They call it the first ice club.
“It’s a Heart Lake tradition,” Vesta says, handing me a mug of hot chocolate.
I nod and burn my tongue on the hot liquid. Myra Todd gives a lecture on the physics of lake freezing and Gwen reads the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “After great pain a formal feeling comes…” I wonder why until she comes to that last stanza, “This is the Hour of Lead— / Remembered, if outlived / As freezing persons, recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”
It’s as good a description of freezing as any I’ve ever heard and it’s not Gwen’s fault if it makes me think of Matt and Lucy’s last moments. First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go. Only they didn’t let go. They had each other to hold on to.
I WONDER IF THEY ASKED THE DEAN’S PERMISSION TO MEET. I wonder if Dr. Lockhart knows about the club. I find I can no longer judge the difference between a club meeting and a pagan rite.
When the girls start stomping their feet in the cold and the hot chocolate runs out we all leave. Gwendoline Marsh and Vesta sing “Silent Night” on the walk back. Club meeting, I think, definitely club meeting.
In the second week of December I notice a change come over Aphrodite. She arrives in class late without her translation done. She’s no good at sight reading, so she can’t fake it. Vesta and Athena try to cover for her. I can tell they are giving her their translations because they are too alike. If I stop Aphrodite to ask her how she got a particular translation or to identify a case ending, she flounders aimlessly amid the syntax. Out of six possible cases she makes four wrong guesses. It’s painful to watch, so I stop calling on her, but still the littlest thing makes her burst into tears: Catullus’s poem about his girlfriend’s infidelity, Book Four of the Aeneid, the definition of the verb prodere.
“What’s wrong with Aphrodite?” I ask Athena after class.
“She’s getting notes from Exeter about her boyfriend, Brian. You know, like that he’s cheating on her and badmouthing her. She’s on the phone with him every night and he swears none of it’s true.”
“She seems to be taking it pretty hard.”
“Well, yeah, they’ve been going together since the ninth grade. She says they’re going to go to college together. Only the way she’s going, she’s never going to make it to college.”
“You mean you think she might kill herself?”
Athena stares at me.
“No. I mean her grades really suck. Haven’t you noticed?”
I DECIDE I’D BETTER TALK TO DR. LOCKHART ABOUT Aphrodite. She listens to my story quietly.
“Of course I’ll have a word with her,” she says when I have finished, “but I doubt if it’s anything serious. The important thing is not to plant the idea into anyone’s head that her sadness might be suicidal. Whatever you do, don’t discuss it with any other student.”
I remember my conversation with Athena and the way she stared at me when I asked if she thought Aphrodite might kill herself. I thank Dr. Lockhart for her time and leave quickly.
That night when I call Olivia she tells me all about her new baby-sitter who watches her after school, about how pretty she is and how they bake cookies together. I think that being jealous of the baby-sitter is the worst I’ll have to suffer tonight until she asks me when she can come back to live with me.
“Soon,” I tell her.
I get off the phone and go into her room and lie down in her bed. On her night table is the Tales from the Ballet. I remember the part of the story when the mother warns Giselle not to dance because of her weak heart. Even with the best intentions, it’s impossible to always protect your child. I’m not sure my intentions have been the best. Did I really consider her welfare when I left Mitchell? I thought I took the job at Heart Lake because it would be a good place for her to go to school, but was I really thinking of her? Or was I following my own desire to return here? I think of the lines I read in Deirdre’s last journal entry: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” The last lines make me think not of a human heart but of the lake and what lies at its core.
I’m no longer sure if I even trust myself with Olivia. Am I any good to any of these girls, I wonder, let alone my own daughter? Am I, as Domina Chambers was accused of being, a corrupting influence?
I go out of the house and listen for a moment to the lake. For always night and day I hear water lapping. The sound tonight is maddening. When, I wonder, will the damn thing freeze?
Instead of taking the path down to the lake I walk out onto the Point. Ice has formed in the glacial cracks. One wrong step and a person could slide off the smooth, curved surface of the rock and into the lake below. When Deirdre Hall fell to her death here some people, her parents, for instance, thought it was an accident. But then the administration confiscated her journal. Deirdre liked to collect quotes about death. She was also fascinated by the three sisters legend, especially after her roommate’s suicide attempt. The last quote in her journal, the one from the Yeats poem, seemed to suggest that she felt drawn to the lake in the same way the three sisters legend suggested that Heart Lake girls were drawn to suicide.
I hear a sound to my left and turn a little too quickly. My heel catches in one of the icy cracks and for a moment I lose my balance, but then I feel a gloved hand catch my arm and right me. It’s Athena. She must have been on the ledge below the Point and that’s why I didn’t see her. Behind her, walking up from the ledge, I see Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd with my other students, Vesta and Aphrodite. The first ice club.
“Magistra,” Athena gasps in the cold air. “What are you doing up here? It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Vesta says. “We saw someone up here from the beach and we thought it might be a jumper.”
Athena rolls her eyes. “We did not. We just wanted to… you know… make sure.”
Aphrodite has come forward, stepping gingerly over the icy rock. She peers over the dome of the rock into the darkness. “Wasn’t there a girl who killed herself by jumping from here?”
Gwen Marsh puts her hand on Aphrodite’s arm to pull her back. “No dear, that’s just another silly legend,” she reassures her. But Aphrodite is still looking at me for an answer and I can’t seem to think of one.
I FIND MYSELF THINKING THAT IF WE CAN JUST MAKE IT through the rest of December to Christmas everything will be all right. Athena is going to stay with her aunt and there’s a possibility her mother might even be out of rehab for the holidays. Vesta is planning to read Bleak House by the pool at her grandparents’ condominium in Miami. Aphrodite will see Brian and realize that those letters have all been lies. After all, I tell her, you can’t believe everything you read.
And I will spend the vacation with Olivia. I’ve rented a room at the Westchester Aquadome for two whole weeks. It’s all the salary I’ve saved so far, but it will be worth it. We’ll swim in the hotel pool and I’ll take her into the city to see the Rockettes and The Nutcracker. We’ll go skating at Rockefeller Center. Far better than skating on the lake, I tell her, which at any rate remains stubbornly unfrozen.
Gwendoline Marsh tells me at the faculty Christmas party that the first ice club has been disbanded. Gwen looks almost pretty tonight. She’s got on her usual high-necked white blouse, but tonight she’s wearing it with a long brown velvet skirt that makes her waist look tiny. Instead of Ace bandages, her wrists are encircled by broad Victorian cuff bracelets. She’s even teased out a few tendrils from her usually severe bun and curled them into ringlets that tremble as she shakes her head over the lake’s unwillingness to cooperate and freeze. Myra Todd overhears our conversation and comes over to commiserate.
“I blame global warming,” she says. “The lake was always frozen by mid-December.”
Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers that the lake was only good for skating four days the pr
evious year.
“It might not freeze at all.”
I turn around to see who has uttered this pessimistic prediction and see that it is Dr. Lockhart. She is wearing a silver dress that shimmers in the Christmas lights strung around the Music Room.
“It’ll freeze when we’re all away on holiday,” I tell her. “When we come back, everything will look different. The school always does, after break.” It may be the two glasses of champagne I’ve drunk, but I find myself oddly cheerful.
“Well, it’ll do us all good to get away,” Gwen Marsh says. “Imagine staying here through the whole break. I hear they used to let the scholarship girls do that to earn extra money.”
“How inhuman,” Dr. Lockhart says, taking a sip of her drink. “Imagine how depressing that must have been for those girls. Did you ever do that, Jane? Stay here during break?”
I notice that everyone is looking at me. I’m an old girl and so an authority on old Heart Lake customs, but no one has ever publicly mentioned before that I was a scholarship student. I wonder how Dr. Lockhart knows, but then I remember those files.
“In tenth and eleventh grade,” I answer. “It wasn’t so bad. My roommates were scholarships, too, so we all stayed. Our Latin teacher, Helen Chambers, stayed on campus and so did Miss Buehl.” I say the last bit loudly enough for Dean Buehl to hear and she comes over, one eyebrow raised inquiringly. “I was just saying that you were always here over Christmas break. We helped you collect ice samples.”
Dean Buehl nods. “Some of the younger girls even stayed with me at my cottage.”
“How kind of you, Dean Buehl,” Gwen Marsh says. “I wonder if any girls would want to stay here with me over break?”
It occurs to me that I haven’t asked Gwen what her plans are for the break. What if she’s stuck here all by herself? I know she has an apartment in town, but I certainly hope she isn’t spending her Christmas alone.
“Oh, I never minded,” Dean Buehl is saying to Gwen. “It was company and I took the girls skating with me. I always wanted to have an old-fashioned ice harvest,” she says, “like the Crevecoeurs had.”
Everyone is immediately fascinated with the idea of an ice harvest. Meryl North describes the icehouse on the other side of the lake at the mouth of the Schwanenkill and explains how even in summer there would still be blocks of ice packed in sawdust. Tacy Beade remembers that when she was a student here they used the ice to make ice sculptures. I notice that as soon as the older teachers come over Dr. Lockhart slips away from the group. I’ve seen her avoid them before and I can’t say I blame her as they both have a habit of droning on endlessly. When Myra Todd starts corralling people into an ice harvest committee (Gwen, I notice, immediately volunteers to do most of the work), I follow Candace Lockhart over to the drinks table that has been laid out under the Crevecoeur family portrait. She is standing with her back to the room, seemingly absorbed in the photograph of India Crevecoeur and her daughters, posing in ice skating costumes on the frozen lake.
“You’d think after the failure of their first ice club they wouldn’t be so gung-ho about an ice harvest,” she says as I help myself to some lukewarm Chardonnay.
“Well, it’s tricky catching the first ice. We always tried…”
“Did you ever see it?”
“I was actually at the lake the night the ice formed my junior year,” I tell her, “but, if you can believe this, I fell asleep.”
“So you missed it,” she says smiling into her drink, something clear and fizzy with ice. “Like you missed that last Christmas break.”
“Excuse me?”
She shakes the ice in her empty glass. “You said you spent the break here tenth and eleventh grade, but not in twelfth. And that’s when your roommate, Lucy Toller, first tried to kill herself. That’s what started it all, wasn’t it? You must have wondered at times if things would have been different if you’d been here.” She turns away from me to refill her glass with club soda. I hear something crack and think it must be the glass in my hand, but it’s only the ice in Dr. Lockhart’s drink, settling in the warm liquid.
“I was in Albany,” I tell her, “with my mother, who was dying of stomach cancer. In fact, she died the day before New Year’s.”
“Oh, Jane,” she says, “I didn’t mean to imply it was your fault what happened. Only that you might feel that way. What is it that the poet says about remorse… ?”
I look at Dr. Lockhart blankly, unable to think of any appropriate line, but of course it’s Gwen, who’s overheard our conversation, who thinks of one. “ ‘Remorse,’ as Emily Dickinson says, ‘—is Memory—awake.’ ”
ON THE MONDAY BEFORE BREAK APHRODITE DOESN’T come to class. I ask Athena and Vesta where she is and they tell me that she went out early that morning to take a walk around the lake and they haven’t seen her since.
After class I go straight to Dean Buehl and report Aphrodite’s absence.
“We’ll go to her room right now,” Dean Buehl tells me.
I am not wild about being in my old dorm room with Dean Buehl, but what choice do I have? Walking from the mansion to the dorm I find myself looking at the Point, which blocks our view of the northeast cove and the swimming beach. I pull my collar up around my neck and start to shake.
“This morning’s weather forecast says the temperature will be in the single digits by nightfall. If we can’t find her by dusk we’ll have to call the State Police and organize a search party. She’ll never make it through the night in that kind of cold.” Dean Buehl and I look at each other and I think we are remembering the same thing—a cold night twenty years ago when I showed up at the door of her cottage. Dean Buehl blushes and looks away first as if she were the one who was embarrassed at the memory.
At the dorm we find Athena and Vesta sitting at their desks with their books open. There is something wrong about the picture, I think. Something stagy about the way their books are laid out and how intently they lean over them. I sniff the air for cigarette smoke and smell, instead, gingerbread. The smell, with its connotations of holiday baking, confuses me. There are no ovens in the dorm. Then I realize what it is: air freshener. The girls were expecting us.
Dean Buehl sits on one of the beds and I stand because the other bed is covered with dirty laundry and it feels strange to sit on the same bed with the dean.
Dean Buehl asks the girls if Melissa seemed upset when she left this morning. The girls exchange guilty glances.
“Um, well, actually we’re not even sure she was here this morning. When we woke up she wasn’t in the single. There’s something on her bed, but it’s not a note or anything—it’s just some dumb poem.”
Dean Buehl and I both look at the door of the single, which is still closed. She nods to me and I open the door and look inside. The bed is neatly made. On its pillow lies a sheet of paper with blue printing. Perhaps it is the blue writing that makes me realize what it is. Who uses mimeographs anymore? Dean Buehl passes me in the doorway and without removing the page from the bed, reads the first two lines: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sound by the shore…” and I finish the poem aloud: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
Chapter Nine
HOW’D YOU KNOW THAT?” ATHENA ASKS. “MELISSA’S been repeating that poem for days. Are you the one who gave it to her?”
Dean Buehl, still standing above the single bed, looks my way.
“No,” I say. “It’s just something I remember. We read it when I was in school.”
Athena and Vesta shake their heads as if to say Teachers! Who knows what junk they carry around in their heads!
“Girls,” Dean Buehl says, “run down to the matron and ask for a plastic bag, then come right back up. Don’t talk to anyone.”
The girls scurry out of the room, glad, I think, to be away from us. Dean Buehl moves as if to sit on the edge of Melissa’s bed and then thinks better of it an
d sits on the window ledge. When she looks up at me I think she’ll ask the same question Athena asked. How did you know that poem? But she doesn’t. Maybe she assumes her old girls ought to know their Yeats.
“I’m going to my office to call the police,” she says. “You’re to follow with Athena and Vesta, but give me half an hour to make the call—no, make it an hour. I don’t want them to overhear what I have to say to the police.”
“What do you think has happened to her?”
Dean Buehl shakes her head. “I just don’t know… it’s all so odd… that poem—it’s the same one that girl left in her journal twenty years ago… that Hall girl.”
“Deirdre.”
“Yes, Deirdre Hall. Right before she jumped off the Point. My God. This was her room, wasn’t it?” She looks around her and then she looks at me standing in the doorway, noticing for the first time, I think, my reluctance to step over the threshold into the small room. She shakes her head. “What the hell is going on here?”
IT IS ONLY 3:30 WHEN ATHENA, VESTA, AND I REACH DEAN Buehl’s office, but already the sun is low behind the mansion, its last rays skating across the lake and filling the room with their deep golden light. The State Police officer, in a chair facing Dean Buehl’s desk, has to shield his eyes from the glare. All I can make out of him is the copper glow of his hair in the sunlight. I usher the two girls in ahead of me and Gwen Marsh, who is sitting on a couch to the side of the desk, gestures for them to sit on either side of her. She slips an arm around each girl even though both of Gwen’s arms are wrapped in Ace bandages. Dr. Lockhart, who is standing with her back to the room, looks at the girls, then at me, and then turns back to the window.
“This is the teacher I was telling you about. Jane Hudson,” Dean Buehl says to the police officer.
The officer rises slowly to his feet and turns toward me. “Yes,” he says, “Miss Hudson and I have met before.”
The Lake of Dead Languages Page 9