The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  I try to imagine what Dean Buehl would make of my old journal. Celeste Buehl was the science teacher when I went to Heart Lake. She was always kind to me when I was her student—and she was more than kind when she gave me this job—but I don’t think that kindness would survive a reading of my senior-year journal.

  When she comes in today I notice how much she’s changed in the twenty years since she was my teacher. I remember her as slim and athletic, leading nature hikes through the woods and skating on the lake in winter. Now her broad shoulders are rounded and her short, cropped hair, once dark and springy, looks lifeless and dull. Myra Todd picks the moment of the dean’s entrance to mention third period’s early dismissal.

  “Jane,” she says loudly, “your third-period class disturbed my senior lab this morning. We were at a very delicate stage of dissection. Mallory Martin’s hand slipped and she nicked her lab partner with a scalpel.”

  I know Mallory Martin by reputation. My girls call her Maleficent. I somehow doubt the incident with the scalpel was an accident.

  “I’m sorry, Myra, I’ll tell them to be quieter. They get so keyed up for these exams.”

  “The thing to do is give them extra problems when they finish their tests. That way they won’t be so anxious to finish early.” Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers this pedagogical advice and resumes scoring a pile of quizzes with a thick red marker. The tips of his fingers are stained red with the marker, and I notice the color has bled onto his sandwich.

  “I let the girls write in their journals,” Gwendoline Marsh offers in a small voice. “It helps them to have an outlet and it’s part of their grade.”

  “And just how do you grade these journals?” asks Meryl North, the history teacher who already seemed as ancient as her subject when I was a student here. “Do you read their private thoughts?”

  “Oh no, I only read the parts they want me to—they circle the parts I’m not supposed to read and mark them private.”

  Meryl North makes a sound between a laugh and a choke and Gwendoline’s pale skin reddens. I try to catch Gwen’s eye to give her a nod of encouragement—she is the closest thing to a friend I have here at Heart Lake—but she is resolutely staring down at a worn volume of Emily Dickinson.

  “They do seem to be under a lot of stress,” I say, more to cover Gwen’s embarrassment than because I want to open this particular line of conversation. There were two suicide attempts last year. In response, the administration has instituted weekly faculty seminars on adolescent depression and “How to detect the ten warning signs of suicidal behavior.”

  “Anyone in particular?” The question comes from Dr. Candace Lockhart. Unlike the rest of us at the table she has no stacks of papers to grade or texts to study for next period. Her fingers are never stained with ink, her exquisitely tailored dove gray suits never tainted with the ugly yellow chalk dust that the rest of us wear like a wasting disease. She’s the school psychologist, an office that did not exist in my day. There is an aura of secrecy surrounding her appointment here. I’ve heard some of the faculty complain that Dean Buehl hired her without going through the proper channels. In other words, without giving the resident faculty a chance to gossip about her credentials. There’s a whiff of jealousy about the complaints, to which I am not immune. The rumor is that she is conducting research for a groundbreaking study on the psychology of adolescent girls. We all suspect that once her research is done she will leave us for private practice, a glamorous lecture circuit with appearances on “Oprah,” or perhaps a tenure-track post at an Ivy League college—some existence more appropriate to her wardrobe. In the meantime, she resides among us with her pale, almost white, hair, blue eyes and thin, ascetic figure, like a lilac point Siamese slumming with drab tabbies.

  Poor Gwen, in her faded Indian print jumper and fussily old-fashioned high-necked white blouse, looks especially dowdy in comparison. Although Candace Lockhart and Gwen Marsh are both in their early thirties, the effects of teaching five classes a day, not to mention sponsoring half a dozen clubs, have left their mark on Gwen. Her complexion is muddy, her hair limp and going gray at the roots, her blue eyes washed out and bloodshot. Candace, on the other hand, clearly has time to get her hair done (that platinum blond can’t be entirely natural) and her blue eyes are as clear and cold as lake water.

  I am sufficiently unnerved by those blue eyes to make a mistake. Of course, I should say, “No. No one in particular.” But instead I name a name. “Athena… I mean Ellen… Craven. I noticed today that she has an awful scar on her arm.”

  “Well, yes, I know about that of course. That’s old news and not surprising given Ellen’s history.”

  I should be glad for her dismissal, but something in the way Dr. Lockhart’s blue eyes glaze over, already looking past me toward whatever illustrious future fate has in store for her, irks me. I am forever thinking I am past such vanities and finding that I am not.

  “Some of the pictures she draws on the back of her homework assignments are… well… somewhat disturbing.”

  “You let your girls turn in homework with pictures on the back?” Myra Todd looks up from her stack of papers, appalled, only to meet Dr. Lockhart’s cool look of disdain. Gratified to have someone else silenced by those eyes, I go on. It has occurred to me that this is exactly what I should be doing. My responsibility as Athena’s teacher, as an especially trusted teacher in whom the girl confided, demands that I seek help for her emotional problems. To whom else should I refer those problems than the school psychologist?

  “Disembodied eyes with tears turning into razor blades, that kind of thing. I suppose the images aren’t unusual…”

  I notice that the rest of the table has grown quiet, and it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be talking about my student in front of the entire teaching staff. Dr. Lockhart must think so, too.

  “Perhaps you should come see me in my office to talk about Athena. I’m in my office by seven. Why don’t you come in before your first class?” Dr. Lockhart suggests.

  She no doubt sees my reluctance to agree to this early appointment—I am thinking of the lake swim I try to take each morning before class—and so she adds this last piece of admonishment.

  “It’s crucial we address any preoccupation with death or suicide immediately. These things have a way of turning into trends, as I’m sure you know from your own experience here, Miss Hudson. Don’t you agree, Dean Buehl?”

  Dean Buehl sighs. “God forbid that happen again.”

  I feel blood rush to my cheeks as if I had been slapped. Any thoughts I had of protesting the early-morning meeting are gone now, and Dr. Lockhart seems to know that. Without waiting for my answer she rises from her chair and adjusts a pale blue shawl over her suit jacket.

  “I especially want to know if that Crevecoeur sisters legend…” The rest of her words are drowned out by the bell ringing to signal the end of lunch hour and the scraping of chairs being pushed back from the table.

  Dr. Lockhart, unencumbered as she is, glides out of the dining room while the rest of us gather books and shoulder heavy canvas bags. Gwen especially seems to list to one side from the weight of her book bag. I ask if she needs some help and she pulls out a thick manila envelope and hands it to me.

  “Oh, thank you, Jane, I was going to ask if someone could type these student poems up for the literary magazine. I’d do it but my carpal tunnel syndrome’s acting up.” She lifts up her arms and I see that both forearms are wrapped in Ace bandages. All I’d meant to offer was to carry something for her, but what can I say?

  I transfer the heavy folder from her bag to mine. Now I’m the one listing to one side as we leave the Music Room, and Gwen, lightened of her load, hurries on ahead to class. I trail behind the rest of the teachers thinking about what the psychologist had said about preoccupation with death and suicidal trends. I picture my students with their skull jewelry and kohl-rimmed eyes.

  The nose rings and skull jewelry and purple hair may be new, but this pre
occupation with suicide is not. Like many girls’ schools, Heart Lake has its own suicide legend. When I was here the story would be told, usually around the Halloween bonfire at the swimming beach, that the Crevecoeur family lost all three of their daughters in the flu epidemic of 1918. It was said that one night the three girls, all delirious with fever, went down to the lake to quench their fever and drowned there. At this point in the story, someone would point to the three rocks that rose out of the water off the swimming beach and intone solemnly, “Their bodies were never found, but on the next morning three rocks appeared mysteriously in the lake and those rocks have from that day been known as the three sisters.”

  One of the seniors would fill in the rest of the details as we younger girls nervously toasted our marshmallows over the bonfire. India Crevecoeur, the girls’ mother, was so heartbroken she could no longer live at Heart Lake, so she turned her home into a girls’ school. From the school’s first year, however, there have been mysterious suicides at Heart Lake. They say that the sound of the lake lapping against the three rocks (here the speaker would pause so we could all listen to the sound of the water restlessly beating against the rocks) beckons girls to take their lives by throwing themselves into the lake. They say that when the lake freezes over the faces of the girls can be seen peering out from beneath the ice. The ice makes a noise like moaning, and that sound, like the lapping of the water, draws girls out onto the lake’s frozen surface, where the sisters wait to drag the unsuspecting skater through the cracks in the ice. And they say that whenever one girl drowns in the lake, two more inevitably follow.

  If the legend is still circulating, as Dr. Lockhart fears, there are a few things I could tell my girls. I could tell them that the Crevecoeur family did lose their youngest daughter, Iris, but she didn’t drown. She caught a chill from a mishap during a boating party with her two older sisters and died of the flu in her own bed. I could also tell them that nineteenth-century drawings of the lake show the three rocks, which were called, by early settlers, the three graces. But I know that the harder you try to dispel a legend the more power it gains. It’s like Oedipus trying to avoid his fate and running headlong into it at the crossroads. And once I begin to talk about the legend they might ask if there were any suicides when I went to school here. Then I would either have to lie or tell them that during my senior year both my roommates drowned in the lake.

  I might even find myself telling them that since then I have always felt the lake is waiting for the third girl.

  Chapter Two

  BETWEEN TEACHING AND TAKING CARE OF OLIVIA AFTER school, the question of who has found my old notebook recedes to background noise. I can hear the question whispering at the edge of my consciousness, but I push it away until I can concentrate on it.

  That night I scramble eggs for Olivia and me. After dinner we wash out the eggshells for an arts and crafts project for her nursery school. Olivia holds the shells under the running tap water and then hands them to me. I surreptitiously scoop out the transparent jelly that still clings to the hollow cups and set them into an empty egg crate. She explains to me that not just birds come from eggs. Snakes and alligators and turtles also come out of eggs. Even spiders.

  “Charlotte made a sack for her eggs and Wilbur carried it home from the fair in his mouth,” she tells me. I remember that her preschool teacher, Mrs. Crane, is reading Charlotte’s Web aloud in class. They’ll study spiders and eggs at the same time and visit a local farm to see pigs. It’s an excellent preschool program, one of the perks of working here.

  I set the crate aside on the counter to dry.

  “And then Charlotte died,” Olivia finishes.

  “That’s a sad part, isn’t it?”

  “Uh huh. Can I watch some TV before bed?”

  “No, it’s time for your shower.”

  Olivia complains bitterly about no TV, about the fact she has to take a shower because the cottage we’ve been given by the school has no bath, and, for good measure, she throws in the fact that her father isn’t here to read to her. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that he hardly ever read to her anyway, that he was usually at work far past her bedtime, but of course I don’t. I tell her that her father will read to her when he sees her the weekend after next, which requires a lengthy consultation with the calendar before she grasps the time frame of every other weekend visitation.

  By the time her shower is finished it is past nine o’clock and my throat is raw from teaching all day and arguing with a four-year-old. Still, I can’t really weasel out of reading to her after that remark about her father. I go into the spare bedroom where I’ve stacked the boxes of books and papers and find one of my old children’s books, a collection called Tales from the Ballet.

  Olivia is intrigued with the idea that this is a book I had as a child.

  “Did your mommy give it to you?” she asks.

  “No,” I tell her, and wonder how I could possibly explain to her that my mother would never have spent money on anything so frivolous as books. “One of my teachers. Here, she wrote something to me.”

  Inside on the flyleaf my kindergarten teacher had written, “To Jane, who dances on ice.”

  “What’s that mean? Dance on ice.”

  “Ice skating. Mommy used to be a pretty good ice skater. I used to skate on this very lake when it froze in the winter.”

  “Can I skate on the lake when it freezes?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. “We’ll see.”

  I flip through the pages of the book looking for a story she’ll recognize—“Cinderella” or “Sleeping Beauty” perhaps—but then the book falls open to a page marked with a dried maple leaf, its once vibrant scarlet faded now to palest russet. “This one!” Olivia demands with that odd certainty of four-year-olds.

  It’s “Giselle.” My old favorite, but not the one I would have chosen for Olivia.

  “This one has some scary parts,” I say.

  “Good,” Olivia tells me. “I like scary parts.”

  I figure I can edit out anything too scary. I stop to explain why Giselle’s mother won’t let her dance and then I have to explain what it means to have a weak heart. She likes the part about the prince disguised as a peasant—“Just like in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ ”—and is sad when Giselle dies. I am thinking I will just leave out the part about the Wilis—the spirits of girls disappointed in love who seduce young men and make them dance until they die—but when I turn the page to the picture of the wraithlike girls in their bridal dresses, Olivia is instantly in love with them. Just as I was at her age. This had been my favorite picture.

  So I read on. Through the part where the girls dance with the gamekeeper, Hilarion, and lure him into the lake to drown, and up to where the queen of the Wilis tells Giselle she must make Albrecht, her false lover, dance to his doom.

  “Will she?” Olivia asks, her face pinched with concern.

  “What do you think?” I ask her.

  “Well, he did make her sad,” she says.

  “But she loves him, let’s see.…”

  Giselle tells Albrecht to hold fast to the cross on her tomb, but he is so entranced by her dancing that he joins her. But because of Giselle’s delay, he is still alive when the church clock strikes four and the Wilis return to their graves. “And so she saves him,” I tell Olivia, closing the book. All I’ve left out are the last two lines of the story, which read, “His life had been saved, but he has lost his heart. Giselle has danced away with it.”

  WHEN OLIVIA HAS FALLEN ASLEEP I TAKE OUT THE PIECE OF paper folded in my skirt pocket. As I unfold it I am sure that I will see now that the handwriting is Athena’s, or Vesta’s or Aphrodite’s, anyone’s but my own. But as I stare at the words again there is no escaping the truth. I recognize not only my own handwriting, but the ink—a peculiar shade of peacock blue that Lucy Toller gave me, along with a fountain pen in the same color, for my fifteenth birthday.

  Still holding the paper, I go into the spare bedroom to find the bo
x marked “Heart Lake.” I tear at the packing tape and rip open the box so hastily that the sharp edge of the cardboard slices into my wrist. Ignoring the pain, I pull out the stack of black-and-white notebooks inside.

  There are three of them. I started them in the ninth grade when I first met Matt and Lucy Toller, and faithfully kept a new one each year through our senior year at Heart Lake.

  I count them as if hoping that the fourth one will have miraculously rejoined its companions, but of course it hasn’t. I haven’t seen the fourth notebook since spring semester senior year, when it disappeared from my dorm room.

  At the time I thought someone in the administration had confiscated the notebook. I spent that last term at Heart Lake sure that it was only a matter of time before I was called into the dean’s office and confronted with the truth of everything that had happened that year, and what I had said at the inquest. But the summons never came. I attended the graduation ceremony and the reception on the lawn above the lake, standing apart from the other girls and their proud families, and afterward I took a taxi to the train station and a train to my summer job at the library at Vassar, where I had a scholarship for the fall. I decided that the notebook must have gotten lost. Sometimes I told myself that it had slipped out of my book bag and fallen into the lake and the lake had washed away all the blue-green ink until its pages were as blank as they were on the first day of senior year.

  I open the first notebook and read the opening entry.

  “Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink for my birthday and Matt gave me this notebook,” I had written in a flowery script that tried to live up to the fancy pen and ink. There were blotches, though, where the pen’s nib had caught the paper. It had taken a while to get used to that pen. “I’ll never have any other friends like them.”