At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “How on earth,” she said to Lenore, “did you ever wind up in a play?”

  “I was curious, I guess. I didn’t think I’d get the lead.”

  This didn’t feel like a lie. She wasn’t concealing the fact that Drama Club had been a punishment for missing curfew so much as she was committing to a role. For the duration of this meal, she would be performing the part of Lenore Littlefield. She never felt like herself around her mother anyway. She was always impersonating her mother’s idea of her. The sandwich shop consisted of eight tables in the front room of what had once been someone’s house—handwritten menu on a chalkboard, display case filled with baked goods. The proprietress came and went, timing iced tea refills so as not to interrupt the scene.

  In American Lit they’d been discussing The Phantom of Thornton Hall all week, and Ms. Pinn was finally ready to hash out the ending—what did it mean that the stage went black with Jenny at the window, so many questions left unanswered?

  “I think it’s about suicide,” said Grace LaPointe, who hadn’t cared about literature before the riding instructor took over but had morphed into a first-rate kiss-ass ever since.

  Ms. Pinn nodded and touched her throat.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Go on, Grace.”

  “Well, why else would it end like that? She’s pregnant. She’s young. She has no good choices. The ghost hasn’t helped. What else can she do? Plus, Eleanor’s suicide foreshadows Jenny’s.”

  These discussions made Lenore self-conscious, not only because she was playing Jenny March but because Ms. Pinn often goaded her to participate, as if Lenore possessed some special knowledge.

  “Miss Littlefield,” she said, “what do you think?”

  “It’s not about suicide,” Lenore said.

  Ms. Pinn straddled a chair and crossed her arms over the seat back.

  “What then? Tell us.”

  “It’s meant to be thrilling,” Lenore said. “Anything could happen next.”

  She didn’t hear the bell so much as react to it, rising, stowing her notebook, the current of girls washing her out into the light. She had felt so close to understanding at Eugenia Marsh’s house. Of course, the woman’s theories had seemed ridiculous, but they’d also made a kind of sense that afternoon, the way algebra could seem perfectly logical in class but fade to mystery when Lenore sat down to do her homework.

  Melissa turned and smiled and walked backward a few steps.

  “You coming?” she said, and Lenore felt her insides lift.

  They were only running up to a convenience store for Slushees and M&M’s but Melissa drove with the windows down, an R.E.M. tape in the deck. They took the long way back to campus. Past the water tower and over the railroad tracks. They had to shout over the wind and the music, their tongues gone Slushee blue, woods pressing in on both sides, and they had no idea that they were skirting the edges of the Disney site, no idea that the project would fall apart over the next few months or that the trees blurring past would remain undisturbed for years, until a new set of developers bought up the land and razed everything for a golf course, lining the links with many-windowed homes, or that those same developers would purchase Briarwood not too many years after that, converting the school into an assisted-living facility for well-heeled retirees. How could they have known? They could hardly see beyond the next bend and then the long straightaway to campus, blacktop tapering into nothing beyond the gates.

  Coach Fink was all business at dress rehearsal. She walked them calmly through each scene. No surprise to Lenore. Her coach was always coiled within herself on the eve of a big game. “I want you strong. I want you at your best. Get a good night’s sleep,” she said, but sleep gusted out ahead of Lenore like an autumn leaf in the wind. Light moved across the ceiling, footsteps moved on the second floor. Melissa was curled up with her back to Lenore, quilt drawn to her ears.

  Lenore thought about energy, the universe. She thought about history—did it mean anything to her beyond tests and papers and places and dates? Did it matter that Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederacy or that those people in Selma had marched with such dignity across the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Those facts had no immediate bearing on her life. But even then, sleep receding by the minute, she sensed that she was mistaken, that somewhere beyond the grasp of her conscious mind lay another answer altogether, one that accounted for Disney and trench warfare and premonitory dreams and the atom bomb and ghosts and her role as Jenny March. She also sensed that this answer would elude her for the rest of her life, no matter how many hours of sleep she lost in its pursuit.

  She sighed and swung her legs around and tiptoed down the hall. She ducked into the phone closet. Shut the door behind her. She hit the light switch and found Nate’s number on the wall. Instead, she called Domino’s Pizza—closed for the night—and J. Crew customer service. “Hello?” the operator said. “How can I help you? Would you like to place an order? Hello?” She tried the number that would tell you the time in Mobile, Alabama. 12:08 a.m. An hour earlier down there. The woman on the recording had a Southern accent, a real one, rich and slow. The light in the common room blinked on and off again. Had someone said her name? Lenore stepped out, holding her breath.

  “Who’s there?” she whispered, and a voice said, “Boo,” and Lenore jumped, whirling toward the sound. She sat down hard and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from calling out.

  “It’s me,” the voice said. “It’s just me,” and Lenore recognized Poppy hovering over her.

  “Jesus Christ, Poppy. What are you doing here?”

  Poppy laughed, pleased with the effect of her surprise. “Melissa let me in through the window. I came to see you in the play.” She lowered herself beside Lenore and gave her a clumsy, one-armed hug. “I took the bus,” she said. “I left the best note. It says I’ve run away with the neighbor’s pool boy. That’ll buy me a little time. The bus, in case you were wondering, could not have been any more repellent.”

  Lenore shot an elbow into Poppy’s ribs. “But they won’t let you come back to Briarwood. Not after this. Your parents won’t let you come back next year.”

  “I’m not sure I want to come back,” Poppy said. “I’ve been thinking I want to check out public school. Fret over my outfit every morning. Date a boy who drives a crappy car. I want to live in the real world for a while.”

  “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “What?”

  “You have to come back.”

  “Briarwood’s just so weird. It’s all bullshit.”

  In another few minutes, they would adjourn to what had been Poppy’s room and stay up talking with Melissa until daylight revealed itself against the windows, but for now neither of them moved. All around them Thornton Hall was quiet, the particular and restless silence of a hundred girls asleep. Lenore would have sworn she felt a presence in the dark.

  “But it’s ours,” she said.

  In the morning, not long before the first bell rang, Valerie Beech unlocked the doors to the Herndon Annex, Connie Booth brought the chandeliers to life in Ransom Library. On the front porch of Briarwood Manor, Linwood Mackey offered his wife a puff of his cigar. After a while, the bell tolled in the quad, ringing in what was, for the majority of students, an ordinary Friday. Most of the girls planned to attend the play, but not all. Grace LaPointe and her stallion, Tabasco, would be competing in a horse show over the weekend, and Marisol Brooks refused to go on principle. What could be more pitiful, she wanted to know, than student theater? Besides, there was no rush. There would be a matinee tomorrow.

  But first—an Art History quiz, a Cicero translation, a soft-ball game, the Briarwood Vixens versus the Lady Cardinals of Saint Mary’s, the plink of an aluminum bat carrying all the way to Faculty Row. There were girls lounging on the library steps, others reading on the benches in the quad, another bunch painting some kind of banner in the grass, squirrels leaping from branch to branch above them, making the leaves rus
tle and shimmer, the scene like a photograph from one of Briarwood’s brochures.

  And that evening, while the cast made jittery, last-minute preparations backstage, cars wound past the gatehouse and along Shady Dell Loop to the parking lot beside Terrell Field. At Bishop’s suggestion, the grounds crew had lined a path with candles, threads of smoke ghosting up from small white paper bags. Great sprays of daffodils and hydrangeas waited just inside the doors. Freshmen in Briarwood dress blazers greeted arriving audience members and presented them with programs. More freshmen ushered them to their seats. Headmistress Mackey roamed the lobby, hailing parents she recognized, lavishing special attention on those who might be interested in her new computer lab. No sign of Eugenia Marsh. Headmistress Mackey was beginning to let herself believe that her plan had worked and opening night could proceed without undo complication.

  Bishop, too, had been wondering about the guest of honor. As he stood between the open double doors and scanned the audience, chatter filling the air, he couldn’t make her out in the crowd and, to his surprise, he felt relieved. Decked out in green-and-white bunting, washed with decorous light, the auditorium looked dressed and ready for a momentous occasion. He thought of Coach Fink, pacing and fuming backstage. Without discussing the matter, they had arrived at a kind of truce. They would return to mutual disregard. When their paths crossed on campus, they might exchange a nod, an offhand smile, but nothing more. This, too, made him relieved and also grateful and also sad from time to time, though he understood that history, personal or otherwise, cannot be expunged.

  At precisely seven o’clock, while Coach Fink was rounding up the cast behind the curtain, Headmistress Mackey commenced her dedication at a lectern on the apron of the stage.

  “In the last one hundred and twenty-six years, Briarwood School for Girls has produced some of the most outstanding women in America. I don’t have to name for this audience all the remarkable young ladies who have passed through our halls. It is precisely because we settle for nothing less that we run the risk of taking that tradition of excellence for granted.”

  “Everybody get in here,” Coach Fink said. “Bring it in.”

  “There are times, however, when an alumna’s achievements are so extraordinary that they demand permanent commemoration so that future students will be reminded of what is possible when a young woman builds her dreams on the foundation laid at this school.”

  Coach Fink extended her hand, fingers spread, palm down.

  “Eugenia Marsh matriculated at Briarwood in 1958, on the eve of one of the most tumultuous decades in our nation’s history. She was a dedicated member of the Drama Club and participated in numerous productions on this very stage. After graduation, she built on her Briarwood experience to compose an enduring work of American theater. The Phantom of Thornton Hall received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1974, and Miss Marsh’s words have been translated into thirteen languages and performed by some of the most talented actors in the world. We’d hoped Miss Marsh could be with us here tonight, but she’s given enough already to us all.”

  The girls pushed in tight and piled their hands atop Coach Fink’s.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Eugenia Marsh Stage in the Beatrix Garvey Memorial Auditorium.”

  As a pair of ushers peeled away the bunting along the lip of the stage to reveal a commemorative brass plaque, Coach Fink said, “So she’s a no-show. Hell with her. Whatever happens out there tonight belongs to you, not her. Let’s make history, ladies. ‘Drama Club’ on three. One, two, three.”

  Their hands leaped up with their voices, their voices muffled by applause. The house lights flickered, and Headmistress Mackey made her exit, and the girls hurried to their places. Lenore arranged herself in the bed in her white nightgown and closed her eyes. It seemed possible in that moment that she might actually fall asleep, that she might wake to another life. Already, she could feel herself dissolving, becoming, the moment spooling out and out and out, whispers fading in the crowd, then a pulse of perfect silence before the curtain opened on a dorm room at a boarding school not so different from Briarwood School for Girls.

  Question 7

  The March 31, 1994, edition of the Thorn was dominated almost entirely by news of The Phantom of Thornton Hall. Including the review, there were three full articles and a sidebar. Which of the following items rated the front page?

  A) Praise for Lenore Littlefield’s performance as Jenny March, which the staff critic called “unsettling” and “entirely authentic” and “quietly heartbreaking.”

  B) The dedication of the stage to Eugenia Marsh during a ceremony presided over by Headmistress Mackey, who was quoted as saying, among other things, “Let Ms. Marsh’s achievement stand as an inspiration to Briarwood students everywhere.”

  C) Several unconfirmed sightings of Eugenia Marsh, who, according to one of the freshman ushers, “slipped in late, just as the lights were going down,” and was seen, according to another, “on her feet at the end, bawling her eyes out,” though there were numerous inconsistencies in these reports, and none of them could be substantiated.

  D) A disturbance during the curtain call in which a suspended student, Poppy Tuttle, wearing a ski mask and Mickey Mouse ears, charged onto the apron of the stage, shouting, “Down with Disney” and “Long Live the Red Hand” and “Sic Semper Tyrannis” before hurling a water balloon at Headmistress Mackey, who was seated in the front row.

  Acknowledgments

  At Briarwood School for Girls is set at a fictional boarding school in Prince William County, Virginia, its action largely confined to dorm rooms and classrooms and field trips and so on, its principal focus the individual dramas of a handful of students and teachers, coaches and administrators, but hovering around the periphery of these more personal stories is Disney’s very real attempt to build a historical theme park in the area. I have allowed myself a measure of artistic license in portraying these events (the Disney representative, for example, who appears in these pages is entirely a creature of my imagination), but I have also made an effort to hew as closely as possible to the facts, including, in some instances, echoing the language of press releases and promotional brochures issued by Disney at the time. Especially useful in my research were Michael Eisner’s memoir, Work in Progress; the website micechat.com; and coverage of the controversy by the Washington Post.

  This book would not exist at all without my godfather, Stillman Knight, who reminded me of the Disney’s America project over dinner some years back and stirred up my interest in the subject. Thank you, Stilly, for the idea and for picking up the tab.

  Thanks to Jenny Long, a former Virginia boarding school girl herself, who told me via email about a button she once acquired at a horse race in Middleburg, Virginia. Her story could not have arrived at a more opportune moment in revision and her button appears now in these pages.

  Many thanks to my agent, Warren Frazier, whose belief in this book has been unflagging from the start; and to my editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, for her patience and her savvy as a reader. Thanks, as well, to Morgan Entrekin and Deb Seager and Katie Raissian and Jazmine Goguen and every single human at Grove Atlantic for their support over the years.

  More thanks to James McLaughlin, who read the very first draft of this novel and the very last; and to Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, Shannon Burke, Susan Pepper Robbins, Elizabeth Weld, and Margaret Lazarus Dean, all of whom read versions of this novel along the way and each of whom made it better.

  Thanks to my wife, Jill, for her beautiful cover; and to my daughters, Mary and Helen, who have taught me so much about what it means to be a fine young woman.

  Thanks to my colleagues and students at the University of Tennessee.

  And thank you, finally, to the state of Virginia, where I lived for a number of years, first as a student at Hampden-Sydney College and the University of Virginia and then as a Visiting Writer at Hollins University. Virginia strikes me as unusually rich in single gender institutions,
several of which provided inspiration for elements of this novel. I hope this book does justice to my fond memories of the years that I called Virginia home.