The Lake of Dead Languages Read online

  “We shared a suite, yes. Lucy Toller and I shared one room and Deirdre Hall had the single.”

  “I believe there was an unsuccessful suicide attempt first.”

  “Yes, Lucy slit her wrists over Christmas break. She and Deirdre were alone here on campus. It could be pretty bleak.”

  “The notes I have from the school nurse at the time indicate that Deirdre Hall was particularly upset by the event, especially since Miss Toller chose to slit her wrists in Deirdre’s bed.”

  “Deirdre had the single. I guess Lucy wanted privacy. But yes, I think Deirdre was upset about that.”

  “Upset enough to make her own suicide attempt. Only hers was successful.”

  “Yes, she fell from the Point and broke her neck on the ice.” I can’t help but look up at the outcropping of stone as I speak. Dr. Lockhart follows my gaze. And there we are, both staring at the forty-foot cliff as if we expect to see Deirdre Hall appear on its height and perform her last swan dive. For a moment a picture does appear in my mind: Deirdre standing on the Point, her face contorted with rage and fear. I blink away the image and turn my gaze away from the window and back to Dr. Lockhart. “Some people thought it was an accident,” I say.

  “According to my files her journal indicated otherwise.” She flips open the folder on her desk and reads silently for a moment. A breeze from the lake stirs the pages and I can tell they are of the light onion skin we used to have in typing class, not the smooth sheets that people use nowadays in computer printers.

  “And then Lucy tried again. She drowned in the lake?”

  “Yes, she went through the ice.…”

  “That could have been an accident as well?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t. I was there.”

  “I see. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

  I look out at the lake. A fog is rising from the water, whitening the surface of the lake. I can almost imagine it is winter and the lake is already frozen.

  “She had a terrible fight with her brother,” I say. The words come tumbling out before I can consider whether I really ought to relate this information to Dr. Lockhart. Maybe it is because they are words I rehearsed and repeated so many times. “And then she ran onto the ice, which was breaking apart.…”

  “What was the fight about?” she asks.

  “I only heard part of it and I didn’t understand it all.” I’m amazed that the well-rehearsed lines are there, tripping off my tongue as if the twenty years that have elapsed since I first delivered them had never passed. Like my Latin declensions, they’d stayed in my memory all these years. “But it had to do with a teacher here.”

  “Helen Chambers.” I notice that Dr. Lockhart doesn’t need to consult her notes to produce the name.

  “Yes, Helen Chambers. She taught Latin and Greek. She was an amazing teacher. She had us all reciting Greek plays. Our senior year, she put on an aquatic version of Iphigenia in Aulis in the lake.”

  “In the lake?”

  “Yes, in the lake.”

  “She sounds remarkable. But why would Lucy and her brother have been arguing about her?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t really know, but Lucy idealized Domina Chambers. We all did. It was thought that Lucy had an unhealthy obsession with her.”

  “It was thought? What do you think?”

  The question is eerily like one that Helen Chambers herself would pose. If you tried to hide behind someone else’s opinion—the introduction in your Penguin edition of Antigone, say, or some predigested litcrit babble from Cliff Notes—she would nail you with those icy blue eyes of hers and ask you—no, demand of you—What do you think? And if your answer failed to measure up to her standards for original thought she would look heavenward and shrug her elegant shoulders. “Perhaps you really haven’t thought at all, Miss Hudson. Come back to us when you have.”

  “She could be a bit harsh,” I tell Dr. Lockhart.

  Dr. Lockhart smiles. “Don’t you ever find, Jane, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh?”

  “Yes, I agree,” I say, but I wonder if I do. I’ve never been much good at the “tough love” school of teaching. “But it was thought—I thought—that she sometimes went too far.”

  “Well, then perhaps you should think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students. As I’m sure you remember, she was let go.”

  AFTER MY MEETING WITH DR. LOCKHART I WALK TO THE lodge for my first-period class. The rain has cleared and the girls who run past me have tied their regulation navy school windbreakers around their waists so that they stream out behind them like shiny, rustling tail feathers. A raucous crowd of eighth graders parts to make way and then regroups behind me never losing the thread of their shouted conversation. I might be a stone parting a stream for all the notice they take of me. It makes me feel good. Like a part of the geography.

  It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To feel a part of something. I wonder if this was how Helen Chambers felt, when she came back to teach at Heart Lake. I know that to me she always seemed the defining spirit of the place.

  On my way to my class I pass the art room. I stop just outside the door and watch Tacy Beade setting up for her next class. The room hasn’t changed since I went here—the girls say Beady deducts points from your grade if you don’t put the art supplies back in their proper places—and neither has Miss Beade. She moves around the room, arranging palettes and easels like a nun performing the stations of the cross. Is this what I want, I wonder, the comfort of teaching in the same place for forty years? To be one of the old girls?

  My first class is Language Discovery for Sixth Graders. I trade off with the Spanish and German teachers. It’s a new idea of Dean Buehl’s. This way the kids will have a basis for picking which language they want in seventh grade.

  “Think of it as a recruiting opportunity,” Dean Buehl had told me. “Make Latin fun. Build up the Latin program and you’ll have a job for life.”

  When I went to Heart Lake Latin was mandatory. The idea of Helen Chambers recruiting is absurd and slightly offensive. I can’t imagine Helen Chambers spending two minutes worrying about how to make Latin fun. And yet we all loved her. We would have done anything for her.

  I wonder what Helen Chambers would think of how I teach this class. I use a textbook called Ecce Romani. Here are the Romans. The title always makes me think of a TV sitcom. Oh, those goofy lovable Romans, with their charming villa in southern Italy and their colorful, perky slaves. There’s even an episode in which one of the slaves escapes. When he’s caught, he’s beaten with a stick (virga) and branded on the forehead with the letters FUG, short for fugitivus, runaway.

  When Dean Buehl first showed me the new books my mouth went dry. All those nights studying declensions and memorizing Catullus hadn’t prepared me to talk about the weather in Latin (Quaenam est tempestas hodie? Mala est.)

  I spent hours in front of the mirror practicing conversational gambits like a nervous teenager preparing for her first date. Salve! Quid est praenomen tibi? Quis es?

  Now, when I enter my first-period class, I am greeted by a dozen loud voices. Salve Magistra! Quid agis? And though I know that quid agis means, idiomatically, how are you, this morning, after my meeting with Dr. Lockhart, I hear instead its literal meaning: What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell her about what you saw last night? And I have to stop myself from telling my cheerful, beaming, prepubescent sixth graders, “Nescio.” I don’t know. I have no idea.

  IN THE ADVANCED CLASS THAT DAY I TRY NOT TO STARE AT Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite, but I find myself stealing surreptitious looks while they read their translations. I think I can detect blue circles under Athena’s eyes, but then I know that the girls often affect this sleepless look by smudging kohl under their eyes, which matches the shade of blue lipstick they all favor.

  She fumbles, though, in her translation, which is not like her.

  “How are you translating praecipitatur in line six?” I ask her.

  “She f
ell under the water.”

  “She?”

  “It’s the light, not she,” Vesta interrupts. “But I don’t get it: The light throws down its head under the water? Doesn’t praecipito mean, like, to fall on your head?”

  Aphrodite giggles. “I think you must have fallen on your head last night, Vesta.”

  Vesta and Athena exchange dangerous glances with Aphrodite, and I find myself, of all things, blushing, as if it were my secret that was threatened. Maybe it is. If they knew that I was there last night, what does that say about my authority as a teacher?

  “Tace,” I tell Aphrodite. “Praecipitare means to cast down headlong. In the middle sense it can mean to cast oneself down headlong. In this case it means the light casts itself below the water, or, more idiomatically, the light sinks beneath the waves.”

  “That’s a lot of English words for one Latin word,” Athena points out.

  “Well, Latin is an economical language, especially when it comes to destruction.”

  Athena gives me a smile that chills me like a rush of lake water. “That’s exactly why we like it,” she says.

  AFTER CLASS, I WALK TO THE PRESCHOOL TO PICK UP Olivia. I am early, so when I come around the corner of the building and see the children on the playground I step into the shadows of a large sycamore so Olivia won’t see me yet.

  I look for Olivia in the brightly colored knots of children playing together in twos and threes, running and climbing in the mottled shade of the playground. And then I see her, apart from the others, dancing and singing to herself under the pine trees.

  She doesn’t look unhappy, but the sight of her alone worries me. It reminds me of something I can’t at first put my finger on. Maybe, I reason, it’s just that she reminds me of myself at her age. Until I met Lucy Toller in the ninth grade I had no friends.

  Olivia’s dance is punctuated now with little swipes to the ground, as if she were picking flowers, only I can see from here that her fingers barely graze the pine needles. It’s a charade of flower-picking, no doubt part of some make-believe. She is so absorbed in her game that she is wandering farther and farther from the playground, into the deeper woods that surround the school grounds and slope down to the lake. And that’s when I realize what she reminds me of: Persephone, straying from her companions to pick flowers on the shores of Lake Pergus, where she was snatched by Hades.

  I step out of the shadows to call her, but just as I open my mouth I hear one of the student aides call her back to the playground. It takes a minute for the sound of her name to penetrate her daydream, but then she skips toward the older girl eagerly. I see the aide lean over to tell Olivia something and Olivia nodding. I can tell by the way Olivia’s eyes slant away from the aide that she is being reprimanded for straying away. Good, I think. But I’ll have to talk to her myself tonight.

  I follow the children as they leave the playground. Dismissal is from inside and I’ll have to wait while they sing their good-bye song and collect their artwork. I find myself wandering under the same trees Olivia had been playing near. I can see why she likes the spot. It is cool under the pines and the ground is golden with dried pine needles. I kick the needles and unearth something thin and gold and metallic.

  Stooping down to pick it up, I am reminded again of Persephone picking her flowers, only it isn’t a flower I retrieve from the pine needles, it is a hairpin, or, rather, several hairpins linked together. When I lift them up into the light I recognize the pattern. Two Ushaped hairpins linked together with a bobby pin bisecting the top one. It looks like the head of a horned animal holding something in its mouth. I shiver, not because of the shade now but because I’ve seen this particular configuration before, but not for twenty years.

  Chapter Four

  WE CALLED THEM CORNICULA, WHICH, AS LUCY found in Cassell’s New Latin, meant little horned ones. Deirdre used to say she had invented them when she found Helen Chambers’s hairpin in the love seat in the Lake Lounge. I have always thought, though, that they were a truly cooperative endeavor, product of a tripartite genesis.

  We were in the suite’s one single room, Deirdre’s room, studying for our Latin midterm, fall semester, junior year, drinking Deirdre’s tea to stay awake. She had the single in our suite because of a note from her mother’s psychiatrist saying Deirdre had boundary issues and severe migraines. Lucy used to say it was overkill, that she ought to have stuck to one thing or the other: boundary issues or migraines.

  Deirdre’s habits, which Lucy viewed as affectations, could be annoying. Her parents had something to do with foreign affairs and she’d spent her childhood in various remote corners of Asia. She wore an antique kimono to the shower room instead of the frayed and stained terry robes the rest of us shuffled around in. She liked to dress in outfits composed entirely of silk scarves clinging provocatively to her well-developed figure. It used to make me nervous looking at her in class because I always thought some piece was about to slip off, but the only time they came off was on our nocturnal swims, and then our path down to the lake would be strewn with her discarded silks.

  She kept two large China tea tins on her bureau, one filled with pot, the other, and this was considered odder by Heart Lake standards, filled with loose tea. She was as particular about her teas as she was about her marijuana. Sometimes, listening to her rattle on about estate provinces and curing processes, it was difficult to know which she was talking about. I suspected she mixed more than her talk about the two, and there was many a morning I spent dazed and light-headed after drinking a cup of her dark smoky tea and many a night I spent sleepless after smoking one of her exquisitely rolled joints.

  On this night Deirdre’s tea had a minty bite to it that set my teeth on edge and made the objects in her room glow around the edges. In between lines of Catullus I found myself mesmerized by the texture of the hemp mats on the floor and at one point the ceremonial dancers on a Balinese tapestry seemed to take a spin around the floor.

  We were translating Catullus’s poem 2, the one where Catullus says he’s jealous of Lesbia’s pet sparrow. Deirdre claimed that the poem was really about Catullus’s jealousy of Lesbia’s female sexuality. Lucy, as usual, was annoyed by Deirdre’s reduction of nearly everything in Latin to sex. Having failed to interest Lucy in her interpretation of Catullus, Deirdre cast about the room for something that might capture Lucy’s approbation. Her eye alighted on a bit of folded paper stuck between the pages of the Tantra Asana that Deirdre kept on the night table beside her bed.

  She slipped the paper, which had been folded into the shape of a flower, out of the book and held it up in front of Lucy.

  “Do you know what’s in this?” Deirdre asked.

  “Some illegal substance, no doubt. Honest, Deirdre, you’re going to be dead by twenty if you keep this up.”

  “Better a short life full of glory than a long inglorious one,” Deirdre quoted. Deirdre was fond of quotes having to do with death. After sex, death was her favorite subject. She kept a silk-covered notebook filled with quotes from the ancients and moderns on the subject of early death. “Anyway, it’s not drugs.” Deirdre tugged at one petal of the flower and the whole thing blossomed in the palm of her hand, only to reveal another packet folded in the shape of a grasshopper. Deirdre loved this sort of thing, secrets within secrets, Chinese boxes, sanctum sanctorum. She knew Lucy did, too. With a flick of her long lacquered fingernail, the grasshopper sprang open. In the center of the folds lay a single hairpin.

  I started to giggle. The unveiling had been so theatrical; the result was anticlimactic. Lucy, I noticed, wasn’t laughing.

  “Where’d you find it?” she asked, touching one finger to the coppery wire.

  “Behind the cushions of the love seat in the Lake Lounge. Where she always sits.”

  Lucy lifted the hairpin out of its paper grasshopper carcass and held it aloft. A single strand of gold hair clung to the metal for a moment and then slipped to the floor where it evaporated into the straw mats. We all three leaned f
orward at the same time to catch it, but Deirdre plucked it from the matting with a quick dart of her fingers, nimble as a child picking up onesies at jacks.

  She held it up to Lucy’s short hair.

  “See, it’s the same color.”

  “You can’t tell from one strand,” Lucy said, but I knew, with a pang, that she was pleased. That Deirdre had pleased her. To be like Helen Chambers in any small way was all any of us wanted. To find some hidden affinity, or to acquire one by emulation, we studied her more carefully than we studied our declensions and conjugations (and we worked on those hard enough, if only to please her). If Helen Chambers left a cardigan draped over a chair back one of us was sure to read its label. If she left her teacup in the Lake Lounge after four o’clock tea, we read the tea bag she’d chosen and studied the lipstick smudge left on the rim. Later, when we were invited to her apartment in Main Hall, we memorized the book titles on her bookshelves, the album covers stacked by her phonograph, and the perfume bottles on her dresser. We amassed our common knowledge into one eclectic but (to us) cohesive portrait: She wore Shalimar and read a Dickens novel every Christmas. She had gone to Vassar and always stayed at the Vassar Club when she went into the city, which she did twice a year to see the ballet (Giselle was her favorite, too) and shop at Altman’s for the simple but beautifully cut black jersey dresses she favored. Her favorite novel was Persuasion by Jane Austen and her middle name was Liddell, which, Lucy felt sure, must be her mother’s maiden name. We liked to think she was related to the Liddell of Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the father of Alice Liddell—the model for Alice in Wonderland. Wouldn’t it be fitting, we thought, if she were related to Alice! But the one thing we never knew was how long her hair was because she always wore it twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.

  Deirdre held the strand of hair between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “I already measured it,” she said, “twenty-seven inches long. It must hang below her ass.”