by M. E. Kerr
That’s what I wanted—O U T.
“It’s fine, Miss Blue.”
“The little poem is so expressive.”
“Yes.”
“I have always felt special about the word ‘adoration.’”
“Yes?”
“Adoration.”
“It’s a neat word,” I said uncomfortably, stupidly.
She looked at me as though I had said something” very profound. She thought a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is neat. Neat. From the Latin nitere: to shine.”
She was looking up at me, nodding her head in the shaky way she had of nodding her head so that you weren’t sure that she was doing it voluntarily. Did she have the shakes, or did she want to nod her head?
I couldn’t cope.
“I’ll be late for dinner,” I shouted over my shoulder as I ran from the bathroom and down the hall.
I wished I’d said “we.” I wished I’d waited and walked with her to Dombey and Son Dining.
But I resented it, too, that this woman had been foisted on me, that I was going to have to contend with her for a long time. And I knew that the way I’d bear it would be to make it all a joke, one big laugh to share with everyone.
I began immediately that night in the dinner line.
Four
BEFORE WE COULD ENTER Dombey and Son Dining, the faculty had to precede us, and APE and her husband, Billy, had to precede the faculty.
That night was my first look at Billy. He didn’t appear at every meal. According to Cardmaker, sometimes he was served in his room on a tray, because he had a bad heart.
Even though the floors leading to Dombey and Son were carpeted, you could hear APE coming—or maybe it was more that you could feel it, the way you could feel distant thunder some quiet summer nights. There was a very subtle rumbling, and then came this tortoise face with glasses on, and great dewlaps held in check by a choker of pearls, the head framed by this very wiry gray hair, brown eyes staring out coldly as if their own little message was: Don’t try to get any sympathy out of me!
APE was a large woman in every way, not fat, but big. Her legs were long and thick; she had a huge rear end; a grand bosom; long; broad shoulders, and great hams for upper arms, with flabby poles connecting them to large hands with long fingers and manicured short square nails. On her wedding finger she wore a gold band with a large round diamond. Cardmaker had warned me that she rubbed the diamond whenever anger was building up inside of her.
Bouncing along behind APE that evening was this little man, almost doll-like by comparison; a sweet-faced, pink-cheeked, bespectacled old fellow with a few hairs combed across his bald head. He was not an inch taller than five feet. Cardmaker told me he bought all his clothes in Saks Fifth Avenue’s Boys’ Department. He was very well groomed in this little pin-striped suit with a vest, and across the vest was strung a gold chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from it. Cardmaker said he did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in full, every Sunday morning at breakfast, with a pen!
Although APE went past most of the student body and faculty on this short trek into Dombey and Son, it was not her custom to notice anyone. I suppose she figured it would be awkward to trudge along saying hello hello hello hello hello hello et cetera, so she simply marched ahead looking neither to her left or right.
Billy looked left and right. He smiled, winked, nodded. He was like some merry little court jester following the old queen mother. Cardmaker said they shared the same bed, in a huge suite on Tale of Two Cities. She said I could see their windows from my room on Little Dorrit; the two long ones with a small balcony in front belonged to the bedroom, the other three were the sitting room and his study.
After APE and Billy went into the dining room, the faculty filed in. I turned my back on this scene because I didn’t want to face Miss Blue again. While we stood there, I told Cute Dibblee and Cardmaker about the picture of Jesus on the bathroom wall, with the inscription underneath.
We all cracked up.
“What table are you bleeding faces headed for tonight?” Cute asked.
“O face divine, let’s try Miss Horton’s,” I said.
If you wanted to sit with anyone in particular, you had to agree ahead of time whose table you were aiming for. Each table was headed by a faculty member. There were a few teachers no one ever raced to sit with, and guess who one of them was. For one thing she always wiped her hands on her napkin after she passed anything anyone else had touched; for another, there was this strong scent of gardenia about her. Who wanted to eat corn fritters or mashed potatoes or meat loaf or chicken à la king enveloped in the smell of gardenia?
But the worst thing, from my point of view, and even from Cardmaker’s, who should have been more blasé about such matters, was trying to keep a straight face when Miss Blue said grace. Where most teachers were concerned grace was something like “OLORDWETHANKTHEEFORTHISFOOD,” mumbled in about six seconds, after which they picked up their forks and shook out their napkins. It was like a sneeze or a hiccup at the beginning of every meal.
This was not Miss Blue’s style at all.
My very first breakfast at Charles, I had dumbly wandered across Dombey and Son to her table. This was her morning grace, spoken very slowly and with tears just beginning at the corners of her eyes:
Jesus, we hear you. We can hear you, dear Jesus. Your footsteps are coming closer. We know you are there. You can count on us. Dear Christ, appear before us in all your glory. Glory. We are your servants. We gather to thank you for our blessings. Dear Christ, do not be afraid we will betray you another time. You may approach. Receive our blessings for this food. Thank you and Amen.
(Cardmaker said with His luck He was probably the type who didn’t like a lot of talking first thing in the morning.)
This second night of my life in Charles School, when the buzzer sounded signifying the students could be seated, we inched forward.
Cute Dibblee said, “There’s too big a rush on Miss Horton’s table, O torn cheeks; we might not all get to sit together if we aim for her.”
“I’ll chance it, thorn-brain,” I said. “She seems to be the only normal person on the faculty and weirdos turn my stomach.”
“You’re surrounded by weirdos, O fingers-nailed,” said Cardmaker. “Maybe you can arrange to be served in your room like Billy is.”
We kept on that way, thinking up new ways to take off on O Bleeding Face, laughing and wisecracking our way into the dining room and across to Miss Horton’s table.
She was in her twenties; she was this blonde who was only a few years out of the University of North Carolina where she’d belonged to Chi Omega sorority, and Cardmaker said that last year she’d tried to work through a petition that faculty could wear pants suits to teach in, but APE vetoed the idea with a raging lecture on Maturity. She spent a lot of time in The Caravan and smelled of cigarettes, and sometimes on an evening of gin, too. She probably enjoyed a martini or two before she had to face the dum solas. That was one of Cadet Butler Peabody’s descriptions of us. It was a legal term, from the Latin dum sola et casta—translated: while single and chaste. Cardmaker told me he often wrote it in his letters to her. “That’s all he knows about Charles School girls,” she said.
Miss Horton had a boyfriend named John Bob White, who was up North somewhere studying to be a doctor. She talked a lot about this John Bob; it was a Southern thing, to call a person by two first names.
I was glad I didn’t have to say much, because I was hungry, and because I’d begun to feel a little guilty at the tack our conversation had been taking in the queue. I didn’t even let myself glance in the direction of Miss Blue’s table. I was afraid everyone would still be sitting there with head bowed while the rest of us wolfed down hash and greens and corn muffins.
Cute Dibblee was doing a lot of talking, too. She was from the hills of West Virginia, and when she talked she said things like, “Well, it don’t rain every time the pig squeals,” and “The rooster makes m
ore racket than the hen what laid the egg,” and “A tater vine grows while you sleep.”
Cardmaker said Cute was a Number Two, On The Ladder.
I liked listening to her and I liked her face. She was round-cheeked and large-eyed, with a pink complexion and a blonde Dutchboy haircut, and she smiled a lot. She looked like a Campbell’s Soup kid, and she had a real Southern drawl.
Cardmaker said she was a poor white not too long before she came to Charles; her father had unexpectedly and suddenly come into a barrel of money with some invention of his for coal mines.
“Wait until you meet him!” Cardmaker had said.
“What about him?”
“Blood will tell.”
“I still don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean you can take the man out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the man. You’ll see. He loves to show up and take a batch of us down to the Stonewall Jackson Hotel for dinner.”
I didn’t pursue the subject. I was wondering how Cardmaker would judge my father. Never mind my mother! I didn’t talk much about family.
Cardmaker said, “His name is Lorimer. Lorimer Will Dibblee. It’s printed in gold on the side of his Lincoln Continental.” She passed me the plate of corn muffins. “And Cute isn’t a nickname either. She’s got a sister called Sweet.”
I felt a rush of loneliness, the type that comes for a second or two like great punches in the stomach and then goes without doing any damage, except to keep you ever alert to the idea that your life has changed completely, overnight. I was surrounded by strangers. Would I ever really care about any of them? It didn’t seem that way. I just felt numb and trapped and envious of Cardmaker, who was so wrapped up in everything and everyone.
For some sadistic reason Mail Queue came immediately after dinner every night except Sunday. I said “sadistic” because if you were really hungry and felt like a third helping of anything, and everyone else was through, they all stared at you with hatred while you finished. No one could leave a table until everyone there was through, no matter how eager a majority might be to get their mail.
Cardmaker said that APE had plotted it that way, so no one would eat a lot of dinner, because dinner was the most expensive meal.
It was Miss Horton who held up the table that night. She was dawdling over a second cup of coffee. “No one’s going to get any mail,” she said. “It’s much too early. You’ve hardly been gone a day.”
There were a few grumbles but we sat it out. I glanced across at APE’s table, and noticed that Billy’s feet didn’t touch the floor. Then I watched Miss Mitchell, the gym teacher, smiling and winking across at Miss Able, the music teacher. Cardmaker said that if you noticed the musical selections Miss Able chose for chapel, you could pick out the message she was giving Miss Mitchell. “Thou Hast My Heart” was a favorite; Cardmaker said it was probably their song. (“Thou hast my heart, thou hast my heart, O Lord, how can I leave thee—”)
As I was sitting there looking around, Miss Blue’s table filed by. I saw her behind the girls, trying to see someone in the dining room to connect her eyes with in a greeting, an acknowledgment, something! She wore this sort of dazed half-smile, one hand clutching the silver cross. Why couldn’t she leave the dining room with her eyes down, like APE? Why couldn’t she realize that no one was going to call out, “Hi there, Miss Blue,” or even smile or even nod? They just weren’t, not for Miss Blue. For Miss Horton, maybe, for a few others, but not for Miss Blue.
I saw her see me and I glanced away. Then I wondered why I was being so small. Just as I was planning to glance back up and grin at her, Cardmaker said, “Here comes O gardenia smell divine. Look at her face! She looks like she shoots up!”
I didn’t glance up at her or grin; I couldn’t look at her face. I knew that look of expectancy. I also knew I hadn’t made things any easier by telling everyone about the picture in the john.
“Dismissed,” said Miss Horton.
We scrambled out of Dombey and Son Dining, I running past Miss Blue as though Mail Queue meant something to me. I wouldn’t be hearing from my father for at least a week…. I’d asked my mother to stay out of my life. Completely.
Cardmaker received this letter from Butler Peabody.
Attention: Ms. Carolyn T. Cardmaker.
Re: Forthcoming Charles School Formal Dance.
Whereas we agreed to mutually partake of the social functions offered at our individual institutions, I shall be delighted to accept your invitation.
Whereas we agreed in special circumstances to attempt to provide a similar arrangement for a recommended party, I will provide one Ms. Flanders Brown with Cadet Sumner Thomas.
Be advised: Sumner Thomas of Baltimore, Maryland, is a fifteen-year-old, five-foot-seven-and-a half aspirant poet.
Whereas aforesaid Ms. Cardmaker did not advise this party of gown color, flowers will be red rose corsages for both Cardmaker and Brown, unless notification is received in 29 hours.
C.B.P. (Delivered by Hand)
“Listen, Cardmaker,” I said, “I never asked you to do that!”
“I know that, but I got permission to telephone Butler last night, anyway.”
“I don’t want to be fixed up!”
“It’s best at these particular welcoming functions, believe me.”
“No!” I said. “Get me out of it!”
“Flanders,” said Cardmaker, “all the other new girls are freshmen. You are a sophomore. Do you realize you’ll be the only sophomore without a date if you don’t accept Cadet Sumner Thomas? You’ll be over in the bullpen with all the freshmen.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
CLANG—DONG DONG summoned us to evening study hall.
“You can thank me later,” Cardmaker said, “and you will. Even if Sumner Thomas is bowlegged and walleyed. Anything’s better than the bullpen.”
That night after light bell, I stared out the window for a long time. I watched the stars and I watched the teachers going in and out of The Caravan, and I watched APE and Billy’s lights.
I thought of my mother. I kept hearing her voice saying something over and over again, something that didn’t have anything to do with anything going on in my life right then, but something she used to say a lot at mealtime. She was born up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, and sometimes she’d use one of the Pennsylvania Dutch expressions, as my grandmother used to do.
I just sat there on my bed in the dark, looking out the window and hearing her voice in my mind saying, “Eat what you can, what you can’t eat we’ll can.”
I didn’t cry, but I ached in my heart badly. Not for her. Never for her. But for life before Bobby Santanni, for family life, for sitting around a table eating dinner together, or coming home to them or having them come home, all the things you take for granted before you land in a place ruled by bells and strangers.
Then it went—it always goes, I’ve learned—and I felt okay but tired…and relaxed, strangely, as though I realized I was going to make it I was going to get past things in this life, no matter what. I was going to be all right.
My eyes were closed. I was beginning to drift off, to start to sleep, when suddenly I heard it.
It was a wailing unlike any I had ever heard, not human, it couldn’t be. A ghost? I didn’t know. I froze. I listened. I heard it again and again.
If I’d been able to think clearly, I would have realized one thing about myself I’d never known before that moment: Whatever I would die of in this life, it would not be fright. If fright could have done it, I would have been dead already.
But I was as good as dead. Because when my door opened, I was paralyzed.
Five
“DEAR? … AGNES IS HERE.”
It was Miss Blue’s voice I heard as I lay there paralyzed. Then the overhead light in my small room was snapped on.
I was no longer powerless; I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes against the light.
Miss Blue was not wearing her cross. She had on an old
light blue wool bathrobe covering a long pink nightie. For the first time I realized that she did not have short gray hair at all. She’d been wearing it pinned back in a bun, but now it fell past her shoulders and she looked somewhat younger.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, “but Agnes has just arrived from Birmingham, and I thought it would be nice if you became acquainted before morning.”
“What was that terrible wailing in the hall just a second ago?” I said.
“There’s something you should know about Agnes.”
“Did she make that noise?”
“Dear, Agnes is a very pretty young lady whose father is a doctor, a prominent surgeon known worldwide, and Agnes is deaf and dumb.”
It took me a while to sort out what she was telling me, and that she was not really telling me about a famous surgeon. She was telling me about the person I was to live with on Little Dorrit.
It still did not completely register.
Then Miss Blue stepped back and gave my door a tiny push with her bedroom slipper, and there stood this girl.
“This is Agnes Thatcher, dear.” Miss Blue turned her back to me and said in a very slow and precise voice, and also loudly, “Agnes, this is Flanders Brown.”
Before I tell you what Agnes Thatcher said, let me tell you what she looked like.
She was short—not as short as Billy, or even Cardmaker, but short and very slender, with shoulder-length hair so white-gold that at first I thought it wasn’t real. Miss Blue was wrong—she wasn’t pretty. To say that Agnes Thatcher was pretty was to say that the Grand Canyon was a hole, for Agnes was almost perfect, beautiful, the sort you turned to look at in a crowd and singled out to watch somewhere in a sea of faces, at a football game or concert, just to stare at. Her eyes were light green, there was some summer tan left on her clear, soft-looking skin, and her wide, full lips were smiling. She seemed like some enchanted angel.