The Lake of Dead Languages Read online

  I almost laugh at the words. Other friends. What other friends? When I first laid eyes on Matt and Lucy Toller I had no other friends.

  I take out the folded paper and smooth it out next to this page. The handwriting is surer and blotch-free, but the words are written in the same beautiful shade of blue-green.

  I go outside to watch the moon rise over Heart Lake. I think, not for the first time, that I must have been crazy to come back here. But then, where else had I to go?

  When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live?” he asked. “For God’s sake, Jane, you were a Latin major. If you leave this house you’ll be on your own.”

  And I had thought of Electra’s line, “How shall we be lords in our own house? We have been sold and go as wanderers.” And right then I knew I’d go to the only homeland I’d ever had: Heart Lake.

  I started to work on my Latin, which I hadn’t touched in years. At night I studied from my old Wheelock textbook, picking away at case endings and verb conjugations until the unintelligible jumble of words sorted itself out. Words paired up like skaters linking arms, adjectives with nouns, verbs with subjects, inscribing precise patterns in the slippery ice of archaic syntax.

  And always the voices I heard reciting the declensions and conjugations were Matt’s and Lucy’s.

  When I had reread Wheelock twice, I applied for the job at Heart Lake and learned that my old science teacher, Celeste Buehl, had become dean. “We’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers,” she told me. I remembered that Miss Buehl had been good friends with my Latin teacher. No one was sadder than she when Helen Chambers had been let go. “But then we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” “Old girl” was how they referred to an alumna who came back to teach at Heart Lake. Celeste Buehl was an “old girl,” as were Meryl North, the history teacher, and Tacy Beade, the art teacher. “Your generation doesn’t seem interested in teaching. I haven’t interviewed a graduate since I became dean, but I can’t think of anyone better to take the job than one of Helen Chambers’s girls. Luckily my old cottage is free. It will be perfect for you and your daughter. You remember it, the one above the swimming beach.” I remembered it all too well.

  And although the idea of living here was at first disturbing, I’ve come to treasure my view of the lake. It’s only a few yards from my front door to the Point, the stone cliff that bisects the lake, giving it its heartlike shape. From where I stand now I can see the curve of the swimming beach, white in the moonlight, and the stones we called the three sisters rising out of the still, moonlit water.

  I go inside and look at Olivia sleeping. The moonlight comes through her window and falls on her tangled hair. I smooth back her hair from her forehead and rearrange the twisted sheets so she’ll be cooler. She stirs and moans softly in her sleep, but doesn’t call my name as she would if she were anywhere near waking. I know she might wake up later, at two or four perhaps, but I’m almost positive she’ll sleep undisturbed for the next few hours.

  I go back outside and down the steep stone steps that lead from our house to the lake. Every night I do this and every night I’m amazed at myself for taking the chance. Of course I know I shouldn’t be leaving Olivia alone for even these few minutes—fifteen, twenty minutes, at most, I tell myself, what could happen? Well, I know what could happen. Fire, burglars, Olivia waking up and getting frightened when I don’t come to her call, wandering out into the woods… my heart pounds at the images of disasters my mind so easily conjures up. But still I walk down the steps barefoot, feeling through the soles of my feet when the stone steps become damp from the mist off the lake and then slimy with the moss that grows over the stones.

  At the foot of the steps the ground is hardpacked mud. I can hear the restless slap of water on the rocks. I wade through the cold water until I am standing, calf deep, next to the first of the three sister stones. I lean my shoulder against the tall rock and it feels warm. Like a person, I think, although I know it’s only giving off the heat collected through the unseasonably warm day. The three stones are made of a hard, glittery basalt, different from the soft surrounding limestone. Lucy said they’re like the tors in England, foreign stones carried from afar and erected in the lake, but Miss Buehl said they were probably deposited by a retreating glacier and then eroded into their present shapes. Each one has been molded differently by water and time, and the freezing and unfreezing of the lake. The first stone, which I am standing by, is a column rising six feet high above the water, the second is also a column, but it leans in the direction of the southern shore. The third stone is a rounded dome, curving gently out of the deep water.

  If you look at the rocks in succession—in the right light or through a faint mist like the one that rises from the lake tonight—you can imagine that the first stone is a girl wading at the edge of the lake, the second is the same girl diving into the water, and the third is the girl’s behind rising above the water as she dolphin dives into the lake.

  The lake feels deliciously cold. The weather has been unseasonably warm for early October, but I know this Indian summer can’t last much longer. Any day now a cold front will move down from Canada and it will be too cold to swim. Suddenly I notice how sweaty and sticky I feel, how sore my neck and back are from standing at a blackboard all day and leaning over stacks of papers. I remember that I won’t be able to take my swim in the morning and the thought is like a physical pain. I could leave my clothes on the rock and swim for just a few moments. The cold water would wash away all thought of that lost journal and what is in it.

  I am about to take off my shirt when I hear a rustle in the trees behind me. Instinctively, I move into the shadow of the second stone as if I were the errant schoolgirl caught out of her dorm at night. From there I can see three white shapes pass by me and into the lake. They move smoothly into the water, like spirits, and I am reminded eerily of the Wilis in the story I had been reading to Olivia. White sheets billow up around them like the Wilis’ bridal gowns, and then, like animal brides in a fairy tale discarding their skins, they emerge out of the white billows and stroke naked out to the farthest rock.

  A white clump floats past me and I pick up its corner and read the laundry marking, which identifies it as the property of the Heart Lake School for Girls.

  One of the girls has pulled herself onto the farthest rock. She stands stretching her arms above her head as if reaching for the moon.

  “We call on the Goddess of the Lake and make offering to honor She who guards the holy water.”

  The two girls in the water giggle. One of them tries to heave herself onto the rock and lands on her chest with a painful-sounding thud.

  “Damn, I smashed my boobs.”

  “Oh, like they could be any flatter.”

  “Thanks a lot, Melissa.”

  With their giggling and bickering the three girls are transformed from mysterious Wilis to three awkward adolescents: my students, Athena (Ellen Craven), Vesta (Sandy James), and Aphrodite (Melissa Randall).

  “Come on,” Athena says, her hands on her naked hips. “You’re ruining it. How can the Lake Goddess take our offering seriously with you two messing around? I told you we shouldn’t have gotten high first.”

  With the last comment I am transformed from innocent bystander—amused voyeur—to responsible teacher, if only in my guilty conscience, because I still don’t reveal my presence. But now I’ve been given some information I should act on. The girls have been smoking pot. And yet, why should this alert me to my role while the sight of my students skinny-dipping at night fails to? Perhaps because skinny-dipping and making offerings to the Lake Goddess are both old Heart Lake traditions. In my day the girls routinely made sacrifices to the spirit of the lake. Sometimes we called her the Lady of the Lake (that was when we were reading Tennyson), which we later translated as Domina Lacunae, and in our senior year we called her the White Goddess. Over the years we offered her half-eaten S’mores, beads from
broken necklaces, and locks of hair. Lucy said that if you gave her something at the beginning of the term you wouldn’t lose anything in the lake that year. Girls are always losing things in the lake. I imagine the dark floor of the lake as faintly glimmering with broken ID bracelets, tarnished hairclips, and hoop earrings.

  At the thought of the lake bottom I am suddenly cold. I remember Olivia alone in the house and I wonder how much time has elapsed. I want to go back, but if I let the girls see that I have seen them, I will have to report them to Dean Buehl. I remember her expression today when Dr. Lockhart mentioned the Crevecoeur legend and know that the last thing I want to do is remind her of girls making sacrifices to the lake. Also I am afraid to leave them here. What if one of them slips on the rocks or gets a cramp swimming back? Having witnessed them I feel they are now my responsibility. So I wait while they finish their “rite.” I can tell they are cold now, their skin goosefleshed in the moonlight, and impatient to be done. I can’t see what they hold up in their hands as offerings, but I can hear their “prayers.”

  “Let me maintain a B average this term so my mom gets off my back,” Vesta says.

  “Keep Brian from falling in love with someone else while he’s at Exeter,” Aphrodite pleads.

  Only Athena says her bit too quietly for me to hear, but I see that as she whispers her plea she holds up her left arm, bending the wrist back so that her empty palm is flat to the night sky and the long scar on her forearm shows up livid in the moonlight. It’s as if her offering were the scar itself.

  Chapter Three

  ANOREXIA, SELF-MUTILATION, SUICIDE… THREE SIDES of the same picture. Teenage pregnancy, STDs, drug abuse, you name it. It all begins when puberty strikes. Look at your ten-year-old girls—they’re bright and confident. Then look at your fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. Girls’ IQs actually plummet during adolescence. And it’s getting worse. Did you know that the suicide rate among girls age ten to fourteen rose seventy-five percent between 1979 and 1988?”

  Dr. Lockhart leans back in her swivel chair and waits for my reaction. It is difficult to read her expression. She sits with her back to the window so that her body is silhouetted against the silver mirror of the lake. A light rain had begun not long after I returned to my house last night and continued through the dawn, consoling me, somewhat, for the loss of my morning swim. Now the rain has stopped and the sky, though overcast, is a bright, burnished pewter, against which Dr. Lockhart is a darker, blurrier gray. Neither the swimming beach nor the two rocks closest to the shore are visible from her second-floor office in the mansion; they are obscured by the steep rock wall of the Point. I can just make out, however, the third rock where I saw Athena standing last night.

  I tell her I hadn’t been aware of a rising suicide rate after 1979. I don’t mention that by 1979 I was immured at Vassar, poring over my Latin books in the library until midnight. Girls got drunk at the campus bar; my dorm reeked of marijuana; boys wandered in and out of the hall bathroom; girls drove each other to the clinic in Dobbs Ferry for abortions. You could get a prescription for the Pill at the school clinic and no one had heard of AIDS. I memorized Horace and struggled over Latin composition.

  “Diderot said to a young girl, ‘You all die at fifteen.’ ”

  I am startled by her statement until I realize she isn’t speaking literally. I am somewhat familiar with this line of thought—that girls suffer a loss of confidence with the onset of puberty. I recognize the titles of the books that line Dr. Lockhart’s shelves. Meeting at the Crossroads, Reviving Ophelia. I think of what I had hoped for my life at fourteen, and it isn’t so much as if I had died as that I had fallen into a long sleep like a girl in a fairy tale. But I had thought of my case as unique.

  “A girl like Ellen is particularly at risk,” Dr. Lockhart says.

  “Why a girl like Ellen?”

  Dr. Lockhart wheels herself over to a gunmetal gray file cabinet and pulls a light green file folder from the middle drawer. She looks at it briefly and slips it back into place.

  “The girl’s parents are divorced—the father is almost entirely out of the picture and the mother’s an alcoholic who spends most of her time in rehab clinics.” Dr. Lockhart rattles off these facts as if she’s reciting a recipe. I remember what Athena said about her mother drying out. “There’s an aunt who’s the legal guardian, but her solution has been to shuttle the girl from school to school.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say. “I knew some girls like that when I went to school here.”

  “Did you?” Dr. Lockhart studies me for a moment and then smiles. “Maybe you asked them home to spend the holidays with you.”

  I start to laugh at the idea. Those girls from Albany and Saratoga in their shetland wool sweaters and graduated pearls might have been neglected by their wealthy relatives, but I could only imagine what they would have made of my mother’s Campbell’s soup casseroles, the plastic covers on the one good couch, the view of the mill from the living room window. I look at Dr. Lockhart and see she’s no longer smiling. “No,” I admit. “I never thought to ask them home. I guess it was lonely here for some of them.”

  “Imagine every time you got settled at one school and made some friends having to start all over again. A person would eventually give up.”

  The dry tone has vanished. She really does care about these girls, I realize. “Did you go to boarding school?” I ask.

  “Several,” she answers. “So I can guess how lonely it’s been for Athena—switching schools so often. It’s that loneliness that makes a girl susceptible to depression and suicidal urges. It’s essential to curb any such tendencies in our girls. Once the idea of suicide breaks out…”

  “You make it sound like a contagious disease.”

  “It is a contagious disease, Jane. I’ve seen it happen. One girl might be playing with the notion of suicide, or indulge in cutting herself as a way of coping with emotional pain, then one of her friends might emulate her and succeed in killing herself. The inevitable drama surrounding such tragedies exerts a morbid pull on these girls. Notice their fascination with death—skull jewelry and black clothing, the whole ‘Goth’ look.”

  “Yes, my senior Latin class looks like something out of the Middle Ages, and they almost all have scratches on their arms.”

  “Do you remember The Crucible?”

  “The play by Arthur Miller? Of course, but why… ?”

  “Remember how the Salem girls accused their tormentors of pricking them with pins? When the judges examined the girls’ bodies they indeed found scratches and cuts, bite marks, pins sticking in their flesh…”

  I flinch and Dr. Lockhart pauses. “I know it’s not a pleasant topic, Jane,” she says, “but it has to be faced. Most of our girls engage in some form of cutting or self-mutilation. Most people don’t realize how long such practices have existed.”

  “No,” I say, “I had no idea. How did you… ?”

  “My thesis topic,” she explains. “Self-Mutilation and Witchcraft in Puritan New England.” She leans back in her chair and looks out the window at the silvery surface of the lake.

  I follow her gaze and once again I think of Athena standing on the rock, holding her arm up to the moon like an offering. A sacrifice.

  “Fascinating,” I say.

  “Oh, it is,” she agrees. “The connection still exists. Often the same girls who indulge in self-mutilation practice some form of witchcraft. It’s all an attempt to gain control over a world in which they have no power. Even their own emotions, their own bodies, seem out of control. Spells, rites, initiation ceremonies… these are all strategies to order the chaos of adolescence.”

  I think of my three students standing naked on the rock in the lake, asking for help with boyfriends and grades. I think of the S’mores and bangles we used to offer up to the Lady of the Lake.

  “Don’t adolescent girls always play with this sort of thing? I mean witchcraft and spells? Ouija boards and cootie catchers.”

  “You’r
e saying you practiced witchcraft with the girls you went to school with?”

  “The girls I went to school with?” The question takes me by surprise. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about Athena all morning. What does this have to do with my schoolmates?”

  Dr. Lockhart wheels her chair in closer to her desk, out of the glare from the lake, and I see her blue eyes narrow on me. She touches the edge of a folder that lies on her desk as if to open it, but then she rests her long, slim fingers on its surface.

  “Wasn’t there a rash of suicides during your senior year?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a rash,” I say perhaps a little too indignantly. I feel as if she has accused me of having a rash. I hear the defensive tone in my own voice and apparently she can, too.

  “Are you uncomfortable talking about this?” she asks.

  “I just don’t see what it has to do with Athena,” I say.

  “I had hoped we could draw on your own experience with troubled, suicidal adolescents. Perhaps what you witnessed back then could throw light on your present students’ troubles.”

  I think of what happened during my senior year and instead of light I see murk, the kind of brownish-green murk I see when I open my eyes in the lake. But perhaps Dr. Lockhart is right. Perhaps talking about what happened back then might help me to understand Athena better. And I do want to help Athena.

  “There were two students who committed suicide my senior year,” I say.

  Dr. Lockhart shakes her head sadly. “That must have been very hard on you. What is so unfortunate in these situations is that one suicide—or suicide attempt—spurs another. As I keep trying to tell you, it becomes almost a fad. An epidemic. The girls were roommates, I believe. Weren’t you all roommates?”