Love and Lechery at Albert Academy

by Dolores Maggiore

  Katie stood up, squared her shoulders, and tossed her pageboy back over her shoulder. She appeared years older, despite her Mickey Mouse nightshirt.

  “I have to go with you.” She thrust her chin in my direction.

  In tears, I grabbed her. “Yes,” I said. “You will. Just to her door.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  The Eve of Mothers’ Weekend

  A new calm seemed to settle over me. I dressed in my favorite Fair Isle sweater and turquoise wool skirt. I rubbed my hand slowly over the still unpilled knit. I knew I could handle this ordeal calmly. I had lost enough control for a lifetime. I was determined to take it back!

  Katie returned from making the phone call to her father. She too appeared at ease. She had taken care of what we could: her father had made the reservation at the Inn for my mother and called to surprise her.

  I didn’t have a plan yet about what to tell my mother. There was a lot to tell, but in stages. The most important thing was to spare my mother the humiliation of hearing mortifying news from an authority figure, Miss Craney. Let’s see…that I was a queer, that maybe there were pictures proving that, that I had caused a girl, Dorotea, to go missing, and last but not least, that I would be ostracized, chased from this prestigious institution and every other one in the future.

  But for now, I took Katie by the hand. I smiled and in a low, sweet tone said, “I love you. That’s the most important thing. I’ll be okay, Katie, and that’s because of you.”

  Katie placed her hand on my cheek and said, “No, that’s because you’re you. We’ll do this together. I’m ready.”

  I helped Katie with her pea jacket and wrapped her scarf around her upturned collar. I started playing with her hat, pulling it down over her eyes, but she held my hand away. “No, I have to keep an eye on you.”

  We laughed as she adjusted my earmuffs and attached the frog toggles of my stadium coat.

  The walk, side-by-side to Damper Hall and Craney’s office, flew by, aided by the wind and my newfound determination and cockiness.

  Katie mumbled, “You certainly ate your Wheaties this morning.”

  I stopped and said, “Uh huh. I’m ready for a tennis match right now! I’ll do this from here.”

  We had arrived at Craney’s door.

  “Break a leg?” Katie whispered with a puzzled look on her face.

  “I’m going to,” I answered, raising my chin.

  I had decided I wasn’t going to wait for an invitation from Craney. I knocked and entered her office without ceremony nor permission.

  Craney was pacing. She hadn’t finished setting the stage or the control for this contest of wits. Her wide-eyed look and wringing of hands betrayed her unpreparedness.

  She attempted to regain the upper hand. “Sit!” She tried a power serve, but her tone faltered as she missed her mark.

  “I’ll stand, thank you.” I added “Head Mistress” for respect. I had returned the play.

  She coughed and smiled, trying to get into the best position for her next move. She chose a soft lob.

  “My dear, I just thought I’d give you a gentle reminder, tomorrow being Mothers’ Weekend.”

  “Yes. I know. I do my best work the night before tests and trials.” Right back at her.

  She tried to get me with a short lob. “My dear, you have choices.”

  “I’ll take that under consideration,” I shot back.

  I astounded myself with my cockiness. Where was it coming from? And then…

  Craney fired a long shot, “Hmm. No news from Dorotea, and so sorry, dear Pina, your sweet friend Alda’s not here to help you.”

  “Hmm. So strange.” I had to keep up, run ahead of her. I was almost out of breath and in the backcourt.

  Craney attempted a drop shot. “And dear Katie, a motherless child. Such a shame. Where’s her father’s help now?”

  “That’s quite all right, Miss Craney. My mother loves Katie like a daughter. We’ll be together for Mothers’ Weekend.” I let that drop back on her.

  “Oh.” She came up short.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Craney. See you on Sunday.” Game!

  I exited, triumphant. I elbowed my way through the velvet drapes, grabbed Katie by the hand, and raced down the hallway to the exit doors.

  “Huh?” asked Katie.

  “Sweetie, my tennis lessons really paid off.” I smirked. “I told her ‘till Sunday’. Hot damn!”

  “You sure about this?”

  “Sure.”

  “Stop! You’re speeding. What the heck happened?” Katie kept yanking on my arm to tell her the details.

  Now, outside, I risked letting out a sis-boom-ba cheer. “Yay. Katie, I did it.”

  “What? Flipped your lid?”

  “I stood up to her. Finally!” I said.

  “Jeez, Pina…You did?” Katie softened her tone.

  “Yeah. I had to.”

  “Oh no.” Katie stopped short on the path to our dorm. “She’ll kill you.”

  I grabbed Katie’s arm and pulled her along, skipping and laughing.

  “But, she didn’t. Besides, I have nothing to lose except my self-respect if I don’t speak up. Don’t you see? I was so darn scared. I let her scare me. All she had to do was act like she knew I was a queer, and I froze. It was as if that look of hers, the one where she’s almost undressing you with her eyes, that look could see everything and could tell the whole world. Like I was walking around with a big ‘Q’ for queer on my forehead.”

  Katie pulled me into our dorm, which was totally empty. Everyone else was off with early arriving moms. She wrapped her bulky blue wool-coated arms around me. She held me so tight, I thought the anchor from her pea coat button would leave its imprint on my cheeks.

  “No, Pin. You have a ‘W’ up there. ‘W’ for wonderful!” She mussed my hair and murmured, “God, I love you.”

  “But, but…I was so ashamed…” I lowered my head. Katie pulled it up and looked me straight in the eye. “No. Not anymore!”

  Filled with the notion of nothing to lose, we lay about on my bed for a good hour. Craney could do whatever she had to. The girls were gone from the dorm, as was Mademoiselle. We could just be.

  We laughed at some of my posters on the wall of Don and Phil Everly and oohed and aaahed over the one of Mont Saint-Michel in France. We talked of going there someday together. We were just two sixteen-year olds doing what sixteen-year olds do: dreaming, being silly, liking our closeness.

  Katie sat up without warning. “What do you mean about your tennis lessons?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s like I saw her words coming at me like tennis balls, hard shots I had to return, backhand, forehand, anyway possible.”

  “Just focused on the ball?” Katie said.

  “Yup. Like Althea. You know, my favorite champion, Althea Gibson.”

  “Yeah, right, my little Althea!”

  We talked a bit about tennis and whether Althea Gibson faced discrimination as a Negro (and as a lesbian, maybe) in 1955. What psychological games did she have to play?

  Katie sat up again. She had stopped laughing. “Your mom?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Oh, sweetie…”

  “Yeah. Craney’s not finished with me by a long shot. It’s not over—” I said.

  “Please don’t say ‘till the fat lady sings.’”

  I leaned over and ruffled Katie’s hair. She apologized. I hadn’t forgotten about my mother and how serious this was. I was just taking a long breather.

  “I am scared,” I whispered.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “Keep telling me how much my mother loves you—and your dad.”

  We decided to go to Eunice’s for burgers and malts. No Albert girls would be caught dead there with their mothers. We told each other stories about our previous summer in Maine. We giggled about all the pranks we had pulled and how my mother had begged Katie to help me be more ladylike. We reminisced about Katie’s father and Joe and ho
w they had fallen in love, like us. All of these things had happened, Katie reminded me, under my mother’s gaze. This time, though, my mother could not choose not to see. I would have to open her eyes the very next day.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Mothers’ Weekend

  A crisp, cold morning greeted me. I shivered with the November chill—and at the thought of my mother’s visit later in the day.

  Katie warmed up the day, bursting into the room, chirping, “Good morning, Sunshine!”

  I rolled my eyes and smirked. “Come here, Miss Sunshine.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be all gloomy,” she said.

  “Yeah. That’ll come soon enough.” I let my voice trail off, matching my mood.

  “Pina, I can walk you to the Greyhound Station to get your mom, then disappear. Okay?”

  “Yeah, that’ll help.” I sighed.

  Dressed and ready to deal with the day, we walked mostly in silence. Katie made me promise I would wake her up later that night to tell her what happened. I agreed, knowing I would need her later just as I really needed to run away with her now.

  Too late to run. The flashing neon sign of the long, gray racing dog came into view. We had arrived at the station. The loud speaker crackling out the incoming bus from New York City told me it was way too late to run.

  I felt Katie’s fleeting touch on my cheek and watched her walk away. I could tell by her slow gait that a part of her wanted to stay here and fight this out with me. Only Katie wouldn’t fight. She would melt my mother’s heart with her soft, lingering look of love and admiration—or my mother and me alike. Maybe.

  ****

  The Greyhound slid into its bay. My mother descended the stairs elegantly and slipped into the role of the old-moneyed mother of a prep school girl. The only problem was my mother was neither old money nor new, and I was a student at the Albert Academy only thanks to the generosity and pull of Dr. McGuilvry. We both had roles to play out. The curtain had lifted.

  The last thing I needed was my mother attempting to put on airs. Craney could pierce that bubble with a pinprick! I wasn’t yet convinced that Craney had really found Katie and myself en flagrant délit, as Mademoiselle would say. I wasn’t even sure when or what “in the act” would have looked like to Craney. Did she have actual proof? Didn’t matter. Craney’s accusation would be proof enough for my mother.

  Getting kicked out of the Academy would definitely kill my Ivy League hopes. I didn’t think Doc could salvage anything. Craney would blackball me from anything good in the future. And my parents, once I was yanked out of here? What? Send me to a convent? Watch me like a hawk? Make me date the ugly, bepimpled son of a distant Italian friend? Or, realistically, following the current cure for lezzies, send me for shock treatments?

  The worst would be the shame. I’d never hear the end of my parents’ asking, “How could you? You must be sick.” Was I?

  My mother’s peck on my cheek and typical greeting, “Hi, honey!” brought me back to reality. I took her suitcase, a new classy one for the occasion, and admired her lush felt hat. We were off to an okay start—that is, until she picked at my cheek to see if “that” was a pimple.

  We had dinner in the small restaurant next to the Inn where she was staying. That gave me the opportunity to get a head start on the Pina-Katie stories I knew she would be exposed to. Craney had the reputation for inviting parents to a luxury tea and then slowing her pouring to ask, “Oh, by the way, do you know your daughter’s pregnant?” I didn’t know how Craney would approach my mother, only that she would.

  How to begin: with the tried and true version, “You know, Katie and I have been really good friends…” or “Gee Mom, I have something really important to tell you…” No. I couldn’t do it.

  “You’re not eating,” I heard her say. I immediately shoveled some peas into my mouth, serving the double purpose of satisfying her and keeping my mouth busy. Before I knew it, I found myself saying, “You know, Mom, I really like Katie.”

  “I’m so glad,” she said. “You’ve finally found a good friend. And what about that nice Italian girl, Alda?”

  Shit. Here we go. “She’s good.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad I’ll be able to chat with her mother. The father, no. I think he’s involved.” She trailed off. I knew she meant Mafioso.

  “But Mom.” I started to panic. I needed a running start, uninterrupted so I wouldn’t chicken out. “Listen! Katie…”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, we’re really close.”

  “Now, have you gone and had a fight with her? What is it with you? Why do you always have to start something?” She reached for more salt.

  “Mother!”

  “Well, you usually do.”

  “Mom, stop! We haven’t had a fight. Nothing like that. Mom, Katie and I, well, it’s like I love her.”

  “Mmm. Uh huh. Pass the sugar, please.”

  “You know, like l-o-v-e. We didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “That’s natural, like sisters or twins.”

  “Mom, we’re not sisters.”

  “I know, of course. But, close, that way.”

  Well,” I stammered. Did she need a picture? “Well, that way, and not. Well, not platonic.”

  “How’s that, honey?”

  “What I’m saying is I like her like a boy, like I’m her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, honey, that can’t be.” She seemed to be doing a boy’s fall shopping list in her mind: one pair of boy’s socks, a pair of jockey shorts, boy’s loafers; no, they won’t work.

  “Mom, that can be. It is.”

  “Pina!” Now she stared at me, as if checking to see if I had breasts and girl features. “Pina, what exactly do you mean?” She looked down at her lap to brush off imaginary crumbs.

  “Mommy, just look at me. I think I’ve fallen in love with Katie. There, I’ve said it.”

  A far-away look crossed her face as she smoothed the peak of her custard with her spoon, back and forth. Finally, she looked up with tears in her eyes.

  “Oh my,” she said. “There are some girls like that, just too good to be true. And we stay bosom buddies the rest of our lives through children and husbands and grandchildren.”

  Shoot! I thought she was getting it.

  “Yeah. Kind of like that, but…” I closed my eyes, shut them tight, and covered my face with my trembling hands.

  “Wait. You don’t mean…”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Not one of them?” she said. She held her breath, gulped some water, and started to fan herself with her hankie. I guess it seemed safer to both of us not to mention the “L” word, to keep it as far away as possible.

  “Yes, Mom.” I stopped short of saying, I am, what? A lesbian? A queer?

  “We didn’t raise you that way.”

  “And what way is that?”

  “Don’t get smart with me! You’re not sick, like them.”

  “They? They are not sick. They’re…I am…No! I’m not.”

  ”Sick or not, what would people say? What would they think of your father and me?”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Then just wipe that thought out of your head. You tell Katie you made a mistake; you like boys, I know you do. Remember that handsome boy two summers ago?”

  “Billy? God! Now you want me to sleep with boys?” Jeez. Why did I have to start getting sarcastic?

  “Who said anything about sleeping with boys, miss? You’re not a hussy.”

  “Uh…” God, I was tempted to—

  “Oh…so you’ve gone and slept with her?”

  “Slept?” Aw, man!

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, Mom, I don’t. I love Katie. She is one of those girls, too good to be true. And so is her dad, not a girl, but a one-in-a-million.”

  “Yes. Dr. McGuilvry is. And what does he think of this?”

  “He’s fine with ‘this,’ and so is Joe. And they’
re fine together!”

  “Oh. Oh? Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What is this? A den of…of perverts, of…not normal. I should take you home right now.”

  “Mom. Remember, you just said ‘too good to be true’. You agreed ‘one-in-a-million.’ Mommy, why are you crying?”

  “Well, yes. I know there are people like that.”

  “Like me?”

  “But you’re supposed to get married.”

  “Says who, Mother?”

  “Those, those other girls, they got married. They had children. Well, one did. And the other…”

  “That one, your friend Rosa? She divorced almost immediately, and I think her husband was homosexual.”

  We sat in silence. My mother whimpered a bit in the emptied dining room. A sweet waitress quietly served more tea. I thought she looked homosexual with her strange, not-quite-pixie hairdo. Her eyes seemed to read my whole story and to blink approval. I guess I could understand my mother; she must have felt as if she had been dropped into a queer world.

  I was glad to focus on her a minute. I played with my straw and realized my throat was tight, my shoulders were up around my ears, and all of me was rather slouched into the high-backed bench.

  My mother’s voice gently cut the air. “Why?”

  “Why what?” I asked. “It happens to some people. They don’t know why.”

  “No,” she said. “Why tell me now?”

  I blew out my breath and sank even further down onto the seat of the bench, if that was even possible. I hadn’t planned this far ahead. Slow. I’d start with Dorotea.

  “Mommy, I think Katie’s roommate has a crush on her.” I scrambled to latch onto a story, any story.

  “Oh, so everyone loves Katie?” That came out of her mouth with a bit more hurt than I expected.

  “Mom, you once admitted Katie would have been your ideal daughter. Yes. Dorotea is jealous and started rumors. She may have even told lies about other things to Head Mistress Craney.”

  “Ah. So, are you a thief or a cheat, or God knows what, as well as a pervert?”

  I really didn’t get the depth of my mother’s hurt and anger. All I could whimper was, “What, Mom?”

  “You know, I didn’t like that Dorotea with her German ways.”