It didn’t help, either, that Miss Pike found Deirdre’s wine flask on the swimming beach and correctly assessed the contents as a mixture of cooking sherry and opium.
Still the scandal might have remained localized if it hadn’t been for the Founder’s Day picnic. I imagine that the dean and her staff debated long and hard that morning over whether to cancel the picnic or not. The problem was that this year India Crevecoeur had been invited to the Maypole dance. How to explain to our ninety-year-old founder that because a boy had been caught wandering the campus in a deer mask and bloodied shirt (the crepe paper dye again), and several girls were found half-naked and reeking of alcohol and opium, Heart Lake’s traditional Maypole dance might suddenly look like a pagan rite? By noon that day there was already talk in town that there was a campus cult that lured innocent boys into drugged sex orgies.
Deirdre laughed when she heard the rumor. “Oh, like they need to be lured into that.” We were sitting outside the Music Room, waiting to be called in to see the dean. Hurriedly we had agreed to say there’d only been Lucy’s brother (since Ward and Roy had gotten away unseen) and we’d asked him to play a part in a May Day pageant that we planned to perform later at the Founder’s Day picnic.
“What about the wine flask?” Deirdre hissed as Miss North came out of the Music Room and signaled for Deirdre to come in alone.
“Just say you bought it used and it must have had the opium in it already,” Lucy told her. “I mean, how much trouble can you get in for stealing some cooking sherry?”
Lucy shook her head as Deirdre followed Miss Buehl into the Music Room. “God knows what she’ll say.”
A few minutes after Deirdre went in, the door to the Music Room opened and Albie came out. She must have been called in to relate her story about finding me covered with dye again. She came over to us and I actually thought she might be about to apologize for causing such a stir. Instead she spoke to Lucy.
“You won’t get kicked out, will you?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. Besides, I live just down the road. Even if they kicked me out of the school I could come back to visit.”
Albie shook her head. “You wouldn’t though. Girls always say they’ll stay in touch when they switch schools, but they don’t.”
“Yeah, but this school’s different. It’s in our motto.”
Albie looked confused. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t know what Lucy was talking about either and I wondered if she was still high from the opium. But Lucy got to her feet quite steadily and led Albie to the front door. She pointed to the fanlight above the door where the morning sun was shining through the colored glass. The words of the motto glowed like molten gold, but you couldn’t read them of course—they were backward from this side of the door.
“You know what that says?” Lucy asked.
Albie shook her head.
“Cor te reducit,” Lucy said. “It means ‘The heart leads you back.’ It means no matter where you go after you leave this place your heart will always bring you back here. It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I’ll always be here for you, too—me and Deirdre and Domina Chambers and Jane…”
I saw Albie frown and look over her shoulder at the mention of my name. I tried to smile encouragingly. Truthfully, Lucy’s speech had touched me, too.
“Go on now,” Lucy said, pulling open the heavy door and holding it for Albie. “Go back to your room and don’t worry. And don’t ever forget what I told you.”
The girl nodded and left. Lucy came back to the bench and slumped down beside me. I could tell her little speech had worn her out. I noticed that her hair was still damp from her morning swim in the lake. We’d been allowed to change our clothes, but there hadn’t been time to shower. Lucy had told me to wear my nicest outfit and when she wasn’t happy with what I’d picked gave me something of hers to wear. The plaid skirt she’d given me was a little too short and I kept pulling on its hem to cover more of my bare legs, which still had streaks of red dye from the crepe paper streamers. Lucy, in a dark blue jumper and turtleneck, looked proper as always, except for a piece of grass caught in her damp hair. I picked it out of her hair and noticed that there was a light film of sawdust on the back of her neck.
When the front door opened I sniffed at the spring air like a prisoner who may only have a few hours of sunlight left to her. What I smelled, though, was something like talcum powder and moth balls—a distinctly old-ladyish smell. Outlined against the bright gleam of lake, a small, bent figure stood in the doorway making little clucking sounds with her tongue. As she moved into the foyer her pale blue eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall above our heads and then settled on me and Lucy. As old as the woman was there was something unnervingly steady in her gaze. I had been scared about being questioned by the dean, but suddenly I wished it were my turn to go into the Music Room.
The front door opened again and Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade rushed in—I’d never seen either teacher move so fast. Miss Macintosh’s hair was coming undone from its chignon and Miss Beade’s face was bright pink.
“Mrs. Crevecoeur,” they both exclaimed. “We thought you were waiting for us to escort you to tea.”
“This was my home for forty years. What makes you think I’d need escorting,” the old woman answered without turning to look at the two flustered teachers. “Who are these girls and why aren’t they in the Maypole dance?” She waved her cane at us and came closer. “In trouble, are you?”
Lucy and I looked at each other and then at our teachers who hovered behind India Crevecoeur.
“Actually,” Miss Macintosh said, moving to Lucy’s side, “these girls are our two Iris Scholarship recipients. They expressed a desire to meet you and um…” I could see Miss Macintosh, who had begun so well and so boldly, was running out of innovations. Luckily Lucy, always cool in awkward social circumstances, came to her rescue.
“To thank you for the great privilege of attending Heart Lake,” she said, rising to her feet. For a second I thought she might even curtsy, but she merely held out her small hand, which Mrs. Crevecoeur, switching her cane to her left hand, took briefly and then let drop.
“This is Lucy Toller,” Miss Beade said, coming to Lucy’s other side and standing almost directly in front of me. “One of our finest students. Miss Chambers says she’s the best Latin student she’s ever had.”
“Toller, eh? Your mother’s Hannah Corey, isn’t she?”
Lucy nodded.
“The Coreys are cousins of the Crevecoeurs, if you go back far enough. You’ve got the same blue eyes my girls Rose and Lily had.”
I couldn’t see Lucy’s expression, but I imagined she was smiling modestly. I was hoping no one would notice the bits of sawdust that clung to the backs of her bare legs. I was too busy staring at Lucy’s legs to notice that Mrs. Crevecoeur’s attention had swerved in my direction.
“And who’s this girl lurking in the shadows here? Didn’t anyone ever teach you to stand in the presence of your elders, girl?”
Blushing, I got up and squeezed myself in between Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade to hold out my hand to the old woman. As I stood I saw the old woman’s pale blue eyes widen, the pupils enlarge and darken. For a second I was afraid I’d missed a button on my blouse or she’d noticed the red streaks on my leg. She looked at me in a way that made me feel naked.
“Who are you?”
“Another Iris recipient, Mrs. Crevecoeur,” Miss Macintosh patiently explained, clearly thinking the old woman had forgotten what she’d been told five minutes earlier. “Remember, there were two of them last year…”
“I’m not senile,” she snapped. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Jane Hudson,” I answered.
The washed-out blue eyes narrowed. “Who was your mother?”
“Margaret Hudson.”
“Her maiden name, child,” she said impatiently.
“Oh,” I said, “Poole.”
For a moment a film seemed to
lift from the eyes. I could see how blue her eyes must have been.
“Your grandmother worked for me,” she said, “as my maid. I never thought I’d see her granddaughter here at Heart Lake.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like I’d been caught impersonating my betters—a serving girl found trying on her mistress’s fine shawl. I guess it was a shock for the old lady to find her maid’s granddaughter attending her school. But wasn’t that what the Iris Scholarship was supposed to do? Give us poor town girls a chance? I looked up at Mrs. Crevecoeur, prepared to offer some explanation, an apology even, but her eyes had drifted to a spot two inches above my head where, no doubt, she’d been accustomed to focus her gaze when talking to servants such as my grandmother.
I must have been overtired, because what I said wasn’t very polite. “Well, here I am. Better late than never.”
That wrenched her eyes down to meet mine. She gave me a curt nod and a tight smile. “Yes,” she agreed, as Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade each took a thin arm—suddenly she looked frail and very tired—and herded her off toward the Lake Lounge. I heard her as she left muttering to herself, “Better late than never. Ha!”
The door to the Music Room opened; Deirdre came out and, without looking at me or Lucy, hurried out the front door. Miss North came out of the Music Room and told Lucy that it was her turn to come in. Left by myself, I got up and paced the hall. I tried to distract myself by looking at the old photographs on the wall, but there was little in the dour faces of the Crevecoeur ancestors to hold my attention. At least not until I came to the picture directly above the chair where I had been sitting. There was India Crevecoeur again, in a smaller copy of the family portrait that hung in the Music Room. Yes, I could see the resemblance, the square jaw and haughty tilt of her chin. Both her older girls had it, too, only the youngest, Iris, skulked in the shadows. I moved closer and looked at the servant who hovered over Iris fixing her bow and for the first time recognized her. It was my grandmother, Jane Poole. That’s what old Mrs. Crevecoeur had been looking at over my head—her old servant who’d unexpectedly spawned an interloper to her precious school. “Well,” I thought, settling back in my chair to await my summons to the Music Room. “I might not be here long.”
NONE OF US WERE EXPELLED THOUGH. THE HARSHEST PUNISHMENT for the May Day affair, as we later referred to it, fell on Matt. What Lucy hadn’t figured on when she’d tried to persuade her to take the blame for the wine flask, was Deirdre’s history of boarding school expulsions. Heart Lake was her third boarding school in six years. Each successive school had been a little less prestigious, a little shabbier, than the last. Heart Lake was, at least, still a reputable school, but Deirdre knew that if she admitted that the flask was hers she would be kicked out of Heart Lake. What kind of school, on what frozen outpost, she might go to next Deirdre had no desire to discover. She might even end up on the Canadian border at St. Eustace’s—or St. Useless, as the girls called it—known as the school of last resort—where they sent you when no other school would have you.
She told the dean the flask belonged to Matt.
“After all,” Deirdre explained later to an enraged Lucy, “he doesn’t go here. What can they do to him?”
Heart Lake, of course, couldn’t do anything to Matt Toller, but Domina Chambers, as his mother’s old friend, could. True to her word, Domina Chambers had let us take the consequences of our actions without intervention from her. But when she heard that Lucy’s brother had brought drugs onto the campus, she stepped in. She went to Hannah Toller and told her, in no uncertain terms, that Matt mustn’t be allowed to compromise Lucy’s chances of making something of herself. Obviously, Heart Lake wasn’t far enough away to protect Lucy from her brother’s bad influence. And since Lucy couldn’t be sent farther away, there was only one solution. Matt must be sent away.
When Lucy told me what she had overheard in her house, I reassured her that nothing would happen right away. After all, there were only six weeks left to the school year. Surely they wouldn’t send Matt away until the fall. And by then the whole incident would have died down and the Tollers might relent.
But Domina Chambers was adamant. On May 4, Matt took the train south along the Hudson to Cold Spring, where he was to attend the Manlius Military Academy for Boys. I didn’t even get to see him before he left.
As miserable as I was at Matt’s expulsion from Corinth, Lucy was inconsolable. In fact, the aftermath of May Day seemed to leave her physically sick. She lost her appetite entirely and grew thin. Mrs. Ames, frantic to “put some meat on those twigs of bones” as she put it, stuffed Lucy’s book bag with freshly baked biscuits, which Lucy promptly tossed into the lake.
“An offering to the Lake Goddess?” I asked her one afternoon when I found her standing on the Point lobbing biscuits into the water.
She turned to me and I saw that besides how thin she had grown, there were dark blue circles under her eyes and her skin had a greenish, sickly pallor. Her hair, once bright and shiny, hung lank and tangled around her face. She looked like someone three feet underwater, like a drowned person.
“Don’t you think we’re getting a little old for that stuff, Jane?” she asked me. Then she turned and walked into the woods.
Even though she said she no longer believed in the Lake Goddess, I heard her praying to someone in the night. The first time it happened I thought I was dreaming. I awoke to an incessant whispering and when I opened my eyes I saw something crouched at the foot of Lucy’s bed. The figure was so small and compact I imagined for a minute it was a succubus, like the demon in Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” which Miss Beade had shown us in art class. No wonder, I thought groggily, Lucy has looked so worn out: that thing is sucking the life blood out of her.
That thing, though, was Lucy. With her knees drawn up to her chest and Matt’s old hockey jersey pulled down to her ankles, she was rocking back and forth, muttering something I couldn’t make out.
I wondered if I should go to her, but there was something so private, so naked, about her grief, I felt I would be intruding.
I didn’t know whom to go to.
Deirdre and Lucy weren’t on speaking terms since the wine flask incident. Nor did Deirdre seem upset by what had happened on May Day. She ate heartily and had put on weight in the last few weeks. She’d thrown herself into her schoolwork, anxious to redeem herself after the threat of getting thrown out. When I tried to talk to her about Lucy she answered brusquely, “Miss prima donna should get over it. She’s just pissed I took her boyfriend on May Day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you know? I was with Ward, which means she ended up with Roy. I’ll tell you this: Ward wasn’t sorry. He told me Miss Ice Princess—that’s what he called her—would hardly let him touch her all those nights we were taking turns in the icehouse.”
I thought about the scene I had witnessed in the icehouse. I’d always hoped the masked boy had been Ward. I told myself that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Matt and I had been together on May Day.
I even tried talking to my mother about Lucy when I went home for Memorial Day weekend.
“If I were you I’d quit worrying about that Toller girl,” she told me. “She’ll land on her feet. You ought to be thinking of how you can help out around here. Charity begins at home.”
I expected the lecture to go on, but it ended abruptly with a coughing fit. My mother had been running the carpet sweeper over the threadbare living room rug while we talked. She kicked at its unraveling hem and muttered through her coughing, “Damned sawdust.”
I looked at the rug. I couldn’t see any sawdust, but my mother’s hand on the sweeper’s handle did look yellow. I looked at her and noticed for the first time how sallow and worn-out she looked, as if after a lifetime of living in the paper mill’s shadow the sawdust had crept under her skin.
“Are you feeling all right, Mom?”
She put her hand on the back of her hip and leaned bac
k. “I could use a little help around here.”
My mother had told me what to do my whole life, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her asking for help.
“School will be over in two weeks,” I said. “I’ll be able to help out then.”
I waited to see if she’d mention any summer job. For the last three years she’d gotten me a baby-sitting job with one of the West Corinth families.
“I think your father could use you around the house this summer,” she said, and then resumed sweeping up the invisible sawdust.
I FINALLY WENT TO THE ONE PERSON WHO, I WAS SURE, would share my concern over Lucy— Domina Chambers.
I waited for her after her last class and walked back with her to the mansion.
“Yes, I’ve noticed she’s lost weight fretting over Matthew. She’s got a sensitive nature, not unlike myself. I can never eat in times of sorrow. Not like your other roommate, eh? Nothing seems to interfere with Miss Hall’s appetite.”
I smiled nervously, unsure of how I was supposed to respond to comments about a fellow student’s eating habits. It seemed, somehow, inappropriate. I steered the conversation back to Lucy.
“She doesn’t sleep either. I’m worried about her.”
“Yes, I am, too. I have a plan, though. Don’t worry, Clementia, I’ll take care of Lucy.”
We’d gotten to the mansion steps. Sitting on the bottom step, hugging her books to her chest, was Albie.
“Ah, Alba, I’d nearly forgotten it was your tutoring day.”
Albie glared at me as if Domina Chambers’s forgetfulness was my fault. Domina Chambers turned back to me. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about Miss Toller?”
The Lake of Dead Languages Page 19
