At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “Must be.”

  “I can’t believe we found her,” Coach Fink said, and Bishop felt a sudden billow of pride.

  He stepped out of the truck, and a moment later Coach Fink did the same. The doors thumped shut. Still no response from Eugenia Marsh. They cast uneasy glances at each other across the hood. There was an intensity to the woman’s focus that made Bishop hesitant to speak. He was trying to think of a delicate way to break the silence, when Eugenia Marsh said, “There’s not a tree within thirty feet of the house but somehow every winter the gutters clog up with detritus. Judging by the volume of acorns, my money’s on squirrels. They must be nesting up here, the little buggers.”

  She climbed down from the ladder and removed the glove from her right hand, tugging first at her fingertips, then peeling forward from the wrist, remarkably elegant for such a simple gesture. She introduced herself to Coach Fink and then to Bishop, shaking hands with each in turn.

  “We’re sorry to just show up like this,” Bishop said.

  “It’s no bother.”

  Bishop knew her face from the photograph in the newspaper. The circles beneath her eyes had darkened and her skin had roughened over the years. It was disorienting to see those eyes in person, like recognizing a movie star on the street or spotting someone you know on the TV news. Herself and not herself.

  Coach Fink said, “The lady at Mother’s Best told us you had crazy fans hassling you all the time. I want to be clear that we’re not fans.”

  Eugenia Marsh laughed. “You don’t appreciate my work?”

  “That’s not what she meant,” Bishop said.

  “I’m only teasing. Doris exaggerates. I get maybe one fan a year, and to be honest, their visits are not unwelcome. They’re graduate students mostly. It’s nice to know that you’re remembered, even if there was a time when I would rather have been forgotten.” While she spoke, she walked over to the truck and lifted on her toes to scratch Pickett’s head. “You’re a handsome dog. Would you like a bowl of water?”

  “What I meant,” Coach Fink said, “is we’re not crazy. We want to invite you to come see your play. We’re doing The Phantom of Thornton Hall at Briarwood, and we open in three weeks.”

  “Why don’t you fix him some water?” Eugenia Marsh pointed at Coach Fink. “This handsome fellow looks thirsty. You should find a bowl under the kitchen sink.”

  Coach Fink scowled but trotted up the steps and into the house. Eugenia Marsh lowered the tailgate, and Pickett jumped down and sniffed her ankles. She smiled, climbing the extension ladder with her eyes. “It never ends, does it? We’re always a step behind in life. As soon as you finish a task a new one needs doing.”

  “I know what you mean,” Bishop said.

  “Is Augusta Mackey still at Briarwood? If memory serves, she was promoted to headmistress after I graduated.”

  “She’s still there, still going strong.”

  “I used to wonder if that woman had magical powers.”

  “She does give that impression.”

  “It’s hard to believe Augusta Mackey has approved a performance of The Phantom of Thornton Hall. We didn’t get along so well when I was a student.”

  “I think everyone was a little bit surprised.”

  Coach Fink appeared empty-handed on the porch. Over the house, the sky ranged wide and empty.

  “There’s no bowl under the sink,” she said.

  “Try the cabinet next to the refrigerator,” said Eugenia Marsh. “I’m picturing a big aluminum mixing bowl.”

  When Coach Fink was out of sight of again, Bishop said, “I should probably let her tell you—she’s the one directing the play—but she’s been having trouble with the cast. Knowing you were going to be in the audience, that would give them a little incentive, something to get excited about, something to work for.”

  “And how do you fit in?”

  Bishop hesitated. “I teach history,” he said. “I thought you might be interested to know that Briarwood has accepted money from Disney for a new computer lab.”

  “That sounds just like Augusta Mackey. Always the pragmatist. She believes she’s picked the winning side.”

  “I was hoping you might have something to say about that.”

  “I might,” said Eugenia Marsh, “but I don’t make public appearances. You know that or you wouldn’t have come out here looking for me.”

  “There’s something else,” Bishop said.

  “There always is.”

  He reminded himself that he hadn’t promised Lenore. She’d insisted, but he’d never agreed.

  “The lead in the play,” he said, “the girl who’s playing Jenny, she’s pregnant. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one she’s told.”

  Slowly, Eugenia Marsh swiveled her head to look at him more directly, as if she hadn’t quite taken him in before, and he had the sense that she was looking through him, not into him exactly but at something behind him, beyond him. “Have you read my second play?” she said. Bishop admitted that he had not, but she just kept staring until Coach Fink returned and set the bowl of water at the foot of the steps.

  “I guess Bishop’s already given you the scoop?”

  Pickett drank deep and wagged his tail.

  Eugenia Marsh said, “More or less.”

  “I’ve been having this dream,” Coach Fink said, “where I’m waiting for a letter that never comes. Or sometimes it comes, but I can’t get to the mailbox. I think the dream is about you somehow.”

  Eugenia Marsh pushed her hand into the dish glove and started for the ladder. “I must tell you that this is certainly the most intriguing visit I’ve had in quite some time.” She paused halfway up, looked back over her shoulder. “I appreciate your invitation, and you have my word that I will give it serious consideration. Please tell the cast for me that it’s vital to hold something back. Keep the mystery right behind you. Make the audience do a little work. That’s especially important in The Phantom of Thornton Hall.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Coach Fink said.

  “If you like, you’re welcome to poke around inside. The graduate students who come never seem to believe that I’ve quit writing. They imagine that I’m hiding a dozen plays under the bed.”

  After a moment, to be polite, Bishop walked up the steps and stood in the front room—it would have been called the parlor back when this house was built—wondering what he was meant to see. The furniture was all wrong, he thought, glass and chrome and black-and-white photographs of glamorous-looking people, leftovers from her past, where country antiques would have been a better fit. She wasn’t going to come for opening night. She was just humoring them. Out of curiosity, he wandered down the hall looking for her bedroom. The door was open, end tables littered with loose change and mail, mostly catalogues for seed and lingerie. Bishop knelt, just to be sure, and peeked under the bed.

  XVII

  Lenore paid cash up front for eight nights at the Marriott in a room with two queen beds and a view of the Washington Monument. She registered as Jenny March. She didn’t have to think about it. She just filled out the form. Nobody asked questions. As Jenny March, she glided up the elevator and keyed open her room. She turned on the TV with the remote and perused the on-demand movies. She stood at the window with one hand pressed against the cold glass. Obelisk, she thought, a bit of art history vocab swimming to the surface of her mind. A tall, four-sided monument tapering to a pyramid-like point. Famous examples could be found in Paris, Istanbul, and right here in our nation’s capital.

  Her appointment wasn’t until Monday, so she had the whole weekend to kill, and the hotel had put a bigger crimp in her budget than she’d anticipated. Mostly, she just walked. She lapped the National Mall, past the museums and the monuments, everything cast in the same colorless granite. She hoofed up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, tourists snapping photos through the fence. The weather wasn’t great, but she bought a cheap umbrella from a vendor’s cart. She kept moving through the r
ain as if some part of her understood that fear and gloom would overtake her if she stopped.

  On Sunday, she looped the reflecting pool, damp cherry blossoms littering the path. The rain fell so softly she had to squint to see it, but she could feel it on her cheeks and on her hands. More an idea of rain than actual rain. Just past the Washington Monument, she was overtaken by a group of schoolchildren, dozens of them swarming past in noisy clumps and fluid bunches, chaperones hustling to keep everyone in line. There was no order to the way they moved or the sounds they made, that pure and joyful racket. Even the reprimands of the chaperones sounded more amused than harried. Lenore followed the group up a flight of stone steps and through a revolving door, and suddenly she was standing in the Museum of American History, voices and footsteps echoing off the marble floors. The chaperones gathered the kids for a head count, and Lenore ducked into the nearest exhibit. Mounted behind a wall of glass was an enormous American flag, the very flag that had inspired the national anthem, the honest-to-God star-spangled banner. Tattered. Shot through with holes. Informational plaques were situated all over the place, but Lenore didn’t read them. She knew the basics from Mr. Bishop’s class: the War of 1812, Baltimore Harbor, Francis Scott Key. Dim light. Faint music. Fifteen stars, one of them poked out by what must have been a cannonball. Lenore wondered which state was represented by the missing star. She kept waiting to feel moved or inspired, but nothing came. Disney would have done it better, she thought. Disney would have made her feel something, even if it was sentimental and half-true.

  So Lenore walked on, slogging all the way to the east end of the Mall, past the familiar dome of the Capitol building and five more blocks to Union Station, where she called Poppy’s home number collect from a bank of pay phones on the wall.

  “My dad is gonna kill me for accepting the charges.”

  “Oh my God. Poppy? Is that really you? We’ve been calling but your mother always answers.”

  “I know. They’ve got me in full lockdown. But they’re out for a couple of hours. They do brunch every Sunday after church.”

  “We miss you,” Lenore said.

  “I figured you would have forgotten me by now.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Everybody is wearing black armbands. An underground movement has sprung up among the freshmen. They call themselves the Red Hand, and they’re dedicated to—I don’t know what they’re dedicated to.”

  Poppy laughed. “The Red Hand? Where’d that come from?”

  “Didn’t we study the Red Hand in Mr. Bishop’s class? It sounded right.”

  “I think you mean the Black Hand. From World War I.”

  “Whatever,” Lenore said.

  “Where are you?” Poppy said. “It’s noisy.”

  Lenore mashed the phone against her ear.

  “I’m at a pay phone,” she said, hoping Poppy wouldn’t press.

  “Have you moved in with Melissa?”

  “Last week.”

  “I’m glad,” Poppy said. “I hate to think of you still stranded up there with Juliet Demarinis.”

  “She’s not so bad.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know. We’re in the play and everything.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Fine. Better, I guess.”

  “I want to see it,” Poppy said. “I’ve been hassling my mom about letting me come for opening night, but so far she hasn’t budged.”

  “You can’t really blame her,” Lenore said.

  “No, but it would piss off Headmistress Mackey if I showed up. You know what I should do? I should run away from home. I should return to Briarwood in secret, bent on sabotage and revenge. I should unleash the mighty forces of the Red Hand.”

  “Don’t do that,” Lenore said.

  “I probably won’t.”

  After they hung up, she sat on a bench and watched the people hurrying to catch their trains. Parents with children. Businessmen in their suits. Ladies with shopping bags over their arms. Bums. Soldiers. Nuns. She just watched. She thought that if she sat there long enough every single American might pass before her eyes.

  The rain blew over Sunday night, leaving the sky a smoggy blue. Lenore walked up Pennsylvania Avenue to E Street. The clinic wasn’t hard to find. The protesters were a giveaway, not too many, six or seven older women and a girl who looked about Lenore’s age, holding a sign that said Abortion = Bloody Murder on one side and A Moral Wrong Should Not Be a Constitutional Right on the other. She’d clearly spent more time on the Bloody Murder side. The background was shaded black, the letters red and dripping, as if oozing blood, whereas the Moral Wrong side had been scribbled in a hurry, sloppy, no embellishment at all. Lenore stood on the sidewalk next to the girl.

  “You been out here long?” she said.

  “Just since they opened. Not a lot of action yet.”

  The clinic occupied a tan brick building across the street. The windows were frosted so you couldn’t see in from the outside, but it wasn’t at all the cheerless shambles Lenore had expected. The frosted windows gave the building a modern and businesslike air. The only suggestion of the unusual was a security guard posted beside the door.

  “What happens when somebody shows up?”

  “That’s when we start chanting.”

  “What do you chant?”

  “Oh, we usually just spell life like cheerleaders—gimme an L, gimme an I, gimme an F …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Gimme an E?” Lenore suggested.

  “I thought that was implied.”

  Lenore smiled despite herself. “How come you’re not in school?”

  “I’m homeschooled.” The girl pointed at a woman in a Virginia Tech Hokies sweatshirt pouring coffee from a thermos into a Styrofoam cup. “That’s my mom.”

  The other women in the group were sitting on folding chairs, playing cards on the lid of a blue ice chest. Beneath the lid, Lenore guessed, were cans of Coke and egg-salad sandwiches and sliced apples, all the supplies they would need for a long day of protesting. There were more signs in a stack on the sidewalk, at least three times as many signs as there were protesters. The sign on top of the stack read Rescue those being led away to death, Pr. 24:11 in neatly stenciled letters. Lenore didn’t recognize the quote. She couldn’t even remember if her mother kept a Bible in the house. She imagined the women swapping out signs like fresh ammunition.

  “How about you?” the girl said.

  “I’m on spring break.”

  “That’s cool.” The girl held out her hand. “I’m Bliss.”

  “Jenny,” Lenore said, and they shook.

  “You here to see the sights?”

  “Something like that.”

  Bliss lifted the sign from her shoulder, spun it around a few times, then let it rest again.

  “You should check out the Air and Space Museum. The planetarium movie is pretty awesome.”

  “I will,” Lenore said.

  They stood there watching the clinic. A city bus rumbled by. A pigeon landed and pecked at something in the street.

  “Go ahead,” Bliss said. “I’ll give you a head start.”

  “Do what?”

  Bliss tipped her chin toward the clinic. “Make a run for it. I’ll let you get halfway before I start the chant.”

  Lenore might have walked away if she’d had somewhere else to go. Instead she took a breath and stepped into the street, a little wobbly, as if wading into a swiftly moving stream. The pigeon leaped up at her approach, fluttered off. She did not run. She did not hurry. She just kept walking. She heard the chant behind her. “Gimme an L—L. Gimme an I—I.” The security guard saw her coming. He held the door like she was entering a fancy restaurant.

  When it was over and she was back at the hotel, Lenore found that those few minutes on the sidewalk talking to Bliss stood out in her memory more clearly than anything that had happened inside the clinic. She felt guilty, no surprise in and of itself, but the reasons for her guilt were not the ones she
might have expected. She worried that Bliss’s mother had gotten mad at her for failing to take advantage of an opportunity to preach the message of their faith. She wondered if Bliss was concerned about the state of Lenore’s soul—perhaps she was praying for her even now—or for her own soul, given the fact that she’d let Lenore off the hook without confrontation. What were the heavenly consequences for doing nothing? Lenore had no idea, and she felt guilty about that, too, though she supposed it was equally possible that Bliss had written Lenore off as another heathen damned to hell or that she took a less personal, win-some-lose-some approach to saving the unborn.

  The waiting room had smelled of vanilla. Lenore remembered that. The receptionist was burning a scented candle on her desk. A nurse in purple scrubs led Lenore down the hall to a plain white room with a sink and cabinets filled with medical supplies and a gurney covered with paper sheets. A second nurse arrived to ask her a series of questions: Did she have any allergies? A history of mental illness? Was she sexually active? How many partners?

  This second nurse, Lenore remembered, had a birthmark shaped like Australia on her throat. She was the one who assisted the doctor with the procedure. Lenore couldn’t remember what the doctor looked like at all. He was just a voice in her head telling her what he was doing between her legs. I’m going to insert a speculum, Lenore and You’ll feel my fingers now and Now I’m going to give you a local anesthetic. She remembered a tremendous and terrible pressure, like her secret was finally too much to contain.

  Eventually, somebody must have called her a cab, though she had no memory of the trip back to the hotel or paying the driver or walking through the lobby or riding the elevator up to her room. She dropped onto one of the beds and plummeted into sleep as if falling out of consciousness from a great height. She dreamed that she and Bliss were at Disney World together, but Bliss believed that Space Mountain was sacrilegious for reasons Lenore failed to understand. It was dark out when she woke, pamphlets scattered on the mattress beside her along with a box of menstrual pads someone at the clinic must have given her. There was a care and recovery pamphlet organized as a list of common questions and their answers: How long before I can resume normal activities? Will I cramp and bleed? What if I still feel pregnant? How do I prevent infection? What sort of complications can occur? There was also a pamphlet about counseling and a prescription for antibiotics. Lenore balled the pamphlets into a wad and dropped them in the trash.