“Do you think it’ll be thick enough?” Lucy asked Matt as we followed a little stream called the Schwanenkill west into the woods, our skates slung over our shoulders. Although we hadn’t gotten much snow yet, the temperature had been below freezing since Halloween. The Schwanenkill was frozen except for a small rivulet down the middle that scalloped the edges of ice on either side. The ground felt hard to me as I struggled to keep up with them. The stream bank was icy and twice I slipped and broke through the thin ice and felt the cold water seep through my thin-soled sneakers.
Matt and Lucy wore the rubber-soled boots they’d gotten from L.L. Bean for Christmas, so they could crash through the ice and water heedlessly. I think that if they had noticed I was wearing Keds, they wouldn’t have taken me into the woods that day, but they could be unobservant that way. She was careless about how she dressed, more often than not wearing one of Matt’s soft corduroy shirts with her faded blue jeans. It didn’t matter, though, because she looked good in whatever she wore.
After we had walked about a quarter of a mile we came to a small wooden hut on the southern end of Heart Lake. When I realized where we were I grew nervous.
“Isn’t this private property?” I asked.
Lucy opened the door of the hut while Matt eased himself down the steep bank to test the ice.
“I suppose so,” Lucy answered with a yawn. I followed her into the hut. It was too dark at first to make out much, but then she opened the two double doors at the opposite end and the small space was filled with the late afternoon sun reflecting off the icy surface of the lake, which came up to the very edge of the building. I noticed that the sun was only a little above the line of hills behind the Crevecoeur mansion on the west side of the lake. It would be dark soon. The walls on either side were lined with deep shelves. Lucy stretched herself out on one of the shelves as if she had come for a nap instead of a skate.
“But no one’s ever caught us,” she said. “And it’s the best place to skate. We even have our own skating lodge.” She twirled her hand around in the mote-filled air, indicating the little hut.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“It’s the old Schwanenkill icehouse,” Matt said, coming into the hut and swinging his skates onto the end of the shelf where Lucy was lying. “The Crevecoeurs used it for storing ice harvested from the lake.” He swept a handful of sawdust from the shelf and sifted it through his gloved fingers. “They packed the ice in sawdust and it lasted till summer.” He pointed to a rotting wooden ramp that led from the double doors down to the ice. “They used that ramp to haul up the ice they cut from the lake. Our father used to help with the ice harvest.”
“You’re a fund of historical information, Mattie. How’s the ice today?” Lucy asked without opening her eyes.
“It’s a bit choppy at the mouth of the Schwanenkill. I think there’s a spring there that feeds into the stream and it keeps the ice from forming solidly above it. But if we skirt around that we should be all right.”
He was already pulling his boots off as he spoke and Lucy, although still supine, brought one heavily booted foot up to her opposite knee and began lazily pulling at her laces.
I looked out at the surface of the lake, which was turning a pale Creamsicle color in the setting sun. It was hard to see well with the glare, but I thought I saw dark patches, like bruises on an apple, which could have been soft spots or just shadows on the ice.
“I hear the lake is really deep,” I said conversationally. I’d kicked off my Keds but I was still twisting the skate laces through my fingers.
“Seventy-two feet in the middle,” Matt answered proudly, as if he had made the lake, “but this side’s pretty shallow near the shore. You stay right behind me, Jane, and if there’s a thin spot I’ll let you know by going through first.” He grinned at me with the utter, unthinking confidence of a fourteen-year-old boy. “You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?”
I nodded earnestly, not sure if he were kidding or not.
“Good, because I’m not sure about this one.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Lucy. “It would probably be too much trouble for her. She probably wouldn’t want to get her feet wet.”
Lucy swiped at Matt’s shin with the tip of her skate blade. He jumped off the bench and lunged out of the icehouse with Lucy right behind him. When they reached the ice their jerky movements suddenly smoothed and lengthened. I saw Lucy catch up with him and grab his parka hood so roughly I thought they’d both plummet headlong through the ice, but instead he turned around, caught her hands and spun her into a graceful pirouette.
I was tempted to stay in the icehouse. Even if I hadn’t been worried about the ice I knew I would never be able to keep up with them. But then I remembered Matt’s trusting smile. You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane? Of course, he’d been kidding, but I realized at that moment, as I tightened my laces until they hurt, that if Matt and Lucy were in danger there was no point at all to me being safe on the shore.
There’s always that first step in skating, from dry ground to slick ice, when it just seems impossible. Impossible that two thin blades of metal will support you, impossible that because its molecules have begun to dance a little slower water will hold you up. There was no railing here, as at the rink, to bridge that gap between solid and liquid, only the imperceptible giving way of earthbound gravity to free fall.
I took a few tentative strokes out onto the ice and then remembered what Matt had said about staying away from the Schwanenkill. I looked for them and saw that they were skating along the lake edge toward the northeast cove, probably to avoid being seen from the mansion on the west side of the lake. I would have liked to get a closer look at the mansion, which I had never seen before, but with the sun setting behind it I could make out little except a low, dark bulk squatting on its rise above the lake. When I looked away there were dark spots burned into my vision, and it took a moment to locate Matt and Lucy under a pine tree that spread its boughs above the lake. Lucy waved at me, but Matt, standing behind her, reached up over Lucy’s head and pulled a branch, releasing a shower of snow down the back of her neck. Lucy shrieked and spun around to grab him, but he was already gone, skimming the edge of the lake with a swift hockey player’s glide.
Lucy knelt on the ice and gathered together a snowball. When she got to her feet she must have realized she’d never catch up with him. He was already on the western edge of the cove where three rocks broke through the ice. She must have decided that the only way she’d catch up to him would be to cut directly across the cove.
She was halfway across the cove when one of the shadows I’d noticed before darkened and opened beneath her. Matt, on the other side of the lake, was turned the other way. I don’t remember deciding to move forward, but I found myself a few feet away from the ice hole.
She was in it up to her waist, her elbows propped on the edge of the ice to hold herself up. I slid one heavy skate toward her and a crack like forked lightning spread between us. Behind her, Matt turned and saw us. He started to skate, not directly toward us, but back along the shore, the long way.
I crouched to my knees and then lay myself down flat on the ice. I moved slowly, but still the ice hit my chest like a wall and sucked all the breath out of my lungs. I reached my arm out but I was still a foot short of her hand. Her fingertips, which had been straining toward mine, relaxed and she shook her head at me. Then one elbow cracked through the ice and her left shoulder slipped under the water. She made a sound like a wounded bird and I thought I heard its echo until I realized it had come from Matt, who was behind me now. I slithered forward, scraping my chin on the rough ice, and caught her right hand. She grabbed my wrist with more strength than I would have imagined existed in those tiny hands.
Behind me I heard Matt’s hoarse whisper telling me—her? us?—to hold on and then I felt a tug at my feet. As he pulled, she got her left arm onto the ice and I grabbed that one, too, only she had no grip in that hand so I grabbed her wrist. Her wrist felt
so cold and brittle I thought it might break, but I held on even after her legs cleared the ice and her body was out of the water.
Matt dragged us like that, both of us flat on the ice, back to the shore. When we were both on dry ground he told me I could let go, but he had to pry my fingers away from her wrist and her fingers away from mine. When she let go I realized I had no feeling in my left arm. I couldn’t even lift it to help hold her up on the walk home so Matt picked her up and carried her the quarter mile back.
It was only after Dr. Bard (who lived two houses down from the Tollers) had examined Lucy and given her an injection of penicillin to ward off pneumonia that he happened to notice how I was holding my arm. When he took my jacket off he saw I had dislocated my shoulder—the bone had been pulled clean out of its socket.
Chapter Fourteen
ONCE SET, MY SHOULDER HEALED RAPIDLY, AND EVEN though it still hurt, my mother didn’t see any reason for me to miss school. It was too bad, she said, that I had always written with my left hand, so this was a good opportunity for me to learn to use my right hand better. I told her I would try, but when I was in school I switched back to writing with my left hand even though the act of writing sent shooting pains through my arm. That arm never felt quite the same.
Lucy was worse off. Despite the penicillin injection, she developed pneumonia from her fall in the lake and was out of school for the whole month of January and some of February. Matt was out of school a lot, too, although I don’t think he was sick. I just don’t think he could bear to leave Lucy alone all day.
I went to the Tollers’ house after school every day to drop off Lucy’s homework until Domina Chambers told me that she would drop the work off herself on her way back to Heart Lake. I grew shy, then, of visiting even though Matt and Lucy had always acted happy to see me. I thought they had forgotten all about me when, on my fifteenth birthday, Domina Chambers gave me a package wrapped in plain brown paper. I waited until my study hall and then sneaked away to an unused corridor where I’d found a window seat looking out over the school’s unused courtyard—an air well really—a place I could be alone if I didn’t mind burning my bottom on a hot radiator and freezing my arms against the cold windowpane.
There were two packages inside, one contained a beautiful fountain pen and a bottle of peacock blue ink. These were from Lucy. I put those aside and ripped open the second package. It was a notebook, the black-and-white kind you could buy in the drugstore for a quarter. I opened it and read Matt’s note on the inside cover, written on the lines provided for a classroom schedule: “To Jane. Still waters run deep. From, Matt.” He’d said that to me once when I told him I’d like to be a writer but I worried about not having enough to say. “You’re quiet, but you’re observant,” he’d said. “Still waters run deep.”
I filled the pen with ink and wrote on the first page, “Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink…” The nib of the pen caught on the page and ink splattered on the paper and my blouse. The effort to write made my whole arm ache and I wondered if Lucy realized it would be so hard for me to use it.
“. . . and Matt gave me this notebook.” I looked at the notebook and tried to think of something poetic I could say about it. It was a cheap exercise book, a brand the town sold because it was made by the paper company that owned the mill. The black-and-white pattern on the cover was supposed to look like marble, but to me it looked like ice on the river in spring, when the ice began to break up and the broken shards traveled downstream to the mill. In the summer the river was choked with logs heading toward the mill to be made into paper—maybe the very paper between these covers and the cover itself—so that holding this book was like holding a piece of the river, and the forests up north, and the ice formed in the high peaks.
I looked out the window at the bleak abandoned courtyard. It was full of the things that kids threw from classroom windows, discarded mimeos and thick felt erasers that had split in the middle and curled up on themselves like small dead animals.
“I’ll never have any other friends like them,” I wrote. I waited for the ink to dry and then ran my fingers down the page. That’s when I noticed the ragged edge along the inside seam of the book. A page had been torn out. I wondered what Matt had written that he had decided to rip out.
I DECIDED TO VISIT THE TOLLERS’ HOUSE THAT DAY TO thank Matt and Lucy for their presents. When I got there I found Domina Chambers having tea in the kitchen with Hannah Toller. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her there; I knew she was dropping off Lucy’s work, but I had imagined her literally dropping Lucy’s assignments on the Tollers’ front stoop and hastening on her way up Lake Drive to the school. I hadn’t pictured her having tea with Hannah Toller. They looked so odd together: Helen Chambers like a Nordic ice queen and Hannah Toller in her housedress like a drab peasant. But there they were, not only sharing tea but apparently sharing intimate conversation. Their heads were nearly touching as they leaned over some large book of photographs.
“Ah, Clementia, we were just talking about you. Come sit down with us.” I winced at the sound of my Latin name, which I hated. We didn’t get to pick our own Latin names in Domina Chambers’s class. Rather they were doled out to us according to a strict system. Domina Chambers told us what our names meant (I never saw her consult a baby name book; she seemed to know the meaning of all names) and then gave us a Latin name which had an equivalent meaning.
Lucy was easy because it meant, like her own name Helen, light, and so Lucy would use the same Latin name Helen had at school: Lucia.
Jane, she told me, came from the Hebrew for merciful, which was Clementia in Latin. Floyd Miller and Ward Castle spent the rest of the year calling me Clementine.
I sat next to Mrs. Toller and looked down at the table. The book resting between them was a yearbook and it was open to a picture of two young girls with their arms around each other’s waists. The girls wore strapless evening gowns and little fur stoles. Off to the side a young man in a tuxedo smiled at the girls. He was blond and handsome and looked, I noticed with a little shock, a lot like Lucy.
“Our freshman winter formal,” Domina Chambers said, closing the heavy book. I saw the year 1963 printed on the cover. “You knew that Hannah and I were at Vassar together, didn’t you?” Domina Chambers lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. “Only Hannah wasn’t so happy there, were you, dear?”
“College is not for everyone,” Mrs. Toller said quietly.
“No, of course it isn’t. What do you think, Clementia, is college for you? Or should I say: Are you for college? Perhaps the state teachers college in New Paltz? You’d make a very competent teacher, I think, and we always need good Latin teachers.”
I nodded. What she described was the pinnacle of my career ambitions, but on Helen Chambers’s lips it suddenly sounded dreary and ordinary.
“Now our Lucia on the other hand… I see her as a Vassar girl, and then she’ll go to the city and work in some arts-related field—publishing, I think, with her preciseness and gift for language. If we can only get her into Heart Lake, she’ll be a sure thing for Vassar.”
“It’s a ways away,” Mrs. Toller said.
“Nonsense! Three hours on the train. She can come home on the weekends—when she’s not too busy studying or going to football games and mixers at Yale or taking in the museums in the city. We were always encouraged in Art History 105 to spend as much time as we could at the museums.”
“Mattie’ll half die missing her,” Hannah said with an edge in her voice I hadn’t heard before. “Have you thought of that, Helen?”
“Well, Mattie will just have to get used to doing without her. He’ll get plenty of practice when she comes to Heart Lake next year. Now the thing to do is make sure she’s ready for the exam. You’re here to study with her, aren’t you, Jane?”
I nodded and smiled, glad to be called by my real name for once. “Oh yes, after all, I’m taking the exam, too.”
Domina Chambers reached across th
e table and patted my hand. “Of course you are, dear, and I’m sure you’ll do very nicely on it.”
I DID DO VERY NICELY ON THE EXAM. IN FACT, I ACED IT. Looking back, I think I set out to do just that—ace the exam—that day sitting at the Tollers’ kitchen table with Helen Chambers, if only to prove to her that I was better than she thought I was—better than someone who does nicely and goes to teachers college. I wrote in my journal that same night, “Teachers college is OK, but what I’d really like is to go someplace like Vassar. And to do that I have to get the scholarship to Heart Lake. I don’t think Lucy would really mind—after all, she’s the one who’s believed in me all along.”
I outlined a study schedule on the back cover of my notebook. I gave myself six weeks to memorize all of Wheelock’s Latin. After my parents would go to bed I got up and sat by my bedroom window studying by flashlight. My mother turned the heat down at night so it was cold in my room. When I looked out the window I couldn’t see the mill past the ice crystals spreading across the black panes. When the lumber trucks passed on the road in front of our house the glass shook and the ice patterns spread like a flower opening. Sometimes when I looked up from Wheelock and saw the ice crystals on the windowpane I imagined the picture I’d seen in the Vassar yearbook, only instead of Helen Chambers and Hannah Toller I pictured Lucy and me, our arms wrapped around each other, smiling into the camera. And off to the side, handsome in dark evening clothes, Matt looked on. Of course, he’d come visit on weekends from wherever he went to college—Yale, maybe, or Dartmouth because, he said, he liked the idea of going to a college founded by an Indian, and he’d heard they had a big Winter Festival.
Each night I ticked off the declensions and conjugations and sententiae antiquae I’d committed to memory in my black-and-white notebook. My fingers turned peacock blue with the ink from Lucy’s pen—the same color as the rings under my eyes.
I thought I’d be nervous for the exam, but instead I felt eerily calm and detached—as if I were recalling something I had done a long time ago.
The Lake of Dead Languages Page 13