Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “Nothing,” Baby said.

  “Your eyes are red.”

  “I’m tired.”

  The tuba player, all skinny arms and wiry dreadlocks, glanced around with nervous energy as he adjusted the instrument over his shoulder. His eyes flickered over the yard, the house, and us, the goggling kids shifting around him. He wouldn’t meet any of our eyes. When some second-year playing cornhole gave a triumphant shriek, he jumped, startled by the sound.

  What did we look like to him? Scrawny, shaggy-haired, furry-legged beasts? Lunatics in matching outfits?

  The tuba player wasn’t a lunatic. He was perfectly normal. He probably lived in a condo in Scranton, maybe, or Allentown, one with wall-to-wall carpeting and vertical blinds. He bought his toothpaste and dish soap at a drugstore. He had a pet dog, a mutt, and a girlfriend, maybe. He took her to breakfast at Denny’s. She ordered a Belgian waffle with bacon. He got the Grand Slam.

  Tomorrow morning, at Denny’s, he would tell his girlfriend about the famous Catherine House. He would say it didn’t seem so haunted, really. Or maybe he would bend in and whisper that it was just as strange as the stories said.

  “The Ferris wheel’s starting,” Yaya said. “Wanna go?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Come with me.”

  “I’m not going up there.”

  “Are you afraid of heights?”

  “Look at that thing. Who installed it? It could fall to pieces right when we’re at the top. You don’t know. It’s not safe.”

  “Oh my God, this is adorable,” Yaya said. “I thought you were fearless.”

  We went into the bouncy castle instead. Baby disappeared back into the house while Yaya, Anna, and I crawled one by one into the orange dream. Nick appeared with cups of wine and we tried to drink, woozy and wobbling, but kept falling down.

  “This is delicious,” Anna said, licking her lips as she crouched in one of the corners. She was wearing her new Pearl Jam tour T-shirt, the only commissary clothing I’d ever seen her excited about. She’d spent all her points on it. “Wine is amazing. I almost forgot.”

  “Cheers,” Yaya said, “to you finally escaping that awful concentration.”

  “You’re not applying for plasm anymore?” I said.

  “Nope. It was going to kill me.” Anna said it with indifference. “Theo’s still applying, though. Baby is, too, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Nick stood up. He bounced. We all rebounded. Yaya’s sunglasses went flying off her nose.

  “Do you know …” I said. “The new materials concentrators—when do they get passes to the umbrella room?”

  “The what?” Anna handed Yaya’s sunglasses back to her.

  “The room in the hallway with the umbrella wallpaper. Not the regular plasm lab, the one downstairs in the Ashley basement, I think. It’s locked with a keypad.”

  “Oh, that’s M. Neptune’s lab. Only M. Neptune’s students get to work in there. Even if you’re in the concentration, you have to be working with him specially to get in.”

  Nick flopped on the floor. We all bounced again. “This is amazing,” he declared. “I’m going to live here.”

  “Does that make you a bouncy king?” Yaya said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Bouncy king of the bouncy castle.”

  “What kind of work does he do?” I said. “M. Neptune?”

  “Some kind of specialized plasm research, I guess. Who knows?” Anna swirled her cup of wine with a shrug. “None of us are ever going to find out.”

  There was a testy edge to her voice now. Her cheeks were flushed.

  Yaya straddled Nick. She kissed him on the mouth.

  *

  The day our midterm grades were posted, I stayed out late with a boy. By the time I stopped by the registrar’s office, it was four in the morning.

  I found my envelope in the bin outside the office and pulled out my grade sheet. I scanned the numbers.

  Most of my classes were fine. Not great, but fine. Except for Japanese Prints. Japanese Prints I might fail.

  I closed the sheet. I’d memorized the difference between the Katsukawa school and Kaigetsudō school and that was pretty much it. I had to do better.

  I walked back to my room, my hands in my pockets. As I made my way through the house, I listened for the construction workers pounding at the baths in the Harrington basement. I’d heard rumors about the baths for months; apparently Catherine’s founders had built an expansive, luxurious complex of underground pools under the house when the school was first established. The baths had been closed for years, but over the past few weeks workers had been coming every morning and leaving every night. Though I heard the workers, I never saw them. I don’t think they ever saw us, either.

  I opened the door to our room expecting Baby to be asleep. She was still up, sitting straight-backed at her desk.

  “Hello, Ines,” she said without turning.

  She was fully dressed, with shoes on and hair pulled into a tight French braid. The room smelled like soap bubbles. She had just taken a bath.

  I shoved my grades in my pocket as I walked over to her desk. She was folding a piece of paper, running her fingers along the fold to tighten the crease.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A horse.”

  “Origami?”

  She nodded, flipping the paper over. “I used to do it more. I don’t know why I stopped.”

  I sat on my bed. Both of our desk lamps were on. The night outside was shapeless with the dark and our translucent shadows on the window.

  Baby flipped the paper and made another crease.

  “Do you want a banana?” she said. She gestured to the bunch on her desk. “I took them from tea. I don’t know why I thought I could eat them all. They’ll go bad soon. I don’t want them—to go bad.”

  “Sure.”

  She broke one off. I opened my hands, gesturing for her to toss it over, but she only stared. I got up and took it from her hands.

  She watched blankly as I peeled the banana.

  “I’m going to the tower,” she said.

  I swallowed my bite of banana.

  “Are you surprised?” She wasn’t meeting my eye.

  “A little.”

  “I cheated on my chemistry test.”

  I put the banana down. I moved to sit on her bed.

  “I knew I was going to fail,” she said. “I didn’t have time to study after biology—and I was supposed to take biology last semester, you know. If I had taken more advanced classes in high school, I wouldn’t have had to take Biology III and Chemistry III at the same time, and my midterms wouldn’t have coincided like this. Anyway. I was in M. Tran’s office asking for clarification about one of the labs. I knew he was administering the chemistry midterm, too. And when he went down the hall to get his notes, I thought he might have copies of the test right there in his drawer. And he did. So I took one.”

  She placed the origami horse on the desk.

  “When M. Tran told me to stay after class today, I wasn’t even surprised. I knew I was going to get caught. And you know what? I’m glad. I’m glad they caught me.” She wiped her nose, though she didn’t seem to be crying. “I’ve been doing those interviews for the concentration, you know? And the professors ask more and more questions, watch me closer and closer, and—I have no idea what they’re looking for. But whatever it is, I don’t have it. I’m not smart enough. I’m not strong enough. I don’t have anything special, and I don’t want anything. I don’t even want to die.”

  “Lie down with me,” I said.

  Baby didn’t look up as she crawled into bed with me. I wrapped my arms around her.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  “Yes. It is. I’m not even so upset, really. Viktória …” Baby cleared her throat, her voice stronger at the mention of Viktória’s name. “Viktória and I, we’re going to have a nice long talk before I go into the tower. Can you believe that? Just me and her. Yo
u’re not the only one she cares about, you know. She—sees me, too.”

  I ran my hand over her shoulder.

  “I have this dream,” Baby whispered. “It’s not that I’m a different person or that I’m gone, exactly. I’m still here. But I’m not myself. I’m full of light, only light, shining forever. I don’t feel any more pain. All I am is beautiful.”

  I wished I could see her eyes, but she lay facing the wall.

  “I thought plasm was that light. I believed in it. But I’m not sure anymore.” Baby shifted in the bed. “I’m messed up,” she said. “I told you. So they’re sending me to the tower to fix me.”

  “When are you going?” I said.

  “Tomorrow morning. Well, today now. Seven o’clock.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two weeks.”

  My throat clenched. I held her tighter. Two weeks, fourteen days and fourteen nights, in that blank, empty room.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said. “It’s a little vacation, really. And you’ll feel so much better when you get out. You’ll feel brand-new.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so. I wish I weren’t missing forums. But I think this is the right thing.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll have the bathroom to yourself.” She shifted in the bed. “You’ll love it.”

  I ran a hand over her forehead. I closed my eyes.

  “You should,” Baby whispered. “You should believe in it.”

  “Believe in what?”

  But she didn’t answer. She was falling asleep. So was I.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun was shining across our floorboards. I was still in Baby’s bed, but Baby was gone.

  I sat up, rubbed my face. My mouth was mucked up with sleep.

  *

  Baby went into the tower in the beginning of July, the first day of forums. Forums were a series of presentations from the second-years that were supposed to synthesize their previous years of study and outline their plans for third-year tutorials, our final projects. The presentations were directed toward their professors and advisors, but the larger Catherine community was invited to attend as our schedules permitted.

  I sometimes skipped classes to go to forums. They were held in the Harrington auditorium, one of the coolest rooms in the house during the summer months, and snacks were usually provided. I would sit in the back of the room so I was closest to the platters of melon balls and mint iced tea. The tea tasted lavishly sweet and cool.

  The presentations varied. Some were creative, like preparatory outlines for scripts or stories, or analyses of Latin texts, or dissections of particular critical approaches to early twentieth century American literature. Others were more research-based, presenting new histories of various mathematical proofs or color theorems. But no matter the topic, the questions from the professors were ferocious. A student would barely begin to speak before the interrogators set in. This approach has already been challenged in recent years. How do you plan to differentiate your work from what has already been done? How can we extend this model in a meaningful way? Are you taking this work seriously? Students would step down from the stage red-faced and shaking. One girl, after discussing her work on Vodon folk myths, sobbed with pleasure when her advisor only commented that her ideas seemed “adequate enough.”

  Viktória usually arrived late. Her heels would click over the parquet floor as she slid into the seat beside M. Neptune. Then she watched in perfect stillness, face impassive and chin in her hand, saying nothing. At the end of each presentation, she jotted a note on her pad of paper, her tiny gold wristwatch glinting.

  “But you’ve misunderstood,” a professor said. It was the final day of forums. The presenter, a chubby redheaded girl with huge watery eyes, had spent the past twenty minutes on Alexander Rodchenko’s design for a Soviet workers’ club, and something she said seemed to have offended her advisor. “It is not just a propaganda machine. His space, this club—it is a utopia. A new world, beautiful. Do you not see?”

  The girl nodded. Her chin trembled.

  “Painful,” Yaya whispered as she laid down a card. We were in the back of the auditorium, playing Go Fish. “Just let the poor girl go home and cry.”

  A new materials concentrator went next. I recognized him as the same acne-faced boy who had tried to pin me during our coming in ceremony.

  As he introduced himself to the auditorium—his name was Burt—two aides wheeled a wooden stand and cart onto the stage. I couldn’t see what was on the cart, but rafts of heavy fabric hung from the stand’s posts. It took a moment for me to recognize the fabric as the remains of a ripped and faded tapestry.

  Burt turned his back to us and faced the cart. I heard the clink of metal instruments. Plasm pins.

  Yaya poked me. “Any queens?”

  “No,” I said. “Go fish.”

  “You are such a fucking liar.”

  “Shh.” A third-year turned to glare at us.

  “Over these past semesters,” Burt was saying, “my new materials classes have focused on plasm theory, research, and analysis using data from the, um, the valid past experiments, with the assumption that this data is still relevant.” He cleared his voice and spoke louder. “But this is not necessarily the case. Some of these experiments were performed twenty years ago. The experiments did produce fantastic results in object, body, and psychosexual healing—or mending‚ to use the proper term.” He inclined his head. “But we must move forward with the assumption that today’s even more rigorous methodologies, more … more careful science can produce results that are just as fantastic. If we re-create some of these original plasm experiments, if we attempt to once again understand plasm directly, not through theory but through its use, through observed results—”

  “Burt, my friend,” M. Neptune said. He was tapping his pen against the armrest he shared with Viktória. “Come on. You’re telling us things we already know, and being way too vague besides. Say what you really mean, and be precise. What are the parameters of your tutorial, specifically?”

  Burt flushed. “I want to … I will reperform one of M. Shiner’s early experiments, the mending of the tapestry. I will mend three of the early tapestries in Catherine’s collection using plasm manipulation. I’ve already been working on this one.” He gestured to the fabric hanging from the stand. “M. Donna says I would need to complete two more and do a write-up to meet the project requirements.”

  “Great,” M. Neptune said. He jotted down a note. “But really, when you submit your proposal, remember to be specific. You’re one of the few new materials concentrators submitting an experimental research project. You’re going to have to be totally clear about the limitations here. I don’t need to explain why that’s important.”

  For a moment Burt looked like he was about to retort. But he just pressed his lips together and nodded.

  An aide turned off the lights, and the auditorium filled with gray shadow.

  Burt stepped in front of the tapestry. He seemed to be pressing the pins onto the fabric one by one along the rip, as if he were sewing. The tapestry lifted and dropped.

  Then he stepped away. And the tapestry kept going, lifting along the rip, sewing itself together.

  Burt spoke as he worked, applying more pins and adjusting them on the fabric—something about pattern sensing and temperature corrections. But I couldn’t hear him. I was watching the tapestry come together.

  “Hey,” Yaya was whispering. “Ines. Any kings?”

  So far I could only see the top of the image. It was the hand of a Roman god, lifting a silver cup.

  “Ines.” Yaya snapped her fingers in front of my nose.

  I looked back down at my cards. I had three kings.

  “No,” I said. “Go fish.”

  *

  I did miss Baby while she was in the tower. Those July nights were cloyingly hot, and I didn’t sleep well without her. I would sprawl across my bedcovers breathing out of my mouth and sta
ring at her desk, wishing she were there. I missed her noises and smells: her sniffles and pencil scratchings, her cinnamon toothpaste and almond hair cream. I just missed her. I hated being alone.

  I hoped the tower would be good for her, though. If the plasm pins could sew the tapestry back together, maybe they could do the same for Baby’s heart and brain—fix them so she felt better. I didn’t understand what the tower had done to me. But whatever it was, I hoped it would help Baby.

  The days were even hotter than the nights. The house wasn’t well ventilated. By late afternoon, the classrooms were so humid and fetid they made me feel drunk. I watched sweat gleam on the back of students’ necks as their drowsy heads bobbed. The parlors, with their heavy curtains drawn to keep out the sun, grew colorless and dim. The halls smelled like sweat, sunscreen, and like Catherine, a woody, dead-rose perfume that stifled my nose and mouth.

  When I wasn’t in class or hunched over a computer in the lab, I was out on the yard. I brought my books, as if I were studying, and lay dead on the grass. I pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. I closed my eyes.

  We spent evenings after dinner out on the yard, too, drinking iced tea mixed with moonshine. We did our homework and gossiped. As the nights grew later, we whispered about the outside world.

  “I hope the Bulls are having a good season,” Henry said. “I miss them, the Bulls. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “Do you know what I miss?” I said. “Sour Patch Kids. I could eat a whole bag of Sour Patch Kids right now.”

  Henry turned to me. “I never thought of you as someone who’d like candy.”

  “I like candy.”

  “I miss my brother,” Anna said.

  I took a sip of my moonshine tea.

  She blinked drunkenly. I brushed her hair from her face.

  One endless Thursday afternoon, I wandered into Theo’s room alone. I didn’t know what made me do it except that his door was the only one open in the hushed hallway; everyone was in class, like I should have been, and tea was still hours away.

  I pressed his door open farther. No, he wasn’t home. His room was silent and tidy as ever, his bed crisply made and books neatly arranged. Today he had a plate of shortbread cookies on his desk. He always seemed to have some snack there.