Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  A thirty-something woman walked out of the Texaco and pulled Eleanor away. Listened to their story and drove them back to school.

  I WAS INUNDATED with mail. On a snowy Saturday, I received a thick letter from Susannah, which I slit open immediately. I peered in to see one folded piece of notebook paper, and a small plastic bag filled with coke.

  I took out the letter so I could read it at the lunch table, and shoved the coke into the pocket of my down coat. I began reading as I crossed the dining hall and knew before I sat down that another meal would go uneaten. Because this letter didn’t narrate Susannah’s life. It narrated my own.

  Susannah explained in the most thorough detail: John Paul’s new relationship with Regan Mercer, a platinum blonde fourth-former from Manhattan, who was planning her sweet sixteen party at Regine’s. And I knew instantly: the scorekeeper, in her fancy gray coat.

  I’m only telling you because if it were me, I would want to know.

  She must have known how incriminating these words sounded but wasn’t conflicted enough to strike them out. Instead, she followed her punishments (of accusation and information) with offerings: It’s been a sad ending to a difficult winter. I am sending you the last of my private stash, which even Drew doesn’t know about, because I think you could use it more than me. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he loves Regan, at least not close to the way he loved you.

  Regan. Regan! The name gloamed above my life, like the Black Thing from A Wrinkle in Time. An oppressive and ominous overhang, presaging destruction, ruin, and all the gullible frailty of human nature.

  Of course John Paul would have a new girlfriend. How could he not? Waverly had been teeming with his suitors—like Penelope in reverse—since the school year started without me. He would have to give in to one eventually, if only to deflect the others. I folded the letter carefully and stowed it in my pocket with the coke. For some reason, probably reflex, I scanned the dining hall for Skye but didn’t see her. Eleanor sat hunched alone over her Brunswick stew, still red-eyed and pale from her ordeal.

  Bummer about your arm. Your friend, J. P.

  It made sense in a way that almost made me feel better. Good, stalwart John Paul. He would never allow himself anything other than the most polite communication to a woman other than his girlfriend. So easy, for someone like him, to lead a girl on. He had learned through hard experience to tread carefully.

  Back in White Cottage, I considered throwing Susannah’s letter away but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I filed the envelope in my box and hid the coke beneath my underwear. Someone knocked at the door—an assertive and male retort—and my heart bolted with the illogical expectance of John Paul.

  “Come in,” I said, sliding the drawer shut.

  He opened the door but didn’t come in. So tall, it seemed his head almost grazed the top of the nineteenth-century doorway. Wearing jeans, a ski jacket, and an itchy wool scarf. Faint scratches just below his right cheekbone—from feline or female fingernails. The wound looked strangely tinted, as if he’d tried to cover it up with powder.

  “Hello, Mr. Butterfield,” I said. Though I thought of him as senator, using that title seemed rude—calling unnecessary attention to his celebrity.

  “Hullo, Catherine,” he said. “Do you have a minute?”

  I looked around the room. Since my injury, Ms. Latham had been helping me clean up. Minus the dining-hall plates, with two days’ worth of dirty clothes instead of five, it still looked fairly wrecked. Especially compared to Skye’s. But of course he wouldn’t stay, anyway—not wanting to be alone in a girl’s dorm room. Grabbing my sweater, I hoped his intent on leaving kept him from noting the mess. We walked downstairs to the tiny common room.

  The Amandas were downstairs—thankfully sitting across from each other, playing cribbage. They gathered up their cards and fled, leaving us to take their places. Skye’s father settled into a rocking chair and I perched on the very edge of the couch.

  “How’s your arm?” he said.

  “It’s bad,” I said. “Broken in two places. I’ll be wearing this cast till the end of the summer.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Skye told me what happened. She feels completely responsible.”

  “That’s because she is,” I said, surprising us both. “I won’t be able to compete at all this year. This was my last chance riding Medal Maclay.”

  Senator Butterfield paused for a moment, then allowed me a sympathetic smile. He looked younger than when I’d last seen him, escorting Skye out of the woods. An ease that hadn’t been there previously—like he’d just let out a long breath.

  “I took Skye out to lunch,” he said. “She doesn’t know I’m here talking to you. She feels terrible about everything.”

  For a strange moment, I thought he was going to make me an offer. Money or admittance to college, in exchange for becoming Skye’s friend again. But he did nothing so dramatic, only settled more deeply into the wicker chair. Accustomed to the slight weight of teenage girls, it creaked in protest.

  “I feel bad, too,” I admitted, wondering what else Skye had told him.

  He rubbed his hands together and looked directly at me. I didn’t turn my eyes away. He still had his lovely way of regarding—as if he had assessed me entirely and was pleased with what he saw. Never mind how deeply he had sunk into mortal status. I still found myself wishing that he were my father.

  “Skye doesn’t make friends easily,” he said. “I’ve never understood that. She’s so special. So lively and smart. And pretty. Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe too pretty,” he said. “Maybe that’s it. People are intimidated. Or jealous.”

  I didn’t say anything. Whatever Skye’s problem, it wasn’t her looks.

  “At any rate,” he said. “She hurt me, too. With that protest. A god-awful mess.”

  “She just meant to do what was right.”

  “If only it were that simple,” he said, with a deep and worldly sigh.

  “Some things are that simple,” I said, not sure I still believed it.

  He smiled at me like I had announced the sky was purple, a mistake equally adorable and incorrect.

  “You hid her that night,” he said. “Didn’t you.”

  I didn’t answer, and he smiled again.

  “You’re a good egg, Catherine,” he said. “I hate to see Skye lose you.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I almost felt more comfortable talking to Senator Butterfield than to Skye. A man who appreciated the necessary precautions when taking wayward paths. A man who knew how to cover his tracks—or at least understood the imperative of trying, even if he hadn’t always been successful.

  A faint pelting against the window pane. More snow. I felt a little sinking inside, at the endless March weather and the conviction that spring would never come.

  “She probably hasn’t lost me,” I admitted.

  He clapped his hands together. This was what he’d come for.

  “Good,” he said. He stood up. Pulled a gold Cross pen from his pocket. “May I sign your cast?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  I stepped forward. He didn’t seem to notice the bare expanse. Just signed below my elbow, in broad, bold letters that I couldn’t see without standing in front of a mirror.

  I could hear his footsteps receding—still confident in the sway of his own audience and the effect it would have on the future.

  SPRING

  16

  SPRING STARTED SLOWLY the last semester of our sixth-form year—not so much mudluscious as mudterrible. Rivulets of mud, cakes of mud. Mud tracked through the dormitory. The bathroom floor had a permanent film, wet and whirling. Hilary Knudsen slipped in JR and broke her wrist, which somehow bode well for forgiveness: accidents happen.

  After Senator Butterfield’s visit, I walked across campus to JR. The door to Skye and Eleanor’s loft was open, as usual, but when I poked my head up through the floor the room was
empty. I thought about crossing to Skye’s desk and leaving a note, but my shoes were caked with dirt. The beds were so neatly made and the floor so spotless. And in truth, I was almost, but not quite, ready to see her. The pristine, empty room felt like a reprieve, however brief.

  The next few days lagged on, empty and dim. I could have studied, but it seemed so pointless—college acceptances were already en route and would land in our mailboxes any day. I let Laura ride Pippin, trying to coach her, but that also seemed pointless. Laura was good, passable. But her hands were way too busy for my horse’s soft mouth; he repeatedly tossed his head, trying to loose the reins from her hands, and if it hadn’t have been for my voice nearby I was sure he would certainly have thrown her. Besides, Laura had already aged out of Medal Maclay, where she’d seldom won anything other than yellow and green ribbons.

  The hideous limbo of the seasons, poised in this brown wasteland between white winter and the green shoots of spring, created a restless and uneasy depression. At night my dreams alternated between nuclear waste and horseback. Pippin and I would gallop through high grass, jumping fences, the mud splashing behind us in sickly, neon tidal waves. Sometimes John Paul would appear, on the opposite side of a riverbank or barely visible through a haze of mist. I would wake up breathless, desperate for something more.

  One night I woke from such a dream and immediately got out of bed. Wriggled into a pair of blue jeans, another impossible one-handed task. Got Susannah’s coke from my dresser drawer and put it in my pocket.

  I snapped up a window shade, trying to assess the night, but it lay outside in utter darkness. And I felt the happiest surge—the first positive emotion since my accident. Just the act of stepping out of that room, and crossing the unlit campus, all at once the mud would be luscious, as I squished my illegal way through it. I opened the door to my room, and there was Skye, about to slip tonight’s letter under my door. We stood for a moment, blinking at each other. Then we burst out laughing, clapping hands over our mouths to silence ourselves.

  “Come outside,” Skye whispered. “It’s wonderful.”

  AND OF COURSE it was: the filthy chunks of ice, stubbornly clinging to the side of the road. The drooling puddles rainbowed by gasoline. The starless, cloud-covered night and the two of us bundled underneath it, walking across the road and over the hill toward the dining hall. We jumped over the divots in the lacrosse field and settled on the metal bleachers.

  “My dad says you two spoke,” Skye said.

  “I thought that was supposed to be a secret.”

  She shrugged and said, “The real secret is that he’s resigning his seat in August. That’s what he came up here to tell me.”

  “Because of you?” I asked.

  “He says not.” She looked past me, intent on the field, as if a game were going on. “He says I was right, on some level. That being a politician means compromising and fudging. That the system is corrupt, and he can’t change it without being a part of it, and that means bending to some of the corruption. He says that I made him remember what it was like to see things on purer terms. He says he’s tired of championing the gray areas. Tired of being a gray area himself.”

  This sounded unlikely to me, even then. I wondered if Skye’s father had been caught doing something illegal, or if he couldn’t stand the idea of losing his next campaign. Skye leaned forward, hands between her knees. A vertical line formed above the bridge of her nose, and I saw that one day it would be there permanently. I looked out at the field and imagined girls from years ago, cradling their wooden sticks, running against each other in the night; attempting their blocks, checks, and goals. Skye stared in the same direction, intent on that ghostly game.

  “Do you remember that day Mrs. November gave us a ride?” she said.

  “Of course.” I pictured the glossy dark hair. The beak of a nose that was fascinating as it was disappointing.

  “I knew she was leaving him.”

  “You did?” I said. “How?”

  “I had a bad feeling about Mr. November from the first day of school. The way he always looked at me. Did you ever notice the way he used to look at me?”

  I reminded her that I did.

  “So then I saw him and Ms. Latham, one night when I was coming across campus to your room. They were just over there, under the elm tree. Kissing.”

  I remembered Mrs. November strumming the strings of her guitar, singing “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” in her cool contralto. I pictured her at home, sitting on their battered couch in the semidark, waiting for her husband to come home.

  “Did they see you?” I asked.

  Skye shook her head. “No. But I wrote a letter, an anonymous letter. To Mrs. November. I sent it just a few days before we saw her. Then when we got into her car, and I saw all that stuff piled in back, I knew.”

  “Does Mr. November know?” I said.

  “No. But I may tell him, just because I need a way to get rid of him.”

  “That should do it,” I said.

  “I did feel bad,” she said. “I felt both ways. Like I’d done something terrible to all three of them. But then I felt like I’d set Mrs. November free. And Mr. November was wrong, right? Somebody had to tell her. You know? So it seemed like the right thing. But then it also seemed cruel. What do you think?”

  I didn’t know. Mr. November and Ms. Latham clearly weren’t together now. This seemed to indicate that whatever had been between them hadn’t amounted to much. With the letter to Mrs. November, Skye had managed to insert herself exactly where she didn’t belong—in their marriage—becoming more of an obstacle to their union than Ms. Latham might ever have been. Still, Mr. November and Ms. Latham had both broken the most serious rules of the heart. Mrs. November deserved better, and I felt glad she’d got away.

  “But Skye,” I said. “Why did you want to go to Ms. Latham’s house and buy pottery? Why did you invite her to come to dinner with us?”

  “Because there’s something wrong with me,” Skye said.

  Months ago, coming from Susannah, this same pronouncement had made me bristle. But coming from Skye, the words sounded ominous, frightening. For a moment I wished I’d stayed in my room.

  “Ms. Latham looks a little like my dad’s girlfriend. I think there may have been more than just the one. I think it might be a part of the reason he’s resigning.” Skye said. “He doesn’t want anything to come out publicly, and humiliate my mother. He says he’s tired of living in dread of the press and the next bad newspaper story.”

  She dropped her head onto her knees. Her hair fell forward, grazing the mud below our feet. “I knew my protest would put my father in a bad spot. Because how could he say anything, after he supported the whole Chanticleer thing? It must have been like seeing himself, in a way, some part of his insides, speaking out publicly against himself. But in my mind, I couldn’t see how protecting a tree would be bad.”

  She sat back up and looked into my face, as if begging me to believe in her lack of self-awareness.

  “Letting it get chopped down seemed like the bad thing,” she said. “I thought I was being noble. Brave. But now I’m confused. I see my father’s face, and I see him leaving everything he’s worked so hard for. And I just feel terrible.”

  She sat back up. Our shoulders rested close, nearly touching; despite the disturbing nature of the information, and my passing wish to flee, it felt completely natural to be with her. Skye and I had been like that—comfortable—within hours of first meeting. I guessed that we could be separated over a span of years, decades, and all it would take was one hello before just knowing each other again. Despite any misgivings, faced with Skye herself there was nowhere else for me to go. I wanted to be with her, simple as that. Sitting there on the bleachers, hearing her confessions and soaking up her reflected glow, I came to life again.

  “It sounds like your father’s grateful, in a way,” I said. “Maybe you saved him?”

  We both breathed in, slightly shuddery. If the
likes of Douglas Butterfield needed saving, where did that leave the rest of us?

  “Well,” she said. “Whatever the case, I feel positively shitty about it. And about you. About everything.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if these past weeks had never occurred. “Don’t feel shitty.”

  “I do,” she said. “I feel like some sort of toxic slime, oozing out of a nuclear power plant and into a pristine river.”

  I thought how much Susannah would like that analogy.

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” I said. “It’s all okay now.”

  She laughed. “What is? The destruction of my father’s lifelong goals? Or your broken arm and your riding career.”

  I thought for a minute and came up with an answer that I knew to be exactly true. “You’re giving yourself too much credit,” I said. “Your father must have been wanting to resign for a long time. You probably just gave him that last push he needed. That he wanted. And for me, as far as the horse shows.”

  Not sure of how to mitigate this loss, I stopped talking. I could have comforted Skye with everything I might accomplish as a college equestrian. I could have announced new plans to become professional and the ways I would surmount my spotty performance riding Medal Maclay. But reaching that far ahead proved impossible. That night Skye and I sat on the familiar grounds of an athletic field amid the New England scents of pine and wood smoke, the springtime brewing of forsythia edging its way into the air. A year from now, who knew? I would be eighteen, finally. When I tried to think to that girl (woman!) about to finish her freshman year in college, I had no inkling as to her identity. I didn’t know what she liked or wanted, what the shape of her life would be. It was a little like contemplating death: that endless, forthcoming void. Suddenly nothing seemed to matter. Not even the loss of John Paul, which I had ascribed at least in part to Skye’s influence.

  “You can’t tell anyone about my dad,” Skye said. “Not a living soul.”