The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I LOWER THE FOLDER TO THE DESK AND THE FIGURE ON THE Point eerily mirrors the motion by lowering its own arm. For a moment I feel as if I’m looking into a mirror and I briefly wonder which would be worse, for the figure on the Point to be a figment of my imagination or a real observer who’s caught me ransacking school property? But then the figure turns and disappears into the woods. A moment later it reappears on the path leading toward the mansion.

  “OK,” I whisper under my breath, “better it’s real and I’m not going crazy, but still, that’s a real person heading this way.”

  I know I should leave right away, but I’m compelled to read to the end of Athena’s file. I scan through the remaining pages looking for my name, searching for some explanation of why my students would want to persecute me. Instead I find something finally in Athena’s own words.

  “When asked how she feels about her teachers, Ellen replied, ‘Miss Hudson acts like she really cares.’ I asked her why she used the word ‘acts.’ Did she think Miss Hudson was faking her concern? She said that she’d had a lot of teachers who had seemed to care about her, but in the end they’d never go out of their way to help her. In the end they were too wrapped up in their own problems. ‘It’s not like I’m her kid or anything,’ Ellen told me. ‘She has a daughter.’ I asked if she felt jealous of Miss Hudson’s daughter and she claimed she did not, but…”

  Here the handwriting becomes so cramped I can’t make it out. I flip to the last entry. It’s dated today. I read the last line and then hurriedly reorder the papers and place them back in the green folder. I check the path again before putting the folder back in the file drawer. Both the path and the Point are empty.

  I lock the file cabinet and let myself out of the office, holding the door carefully so it won’t bang again in its frame. As I head down the stairs I find myself repeating the last lines of Dr. Lockhart’s notes on Athena.

  “A person who has been shut out from love her whole life may form unhealthily close attachments. When someone (a teacher or an older girl) finally seems to care about her she may become obsessed with that person. If that person fails her, betrayal may be shattering. There’s no telling what the betrayed one might do.”

  DOWNSTAIRS I FIND THAT THE FACULTY MEETING HAS BROKEN up and students are filing in for the Ice Harvest slide show. There are quite a few students. Either they are really bored or some teacher has offered extra credit for attendance.

  Myra Todd, who is rearranging chairs for the slide show, scowls when she sees me. “There you are. Did you find Gwendoline?”

  “No,” I say. “I looked all over the building for her, but she must have gone outside.”

  “That’s just great. She was supposed to get the ice pops and run the slide projector. How am I supposed to get this meeting started on my own?”

  “Where are Dean Buehl and Dr. Lockhart?”

  “Dr. Lockhart misplaced her keys, so she went to her car for her extra set. Dean Buehl and the extension agent went out to look at the lake and decide where to cut the ice.”

  “I see. Well, I guess I can get the ice pops.”

  “Do you know where the freezer is in the basement?”

  “Sure, the cook used to send us down for stuff all the time.”

  “Well, it would be a help… ,” Myra says, “but you won’t be able to carry them all—I’ve had my girls making them for a week now.”

  “I’ll take a student,” I suggest. I notice Athena and Vesta milling around the front of the room near the slide carousel. Octavia and Flavia are skulking at the back of the room, embarrassed, I think, to be seen by me after defecting from the class. Several of my eighth graders are clustered at the door, their heads bent together over something. As I approach them I see one girl is holding another cootie catcher. Her fingers open and close the folded paper so quickly it’s like watching a speeded up film of a flower opening and closing. When the girls see me approaching they whisper to the girl holding the cootie catcher and the white flower disappears in a blur into a pocket.

  I change my mind and head over to Athena and Vesta. “Would one of you like to help me bring up ice pops from the basement?”

  Vesta stares at me blankly as if I were speaking a foreign language.

  “I’ll do it, Magistra,” Athena says, rolling her eyes at Vesta. “Miss Pruneface is in a bad mood. She failed her chemistry exam and had to show up here for the extra credit.”

  “Shut up, Ellen. I wouldn’t have failed the exam if you hadn’t kept me up half the night with your light on. Baby’s afraid of the dark,” Vesta says sneeringly to me. “She’s afraid the lake monster’s gonna get her. Afraid the curse of the Crevecoeurs is gonna make her off herself.”

  I see Athena’s already pale skin go a shade paler. “Cunt-sucking dyke,” she says very quietly, and then turns on her heel and heads out the door. I follow her.

  I catch up to Athena on the stairs leading down to the basement. “Why are you and Vesta fighting?”

  “She’s such a bitch, Magistra Hudson. She’s acting like I really tried to kill myself in October. She says she doesn’t believe it was Melissa who cut my wrists…” Athena’s voice cracks and trails off. She turns from me and puts her head against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The only light down here is a naked bulb hanging from a wire at the foot of the stairs. The walls of the basement are bare, damp, moss-covered rock that swallow up the faint light and smell like dead fish. The Crevecoeur family carved the cellar out of the living rock and used the natural springs to keep their food cold down here. I shiver and wonder what the hell they needed to cut up ice from the lake for. It’s cold as the grave down here.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed about,” I tell Athena. I’m thinking about Dr. Lockhart’s notes. What she said about Athena being in on the faked suicide. I touch her arm and she turns on me. I see such fury in her eyes that I instinctively step away from her and back up against the cold stone wall.

  “You don’t believe me either,” she says. “I thought you were different.”

  When someone finally seems to care about her she may become obsessed with that person.

  “Athena, I do want to help you, but I can’t do that unless I understand what’s been going on.” Because of the cold my voice shakes and it makes my words sound to my own ears nervous and false. Athena wraps her arms around her chest and glares at me. The lightbulb hanging above us makes her eyes glitter feverishly. The shadows make her multicolored, jaggedly cut hair look even wilder than usual.

  But if that person fails her, the betrayal may be shattering.

  Athena looks like someone who has been shattered. In fact, Athena looks like the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. Only we’re in the basement not the attic. I can feel icy water dripping down between my shoulder blades. I would far prefer an attic to this basement.

  “You know what’s going on,” she says. I start to shake my head, but I see she’s not looking at me anymore. “It’s the Crevecoeur curse,” she says.

  “Athena, that’s just a story…”

  “It’s what made those girls drown themselves in the lake. You should know—it happened to your friends and now it’s happening to us. It’s because you came back. The lake wants the third girl. That’s what the motto means: Cor te reducit. The heart—meaning Heart Lake—pulls you in.”

  I am about to correct her translation, but then I realize she’s right. Leads back, pulls in, both are acceptable translations for reducit.

  “How do you know about my friends?”

  Athena shrugs and wipes her eyes. The gesture makes her look like a tired child. It reminds me of Olivia. I want to tell her that—that she reminds me of my own daughter—but I remember what Athena said to Dr. Lockhart. It’s not like I’m her kid or anything. I picture Olivia standing on the rock. Could it have been Athena who lured her there? Out of some obsessive jealousy?

  Athena sees, I think, the look of suspicion on my face.

 
“Someone told me,” she says. “I don’t remember who. I bet you’ve felt bad about it all this time—about your friends dying.”

  How can I deny it? I nod.

  “It feels pretty shitty when you let someone down, doesn’t it?”

  I nod again. There’s no telling what the betrayed one might do.

  “Don’t worry,” Athena says, almost kindly. “It’s not half as bad as being the person who’s let down.”

  BY THE TIME WE GET UPSTAIRS WITH THE ICE POPS, THE LECTURE is already in progress. There aren’t two seats together, so Athena takes a seat at the end of a middle row. A few rows behind her, Octavia and Flavia reluctantly make room for me to sit between them. I look around for Vesta, but don’t see her. Dr. Lockhart is sitting in the first row. If it’s possible for good posture to convey disapproval her ramrod-straight spine is speaking volumes of contempt for the proceedings.

  I notice that Gwen is back and that she’s manning the slide projector. I try to catch her eye, but she stares resolutely ahead at the screen.

  Meryl North presents a short lecture on the history of ice harvesting in the Northeast. She tells us that giant ice blocks could be preserved in sawdust so well that blocks were shipped as far as India. Tacy Beade presents her idea for using the harvested ice for ice sculptures. She shows some slides of Michelangelo’s series of unfinished statues called “The Captives.” “Michelangelo believed the figures were in the stone waiting for the sculptor to free them,” she concludes. “Who knows what figures we’ll find hiding in the ice.”

  There’s a smattering of embarrassed applause as Miss Beade goes back to her seat. “Figures hiding in the ice,” I hear Simon Ross whisper. “Where has she been all year? Does she even know there’s been a death on campus?”

  Maia Thornbury takes the floor to present a history of ice harvesting on the Crevecoeur estate. She is a small, middle-aged gnome with a cap of graying hair cut in a style that I think used to be called a Prince Valiant. Her round eyeglasses reflect the mote-filled light from the slide projector and make her face appear even rounder. After all these years hearing about the county extension agent this is the first time I’ve actually seen her. I remember how we worried she would catch us using the boat and that she was the one who found Matt on May Day. I had always pictured her as some imposing, Girl Scout Valkyrie. She is all of four feet five. More wood sprite than Valkyrie.

  “The Crevecoeur family were descended from the Huguenots who fled religious persecution in their native France in the seventeenth century,” she lectures. I can hear several girls yawning. They must really want those popsicles or else they really need that extra credit. “Unlike most of the Huguenots, who settled in communities farther south along the Hudson or in New York City, the Crevecoeurs preferred solitude and self-sufficiency.”

  The screen darkens and then resolves into muted tones of brown and white. A row of men with old-fashioned sideburns and tall, sturdy women with strong, square jaws stand in front of a small slant-roofed hut. The women are carrying tin milk pails.

  “Like most Frenchmen, the Crevecoeurs loved their homemade cheeses and butter, but they needed ice to keep them fresh in the humid Adirondack summers.”

  The sideburned men and square-jawed women fade and a family portrait of the Crevecoeurs, in full skating regalia posed on the ice, appears. I’ve seen the picture before—it’s the same one that hangs in this room right behind where the slide projector screen hangs now—so I recognize India Crevecoeur as the stately matron in the foreground, her head tilted coquettishly under a fur cloche. Although it is hard to connect the woman in the picture to the desiccated old woman who accosted me on May Day junior year, I do recognize the arrogant glint in her eyes that I saw in the old woman when she realized that her former maid’s granddaughter was attending her school. I remember that the way she looked at me made me feel like an impostor, and that’s just how I feel now. The caring teacher. One of Helen Chambers’s girls.

  The two blond amazons on either side of India must be her older daughters, Rose and Lily. A little to the right, a smaller girl stands unsteadily on the ice, her arms held akimbo for balance. I recognize the plain sepia face from my dream of the night before; it’s Iris Crevecoeur, who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. I wonder if Maia Thornbury will mention her, maybe this would be a good opportunity to point out that one girl died, not three, and so dispel the legend. Looking at the skinny, sallow girl next to her fair, hearty sisters it’s not surprising that she was the one to fall victim to illness. The way the servant hovers anxiously over her—my grandmother—also says something about her frailty. But Maia Thornbury doesn’t bring up Iris Crevecoeur’s fate; she has another ax to grind.

  “India Crevecoeur and her daughters loved to skate on the lake, but their favorite activity was attending the annual ice harvest.”

  If Dr. Lockhart’s spine could get any straighter it does so now. I’ve always wondered why she seems to dislike me and now I think I know. Twice a week she listens to Athena talk about me, about how I pretend to care but really don’t. No wonder she seems to see right through me.

  The next slide shows the icehouse from the lake. A long narrow channel has been cut out of the ice leading to the open doors. On one side of the channel a muffled figure leans over the ice with what looks like a large saw. Another figure holds a long pole up toward the camera. He looks like an angry Eskimo shaking his spear at an intruder.

  “After the snow was scraped off the ice, saws were used to cut out a ‘header’—a channel through which the ice could be moved through the water to the icehouse. Then a plow marked out cakes of ice. Pike poles were used to push the cakes of ice down the channel and onto a conveyer belt into the icehouse. Would someone turn on the lights for a moment?”

  I close my eyes against the sudden light and when I open them I see Maia Thornbury wielding a spear-tipped pole nearly twice her height. She shakes the pole with both hands. Perhaps my original idea of her as Valkyrie wasn’t so far off.

  “This is one of the original poles used on the Crevecoeur estate for ice harvesting. It’s eight feet long.”

  “Oooh,” someone coos, “what a long pole you have there.”

  The girls giggle while the teachers make shushing noises.

  “Is that point sharp?” someone else asks.

  “Oh yes,” Maia Thornbury says, hefting the pole up and angling it so we can all see the six-inch-long steel tip. “It had to be to grip the ice. Would you like to touch it?”

  More hysterical giggling as the girl who spoke rises from her chair. I’m surprised to see it’s Athena. I wouldn’t have expected her to express such an interest in ice harvesting after our scene in the basement, but here she is, walking up to the front of the room where the extension agent holds the pole parallel to the floor. As Athena walks toward the spear I have the disturbing thought that this is how Roman senators killed themselves: by falling on their own swords. I am poised to rush toward Athena, but she only lifts her arm and touches the point of the spear with the tip of her index finger.

  “Sharp, isn’t it?” Maia Thornbury asks like a magician testing the veracity of some trick with a volunteer from the audience.

  Athena nods without taking her eyes off the spear point. Then she turns and walks back to her seat. Before the lights go out I see her look down at her finger, to a drop of blood poised there. Then she puts the finger in her mouth and sucks.

  “To celebrate the ice harvest, the villagers carved decorative statues out of the ice,” Maia Thornbury says as the lights go out. I am still looking at Athena when the next slide appears, so when I hear the rest of the audience gasp I have the awful thought that there’s been some accident with the ice pole. But when I look up I see it’s the slide that has made everyone gasp. This picture is in color. It shows a girl, nearly naked except for some flimsy white drapery, stretched out on the second sister stone. The girl and stone are so pale they could be almost mistaken for some particularly skillful ice sculpture. Except for th
e gash of bright red blood across her throat. I immediately recognize the girl as Lucy, but it takes me a few moments to recollect where the picture is from. As the lights go on and Dean Buehl tries to calm the now hysterical girls I try in vain to explain to someone that what the picture portrays isn’t real. It’s just Lucy Toller playing Agamemnon’s daughter in our senior year production of Iphigenia on the Beach.

  BY THE TIME I MAKE MY WAY TO THE FRONT OF THE ROOM I can see that my explanation won’t help. Dr. Lockhart is arguing with Myra Todd about the wisdom of going on with the ice harvest given the inevitable connotations the girls will now have. Maia Thornbury is going over her numbered slides with Dean Buehl to prove to her that the picture of the slaughtered girl was not part of her original demonstration. The slide itself has been passed from Maia Thornbury to Meryl North to Gwen Marsh to Dr. Lockhart to Myra Todd, and, finally, to Dean Buehl, so any fingerprints that might have been found on it are probably now obscured. I surprise myself by thinking of fingerprints. Could I, perhaps, take this slide to Roy Corey and ask for it to be fingerprinted? Maybe, but now it’s too late. I promise myself, though, that if any other relic from my past shows up I’m taking it straight to him. I pick up the slide now and look at it. Lucy as Iphigenia. I remember watching the play from the eastern shore of the lake. This picture shows the reflection of the setting sun on the side of the rock nearest to the camera, so it must have been taken from the opposite side.

  Someone plucks the slide from my fingers. “Like a scene from a Greek tragedy, don’t you think, Miss Hudson?” Dr. Lockhart smiles at me as she slips the slide into a plastic bag. I’m not sure if she means the slide itself, or the furor its appearance has caused.