Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  I flinched at a whirring and the impression of sudden movement near my face: A sparrow had found its way in. Against the round window at the end it bumped and fluttered horribly before hurling itself back down the hall again. Then one of the doors beside me opened and the line began shuffling inside. I watched, balancing my suitcase on the tops of my feet. Inside I could see part of a blackboard, benches, anatomical diagrams suspended from a dado. The last child went in; then a white man with tight black curls and a purplish red face, wearing a sort of smock, buttoned at the neck and loose below, looked out, saw me—this was a shock (but spiritualists do see ghosts, I thought, if anyone does)—clicked his tongue irritably, and said, “What are you doing standing out there like a lump? Take your place at once,” seized me by the elbow, and dragged me into the room.

  He took up a position at the front of the room, raising his ruler. His smock was buttoned so tightly around his neck that it appeared to have driven all the blood to his head. I had the fancy that droplets would at any moment start from his pores. When he brought down the ruler on his scarred wooden desk, it was with such violence that it rebounded and struck him in the cheek. He clapped his hand to his face with a look of fury and rubbed the spot, where a welt was already rising, as the class clattered to their feet again—I had not left mine—and began what must have been a recitation, though they spoke so quickly that I was unable to make out a word. It seemed possible that they were stammering, but if so, they were stammering in perfect unison and with—if such a thing were even possible—great fluency. It frightened me to hear them and again I began to feel that I was separate from everything and did not belong. Only here was the instructor, glaring at me and pointedly marking time with the ruler.

  Hesitantly, I opened my mouth. The music, if that is what it was, came to a stop—inhumanly sudden, inhumanly simultaneous, I thought—and the other children now turned on me their shining eyes all at once, like one manifold insect.

  “I had thought to make a show of joining in,” I said at last, turning to face the instructor and squaring my shoulders, “just to spare myself the embarrassment of admitting that not only had I intruded on your lesson but I did not know where I was supposed to be instead. But the truth is that I have only just arrived”—indicating my suitcase. I had spoken with uncommon assurance and without stammering, and in my surprise at this circumstance I felt a silly smile spread across my face.

  “What is that to grin about?” he said. “If you don’t belong here, remove yourself. Go speak to the Intake Coordinator at once.”

  I picked up my suitcase. Seeing that the instructor was already raising his ruler, I cleared my throat: “Excuse me, I don’t know how to find the Intake Coordinator, please.”

  He swung around with a look of outrage and banged his ruler on the table again. This time, the tip broke off and jumped away, and so did I. I was standing in the hall, morosely inspecting the other doors for a clue, when one opened. “There you are,” said the foot-faced woman, very red, the hairs on her lip and her cheek all standing out. “What on earth have you been doing?”

  She must be the Intake Coordinator, I thought, and followed her silently into a small office containing a desk, a daybed with a furry throw of an indeterminate color and material messily bunched up on it, and beside it a pair of great black puissant shoes. Now she threw herself down on the daybed, drawing up her stockinged feet and tucking her robe under them, and thumped the space beside her with a heavy hand. “A little nap wouldn’t hurt.” Then she tucked her hair behind her ears and laid her head down on her arm. In less than a minute she appeared to be sleeping. Her chin trembled slightly as she ground her teeth.

  This was very strange, but I did suddenly feel a great tiredness, so I sat down, gingerly, on the edge of the bed. After a moment the white arm of a cat reached out from under the bed and delicately clawed my ankle, catching in my sock, so that the fabric stretched out in a point and then snapped back. I slid my feet out of my shoes and curled up on the very edge of the daybed, so that no part of me touched the woman behind me, from whom a comforting warmth nonetheless reached me, and fell asleep in turn.

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  We are fortunate that a scholar of what we would today call linguistic anthropology visited the Vocational School during the Founder’s lifetime and was able to report on what he saw there. Unfortunately nothing more is heard from him3 after the truncated text—scarcely more than a pile of handwritten notes toward a book never written, and in no particular order—that appears here for the first time, discovered by myself in a mixed lot of old papers auctioned off by the Cincinnati branch (two old biddies) of the American Spiritualist & Temperance Society. As its length may try the reader’s patience, I have broken it into sections; those eager to read them consecutively may of course do so by skipping ahead. —Ed.

  How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School

  I credit my involvement with the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children to a difficulty with the letter M.

  Born into the hardworking, hardheaded middle class, educated expensively by the indifferent benevolence of a wealthy great-aunt to whom my parents applied for aid, and who had (and sought) no nearer relation to me, I had found myself a niche in the same small college in which I had recently completed my own graduate studies, dutifully inserting into the minds of the young what had been inserted into mine by my predecessor, recently and opportunely retired. I knew myself to be fortunate but was a martyr to indigestion and, dare I say it, boredom. But in my thirties, something put a period to my boredom in a most unwelcome way: I developed a stutter. How this delighted the young m-m-misses and m-m-misters who were my students, and how I suffered! It was in the search for a remedy that I came across a promotional publication of the Vocational School.

  I found, not a cure, but a thesis.

  I had long speculated that language had its origins in mourning. Without the desire to speak to and of the beloved dead, we would not have troubled to supplant simple grunts and gestures with words. Everyday necessity cannot account for the disproportionate ostentation of every known language. We do not need descriptive flourishes to say, “’Ware tiger!” or “Give me food!” No, language is the equivalent of those great monuments to the dead—your Sphinxes, your pyramids—the construction of which mulcted generations of the living.

  I smoothed the pamphlet on my desk, and copied down an address. Here, finally, was direct evidence of the link between language and loss. If the Vocational School did not mourn their losses, since for them the dead never really departed, that did not confute my hypothesis. They had merely abbreviated the passage from loss to language, achieving consolation so quickly that the grief was never felt. And yet grief lay behind everything they did. I believed that before I ever saw those dark cornices thrusting into the oblivious blue of a summer sky, the stricken eyes locked in that imperious face.

  On the Architecture of the Vocational School

  The Vocational School is a huddle of mostly elderly buildings, much abused by the weather, and dank even in summer. The Chapel of the Word Church is the one recent addition. (As I came up the drive, I glimpsed above the dilapidated carriage house the Chapel’s narrow spire, like a finger raised to shush the sky.)

  Did I say that language was like those great works of memorial architecture erected by the ancients? I found that for the Vocational School, architecture was language. Beyond the Chapel’s arched doorway was an introduction in three dimensions to Vocational School philosophy. The building alluded in its form to both Speaking Ear and Hearing Mouth. The nave was tiered, or one might say whorled, like an ear, and the vault ridged like the roof of a mouth. The children seated in the nave made up the Tongue. (Dressed identically in red flannel short pants, jackets, and caps, they looked a bit like those quaint statuettes known as Gartenzwerge.) Members of the faculty designated as Teeth, wearing peaked cowls of star
ched flannel of an ivory hue, lined the first tier above them and occasionally descended to impose discipline. Circulating freely through the congregation, the Salivary—advanced students, wearing large, pink, papier-mâché collars resembling the Egyptian usekh, and representing the pharyngeal opening—distributed gags, erasers, and other devotional items.

  At the focus of the theater, the Analphabetical Choir was ranged in ascending tiers to left and right of a great hole, angled downward, and terminating out of sight of the congregation, with at the bottom a stoup kept brimming with the saliva of the devout, collected in spittoons throughout the ceremony. (I have contributed my tittle of froth.) In front of the hole, though not blocking it from view, was a standing screen of black paper with a small aperture through which the heavily rouged mouth of the Headmistress might address the congregation. The disconcerting effect was of a mouth, on the verge of being swallowed by a much larger mouth, turning back to utter a few last, barely audible words—“Don’t do it!” perhaps, or more mundanely, “White vinegar is sometimes efficacious in removing stains.”

  If the Chapel was an educational tract, what was the main school building? The original structure, formerly the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, dates back to 1841, almost sixty years before the school was founded, but in it the lines of a once-dignified building in a restrained Victorian style have been lost under additions so peculiar as to raise doubt in the mind of at least one observer as to whether they could be described as architecture at all, or might not better be classed, to quote Jim Jimson’s Notable Architectural Abortions of Old New England, as “biological growths of the persuasion mushroom.”4 But those who, suspending judgment, pass under its preposterous porticos to amble down its hallways and faint in its fainting rooms will find a kind of fascination stealing over them. Without perceiving anything obviously outlandish, one begins to feel that one has entered another world in which planar surfaces curve; parallel lines meet; and up, down, left, and right have all been subtly twisted out of true.

  One day the Headmistress handed me the key to this mystery with one of her characteristically gnomic remarks: “A building, like a person, is a free-standing hole.” Like all holes, it has a special affinity with the dead; only consider how many more haunted houses there are than haunted paddocks or playing fields. But this affinity can be amplified, tuned. When a hallway is adjusted with dropped ceilings and wainscoting to the exact proportions of the trachea, larynx, or oral cavity, who knows but what it may even speak.

  I do not know whether this contributed to the eerie way that, when the wind blew up from the valley in the late afternoon, and was channeled down the hallways through a great oculus that was winched open at this hour (in which a wedge-shaped piece of wood, very thin at one end, acted as a reed), the hall and indeed the whole building hummed with a note so deep that it was more felt than heard—a mood, not a sound. The doors to the classrooms opening and closing acted as finger holes to a flute, changing the pitch. Over time I was able to pick out more and more elements of this symphony, as for example the grace notes supplied by the almost inaudible whistles and peeps that issued from tiny holes or spiracles drilled in the walls here and there.

  After some months of listening to this curious music I realized that I was anticipating its changes. Unlikely as it seemed, the students, teachers, and menials passing through the doors did so in an intricate but repeating pattern. Remarkable! Perhaps the Headmistress had used musical principles to schedule both classes and the rounds of the domestic help—a logistical challenge, no doubt, but theoretically possible. But the building was a perpetual bustle at this time of day: teachers flapping by in a whirl of black robes; students, some loitering, some hurrying, their oversized shoes slipping off their heels to percuss the floor at every step; maids with expressionless faces and exaggeratedly humble posture, passing up, down, and across the halls, closing doors, opening others. Could all this activity really be choreographed? And if so, what was it for?

  I was offered on different occasions various answers: The house was a receiving device, in which the students could be made to vibrate in tune with the dead. The house was a pedagogical tool. The house was a philosophical disquisition about language, death, and no doubt, architecture too, given that capacity for recursion for which language is notorious. It was all these things. But I did not really understand its song until I learned who5 had been a tenant at the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, and saw that the house was also a ghost story.

  I felt, I would say, relieved. Not just that I had saved my theory by finding the link I had predicted between language (in its architectural form) and loss. But also that there was a familiar, a human basis for the grief that came over me in those moments when, at twilight in the gardens, watching a firefly make its slow way through the still air, I caught a snatch of the school’s eerie song, and looked back to see a woman’s head in silhouette, turning away from a lit window . . .

  You may judge how far I had already come from conventional thinking. Ghosts? A commonplace. But the half-heard, half-imagined song of an old house, that confounded and even, I will admit, frightened me. Why then do I find myself humming it now?—in a manner of speaking, at any rate, it being pitched so deep. I do not transpose it into a higher register. No, I hum it in its own register, which is—as I said—that of emotion: I hum it with my soul. It does not make me happy. But then I have often noticed that the behaviors people feel compelled to repeat are not necessarily those that make them happy.

  There is a whole wing of the school, incidentally, that has no material form. It exists only in the form of verbal descriptions, rumors, and reminiscences.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #2

  Dear Mr. Melville,

  It has come to my attention that you are dead. I wish I had known that before writing my last letter; I would have expressed myself differently. I had naturally hoped to persuade you to come to the aid of my school. A testimonial from a great man, a national treasure—

  But a corpse cannot write a letter to the Times.

  A corpse cannot read a letter, either. That is common sense. Perhaps I am a zany for writing this; perhaps it is true what Mrs. Brock and the other hens at the Harmonial Sisterhood said of me. But is it really so much more sensible to levitate tables, and converse with dead Lincolns, and have your likeness taken with ectoplasm pluming from your nostrils, as Victoria Littlebrow did last August in Chicago, at the home of the Beatific Twins?

  Which reminds me: I hope my last letter did not give you the impression that I am one of those Very Veiled Ladies clutching at the cold hands of drowned daughters and overlooking the ice bucket in the medium’s lap. My researches are driven by a passion for inquiry, not by wishful thinking, and are pursued on the very latest equipment, as the Reflectograph; Communigraph; Dynamistograph, or Cylinders of Matla; and many other devices of original design.

  My students receive, in addition to vocational training, a superior general education. Here history is taught by people who lived it, Boolean algebra explained by Boole himself. Our students might study thermodynamics with Jim Maxwell or natural selection with Chaz Darwin. Our school is a hive of industry. Even now, from behind the paneling comes a dry, insectile chirring: my stutterers practicing their scales in the next room, under the bloodshot eye of Mr. Lieu. Some of them cannot pronounce the letter A. Some the letter B, or C, or D. And I have lately spotted (in our little town of Cheesehill of all places) an E, and scheme to bring her to us. Eventually we will silence the whole alphabet.

  Do you know, once I could not pronounce my own name? It does something to a child, something I intend to do to my students. I have assigned them new names according to their gifts. You are the ’d’ms and ’v’s of a new Eden, I tell them.

  Why do I continue to trouble your repose, you may ask: Are there no living authors to whom I can turn for guidance or companionship? Perhaps I am more comfortable with the dead than the living, though there seems to me scant difference between
a dead and a living writer. This is not so much because dead writers seem alive still in their words, as because the living ones seem already dead in theirs.

  A book is a block of frozen moments—of time without time, which can nonetheless be reintroduced to time, by a reader who runs her attention over it at the speed of living. Just so does a traveler turn a landscape into a sequence of moments, in one of which she glimpses a javelina disappearing into an arroyo, in another, the fence she can hop for a shortcut home. The comparison is not frivolous: In the book, the author’s voice has become a place.

  This place is the land of the dead.

  I do not mean that figuratively. I consider writers my fellow necronauts, pulling on their Ishmaels and their Queequegs like mukluks and trudging across the frozen tundra of the page.

  Incidentally, you would marvel if you could see me, for I am wearing a cunningly constructed device that pulls open the mouth and stretches the tongue, which in my opinion can never be too long. On the latter I am wearing a sort of costume made of paper. One of my principle communicants on the Other Side, Cornelius Hackett, said something today (through my mouth, of course) that I did not quite make out, but that may have been “little dress.” It is also possible, as one student suggested, that it was “littleness” (humility?) or even “fickleness.” Though to what in this world have I been as faithful as I have been, my whole life long, to death?

  I will know soon enough if my “little dress” pleases the dead. It certainly pleases me to see, in the mirror, my neatly turned-out tongue jumping in my mouth, like a pupil at morning calisthenics. On the other hand, my shadow on the wall, wagging with the flame, is fearsome. It almost looks like the head of someone who has been partially flayed with a blunt instrument, possibly a spoo—