The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  I felt I was already listening to a foreign language more arcane than Greek or Latin. I hadn’t understood half of what she’d said—I had never heard of Ovid or Catullus or Domina Chambers—but it was a little like listening to opera on public radio. I didn’t always understand the story, but I liked how listening to it made me feel. I liked how the weak sunshine that came through the dirty cafeteria window made Matt’s sandy brown hair turn a fiery red and Lucy’s pale, greenish hair glow like burnished gold. I liked being with them.

  I think that if they had been asking me to join the foreign legion instead of only inviting me to study Latin with them, I would have followed them into the desert willingly.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE IRIS SCHOLARSHIP—NAMED AFTER THE CREVECOEUR daughter who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918—was awarded to the freshman girl from the town of Corinth who scored the highest on her Latin exam. It was a sop, my mother told me when I came home that first day of ninth grade, to the town’s resentment of the school. When, in the early seventies, the Corinth Public School Board threatened to cancel the Latin program due to low enrollment and a scarcity of qualified teachers, Helen Chambers, a Heart Lake alum and newly appointed classics teacher there, volunteered to teach the Latin class at Corinth High.

  We were her first public school class, she told us that first day, and as such responsible for whatever impression of public education she would take away with her. We also turned out to be her last public school class, so I assume the impression she took away with her was not favorable.

  Helen Chambers was unlike any teacher I had ever seen before. The teachers we got in Corinth generally fell into one of two categories. There were the plump, motherly women in shapeless Dacron dresses and cardigans embroidered with ABCs and apples (or whatever was in season: pumpkins at Halloween, candy canes at Christmas) who showed lots of film strips and drew happy faces on returned papers. Then there were the sternish old maids in Orlon sweater vests, scratchy wool skirts, and support hose pooling around their thin ankles who lectured in monotones and gave detention for falling asleep in class. Occasionally, some young woman just out of the State Teacher’s College came to Corinth for a few years. Such was Miss Venezia, my kindergarten teacher, who looked like Snow White and gave me Tales from the Ballet. But if they were any good they went on, as Miss Venezia did, to better jobs in Albany or Rochester.

  Helen Chambers was neither young nor middle-aged. Instead she resided in a suspended state between the two. She was tall and fair, with the sort of blond hair that turns silver instead of gray and which she swept up in an elegant twist like an actress in a French movie. She wore, invariably, black—a color ill-suited for days spent in front of a chalkboard, but then I can’t recall ever seeing her use the chalkboard.

  She conducted her classes, I realized later, like college seminars. That first day she had the eleven of us pull our desks into a circle, which she joined. She gave us each a plain gray cloth-bound book and told us to turn to chapter one to review the first declension. She timed us on the watch brooch pinned, like a nurse’s, above her heart. When five minutes had elapsed she told us to close our books and recite the declension of puella, puellae, one at a time, around the circle. She ticked off points in a small leather notebook for each mistake we made. Lucy and Matt were the only ones who got it right.

  Afterward she read us a poem by Catullus about a girl who keeps a sparrow in her lap, which makes her boyfriend jealous. Ward Castle made a rude gesture at Lucy and was told he could sit in the hall for the rest of the class. She told us to memorize the first declension and the present indicative active of laudo, laudare for tomorrow and dismissed us by saying “Valete discipuli.”

  Lucy and Matt responded by chanting “Vale, Domina” and the rest of us muttered some approximation without having the slightest idea what we were saying.

  The next day our class size had dwindled to nine, by the end of the week: seven. Aside from Matt and Lucy and me, the rest were the children of doctors and lawyers whose parents had told them they had to stay in Latin to get into law or medical school.

  After two weeks I had memorized the first declension, but I hadn’t the slightest idea of what a declension was. But I was happy chanting the words with Matt and Lucy walking down River Street after school.

  I was happy, truth be told, to be walking in the opposite direction from my own home. I wouldn’t have to pass the mill with its sickening smell of fresh-cut lumber and its yellow pall of smoke. My house was down the hill from the mill and every day of my life I had woken up to that oversweet smell and the yellow smoke staining the sky outside my bedroom window. The lumber trucks went past my house, rattling the windowpanes and making the vases of artificial flowers on the coffee table tremble. My mother waged an everlasting war against the sawdust that my father brought home on his boots and work clothes. She made him take off his clothes in the mudroom and wash his head under the garden hose even when it was so cold that the water froze in his hair and beard. Still the sawdust crept in, forming tiny drifts in the corners and speckling the china bric-abrac and tickling the back of your throat. At night I could hear my father, who breathed that dust all day, coughing so hard that the iron day bed he slept on in the sewing room rattled. When I came home in the afternoons my mother would be dusting and railing against the sawdust and the mud and my father’s salary and the cold.

  “This is the last place on earth I thought I’d end up,” she told me again and again. Since it was the place where she started out, I never understood her surprise over finding herself here.

  When I told her I’d be going home with Lucy Toller that Friday I saw her take in the name and roll it around in her mind, measuring its worth like a pound of sugar.

  “She’s a bastard, you know.”

  I don’t think I had ever heard my mother use a word like that. She always said cursing was common.

  “Illegitimate, I mean,” she said, seeing I didn’t understand. “Cliff Toller’s not her daddy. I knew her mother, Hannah Corey, in school. A smart girl. Maybe too smart for her own good. She got the Iris Scholarship.” Maybe that was why she didn’t like Hannah Corey. “She even got into one of those fancy women’s colleges, but she came back after a year with a baby and wouldn’t say boo to anyone about whose it was. Cliff Toller married her all the same and gave her a nice little house on River Street. I wouldn’t have picked her daughter as first choice for a friend, but you might meet some of her friends on River Street.”

  I didn’t tell my mother that Lucy and Matt didn’t seem to have any other friends.

  “She’ll probably win the Iris this year and then you’d know someone at Heart Lake.”

  “Lucy says I could have a shot at the Iris,” I told my mother. “She says we’ll study together.”

  My mother gave me a long look so that now I felt like the pound of sugar. I couldn’t tell if she had never thought of me having a chance for the Iris Scholarship until now, or if she’d been planning for me to go after it all along. After all, I was a good student, although more out of a slavish need to please my teachers than from any innate talent.

  “The Iris Scholarship,” she said. Like all her goals for me she looked at it with both desire and mistrust.

  “Well,” she said, “that would be something. But I wouldn’t set my heart on it.”

  From the start, though, I think I did just that: set my heart on the Iris Scholarship. I’d never seen the school even though I’d grown up only a mile from its gates. I’d seen, though, the Heart Lake girls come into town to browse the drugstore for magazines and try on lipsticks at the makeup counter. They’d try on half a dozen shades and then wipe their mouths clean before going back to the school. I thought there must be a rule against makeup, but then I noticed how resolutely plain they were in their dress. Even when the school abandoned their uniform, the girls seemed to be wearing one. Plaid kilts and pastel sweaters. Down vests in the winter, like loggers. Scuffed penny loafers worn down at the heel. M
y mother always said you could tell a lady by the heels of their shoes, but there was something about these girls—maybe the perfectly straight teeth, the way their hair gleamed, the discrete flash of gold on earlobes and throat, and, most of all, a carelessness combined with confidence—that told me that the backs of their shoes might be worn to the nub but they’d never be, what my mother called, “down at the heels.”

  It didn’t seem such a far leap—from my actual poverty to their assumed negligence.

  “You’re a cinch for the scholarship,” Matt told me walking back to their home that Friday. “The only other one eligible financially is Lucy.”

  “Well, then Lucy will get it,” I said.

  “Lucy’s lazy,” Matt said, loudly enough for Lucy, who was walking up ahead, to hear. I thought she’d get mad, but instead she plucked a scarlet maple leaf from an overhanging branch and, looking coyly over her shoulder, bit down on its stem like a flamenco dancer holding a rose between her teeth. Matt skipped up to her and, clasping her into tango position, spun her around the lawn of one of the big mansions. They waltzed through the neat leaf piles the gardeners had raked together, kicking up red and gold maelstroms, until Matt dipped her low over a bed of yellow leaves and let her drop there in a graceful swoon.

  “See,” Matt said, turning back to me. I had stayed on the edge of the sidewalk, standing still under the gold waterfall of leaves. “She needs some competition.”

  Then he grabbed me, one arm firm around my waist, the other holding my hand straight out in front of us, his cheek, cool in the crisp fall air, against my cheek. As he spun me around, the red and gold leaves blurred together like the wings of the Firebird in my ballet book. His breath, against my cheek, smelled like apples.

  “Now, repeat after me,” he said in rhythm to our dancing, “Puella, puellae, puellae…”

  I repeated dutifully, shouting the declension as we spun around the lawn. When we came to a standstill, Lucy was on her feet, watching us, red and gold leaves sticking out of her hair like a chaplet of beaten gold. Everything else seemed to keep spinning except for her steady little figure.

  “See,” she said, “you’ve got it memorized.”

  “But I don’t know what it’s for.”

  Lucy and Matt exchanged a look and then he plucked one of the leaves from her hair and, with an elaborate sweep of his arm, presented the leaf to me.

  “Puer puellae rosam dat,” Lucy said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The boy gives the girl a rose,” Matt translated.

  “Boy—puer—is in the nominative case, so it’s the subject, he’s the one doing the giving,” Lucy said.

  “Girl—puellae—is in the dative, so she’s the indirect object of the verb—the one who receives the action of the verb. The rose,” Matt twirled the scarlet maple leaf between his fingertips so that for a moment I thought I was looking at a rose, “Rosam is accusative. It’s the direct object of the verb—the thing that’s being given.”

  “See, you can mix it all up,” Lucy said.

  Matt jumped around me and stood on my right side and held the rose, the leaf, out to his right. Lucy pointed. “Puellae puer rosam dat. It still means… ?”

  “The boy gives the girl a rose,” I replied.

  Matt transferred the leaf into his left hand and held it between us.

  “Puellae rosam puer dat?” Lucy asked.

  “The boy gives the girl a rose,” I answered.

  Matt held the leaf over his head. “Get it?”

  I nodded. For the first time I actually did understand.

  Matt bowed to me and handed me the maple leaf, which I slipped carefully into my pocket.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Now, let’s get home. It’s getting dark.” Matt linked his left arm in mine and Lucy linked her right arm in mine and we walked the rest of the way up River Street, chanting the first declension into the cool, blue evening air.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE HOUSE AT THE END OF RIVER STREET WAS NOT A mansion, but rather the sort of cottage you’d expect the seven dwarfs to live in. It had originally been the gatehouse for the Crevecoeur Mansion. When the estate became a girls’ school, the gatehouse was sold separately to the school’s first headmistress. How it passed into the Toller family I never knew.

  The downstairs rooms were always a disappointment to me. They were furnished in the same overstuffed and overpolished colonial style as my own house. But whereas my mother regarded each chair and end table as a prized possession, there was an air of disregard and neglect in Hannah Toller’s decorating. It looked as if the furniture had been picked off the showroom floor with no regard for what my mother called “color coordination.” Ugly brown plaids vied with blue and red chintzes. The curtains were a particularly horrible shade of mustard. While neat, the place looked unloved.

  From that first day we spent as little time as possible downstairs. I was introduced to their parents and allowed to exchange strained conversation with them for the length of time it took Lucy to heat up some hot cocoa and Matt to raid the cupboards for cookies. I saw immediately why no one could forget that Lucy was not Cliff Toller’s daughter. In fact, it was hard to imagine Lucy issuing from either of the Tollers. Cliff Toller was large and red-haired; his hands, especially, seemed huge to me. Hannah Toller was small, like Lucy, but looked so dull, with mousy brown hair and unmemorable features, that one could only think of her as a genetic neutral that would require some divine visitation in order to have produced Lucy. I remembered my mother had told me that she’d conceived Lucy in that one year she had gone to Vassar and I imagined some blond scion encountered at a Yale/Vassar mixer.

  When Lucy and Matt introduced me, Mrs. Toller’s dull brown eyes lit up for a moment. “Jane Hudson,” she said my name slowly, much as my mother had pronounced Lucy’s name. “Margaret Poole’s girl?” I nodded.

  “I went to school with your mother,” she told me. “Everyone thought she’d be the one to win the Iris Scholarship, but on the day of the exam she didn’t come to school.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she was sick,” I said, but I knew that probably wasn’t what happened. My father had told me that my grandmother didn’t want her to go to Heart Lake, but I hadn’t known until now that she must have kept her home the day of the exam. I tried to imagine what my mother must have felt that day, after studying for the exam, to be kept from what must have seemed her only chance to get out of Corinth and a life of dreary millwork.

  “And what do you think of your teacher? Domina Chambers?” Hannah Toller asked me.

  “Oh, she seems wonderful,” I gushed. “So elegant and…” I struggled for the right word, “. . . and refined.”

  “Refined? Yes, I guess you could call her that.” And she went back to stirring some pungent-smelling stew on the stove.

  “Mother went to school with Helen Chambers,” Lucy explained as we trooped up the steep stairs. “First at Heart Lake, and then for one year at Vassar.”

  “Oh?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say and I was glad that Lucy and Matt were ahead of me on the steps or they would have seen me blushing and known I’d heard the whole story about Lucy’s birth.

  “Yeah, she got the Iris Scholarship when she was our age,” Matt said.

  “I guess that’s why she wants Lucy to have it,” I said.

  I saw Lucy and Matt turn to each other at the top of the steps. Matt whispered something and Lucy shook her head as if she were angry at what he had said. I was glad to be able to change the subject by exclaiming over their rooms.

  “You guys are so lucky,” I said a little too loudly. “It’s like your own private hideaway. It’s like the attic in The Little Princess.”

  “Yeah, Lucy’s the princess and I’m the little serving girl she lets clean up after her.”

  Lucy scooped up a pile of dirty laundry on the landing and tossed it at Matt. “As if you picked up anything ever.”

  The rooms were messy. Lucy’s room, on the righ
t side of the stairs, was tiny, with hardly enough room for a single bed and a small bureau. This was why, she claimed, she’d encroached into Matt’s room on the other side of the stairs. You’d have thought from the freefall of clothes and books and swimming goggles and ice skates and loose paper and teacups and half-eaten apples that they shared his room.

  Lucy had even pushed her desk over to Matt’s side so that they could study better. The desks faced each other on either side of the window— “so we both get a view,” Lucy told me. “We fought terribly over it.” That first day they found an old table for me and placed it between their desks facing the window.

  “She’ll get distracted looking out the window,” Lucy said.

  “She won’t,” Matt countered. “Will you, Jane?”

  They both turned to me and I looked out the window from which I could see the river running between tall white birches, their yellow leaves catching the last light, like a band of sapphires set in gold.

  I looked back at their eager faces. “No,” I told them, truthfully. “I won’t be distracted.”

  I STUDIED WITH THEM EVERY DAY AFTER SCHOOL THROUGHOUT the fall term and sometimes on Saturdays until Christmas break. I had been afraid that without the excuse of studying together Matt and Lucy would disappear from view over the long vacation. My relief at their invitation to go skating was tempered only by having to admit to them I didn’t have skates. I’d always relied on the rented ones at the public rink.

  “You can have my old ones,” Lucy told me. “Your feet are smaller than mine.” Surprisingly, she was right. Although she was tiny everywhere else, Lucy had unusually long feet. I tried on her skates and found that with an extra pair of socks they fit perfectly.