Is That You, Miss Blue?

by M. E. Kerr

  “Who’s Ape?”

  “Who’s APE?” She laughed knowingly. “She’s the headmistress. Annie P. Ettinger…. Oh, you don’t know the half of what awaits you, Brown. Lord strengthen thee.” She dropped her cigarette and squashed it with her shoe.

  I said, “Amen,” aloud, for the first time in my life.

  Two

  ALL THE RESIDENCE HALLS at Charles School were named after Charles Dickens novels. Cardmaker had warned me about it.

  “Miss Charles, the founder, was an Anglophile,” she’d told me. “It’ll show up in a lot of ways, like we call the john the W.C., and there are all sorts of queues: The Sweet Shoppe Queue, the Mail Queue, et cetera, and there are pictures in the parlors of kings and queens and moors and palaces.”

  My room was on Little Dorrit hall.

  Before I was given this information, I had to locate my luggage, be assigned class cards, and sit through “Preliminary Welcome,” which was a lecture on the traditions of Charles School. (It was traditional, for example, to attend classes on Saturday and have Mondays off. I wondered if that was an English custom, an Episcopal one, or a Southern one. Cardmaker had said the traditions were usually one of those three.)

  When I finally left the registration line, I saw Cardmaker waiting for me. She roomed on Hard Times with another sophomore. She had already unpacked and made her bed and gossiped with her roommate while I was going through orientation.

  “Where are you living?” she asked.

  “Little Dorrit.”

  “There’s been a mistake, Flanders.”

  “No, that’s where I’m going to be.”

  “There are only single rooms on Little Dorrit,” Cardmaker said. “No one rooms on Little Dorrit.”

  I said, “I do. I have asthma.”

  “So what! You don’t want a single on Little Dorrit. Believe me!”

  “I’d keep a roommate awake.”

  “So what!”

  I kept arguing in favor of the single by describing my worst symptoms: difficult respiration, livid countenance, cold extremities, coughing with expectoration; and Cardmaker kept replying “so what” after every one. We were walking up the stairs of Old Main and down past David Copperfield, in the direction I’d been told to take to Little Dorrit.

  “Apply for a change immediately,” Cardmaker said. “Do you know what goes on on Little Dorrit all day long and half the night?”

  I knew from experience there was no way to stop Cardmaker from telling me. I could see the dark blue beginnings of evening from a hall window, and I realized I’d been in Cardmaker’s company nearly twelve hours, counting the wait in Washington, D.C. … The single sounded good to me suddenly.

  “They practice piano on Little Dorrit,” Cardmaker said. She had changed her clothes. She was wearing a pair of boy’s black cotton pants a size larger than she was, with the legs cut to shorts, and a black-and-white T-shirt with a fancy insignia stamped on it in gold. Across the T-shirt was written: Cadet Butler Peabody, Wales Military Academy, Wales, Virginia.

  She had told me about Peabody on the train. He was a P.K., too. They had worked up some kind of agreement between them whereby Cardmaker would be asked to all the W.M.A. social affairs, and Peabody would be invited to all those at Charles School. Cardmaker said it was a practical arrangement worked out in contract form by Peabody, who was going to Harvard eventually to study law.

  Cardmaker continued to denigrate Little Dorrit as we walked there.

  “They practice piano, violin, trumpet, whatever anyone around here plays,” she said, kicking at imaginary stones in her path with her ragged sneakers. “Little Dorrit is a practice hall, that’s why the rooms are so tiny, Flanders! All they do is move out a piano and move in a bed! It was never supposed to be a residence hall! There isn’t even a faculty chum assigned to Little Dorrit, and every other hall has one!”

  “I don’t care, Cardmaker,” I said. I didn’t either. In my mind I was writing letters to my father, suggesting ways I might be of help in running Attitudes, Inc. I had sunk that low in less than a day.

  “Wait, it gets worse,” Cardmaker promised. “Do you know who they always put on Little Dorrit? Number Fours! Always! You’re liable to room next door to a pinhead.”

  I just kept repeating “I don’t care” over and over in a voice softened by severe doubt that I would ever be happy again.

  “Do you want to share a bathroom with a pinhead?”

  We stepped three steps down to Little Dorrit, and the question went unanswered. It was quiet there. No one was dragging trunks and suitcases by. There were no open doors with views of twin beds piled high with blankets and sheets, and girls flocking about getting acquainted. There was no one there but Cardmaker and me.

  I said, “I’m in 7.”

  “I hope you’re not going to be the only one on the hall,” said Cardmaker. “There have been years when there weren’t any Number Fours in the school.”

  “I’d just as soon be spared washing up next to a pinhead,” I said.

  “And spend the night alone on this hall?” Cardmaker said. “I wouldn’t spend the night alone on this hall for anything! This hall is isolated from the whole school—that’s why it’s okay to play instruments up here. You could play a tuba or holler bloody murder, and no one would hear.”

  A voice behind us said, “Someone would hear, Carolyn.”

  We turned around. I remembered the woman. She was not much taller than Cardmaker. She was thin and gray-haired, with bright blue eyes behind the rimless glasses and very pale white skin. She was dressed in black, with an enormous silver cross hung about her neck.

  “You didn’t ride with the rest of us today,” she said. There was a heady scent of gardenia attached to her, and her teeth were very white. “But we met at Penn Station, remember?”

  “How do you do again,” I said, putting out my hand to shake hers. At “Preliminary Welcome” I was told that it was traditional to shake hands with faculty members when greeting them for the purpose of conversation.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she told me. She received my hand and for a very quick moment gripped my fingers viselike, then let go. She dropped her hand to her side and wiped her palm against the side of her dress. “I’d stepped around the corner to admire the painting of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the top of the staircase. It’s my favorite painting.”

  My own palm was wet from its encounter with hers.

  Cardmaker spoke up then: “If someone were to play the tuba, or more likely, scream bloody murder up here all by herself, how would someone hear?”

  “Carolyn,” said Miss Blue. “Oh, Carolyn. I prayed so much for you this summer.”

  “How would someone hear?” Cardmaker persisted.

  “Someone around that corner,” said Miss Blue, pointing to the left of the Little Dorrit sign, “with very excellent hearing, thanks to our Lord, would most definitely hear…. And I would be down here in the wink of an eye.”

  “You mean they’ve made a faculty room on David Copperfield?” said Cardmaker.

  Miss Blue smiled and nodded. The huge cross bobbed against her bosom, which was surprisingly ample for such a small, thin woman, and very firm for someone her age. How old was she? I was never good at telling ages—my own parents always looked so young. I guessed she was fifty-five, maybe even sixty.

  Cardmaker said, “The only room on David Copperfield is the old linen closet and utility room.”

  Miss Blue’s cross bobbed again in agreement.

  I was holding my breath, fearful that Cardmaker would make some awful crack about putting Miss Blue in a closet to live. Without even knowing her, I sensed she needed protection. Then, and in the future, I would hold my breath when I came upon Miss Blue coping with others, or attended her classes, or just watched her from a distance in church, at chapel, in places where she was most vulnerable. And I would never forget the viselike grip, the strength of it and the willfulness.

  Miss Blue was reciting from memory, a section fr
om the faculty rule guide. “Any residence hall with two or more girls living on it has assigned to it a faculty chum.” She smiled up at me, that strange smile of hers, almost pristine, as though it were the first time she had ever asked her face to try that gesture. With an accompanying flush to her skin, she said to me, “I’m yours.”

  Cardmaker didn’t give me a chance to reply. She said, “Two or more, two or more. Then there’ll be more on Little Dorrit, or two? How many will there be on Little Dorrit, Miss Blue?”

  “Another besides Flanders,” said Miss Blue. “A Miss Agnes Thatcher from Birmingham, Alabama. Due any time now.”

  Three

  I NEVER THOUGHT I’D find myself doing one of the Attitudes, Inc., exercises on my own. I have a thing against any philosophy or “ology” my father gets wrapped up in. My father was once described by an ex-boyfriend of mine as the answer to the question: What does the duck say? (Quack, quack, quack.) He didn’t know it while he was making the crack, but that was our last date. Love me, love my old man.

  But I have to admit Mr. Teddy Brown does things sometimes even I wonder if he really believes in. Like Attitudes, Inc., this new sort of therapy farm he was setting up in Maryland. How was my father going to help people solve their problems with therapy when he wasn’t even a Ph.D., much less a real doctor? His answer to that was that the world was expanding beyond the confining concepts of doctor/lawyer/merchant/chief, and people were discovering corruption and narrowness in the old sacred-cow authority figures. He said people wanted less commercial, more creative leaders.

  But he wasn’t doing it for peanuts himself. Every “seeker” paid $150 per weekend, and had to sign for a minimum of six. (I can remember when my mom and dad were doing handwriting analyses by mail order for fifty dollars apiece.)

  Anyway, my second twilight at Charles School, as I was stretched out on my bed listening to someone across the hall practice the piano, I thought of the P/N exercise, which is an elementary Attitudes, Inc. exercise. Here’s how it works. You shut your eyes and you see a perfectly blank white screen.

  On the left side you write POSITIVE.

  On the right side you write NEGATIVE.

  Then you draw a line down the center, separating P from N.

  You’re ready now to list the positive and negative aspects of your present situation. You must list a positive before a negative, and you cannot list more negatives than positives and vice versa, though they don’t all have to be really heavy aspects.

  For example, my first positive was:

  I’m lying down.

  This is how my P/N exercise took shape:

  Positive

  Negative

  I’m lying down.

  The food is awful and it’s supposed to be loaded with saltpeter to keep us from getting horny and turning into dykes or running off with WMA cadets.

  Cardmaker will be a good friend.

  No sign of Agnes Thatcher so far and there are rumors that she is not coming, or that she came but was discovered to have both male and female sex organs and was sent back home…. It is a little spooky being the only one on the hall.

  I met a teacher I liked named Miss Horton. She is the librarian.

  I met APE, not personally but at Morning Assembly, and she is as bad as Cardmaker said she is. She looks like an old mud turtle which someone has stood upright and put a dress on. She wrote a sentence across a black board that she said she wanted us all to memorize. It was: SIMPLICITY IS THE KEYNOTE OF REFINEMENT. She broke her piece of chalk with the strength it took to write it. Cardmaker said a mild way of describing her is “very excitable.” Cardmaker says a little man will appear at her table evenings, who is Billy Ettinger, her husband (!).

  I like Cardmaker’s roommate, Cute Dibblee, too.

  My room is not only on the practice hall but directly under the large tower with the bell inside which triggers all the activity around this place. It is a horrible, large clang and then a great dong dong. CLANG (pause) DONG DONG. I lie here wondering how it is possible to hate a bell.

  There is a breeze from the window.

  My room isn’t much bigger than a closet and I have to share the W.C. with Miss Blue. It’s very unusual to share a john W.C. with a faculty chum, but Little Dorrit isn’t typical…. Miss Blue has put in a nail near the mirror—to hang what on?

  No asthma attacks so far.

  There is a dance coming up and it is actually formal. Formal! I am expected to wear that long dress we were required to bring! Cardmaker says the reason it is formal is because at get-acquainted dances, the cadets often try to smuggle in booze. Formal dresses are supposed to remind us we are ladies, and we do not drink booze no matter how nervous and self-conscious we are. A long dress makes everything more difficult, too, Cardmaker says…. The cadets have to wear full-dress uniforms.

  Five more days till Monday and a chance to go to the movies in town.

  The reason we get Mondays and a chance to go to the off instead of Saturdays is movies in town that on Saturdays the streets of Wales are filled with cadets and high-school boys and other attractive people. Mondays there is no action whatsoever in the city but troops of little goody girls in their blue wool blazers being herded off to the movies or shopping with an honor senior in charge.

  That was as far as I got in my P/N exercise before the old CLANG—DONG DONG signaled dinner. (According to my father, P/N keeps you from being repressed as well as forcing you to think positively. All I know is I never did that exercise when the P’s came out longer than the N’s.)

  I had ten minutes from CLANG—DONG DONG to get myself cleaned up and down to Dombey and Son Dining.

  From my bedroom window I could see a lot of the faculty pouring out of the house trailer next to the tennis court. It was the only place at Charles School where smoking was permitted. It was called The Caravan, and only faculty members were allowed there.

  I’d heard Miss Blue never went near The Caravan, not just because she didn’t smoke, but also because she didn’t mingle; she was a loner, not exactly by choice. She had the effect on most people of embarrassing them, as in the sentence “I was embarrassed for her.” If Miss Blue wasn’t in her room, and she rarely was, she was down by the staircase off David Copperfield, sitting there in the straight-backed wooden chair, reading the Bible or staring up at that painting of Mary, Queen of Scots. I guess the linen supply closet wasn’t much bigger than my room; maybe she was claustrophobic. I only knew she spent a lot of time in that chair in the hall, and it was not the kind of chair anyone’s body would look forward to being lowered into. I don’t think it had been put at the top of the staircase with the idea anyone would ever want to sit in it. It was just old and hard and handsome, as good a decoration as any, not there for creature comfort.

  That night she was neither in her room nor down the hall. As I tried the bathroom door she called out that she was sorry, she would be out in a moment.

  I was ready to skip washing my hands and proceed to Dombey and Son Dining when the lock on the door rattled and Miss Blue came out. She was blushing as usual, and her eyes were blinking fast, as usual, but something about her attitude was different, and she was even pausing a moment as though she might be capable of conversation, instead of scurrying past me around to David Copperfield. I hoped she hadn’t decided she was capable of conversation, because I had already perceived that she was the kind of adult I could never think of anything to say around. She was the sort I wanted never to be left alone with, the sort whose eyes I could never meet with my own, the sort who left me totally speechless, unable even to cough up the minimal civilities like it’s such a lovely day out, isn’t it, or something about drought, rain, snow, sunshine, something.

  My father always says that when you’re shy you should ask a question, but I don’t know why he thinks that’s such a splendid solution, since the question itself isn’t that easy to think up. He claims people love to answer questions, especially directions to places. “It’s the kind of questi
on you ask that’s important,” he says. “Don’t ask anything personal, but ask, for example, how to find someplace you know they can locate easily. It makes people feel good to direct you. Or ask if there’s a restaurant nearby they could recommend, or if there’s a recent book that’s amusing….”

  But I didn’t have to think of a question because Miss Blue asked me one.

  “Have you seen the new addition, dear?”

  “Agnes Thatcher? Has she arrived?”

  “Oh, no, dear. Not Agnes Thatcher. Jesus. In the bathroom.”

  For a moment I had forgotten the nail with nothing hanging on it. I stood there, unsure of how to proceed.

  “Next to the mirror,” said Miss Blue. “I put Him there. You don’t mind Him there, do you, Flanders?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “You may tell me if you don’t want Him there. After all, we share the bathroom.”

  I was grateful that she didn’t call it the W.C. I still preferred bathroom, even john, even can or head, to W.C. W.C. sounded so affected for a place where affectations wouldn’t do you very much good.

  I said, “I really won’t mind, Miss Blue.”

  “You may take a peek at Him.”

  I went inside the bathroom and looked up where the nail used to be.

  There hung a picture of Christ, one of those crown-of-thorn types showing mostly His head, with some drops of red blood on His face.

  There was a verse under His face:

  O bleeding face, O face divine,

  Be love and adoration thine.

  Miss Blue was standing behind me, her hands folded across her chest and resting against the huge silver cross. I could feel the tiny blue bird-eyes watching the back of my head, waiting for me to turn and say something.

  I knew if anyone else my own age had been there we’d have had a giggling fit and collapsed on the floor. Not that the idea of Christ’s bleeding face was funny, but things out of context often seem preposterous. And someone like Miss Blue, for all her serious intentions, comes off crazy as a loon. But if you’re confronting the thing alone, as I was confronting alone Miss Blue’s addition to our bathroom, instead of getting hilarious, you get selfconsciously aware of how little you can respond: You want out.