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To Sam
We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
—N. K. Jemisin
Part One
Belmont Girls
Chapter 1
BELMONT
Roanoke, Virginia, 1962
Daniella’s father steered the Dodge Pioneer up the serpentine drive of Belmont College, home to more than five hundred girls renowned for their Beauty and Brains, or at least that was what the boosterish tour guide who had shown Daniella around the previous spring had claimed. Just as the main quad came into view—a pleasing vista of faded brick buildings with white columns, the Blue Ridge Mountains serving as backdrop—they passed a gang of cheering students holding signs painted with the school colors of green and white: “We Love Our New Girls!” and “Honk If You’re a Monty!” and “Welcome to Heaven!”
Daniella’s father beeped his horn at the cheering girls, causing them to yell all the louder.
“How fun!” remarked Daniella’s mother, a woman who should have graduated from a school like this but had dropped out of Sweet Briar (only an hour’s drive away) after her second year, when she became pregnant with Daniella’s older brother, Benjamin, by the visiting history professor, the handsome, young, and Jewish Dr. Gold. The Golds parked in the visitors’ lot and, passing other pretty, fresh-faced girls carrying suitcases and pillows—many of whom were followed by their fathers, lugging trunks—they made their way to Monty House, the redbrick Colonial that was to be Daniella’s new home. There was a portico out front and a large Palladian window above the open front door. Waiting just inside was a stout woman who wore her silver hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. She introduced herself as Mrs. Shuler, Monty House’s dorm mother.
A faded Oriental rug, so thin in spots it was almost translucent, partially covered the dark wood floor of the entryway. Against the wall ticked a grandfather clock, and beside it hung an oil portrait of Georgina March, whose father founded the college. The whole place smelled of oranges, as if someone had polished all of the wooden surfaces with citrus oil. Mrs. Shuler noted that supper would be served at 6:00 p.m. in the dining hall and told Daniella that her room was on the second floor, the fourth on the right past the front staircase. Daniella’s roommate had already arrived. All Daniella knew about her was that her name was Evelyn Elliot Whalen, she went by “Eve,” and she was from Atlanta. Moments later, when Daniella walked through the open door of her new room, she was practically tackled by Eve, who flew through the air to envelop her in a hug. She smelled of roses—Joy perfume Daniella would soon learn and which she, too, would start wearing.
“You are Daniella, right?” Eve asked, no longer embracing her, but with both hands resting lightly on Daniella’s forearms, which were tan from tennis.
“Indeed, I am,” said Daniella, trying to sound breezy but feeling a little overwhelmed.
“Oh, I’m so excited to meet you! I don’t mean to be such a spaz, but I’ve been looking forward to this moment all summer! I thought I was going to room with Tate Pennington, but then she ended up going to Agnes Scott at the last minute to be near her boyfriend at Tech. And I was secretly so excited because that meant I would get to meet a whole new person!”
Daniella’s mother smiled brightly at her daughter.
“Well,” said Daniella. “I hope I don’t disappoint.”
Eve waved away that bit of blasphemy as if clearing the room of an unpleasant odor. She was taller than Daniella, at least five foot eight, and while she was far from overweight, her hips were curvy and her body was, if not large, present. She was not a girl who would ever fade into the background. She wore a kelly-green sleeveless shirtdress and a pair of Keds printed with watermelon halves. Her shoulder-length blond hair was teased and curled, so that it formed a bump on top, secured with a barrette, and flipped under at the ends. Daniella teased her brown hair, too, only first she straightened it using the comb attachment that fit on the end of the hose of her hair dryer. Left to its own devices it frizzed.
Eve had already set up her bed with a white eyelet spread and pink-and-green decorative pillows. On the far wall of the room, sitting on an antique coffee table, was a silver tea set on a silver tray. Eve noticed Daniella looking at it. “Grandmommy gave it to me. I guess there’s a tradition of girls hosting tea for each other?”
Eve conveyed this information with enough of a raised brow to let Daniella know that she recognized it was all a little silly. Daniella’s father stood off to the side, his lips pressed together in amusement. But Daniella’s mother was clearly delighted.
“Is that Strasbourg?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Eve.
“Daniella! Strasbourg is the pattern Mother Scott left you! Can you believe it? You two are a match made in heaven.”
“Oh, we’re going to have a ball!” gushed Eve.
• • •
After hugging her parents good-bye and watching them drive away, Daniella returned to Monty House to settle in. Eve was just finishing unpacking her trunk full of beautiful clothes. Daniella admired Eve’s Burberry trench coat (the same one Audrey Hepburn made famous in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and the rainbow of cashmere twin sets Eve hung in her closet, along with a little fox fur stole Eve’s grandmother had given her to wear to formals on chilly evenings. Daniella had her own collection of cashmere twin sets, but she owned three, not ten, and it had never even occurred to her that someone might bring a fur to college.
That night after their dinner plates were cleared and scoops of vanilla ice cream were served, Daniella and Eve lingered in the dining hall talking, long after the other girls had left. At one point Eve walked to the kitchen where the cafeteria ladies were cleaning up, taking her and Daniella’s empty bowls of ice cream with her. Daniella assumed she was bussing their table, but instead Eve returned carrying a half-pint carton of milk, a can of Hershey’s syrup, and one of their old bowls, which now contained a heaping second serving of ice cream. Eve then proceeded to make a milk shake for the two of them, dumping ice cream, milk, and chocolate syrup into a water glass, then swirling the concoction furiously with a spoon. After she drained her half of the shake, Eve patted her own stomach, saying that she’d better watch out or she would turn into a fat pig.
“Don’t say that about yourself,” scolded Daniella. “You’re beautiful.” Eve looked at her, surprised.
“Aw,” she said, and looped her arm over Daniella’s shoulder, giving her a little sideways hug.
Later, after hanging the framed Audubon prints of hummingbirds that Eve had brought and organizing their desks, the two girls stayed up till 3:00 a.m. talking, long after their other hall mates, who had joined them for a spell, had wandered back to their rooms. As the night progressed, Daniella surprised herself by telling Eve the awful secret that she hadn’t shared with anyone: that she was almost certain her father was carrying on an affair with Dr. Spool, the new lady professor in the history department at George Mason, where her father taught. That past spring Daniella had surprised him by showing up at his office one afternoon after tennis practice. She had wanted to talk to him honestly, and without her mother around to interject, about whether she should go to
Barnard or Belmont the following year. His door was closed, but the department secretary had assured her that he was in, so she knocked until he answered. When he finally opened the door, Dr. Spool had hurried out of his office, her blouse haphazardly tucked into her pencil skirt, her cheeks flushed.
Eve shared a shocking revelation of her own: Her mother’s best friend—Eve’s “Aunt Pooh”—had died in a plane crash that summer, a chartered plane filled with Atlantans returning from a European art tour. Upon takeoff in Paris, the plane had caught fire.
Eve blinked and her eyes pooled with tears. “You cannot imagine. So many of my parents’ friends died. It was just—it was biblical. Like a flood swept over Buckhead, wiping away so many good people.”
They continued to share the details of their private lives, Daniella telling Eve of the chronic nightmare she had been plagued with ever since she was nine years old, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being communist spies, the Rosenberg children losing both of their parents in the course of a single day. In her nightmare it was her own parents who were dragged away by the police, all the while Daniella screaming that they were innocent, that she needed them, she needed her mom and her dad. “My father is Jewish,” Daniella explained. “And while I was raised Unitarian, the fact that the Rosenbergs were Jews haunted me, as if that were the real reason they were killed.”
When the subject turned to sex (both girls confirmed they were virgins), Daniella confessed that over the summer her high school boyfriend had unhooked her bra and cupped her breasts in his hands. Eve said that one summer when she was twelve she hid in her brother Charlie’s closet and watched him change into his swim trunks so that she could see what a penis looked like. He was sixteen, and she was fairly certain he knew that she was in there, watching, though neither of them ever said anything to the other about it.
Both girls had older brothers, but neither was particularly close to her sibling. Eve reflected on how differently she and her brother were raised, that when Charlie got in serious trouble her father would hit him with a belt, but that he never hit her. She said she always felt guilty when Charlie was punished, but she noticed, too, that as they grew older her father listened to Charlie more and more, treating him like a man, whereas she felt she would always be cast as the family’s “baby,” adored but never particularly respected.
Daniella said that she didn’t know if her father really respected her mother, that when he spoke about politics or other matters of importance at the dinner table it was her and her brother he addressed, and not his wife, even though she had, in fact, been a stalwart volunteer for JFK’s presidential campaign. But it seemed as if Daniella’s father just couldn’t stop seeing his wife as the pretty college girl he had once seduced.
“At least your dad talks to you,” said Eve. “My dad would never even consider that I might have an opinion about that stuff.” She raised her legs and crossed them beneath her, intending to sit Indian-style on her bed, but just as she did she passed gas, loudly. Daniella wasn’t sure what to do—it had been drilled into her to ignore such things—but Eve started laughing so hard she snorted. And so Daniella started laughing, too, and then Eve passed gas again and it made Daniella laugh even harder, and Eve pointed out that when Daniella laughed her nostrils vibrated.
• • •
In the basement of each residence house lived a maid. The maids were there to straighten the common areas, to assist with afternoon tea, to clean the girls’ bedrooms, to do their laundry, even to do their ironing. A sophomore informed them, “If you need a dress or a blouse pressed, just leave it hanging on your door and it will be returned the next morning, wrinkle-free, presto change-o!”
Miss Eugenia lived in the basement of Monty House. She was an older woman, though Daniella could not say how old. Like all of the maids at Belmont, she wore a knee-length black uniform with a white apron tied around her waist, thick white hose covering her brown legs. Any time Eve saw Miss Eugenia she would grin and say, “Hey!” as if she were encountering a favorite cousin at a family reunion. Miss Eugenia always smiled politely and answered with a formal greeting, and she always called Eve ma’am. Eve told Daniella that she couldn’t see a maid without thinking of Ada, who had practically raised her back in Atlanta, spending five days a week at the Whalen house, letting Eve watch soap operas with her while she ironed the family’s clothes, fixing chicken and dumplings for dinner—Eve and Charlie’s favorite—on nights when their parents were out.
Eve and Daniella started bringing cookies down to the basement any time Eve’s mother sent some of Ada’s from home, in an attempt to “Only Connect,” the E. M. Forster edict that the dreamy youth group leader from Daniella’s church back home had adopted as his motto, and that Eve had latched on to as well under Daniella’s influence. In early October, Eve’s father sent a half bushel of Winesap apples from Ellijay, Georgia, where he had spent the week hunting. The apples were a perfect balance of sweet and tart, and so fresh the juice ran down their chins whenever they took a bite. Eve put most of the apples out in the common room for the other girls to enjoy, but she and Daniella decided to bring half a dozen down to Miss Eugenia.
It was midafternoon, the calmest stretch of the day. They found Miss Eugenia sitting in her lounge chair watching Central Hospital on the little black-and-white television that she kept on her dresser. “My baby,” she called it. Though her door was open, Eve knocked anyway.
Eugenia jumped and quickly stood. “Lord, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I not hear the bell? What you girls need?”
Every room at Monty House had an interior doorbell. If a girl needed something she just pressed the doorbell and Miss Eugenia would arrive.
“Not a thing, Miss Eugenia,” said Eve. “We just wanted to bring you some apples.”
“No, thank you, honey,” said Eugenia, sitting back down and returning her attention to the TV screen.
“But they’re so good! My daddy sent them fresh from Ellijay.”
“I ain’t got nothing but fake teeth in here,” said Eugenia, tapping at her top tooth. “Cain’t bite an apple.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Daniella.
“Wait, is that Dr. Lance Patterson?” asked Eve, pointing to the handsome man on the TV screen.
“It sure is, honey, and he supposed to be dead.”
“I know!” said Eve, making her way into the room and sitting down on the end of the narrow bed. “I watched all last summer.”
“Well, what happened is his cousin buried him alive in that cave, but what his cousin didn’t know was there was an old hobo already living in there, and that hobo fixed it up so they could get water from a little drip that came in through the rock, and he had all kinds of canned goods for them to eat. Dr. Patterson lived in that cave for six months, honey, six months! Till one day there was an avalanche and he just tumbled right out.”
“Oh my Lord,” said Eve, covering her mouth with her hand, the opal and diamond ring her mother had given her in honor of her sixteenth birthday twinkling in the television’s soft glow.
• • •
After that, Eve would go to Miss Eugenia’s room to watch Central Hospital any afternoon she wasn’t in class. Miss Eugenia didn’t exactly invite her, but she didn’t seem to mind the company, either, even offering Eve some of her Kraft caramels, which she sucked on like hard candies since she wasn’t supposed to chew them with her false teeth. Sometimes Daniella would go down, too, to try to talk with Miss Eugenia during the commercials. Daniella wanted to know where she was from, and did she have a husband, and did the two of them have children, and how much did she get paid for cleaning up after the Belmont girls?
Miss Eugenia spoke easily about her four children and three grandchildren, all of whom lived nearby in Roanoke, except for her oldest grandson, who had enrolled in the Army, but she would never give Daniella a straight answer about her salary. “I get by,” she would say.
Later Eve told Daniella it was bad manners to p
ry, to which Daniella responded that southern manners helped keep segregation in place. “My dad says it’s all part of an elaborate code to keep the racial lines firmly drawn.”
“That’s not true,” said Eve. “Manners are about making other people feel at ease.”
“Yeah, I’m sure Miss Eugenia feels really at ease with what she gets paid,” Daniella retorted. But then she wanted to take back her words, because Eve looked as if she might start to cry.
• • •
“Lord, I miss Ada,” Eve said the first week after Thanksgiving break. She told Daniella that besides a brief stay at her family’s farm in South Georgia, where she caught up with her brother and her cousins and even went hunting with the men, she had spent most of her time in Atlanta following Ada around like a dog, just going from room to room with her, getting in the way. She even offered to help clean, but Ada told her to quit being foolish.
“You’ve influenced me, you know,” Eve said. “I asked Ada how much she gets paid.”
“What did she say?” asked Daniella.
“That it was none of my business.”
“You could ask your dad.”
“I did. He said she probably doesn’t get paid enough, but that Mother can’t pay her more because then the other maids would start demanding more from their employers and Mother would be in trouble with all of her friends. So they try to make up for it in other ways. Like Daddy puts money in a savings account for her, and Mother often gives her old clothes that are still in really good condition, stuff she would normally take to the Nearly New.”
“Kind masters,” said Daniella.
Eve frowned. “They are kind. Don’t be mean.”
“Sorry,” Daniella said, feeling a little stung. They always talked honestly about their families, about what they did and did not like about them. Eve had never accused her of being mean before.
We Are All Good People Here Page 1