The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  Meanwhile, back at the game, our players were charging toward the rival goalie, who lumbered toward them, her knee pads bunching and unbunching like the body of a centipede. Viciously she kicked the ball out of her territory. And then a tall phys-ed woman with the physique of an ape broke from the pack and loped toward our goal post, and everyone on the embankment screamed.

  The Virgin suddenly appeared on the stone steps behind the pitch and began to pace the edge of the embankment, angrily calling out to our defense to get their sticks on the ground. She was dressed in her unflattering charcoal suit.

  I looked at the field. One of our guards had stopped the forward, and Tory was running with the ball. Now the hefty forward was chasing Tory, waving her stick as if she wanted to smack the bum of my roommate, who seemed to be running away from us all—running to victory in a whir of white dandelion hair and green bloomers and purple knee socks pulled up over her shin pads, so even her nice ankles looked fat.

  Then suddenly, something went wrong. The stick of the ape-woman hooked Tory across her right ankle, and she fell flat on her face on the grassy pitch. Miss Ibister sounded her whistle, and the players came to a standstill like pieces in a shattered clock. “Tory’s down!” somebody shouted. Everyone rushed toward the middle of the pitch, and Tory disappeared behind a phalanx of female bodies.

  On the embankment a few girls called: “Two, four, six, eight! Who do we appreciate? Tory! Tory!”

  Miss Ibister pipped her whistle in my ear. “Don’t just stand there like a ninny! Cover her with this while I get the nurse!” She handed me a coarse wool blanket and pushed me, stumbling, over to where Tory was lying in an awkward crumple on the grass. Her lips were blue, as if she were cold. I bent down beside her, pretending I was Morley on a house call.

  “She’s had the wind knocked out of her,” I said to nobody in particular, and I tilted back her head and lifted her jaw. Immediately her cheeks went pink again and she began to breathe. Her tongue had been stuck in the back of her throat. I am good with my hands, Sal always said so, but I don’t know how I knew to do this. I must have read it in one of Morley’s textbooks and stored it away to use in a fantasy that featured me as the rescuer. I was borrowing his manner, too. The I-will-make-you-well set to his shoulders he put on in front of a patient; the reassuring taking of the pulse.

  Tory weakly raised her head and somebody cheered, and then two prefects carrying the tray of oranges pushed me out of their way and back into the crowd. On every side of me, women’s bodies shut out the sky. My head was barely higher than the rows of breasts bulging out of their blouses—some pairs large and jolly as pumpkins; others, in the stiff, pointed cups of their bras, narrow and sharp, like dangerous instruments that could slice open your skull.

  Across the field, a skinny fair-haired woman with a face like a minnow’s was hurrying toward Tory. One of the school nurses and a doctor accompanied her. All the girls and the thickset phys-ed women turned to stare. She was what Sal called “a looker.” Even Morley would have been impressed by her tight navy suit, high heels, and lean legs sheathed in the russet gossamer of Haines stockings. I guessed she was Tory’s mother. She stood watching silently as Willy the janitor and Lewis lifted Tory onto a stretcher and carried her off.

  A crowd of girls began to follow them, but the Virgin called everyone back. She stood quietly for a second, the skirt of her old chalk-stained suit fluttering in the breeze. Finally she said, “The game’s over, girls. There’ll be doughnuts and soft drinks in the cafeteria for everybody.” The school’s crullers were my favs, but nobody asked me to join them so I walked off slowly, my head down, hoping one of the girls in the stricken crowd would call me back.

  12

  I sat down in the long grass near the ravine fence. It was just the spot Virginia Woolf would have picked if she’d gone to Bath Ladies College. Granted, it wasn’t real countryside, like the windy beaches and pine-fringed islands where Morley and I come from; but at least milkweed and wild asters grew there, and the fence around this part of the grounds was made of fieldstone, not wire. The rumour was that Sir Jonathon had paid a dollar a stone to the farmers who brought them to him from their fields. At one time there’d been 250,000 stones in the fence, and a dollar was almost what those farmers made in a week.

  I liked Sir Jonathon’s extravagances—not just because it would shock Sal, but because I was starved for news of somebody who could get away with doing what they wanted. I checked to make sure nobody could see me, and then I lay back in the grass and pulled out a pack of Sweet Caps. Oh, Mouse, aren’t you wicked, I told myself as I lit up. I was barely into my first exhale when I jerked up with a little cry. Lewis, the grounds boy, stood grinning down at me. I couldn’t help noticing his missing front tooth. Paulie’s teeth were in better shape, but the family resemblance was more obvious now that I knew the two of them were brother and sister. He squatted down beside me, his bum touching the backs of his ankles.

  “You could get expelled for that.” He looked impressed.

  I nodded. “I wouldn’t mind that,” I said.

  Lewis began to roll a fag from a package of Drum tobacco. He seemed to know I was watching him and didn’t mind. I’ll have to be careful, though, I thought, not to make him think I’m interested in him sexually. I wasn’t, was I, Alice?

  “I saw what you did.” He deftly lit his fag from a match inside a rolled-up match cover. “Nice work.”

  “Will she be all right?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He stared sullenly at the school rising from the lawns to the west like a prison. “Maybe she’ll get to go home and get out of this joint. By the way,” he said, “I have a favour to ask of you.”

  “Oh?” If he wants my body, I thought, he’s got another thing coming. I waited nervously, in case I had to deny him.

  “Give her this, will you?” He handed me an envelope covered with weird little stick drawings of a girl and a monkey with a long tail. On the front, in big block letters, I read the words, “To my girlfriend, Victoria.” I saw more drawings and some initials on the back. At first I thought they spelled out something like SWAK (sealed with a kiss). But when I looked closely, I made out the phrase “KONG LIVES. LONG LIVE KONG.” He laughed at my face. “Don’t worry, kid. She understands my jokes. We’re two of a kind.”

  “And what kind is that?” I asked, carefully putting his letter in the breast pocket of my school blouse.

  “Free spirits. Like James Dean. You know who that is, don’t you?” I nodded, and he spat and then squashed his cigarette with the heel of his shoe. I looked down at the butt; it was totally demolished. Then I did the same thing—squashed out my cigarette with the heel of my big, heavy oxford. My butt kept smoking.

  “Filters take longer to burn out,” he said, and stomped on it. He stared at me as if he wanted to kiss me, so I put out my hand for him to shake, and instead he kissed it with a mocking laugh.

  I watched him walk away down a path through the trees. At the bottom of the ravine, he turned and waved. He looked like the stick figures he’d made in his doodles: two legs, two arms, and a head. A boy. There goes the person Tory loves, I thought. She has Lewis, and I have nobody. And I felt terrible again.

  13

  “Bradford, make it fast,” Pauline hissed as I crawled behind her into the dumbwaiter. Paulie pulled down the door with a scary bang and we sat crouched together, knees up to our chins, in a space no bigger than the inside of an old icebox. Now Paulie began to pull on the heavy hemp ropes, watching me suspiciously, as if she expected me to cry out and give us away. So I stared up into the darkness at the top of the shaft, trying not to notice the way the platform swayed slowly from side to side like a subway car. I heard little rattling sounds and squeaks, and then the platform stopped and something clicked into place. Paulie pried open the outside latch with a screwdriver, and we stepped out into a dark hallway whose windows looked down on the ratty little space behind the school where we weren’t allowed to go. No
body except the tradesmen used it.

  Paulie put her finger to her lips, her hooded eyes measuring me as she pointed toward a closed door. I recognized it as the door to one of the infirmary bedrooms. She opened it cautiously, and I followed her into a large dormitory. A girl with frizzy blond hair lay sleeping in the second bed. It was Asa Abrams, the only Jewish girl in the school. Poor Asa spent most of her time in the infirmary. We crept past her slowly breathing body. Ahead of us, the night sky in the narrow window beyond the beds glowed pink from the lights of the city. Luckily for us, Tory was awake. She was sitting up in a pair of polka-dot pyjamas and a pink Viyella housecoat. When we got to her cot, Paulie put her hand on Tory’s arm, and the two of them stared and stared at each other. At last, Tory motioned to me to come closer.

  “I asked Paulie to bring you, Mouse,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping me Saturday.” Tory never called me by my last name, the way the other girls did. I hoped it wasn’t because she felt sorry for me. Now she nodded at Paulie, who hadn’t taken her eyes from Tory’s face. “Mouse will help you with your essay, won’t you, Mouse?” I whispered “Yes” without knowing exactly what Tory meant, but I realized she was making me a substitute for herself. I felt pleased. I was finally being included. “My left leg is broken in two places.” Tory threw back the covers so that we could see her legs stretched out stiffly in plaster casts that looked like giant white pupas. “I’ve torn the ligament in my right ankle, which is almost as bad. I’m being sent home for the rest of the term.” I felt my pleasure shrink. The idea of boarding school without Tory made me feel lost. Paulie must have felt the same way, because her dark head sagged a little, too. Then I remembered Lewis’s note.

  I handed it to Tory, and Paulie and I watched her read it. “Lewis wants me to give him a picture,” Tory whispered. She handed the note to Paulie, who put it in her pocket without reading it. “And he wants to know why I’ve got a photo of a boy on my dresser,” Tory said. “How does he know I have my brother’s photograph there?”

  “Lewis has the run of the school,” I whispered, to their surprise. Then I told them about seeing Lewis in the bathroom on the first day. They both listened carefully. Particularly Paulie.

  “Oh, that’s so nervy!” Tory said. “Going into our washroom like that, right under Phillips’s nose!” She grabbed my hand. “Do you think he lay on my bed, Mouse?” She started giggling uncontrollably. “Maybe he looked in my laundry bag!” Suddenly, at the end of the room, Asa coughed twice, very pointedly. “Get on the floor!” Tory hissed. Paulie and I flattened ourselves under Tory’s cot and listened. The coughing stopped, and now a door squeaked open.

  “Is everything all right in here?” the nurse asked. “I thought: I heard voices.”

  “You did,” Tory said. “I’m afraid I was talking in my sleep.”

  “Well, settle down now, Victoria.”

  The door closed, and I happened to look over at Paulie. She was watching me again—no longer with hostility but with an expression I didn’t understand.

  14

  In my heart of hearts, I knew that Bath Ladies College wasn’t a school but a time machine that trapped you for good. The outside world kept changing, but inside the boarding school nothing ever altered. That’s why the matrons and teachers looked the same as they did in the yearbooks twenty years before. And why girls like me didn’t have a hope in Hades of going home in one piece.

  I was sure old Sir Jonathon never intended things to turn out like this—i.e., for his nice home to be used as a prison for six hundred girls. His original plans, before he ran out of money, called for a large Scottish tower (besides the mock-Norman tower I lived in), a bowling alley, a stable for one hundred horses, and a deer park exactly like the Queen had at Windsor Castle.

  The Virgin tried to make a little extra out of the old place by opening the reception hall and foyer to the public over Christmas and the summer holidays. The board didn’t think she worked hard enough at this, but their charge was unfair. She did the best she could, under the circumstances. As it was, we all had to set up chairs in Sir Jonathan’s mammoth library for old girls’ weddings.

  The older girls who acted as tour guides on public occasions passed on to us information about what a fanatic Sir Jonathon was for cleanliness. He’d installed gas-fed fireplaces because he considered wood-burning fires too dirty. And he put the coal furnace outside the castle for the same reason and built an underground heating tunnel to connect it to the house. He’d even installed a central vacuuming system, which depended on a water-suction machine in the basement. The system cost too much to run now, but you could still see the brass fittings over the suction holes on the walls of our classrooms.

  Sir Jonathon was a bachelor. Maybe, like me, he didn’t think much of girls. What would he say if he knew how we sweated and cursed old Hammerhead under our breath when she made us hang from ropes and jump over the horse in his conservatory? It used to be the showroom of his castle: he’d installed a vast stained-glass dome in the ceiling and run special steam pipes through the dirt in the planters to keep his exotic flowers warm. Now only a few rubbery houseplants grew there. And how would he feel about the wastebasket in his grand bathroom stuffed to the top with little brown bags containing used sanitary napkins—the bathroom with a shelf cut into his white Carrara marble for the first telephone in Toronto? He couldn’t have had much fun with the women who went to his tea parties. In the photographs of gatherings on the castle lawn, they wore dresses that looked like heavy coats, and hardly any of them smiled except for one or two and only then in such a vague kind of way that it was hard to tell if they were really smiling at all.

  I couldn’t help thinking how different they looked from President Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, in her snug Dior coats and pillbox hats. I may have been wrong, but I didn’t think Jackie would enjoy herself at a party like that. Of course, I didn’t know Jackie personally. My relationship was with her husband, the president, and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.

  October 4, 1963

  Dear Mr. Kennedy,

  I know you have been working too hard refuting Senator Goldwater (keep up the good work on your nuclear test-ban treaty!), so I’m sewing a pillow for your poor sore back. It’s green calico to match your smiling Irish eyes! Plus—guess what!! My roommate Paulie likes you. Yesterday in church, she told me she saw you on TV debating Nixon and thought you were pretty nifty for a Catholic. That’s high praise, Mr. President. Ordinarily, Paulie never has nice things to say. I was so surprised, I nearly fell out of the pew. (Wouldn’t that have been a riot?) I hate going to St. Paul’s, by the way. I can’t concentrate on the sermon, because I don’t know when to kneel or stand. The congregation jumps up and down when you least expect it, so that’s a bit nerve-wracking. Plus we have to line up on the front steps in pairs and then file in wearing stupid navy dresses and coats while everybody watches. The only good things about church are: (1) getting to wear a hat with a dark veil (that makes me feel mysterious, like Greta Garbo); (2) staring at the hats of the pretty women who sit in the front of the church; (3) imagining how good our chicken à la king lunch will taste; (4) riding in Sergeant’s bus. Its seats are shot, so we bounce up and down like crazy, and he teases us when we drive by the boys’ school. He says, Would you like me to turn in here, girls? And everybody squeals yes, yes! And Miss Phillips just looks nervously out the window and pretends not to hear.

  All in all, Sunday is a pretty slow day for us at Bath Ladies College, Mr. President. Paulie says it will be better next year, when we can teach Sunday school in Marly Hall. Of course, the little kids scream and do stuff that gets on your nerves, but at least we get to munch on arrowroot cookies and drink apple juice, while the rest of the school has to listen to another sermon about the low points of being human.

  But enough about church. I know you like it, and I will try harder to like it, too.

  Paulie hates church like I do. I help Paulie with her homework assignments, so she’s nicer to me no
w. But I’m a little afraid of her. She’s an unusual girl, a bit strange—maybe even too strange. It’s hard to know for sure, because I don’t have anybody here to talk to except you. My other roommate, Tory, tore a ligament in her right leg and broke her left one, so she has gone home for the term. And, what’s worse, a drip named Ismay has asked to take Tory’s place.

  To tell the truth, I guess I don’t have many friends here. So it’s hard to know what’s real. There are days when I feel as if the tower could swallow me whole, like the Blob. (Have you seen that film?) You see, there are days when I’m not sure who I am, Mr. President. I feel like my Mouse head and body could belong to anybody. Do you know what I mean? Maybe it’s because I feel other people’s feelings so much, I can’t tell my emotions from theirs. I’m just floating around inside a great big pile of old stones, and a whole lot of girls are floating around in here with me.

  Your devoted friend,

  Mouse Bradford

  Men Were Hard to Come By

  Men were hard to come by at school. Only two kinds were allowed inside: funny-looking janitors who had B.O. and ministers, who were more interested in God than sex. Still, both kinds wore trousers, and that was good enough for us. If President Kennedy had ever visited, the whole school would have died.

  On the second Friday in October, Mrs. Peddie brought Tory’s father, Canon Quinn, to our Family Life class. I wanted to like him because of Tory, but he had eyebrows like a pair of unfurled bat’s wings. And bad fingers. It was hard not to stare at his fingers. They were rounded at the end like the blind heads of worms. Maybe that’s why he kept them clasped on his lap. He even held them there when he walked.

  He was holding his fingers like that when Mrs. Peddie introduced him.

  “We’re here to discuss your future role as wives and mothers. An educated woman is of great benefit to her children, isn’t that true, Canon Quinn?” She turned a huge, gummy smile at the minister. The trouble with Mrs. Peddie was that she always wanted everybody to agree with her. Her optimism was depressing because if you didn’t agree, you knew you were going to hurt her feelings, and if you did agree, then you were lying to her and letting her down anyhow. I wondered if Canon Quinn found it as much of a problem as I did.