one. They were making an exaggerated attempt to move slowly and casually, lest anyone question the right of three males to roam freely about the grounds of an all-girls’ school. They disappeared into the trees some twenty yards before the footpath leading to the pond. Either they were there by prearrangement or they hoped to be witnesses to some skinny-dipping.
“They could be your pranksters,” I said to Helen, and asked her if she recognized them. She said no, not really, although Pickle Raines had gone to the Rumsey dance with a guy who looked like the freckled one. “I hope they don’t do it again tonight, if that’s who they are.” I said, “Remember to tell Miss Leatherbee. Isn’t she your housemother?” “They look so ordinary,” said Helen, “like lots of other boys.” “They’re no beauties,” I said, “but at least they have clear complexions.” “I don’t like boys,” said Helen. “They work in packs.” I laughed and hugged her impulsively. “Get down there and warn your friends,” I said.
I watched her move away, taking long strides, walking alone and thinking for herself. Of course, her reaction to the band of male visitors was overstated. What harm could the three young men inflict on a group of twenty girls who had the home court advantage? In their freshman ancient history and mythology class, these same young women had acted out the death of Dionysus, impersonating the delirious nymphs who had killed the god—in this case, a straw dummy—by tearing him limb from limb and floating the pieces down the river.
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