All Souls
Christine Schutt
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Also by Christine Schutt
Nightwork
Florida
A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer
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Harcourt, Inc.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego London
* * *
Copyright © 2008 by Christine Schutt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the
work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schutt, Christine, date.
All souls/Christine Schutt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Private schools—Fiction. 2. High school students—Fiction.
3. Female friendship—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.C55555A45 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007032814
ISBN 978-0-15-101449-1
Text set in Bell MT Std
Designed by Linda Lockowitz
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
A C E G I K J H F D B
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, organizations, and
events portrayed in this book are either the products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously for verisimilitude. Any other re-
semblance of places and characters in the book to any organization
or actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
* * *
To my students, of course
* * *
Contents
The Girl No One Knows 1
Fa La Lah 53
January 79
Romance 103
Numbers 133
Dance 145
Fools 169
Hives 187
Prizes 201
Acknowledgments 225
The Girl No One Knows
Fathers
Mr. Dell, in his daughter's room, stuck his face into the horn of a stargazer lily, one of a ... one of a ... must have been a dozen, and he breathed in and said wasn't that something. And wasn't it: the pileup of cards, a stuffed bear, a bouquet of balloons, a banner, a bed jacket, books on tape.
We love you, Astra! The chorus to his daughter was always the same, and he, too, said the same, but he did not look at her famished face, did not meet her eye, did not take her hand; he wheezed out only so much cheer. "That party at the Mortons'" was how he started. Mr. Dell stood between his daughter's bed and the window and described what he could of the Mortons' party. "I've been to Suki's before, Dad." Okay, he had forgotten, so other things, then. Not far into the kickoff fund-raiser, the host had stood on a piano bench to say he was not sorry to be so poorly acquainted with the parents gathered, but he expected to know a lot about everyone by the end of the school year when the money for the senior gift was raised. "Then Mr. Morton expected he would never see any of us again."
"That sounds like Suki's dad."
"Suki's mother is funny."
The room Suki's father had spoken in was a very big, cream-colored box of a room, a cake box, a hatbox, something large and expensive. Mr. Dell described the party to his daughter in the way Grace would have described it: how things looked and sounded, the gurgle of civility among designing adults. He described what it felt like to be known as the parent of such a child, his own, his only, his best, bright addition.
"Dear, dear Astra, how are you feeling?" he asked now.
"Daddy," Astra said, and she smiled when she told him how corny he was.
He told his daughter who had come to the Mortons'. Mrs. Forestal was there, so Mr. Forestal was not. Mr. and Mrs. Van de Ven, Mrs. Abiola, the Cohens, and Mr. Fratini were there. "I talked a lot to Alex's mother—is that woman crazy? The Johnsons were not in attendance. The headmistress, Miss Brigham, was there for a short speech, and she asked after you—everyone there asked after you, darling. Everyone sends love." Then he remembered that the Johnsons were in Europe meeting somebody royal.
Astra said, "The Johnsons have expensive fights that end with new jewels."
The Mortons' apartment was all bloody mahogany and damask. Crystal chandeliers, those plinking rainbows, were hanging everywhere. Double sconces, elaborate molding, herringbone floors. The caterers were using monogrammed family silver. The word expansive came to mind, or a three-tiered cake on a crystal stand, a monument in buttercream frosting, swags of sugar violets, silver dots. That was the equivalent dessert to the Mortons' apartment as far as Mr. Dell was concerned. He looked at Astra again and saw how tired she was; her eyelids looked swollen as if she had been crying, and perhaps she had cried. He hadn't been here for all the tests; he was at work.
"I wish I could be hungry," Astra said. She shut her eyes.
Good night, ladies, good night, ta, ta, or however it went. Mr. Dell thought literature should be a consolation, but what he most often remembered did not comfort him. He did not have his wife's gift, Astra's inheritance from Grace for hope and serenity. Sick as his little girl was, she yet lay hopeful of recovery—fearful, too, at times, at times overwhelmed, given to deep, jagged sobs, and yet ... she was sick and in pain on a sad floor in the hospital, and yet she seemed to feel his terror, his sorrow, and she consoled him by being mostly mild, sleepy, quiet. Most of the time when he visited, she slept and slept. She grew smaller.
Again he asked and again, day after day, "How do you feel?"
Better. Not well. Sick. Hurting. Hurting a lot. Here is where it hurts the most. Look at what they did.
Why was it hard to look when he had already looked into disaster, into the broken face of his beautiful wife in a bag on a gurney? Yes, he remembered saying to the figures standing behind him—a row of janitors, a man with a mop at attention was that who? Policemen? Morticians? Yes. My wife. This is Grace Walker Dell, yes. My wife.
What business had Grace there on that street at that hour? Why had she not been home, but she was saving money looking for a new lamp on Bowery. He wanted her here with him at this other, terrible bedside. He should not have to be alone.
Mothers
Theta Kovack called First Wok and ordered garlic chicken, noodles, soup. Two Cokes. Marlene, at her ear, said, "General Tsao's! Get General Tsao's!" But Theta said, "Aren't you on a diet?" and she scuffed off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse. The twenty she extracted from her purse felt damp. "For when the guy comes," she said, holding out the money. She let her skirt slip down her hips as she walked to her room and shimmied out of work. Of course, she didn't want to see herself, but she saw herself, or parts of herself, her belly rucked by the band of her slip, an angry redness she rubbed at. Glad she had not gone to the Mortons' party arrived wrongly dressed. Now the damp smell was surely hers, and nothing of Dr. Bickman's office—the minty winter-green of mouthwash, the cleansing alcohol, the doilies on the trays of tools—remained. A subway with a few stops and a three-block walk was all it had taken to grease Theta's face.
A Daughter
Miss Wilkes, undressing at home, sniffed the bitter smell at the underarms of her turtleneck and said, "My god!" She sniffed again. When did her sweat turn so pec
uliarly acrid? The face she saw in the mirror, her own, seemed still a girl's, not a teacher's, but the stink of her was something awful, old. True, the girls themselves were not always so fresh. Edie Cohen, in her usual rush, liked to announce she hadn't showered. The girls said, "Keep your arms down. Stay away!" But the girls got up close to each other and examined each other and were amused or mockingly repelled by what they sometimes found. "Want an Altoid?" Good girls mostly, polite, they offered her Skittles and mints, whatever they had secreted—and she allowed. Miss Wilkes said, "Yeah, I would like," and she took her favorite colors. They got up close for her to pick and seemed startled at what they saw. What did they see? But they were never so familiar as to fix her. They would let her go through a class smudged rather than say, "Miss Wilkes, you've got ink on your chin." Only Lisa Van de Ven had stopped her, had said, "Wait." Lisa it was who had tucked in the label of her shirt, who had said, "Miss Wilkes," holding out a box of Kleenex. Lisa Van de Ven, Lisa. Miss Wilkes was on the bed with the weight of her hand between her legs.
Mothers
In a corner apartment with a southwestern view of Park Avenue's islands bedded with begonias, glossy begonias, Suki Morton's mother held the phone in one hand and a drink in the other and heard her daughter's screed against that fat Dr. Meltzer and his chem class labs. "He keeps us late. He piles on the homework. We're seniors, for god's sake. We're under a lot of stress as it is. I hate Dr. Meltzer."
Mrs. Morton could not come up with an expression. Dr. Meltzer was a name attached to a fat man who smelled like the movies. Buttery and smoky at the same time. Butter-yellow teeth. Short-sleeved shirt, pocket protector, high waist, and waddle. Surely encountered in the movies but a teacher to be found in a public school, never one like Siddons. Mrs. Morton hung up the phone and said, "I never liked science."
Ten blocks south, Suki's best friend, Alex, was watching cheese melt over chips. She was talking to herself, rehearsing a college interview, saying that what she loved about this college was there were more boys than girls, better parties, good drugs. Alex was saying her ambition was to be the most famous party girl the school had ever known, and she knew what she was doing, and she could meet this goal.
Car Forestal twisted utensils through food she had mashed to look like war salvage, drought gruel, rancid scraps from boarding school. She was at the orphanage and eating with her baby "pusher," the tiny silver spade from her godmother. Car pushed and smoothed and rearranged the food; she made patterns.
"Look, Carlotta, if you're not going to eat it, at least stop this baby business. Not everything on your plate has to be mashed." Mrs. Forestal said she simply could not sit for hours and play the warden, and she pronounced Car's manners repugnant and left the table. Car excused herself elaborately—"May I please"—and made answer, "Why of course, my dear," and the girl left her plate of food that no longer looked like food and went to her room and drank water.
Sarah Saperstein and her father were talking about global warming, and Edie Cohen—Dewdrop to her father—was listening to her father talk about her older brother, Jake, the pride of the family, a sophomore at MIT who was making computer programs for Intel or Extel or Ontel, some techno-sounding company that had a tel to it. Edie Cohen's brother was one of the reasons she worked so hard; she had his career to live up to no matter what her parents said. Her parents said they didn't care what grades she got as long as Dewdrop could say she had given her all.
Ufia, the black princess, was eating chickpeas and telling her mother she didn't think Mr. O'Brien saw the racist significance of the Dickinson poem, at least not the way she did. "Just think of the term," she said. "'White Election.' Could anything be more obvious?"
Kitty Johnson had come home after seven from advisory with Mr. O'Brien, and her head ached. Kitty said it was a migraine-order headache, and she told the housekeeper she was going to bed. "I'm not going to be 'up to nothing' in my room, as you say. I won't be phoning anyone. I don't do that, anyway. I just don't want any dinner."
***
What other conversations were there? Was there still talk of the Dells, Astra Dell especially? Was the subject of her cancer old, or simply avoided because it diminished all the other griefs a healthy person felt? Here was a body dangerously sick: Astra Dell, that pale girl from the senior class, the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever, and she consumed.
CHF
The sofa Car sat on was smooth as a mushroom and so plumply overstuffed that no indented evidence of her remained when she stood up; in fact, there was no evidence of anyone's passing through her father's apartment, and she could only imagine the swaying enormity of the cleaning lady, who was so thorough in her work that the slats of light through the blinds seemed dust-less. Here all was sealed, unscented, unused, unmarked, yet the clock was wound and keeping time. Her father's drawers were empty; his closet, locked. Car had a key to her father's apartment, and this, she supposed, was enough, was a lot really, and meant she could wander and phone as she would, as she had and did last week, this week, any week, and because her father's number was unlisted and her mother didn't know it, Car was inaccessible. That man! was all her mother said. That man, Car's father, impeccably pressed and pleated, was surely in handsome company. Dearest girl. He wrote the occasional postcard that took weeks to get across the ocean. Dearest wren. Today in the Galleria Borghese, William stood in front of the Bernini and wept. You know the statue. Daphne breaking into branches. Her father was a character in a Henry James novel. Car lit up another cigarette and ashed it on the table.
Marlene
Marlene picked her nose and sent what she found in it flying across her room. She was a dirty girl, she knew that much, and whatever the girls in school suspected her of—stealing, farting, lying—was true. The slut part was not true, although she wished it were, but all the dirty parts—yes, she was that girl. Look at her messy room, the unresolve of such disorder. She had no ambition but to dizzy herself into absence. Smoking cigarettes helped. The nights when her mother came home and went straight to bed saying her feet were swollen, those nights Marlene often shamed herself into high feeling. She flashed her ass in the bright windows of the living room; she pulled her cheeks apart; she said, Kiss my a-hole; she said, Eat me. Ugly expressions she used as she would spit, and she picked at herself and made worse scabs. But who could see this now in the soft light of her bedroom? She wrote to Astra Dell and chewed her nails to a bloody quick she blotted on the draft of her letter ... Dear Astra. She meant what she wrote, the dear part. Of all the girls in her class, only Astra Dell had ever been genuinely kind to her and was, yes, was dear to her, and now Marlene was in a position to help Astra. To help Astra Dell! To be her friend as no other. I have never shared more than a hello nod or a smile with you, but the one time I saw you cry, I wanted to share those tears with you. I am thinking of you, which was purely the truth. Marlene was thinking of Astra and rumors of scorching treatments being used to cure her. Marlene wrote three pages, single-spaced, telling Astra about stupid things, school, Miss F. She either just sits there and waits for you to have some trigonometric moment or tells you that she cannot believe that you don't know it. Marlene's letters were filled with whatever she had overheard in the senior lounge, for she had found a place there for herself in the lounge. Alex began laughing hysterically over nothing in chemistry, and Dr. Meltzer kicked her out of the class. Marlene often sat in the corner of the lounge leaned up against the lockers, and from there she listened in, took notes, copied stories, scribbled, drew flowers. Alex was making a video of the senior experience, but Marlene was writing it all down for the sick girl.
Marlene wrote to Astra about her yearbook page. Marlene Kovack, Last Heard Saying: Nothing. Who wrote that? Marlene had some ideas—Suki Morton and Alex Decrow. Some joke.
But there's always got to be one person to hate in every class, right? Marlene wrote to Astra: Expect to see Alex's movie. She's shoving her camera into everyone's fa
ce. Even Marlene's, of course. Marlene had been asked to look into the camera and say something to Astra. Marlene, watching from her corner, had said, "Catch me in action," and then held as still as she could, hardly seeming to breathe. Alex filmed some girls from below because, as Alex said, the angle was so fucking freaky, possibly original; the way a little kid sees the world is mostly oily, prickly legs. Marlene believed Alex wanted everyone to look ugly. That was school for Marlene, an ugly ongoing movie, but now suffering had another meaning, real suffering led to real death. Dear Astra, I hope to see you even before you get this letter, and she did hope to see Astra; this was the truth.
Siddons
Dembroski was checking off attendance in senior class meeting.
Alex Decrow?
Edie Cohen—sick.
Marlene Kovack—
Suki Morton?
Later Mrs. Dembroski wondered at the suspended notation for Marlene Kovack; she couldn't account for her own indecision on the matter. Where was Marlene on Wednesday?
Unattached
Anna Mazur sat near the end of the bed and watched Astra's breathing because everything else she looked at was hospital-like, too white and too clean, bandaged, tubed, needled, starched, so that the rise and fall of Astra's breathing in the bed was what she watched, the way she might watch a clock, as if the visit could be hurried by such attention, but her time at the hospital was like all time at the hospital and slow! A nurse came in and pinged the IV sac, and later the nurse came back and said, "Still sleeping is she?" and Anna wondered at the sameness of hospital talk, remembering her brother Mitchell in a cold room where he slept and slept away what little time was left. The unfairness of things. Anna Mazur knew Astra from the English Speaking Union's Shakespeare contest. "You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand." Anna had never been Astra's teacher; she had only stepped in to coach when, last year, Miss Hodd was out and Astra had needed help to prepare for the contest. Anna liked the girl very much and wished she had taught her, wished she had been a favorite, but Anna had never been anyone's favorite. (She was no Tim Weeks.) Maybe in a different school or another profession, she might be valued more. Oh, she had been liked as a teacher, yes, even well liked on occasion, but nobody's best, nobody's favorite. She had been three years at Siddons and had never seen Tim Weeks's apartment. Anna stared at the blanketed rise of the sick girl's feet. She thought Astra's toes would break off if she touched them, and so she backed out of the room in good-bye, glad to be gone and down so many floors and into the unseasonably flushed and humid yellow air. She shivered to be alive, but the unfairness of things—criminals turning on the spit of their crimes, the crooked and maimed and unspeakably wicked thrumming with health while the innocent died—saddened Anna, and she called Tim Weeks once outside.
All Souls Page 1