The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “Ah, Jane, I saw your name in the sign-in book and thought I’d wait for you.”

  The matron hands me back my driver’s license without looking up at me. I wonder if she called the dean to tell her I was here in the dorm. I wonder if she had been instructed to do so.

  “Did you see the note I left on your door?” Dean Buehl asks. “Asking you to call as soon as you got in?”

  “I haven’t been back to my house yet,” I tell her. “I came here first to get a flashlight.” I hold up the flashlight as corroborating evidence.

  “Ah,” Dean Buehl says, nodding. “I remember the path up to that cottage could be tricky. Of course I’ve walked all these paths so many times I think I could find my way around the campus blindfolded. Let me walk you back to the parking lot and help you with your luggage. We can talk along the way.”

  IN ADDITION TO MY SUITCASES I’VE BROUGHT BACK SOME boxes of books from the house in Westchester. Although I tell her they can wait until the morning, Dean Buehl cheerfully hoists up two and takes off down the darkened path so quickly I am hard put keeping up with her with my one box. I am reminded of the nature hikes she used to take us on when she was the science teacher—the way she strode through the woods, leaving her students scrambling over rocks and puddles, desperately trying to stay close enough to hear her lecture. We’d be tested on every rock and flower identification, we knew, and inability to keep up was no excuse. “The race goes to the swiftest,” was one of her favorite sayings and in her class it was literally true.

  Twenty years haven’t slowed her down a bit. When I do finally catch up with her I have to stay behind her because this path hasn’t been plowed. Fresh snow covers the narrow track that had been shoveled before Christmas break and the sound of our boots crunching in it makes it doubly hard to hear what Dean Buehl is saying. She is talking over her shoulder to me as if I had been right behind her all along and I realize I’ve already missed half of her “getting me up to date on the Melissa Randall affair” as she calls it. She is tossing out autopsy and DNA findings the way she used to rattle off the names of trees and wildflowers. I gather, though, that there’s nothing I haven’t learned already from Roy Corey. Then I hear her refer to “that journal you kept senior year” and I interrupt to ask how many people know about it. “Well, Dr. Lockhart was there when we found it,” she tells me. We have reached the door of the cottage, so this I get to hear clearly, “but the only people who have read it are me and that nice young detective. Of course, I told Dr. Lockhart a little about the contents so she could assess their influence on Melissa. It should make an interesting chapter in the book she is writing on teenage suicide.”

  I am somewhat unnerved by the idea of my journal figuring in Dr. Lockhart’s research, but I smile at Dean Buehl in a way that I hope is ingratiating. “Thanks for helping with my stuff. I’ll make us some coffee, we can sit and talk…” I gesture toward the old Morris chair by the fireplace, the armrest of which still holds the teacup I drank from the night before I left. I see her follow the sweep of my hand and take in the little living room, the battered, old floral love seat under the window, the coffee table stacked with Latin books and Lands’ End catalogs and piles of ungraded blue books. The lines of her face, which had looked firm and rosy from the cold air and exertion of our walk, seem to settle downward and her skin pales. I think it is my untidiness, but then I remember that this was once her home. The furniture was here when I moved in and, now that I think of it, is arranged just as it was that night I stumbled out of the snowstorm and into this room. Only then there was a fire in the fireplace and classical music on the radio and the room shone with a kind of brightness that has now dulled with dust and the usage of uncaring tenants.

  She walks out my door and heads in the opposite direction from the parking lot.

  “Beautiful night…” I hear her say as she disappears down the path to the Point. “Better to talk out of doors.”

  I follow her to the Point where she has taken a stance—legs spread apart and arms clasped behind her back, like a general surveying her troops—on the curving rock above the frozen lake.

  “Always find this a good place to think,” she says as I come up beside her.

  “Yes,” I say, “the view is beautiful.”

  She shakes her head impatiently and scuffs at the snow with the heel of her heavy hiking boot like a horse pawing the ground. “Not the view,” she says with the weary patience of a teacher used to hearing the wrong answer, “the rock. Right where we’re standing was a mile-high glacier. This rock here is so hard it’s barely eroded in ten thousand years, but the marks the glacier left are still here. Puts things in perspective.”

  “Yes,” I say, although I am not exactly sure what the perspective is. Is it that human suffering is insignificant in the face of the majesty of nature, or that the scars of the past are still with us and always will be?

  “You’re embarrassed,” she says. Actually, I’m more perplexed at the moment but I nod.

  “Because I’ve read your old journal.” Dean Buehl sighs and relaxes her stance a bit so I can see, suddenly, the slight curve in her shoulders and the droop in her once taut figure. “Don’t be, it was a great relief to me.”

  I can no longer pretend to understand what she’s talking about. “My journal was a relief to you?” As the words come out I realize I can no longer hide my anger either. First the outpourings of my foolish young heart are appropriated by a hysterical teenage girl, then they are co-opted as a research tool for an ambitious psychologist, and now they are balm to my former teacher and present boss?

  “Yes,” she says, ignoring the outrage in my voice. She looks down at the rock where she’s kicked away the snow. “All these years I’ve felt it was my fault what happened to Helen. I thought if only I had spoken up at the hearing she might not have been fired and if she hadn’t been fired she wouldn’t have killed herself…”

  “Killed herself? Domina Chambers killed herself?” I picture my old Latin teacher—her proud and haughty profile, the way she lifted one eyebrow when a student mistranslated a line of Latin. She is the last person I can imagine taking her own life.

  “Yes.” Dean Buehl looks away from the rock as if the perspective the rock has offered has vanished and the scars of that distant calamity are fresh again. “Four years after she was let go. It was a terrible blow for her. For me, too.” When she doesn’t go on I turn to look at her. The lines in her face stand out starkly in the moonlight, like fault lines that have deepened after a quake and then I realize that the trembling that passes over her face is her trying to keep from crying.

  “I even tried to get her a teaching position at a Catholic school up north,” she says when she has regained control of her voice. Up north from here? That could only mean St. Eustace. I couldn’t blame Domina Chambers for turning that down. “Some of the girls from here had gone there after… after the scandal… and I thought she might take an interest in keeping up with them, but she didn’t. Instead she went down to Albany and got work as a substitute.”

  “Really? A substitute? Domina Chambers?” This surprises me more than the idea of her killing herself, even as it goes some way to making that idea more plausible.

  “You can imagine what she thought of that.” Dean Buehl tries to smile, but the effort seems to release that trembling again and she gives it up.

  I remember how we treated substitute teachers at Corinth High. I have a sudden picture of Domina Chambers standing at a blackboard (she would have been reduced to writing on the board if only to write her name), her elegant black dress besmirched with yellow chalk, the silver hair coming undone from its intricate twist.

  “When I heard she had killed herself I thought it was because of how she had come down in the world and perhaps I could have made a difference. And then, our relationship didn’t help at the hearing…”

  Dean Buehl’s voice hoarsens and trails off. There’s a final shudder and then her face gleams in the moonlight, her emotions so
naked and exposed that I have to make an effort not to look away. “You mean you and Miss Chambers…” My words sound childish and prurient even to myself. I remember Deirdre Hall’s salacious conjectures about Miss Buehl and Domina Chambers. I remember again the cottage the night of the snowstorm, the fire and the teapot and the classical music… What was it she had said? That they had been working on some curriculum project together?

  “Domina Chambers was staying at your cottage,” I say.

  Dean Buehl nods. “She spent every break at the cottage. It was the only time we really had to ourselves, but then that girl showed up and we had to pretend that Helen had come by to work on the AP curriculum. We had to make up a story. Do you know what it felt like? Having to pretend—like schoolgirls caught breaking curfew?”

  I remember the tangle of lies I’d been caught in and nod—yes, I know what she means—but she doesn’t notice; she’s lost in the past.

  “We had to pretend even when we knew they all knew. We knew what you girls whispered about us behind our backs and the stories our so-called colleagues carried back to the board. I knew that was why they were so hard on her at the inquest, but I was afraid that if I spoke in her defense I would be fired, too. I’ve been so ashamed… all these years… not for what we were but that I denied it. And it wasn’t just Helen who was hurt. The girls who had to leave the school because of the scandal… I felt such a responsibility for them. It’s why I took the dean’s job even though it was like taking over a sinking ship.…” She breaks off and I look away while she struggles to get her voice under control. On the lake I see a black speck circling on the white ice. I think it’s a bird but then realize it’s a skater. Dr. Lockhart, no doubt.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” I say, “even if you had spoken at the hearing…”

  Dean Buehl waves her hand at me impatiently. “It’s not just that,” she says. “You see, it was my fault Lucy found out that Helen was her mother, and I always thought that must have been what Matt and Lucy were fighting about when they went through the ice.”

  I look away from the skater and back at Dean Buehl. “You knew that Lucy was Helen’s daughter?”

  She smiles at me. Finally, I am the student with the right answer. “You guessed, too. You always were smarter than people gave you credit for, Jane.”

  I wonder what people.

  “Of course Helen told me. We told each other everything. And it explained so much. The way Helen missed her freshman spring semester at Vassar… oh, I was at Smith,” she fills in hurriedly when she sees my perplexed look, “but I wrote to Helen often. I remember her writing that she had to go nurse a sick relative. It sounded very odd at the time. Of course I realized later she must have had the baby then and given it to Hannah.…”

  “Why did Hannah Toller go along with it?” I ask.

  Dean Buehl stares at me as if I had interrupted her lecture on cell division to ask a question about thermodynamics.

  “Well, Hannah adored her of course. From the ninth grade on. The only reason Hannah even went to Vassar was to be near Helen.…” I detect a note of jealousy in her voice that she shakes off like a dog shaking off cold water. “Helen said she had first planned to give the baby up for adoption and it was Hannah’s idea to say the baby was hers. She wasn’t really cut out for college life, and there was a boy from back home who would marry her in a heartbeat. It made so much more sense for Hannah to give up college than for Helen, who had such promise.…”

  “Then why did she come back here?”

  Dean Buehl looks down at the rock as if the answer were in the glacial inscriptions.

  “She missed the girl. She wanted to be closer to her. I told her she might as well tell the girl she was her mother.”

  “When did she tell her?”

  “In February. A week before she died.”

  I remember the day Lucy came back from tea with Domina Chambers and wrote Matt that letter. She told Matt that Helen had told her something that changed everything.

  “That’s why she wrote Matt and asked him to come,” I said. “She was going to tell him they weren’t brother and sister.” Only she had never gotten the chance.

  “Of course I had no idea what disgusting things they had been up to. All of you cavorting around the campus like a pack of wild dogs and right on my doorstep.” Dean Buehl flings a hand in the direction of the cottage so abruptly she nearly hits me. I step back and, for a moment, lose my balance on the snow-covered rock. She grabs me by the arm before I can fall. We’re quite a way from the edge, but still I feel that queasy sensation of vertigo, like when you stand on the beach and feel the tide sucking the sand out from under your feet. Dean Buehl must also be aware of the precipitous drop not so far away, because she does not release her grip on my arm right away. I can feel her strong fingers digging painfully into my forearm. I look at her face and see that the tears are gone and that look of naked grief I’d glimpsed a moment earlier has hardened into something else, something I find harder to read.

  “But when I read your journal, Jane, I realized it wasn’t all my fault. I may have been responsible for Lucy learning who her mother was, but you must have let on to Matt about the baby, didn’t you? That’s what happened out there on the ice, isn’t it?”

  I nod, amazed she has put together so much from that last journal entry. I had written, “Tonight I will go down to the lake to meet him and I’ll tell him everything.” I think of what I had written next and blush to think of Dean Buehl reading that very last line.

  “I didn’t tell him the baby was Lucy’s and his. I didn’t know that.”

  “But you told him enough so he guessed.”

  “Yes,” I agree limply. If not for Dean Buehl’s grip on my arm I might sink down to the cold rock.

  “It was my fault,” I say. Mea culpa, I say to myself, mea culpa. This is what Roy Corey had been talking about. Taking responsibility for the sins of the past.

  “And that’s what they were arguing about when Lucy ran out onto the ice.” I nod weakly. “At the inquest you said they were arguing about Helen, but that wasn’t it? Unless Lucy told Matt what Helen had told her… that she and Matt weren’t brother and sister…”

  “No,” I say, “she never got the chance.”

  “So you lied at the inquest.” I expect now that she will shake me, even hurl me from her, but instead she relaxes her grip on my arm and smiles at me. I’ve told her what she wanted to hear. I’ve cleansed her of sin. I can see the weight of it, lifting from her, the burden of all the guilt and shame she’s carried with her all these years. She’s shed it like the layer of dust the sculptor’s chisel leaves and now her face is as smooth and firm and pale as marble in the moonlight. “Well, dear, don’t be too hard on yourself. The thing to do now is put the past behind you. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ve made what amends I could and now I’m going to put the whole thing behind me. Can you do that, Jane?”

  I almost laugh. Now that she’s shifted the blame from herself to me she tells me to forget. But I nod to let her know I’ll try.

  Then she turns on her heel and leaves abruptly, that fast stride taking her into the woods and out of sight before I realize that she is leaving.

  I stand for a few moments trying to collect my thoughts, but all I hear is Dean Buehl’s advice to me. Forget the past, forget the past. For the moment the words seem to block out any thought, but can I really do it? Can I forget the past? Do I even want to?

  I look at the skater on the lake. It must be Dr. Lockhart, but it’s hard to connect the stiff and forbidding psychologist with this ethereal figure dancing on the ice. She skates over the ice like a black swan on white water. So effortless do her movements seem I am reminded of those magnetized skaters on the ornamental ponds that decorate shop windows at Christmastime. The ones with little plastic figures that turn in the same magnetized grooves over and over again. It seems that the loops Dr. Lockhart inscribes on the lake follow some pattern, too, so that if I could see t
he lines her skates cut in the ice some intricate mandala would be revealed.

  It reminds me of a dream I’ve been having lately. In the dream I am skating on the lake, as beautifully and skillfully as Dr. Lockhart is now skating. I feel, in the dream, finally free of the past, but when I look back from the shore I see I’ve cut a pattern in the ice and the pattern is Matt Toller’s face. As I watch his face sink into the black water I can clearly read his expression. He is disappointed in me. I can’t hear the words his lips are forming, but I know what he is saying. You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?

  I suppose this is the sort of thing Dean Buehl would say is best left forgotten. Yet as painful as it is to see that look in Matt’s face every night in my dreams, it’s far more unbearable to think of never seeing his face again at all.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I FIND, IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, THAT IT IS EASIER TO FOLLOW Dean Buehl’s injunction to forget the past than I would have imagined. My own unpreparedness comes, blessedly, to the rescue. Since I hadn’t quite believed I’d be back at Heart Lake, I didn’t spend my break getting ready for the next semester. It was a sort of hedge, I realize now, against the possibility of being fired. It makes me realize how much I was afraid of being let go (my predecessor’s fate) and how glad, after all is said and done, I am to be back, even though I miss Olivia so much I feel physically ill. Again, it’s a blessing of sorts to be so busy. And when I make the drive down to Westchester she seems happy enough. Happy with her father, happy with the young college girl who watches her during the week, happy to see me when I come down every other weekend. It’s only when Sunday comes and I have to say good-bye that she seems to fall apart a little. When I get back to the campus on those Sunday nights I throw myself into translating to catch up on the time I’ve lost.