by Gail Godwin
“I hear from Feron that you two are getting along well.”
“Did she say so? Oh, I’m so glad! I’ve never met a person like Feron.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, she has complex ways of expressing herself. To make her point, she will often say the exact opposite of what she means and count on you to pick up on it.”
“That’s called irony.”
“Oh, is it? And when you get to know her she can be so funny. Not ha-ha funny, but a dry, kind of sideways funny. She’s more complicated than any other girl I have known. The more you’re around her, the more you realize you don’t know. I just hope I don’t seem too uncomplicated to her.”
“Having heard from each of you now, I’d say it’s a good match.”
Merry didn’t believe Feron had any idea of her homesickness. Now Ritchie was the complete opposite. He loved being away from home and at twelve was making plans for traveling the world. What made him different? Did people who weren’t homesick carry their home inside them? And then there were people who wanted to forget the home they came from. She knew Feron must be one of these.
Feron was as usual reading with her flashlight under the covers after lights out, which was an honor code violation. The illuminated bedclothes rising from the bed across the room reminded Merry of the caterpillar tents that infested the Jellicoe cherry trees every spring. Not that the creatures were given much time to get on with their cycle. Ritchie loved blasting the tents with a high-powered water hose and shrieking, “Die, wormies, die!” She preferred a long pole with nails to rake away the cobwebs.
Her roommate’s habit divided Merry’s heart. By not reporting Feron, wasn’t she an accessory to the crime? But if she warned Feron that she was going to have to report her if she didn’t stop, it might unbalance their good match, as Dean Fox called it. It might arouse Feron’s anger or disdain.
But concerning this particular night, Miss Darden had tipped off Merry to something Feron didn’t know. And I have to make sure she doesn’t spoil what’s going to occur.
“So glad I happened to catch you, dear,” Miss Darden had said to her earlier that day. Though it was pretty obvious Miss Darden had been waiting for Merry to come out of accounting class. “I want to let you in on something that’s going to happen after lights out tonight. Feron is going to be tapped for the Daughters and Granddaughters Club. They’re the only organization allowed to roam around in the dark and surprise the inductees. Because there aren’t that many girls to be tapped. And, being what it stands for, it’s an honored tradition.”
Occasionally in the past, some nocturnal tappings had gone awry or been spoiled. For example, one roommate who didn’t get tapped went to pieces. “It was the final straw,” Miss Darden said. “From the first day, this girl had felt she didn’t fit in at Lovegood, and here was her roommate being carried off in the dark by song and candlelight to one more thing that excluded her. Even when we explained it was a club for those whose mothers or grandmothers had attended Lovegood, she wouldn’t be consoled and dropped out soon after. And then what to do about the two roommates playing poker for cash by candlelight? That was a tricky one. Both were caught violating the honor code. What was to be done? Well, they went on and tapped the daughter, but both girls were brought before the honor council.”
Then there had been those humiliated daughters or granddaughters brought to the ceremony with their hair in rag curlers or night cream smeared on their faces. If only they could have been warned!
“When I arrived as dorm mistress in 1927, there were only three girls in the club, but ten years later the number had doubled, and that’s when it occurred to me the event might need a covert ‘Warner,’ and that I was the ideal person for the job.”
Feron didn’t use night cream or curlers, Merry told the dorm mistress.
“I still don’t understand about the club. Was Feron’s mother or grandmother—?”
“It was her paternal great-grandmother. Her uncle’s and her father’s grandmother, Sophie Sewell Hood, was in Lovegood’s third class, the class of 1875. She dropped out after her first year to marry.”
“Just like my mother,” remarked Merry, inwardly making adjustments to her image of Feron. Not just the solitary girl without parents or a home, but also the descendant of a girl who had lived somewhere in this old building and whose name was still remembered.
“Feron, please turn off your flashlight. Do it now. Do it for me, please.”
To Merry’s surprise, the phosphorescent tent immediately disappeared.
“I was finished reading anyway,” came the nonchalant reply through the darkness.
Soon Merry heard Feron switch into her sleep breathing. Merry slipped into a reverie in which she traced shorthand strokes on her bottom sheet. Then came a soft knocking at the door, and she opened her eyes to a cluster of girls, lower faces lit by candlelight, standing around Feron’s bed. Someone hummed a pitch and five or six voices sang scarcely above a whisper:
Mothers, embrace thy daughters
And bring them up with gladness;
Guide their feet to walk steadfastly,
Shrinking not from strife or sadness
Now we walk unseen beside you,
Faithful spirits always guiding.
Motherlove abides forever.
Feron was now being raised from her bed. One girl wrapped a shawl around her, another girl lit a candle, and, after some murmuring, the group departed the room with Feron and her candle in the lead.
And here was her roommate being carried off in the dark by song and candlelight to one more thing that excluded her, Miss Darden had said about the girl who felt left out. Though she herself was blessed with family and home and had never felt particularly excluded anywhere, Merry could imagine how that poor girl had felt.
7
Lingering on the lawn till early dusk …
Midst friendship’s gentle bonds …
—Mary Louisa Summerlin
Class of 1918
“Feron, does it ever feel like a dream to you?”
“What?”
“Being here. On this same lawn, in front of this same school, like in the pageant. It feels like we’re in the poem, the class poem of 1918. I wonder what happened to the poet?”
Feron’s fingertips tapped calculations onto the cool grass. “She would be in her upper fifties by now. Her life would be, not over, but set, congealed—like Jell-O.”
“I love the way you compare things. But maybe she died of cancer or something. No, I shouldn’t have said that, your mother …”
“My mother didn’t have cancer. She fell against a radiator and died of a brain hemorrhage.”
“Oh, Feron, how awful. Was she alone?”
“It happened while I was at school and my stepfather was at his flying school. There was a postmortem, but that was because I had been upset and told some people Swain could have hit her and then left for his work.”
“Hit her?”
“With Swain, hitting was like part of any conversation. He was small and thin as a whiplash, but he could easily knock you across the room.”
Years ago she had teasingly called him “Swine,” and had a dead front tooth to show for it. The tooth was still a dull white, but it didn’t match the others. Uncle Rowan said they would get it capped, but there hadn’t been time before school started.
“But left her to die?”
“Well, no, when she died, Swain was up in the sky giving a flying lesson. The verdict was that she passed out and hit her head on the radiator. I retracted my accusation about him hitting her and leaving the house, and I apologized to him. I had to go on living with him because I was still a minor. Or as he liked to put it, I still ‘belonged to him.’ ”
“Was she a fainter, your mother?”
“No, but she was often unsteady on her feet. She was an alcoholic.”
“Oh, Feron, you’ve had such sad troubles. The worst that’s ever happened to me was my dog, Sam, dying.
But listen, did you believe he might have?”
“Might have what?”
“Well, hit her and then left the house.”
“I must have wanted it to be what happened. Then he would have had to go to jail, and I would be free. That is, as soon as I turned eighteen, I would be free. I dreaded having to live with Swain in the house without my mother. Even when she was so drunk she couldn’t stand up, she had a sort of restraining power over him.”
“Neither of my parents drink, but Mama gets these dark periods during the winter months. She can’t stand being around people, including us, and she spends lots of time by herself in this room at the top of the house. Once it was a hayloft, and you can see where someone has plastered over the loft’s opening and put in a plain little sash window.”
“But what does she do there?”
“Nothing, as far as we can tell. There’s just an old chair with the stuffing coming out and a table and a blanket. As soon as he could talk, my brother Ritchie started pestering her about it. What did she do in there? Until one day she told him she had to go into that room to put herself back together. Ritchie was still little enough for that idea to really frighten him. If Mama needed to do that, it must mean if you opened the door, you would find her in pieces.”
“But what about the cooking and things?”
“Oh, she takes care of all that. In the autumn after harvest she does a mammoth canning, and we have all the fruit and vegetables we can eat until she’s feeling herself again. Daddy takes care of the grocery shopping. Or Mr. Jack, our manager. But, Feron, this is just our little family side-story, no one gets hurt and Mama always comes out of her room. But then you did have to live with your stepfather, didn’t you?”
“I did until I ran away.”
“You have really been tried, Feron. You and I are the same age, and you have been tested in ways I probably can’t even imagine.”
Merry waited. Here was an ideal opportunity for Feron to reveal some of the things that Merry couldn’t imagine. But Feron didn’t reply. And by now Merry knew her well enough to understand it was going to be one of Feron’s nonreplies.
8
Miss Petrie often began both her Literature and Composition classes by reading aloud.
From Paradise Lost, she read
from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve
or
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa
Her mournful cello voice enhanced the cadences, and the cadences luxuriated in her voice.
In Composition class they were studying the short story. Miss Petrie stood in front of them, fingering the brooch on her blouse, and read aloud a story about a New England minister who wore a black veil over his face, about an Irish boy who got to the bazaar too late, about a poor Russian girl who lived with a medical student and stripped naked in a cold room so he could make chalk marks on her ribs and teach himself anatomy. The girls never knew where Miss Petrie was going to take them. They gave themselves over to the spell of her voice and observed what she wore and wondered what her own story was. Her almost-too-thin body was perfect for her clothes: dignified well-cut skirts that floated when she walked, her large assortment of old-fashioned blouses. There must have been some great disappointment. Her curly black hair was laced with silver threads, but she was too young to have lost a fiancé in World War I. Miss Petrie and the sunny-natured gym teacher, Miss Olafson, shared an apartment and drove to and from school in Miss Olafson’s Jeep.
Miss Petrie had just finished reading today’s story about a young Russian soldier on a train, coming down with typhus. When he wakes up at home and learns that his beloved sister died nursing him, his consciousness registers the terrible news, but then he can’t overcome his own animal joy at being alive.
At first the girls had been bewildered by their teacher’s selection of stories, until, in the discussions afterward they realized that (as Feron put it to Merry later) Miss Petrie was leading them toward an acceptance of being left in uncertainty.
“I want each of you to write a story for next time,” she was announcing.
Hands flew up with questions.
“It can be anything you want. Either based on a personal experience or you can make it up. Or it can be a mixture of real and imagined. A story starts somewhere and ends somewhere. No, you don’t have to share it with the class, it will be just between you and me. Try for five hundred words, that’s about two-and-a-half handwritten pages. No, it won’t be graded, it’s to familiarize you with the practice of writing a story.”
Merry did her homework in bed. She stepped into a pair of boy’s pajamas (outgrown by the twelve-year-old brother who slid down bannisters), plumped up her pillows, and set to work. The fluency of Merry’s attack on assignments was disconcerting to Feron: it was like someone had turned on a switch and Merry started writing, and when she finished the assignment, the switch was turned off. Frustrated by the facile tempo of Merry’s fountain pen, Feron decamped to the library and did her work at a long back table under a green-shaded lamp.
Her story, “Bus Trip,” was going to take place during a long bus ride. She could smell those bus smells, most of them unpleasant, and feel the sense of endangerment that had ridden with her like a noxious seatmate.
But feeling queasy and endangered was not a story. Her character was on the bus, but what happened before she got on the bus? More important, what happened after she got on the bus? In the typhus story the soldier was on a train, coming down with a disease, and that was something beginning to happen. In the typhus story the soldier was on his way home to infect his sister. The sister dies and that is an ending.
What had happened in real life after Feron was aboard the bus was not a story she would ever dream of handing in to Miss Petrie.
“Now, tell me if what I’m going to ask is an imposition, Feron.”
“How will I know until you ask it?”
“Will you read my story and tell me if it’s acceptable enough to hand in to Miss Petrie?”
Feron had been loitering on her bed, putting off her trek to the library. Her story had reached an impasse, and Friday was Miss Petrie’s class. “Sure, I’ll read it.”
“But you have to be honest.” Merry, in yet another pair of her little brother’s pajamas, was already en route to Feron’s bed. “If it’s terrible, you have to tell me. Promise.”
Feron accepted the pages. The title was “Lingering on the Lawn.”
Oh, God, she’s written about us, Feron thought, glancing down at her roommate’s fluid penmanship. “Look, I can’t read with you standing over me.”
“Want me to leave the room?”
“No, I’ll leave.”
“Please, Feron, don’t keep me in suspense too long.”
Feron locked herself in one of the bathroom stalls. No, it wasn’t about the two of them. Well, it was and it wasn’t. She skimmed the two-and-a-half pages so she could see where it was heading and then calmly began again.
Two girls were sitting on the lawn, wondering aloud what the future held for them. One was dark-haired and “complicated,” and the other was blonde and “ordinary.” The worst thing that had happened so far to the ordinary girl was her dog dying. The dark-haired girl had lost both parents and was living with an uncle. She had moments of looking “haunted.” The ordinary girl loved the school and during her second year composed a poem in its honor. It became the class poem. Then it turns out that this is the winter that World War I has finally ended, and everyone is rejoicing. But unbeknownst to her feverish self, the ordinary girl will not survive the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918. She is tossing on her deathbed and remembering when she and her best friend lingered on the lawn and talked about their futures. Only, in her happy delirium she thinks she is back at school and the whole thing is really happening again.
“Okay, you wanted the truth. Here it is. It’s a success—”
“Oh, Feron! Really?”
“Wait, I haven’t finished. You have to let the reader know right away we’re in the year 1918, otherwise we assume it’s the present. Also, ‘ordinary’ doesn’t really suit someone who is going to be the class poet.”
“What would be a suitable word?”
“Oh, radiant, cheerful, optimistic. Optimistic might pack the most wallop, since she’s going to end up dying.”
“I’ll have to copy over the first page, but I think you’re right.”
“How did you know so much about the flu epidemic?”
“While Miss Darden was doing our room check, I asked her whether people still got typhus in 1918. She said influenza would be better for my story because everyone was dying of it that year. She had a younger sister and an aunt who got it. The sister died, but after the aunt recovered she described how it felt.”
Feron had discovered something new about herself in the bathroom stall. She was goaded by someone else’s success. First came the sting of envy, then an inner call to arms, which forced her over some barrier that was always reminding her she was tainted, and no matter what she did she would never be good enough.
Later, when Feron was asked what had made her become a writer (Do you remember a special moment or person that started you off?) she had fished up Miss Petrie, floating reliably near the surface, complete with long skirts, mournful voice, and anecdotes. “It was this English teacher we had in junior college. She had the most beautiful voice. Like a cello. She read to us from Chekhov and Joyce and other great writers. And she taught us …” Here Feron had learned to pause, as one pauses when formulating a fresh thought. “She taught us to accept being left in uncertainty.”
Still later in life, when Feron had accepted aspects of her character that could still made her shudder or cringe, she heard herself easily acknowledging to someone who had asked the old question, “Oh, yes, I can tell you the moment it started. I was in a bathroom stall at my junior college. My roommate had asked me to read her story and tell me if it was good enough to turn in for the assignment. I read the story and it was a success. For what it was. Then jealousy woke up in me like a sleeping animal and I thought, ‘I can do this. I can do it better.’ I guess you could say the jealousy woke up my competitiveness. I have always been stimulated by a competitor. Though this leads me to another question: Can two people be called competitors when only one of them is competing?”