Charlie and I are going to travel through Europe this summer. That’s what Cressida told Kersti the night before she fell and she’d seemed genuinely excited about it.
“Maybe Lille thought someone pushed her,” Jay suggests.
“Maybe.”
“You never talk about what happened in Switzerland,” he says.
“It was another lifetime.”
“Your best friend fell off her balcony and you left school before finishing. Hardly insignificant. I’ve always felt a bit shut out of your past.”
Kersti shrugs, not sure what to say. “I told you. I didn’t want to dredge it up. I wanted to forget about it and move on.”
“Did you?”
“I guess not.”
“What about this Magnus guy? Can you talk to him?”
“I don’t know—”
“What about Deirdre? Could she have that ledger? Obviously this was your friend’s dying wish, for you to find out what happened to Cressida. You could probably use the distraction—”
And there it is. Kersti bites her lip. He wants her to find something to occupy her time so she’ll stop pressuring him about an egg donor. “I don’t know where the ledger is,” she mutters.
“What are the Helvetians?”
“It was a secret society at the Lycée. It was banned after those girls were expelled, long before I got there. I have no idea what any of it has to do with Cressida,” she says. “Anyway. I should get back to writing.”
She looks purposefully at her laptop, but they both know she hasn’t been writing.
“Sounds like you might have the makings of a good mystery novel here,” Jay says. “Maybe it would be cathartic to write about what happened to you at the Lycée. Maybe you could look at it as research for your next—”
“Maybe,” she says, gritting her teeth. And even though she’s annoyed with his suggestion, she can already feel the familiar stir of that feral writer inside her getting wind of fresh prey.
Jay stands up, collects the tray with her cold, unfinished soup, and forces a smile. “I’ll let you get back to your work.”
Kersti doesn’t respond, but after he’s gone she stares disapprovingly at her laptop, hating every word of the opening paragraph of her latest Estonian novel. She feels no spark for The Jewel of Reval.
In spite of how angry she is with Jay, his idea to explore what happened to her in Switzerland is not a bad one. Baby or no baby, she already feels that creative twinge in her gut, the spark that typically informs which direction she’s going to go with a book.
Chapter 4
LAUSANNE—February 1995
Ten p.m. on a freezing cold Saturday night. All six of them stumble inside Huber House, the door slamming behind them. Curfew. The foyer is warm. They’re giggling and shushing one another. Six drunk girls, stomping their snowy boots on the mat, removing their hats and mittens, unzipping their coats. Alison Rumsky, Lille Robertson, Noa Vandroogenbroeck, Rafaella Schwartz, and Cressida and Kersti.
They clomp upstairs, tracking snow and slush on every step, doing a poor job of being quiet. Kersti and Cressida are holding hands. Kersti is very drunk and still buzzing from her flirtation with Magnus Foley. Cressida yanks her backward, making it impossible for them to get up to the third floor.
“Shhhhh!” Alison hisses. “Hamidou’s going to come out.”
Kersti and Alison are on the volleyball team together. Kersti is a setter, Alison the star hitter. She’s from Vancouver—one of the few other Canadians at the Lycée—and has an open, friendly way about her. She has red hair, golden freckles on pink skin, and a tall, ultralean body that serves her well as captain of both the basketball and volleyball teams, as well as on the slopes. She’s the school’s superstar athlete, Coach Mahler’s protégé.
Mahler himself was the silver and bronze medalist respectively at the 1948 and ’52 Winter Olympics for bobsled. He’s been coaching at the Lycée since the late fifties and some say he still wears the same uniform he wore back then—a snug-fitting undershirt, high-waisted shorts, and tube socks pulled up to his knees. Like many teachers of his generation, he’s never embraced political correctness in his coaching style. He often refers to the girls as twits and spinsters and schwachköpfe—which means imbecile, but sounds slightly less offensive in German—and thus he somehow manages to get away with it. In spite of that, he’s well liked. He’s ferociously competitive and his winning record over the past three decades no doubt gives him sway with Harzenmoser and Bueche. After all, great sports teams attract an excellent caliber of students.
Even though she’s usually second setter, Kersti enjoys being part of a sports team. It makes her feel even more woven into the fabric of the Lycée’s world.
“One more floor,” Lille encourages, and they stare up at that last flight as though it’s the Monte Rosa. Cressida and Kersti double over laughing, clutching each other, tears streaming down their frostbitten cheeks.
“Sh-sh-sh!” Rafaella says, spraying saliva. She has the room next door to Kersti and Cressida. She’s the daughter of a painter from New York and a European prince. Her godfather is Tom Jones. She has a tendency to weave these whopping fibs with equally fantastical truths so that no one is ever really sure which is which. But her mother is famous and her father is in fact a prince, though Kersti isn’t sure from which country.
“I need a smoke,” Cressida says, reaching inside her coat pocket.
“Me, too,” Noa agrees, reaching into the pocket of her parka. She smokes horrible-smelling, hand-rolled cigarettes. Her father sends the tobacco from Rotterdam.
“Wait till we’re in the bathroom,” Lille says, having enough good sense not to let them light up in the stairwell. There’s supposed to be no smoking in the building, except for in the teacher’s lounge and the TV room on the main floor. But Mme. Hamidou is a smoker herself and turns a blind eye to it. The one thing she doesn’t allow is smoking in the dorm rooms, even though she smokes in hers. It’s a fire hazard, she says, with all those flammable polyester fabrics.
Mme. Hamidou is a good housemother. She’s fair and funny, and possesses just the right balance of strictness and kindness. She runs Huber House virtually independent of the rest of the school, which speaks more to the laissez-faire attitude of the Lycée’s owner, Mme. Harzenmoser, and its principal, M. Bueche. The Lycée is a family business. It was founded by the heir to a pharmaceutical empire in the Upper Rhine Valley, Philipp Harzenmoser, when he was twenty-five. He married a much younger woman—one of the Lycée’s cooking teachers—and promoted her to vice principal, a position she held, alongside her husband, until the mid-sixties. They had one daughter, Françoise, to whom leadership of the school eventually passed in 1966.
Françoise Harzenmoser never married and over the years has become more of a figurehead than a director. She lives on campus in a charming chalet, and is frequently spotted tending to an enchanting garden of purple bellflowers, lupines, Alpine rock jasmine, and potted petunias. She’s a tall, white-haired woman who cuts an imposing figure, but she is utterly benign on campus. The real leader—or principal and CEO, as he’s known—is her business partner, M. Bueche, an elegant man in his late forties with wavy black hair, a coiled mustache, and a triangle of silk scarf always poking out of the breast pocket of his jacket. There’s something slightly sinister about M. Bueche, like one of those cartoon characters who twirl their mustache while laughing maniacally. There’s a certain insincerity about him—his too white teeth, his intricately coiffed hair, the silk handkerchiefs, the airs. But the man cannot be faulted for his devotion to the Lycée.
M. Bueche is the one who controls the school, and its mission is to make money, something he’s achieved by attracting new and prominent students every year. He’s obsessed with the Lycée’s reputation, a word one might hear M. Bueche utter hundreds of times each day. He’s much less concerned with discipline than he is with profits, which are generated largely from the obscene fees students pay for laundry services, dining fees
, mandatory monthly travel expenses, books, extracurricular activities, and uniforms, all automatically billed to the parents.
“Guys, come on,” Lille pleads, looking nervous. “The whole stairwell stinks of smoke. Hamidou’s going to wake up.”
Lille has a fragile quality about her. She comes across as being much weirder and more damaged than the others. She has a series of peculiar grooming quirks, which she thinks improve her appearance but actually draw attention to it. She has an obsession with the width of her nose and draws black lines down the bridge of it to make it look narrow. She also cakes her face with white translucent powder and bleaches her long blond hair until it’s white and brittle, after which she teases it out. Between the crazy hair and the white face and the black lines, she’s like a mad wraith in designer clothes. Cressida calls her a sad soul.
Upstairs in the third-floor bathroom, they finally land in a tangled heap of coats and scarves and wet boots. Kersti lies flat on her back on the cold tile floor, staring up at the cracking brown ceiling. She’s happy. Happy because of Magnus’s attention earlier at the Brasserie, happy to be here now. She loves her strange new friends, loves being away from her family and their relentless in-your-face Estonian-ness, and most of all, loves her independence. And it all began right here, in this derelict bathroom on the third floor of Huber House, with its rusty toilets and damp musty smell of mothball and mold. Harzenmoser and Bueche are supposed to renovate it, but so far they haven’t found it necessary to put their francs toward modern plumbing. Most of the girls shower in the second-floor bathroom and use this one for middle-of-the-night peeing and smoking.
The first gathering of their little circle took place organically on a Saturday night in the fall. Cressida and Kersti went to sneak a smoke and discovered the other four girls already sitting cross-legged in a circle. Rafaella was drinking from a plastic bottle of Evian. She passed it to Cressida and Cressida had a swig. When she made the slightest grimace, Kersti knew it wasn’t water. Then she passed it to Kersti and Kersti drank from it and gagged. It was straight vodka, burning hot in her chest. She handed it back to Rafaella.
“Noa was just telling us about her brother,” Lille said. It was September and they were all still getting to know one another.
“He was kidnapped,” Noa told them matter-of-factly. She was from one of the wealthiest families in Holland. “That’s why my parents sent me here. They figured I’d be safer in Switzerland.”
“Is he okay now?” Kersti asked her.
“They killed him,” Noa said, expertly rolling tobacco into a thin paper. “My father paid the ransom but it didn’t matter.”
None of them said anything for a while. They passed around the vodka and watched smoke fill the room. Alison stood up to breathe with her head out the window.
“We all have our shit,” Noa said, tilting her head up and releasing a cloud of smoke into the air.
“My mother and I communicated by easel my whole life,” Rafaella offered.
“By easel?”
“She worked and traveled so much, she decided to set up one of her easels outside my bedroom with a giant pad of paper. I’d wake up in the morning and there would be a note. Have a good day at school. I’m going to Monaco for the weekend. And then at night I’d scribble back to her. I got an A on my test. I have a cold. So-and-so pulled my hair in class. Blah blah blah.”
Alison abruptly shut the window. “I masturbate every single day.”
The others fell absolutely silent.
“I’m not sure if other girls do that or what,” she went on. “Or if I’m, like, not normal. But I think about it constantly. Every minute. In class, doing sports. Except for when I’m skiing, that’s when my mind is clear.”
“Maybe it’s because you’ve never had a boyfriend,” Lille said.
“Maybe. Do you think something’s wrong with me?”
The other girls were watching her, mouths slightly agape. Kersti was hoping she would be able to look at Alison from that point on and not picture her masturbating.
“Because most of the time, if you look at me and I seem preoccupied, that’s probably what I’m thinking about.”
No one said anything for a long time. And then, like a cork popping, they all burst out laughing. Alison smiled and relaxed. Kersti was grateful for the levity.
“What about you, Lille?” Cressida said, turning her attention to the nervous little creature beside her.
“I was conceived in Lille, France, on my parents’ honeymoon,” she divulged, accepting her turn in the circle. “My dad lives in Oman and my mother splits her time between a pied-à-terre in Paris and our farmhouse in Westport. Mother doesn’t let me have friends over if the crystal chandeliers aren’t polished or if her hair hasn’t been professionally blown out.” She looked up at the others through her curtain of bleached hair and said, “And I hate the word nipple.”
Everyone laughed.
“Your turn,” Noa said to Kersti.
“She’s got a complex because she’s poor,” Rafaella answered for her.
“I’m middle class,” Kersti corrected, embarrassed.
“Same thing,” Rafaella remarked.
“It’s not the same thing,” Cressida said sharply. “And who gives a shit? You have no perspective, Rafaella. You don’t know anything about the real world.”
“You can’t be poor and go to the Lycée anyway,” Lille said.
“I’m here on the Legacy Scholarship,” Kersti admitted, her face hot with shame. “My dad has a travel agency and we live in a regular house. Not an estate, or a pied-à-terre, or a villa. Just a regular old house with shag carpets and forty-year-old wallpaper. I’ve never traveled, I don’t have my own bank account or credit card—”
And she was basically pretending to belong, but she left that part out.
“None of that shit matters,” Cressida said, speaking more to the other girls. “I love that you aren’t like the rest of us, Kersti. You’re probably the most normal, grounded one here.”
“Definitely more normal than Alison,” Noa joked.
Kersti felt the shame leaving her body. She sat up a little straighter, was able to look them all in the eye and own her place in their group. She looked at Cressida, surging with relief. Cressida had defended her to the others, stood up for her in a way no one else ever had before. And in doing that, Cressida had established how the others would treat Kersti from then on. By not judging her, she’d made it okay for everyone to accept her. Kersti would never forget that. She felt in that moment that she could finally be herself.
“What about you, Cressida?” Rafaella said. “What’s your deal?”
Everyone in the circle looked at Cressida.
“My chauffeur used to make me give him blow jobs,” she said.
The other girls looked down at the floor. Kersti was stunned. But then, with a mischievous smirk, Cressida said, “Just kidding.”
Kersti pinched her and they were all laughing and then all of a sudden Angela Zumpt shoved her head inside the bathroom. “I can hear you in my room!” she snapped, her face red. The smell of her body odor quickly filled the bathroom, cutting through all the smoke.
“Close the door!” Rafaella said, covering her nose.
“Be quiet or I go to Madame Hamidou,” Angela threatened.
Angela Zumpt’s hygiene was already a state of emergency at the Lycée. One morning, Kersti and Cressida were roused from sleep by a shriek of laughter on the second floor. They went downstairs to check on the commotion and discovered a cluster of girls standing in front of Angela’s room. Her door was covered with yellow police tape and a crudely handmade sign of skull and crossbones with the word quarantined above it.
“Here,” Nastia Panagakos said, handing Kersti a clipboard. “Sign our petition to force Angela to bathe or be suspended.”
The other girls standing outside Angela’s room started chanting, “Bathe! Bathe! Bathe! Bathe!” Kersti was reminded of her family’s chanting around the bonfire at
the festival of St. John.
Angela’s door opened and she popped out, looking confused. She took it all in, almost in slow motion, her eyes blinking, her mouth half open. First the police tape, then the sign Scotch-taped to her door. “Vass iss mean quarantine?” she asked, staring blankly at her tormentors. She wasn’t very bright. She was in the Econome program, which meant she was learning how to iron, sew, can fruit, and fold linens for her future. There were only a handful of girls left in the program—it was outrageously outdated—and most of them were from Japan.
“Iss mean you stink!” Nastia told her. “Everyone is going to sign that petition, so why don’t you just have a goddamn shower?”
“I’m not going to sign it,” Cressida said defiantly, shocking the rest of them. And then she strode heroically across the landing. In one swift movement, she ripped the yellow police tape off Angela’s door and crumpled it into a big ball, which she dropped at her feet. “Leave her alone.”
Someone at the other end of the hall whipped a stick of deodorant at Angela. It smacked her in the forehead, leaving a purplish mark, and then landed on the floor with a bounce.
The other girls whooped and laughed. “Bull’s-eye!” someone yelled.
“Who threw that?” It was Mme. Hamidou. She had appeared midway up the stairs.
The girls’ chanting tapered off into contrite mumbling. Angela’s pale oblong face was blank, but her eyes were filling with glassy tears.
“Madame,” Nastia said, mounting her defense, “Angela doesn’t shower or wear deodorant. I’ve tried speaking to her nicely, but she doesn’t care. It’s not fair to the rest of us—”
Mme. Hamidou looked from Angela to Nastia, her lips pursed into a taut thread. She picked up the deodorant and tucked it into the pocket of her robe. “Miss Zumpt,” she said, “Komm mit mir.” They disappeared inside Angela’s room, closing the door behind them.
The Finishing School Page 4