He looks up with a scowl at being interrupted, an expression that quickly changes to concern when he sees who it is. “Ophelia? Are you ill?”
“No. I just wanted to let you know I’m going to lie down for a while.”
His eyes flick across my pink cheeks. For a moment he actually smiles, and it transforms his entire face into something softer. “There’s a marvelous invention called sunscreen, or a hat if you want to be old-fashioned. You might try them next time.”
I smile back, leaning against the doorway. “I’ll try to remember.”
“Get some rest then,” he instructs. “Just remember to be up and dressed in time for dinner.”
Then it’s back to work, even though I haven’t left yet. As I gently close the door, I can hear him muttering about immunizations for the new students.
The Danemarks and the male scholarship students live on the second floor; the female scholarship students, none of whom have stayed for the summer, share the third floor with us Castellans. This level should be silent, and at first I think it is, until I pass my brother’s door and hear the muffled sounds within. There’s a towel pushed under the door.
I wonder what her name is, if it’s the same girl he spoke with on the phone, if it’s someone I know. He sometimes brings up girls from town, I suppose to impress them with the school and the house, something no boyfriend in town could ever equal.
It’s petty. I know that as soon as the thought comes into my head, but it doesn’t stop me from crouching down and carefully tugging the towel from under the door. The doors are cut high for the carpet but they misjudged and cut too high, so even the thickest carpet leaves a gap for sound to emerge. Without the towel there, the sounds are more obvious, unquestionable.
I twist the knob and let the door drift open in the currents from the air conditioning.
My room, sandwiched between Father and Laertes’, doesn’t allow for the privacy I’d like at times like these. Even if I’d left the door closed and the towel in place, I’d still hear the sounds of my brother having sex in the next room. The walls conceal nothing, and while Laertes is usually pretty quiet—up to a point—whatever girl he has in there is anything but. I don’t know if she’s loud enough to bring anyone running up from the first floor, but just the fact that they could be discovered through the open doorway amuses me.
All of Laertes’ warnings about Dane are the warnings he should be giving about himself. He won’t be serious, he’ll hurt you. He’ll take advantage of you. He’ll take what he wants from you and then move on to someone else.
Dane hurts himself by hurting me. It doesn’t mean he won’t do it again, but I saw his face when he saw the bruises.
I bury my head under my pillows to try to filter out the sounds from the next room. I can hear Laertes grunting, which he only does when he’s close to finished. The pillows are useless.
Then there’s a crash in the hallway and a strangled gasp, and I remember the maid that was going to bring my snack.
Still buried in the pillows, I laugh until my sides ache. The maids won’t tell Father; the maids don’t tell anyone anything except when gossiping amongst themselves, but Laertes doesn’t know that. Through the wall, I can hear the girl start sobbing, hear Laertes’ frantic apologies—to the maid or the girl, I’m not sure.
When my door opens, I’m still laughing, but the maid just touches my elbow with a warm smile and tells me it’ll be a few more minutes before my snack is ready. She knows I opened the door. She’ll tell the other maids as they gather in the kitchen between duties, and they’ll all have a good laugh that little Ophelia was able to pull one over on her overprotective brother.
I close my hand around the class ring and wonder if I should tell Dane. In the right mood, he’ll find it hilarious. In the wrong mood, I’ll have to explain why the hypocrisy is so funny, have to tell him that his friend doesn’t trust him with me.
And suddenly the laughter is gone, and tears sting my eyes as I lay back and stare at the ceiling.
Because I trust him.
Even knowing that Laertes is just a little bit right.
CHAPTER 13
Every year, two or three weeks before school starts, Gertrude takes me into the city for a weekend of shopping. She calls it a girls’ weekend out, time to spoil ourselves silly. I don’t think it ever occurs to her that I don’t enjoy these outings. I enjoy the city on the rare occasions I get to see a concert or a play, or spend a day or two lost in the museums, but with Gertrude I only ever see the shops and the employees that trail around us holding our selections and the purchases from other stores.
I don’t like being her living doll, the human toy to dress up however she wants, but I always let her do it. I let her because it gives her pleasure, because it pleases Father.
Dane teases me about it the night before we leave. We sit out on the dock with Horatio. The flasks make no appearance, but both boys have cigarettes aglow in their hands. He tells me I should make outrageous suggestions, find clothing to make his mother blush and gasp, say rude things to the shopkeepers to see if I can get us thrown out. We all know I’d never do any of it, but he has us laughing ourselves breathless anyway just trying to imagine it.
When I finally say good night and head back inside, he follows me to my door and kisses me softly, gently, a kiss with no anger or grief in it. For once he doesn’t push, doesn’t ask for anything more. I see this Dane too rarely anymore, so I treasure his brief appearance.
It’s a long ride into the city, one I intend to only be half awake for, but Gertrude has the car stop to get us real coffee like we haven’t had since Hamlet died rather than the muddy instant singles. She has a stack of glossy magazines beside her that acts as an impromptu table for the box of Danishes, and every now and then she hands me the current selection folded back on a page and asks my opinion about it.
Most of my opinion is taken up in wishing I’d sat on the right side instead of the left, so at least her new wedding ring wouldn’t intrude quite so much, but I manage mostly reasonable responses until she turns the page and looks for something else.
Against a chorus of blaring car horns, our driver rolls the center window down to tell us we’ll be late in arriving; an accident has brought the freeway to a dead stop until it can be cleared away.
“He’s still angry, isn’t he?”
At her soft words, I stop trying to see the distant wreck and turn back in my seat to face her. Her eyes are downcast, focused on a picture of an evening gown, but I don’t think she actually sees it.
“He doesn’t even speak to me anymore, not since the wedding. Sometimes he even leaves the room when I walk in.” The large diamonds in her ring flash in the morning sun through the window. “How can he hate me so?”
Because you betrayed his father. Because you didn’t wait.
Too often I don’t say what I really think; how many opportunities do I miss because of that?
“He’s hurt,” I answer finally.
“He’s never been lonely.”
“He is now.”
She smiles at that and lightly touches my cheek. “How can he possibly be lonely when he has you, dear child?”
The idea intrudes as it has too often since the wedding: Gertrude is not quite bright. Loneliness isn’t the absence of other people, has nothing to do with who is or is not around you. Loneliness is something harder to define. But Gertrude doesn’t understand that. She thinks loneliness is the simple act of being alone; she marries a man when her husband is barely in the ground so that she doesn’t have to be alone.
“He misses his father.”
She sighs at that, returns her gaze to the evening gown as though it will offer her an answer. “They were always close, but this excessive grief cannot bring Hamlet back from the grave.”
Perhaps excessive grief cannot, but murder and incest apparently can. I’ve almost grown used to Hamlet’s two ghosts. One sits with lowered head and sad eyes on the gravestone, never wanders, never int
eracts even with the other ghosts. The other prowls the boundary of the iron fence with furious steps, tests the limits, and each night he comes a little farther away, stretches his tether a little bit more.
She lifts a hand to her hair, and the sun sparkles violently on the ring. “Had circumstances been slightly different twenty years ago, Dane would have had Claudius, rather than Hamlet, for a father.”
He wouldn’t have become Dane. Dane is very much a product of his father’s teachings, combined with his mother’s anxieties. The product of Claudius and Gertrude would have been someone very different.
But she’s given me an opening, a chance to assuage the curiosity that’s been nagging me even as I knew I would never broach the topic myself. As casually as I can, I shift in the seat to better see her expressions. “Jack told me you used to date both brothers.”
She laughs at that, like it means nothing. “He would remember that, I suppose. How many times did he chase us from the hedge maze with bits of leaves in our hair?”
There’s a limit to what I need to know; that … no. Just no.
But she smiles and leans forward like she’s sharing a secret, and perhaps she is; perhaps this is something most others have forgotten over the years. “I was honest with them, Ophelia, which is the only way a woman may ever honorably be courted by more than one man. Hamlet laughed when I told him, said he would do his best and respect my choice. Claudius vowed to win me. They were so different, even then.”
“Different how?”
“I suppose they wanted very different things,” she says slowly. She isn’t sure of the answer; she tests the words as they come out and doesn’t seem satisfied by them, but she doesn’t know another answer to give. “Even then, Hamlet was always full of ideas for the school. He used to talk all the time about instituting a scholarship program; his father finally gave in on the condition that Hamlet run it himself, and the way he threw himself into it, you’d think someone had given him a prize beyond measure. He always knew he’d come back to the school as soon as he could. He was proud of the Danemark legacy, proud to be a part of it. He was the Headmaster’s son, wealthy, influential, very handsome … all the girls spoke of him in that kind of voice, hushed, like they were afraid he’d hear how much they admired him. I don’t know that he ever realized it; it was just such a part of who he was.”
“And Claudius?”
She hesitates. Her right hand twitches to cover the gaudy ring on her left. “Claudius as a boy was … driven, I suppose. The younger son. Things are very different for younger sons, even now when we think they shouldn’t be. Hamlet was always guaranteed a certain measure of success by virtue of being the elder. Claudius always felt he had to work twice as hard to get half as far. He was … oh, fierce, I suppose, in pursuing what he wanted. Being with Hamlet felt like being treasured; being with Claudius felt like being won.”
“But you made a choice. Eventually.”
“Of a sort. I couldn’t decide between them no matter how often I sat and tried, so I finally decided I would marry the one who asked me first. It seemed the fairest way I could think of. They were both in college when I graduated, both focused on their studies, so I attended a women’s college, and then when Hamlet graduated with his first degree, he took me out to dinner and proposed. Said he hadn’t felt right about offering marriage if he couldn’t support me on his own without recourse to his parents.”
I glance away so she can’t see my wince. She didn’t make a decision at all, simply left it up to their characters. How could any man on the wrong side of that ever be content with it, knowing it was a question of timing and not of affection that denied him the chance to ever be with the woman he loved?
“After the wedding, we lived in a small house while he pursued his other degrees, and I spent time with the faculty wives when he taught the lower classes, and then, of course, we came back to the school. Claudius finished his first degree a year after the wedding, and he just left. Went off to England first, though he spoke occasionally of traveling elsewhere as well. It was hard for him to see us together, especially once Dane was born. It pained me that he never married, never tried to have children of his own. He would have made a very good father. Now, of course …” She turns the page too quickly and tears the thin, glossy paper near the spine. She frowns and smoothes a finger across it like that will somehow mend the rip. “Claudius has waited all his life to be recognized for his skills; now he finally has the chance. And when he asked me …”
I swirl the last of the coffee, long since cold, in the bottom of the cup. I recognize this from Dane, the type of thing that’s easier to say when no one is looking at you. When no one can see your face to judge your motives. I watch her from the corner of my eye, though. She has no idea why she said yes when he asked her to marry him.
All the pain the answer has caused, will continue to cause, and she doesn’t even know why she gave it.
“Love is a funny thing, Ophelia,” she murmurs eventually. “I suppose it makes fools of even the best of us. I’ve loved both of them since we were little more than children.” She laughs suddenly, thrusts the entire question from her mind with a careless wave of her hand. “If anyone knows that better than I, it would be your father.”
“Father?”
Mama thinks he’s the biggest kind of fool; being a fool for love can only be a piece of that.
“Have you never heard how your parents came together?” she asks with surprise.
I shake my head. Father never speaks of Mama, and Mama doesn’t speak of what used to cause her pain. Whatever brought my parents, so dissimilar in every way, to marriage isn’t the kind of story they would fondly tell their children. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask if she’s ever told Dane of her love for both brothers, but the question can’t be anything but cruel, so it stays silent, unasked.
“When I was a student, your father came back to the school as assistant to the Headmaster, Hamlet IV at that point. There was a girl a few years younger than me, Morgen Bishop, a wild child such as the school had never seen. She truly seemed sometimes half feral. She was beautiful, Ophelia, I’m sure you remember that. There was something about her that drew the eye, something wild and untamed that made almost every boy in school want to be the one to tame her. But she set her sights on Polonius.”
I’d known there was a significant age difference between my parents; I’d never learned why.
“I don’t know if it was just a challenge for her or if there was a bet or perhaps there really was something about him that drew her, but Polonius never really had a chance once Morgen put her mind to it. He was mortified by it; he came straight to my father-in-law and offered his resignation, but Morgen was eighteen, barely, and Polonius wasn’t her teacher, so the Headmaster simply told him to be sure it never happened again.”
“Did it?”
“A few times more, I should imagine. Morgen was never so entranced by a thing until she was told she couldn’t have it. Then, near the end of the school year, she fainted in class and the nurse discovered she was pregnant. You must understand, Ophelia, and I mean no pain to you in this, your mother was … well …”
“Promiscuous?”
She looks relieved at not having to choose a word, or perhaps it’s simply that I’ve said it for her. “Yes, precisely. There was no guarantee that the child was even Polonius’, but he said if there was even the chance, he was going to do right by her and the child, so he went to the Bishops and confessed what had happened and offered to marry her. To be honest, I think they were relieved. Here was someone willing to take their wayward girl off their hands. Morgen actually ran away in protest, but she didn’t have anyone to run to, so after a month or so she returned and they were married.”
She studies my face, but I think it’s my mother she sees. “Despite everything, I truly believe Polonius came to love her and hoped that she would feel the same for him. I don’t know that she ever did, though. He tried to make her happy, tried to give her wha
t she wanted. It didn’t ever seem to be enough.”
Only the lake was enough to make her happy, to take away the emptiness that made her restless and lonely and scared.
“When Laertes was born, we all tried to see something of Polonius in him, but he looked so very much like Morgen, and then you … you lack her height but could otherwise be her twin, so little of Polonius in either of you, but he never hesitated to call you his. It’s easier to see it now that you’re older, especially in Laertes. He is very much his father’s son, I believe, and the school will be the better for having someone of such competence to continue your father’s work.”
She doesn’t stop to consider whether or not Laertes would want to continue Father’s tasks. It simply makes sense to her, like the way generations of Danemarks take up the tasks of those before them to continue to lead the school.
“I think he still loves her, Ophelia. He’s never gone out on dates, never expressed any interest in another woman, doesn’t even speak of her for the pain it causes him to know that she’s gone.”
That she left.
“Things are never so terrifying as when love is involved.” Her voice is soft, almost a whisper, like she’s forgotten I’m in the car with her. “What we do for love … it can be wonderful, the best of all that man has to offer. But sometimes … sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes what we see is far from the best it could be.”
There’s a syringe hidden in a chest of my mother’s clothes, a small tube of glass with poison still clinging to the smooth surfaces. There’s a body in the graveyard, a pair of ghosts that show the best and worst of the Headmaster that was, and a boy shredding himself and everyone else in the face of emotions he doesn’t know how to define or control.
For the first time, I wonder if Gertrude knows—or suspects—about that syringe, about what her new husband did to gain his titles. There are some men for whom love—love of position, love of power, love of a woman—can be a whip to murder, and she’s married one of those men.
Does she know that?
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