Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  The lines, as it turns out, are a biblical mashup. The first, Now get up and go, is Acts 9: the voice Saul hears on the Road to Damascus when, thrown to the ground by the light of God, he looks up at the sky and asks, “Who are you, Lord?”

  Jesus replies:

  I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.

  Saul becomes Paul—the apostle and great teacher of first-century Christianity, and not incidentally the patron saint of my boarding school.

  In spite of my illness and sense of crisis in those days, I liked that there was a window telling the story of Saul’s transformation. We were all of us being exhorted to become somebody better, somebody new, at that school. It was nice to see a founding narrative quietly waiting to be discovered, to be reminded that we weren’t the only ones.

  The second line in the window, about the knowledge of the secrets of God, is from Matthew. As Matthew tells it, Jesus has just finished teaching the parable of the sower, which is a challenging one. In the telling, seeds are scattered over paths and rocky places—shallow soil and soil choked with thorns—and nothing grows. Only the seeds that fall on rich land will produce. Presumably the Word of God, just so, will be wasted on improper hearts. I always wondered why God didn’t just help people understand. And anyway, is there not also a place for paths and rocky places and thorns? Is this not Creation too?

  The disciples agreed with me. They ask Jesus why he teaches in tricky parables, and he replies, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.”

  But not to them. They left that part off the bright glass.

  Do you really need it?

  This chapel window offered up the school’s soul: the commanding of a divine mission backed by an assurance of superior knowledge. The light fell through it and jeweled my entire row.

  2

  Fall 1989, Fourth Form

  Our first year at school, our fourth-form year, my urban friends, Washington and New York, shared a double room beneath the eaves of their dorm, with sharply slanted ceilings, and we used to sit on their sofa and talk about things boarding school could not deliver. Because of the alcove space, the room was long and dark. One high dormer window above the sofa opened over the roofs of other dorms and the crowns of the trees, so we could hear voices coming up from the quad but not see their owners.

  What was grim about it made it fabulous. Lovely girls trapped in a tall tower—we could work with that. The girl from New York stroked her long hair with a Mason Pearson hairbrush (“You don’t have one? Don’t you know the others will break your hair?”) and the girl from D.C. practiced tying scarves to sit just so across her collarbone. They applied face creams. “Here, touch, see how soft,” said New York, presenting her face to me like a child. Her forehead was entirely smooth, where mine was stippled with acne. Had she noticed my skin? The way she presented herself, her surfaces, for my inspection and my touch, stunned and soothed me. She was not comparing us or judging me. We were always looking only at her.

  She took me into the bathroom to teach me how to make myself throw up: “Just open up and take it all the way in. Like you’re giving head.” I made accommodating gagging noises from my stall alongside hers. Fellatio was what she meant. I was to stick my hand down my own throat. Why would I want to make myself puke? “Cool,” I told her.

  Plans were afoot for them to sign out for the weekend and travel with their boyfriends to Martha’s Vineyard, to stay in someone’s parents’ house. Lies would be told. Parents were not consulted. This was astonishing to me. The trip involved plane travel, and I was not even sure that was legal—weren’t there officials of some kind to monitor these things? But New York picked up the pay phone in the hall by the back door and read the numbers off her credit card. If I asked who Martha was, my friends laughed and laughed, watching me for the tell. When it didn’t come, they laughed even harder and said, “Oh my God, you’re so cute!” I did not ask the things I really wanted to know: What happened when you spent a weekend with a senior? What did you eat? What happened at bedtime? Did you brush your teeth, your hair? What did you wear?

  “We have to get you a boyfriend,” said New York.

  D.C. had ideas. None of them were good.

  “Let me talk to Russ,” said New York, of her new beau. “He’ll come up with someone.”

  He did. A senior on the wrestling team who was game to “hang out” with me. This boy, Shep, was cute—blue-eyed, with a too-thin top lip that gave him a rabbit smile, but it was sweet, and he was growing into it. With a bit of insouciance, it would have made for a nice come-hither curl. Analogies were prominent in our classwork, this is to this as that is to that, of angles or adjectives, and I understood that Shep was to Russ as I was to New York. There was no romance to this but the geometry of high school popularity. I thought it was a fine idea.

  Shep had a caveat.

  Her name was Shyla, and she was a fourth former too. She looked, to my eyes, like a pinup model: glamour-puss lips, blinky blue eyes so large and bright you thought they might close automatically when you laid her down. She was oddly independent, not falling in with the sort of crowd her looks would suggest. I had yet to work out the catch here, the reason why she wasn’t considered a bombshell. Was she poor? Was she too smart? Was she crazy? She did wear this bulky wool coat, with wooden-toggle closures and a fur-lined hood, when the done thing was a light outdoorsy sweater or (arms crossed, refusing the shiver) nothing but short sleeves. Did someone know her from before, such that she trailed a horrible hometown tale?

  I liked Shyla. She smiled and said hello, and lots of people didn’t.

  So, my New York friend told me, Shep was going to choose one of us. We were each to write a note explaining why we wanted to be his girlfriend and place these notes by lunchtime in his student mailbox at the post office at the center of campus. He would come to the library that night and tell us who had won his favor.

  Odd, that we, the girls, were the suitors, and the older boy the prize. Even I sensed that something was off. But what did I know? My friend was smiling her perfect, delightful, seed-corn smile, and rubbing her hands together as if to warm them before setting them on chilly me. “Let’s do this,” she said. “He will choose you.”

  I wrote:

  Dear Shep,

  I hope to see you tonight at the library.

  Lacy

  I folded the notebook paper and addressed it to him. He had a famous name, and I thought it might appeal to him that I was an ordinary person, not afraid to use normal words and say simple things. Maybe he’d think I was unimpressed, which would make me impressive. Besides, I didn’t know what else I might have said. I hoped my brevity conveyed sophistication.

  After dinner I went to the library and waited. Other students filed in one at a time—the shy or exceptionally studious. The more gregarious among us were involved in activities or clubs, practicing debate and rehearsing shows, or visiting each other’s dorms. According to the practice of “intervisitation,” a girl could visit a boy’s room and vice versa, but three rules applied: door open, lights on, three feet on the floor.

  I remember how my mother laughed when she first heard this rule, at orientation that fall. The laugh escaped her throat and floated free, and other mothers turned to look. I didn’t understand their curiosity because I didn’t understand the rule. Nowhere in my imagination was the implied danger—namely, kids on the dorm-room bed. Instead, hearing “three feet on the floor,” I dreamed up a student standing one-legged, like a flamingo. Would it be the boy or the girl? I was gulping down information in those first days, and with particular urgency in the hours before my parents kissed me goodbye and drove back down to Boston for their flight home. Impressions burrowed deep. When I remember “intervis,” my mind still conjures teenagers balancing in the raw-bulbed light of a dormitory single.

  At the library, aged fourteen, waiting for Shep, I wasn’t sur
e what I was supposed to be doing, so I wandered the poorly lit reading room. A set of black books on a low shelf were stamped with red swastikas. I reached for one and let it open in my hand. Tiny print described a scene from a Nazi killing field that remains to this day the most horrifying thing I have ever read. I have never again seen a description of that same grotesque act forced upon the condemned. I grew dizzy and the print swam. Could this be real? Could any of this be real? I closed the book on my thumb and looked up and around. I had forgotten about Shep. I forced myself to reread the page, and then again, and then, nauseated and terrified and very far from home, I went to the bathroom and tried to make myself throw up.

  Shep didn’t show.

  My New York friend explained the next day: Shyla had tucked into his post-office box a blue satin bra and a note that read, “If you want to see the other piece of this set, meet me in my room tonight.”

  Even New York was impressed.

  Blue satin bras and killing pits were ever after twinned in my mind. The one, in its self-conscious cupidity, limned the depths of the other. All at once I appreciated the depravity and banality of the human animal. I was positively wearied by wisdom. Shyla’s bra, my friends and I discussed at length. The horror page stayed secret in my mind. Silly gorgeous girls, they weren’t ready for that sort of knowledge. Not yet and maybe not ever.

  I got my bras on hometown outings with my mother to Mimi’s, which was pronounced “Mimmy’s” and did not sell blue satin anything. The ladies made Cs with their wrinkled fingers and pressed them to my rib cage. Baby hangers tinkled like xylophones. The place smelled like peonies.

  The Holocaust was more interesting to me than bras or Shep or, for that matter, sex—unless it was, as it might have been, an elaborate unconscious substitution for the threat of sex. (You, a girl, are waiting to meet a boy. Which book do you pick up? One that looks inviting, or one that looks forbidding?) Death for sex, terror for maturation—there’s a well-traveled path there, of course. At fourteen, I suppose, I found what I imagined of war less frightening than the possibility of a boy’s body on mine.

  I beheld Shyla’s triumph without regret or envy. The entire experience was clarifying. I was not a girl who belonged to boys. I had known that already. Nor did I long for what such girls had: men to squire them to island retreats when it all got too dreary, badger-bristle brushes for their hair.

  I went back to the library. This was the school’s old library, which was decommissioned a year later, following the completion of the enormous Robert A. M. Stern–designed new library across the way. The old library was squat and gray, all stone, and built so close to the edge of the pond in the center of campus that from many angles it appeared to rise out of the water. I never picked up the Nazi book again, though I kept my eye on it from the couches, the way you watch a spider on the wall. The library took me in most nights that fall. In the cold blaze of novelty of the first months at school, I had forgotten this simple thing about myself: that I loved books.

  There was something else new, too. If I played my cards right, this school might offer the world—devastated and astonishing—to me.

  Among all the silly questions and squirrelly concerns traded with my two friends that first semester at St. Paul’s, there was one thing I said that caused them to stop and listen: I mentioned, casually, that a man wanted to fly his plane up to see me.

  “Wait, who is he?” asked New York. She had been filing her fingernails with a silver emery board, and now the zip-zip sound stopped. Her head was tipped, her lips pink, and she was looking right at me.

  A nascent instinct for seduction told me not to give his name. “He works with my dad,” I said. Not true—he was one of the sons of a storied financial institution, and back home in Chicago my dad worked for an investment arm of that institution. I wasn’t sure if this man worked at all. “He takes me to lunch in the city.”

  This was true. I had taken the train downtown the previous summer with my father, who then went on to the office. Mr. Lane chose an Italian restaurant in the gallery district, hip and loud. I drank iced tea and concentrated on not spilling on my dress. I had gotten everything right: I remembered to kiss him on both cheeks, the way he preferred to be greeted; I remembered to thank him for everything, I remembered the books I was reading when he asked. (St. Paul’s had assigned The Unbearable Lightness of Being as summer reading. This is incredible to me now—that this novel, with its themes of loveless sex and careless coupling, could have been required reading for sophomores—but Mr. Lane seemed unsurprised. He nodded and sipped, and smiled wet teeth.) I made him laugh.

  “It’s important,” said my mother, “to have adults like that in your life. It’s an honor that he wants to spend time with you.”

  New York nodded coolly—lunch with a man did not impress her. My mom was right, then—one had to have adults like this in one’s life.

  My Washington friend was Catholic, the daughter of a European mother. “Is he like a godfather?” she asked.

  The Lanes had surged into our world once my father joined the firm that bore their name. We’d moved to a bigger house closer to town and begun to meet different sorts of families from the city, where Dad now worked. He spoke of having gotten a late start to his career, and his path in early adulthood formed a founding narrative for my brother and me, since the story was about fairness, luck, and the value of education. As a senior in college my father had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, but in spring 1968, a few months before he was due to head to England, President Lyndon Johnson ended graduate-school deferments for men seeking to delay service in Vietnam. Dad’s hometown of St. Louis had already been under pressure regarding the inequitable use of student deferrals. He was told he’d be classified 1-A and called up immediately.

  Dad abandoned his Rhodes and presented himself to a Navy recruiter. He and Mom spent the first years of their marriage in Fairfax, Virginia, where Dad was able to take advantage of an unusual program for enlisted men who possessed special skills in urgent demand: his then-esoteric fascination with the first mainframe processors had prepared him for work programming shipboard computers. He never so much as set sail as a Navy man, but what did disappear over the horizon was the life he had imagined would follow his Oxford degree. I’d grown up hearing about Dad’s fellow Rhodes honorees—chief among them young Bill Clinton—who had secured exceptions to the new draft rules. There was always the sense thereafter of catching up to where my parents felt we belonged.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lane were a sign that all was in order. They adopted my parents very much the way my first St. Paul’s friends adopted me: immediately, with the conviction of rescue, and with all attendant expectation of gratitude. Never mind. It was an invitation to the ball. His name was a monument and she was even better, a tiny heiress who had grown up adored in the hills of North Carolina.

  The Lanes were sponsors, in a way, of my leaving for boarding school. If they had done it, then this was how it was done.

  “He’s sort of a godfather,” I told Washington. “He wasn’t there at my christening, but he’s really involved now.”

  New York said, “Married?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “I love her,” I told my friends.

  I thought Mr. Lane hardly deserved her. They lived in a five-story brownstone on the loveliest of Chicago’s Gold Coast streets, but she answered the door barefoot, with no makeup, and took you by the hand. No child was made to feel like a child and no woman was made to feel unwelcome. She gave terrific gifts, silver cases and blown-glass bottles nestled in striped boxes. I’ve rarely seen her conspiratorial blend of secrets and goodwill. Her circle was clever and close. Her children, younger by a few years than my brother and me, were lucky devils.

  Mr. Lane’s beard bothered me. I was unimpressed by his story of racing sports cars without headlights over country roads in Michigan. (I was more interested in my mother’s report of how he had bitten into a chocolate truffle
at a dinner party and, finding half a pistachio inside, excused himself to the bathroom to inject himself with epinephrine before he died. It was a startling example of an adult’s vulnerability, which I did not often see. It was also, of course, a story about what a person might do without disrupting a dinner party—about what manners could conceal.) But my father thought he was great fun, and can I blame my parents for thinking it a kind of triumph when my dad was asked to join the small group of men who crewed on Mr. Lane’s yacht each August, cruising the Aeolian Islands?

  It was really something, that he had taken me to lunch. And I had done so well that he’d said he would fly his plane to New Hampshire to take me to supper, once I had begun at St. Paul’s. I hadn’t even taken this idea seriously before now. Why hadn’t I seen the riches in my hand?

  “What kind of plane?” asked New York.

  “I don’t know. He flies it himself.”

  She worked on this for a bit, then said, “You should do it. When’s he coming?”

  Behold the grammar of entitlement: from the imperative should to the present progressive, from the provisional to the certain, just like that.

  Could you do that, and have the world obey?

  “Christmas,” I said. Christmas sounded good.

  “Oh, great. Can he take us to the Vineyard?” asked Washington.

  “Don’t be silly,” said New York. “He’s coming to see Lacy. It’s amazing.”

  The girls looked at me differently after I told them about Mr. Lane. If I’d known, I’d have mentioned it the first day they invited me to sit with them at our welcome picnic. I’d have pinned it to my newb name tag. I’d have written that on my note to Shep.

  Mr. Lane never did fly to me. But at a party that Christmas, after he’d presented me with a ribboned hat box that contained a bowler hat, his wife opened her satin clutch to allow me to peek at the pearl-handled Derringer she carried with her in the evenings. It was the first handgun I had ever seen. You will not see it again, in spite of Chekhov’s imperative.