The Finishing School

by Joanna Goodman

  With the show over, everyone retreated. Cressida said nothing, but she seemed upset. Kersti was impressed once again by her unexpected compassion for Angela Zumpt. A girl like Angela was utterly beneath Cressida, not even worthy of her kindness, yet she’d jumped in to protect her, ripped the sign off her door, showed her solidarity for no apparent reason. Just as she had done for Kersti. She had a good heart beneath her beautiful surface, which made Kersti love her all the more.

  Since then, these girls have become Kersti’s best friends, each one special in her own way. Beautiful, brilliant, fractured. There’s a palpable brokenness in each one of them, a lonely interior life or a penchant for drama. Kersti occasionally tries to figure out her place in the group, but all she can come up with is that she’s their mascot for Reality.

  Alison immediately opens the window again, letting in a rush of frigid air.

  “Close the fecken window!” Noa cries. “It’s minus a thousand out there.”

  “I have a game tomorrow,” Alison says. “I’ll close it if you Eurotrash put out your butts.”

  No one does.

  “Did you see Magnus tonight?” Rafaella says. Magnus Foley attends the day school and lives with his uncle a few blocks from the Lycée. He has spiky blond hair and blue eyes, both the gift of phenomenal genes from his Swedish mother and Irish, music producer father. He lives in Malibu during the summer, where he spends his time surfing and playing guitar. He’s smart and sarcastic, too, which, if you put it all together, basically makes him perfect.

  “I love his new haircut,” Noa says, sucking on her misshapen hand-rolled cigarette.

  “He still likes Cress,” Lille reminds them. “There’s no hope for any of you.”

  Kersti is stung but doesn’t say anything. She likes Magnus, too. Has quietly liked him since their first math class together. And she thought, given how he always talks to her in class and how he looked at her all night tonight, that he might like her back.

  “Magnus is not my type,” Cressida says, and Kersti is secretly overjoyed. She was sure he’d been staring at her most of the night at the Brasserie. “I like someone else anyway.”

  “Who?”

  Before Cressida can answer, the door flies open and Mme. Harzenmoser appears. Lille lets out a soft gasp and they all drop their cigarettes in the toilet.

  Chapter 5

  TORONTO—October 2015

  Kersti is lying on her bed with her laptop on her chest. She opens the link that Dr. Gliberman emailed her with information about a new donor agency in Minnesota and, after scrolling through the potential donors—most of them blond, rosy, and descended from Vikings—she actually starts to feel excited. She stops at one she really likes, a twenty-four-year-old with white-blond hair and prerequisite blue eyes, a perfectly shaped oval face, a straight nose with a slightly upturned tip, and full lips. No feature that would be jarringly different from Kersti’s, if the child was to look like her real mother.

  The donor is wearing a tank top and shorts in her photo, her skin sun-kissed. Her hands are on her hips and her expression is one of self-satisfaction, as though she’s just finished running a marathon or climbing a rock or producing a shitload of viable eggs. An overachieving reproductive savior, that’s what she is.

  Kersti saves the profile and shoots an email to Dr. Gliberman. I found her. Finally, this is one she can show Jay with confidence. She grabs her laptop and runs downstairs to Jay’s office. He’s sitting at his desk, sifting through contact sheets from a recent photo shoot, surrounded by all the things that make him Jay. His framed ADCC Scarlett Letter Award for best ad agency 2009; a signed poster of George Lois’s 1969 Esquire cover with Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup; Lois’s book Damn Good Advice.

  “Look at her,” Kersti says, opening her laptop.

  “You’re finally agreeing to a ménage-à-trois?”

  “She’s a donor, Jay.”

  His mood instantly changes and she can feel his shoulders tensing in her arms.

  “You’ve been doing this behind my back?” he says.

  “No. I’m just . . . I wanted to start.”

  “Egg donation is illegal in Canada, by the way. Did you know that?”

  “This agency is in Minnesota,” she explains. “They have an arrangement with Gliberman’s clinic. We would fly our donor in for the procedure. He’s the only doctor in Toronto with a donor program—”

  “We agreed to not talk about it for a while.”

  “I just wanted to check out some profiles,” Kersti said. “Look how beautiful she is.”

  “It wouldn’t even be yours. Not by blood.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “You’ve officially become that woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “The desperate, obsessed woman who has to have a baby to feel okay about herself. You swore you’d never become her.”

  Kersti takes a step back, reeling.

  “Remember the contract?” he flares, opening one of his desk drawers. “Here! I kept it!”

  He pulls out a piece of paper and waves it in her face. She wrote it not long after their first IVF cycle failed. She wanted to start another cycle right away, but Jay was reluctant. She decided to persuade him the best way she knew how. One night, when he was reading in bed, she sauntered in wearing fishnet stockings, black Manolo pumps, and a sheer white baby-doll trimmed with black lace. There was a piece of paper between her teeth. She approached the bed and straddled him. He pulled the paper out of her mouth.

  “I know when we started this journey I swore I wouldn’t become one of those self-pitying, baby-obsessed freaks,” she said. “And I’m ashamed to admit I’ve had my moments lately.”

  “That shrine to your fertility gods was a bit much,” Jay joked.

  “It wasn’t a shrine,” she played along. “Just a few talismans to our fertility gods, Metsik and Peko. Anyway, I drew up this contract.”

  She read it out loud to him.

  I promise not to start wearing frumpy pajamas. I promise to stay up past ten, even the nights before I have to go in for bloods at five in the morning. I promise to pleasure you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed.

  “That’s a good one,” he interrupted, squeezing her nipple under the baby-doll.

  I promise never to join an infertility support group. I promise not to spend any more money on Reiki or acupuncture. I promise to let go and accept our fate before we go bankrupt or if our marriage starts to suffer.

  Now Jay is waving the contract at her. “Remember this?”

  “But we’ve come this far, Jay. It’s crazy to stop now with nothing to show for it.”

  “I’m so tired of who we’ve become.”

  “What are you saying?” she asks him. “You’re tired of our marriage?”

  “What marriage?” he counters. “You don’t seem to feel we have one without a baby.”

  Kersti is silent.

  “I’m going to the Four Seasons tonight,” he says. “I want to be alone.”

  “Jay, I’m sorry I looked at donors—”

  “I’m not even sure we can get back what we had,” he interrupts. “We don’t want the same things anymore.”

  “So it’s done then?” she says. Even as she disbelieves it, the cold reality of his decision settles in her bones. “Just like that? We’re finished trying?”

  Jay glances at the pretty egg donor on her screen, makes a point of sighing, and leaves the room.

  Alone in his office, Kersti tries to absorb what’s just happened. He seems to mean it this time. She has no choice but to sit with that.

  Now what? she wonders.

  The truth is, she knows exactly what she’s going to do. She’s probably known since Jay first mentioned it the other day.

  As a plan begins to form in her mind, she realizes she’s actually a little bit relieved that Jay has put her baby crusade on hold. In spite of her inevitable disappointment, there’s also the budding potentia
l for something new in her life.

  She wants to know what happened to Cressida. Maybe she’s always wanted to know. She’s never felt quite ready to go there, but now the timing feels fated. Here is her opportunity to start talking to people about what happened in Lausanne, including Cressida’s mother; to explore all the unanswered questions she shut the door on almost twenty years ago. And if what she discovers on her journey turns into a new book, so be it.

  Deirdre Strauss lives in Boston. She has a place on Beacon Hill, where she’s been since Armand’s fatal heart attack in 2000. Visiting her now feels like the inevitable next step.

  The first time Kersti met Cressida’s mother, she thought she resembled a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. She was petite and ethereal, with skin like milk and haunting aqua eyes. Her tiny, childlike figure was dwarfed by an enormous blazer and swags of mothball-size pearls knotted around her slender neck. Deirdre, with her pale, veiny hands, like paper-thin insect wings. And then there was the way she gazed at and spoke about Cressida, right in front of her, as though she was a trophy she could take down from the shelf whenever she wanted, like one of her prized Tony Awards.

  “She’s going to accomplish great things,” she once stated, with absolute confidence. “I envy the life that lies ahead for her.”

  Kersti has always wondered if what happened to Cressida was karmic retribution; comeuppance for her recklessness and her insatiable sense of entitlement. That’s how Kersti first rationalized it anyway, even blaming herself for secretly wishing that Cressida would eventually be held accountable.

  Kersti has to wonder now if the same holds true for her. What if her inability to conceive is somehow her fault, the result of her own inadequacy and passivity? Punishment for the things she did not do, the bad thoughts she had about herself and others, or simply for everything she failed to be?

  Maybe if she can find out the truth about what really happened to Cressida, she might somehow be relieved of this burden of guilt and self-condemnation.

  Chapter 6

  LAUSANNE—October 1995

  “Good evening, girls,” Mme. Harzenmoser says, stepping inside the cramped bathroom. She towers above all six of them, her legs slightly apart, her hands on her thick hips.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” they mutter, not one of them daring to look into her face.

  She looks at her watch. No one moves. “Do you know what time it is?” she asks them.

  No one answers.

  “Does Madame Hamidou allow you to be in here after curfew?”

  “No, Madame.”

  “Does she allow smoking in here?”

  “No, Madame.”

  “Has the Helvetia Society been resurrected?” she says, the hint of a smile coming into her eyes.

  “No, Madame.”

  Helvetia is the national symbol of Switzerland. There’s a sculpture of her down by the tennis courts—a replica of the real one that overlooks the Rhine—with braided hair, a floral wreath and draping toga, and a spear and shield in either hand. The school’s famous mission is written in stone at her feet: Preparing Young Women to Become Citizens of the World.

  “Was there really a secret society here?” Rafaella asks Mrs. Harzenmoser.

  Up until now, Kersti assumed the stories about the infamous Helvetia Society were merely urban legend.

  “Of course there was,” Mme. Harzenmoser says, sounding almost offended by Raf’s skepticism. And then she does something absolutely unexpected: she sits down cross-legged in their circle. She’s surprisingly agile given how tall she is. Kersti imagines she was one of those people who used to practice yoga. Maybe she took a sabbatical from the Lycée in the sixties or seventies and went off to India on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Looking at her now, with her silver braid resting on her shoulder like a pet snake, Kersti can picture her in her youth, a free spirit who was unwillingly tethered to this school like a balloon tied to a child’s wrist. Someone who was handed a certain life—one she would not necessarily have picked for herself—but who never had the inner fortitude to leave it, or even to know she could have made a different choice.

  “Was the Helvetia Society like the Skull and Bones?” Alison asks her.

  “Well, interestingly, it was an American student named Mary Oxford who started it,” Mme. Harzenmoser explains. “She was from the East Coast and her older brother was a member of Elihu, one of the secret societies at Yale.

  “Mary chose the six most outstanding female students at the Lycée to join her in a secret society based on the tenets of Elihu. The idea was to champion the cause of their generation—suffrage—which was really gaining momentum in the States. In those early days, the Helvetians’ raison d’être was social justice and philanthropy. That’s why my father approved of it.”

  Kersti glances over at Cressida, wondering if she already knows any of this, but her expression offers no clue.

  “Eventually,” Mme. Harzenmoser continues, “the causes changed—war, temperance, feminism, and then, coming full circle, women’s right to vote in all the cantons of Switzerland, which only happened in 1971.”

  “Weren’t you running the school then?”

  “I was.”

  “And the students were allowed to have secret meetings?”

  “They did good philanthropic work, which, in turn, was good for the school’s reputation,” she explains. “So we allowed it.”

  “What happened?” Lille asks.

  “The Helvetia Society fizzled out in the seventies. By then it had become a glorified sorority,” Mme. Harzenmoser remembers. “There were no causes to rally the girls, and drugs had become prevalent on campus.” She pronounces it drogues. “Finally, in 1974, Monsieur Bueche expelled two students for vandalism. They were both Helvetians, so we made the decision to ban the meetings once and for all. They were serving no more purpose other than to cause trouble.”

  “Was Madame Hamidou here then?”

  “Oh yes, she started in the early sixties. She was very attached to those girls who were expelled, so it must have been hard for her. You know how she treats you, like you’re her own children. She’s always been very protective.”

  “Wasn’t expelling them for vandalism kind of extreme?”

  “Monsieur Bueche felt it was the only thing to do,” Mme. Harzenmoser says pragmatically, and then she claps her hands together and rises to her feet. “Now to bed,” she announces, her tone changing. “And I will have to let Madame Hamidou know that you’ve been smoking in here. You’ll all have detention next Saturday.”

  “Madame Harzenmoser?” Lille says, as she reaches the door. “What did those girls vandalize?”

  Mme. Harzenmoser turns back to them. “Our statue of Helvetia,” she says.

  The next night after supper, Cressida and Kersti go to the teachers’ lounge to speak to Mme. Hamidou. They find her grading science papers with a trademark cigarette between her lips. The room is cloudy and reeks of Gauloises. Cressida sits down in an armchair and Kersti sits cross-legged at her feet, leaning her head against Cressida’s legs. Cressida absently starts playing with Kersti’s hair.

  “What can I do for you?” Hamidou says, in her peculiar accent. It turns out she’s half Filipino, born in Algeria and raised mostly in France.

  “Why were those two girls from the Helvetia Society expelled in ’74?” Cressida asks, stealing a Gauloises from her pack. She’s outrageously bold with Mme. Hamidou, knowing as she does that she’s untouchable. Kersti still isn’t sure if it’s because Hamidou adores her like a daughter or because Cressida simply doesn’t give a shit if she gets expelled.

  Hamidou looks surprised. “Why do you bring that up out of the blue?” she asks. “It was twenty years ago.”

  “Harzenmoser told us about it last night.”

  “Harzenmoser?” Hamidou repeats. “Since when does she talk to the students?”

  “She was patrolling Huber last night.”

  “Hmm.” Mme. Hamidou looks annoyed to hea
r of this intrusion on her turf, even if it is the director of the school. “She must be lonely.”

  “You’ve never mentioned the expulsions before,” Cressida says. “Which is strange, considering how much you love to warn us about how Old Girls got into trouble.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, you frequently use Lycée lore to make veiled threats,” she teases.

  Hamidou smiles. The spaces between her teeth are brown. “More like cautionary tales,” she clarifies. “Vandalism has not been an issue since then.”

  “So it was vandalism?”

  Hamidou nods.

  “What did they write on the statue?” Kersti asks her.

  “I never knew,” she says. “Monsieur Bueche had it removed by morning. Whatever it was, he thought the punishment fit the crime.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?”

  “Bof,” she says dismissively. “I’ve always cared more about the students than the Lycée’s reputation. Of course I was against the expulsions. I tried to persuade him to be more lenient, but when Bueche make up his mind, fini.”

  “What were their names?”

  Hamidou stubs out her cigarette and reaches for another. “Brooke Middlewood and Tatiana Greenberg. They were both American. The Helvetians were mostly American. The popular girls, the overachievers, as you say.”

  Hamidou stands up and goes to the window. She opens it and lets in some air.

  “What happened to the other Helvetians after that?”

  “They graduated.”

  Cressida looks thoughtful. Something is on her mind. After a pause, she says, “What do you think they spray-painted on the statue that got them expelled?”

  Hamidou shakes her head, looking sad. “Bueche wanted those girls out of the school,” she states. “That’s all I know for sure.”

  Chapter 7

  TORONTO—October 2015

  Kersti leans back in her seat and stares out the window, tuning out the flight attendant’s safety speech. Her thoughts return to her earlier conversation with Jay and she can feel herself getting angrier and angrier. How dare he give up? He knows what’s at stake, how much it means to her.