The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  There did appear to be something in the air at Haddan that caused good judgment to dissolve. Betsy had noticed that several of the girls in her care had been growing progressively wilder. More girls climbed out their windows at night than stayed in their beds, and some were so blatant in their disregard for rules that Betsy had insisted they clean the common rooms as a punishment for their late hours and careless ways. In fact, there was a reason for such bad behavior: girls at St. Anne’s most often fell in love in October. Every year there was a rush of romance from the first day of the month to the last, a tumbling falling in love at first sight that occurred with such intensity anyone would have guessed no one on earth had ever fallen in love before. Love like this was contagious; it spread in the manner of measles or flu. Couples stayed out until morning, only to be discovered at the canoe shed, wound in each other’s arms. Girls stopped eating and sleeping; they kissed their boyfriends until their lips were bruised, then dozed through their classes, daydreaming as they failed quizzes and exams.

  Girls in love often had odd appetites, for cucumber pickles or pumpkin pie, and some of these girls were convinced that any rash acts were acceptable, if done in the name of love. Maureen Brown, for instance, did not seem embarrassed in the least when Betsy found a boy from Chalk House hiding beneath her unmade bed. There would always be girls with such unstoppable cravings they turned their backs on all reason and good intentions, forsaking everything but romance. Why, even Helen Davis herself had once been easy prey for love. Nowadays, people at school insisted that Miss Davis was so cold a single touch from her hand could freeze water in a glass, but this wasn’t always the case. During her first year at Haddan, when she was twenty-four and the month of October was especially fine, Helen paced the hallways every night, until a path in the carpet had been worn from her tread. She fell in love with Dr. Howe in a single afternoon, long before he’d ever called her by name. That October the moon was orange, it shimmered with light, and perhaps its shine was blinding, for Helen chose to ignore the fact that Dr. Howe was already married. She should have known better, she should have held back, but before the month was done, she had agreed to meet him in his office late at night, without the wisdom to guess she was neither the first nor the last woman to do so.

  Shy Helen, who had always been so serious and reserved, was now consumed by her own longings. Within this grid of passion, Dr. Howe’s wife was nothing more than a woman with red hair who worked in the gardens, only a stumbling block in the path of Helen’s own resolve to win the man she loved. All through the winter, Helen ignored Annie Howe; she did not raise her eyes when they passed each other on the paths, and this was the reason Helen was among the last to know Annie was expecting a child in the spring, not that such a situation could stop Dr. Howe from straying.

  Helen paid Annie no mind at all until the day in March when the roses were all cut down. She happened to be coming from the library that afternoon, carrying half a dozen books, when she noticed Mrs. Howe crouched on the ground, a pair of shears from the groundskeeper’s shed in her hands. Annie had already been through most of the campus; vines and branches were everywhere, as though a storm had passed through, leaving only thorns and twisted black bark. Annie was a tall woman and in pregnancy she was even more beautiful. Her hair was the color of fire, her skin like satin, luminous and pale. But with the shears in hand, she appeared dangerous; Helen stopped, frozen in place, as Annie tore through the bare canes of the cinnamon ramblers that grew alongside the library. Helen was only a young and foolish girl, witnessing something she had neither the capability nor the experience to understand, but even she could tell that she had come face-to-face with real sorrow. Standing beside the weeping beeches, frightened for her life, Helen gleaned, for the very first time, that she might actually be the guilty party.

  But for her part, Annie had no interest in Helen. Far too intent on her mission, she saw no one at all. There was no wind that day, and the aroma of cloves was powerful when Annie moved on to the scented snowbird roses that grew beside the dining hall, destroying each vine so thoroughly it would never flower again. She didn’t seem to notice that her hands were lacerated and torn as she moved across the quad, in the direction of the girls’ dormitory. There was the arbor Annie had commissioned the grounds crew to build, and the Polar roses she had nurtured for ten years, with no success until now. For on this raw March day a dozen white roses had bloomed months ahead of schedule, each one shivering with cool silver light. Annie began to chop at the vines, but she was careless, and before she realized what she’d done, she had clipped off the top of her ring finger. Immediately, blood began to flow. Although Helen startled, Annie herself did not even cry out; instead, she reached for one of the cut roses. Despite the thorns she held it close, letting her blood fall onto the petals. If Helen wasn’t mistaken, Annie smiled as she held the one bloom that had begun to turn red.

  When the swans spied their mistress there on the lawn, they came rushing to her, clucking with distress, pulling out their feathers. Their racket seemed to wake Annie from her reverie, and she gazed at the damage she’d done as though she were a sleepwalker with no idea of how she’d managed to wander so far. Her finger still bled, the blood coursing more and more thickly. Already the rose was so saturated it had begun to dissolve in her hands and she carefully put it back together again, petal by crimson petal. By then, Annie’s rampage was common knowledge in Haddan. The authorities were called in by one of the faculty wives, who had run all the way to the police station, in fear for her life. Two of the three men on the Haddan force were nearing retirement, and so it fell to Wright Grey, the young lieutenant, to hurry on down to the school.

  Annie had known Wright all her life. As children they’d been to school together, walking the distance to Hamilton; they’d gone swimming at Sixth Commandment Pond on hot, hazy days. Now when Wright politely asked her to accompany him to the hospital in Hamilton, Annie did as he asked. All these years later, Helen Davis can still remember how carefully Wright helped Annie from the grass; she noticed his blue eyes and his look of concern as Annie insisted he wrap his handkerchief not around her wounded hand, as he clearly would have liked to, but around the stained white rose.

  In less than a week’s time, Annie returned from the hospital, but she didn’t look the same. Now she wore her hair in a single braid, the way women in mourning often do. She was heavier and she moved more slowly; if spoken to, she appeared puzzled, as if she had lost the ability to understand even the simplest command. Perhaps this was because she had truly believed her husband would let her go if she turned a single rose red, but he’d laughed when she unwrapped the linen handkerchief she’d borrowed from her old school friend. In time what was crimson turns black, and the petals of dried roses fade to ashes. Annie Howe might as well have given her husband a handful of soot as deliver the rose she had stained with her blood.

  As for Helen, she could no longer pretend that Dr. Howe was hers, nor ignore the fact that he was a father-to-be. Now when he kissed her, it was Annie’s red hair Helen thought of. When he unbuttoned her dress, she heard the swans’ cry. She went out of her way to avoid him until one morning, when the sky was still dark and the girls in the dormitory were safely asleep in their beds. It was then Helen heard a tread upon the stairs. She pulled on her robe and went to the door, guessing that one of her charges needed help, but instead, she found Dr. Howe in the hall.

  “Go back to sleep,” he told Helen.

  Helen blinked as she stood on the threshold. Was it possible for him to be standing there? Perhaps she had conjured him out of thin air and might just as easily conjure him away. But no, Dr. Howe was flesh and blood; Helen knew this because of the weight of his hand on her arm.

  “Close your door,” Dr. Howe said, and because of the seriousness of his tone and the lateness of the hour, Helen did exactly that, leaving herself to wonder, forever after, what would have happened if she’d disobeyed him. At the very least, she might have learned the truth.

/>   Several hours later, two fourteen-year-old girls found Annie Howe in the attic: Their screams woke everyone in the house and so frightened the rabbits in the thickets that they were overtaken by an instinct to flee, dashing madly across the green in broad daylight, only to be scooped up by the red-tailed hawks that perched in the beech trees in anticipation of exactly such moments of panic. Annie had hanged herself with the sash from Helen’s coat, left on a hook in the corridor near her back door. The coat, recently bought at Lord & Taylor, had been considerably more expensive than Helen could afford, but that didn’t dissuade her from depositing it in a trash barrel behind the library that very afternoon.

  Because Annie Howe had taken her own life, there was no service and no burial in either the Haddan School cemetery or the churchyard behind town hall. For weeks afterward, the house where she’d died smelled of roses, even though the weather was dismal and no flowers bloomed. The scent was in the stairwells and in the cellar and in the corners of every room. Some girls began to have migraines brought on by this odor, some became sick to their stomachs, still others burst into tears at the slightest provocation, whether it be an insult or a dashed hope. Even when the windows were closed and the doors were shut, the scent remained, as if roses had grown through the floorboards of the overheated hallways. Up in the attic, the fragrance was especially overpowering, and when several girls crept up to see the scene of the crime, they fainted dead away, then had to be carried downstairs and put to bed for a week before they regained their senses.

  Only Helen Davis was resistant to the scent. When she walked through the dorm, there was only the tang of soap, the sharpness of shoe polish, the cloying fragrance of violet cologne. Helen buried her face in curtains and carpets; she went to the attic and breathed in deeply, desperate for the scent of roses, but she never did find it, not in that house and not anywhere else. Even now, when Helen approached an ordinary rosebush in the village, say a Velvet Fragrance, whose dark crimson buds emitted such a powerful perfume every bee in the county had been called forth, Helen couldn’t smell a thing. She could stroll past Lois Jeremy’s famed damasks, known for their lemony fragrance, and breathe in nothing but cut grass and clean country air.

  In memory of the Howes’ unborn child, a little stone lamb was erected in the Haddan School cemetery, and there were some women in town who still draped garlands around the statue’s neck, hoping to ward off illnesses and protect their own daughters and sons. And why shouldn’t such charms be possible? To this day, the scent of roses in seasons when no flowers grew continued to occur at St. Anne’s, affecting only the girls who were the most sensitive and high-strung. Amy Elliot, for one, who was allergic to roses, had to be sent to a specialist in Hamilton after moving into St. Anne’s and was prescribed an inhaler along with shots of cortisone. Several girls in the attic, including Maureen Brown and Peggy Anthony, went searching for the cause of the red rose-hive bumps that marked their arms. They cleaned out bureaus and rooted through closets, but in the end they found nothing but stray bits of twine and crumbs of toast left behind by the mice.

  Old houses always have their flaws—radiators that bang, unexplainable odors—but they have their pluses as well. St. Anne’s, for instance, was surprisingly private, the thick horsehair plaster walls serving to keep sound to a minimum. Students could throw a party on the first floor and the girls in the attic wouldn’t hear a thing, thanks to the insulation and the heavy oak doors. Only a few people knew that Carlin Leander often sneaked out at night, with fewer still having any idea that Peggy Anthony rooted around in her suitcase for chocolate bars to gorge upon, and even fewer aware that Maureen Brown had a series of boyfriends who secretly spent the night. It was this level of privacy that had enabled Helen Davis to keep her illness to herself for the past two years. She suffered from congestive heart failure, and although her doctors in Boston had done their best with surgery scheduled over summer vacation and then with the prescribed course of medication, Helen’s condition had grown progressively worse. Her heart, weakened by a bout of rheumatic fever in childhood, was not pumping enough blood; already, her lungs were overworked, and she coughed through the night.

  At last, Helen’s doctors had admitted there was nothing more to be done. In light of the finality of this diagnosis, her life had unwound, as if she herself were nothing more than a spool of thread, body and spirit combined. In all of Haddan, the only one who knew of her situation was Pete Byers, the pharmacist, and they had never once discussed the status of her health. Pete simply filled Helen’s prescriptions and talked about the weather, all the time wearing the thoughtful expression he always had, no matter if a customer’s ailment was cancer or a simple sunburn. Although he never said a word, Pete had taken notice of how frail Helen had become. The last time she’d come to pick up her medication, she’d been so exhausted Pete had closed up shop and driven her back to school.

  Lately it had become an effort for Helen to slip on shoes or button a blouse; it was too much work to fill the bird feeder or set down a bowl of cream for the cat. Last week the most humiliating situation yet had occurred: Helen discovered she could not lift her book bag after class, she simply could not manage its weight. She’d remained at her desk, watching mournfully as the room began to clear, cursing the wreckage of her weak heart. She watched with envy as boys and girls hauled heavy backpacks over their shoulders, as though toting nothing more than feathers or straw. How could they ever imagine what it might be like to have every object suddenly turn to stone? Put a stone in the palm of a boy’s hand and he’d merely toss it across the river. Give a girl a stone and she’d crush it beneath the heel of her shoe, then string the shards to wear around her neck, as though she possessed diamonds or pearls. But to Helen stone was that and nothing more; every book on her desk, every pencil and pen, the clouds, the sky, her very own bones, all of it turned to stone.

  Betsy Chase might have been among those who had never guessed anything was wrong if Helen hadn’t invited her in for a cup of tea. It was an invitation offered on impulse, a misguided attempt at civility that was bound to backfire, as it soon was to do. Waiting in the living room, Betsy heard the kettle whistling unattended and, when Miss Davis failed to respond, she grew concerned. She went to the kitchen, where she discovered Helen at the table, unable to rise from her chair. The room itself was a disaster, with stacks of newspapers on the floor and unwashed dishes in the sink. In spite of the daily presence of Miss Davis’s cat, the mice had all but taken over; they ran through cupboards and pantries alike, as fearless as wolves. The refrigerator was all but empty; for quite some time Miss Davis had been eating nothing more than bread and butter. In point of fact, after she’d invited Betsy in and put up the water, she had realized she was out of tea as well. It served her right for being so foolish as to think she might have a guest; company, as anyone with sense could tell you, always caused trouble.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” Helen said when she saw the worry on Betsy’s face. It was pity that showed there, absolutely the last thing Helen needed.

  Betsy went to turn off the kettle, and as she did she thought of Carlin Leander, the pretty scholarship girl who wore the same clothes nearly every day and never went out on weekends with the rest of the crowd. “I think you need some help around here and I know someone who’d be perfect. She needs the money, you need a strong pair of hands.”

  “There’s nothing I want less than help.” Helen felt dizzy, but with effort she managed to sound almost as ill-tempered as usual. This time around, however, she certainly wasn’t scaring Betsy, who had begun to search the cupboards, at last finding something worthwhile, a jar of freeze-dried coffee.

  Although the coffee Betsy fixed was awful, Helen did feel somewhat revitalized after a taste. If asked, she could probably walk to the history department and back right now. She could lift her damned book bag right over her head, couldn’t she? In fact, she was feeling so much better she didn’t notice Betsy sniffing around the pantry.

  “Where ar
e the roses?” Betsy asked. “They’re definitely here somewhere.”

  “There are no roses.” As usual, the scent had eluded her. Helen no longer imagined she would ever be able to experience that which had always passed her by, any more than she expected to be granted forgiveness for her youthful mistakes. “It’s nothing. Some air freshener. An old sachet.”

  As she spoke, Helen remembered that Annie Howe had been known for a particular recipe, rose angel cake, baked only on special occasions, Easter, for instance, or to celebrate a student’s birthday. Fresh vanilla beans and rose petals were added just before the tins went into the oven, and maybe that was why students all over campus were drawn to Annie’s kitchen, with the more forward among them knocking at her back door to beg for a taste. These days, nobody baked anymore, let alone added roses and vanilla to the batter. People were perfectly satisfied with store-bought desserts and quick divorces and watery instant coffee. Perhaps Helen had lived too long; certainly there were days when it felt that way. So much had changed, she wasn’t the same person anymore as the girl who’d come to Haddan, that foolish child who thought she knew so much. She used to work all night long; she used to wait up for the sunrise. Now she was lucky if she was able to walk from her kitchen to her bedroom without her legs giving out. She was too weak to go to the market, and could no longer carry her groceries home. Lately there had been nights when she found herself wishing for company or a hand to hold.

  “Fine, if you insist,” Helen Davis said. “Send the girl.”

  * * *

  HARRY McKENNA DECIDED HE WANTED CARLIN lin as soon as he spied her in the doorway to the library one rainy afternoon. In the low branches of a weeping beech, there sat a pair of phoebes, birds who mate for life and sing an uncommonly tender song. Most birds hide in the rain, but not these phoebes, and the girl with the green eyes was pointing them out to Gus Pierce, who had somehow managed to be lucky enough to be there beside her at the moment when Harry first saw her.