The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  I saw Albie curl her lip back and I realized it sounded as if I had been telling on Lucy. I blushed, not only because I looked like a snitch, but because I had a sudden, unbidden image of all that there was to tell: Specifically, the picture that came to mind was of the masked and horned figure in the icehouse.

  I shook the picture away. Why had I thought of it? But then I realized what had reminded me of that night. It was Albie’s sweater, a blue Fair Isle cardigan several sizes too big for her. It looked just like the one I’d borrowed from Lucy; the one I’d left hanging from a branch on the side of the path.

  “Miss Hudson?” Domina Chambers repeated my name. “Are you satisfied?”

  I tried to think of something to say that would make it clear to Albie that I was only looking out for Lucy. “Well, school’s almost over and Matt will be home for the summer,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll feel better then.”

  “Oh, no.” Domina Chambers shook her head so hard some strands of silver hair came loose from her chignon. “The military academy has had such an excellent effect on Matthew his parents have enrolled him for the summer program. As for Lucy, I have other plans for her summer.”

  IT TURNED OUT THAT DOMINA CHAMBERS’S PLANS FOR Lucy involved taking her to Italy for the entire summer break, where she had a grant to study at the American Academy in Rome. Lucy would accompany her and have the opportunity to see the art and architecture of ancient Rome firsthand.

  “She says it will be excellent for my classical studies when I go on to college. Of course, I’ll major in classics. I’m also supposed to study Italian. On the weekends we’re going to Florence and I’m supposed to memorize like every painting in the Uffizi.” Lucy was packing her suitcase. I was sitting on her bed looking out the window at the lake. We’d started swimming classes these last few weeks of school and I’d thought about coming back out to the lake over the summer and swimming, but now I wondered if I would do it alone, without Matt or Lucy.

  “Do you have to go?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t your parents let you stay if you asked to?”

  Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make? Matt’s not here anyway.”

  I’m still here, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Lucy did rouse herself enough to realize she might have hurt my feelings.

  “And you’re always so busy over the summer anyway, Jane. Hasn’t your mother hired you out as an indentured servant?”

  I shook my head. “No. She seems to want me to stick around this summer.”

  “Gee, that’s a change. Well, think of it this way, at least you’re not being shipped off to some other boarding school, like Deirdre or Albie. Your summer can’t possibly be as bad as theirs is going to be.”

  But Lucy was wrong. When I came home after the last day of school I found my father home from work in the middle of the day. He sat me down in the living room and told me that my mother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had six to eight months to live.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  OVER THE SUMMER I WATCHED AS MY MOTHER LOST thirty pounds and most of her strength. By August she was barely able to get out of bed to use the bathroom. She lay, sunken and yellow, waiting for me to bring her meals she couldn’t eat and complaining about the way I prepared them or how long it took me to bring them. She never complained about the cancer or the pain, which I knew about from the way she sometimes drew her lips back from her teeth, but if I had hoped that sickness would put an end to my mother’s endless complaining about me, I would have been sorely disappointed.

  She complained about the way I dressed and the way I wore my hair. “You look like a deranged old maid,” she told me one day. My hair was pulled back in a sloppy bun, which was as close an imitation of Domina Chambers’s chignon as I could manage, and I was wearing a plaid gym kilt and a salmon-colored button-down shirt that Matt had given to Lucy and Lucy had given to me. “Is this why I sent you to that fancy private school, so you can look like a freak?”

  I could have pointed out that she hadn’t sent me anywhere; I had earned the scholarship for Heart Lake on my own. But then I looked at her. She had lost most of her hair to chemo by then and her arms had grown so thin that they fell back from her shoulder bones and disappeared under the covers, making her look like a double amputee. Her legs, on the other hand, had swollen to twice their normal size. Ballooning under the covers they looked like one bloated appendage. A mermaid’s tail. That’s what she looked like: a bald, yellow, armless mermaid. This was the person calling me a freak.

  So I told her that this was the way the girls dressed at Heart Lake and, Lucy had told me, at college. I tried to distract her by reading to her my college application essays. I showed her my SAT scores and explained how good they were. I told her that Miss Buehl thought I had a very good chance of getting a scholarship to Vassar.

  “Another scholarship,” she said, looking out at me through her yellowing eyes. “That’s all they’ll see you as: the charity student. It’ll never make any difference. You’ll always be the housekeeper’s granddaughter. Mill folk. That’s what my mother tried to explain to me, but I wouldn’t listen. Now look at me, I can’t even die without the sound of that infernal mill pounding in my ears.”

  The sound of the logs being processed into lumber and paper had always been a low hum in the background of our lives that I’d long ago stopped hearing. I tried to close the windows so she wouldn’t hear it, but it made the house insufferably hot, and the hum of the mill seemed to vibrate through the windows. Each time a lumber truck passed our house it made her old iron bed shake and she would wince in pain from the motion. Sometimes, when I heard the sound of gears shifting on the hill beneath our house, I would try to hold the headboard to keep it from shaking, but then she accused me of shaking the bed myself.

  My father found me one day sitting on the floor outside her room.

  “Try not to mind the things she says,” he told me. “It’s the cancer talking, not her.”

  I tried not to listen to her, but by the end of the summer I felt as if everything in my world had shrunken and wasted away.

  So accustomed was I to the look of sickness that it was something of a shock, then, to see Lucy on the first day of school. Apparently Domina Chambers had been right about the salutary effects of Italy: Lucy had bloomed over the summer. She’d put on weight, especially in the hips and chest, her skin was golden and her hair, pulled back in a new elegant twist, shone like the Mediterranean sun.

  “All that pasta and olive oil,” she said unpacking silk shirts from Bellagio and sweaters from Harrods (they’d stopped in England for two weeks on the way back) and beautiful leather shoes.

  “My God, you’ve got tits,” Deirdre announced the minute she saw her. “Why does everything I eat go to my ass?”

  I expected Lucy to make a snide comment—Deirdre had gained even more weight over the summer—but instead she smiled benignly and said, “Helen says if we all ate like the Mediterraneans we’d be much healthier. She’s going to start a Mediterranean cooking club. Do you want to join with me, Deirdre?”

  And so, along with all the other surprises, I found that Lucy had apparently forgiven Deirdre over the summer and wanted to be friends again.

  “Matt’s doing fine at military school,” Lucy told us. “He spends the weekends at Aunt Doris’s house. He says Roy asks about you, Jane.”

  “Oh?” I said, feigning nonchalance. I would have been happier to hear that Matt himself was asking for me, but perhaps this was just his oblique way of communicating.

  “He’ll be back for Christmas break,” she said. And that was all. As if seeing her brother twice a year was suddenly just fine with her. “Oh, and he says he was sorry to hear about your mom,” she added. “We both are.”

  “Yeah,” Deirdre chimed in, “tough break.” And then they were back to making plans for the year. Cooking class and a cross-country ski club—“Helen says it’s chicer than downhill skiing”—and a play.

  “Helen says that when she wa
s here they did Aristophanes’s The Frogs in the lake,” Lucy told us.

  “In the lake?” Deirdre asked. “What a hoot! We’ve got to do it.”

  Lucy and Deirdre kept busy that fall, pursuing extracurricular activities with a near frenetic zeal. I couldn’t participate in most of the activities because I was expected to spend my afternoons and weekends at home. I was most disappointed about not being in the class play. They’d decided, instead of The Frogs, to do their own version of Iphigenia based on Euripides’s two plays, Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. They called it Iphigenia on the Beach.

  It came about because when our Greek tragedy class, which Domina Chambers and Miss Macintosh taught together, read Iphigenia in Aulis, Deirdre was furious that the play ended with the girl’s death.

  “It just sucks,” Deirdre blurted out, “It’s so… so patriarchal. They kill this innocent girl so these men can go off and fight their stupid war, which they’re fighting all because some impotent jerk couldn’t satisfy his wife in the first place.”

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know, Miss Hall, that Euripides apparently agreed with you. Although I doubt he would have phrased it in quite the same words.” The class giggled and I noticed Miss Macintosh furiously scribbling notes in her lesson plan book. Someone wondered aloud what the Greek for “sucks” was. I’d noticed that even Domina Chambers seemed more tolerant of Deirdre since Lucy had warmed to her.

  “How do we know that Euripides felt that way, Miss Chambers?” Miss Macintosh asked. I noticed that Miss Macintosh eschewed the title Domina.

  “Euripides wrote a second play called Iphigenia in Tauris in which Iphigenia reappears and tells us that just before the priest would have slit her throat she was spirited away by Artemis to the island of Tauris and a deer was sacrificed in her place.”

  “Cool,” said Deirdre.

  “Why don’t we read that one next?” asked Lucy.

  I saw Miss Macintosh stabbing her finger at her carefully prepared syllabus (I believe we were scheduled to read Medea next), but Domina Chambers answered without a glance in her direction.

  “Excellent idea, Miss Toller. We shall.”

  And so we read Iphigenia in Tauris. Deirdre was disappointed that Iphigenia’s stay in Tauris wasn’t the goddess/

  commune she’d thought it would be. Instead, Iphigenia, as a priestess of Artemis, is forced to sacrifice any shipwrecked sailors who are unlucky enough to wash up on the Taurian shore. But Lucy loved the play. Iphigenia’s brother, Orestes, and his friend Pylades, come to the island, but because Iphigenia doesn’t recognize him she prepares to sacrifice him at the altar of Artemis. Lucy loved the scene where Iphigenia and Orestes talk about how they’ve lost, respectively, a brother and a sister without knowing that they’ve already found each other.

  “A perfect example of dramatic irony, wouldn’t you say, Esther?” Domina Chambers asked Miss Macintosh, who sullenly agreed. Since having her syllabus preempted she’d retreated into an incommunicative funk at the back of the room where she kept copious notes in her lesson plan book. I knew, too, that she hated when Domina Chambers ignored school protocol and referred to her colleagues by their first names in the presence of students.

  “I know it’s corny, but it gives me the chills,” Lucy said. “She almost kills her own brother.”

  Their identities are revealed only when Iphigenia recites a letter for Pylades to bring home to Greece. “A greeting comes from one you think is dead. Your sister is not dead at Aulis.” Lucy begged Domina Chambers to let the class do the play.

  “We can do it on the swimming beach,” she said. “We can use one of the rocks as the altar at Aulis and Artemis can appear on a boat to take her to Tauris. One of the rocks can be Tauris…”

  I noticed Miss Macintosh lift her head from her lesson plan book and raise her hand to object. “We couldn’t possibly. Think of the insurance problems. Girls falling in the lake…” As she spoke I imagined it: stola-clad girls getting tangled in their sheets and sinking to the bottom of the lake. But Domina Chambers was not one to be swayed by conventional concerns. She waved a hand in Miss Macintosh’s direction as if she were batting away an annoying insect. I noticed Miss Macintosh turn pink above her white high-necked collar. Domina Chambers admitted that the plays were not her favorites and she thought the addition of a happy ending for Iphigenia was pure soap opera melodrama; however, she thought the material lent itself to reinterpretation.

  “We should always recall,” she lectured, “that the Greek playwrights felt free to bend the mythic material to their purposes—as Shakespeare did—” here she shot a meaningful look at Miss Macintosh. “And so, why shouldn’t we?”

  Of course, Lucy was chosen to play Iphigenia. Deirdre played Orestes. They wanted me for Pylades, but I couldn’t make enough rehearsals, so they got another girl. All the speaking parts were taken by seniors. The swim team played the chorus. They stood in a lifeboat, led by Miss Pike, who looked splendid in a Greek stola. She insisted on holding a lifesaving float in case any of the girls went overboard, but she managed to hold it in such a way that it looked like some kind of heraldic icon.

  We all wanted Domina Chambers to play Artemis. She demurred at first, recommending Miss Macintosh, as a sop, I think, to her wounded feelings, but when Miss Macintosh stoutly refused, she agreed.

  Although I couldn’t be in the play I helped Deirdre with the costumes. We made a gold helmet embossed with an owl for Miss North, who’d agreed to play Athena, and a silver helmet with a moon and deer etched in tin foil for Domina Chambers. We already had a deer mask for the deer who takes Iphigenia’s place at the altar. We used one from May Day. I noticed it was the one with the green heart embroidered on it.

  The problem, as I heard Deirdre and Lucy discuss day after day, was how to make the switch—the deer for Iphigenia—dramatically. Deirdre suggested the priest could fling a sheet over Lucy and then she could slip under it and get in the boat with Domina Chambers.

  “But everyone will see me wading up to the boat. It ruins the effect. And where’s the deer going to be before she slips under the sheet? There’s no backstage, you know.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who was so hot to do it on the swimming beach!”

  I had to admit I almost enjoyed hearing them bicker. But then Deirdre came up with a brilliant solution.

  “If we use the second stone as the altar the deer can wait in the cave behind it. When I throw up the sheet you can slip in the water and swim underwater to the boat. The deer can swim underwater to the rock and pop up under the sheet.”

  Lucy liked it. The only problem was getting someone small and agile enough to play the deer. Someone who was also a good swimmer and wouldn’t mind sitting still in the cave throughout the whole play.

  “I know just the right girl,” Deirdre woke us both in the middle of the night to announce. “Albie. She’s small and she can move without making a sound. And she’d do anything for Lucy.”

  On the day of the performance my father agreed to come home early from work to take over watching my mother. The play was timed to end at sunset and so I found myself sitting by my mother’s sickbed anxiously watching the sun sink over the lumber mill smokestacks.

  “You think by staring at it you’ll stop the sun in the sky,” I heard my mother’s voice from the bed behind me. I had thought she was asleep.

  “They’re doing a play on the swimming beach,” I told her.

  “On the beach? What nonsense. It was no lucky day you won that scholarship. You should be learning practical things not wasting your time with rich girls. You’ll never be more than a servant to them, that’s what my mother always told me…”

  “Lucy’s not rich.” I was only able to interrupt my mother’s tirade because she had run out of breath. She started to wheeze now, impatient to answer me. I helped her sit up and gave her a drink through a straw.

  “You wait,” she said when she’d regained her breath. “Lucy’ll come into her share of wealth some d
ay and then see how much you’re worth to her.”

  I’d have asked her where Lucy was going to get this money, but my father came home and I could tell by the angle of the sun that I’d already missed most of the play. I ran all the way up River Street and then cut behind the Tollers’ house and followed the Schwanenkill to the south end of the lake. I could see when I got to the icehouse that the play was still going on. I started out along the eastern side of the lake, but I realized I would miss the whole thing by the time I got to the swimming beach. I knew where there was a rock on the east shore where I could sit and watch at least the end of the play. I wanted to see how they managed that last scene.

  As it turned out, I had a perfect view of the stones. I could see, as I settled myself on the rock, that the second sister stone was covered with a white sheet that glowed a fiery red in the light of the setting sun. It looked exactly like the bloodred altar it was supposed to represent.

  From where I sat I could see things the audience was not supposed to see. It didn’t ruin the effect, though, when a hand reached out from the cave and tugged the sheet away, revealing the prone shape of a naked girl tied to the rock. I could hear, over the still water, the gasp of the audience on the swimming beach.

  “Jesus,” I thought, “Domina Chambers really is fearless!” But then I realized, as the rest of the audience must have soon discovered, that Lucy was wearing a pale pink swimsuit that clung to her newly ample figure like a second skin.

  The chorus’s dinghy swayed erratically as a figure in a robe with a gold foil mask disembarked and waded through the thigh-deep water over to the rock. The players had been lucky that the warm weather had lasted this long, but still I didn’t envy the actress playing the priestess who had to stand in this water. I stretched out on my rock and dangled my hand in the water. It felt icy.

  The robed figure lifted a dagger and held it above Lucy’s white arched throat. Just as the blade came down toward her throat, the priestess lifted her left arm and her long trailing sleeve hid the victim from the audience. There was a scream that echoed off the wall of the Point and rippled over the still water and a bright spray of blood splashed the priestess’s robe. Even from where I sat it looked so real that I stood up and tried to see Lucy sneaking into the cave behind the stone. But the setting sun was in my eyes, turning the water such a lurid red I could almost believe it was Lucy’s blood flowing into the lake. Barely a minute passed, but it felt like an eternity. I looked toward the beach and could see that many in the audience had also gotten to their feet and were craning to see what was behind the priestess’s robe. And then the priestess swept away her arm again and we saw, in Lucy’s place, a slaughtered deer, blood dripping from its torn neck. At almost the same moment a small boat rounded the Point and we saw Lucy at the prow, swathed in scarves the color of the sunset. Behind her stood Artemis holding a chaplet of gold above Lucy’s head. The boat was rowed by Miss Buehl in a short toga.