“I’m not sure. I’m thinking about it.”
“Well, you either have to come back to school or go home to your mom. What else can you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you make up your mind?”
“I’m never going back to Foxhall. Never.”
“Okay. Then how about letting me call your mom. Maybe she can come to New York and get you.”
“No.”
“How about if I at least tell her you’re okay?”
“Not now. Maybe later. I’ll call you tomorrow at this time on your hall. I have to think about it some more. Bye.” With that she hung up and I was left feeling like I’d pushed her too much. It was then I remembered the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge was two blocks from my parents’ apartment. It also spanned the East River, just like the Brooklyn Bridge. And my bedroom window in the apartment looked right at it. My hand shook as I yanked the wire and the last change I’d put in came gushing back out. I slipped it into the bag and slid the door open, looked out at the hall, didn’t see anyone, and let myself out.
There was a KOB waiting for me back at my room. Someone had tossed it on my bed. It had to be from Wes. I could spot his handwriting when I picked it up. Inside he had drawn a big heart and inside the heart he’d written, “Hope everything went okay. Were you careful?”
I sat down and tears pricked at my eyes. I wanted to tell him everything. Wanted to feel his arm around my shoulders, reassuring me that everything was going to be okay. It was funny that someone else—who couldn’t possibly predict what was going to happen any more than you could—telling you everything was going to work out for the best, made you feel like it actually was.
Being too late to send a return KOB, I would have to wait until breakfast to give Wes an answer. It was time to get ready for lights out so I gathered my things to go to the bathroom but just as I was about to leave my room, there was a knock on my door. Figuring it was Brady or maybe Jan I yelled, “Yeah, come in.”
But it wasn’t Brady or Jan and I nearly fell over when there stood Bleaker. With the bright hall light from behind, her standard black dress looked even darker filling up my doorway. And the look on her face, well, it kind of terrified me. As far as I knew, she had never come to a dorm room, had never even been on a dorm hall, and for her to be here now, especially at night, was creepy and I didn’t know what to say.
“I would like to speak with you, Miss Greenwood,” she said but took no step forward.
“Here?” It sounded incredibly stupid, but it just popped out.
“Yes.” She glanced around as if looking for a place to land. “May I come in?”
“Sure,” I said and then almost bit my tongue. Sure? Sure? Who do I think I am talking to? I wished fervently that some-one—anyone—would show up and interrupt this visit. I saw a few girls skitter past my door, whispering and pointing. That was when my mind started rushing to find an answer to the more obvious question of why she was at my door in the first place. And in the second place, the question of what kind of trouble I was about to be in. My brain went into overdrive. If I could have peered inside my head—maybe through one ear with a tiny piercing flashlight to illuminate its workings—it probably would have looked like a high speed bumper car chase all the cars spinning and whirling, crashing into each other and jerking to a new start.
Was it the wire, not very well concealed at that very moment at the bottom of my closet? Had someone seen me, had someone heard me, had the telephone operator suspected something, would I go to jail, did I need a lawyer, had my father been notified, how would this affect my mother, had someone on the hall overheard me last night, was it that day at the trestle with Wes, had we held hands and been seen by Bleaker walking back from study hall, had someone seen us on the hidden steps by the track, did they think I had the key to the mattress room or worse, were they after Wes, did they know I had set up Donald Wingart to be at the dance to see Moll, was I going to be expelled, what else could they catch me for, how many infractions had I committed, and how bad were they?
I must have looked as guilty as Bonnie and Clyde, blinded by my own thoughts standing there for what seemed like forever.
“May I use this chair?”
Bleaker was talking. She couldn’t possibly hear my thoughts. She wanted to sit down. If she were going to throw me out of school, it wouldn’t be like this, not right before lights out on a weeknight. No, she wanted to talk to me but maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t in trouble.
“Oh. I’m sorry. Of course.” I pulled the chair away from the desk and shoved it toward her.
She sat. With her knees pulled tightly together on that old wooden desk chair that had likely never seen the backside of anyone but a student in all the years it had gone from room to room and student to student. It was pitted and scratched and one leg was slightly shorter than the other three, which allowed a student studying or writing a paper to tip the chair to one leg in a kind of tapping that prevented the student from falling asleep. At least that was what I had found. But Bleaker sat as still as a cat on a windowsill.
“I’ve come to ask for your help,” Bleaker began and that hand motion where she appeared to be squashing something between her palms began again.
“It is not normal for me to find myself in this position as I’m sure you can understand. Nor is it a comfortable position that I find myself in.”
What in hell is she going on about? I didn’t know what to do with myself, standing there holding my bathroom caddy in one hand and a tooth brush in the other. A bell would ring soon signaling fifteen minutes until lights out when we all had to be in bed with no control over the lights and the room would be totally dark. She must have known that. The same way she must have known we only had ten days until Christmas break began and we’d all disappear for three weeks. But she seemed oblivious to everything, especially to me standing there awkwardly looking around for some way to feel normal in this abnormal situation.
It was at that point I noticed her eyes. They were red and swollen as if she’d been crying for a very long time. I knew what that looked like, having spent much of my childhood in tears over one thing or another, precipitated by my mother, extended by my sense of isolation, and never having a satisfactory resolution when the tears were over. They just dried up and life moved on.
It was an odd situation, this being in the middle of something I felt was impossible. When you have a choice between right and wrong or good and evil, you always know which was the choice to make. You might not choose the side of right or good. You might do something you know was wrong. Hadn’t I done that many times myself since arriving at Foxhall? The rebellious among us didn’t think of those in-fractions as moral choices. We thought of them as striking a cause for freedom when every waking moment in the ecosystem we inhabited told us we had no freedom of choice. We were opting for neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. We were maintaining a sense that we had some control. Okay it was always clandestine and it came with risks. Still, it gave us a sense of self-determination.
But this was different. I had no loyalty to Bleaker. No, I had a decided antipathy to her. Had I looked deeply into that antipathy, would I have found a layer of payback for all the wrongs done to me by my mother? Probably. Yet the wrongs perpetrated by my mother were interwoven with all sorts of conflicting feelings and loyalties. I needed her, whereas I decidedly did not need Bleaker. If that meant any decision I made now, facing what I could only characterize as begging for my help on her part, was colored by dislike for her and everything she stood for (all right—I did not know everything she stood for but at least what I had perceived she stood for), then so be it. Being on the receiving end of my mother’s inexplicable emotional meanderings had inured me to the needs of other authority figures, whether or not those figures had needs I could alleviate. In other words, and perhaps I should have begun here, I really didn’t give a shit what Bleaker wanted or needed. I would bear that burden later. But standing
there in my dorm room, I had no idea what burden I would eventually face. At that moment, the thought of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge framed by my bedroom window overlooking the east river in New York City with Moll standing there, staring out at it, possibly contemplating a drop into the icy waters below, was enough to cement my loyalties. I did not move. My shower caddy was my shield, my tooth brush my sword. I would vanquish the intruder.
She was going on about her role at the school, how much she cared for all the girls, how she had been at Foxhall for twenty-five years and nothing like this had ever happened before, how girls must have standards of comportment—she actually used that word—how easy it was for girls to forget themselves in the face of social pressure, how she herself had been tempted when she was young but how she had resisted and how glad she was that she had chosen the path of decency, pudency even (Pudency? What was that, I wondered, and made a mental note to look it up later.), how girls must choose their role models with care and how her only aim had been to guide Moll along a path of moral and ethical behavior that would yield her the eventual results she would desire when she had passed through these difficult years.
Finally, she stopped talking at me. I didn’t know what to say. But I shouldn’t have been concerned because at that point she reached into a side pocket of her black dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper, which she carefully and slowly unfolded. It had been folded three times so this took a few seconds. She held it carefully in front of her at reading distance and stared pointedly at me.
“I want to read you something,” she said.
What is this now? A written lecture? Something she found in her archives?
She cleared her throat, took a raspy breath then began to read.
“When a person devotes her whole life to one purpose, that life takes its meaning from that purpose, it upholds the virtues that flow from that purpose and it rests its moral imperative upon that purpose. Such a life, devoid of other, more temporal pursuits, must, by definition, rise above and seek recompense beyond petty deviations from its purpose. It must, if its purpose is worthy, pursue it above all else until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
She stopped and looked up at me. I had no idea why she was reading this to me or what it meant. But it sounded to me like she was headed to the nearest convent to splay herself on a cement floor in front of a statue of Mary and beg forgiveness. At least she would have admitted her sin and been out of my life. But she wasn’t finished.
She cleared her throat again and continued to read one last sentence.
“What is one to do if she finds that her purpose has been for naught?”
The fifteen-minute bell had rung in the middle of her oration and with only twelve minutes left until my room went dark, it was still not clear what she was doing there—or what she wanted from me. Fear of saying the wrong thing kept my lips shut tight. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand there forever and she apparently had said her piece and was not about to go further. She folded her paper with great solemnity and slipped it back into her pocket.
So we had reached an impasse. My feet were reminding me that they were meant to move, the fingers clasped around the shower caddy were turning numb at the tips, and I feared I would soon sink down onto my bed like a sack of sand. And then the most astonishing thing of the whole visit happened.
Bleaker advanced toward me, the look on her face un-readable, as if she was wearing a mask that only looked like her. The eyes were wide, pupils dilated, pale skin taut over the flat cheeks, but it was the mouth that fascinated me as she approached. The lips were moving prayer-like, but no sound emerged. She wore that slash of lipstick but it had become dry and cracked and as her lips moved, she drew them back in a kind of grimace. When she reached me, she took both my wrists in her hands, pulling them to her at the waist, which made the shower caddy bump against her, jiggling its contents. She seemed not to notice there was something between us as her lips moved ceaselessly. Finally, finally a sound emerged.
“You must tell me,” she said. “I’ve seen the call logs at the telephone operator’s office. I know you received a call from her. You must tell me where she is. You must, you must, you must.”
She clung to my wrists. Just as it seemed she was coming unhinged, she dropped them and sank back onto my bed and sat staring up at me.
“If you tell me, I won’t say a word to Mr. Williamson or anyone else. It will be strictly between us.” The look on her face reminded me of a child pleading for a treat, a child who knew no treat would be forthcoming. “I give you my solemn word. You must understand. You girls and Foxhall are my whole life. That is my mission. I can’t allow one of you to go astray.”
I’ll admit it. Right then all I could think was: Then why, you petrified old biddy, did you treat Moll so shabbily, shame her practically in front of the whole school, take a poor innocent girl who was only trying to fit in and make a boy pay some attention to her, why did you do that? You deserve to suffer for that. Al-though I thought of her as old, now that she was up close, it seemed she was only about, maybe, forty-five. At fifteen, anyone over nineteen fell somewhere into that indeterminate category of “older,” but not like my sixty-two-year-old gramsy, which was ancient. Now, of course, sixty-two seems relatively young. If I could go back there, Miss Bleaker was probably almost young enough at that age to be my daughter at my current age. Yes, perspective plays tricks on you, especially about age. But that night, to me she was old. And old meant do not trust. And especially do not trust at Foxhall be-cause once that ball of twine began to unravel, who knew where the string would lead. So finally, I spoke.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Bleaker.” I said it the same way I had lied my way through her interrogation about the wilted dandelion rings. It had worked then, so why not now?
Ahhh, she knew. I could see it on her face and she knew that I knew she knew. It also seemed clear that I was not about to give up or give in. And this was where the hypocrisy and rigidity shook hands and came out of their respective corners ready to do battle. I knew hypocrisy would win but rigidity wouldn’t go down until about the fifth round. So she went on and on, begging in her Bleaker-ish way, pleading as only someone who was used to being in the dominant position can plead, that was, with a superior attitude as if she was doing you a favor by allowing you to give in to her.
She came back to the same points but with each plea, she added another sweetener to her proffers—she would cancel my study hall punishment, she would give me the plum assignment of role taker starting after Christmas break (how she would do that was not clear, but I assumed it meant she would take it away from someone else), she would, if I wanted, give me a single again next year, she would have me excused from Sunday breakfasts for the rest of the year so I could sleep in. The list expanded as her desperation grew until at the end, her hypocrisy had won and I believed she would have sold me her soul had I been the devil.
“Miss Bleaker,” I finally answered. “Lights are going out in a few minutes. I have to get to the bathroom before that.”
“Don’t be concerned about the lights out rule. I can excuse you from that, too.”
“Miss Bleaker,” I said this as emphatically as I deemed possible in the situation. “I really don’t know anything and I have to go.”
“Then the consequences will be yours to bear.” She said this last in a desperate way; her shoulders sloped down and inward like a U.
She stood up and I figured at last she’d go, but no. She turned to me with one last salvo.
“Foxhall is my life,” she said in a tone I’d never heard from her before, her voice cracking a little as if she’d breathed in some dusty air. “I’ve given the school and the girls who come through here everything I have. If I can’t remedy this situation, my life here will be over. And no other school will ever give me a second chance. I know you girls think I’m unreasonable but you don’t understand it from my side.”
All I could think was: So Mr. Williamson m
ust know it’s because of her Moll ran away. But if she thinks the threat of losing her position here is a reasonable argument for me to help her, she must be completely bats. If helping her find Moll means she’ll be here forever and the other girls find out that was because of me . . . that’s all I need.
Later, even years later, these thoughts would come back to me. I don’t deny the uncharitable nature of them or the impulse behind my unwaveringly stubborn stance. Nobody liked Bleaker, Nobody liked Moll, but for different reasons. One was disliked because of the power she wielded; the other was disliked because she was easy to victimize. At a Quaker school, the victim came first, theoretically. Bleaker had other choices, other tools at her disposal but she chose shaming and bullying. I wasn’t about to give in to her and, it occurred to me, in a less than altruistic vein, that if I told her about where Moll was, she could turn her bullying in my direction. And hadn’t I already seen evidence of that? Even at fifteen, I knew that you couldn’t make an honest deal with a person whose motives were suspect.
THIRTY-SIX
The Last Call
THREE NIGHTS LATER, THURSDAY, MOLL CALLED ME. I HADN’T expected it so Jenny answered the phone again.
“Greenwood, for you—again.” She yelled with impatience as if to say, “Why can’t you answer your own damned calls?”
I’d been castigating myself for not setting up another time to phone Moll at my parents’ apartment. But then I also told myself that there was so much on my mind at the time, I really wasn’t thinking ahead but just trying to manage what was right in front of me. Which, in addition to my visit from Bleaker, included a note from Mr. Williamson, delivered to me the next day at breakfast, to come to his office in my free period after lunch. He knew when I had a free period, of course. “They” knew everything about us, except for whatever secrets of our Foxhall lives we could manage to keep from “them.”
The Other New Girl Page 21