Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “Winifred, why I am being offered this? Has it happened to anyone before me?”

  “Lovegood has never had a dean like you, Susan. We couldn’t believe our luck when you agreed to come. I understand perfectly well why they are doing over Dinwiddie House to keep you on the premises. You are classic, like our Doric columns. Seeing you around will set an example for our students and be an incentive for donors.”

  “A presiding ghost of old Lovegood values?”

  “Regarding those, we will need all the help we can get. Do you remember when you first came? You would say, ‘The world is fast-changing all around us, Winifred. Who knows where things will be in the next ten years?’ And now we’re approaching the twenty-year mark. Tell me truly, Susan, did you imagine so much acceleration, so much change?”

  “I can’t say that I did. I anticipated some things that never came to pass and failed to sense some that were breathing down my neck. But that’s the nature of change, isn’t it?”

  Winifred would have liked President Brook. (Since he had come to them from his last school as “president,” they voted unanimously to retire the title of dean.) Everyone liked him. Lovegood girls—Lovegood women—had crushes on him. The Dean Emerita liked him. Devlin Brook was a worthy successor. Carrying on her “lucky to get” qualification, he had been president of a small prep school for boys that everyone had heard of. He had four daughters of his own, he had told the search committee that already favored him, “so I am no stranger to the ways of young ladies.” He was a southerner, which was a plus. And a Catholic, which put off several board members until a prevailing one said: “Oh come on, haven’t we already been through that with President Kennedy?”

  Coming from a boys’ academy, President Brook had known about the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation’s visionary plan, started by the Reynolds tobacco heiress in 1967, for placing young black men in southern prep schools. He had looked around and discovered the Fairlie Foundation, which, since the early seventies, had been enrolling young black women in state colleges. Lovegood opened places for two of them, but at the last minute they opted for the four-year colleges. She herself would have done the same: Why get settled into one place that had misgivings about your being there, and then after two years start all over again battling a second school’s misgivings? But for a while, there had been excitement. Even the holdout board members had been persuaded. Here was Lovegood’s chance to set an example of liberal-mindedness (and become eligible for many of the new state grants).

  At the end of his first year, President Brook had called on her in her new residence, a block from campus. “Dean Fox, I’ve come to invite you to be my accessory in fund-raising. I’ll do the clubs and the speeches and the footwork and take care of the mailings, if you will host the dinners and teas at Dinwiddie House. If you are game.”

  “Would I have to prepare the food?”

  “Oh, no, no. That will all be catered, and our honor students will be asked to serve.”

  “In that case,” she paused to bestow a touch of ceremony, “I accept with pleasure. But please let me help with the mailings, which I can do quite comfortably from home.”

  Their combined efforts—yes, she would accept her share of the credit—on behalf of Lovegood’s most ambitious Capital Campaign—had surpassed their expectations.

  Speaking of the “G” in G.E.T., Feron Hood had published another novel, Mr. Blue, and had contributed to the capital campaign fund. She continued to send an annual donation to the Sophie Sewell Hood scholarship established when she published Beast and Beauty.

  My years at Lovegood shine bright as ever. There, for the first time in my life I felt secure enough to try my wings. It was while reading a story of Merry’s in a bathroom stall that I decided I wanted to become a writer.

  Susan Fox had been honored to be the recipient of such a personal revelation, even after she came across it in the library, almost word for word, in a newspaper interview. She wished she had been secure enough in those first years at Lovegood to seat Feron across from her in the famous Saxon Hall armchair (which now graced her study at Dinwiddie House) and follow her former commanding instincts: “What was it like, to sleep outside in that Chicago park? How did you keep warm? What were your thoughts?”

  However, the initial Lovegood years were her “humbled” years, when she was seeking to build a new life from the ground up after bringing the roof down on herself at Saxon Hall. With the young Feron she had stopped at: “You can count on a discretionary ear in this office if you ever feel the need to say more about that stressful period of your life.”

  Having later read and pondered Beast and Beauty, she was fairly certain the runaway girl never did sleep in a Chicago park, but under the blankets with an ex-convict, now safely fictionalized into the sympathetic character of a beast.

  I could have gone to jail like the headmistress of the Madeira School, she thought. Jean Harris was fifty-seven when she shot her lover. I was forty-two when I broke his windows and bit the policeman, and was carried away screaming. What made the difference? If I had gone up to his campus apartment packing a pistol? Not my style. Just as I never would have penned such obscene foolishness as the famous Scarsdale Letter. Her rabid handwriting was a neurotic giveaway. When I told President Brook to leave the mailings to me, I meant handwritten letters with real ink to five thousand former students and friends of Lovegood. And as I did my stint (thirty each afternoon in my study at Dinwiddie House), I would call to mind how many recipients would recognize the writing on the envelope with the Esse Quam Videri crest. Mrs. Camilla Cherrington, my savior in ninth grade, gave me my distinctive cursive. I entered her class writing in a stiff upright with unconnected letters and left it with a facsimile of her elegant, loopy slant because I wanted to copy everything about her. Some people, if they are lucky, meet an early savior who makes all the difference. Does anyone remember me as an early savior? Did Jean Harris have one? Was she one to any of her girls?

  Feron Hood’s Mr. Blue was a short, peculiar work, not as likable as Beast and Beauty, nor as satisfactory a read. Though it was beautifully produced, this time with evocative watercolor illustrations that were more conclusive than the story itself. The jacket copy presented the novel as “Feron Hood’s feminist retelling of the ancient tale of ‘Bluebeard.’ ” In Feron’s story it is the woman who insists on keeping a secret room. The reader meets her as a child of eight, opening the door to Mr. Blue, who has been summoned by her dying father to take over the farm. She is rude to him, tells him to wait outside, and shuts the door on him. The story was set on a large farm, crop unspecific, but the golden leaves waving in the summer sun suggested tobacco. We are in the mind of Mr. Blue, having just had the door shut in his face. He knows the little girl will be made to invite him in, just as she will have to learn to value him, “fear him a little, but respect all the necessary things he could do.” She will grow up, still being proud, but the day might come, he thinks, when that proud little face would have to open and let him in. The viewpoints are shared between the two major characters, as in Beast and Beauty, and the reader is privy to the imperious little girl’s thoughts as she grows into an imperious young woman. She finally accepts Mr. Blue as her husband because she feels it is her fate just as the farmland is her destiny. They will farm it together. She often retreats to her single third-floor room, telling him it is just a place she has to go in order to put herself back together. The room, once a hayloft, is ugly and bare except for an old armchair losing its stuffing, a small table, and a folded blanket. In the illustration you can see the seams where the hayloft opening has been closed in to hold a single window looking out on the fields. Mr. Blue accepts her bid for privacy and never ascends to the third floor. They endure and seem to grow as a couple. Only after his wife’s death does Mr. Blue finally enter the room. He is shocked by its bare ugliness. He can’t imagine how she would have used this room to put herself together again. He is not only bewildered but bereft, having lost not only his wife but their
infant child.

  Had Mr. Blue incorporated some facts from the life of Merry Jellicoe Rakestraw? The last time Dean Fox had seen Merry, when she accompanied a new student to Lovegood, she announced she had recently married Mr. Rakestraw, who had been her father’s manager for many years. But Merry was still alive. She had contributed handsomely to the capital campaign fund, on a check bearing the names of both husband and wife, and, like Feron, had sent annual sums since then.

  As she had done with Beast and Beauty, Susan Fox withheld final judgment until Eloise Sprunt (still math and science) had read it.

  “I loved the illustrations,” said Eloise. “Why do books for grownups stop offering pictures? I liked Mr. Blue best. It’s the man who gets abandoned in both novels. Of course, in this book, she didn’t leave him, she died giving birth, but still …”

  “Feron wrote that she was uncertain about the ending. She was warned that second novels were destined to disappoint. She knows an older writer of a wildly successful first novel who refused to write a second one.”

  “After I’d read it, you know what crossed my mind, Susan?”

  “Please, tell me.”

  “I thought, Bluebeard never made an appearance in this tale. It could have equally been called Mrs. Blue. The story is about something else altogether.”

  “How perceptive! I think you are right. You know, he was generous and kind, the way the man was in Beast and Beauty. The men in both novels come off better than the women.”

  “What will you tell her when you write back?”

  “Well, I might begin by stealing your comment about grownups needing pictures, too. And I’m going to say I liked the character of Mr. Blue, because, like you, I did. And I might say that although Mr. Blue is a more complex story than Beast and Beauty, its folklore frame suited it. And I will say I am very much looking forward to her next book.”

  26

  1988

  It was new in the window of one of those pricey Madison Avenue boutiques that Feron passed on her way to work every day. Center stage between a pair of nineteenth-century jeweled opera glasses and a Chinese porcelain dragon rode a rat in formal morning dress whipping a galloping horse already frothing at the mouth. The rat’s yellow buckteeth were bared. Everything was meticulously made: the top hat, the English saddle, the dress shoes in the stirrups, the soft gray vest under the tail coat, the tumbling froth. You even saw that it was a male horse with everything intact. Horse and rider together couldn’t be more than six inches high, about the same in length. If Marguerite Steed were standing next to her, she would be able to identify the materials that went into the clothes and explain what hidden structure supported their frenzied flight. On the rucked-up gray velvet beneath the figures was a calling-card-sized price tag in feathered calligraphy.

  Rat Race

  $2,500

  It was the first thing Feron yearned to buy for herself since arriving in New York fifteen years ago. The formal bucktoothed rider and his frothing stallion profoundly impressed her. Constructing each careful item, the dollmaker must have chuckled wickedly. She could see it as one of the rare personal touches she might allow herself in her MacFarlane flat-sits.

  Then she imagined sending it back to Marguerite Steed with her cousin Thad, who was in town for a Realtor’s convention and was taking her out to lunch today. (“Tell Marguerite this is for her upstairs collection.”)

  She had been more vexed with herself than disappointed by the reception of Mr. Blue, which didn’t fare all that badly. It got more attention in “serious” journals and sold more copies because Beast and Beauty had given her an outré reputation of sorts. The critics who liked to declare a book “enigmatic” had plenty to work with in Mr. Blue.

  “You can afford one baffling book,” her editor had said. “The students like to carry them across campus—face out. Didn’t you do that?”

  “I remember doing it with Nightwood,” said Feron, “and never reading it.”

  “What? You didn’t read Nightwood?”

  He loved to catch her out like that.

  Almost all the reviewers mentioned the art. One of them advised the reader to study the illustrations for the meaning of the story. One quipster declared that the illustrations alone were worth the price of the book.

  Feron had prodded herself into writing her second novel. The contemporary writers she measured herself against produced a new one every two or three years. Moreover, she had been goaded once again into competition with her old roommate, Merry. Good old competition! After their lunch at the Neuse River Café, Feron had driven back to Blanche’s and read Merry’s striking article in the state magazine and hurried off a letter to her friend, assigning Merry the “task” of making it into a novel. That had been in 1979, three years after Beast and Beauty. Feron had feared that if Merry still wrote the way she had at Lovegood, line after line with her busy pen, Merry might be halfway through her novel about the slave before Feron even came up with a topic for her second novel.

  Her editor had perked up when Feron suggested she try a second modern fairy tale. He had more than recovered his minuscule advance on Beast and Beauty, what with its flush of notoriety and the two movie options, though neither was renewed. “If you had gotten out there yourself a little more to promote Beast and Beauty, it might have helped,” the editor scolded. But he doubled her advance for the proposed Mr. Blue, a sum that would have covered the price of “Rat Race” with five hundred dollars left over.

  “However, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Giving a woman Bluebeard’s role hasn’t been tried, not that I know of. Though it’s possible that all the bodies of the writers who tried and failed are piled in a bloody heap behind a locked door.”

  The editor always enjoyed sending her off on this note of half challenge, half put-down. “But beware,” he went on, “the Bluebeard premise might not give itself up gracefully to the gender switch. Do women crave the same kinds of powers men do? Do they have the same things to hide? Are women afraid of the things men are? Are men as curious about the same things women are? I’ll be curious to see what you make of your modern tale.”

  Alexy Cuervo, having transcended her initial assessment of him as her “evil genius,” had become her adviser and best friend. “It’s time for you to get an agent. One who will mark up the publisher’s boilerplate contract and insist on retaining your film rights.”

  “An agent would just shave off fifteen or twenty percent for himself.”

  “Who is speaking now, the tightwad or the procrastinator?”

  “Probably both. Besides, you got me all the connections I needed better than any agent could have.”

  “I won’t be around forever.”

  “Well, neither will I, for that matter.”

  “Look, sometimes the art prevails, sometimes the marketplace does. If you’re lucky, there is a fortunate blend.”

  “Is Mr. Blue more art or more marketplace?”

  “Quién sabe. The readers who liked Beast and Beauty will rejoice: ‘Ah, here is another fairy tale by Feron Hood. And, look, this one has these beautiful illustrations.’ ”

  “I have a tiny suspicion my editor wanted to promote this artist.”

  “His style matches your story. His watercolor figures remind me of Charles Demuth.”

  “Who is Charles Demuth?”

  “A late nineteenth-century painter. He illustrated Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. He also painted many sailors and circus performers and scenes in public baths. He was a fairly happy homosexual, which was rare in his times.”

  “Yes, well, I wish I were happier with my ending.”

  “How would you end it now?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know. I was so caught up in being clever and reversing the tale and having it be the woman who forbids the man to go into the secret room.”

  “You succeeded.”

  “But she doesn’t forbid him, she just says it’s her private place, and he never goes in the room until after she’
s dead.”

  “So you ended up writing a tale that’s about a marriage discovering itself, not bloody murder or serial killing.”

  “But I shortchanged her. It’s exactly how those conventional nineteenth-century novels you’re always sneering at would have done it. If the woman asserted herself or asked for too much, she had to die.”

  “Why don’t you write a second version?”

  “What for? Who would want it?”

  “Perhaps nobody. That is to say, nobody who would pay you money to publish it.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point, my dear, is there is the artist and there is the career. If a writer wishes to have a career, he must publish a second book in order to publish a third, and so on, to build his oeuvre. It stands to reason some books in the oeuvre will surpass the others. Every great writer has duds in his oeuvre.”

  “But you made a splash with your one book and stopped.”

  “Nito’s Garden was a prodigy, like myself. We were one bright package that exploded like fireworks on the zeitgeist.”

  “But why did you stop there? Why didn’t you write your second book?”

  “I had written my way out of my desperate place. Nito’s Garden is one of those novels that is in itself a testimony of its need to exist. Nito saved me. Had I not been able to make Nito exist, I would have committed suicide.”

  “You said, ‘if a writer wishes to have a career,’ but how can someone not have such a wish?”

  “By choosing not to be sponsored.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what a sponsor is, yes?”

  “You were my sponsor, right?”

  “And the publisher was your sponsor, the business act of the production and publication were your sponsors, and, after that, you are sponsored by the booksellers and buyers, the readers, the reviewers, the admirers and detractors, ad infinitum. Sponsors are all the influences outside yourself, or between you and your work.”