Payback

by Mary Gordon

  But Miss Vaughan had singled Heidi out, not Jeanne Larkin. She had singled her out with the gift, in the shiny white bag. She had singled her out, and trusted her with a secret. It would be a problem for Miss Vaughan if Heidi told anyone. She never would, and Miss Vaughan knew that: it was the truest sign of her regard.

  Heidi has something that no other girl in the Lydia Farnsworth School has. A secret. Which she would not reveal, but could, causing embarrassment, perhaps even censure from the totally uptight headmistress. And if the other students knew, it would be bad for Miss Vaughan in another way. Because they would think there was no good reason for anyone to favor Heidi Stolz. And it would make them wonder, and their wondering would make Miss Agnes Vaughan, whom most of them adored, much smaller in their eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Standing behind her desk in the empty classroom, with its overlaying smell of chalk and overripe apples, the light striking the polished desks from the large schoolroom windows, Agnes knows that she has made a mistake. She tries to go back to the moment in New York when she was convinced that making a present of the boots to Heidi Stolz was a perfect idea. She had thought that until she caught that split-second look in Heidi’s eyes, what she thought of as a mix of unease and calculation, not the frank delight she had imagined from a girl thrilled to be so singled out.

  But wasn’t that why she was so fascinated by Heidi Stolz, because her reactions were nearly always unexpected? Because she was never taken in by the popular enthusiasms, by conventional responses or tastes. Even the way she presented herself went against the grain of every other girl: her hair in a single plait, her black winter coat, a throwback to the ’40s, which, when Agnes admired it, Heidi confessed to having bought in a thrift shop. Agnes remembered what Letitia Barnes had said to her about Heidi: that she was a starved creature, that her mother had looked on her with the look that starved rather than nurtured.

  She wishes that Heidi could see that she was in her own way, if not lovely, then striking: the high forehead, the prominent but distinguished nose, the slight overbite. Her eyes were not large, and that might have made the difference. And it was unfortunate that her name suggested a rosy-cheeked blond, an Alpine Shirley Temple. Her legs were enviably long, and she was surprisingly voluptuous; her stooped walk was, Agnes was certain, a tactic to try to hide her large breasts. Obviously, she had inherited her breasts from her mother, Agnes thought, remembering with unease the unsettling limerick Heidi had shown her.

  It was a terrible thing to have such contempt for your parents at her age, a pitiable thing, and Agnes’s heart went out to the poor starved creature, because she knew she herself had been extraordinarily loved and loved her parents easily, especially her mother, and if she had some difficulties with her father, there was nothing like contempt that touched her daughterly imagination. Such hateful words, the words in that limerick about her parents…and yet they had stuck in her brain.

  She had asked Letitia Barnes about Heidi’s family.

  Miss Barnes had let her preternatural discretion lapse; she looked down at her blotter. “Well, the mother is foreign, Swiss, I believe an athlete in her youth. A skier. When she talked about her past, she mentioned the war only to say that it prevented the 1940 and ’44 Olympics, in which she might have successfully competed. I must say, I find her a thoroughly unpleasant woman, mutton dressed as lamb, you’ll forgive my saying. The father is the head of a large pharmaceutical company, although he seems rather beaten down for the tycoon I know him to be.”

  “I worry for her,” Agnes had said.

  “You’re not wrong. But be careful. New teachers often get entangled in ways that have unfortunate consequences.”

  Is that what she had done? Had she done it precisely to go against Miss Barnes’s warning? And was she entangled now?

  She thinks of the old proverb that never seemed to have any application to her life: Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. She tells herself she hadn’t deceived, not really, but she knew that giving Heidi the boots was something that had to be kept secret. But why? Because it was not a thing teachers were supposed to do. Give students expensive gifts.

  She had told her mother about it, because she knew that what she was doing was questionable and she also knew that her mother didn’t immediately write off questionable behavior. She had shown her mother the boots. “They’re wonderful…Agnes, keep them for yourself.”

  “Mother, they were a stupid impulse. I have nothing to go with them.”

  “Then maybe you ought to get some new things,” her mother said. Her mother, having no appetite for large extravagances—furs, jewels—indulged in a series of smaller ones. Antique combs that decorated her chignon or French twist, a collection of hats that her father regularly, properly teased her for; she traveled to Providence to get her hair colored by the most expensive salon in the city; she prided herself on her blouses of real silk and her thin gold watch.

  “Nobody else likes this girl, Mother, not even her own parents, not even Florence Gould…and she likes almost every student. Jo and Christina just roll their eyes when I mention her name. Jo because Heidi smirks whenever one of the ardent antiwar girls carries on, and Christina because she thinks Heidi slinks like a coyote, that she’s always plotting. I understand, maybe they’re right, but she has a genuine imagination, she’s not afraid to go against the grain. And then she’s so lonely, so shocked that anyone would show her the slightest kind attention. She just seems like such a wounded creature to me…so undernourished.”

  “And you want to nourish her?”

  “Yes, Mother, I do.”

  “Well, I love you for that. I always loved you for bringing in wounded birds. For trying to domesticate feral cats. You remember the one who gave you such a bad scratch we had to take you for a tetanus shot? I suppose I’m guilty of the same temptation myself. With my prisoners.”

  “People said you were mad to volunteer in the prisons giving art classes.”

  “Well, they were wrong. But I have made mistakes. Do you remember Ronald Simonson? So gifted…well, untutored, and rather vulgar in his taste, but with a remarkable ability to do a likeness in a few strokes. I wrote letters in his support for the parole board, and then he got out and beat his ex-wife almost to death a week after his release.”

  Agnes was silent, remembering her mother’s remorse, her mother’s visits to the ex-wife, her financial support of the woman…who had also, Agnes and her father believed, taken advantage much longer than she had a right to.

  “But then there was Leo Johnson, who I thought had the makings of a great draftsman, and he did, he actually got himself to college and is working for a big architect in Boston. So if I hadn’t had it in me to believe in possibilities, on the one hand, I wouldn’t have supported Ronald Simonson. But then I wouldn’t have supported Leo Johnson either.”

  “Heidi Stolz has no one, Mother. Which is why my heart goes out to her.”

  “I’ve come to believe that about sixty percent of things we do from the heart turn out badly. But it would be dreadful not to do them.”

  Agnes laughed, and ruffled her mother’s hair. “Where did you come up with that statistic, sixty percent?”

  “Well, I knew it had to be more than half, but I didn’t want to make it seem impossibly discouraging.”

  * * *

  —

  Heidi’s aloneness was Agnes’s greatest concern. She seemed to have no friends, and no interest in making them. The only non-contemptuous thing she ever said was about her admiration for Jeanne Larkin. Jeanne Larkin, who rather frightened Agnes; she had never met a girl so self-contained. Jeanne had told Agnes she wanted to be a vet or an astronaut, and Agnes could imagine her, helmeted and suited, hanging, attached by a cord to her rocket ship, dangling happily alone in space, or helping some large animal caught in a trap or a difficult birth. Jeann
e was not one of the girls who Agnes knew adored her, but Agnes had at least won her respect by giving her some pointers in the botanical drawings she wanted to do for her project.

  She would talk to Jeanne Larkin about perhaps taking Heidi under her wing.

  Jeanne was Christina’s protégée: the only student at the Lydia Farnsworth School whom Christina considered genuinely scientifically gifted, for whom she mourned the inadequate laboratories, the clear preference for the humanities.

  They were driving back from Danbury, the one visit per month on which they accompanied Jo on her visits to her husband. The drive down was always tense: Jo was always afraid that Jack had been beaten, raped, given poisonous food. This had never happened, and on the way home, Jo was always a little annoyed at Jack’s good spirits, his success at tutoring fellow prisoners, the fact that he had a lot of time to write—he was working on a biography of Thomas Paine—and his delight that he was in the same institution as Daniel Berrigan, his hero. “It’s like he got locked up with a movie star and gets to have lunch with him every day,” Jo said. “It never rains on Planet Jack. It drives me nuts,” Jo said, but her friends knew she was secretly proud.

  * * *

  —

  “Chrissy, tell me your thoughts about Jeanne Larkin,” Agnes said.

  “Jeanne Larkin. Well, she’s the best student I’ve ever had. A real mind. She’s kind of inhuman, but in the best sense of the word,” Christina said.

  Agnes and Jo laughed: Christina’s malapropisms were a source of great joy to them. Fortunately, Christina didn’t mind being teased. “I do numbers and formulas, not words,” she said.

  “Why do you want to know about Jeanne Larkin?” Christina said. “I didn’t think she was one of your arty types.”

  “She’s not…she makes a point of telling me that she sees no point to painting or sculpture. So I let her do botanical drawings, which she’s of course very good at, and I even got some points for showing her how she could improve things, and by telling her my mother was a medical illustrator.”

  “So why the interest?”

  “Well, it’s Heidi Stolz, I know you can’t stand her but she’s my most gifted student, and she’s so terribly isolated…really, her family is just a nightmare.”

  “I’ve checked out the mother. I don’t think she has one inch of skin on her body where it was originally meant to be.”

  “Well, I really feel sorry for Heidi. You know, Jo, you keep talking about looking out for the poor. She’s really one of the poor.”

  “Her poverty is of her own making. She’s a nasty, sneaky little thing. That’s why Chris was so right to call her the coyote.”

  “That’s like blaming the poor for being poor, which you claim to be against.”

  “What does it have to do with Jeanne Larkin?”

  “Jeanne Larkin is the only person I’ve ever heard Heidi speak of without contempt, with anything like admiration. So I was hoping maybe there was some way we could cook something up so they were doing some kind of project together, or something.”

  “What, you’re matchmaking now?” Christina said.

  “Well, in a sense. What I was thinking was this. I know that Jeanne goes down to Columbia every Saturday for the special class for scientifically gifted students that you found for her. I was thinking I could find something for Heidi to do so they could go down on the train together. I was thinking maybe we could arrange for a joint project—something about, oh, I don’t know, relativity and cubism…something like that.”

  Christina tapped on the armrest of the back seat. “That’s actually not the craziest idea I ever heard of.”

  “I’m out of it,” Jo said. “I’m the history teacher, remember, and history would suggest this is a bad idea.”

  “What history?” Christina and Agnes asked at the same time.

  “There’s always something,” Jo said. “I’ll think of it.”

  * * *

  —

  Christina agreed to meet with Heidi and Jeanne in Agnes’s classroom. Heidi arrived first, slinking into the room, as she always did, looking around her as if she expected someone to spring out and do her harm.

  “How are you, Heidi?” Agnes asks.

  Heidi shrugs. “Just putting in my time in this genteel prison until graduation.”

  “Have you thought about what I said about a liberal arts college instead of art school?”

  “Well, my parents think you’re right.”

  “We can talk about it next year. Have you been doing any more painting or printing?”

  “I’m looking forward to showing it to you when I’m done. You’re the only one I trust to look at my work.”

  “I’m pleased,” Agnes says. She was, and her pleasure, she knew, was somehow wrong. “But I’m sure there are some other people, other students here, who would be a good sounding board for you.”

  Heidi snorted. “You, Miss Vaughan, are the only person here whom I don’t consider a visual ignoramus.”

  Christina and Jeanne walked into the room together. Agnes noticed that Jeanne’s shoulders were disproportionately wide; without them she would have been merely the perfect gamine, but instead she suggested something regrettable, slightly alarmingly powerful…and Agnes was sorry, as someone who had drawn from live models, that the wide shoulders spoiled the line.

  “Are we in trouble?” Jeanne said, with a half smirk, knowing full well that she was not.

  “On the contrary,” Christina said. “It’s that we had an idea for a senior project for the both of you. We’re aware that you’re quite far ahead of most of the other students—you, Jeanne, in chemistry and physics…you, Heidi, in visual arts. So we thought perhaps you had something unique to offer each other, something that would add a kind of dimension to your experience here. We were thinking that perhaps you could write a joint paper, as your senior project, on the link between relativity and cubism.”

  “I’ll be spending a lot of time on dressage next year,” Jeanne said. “And I’m competing with my horse.”

  Heidi seemed to shrink into her torso, but she shot Agnes a look of angry accusation. Agnes knew what she was thinking: This would never work, why did you think it would work.

  Agnes drew herself up in the way that she had seen her father do when he encountered opposition. She didn’t know where the muscle memory came from; she had no thought of ever having called on the posture before.

  “All the more reason, Jeanne,” she said. “We could speak to the headmistress about being more flexible with your schedule so you could be freer of class time to pursue your outside activities.”

  “You mean, like time out of school,” Jeanne said. For the first time, there was a change in the absolute level of her gaze. For the first time, she looked surprised and young.

  “Yes, that’s precisely what I mean,” Agnes said. She saw Christina’s panicked look. There was no guarantee that Letitia Barnes would agree to it. But Agnes knew that she was Letitia Barnes’s pet. She had asked for no favors since she got here; she would call her markers in.

  “That might be kind of cool,” Jeanne said.

  Agnes tried to read the look in Heidi’s eyes. It was fear, she decided, the same fear with an undercoating of anger she had seen when she gave Heidi the boots.

  “If you want to,” Heidi said. “Anything to spend some time away from this place and the idiots I have to spend my days with.”

  “Let’s shake on that,” Jeanne said, and Agnes let her shoulders relax. This, she knew was a wholly good thing. This, she knew was a triumph.

  * * *

  —

  Agnes was eager to lay the groundwork, so perhaps over the summer the girls could spend time together. An Oxford art historian was giving a lecture on Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art. The lecture was on a Saturday, and Agnes knew that Jeanne traveled to
Columbia on Saturday mornings. That was why she had pressed Christina to propose the plan to the girls that very day, so they could work on the idea on the train that weekend. She didn’t know when there’d be another opportunity for her to suggest—or did she mean insist—that Heidi travel to New York.

  “Jesus, Agnes, why don’t you just put leashes on them and take them down there yourself?”

  “Am I being that, well…bossy?”

  “You know, what I love about you is everyone thinks you’re a delicate little flower but when you want something, you’re as stubborn as a mule. I’m quite sure this is a terrible idea, but I’m exhausted from arguing with you.”

  “Do you really think it’s terrible?”

  “I do, but I want it to be great because I need to believe that good intentions from a good person can be of some good in the world.”

  “I don’t think I’m such a good person. You don’t know some of the thoughts I have.”

  “If you’re not a good person, I would have to relinquish everything I think about the possibility of a good person. And I’m not willing to do that. So you’d better be right about this.”

  * * *

  HEIDI KNOWS she is ridiculously early for the train, but she didn’t want Jeanne to be watching her approach, and she wanted to make sure she could make her way without the ignominy of rushing. She watches Jeanne make her way up the stairs and across the platform.

  Jeanne is wearing jeans and a poncho: a light brown background with alternating black and white animals. The wool looks so soft, so comforting, that Heidi longs to touch it; despising herself for the impulse, she steps back as Jeanne approaches. Her boots are square toed and low heeled, and they make a heavy determined sound on the cement of the train platform.