The Lake of Dead Languages Read online

  I pull my sweatshirt over my wet suit and climb into my jeans without toweling off. I feel the wet seeping through the seat of my pants almost immediately. When I turn to Athena she is finger-combing her wet hair, the blue spirals on her hand weaving in and out between the wet ropes of hair. The color has returned to her lips. I have a sudden, unbidden image of Helen Chambers in her apartment in Main Hall taking down her hair and combing it while Lucy and I watched. She had handed the brush to Lucy and asked if she wouldn’t mind combing her hair out.

  I remember, too, what Dr. Lockhart said at the end of our meeting the day before.

  Think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students.

  I’M FIVE MINUTES LATE FOR MY NINE O’CLOCK CLASS. I quickly scan the hall to see if anyone has noticed, but luckily Myra Todd is off first period and Gwen Marsh is also late—when I stick my head in her class her girls are either writing in their journals or reading. I go into my room and tell my ninth graders to translate the next lesson in Ecce Romani. When they finish that I let them read—Gwen does, I think—because I’m not up to much in the way of teaching. I can’t help myself from doing what Dr. Lockhart advised—I think of Helen Chambers.

  Specifically I think about how she ended her tenure at Heart Lake.

  After two of her students, and the brother of one of her students, ended up dead in the lake, an inquest was held to look into Miss Chambers’s professional behavior. The effects of the two dead girls were examined and students were interviewed. Deirdre Hall had kept that journal with quotes about premature death and suicide. Several of the quotes were either attributed directly to Helen Chambers or Deirdre had credited her teacher as the supplier of the quote. Lucy hadn’t kept a journal but she had written a letter to her brother the week before their deaths. In it she told Matt that Domina Chambers had opened her eyes to a secret that had changed everything for her, for the both of them, she wrote. When I tell you what it is you’ll understand why we have always felt different from everybody else. The ordinary rules of the world don’t apply to us.

  The board asked Miss Chambers to explain what her student meant by this enigmatic letter. Into what secrets had Miss Chambers initiated this young girl? Miss Chambers declined to answer the board’s questions. She said it was a private matter between her student and herself and she couldn’t discuss it.

  Miss Chambers’s students and colleagues were called in for questioning. We were all called in. We waited in a row of chairs that had been placed along the wall outside the Music Room. The cold weather and storms that had delayed the dredging of the lake had broken and it was unseasonably warm. The school grounds were awash in melted snow and slush. The foyer floor was gritty with mud and broken glass (someone had broken the fanlight over the front doors) and we sweated in our Fair Isle sweaters. We were told not to speak with one another. No one was allowed to discuss the questions they had been asked in the Music Room. Whenever a girl came out of the Music Room she went out the front door without looking back at the rest of us. Wet, lakey air gusted into the foyer and we all sniffed the breeze like dogs scenting game until the door slammed shut and we were left in the stale, overheated hallway, the boarded-up fanlight staring back at us like the blinded eye of the Cyclops.

  I was the last to go because, I assumed, as the roommate of the two dead girls I would know the most. When it was my turn I went into the room and sat at the single chair that had been placed in front of the long dining room table behind which the members of the board sat. Helen Chambers was there, a little apart, in a chair in front of a window. A dark figure silhouetted in the bright glare of the melting lake ice.

  It was odd seeing her sitting apart. The board was made up almost exclusively of “old girls.” Truly a jury of her peers, it was a club to which she’d not only belonged, but seemed to epitomize: women of indeterminate ages, who favored frumpily elegant dresses and wore their hair in untidy buns or cut boyishly short. They’d all gone to good women’s colleges after graduating from Heart Lake and gone on to get a master’s degree or some apprenticeship in the arts. There was Esther Macintosh, the English teacher, who had gone to Mount Holyoke and was supposed to be working on a book about Emily Dickinson. She even dressed like Emily Dickinson, in high-necked white blouses, her lank brown hair parted severely in the middle. Tacy Beade, the art teacher, worked her way through Sarah Lawrence as an artist’s model. There was a certain slide—shown only in Honors Art—of an abstract expressionist nude that was purported to be of her. Dean Gray, Celeste Buehl, Meryl North, and even Elsa Pike, the chunky gym coach, were all there in almost identical black dresses and graduated pearl necklaces. Silhouetted against the windows they looked like a row of crows perched on a telephone wire.

  I fixed my eyes above their heads on the portrait of India Crevecoeur and her family, but instead of looking at India I found myself looking at Iris Crevecoeur, the little girl who’d died of the flu. She stood a few feet away from the rest of her family, small and dark where her sisters were tall and blond, fussed over by a family servant who seemed to be trying to tie the sash at her waist. She looked as miserable and as lost as I felt.

  And for the first time I realized that even though Helen Chambers was one of them—one of the old girls—she also stood apart. The black dresses she wore were cut better, her pearls had a softer gleam. She was a little smarter and much more beautiful than any of them. And now they would make her pay for that. Even before the first question I knew what the board members believed. I knew what they wanted to believe.

  Did Miss Chambers encourage drug use? Miss North asked.

  Only for sacred, not recreational purposes, I answered.

  Did Miss Chambers encourage free sex and homosexuality? Miss Beade asked.

  She said the same rules didn’t apply to everybody—like in Antigone—and, I quoted, proud to have remembered the words, “Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?”

  Had my friends been unhealthily obsessed with their teacher, Miss Chambers? Miss Macintosh asked.

  I told them about the strand of hair we found. I told them about the used tea bags we stole and the lists we kept of things we knew about Domina Chambers.

  Did Miss Chambers encourage this obsession? Miss Pike asked.

  I told them about the private teas that she invited Lucy and Deirdre and me to and how she then invited just me and Lucy and, finally, just Lucy. I told them that Lucy had stopped sleeping. She seemed upset when she came home from these teas, but she wouldn’t tell me why.

  Miss Buehl picked up a piece of thin blue paper. I noticed that her hand was shaking. This is what Lucy wrote to her brother the week before she died: “Domina Chambers has told me something that changes everything. When she told me, I understood why I’ve always felt different from everybody else. The ordinary rules of the world just don’t apply.” Do you know what she meant? Miss Buehl asked.

  I told them no, I didn’t know. That was true enough. I didn’t know what she’d meant, but I knew what it sounded like.

  Is that what she was fighting about with her brother when she ran out onto the ice?

  I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t tell them what Lucy and Matt had argued about on the lake. So I did what was easier. I agreed with Miss Buehl. I told them they had been arguing about Domina Chambers, but that I hadn’t really understood what it was all about.

  I saw Miss North and Miss Beade exchange a knowing look. Then they told me they didn’t have any other questions and that I should go and finish studying for my finals. We see you have a scholarship for Vassar for next year, Miss Buehl said kindly. You’re a smart girl; you shouldn’t let these unfortunate events interfere with your future plans.

  I left without looking in Helen Chambers’s direction. I kept my eyes on the floor as I walked past the line of chairs in the foyer even though they were now empty. I saw specks of red and blue and yellow glass glittering on the floor—tiny fragments of the stained-glass heart and the school’s motto: Cor te reducit. No
t me, I thought, I’m never coming back here.

  Outside the wind was blowing off the melting ice in the lake. I never saw Helen Chambers after that day. Dean Gray announced at dinner that night that all of us at Heart Lake must put the incident behind us and never talk about it again, lest the reputation of the school be irrevocably damaged. (Of course the damage was done. Already parents were pulling their daughters out of the school, not even waiting for the end of term.) She said that Miss Chambers had been let go. When I heard the words I imagined a hand releasing its grip on another hand and I felt something slip away, and that was as much as I knew about how Helen Chambers had ended up.

  Athena doesn’t come to class. I ask Vesta and Aphrodite if they know where she is and they both shrug. I assume they’re covering up for that early morning swim Athena took. It may be my imagination, but the advanced girls seem sullen today. Perhaps it is the weather. This spell of Indian summer we have been enjoying seems to be drawing to a close. A fitful wind rattles the windows of the classroom and I can see storm clouds massing on the eastern shore of the lake. There hasn’t been a glimmer of sun since yesterday afternoon. The thought jars something in my memory—a flash of white on the Point just before I saw Olivia stranded on the rock. I’d thought it was the sun glinting off the rock, but now I remember that the sky had been overcast. Could it have been a rowboat just rounding the Point? Could it have been one of my students—maybe three of my students?—who rowed Olivia out to that rock? I look at Vesta and Aphrodite, noticing the deep circles under their eyes that look real, not kohl-induced. If they’re sneaking out to the rocks at night, might they also take a boat out onto the lake? They look edgy to me, but then, so do all the girls. When called on, the girls whisper their translations, which are lost under the hiss of the steam heat. When I ask them to speak up they get nervous and seem to think they have translated their pieces wrong. They turn their sentences around and come up with unintelligible messes. When I try to unravel their syntax I can hear an irritation in my voice I hadn’t even known I was feeling. I give up and tell them to read quietly until the end of the period. Several of them put their heads on their desks and fall asleep. I let them, hoping Myra Todd doesn’t come by and peep through my door window.

  At lunchtime I commit the unpardonable sin of dining alone. I purchase peanut butter crackers and a Coke from a vending machine in the lodge basement and go down to the swimming beach. I stare out at the three sister rocks and across the lake to the south shore, where I can just make out the shape of the icehouse. The county extension agent used to keep her boat there. During Christmas break senior year, Lucy and I took the boat out and rowed it all the way across the lake almost to the Point. I’d written the whole episode down in my journal. The journal that I’d lost.

  A wind from the north is whipping the water against the three sisters. I watch a flock of Canada geese land on the lake and take off again. When I walk back to the lodge for my last class of the afternoon I think I have gotten things into perspective.

  One of the girls—one of my students—has perhaps found my journal and realized that I was involved in two deaths during my senior year, three if you count Matt Toller. I have to face the fact that it might very well be Athena. The “rite” I witnessed on the three sisters indicates an interest in the suicide legend. Although I can’t figure out what she hopes to gain by bombarding me with these relics of my past—the journal entry, the corniculum—and luring my daughter out onto one of the rocks, I can only assume she has some plan to blackmail me or somehow compromise my authority as a teacher. Let’s face it, my authority has already been compromised.

  I think of what Dr. Lockhart said, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh.

  I decide to go to Dr. Lockhart and tell her everything. Then we’ll go to Dean Buehl. I imagine that I will be reprimanded, but I don’t think I have done anything to merit my dismissal.

  With a clear plan in my head, I feel better already. When I open my classroom door, though, my calm dissolves at the sight of Dr. Lockhart seated at my desk leafing through my homework folder.

  When she looks up and those cool blue eyes narrow on me I feel a chill gust of arctic air.

  “Bad news,” she says. “Ellen Craven has tried to kill herself. She’s been taken to the hospital in Corinth.”

  I almost ask who? before realizing she’s talking about Athena.

  Chapter Six

  I FIND ATHENA SHROUDED IN WHITE. SNOWY WHITE SHEETS are pulled up to her chin. Her arms, which lie on top of the sheets, are bandaged from the tips of her fingers to the crooks of her elbows. Both arms. She is sleeping, or at least I hope it is sleep and not a coma.

  Outside the hospital window I can see that the sky above the paper mill has gone blank and white as well. Driving here in Dr. Lockhart’s car, I noticed that the sky in the west was growing overcast. Now it looks like it might snow. Only this morning Athena and I swam in the lake and now the sky is threatening snow. I know from growing up here, on the edge of the Adirondacks, that such shifts of weather are possible. (The night Matt and Lucy drowned had been as warm as a spring night and the next day we got one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history.) Still, I find the change stunning, although perhaps not as stunning as the change in Athena—from the strong swimmer of this morning to this pale shrouded invalid.

  “Is she sleeping?” I ask Dr. Lockhart.

  “She’s not in a coma,” she replies. “She regained consciousness briefly after her stomach was pumped. She didn’t take enough sleeping pills to put her in a coma.”

  “She took sleeping pills and slit her wrists?” In my mind I hear Lucy’s cool, assessing voice: overkill.

  “Yes, I find that distressing as well. Many experts believe that the more violent the means of suicide the more it’s meant as a kick in the face to the survivors. ‘This is how badly I hurt,’ the victim is saying, ‘this is how badly I want out.’ ”

  “But she’s alive,” I remind Dr. Lockhart. Or perhaps I am reminding myself. Saturated in white, her skin pale as the sky outside, her lips still stained with the bluish lipstick she habitually wears, my student looks dead.

  Dr. Lockhart dismisses my comment with an impatient wave of her hand. “Only because I decided to check up on her when she didn’t show up at breakfast today.”

  For all my concern about the girls it had never occurred to me to seek them out at meals.

  “You found her?”

  “Yes, so I can attest to the violence of her attempt. She used a steak knife we think she stole from the kitchen when she did her clean-up shift last night. She severed both arteries. Thank goodness it happened before the weather got worse.” Dr. Lockhart gestures toward the lowering sky outside the window. “I can’t imagine what we would have done with her if we’d been snowbound. I’ve heard that happened once.”

  I nod. “When Lucy cut her wrists. We couldn’t get her to the hospital. Celeste Buehl herself had to suture them.”

  Dr. Lockhart shakes her head. “I didn’t think Ellen would make it, not with all the blood she lost. They’ll have to pull up the floorboards in that room to get it all out. I don’t know what to do about my dress.”

  I give her a puzzled look and she opens the long charcoal gray coat she has been wearing since I found her in my classroom, and had kept closed during the drive here. Under it she is wearing a dress I take to be burgundy. I think it is an unusual choice of color for her until I realize it’s blood.

  “I haven’t had a chance to change,” she says, no doubt seeing the horror on my face. “I had to call her aunt, who’s at a spa in California, and then I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Me?” I want Dr. Lockhart to close her coat, but she leaves it open.

  “After our conversation about Miss Craven I thought you might be able to help me explain this to her aunt.” She says this and gestures to Athena’s somnolent form. “When was the last time you saw Ellen?”

  “Ellen?”

  Dr. Lockhart looks at
me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses and I do just about the worst thing I could do. I laugh.

  “It’s just that I think of the girls by the Latin names they take. She’s Athena to me.”

  “Hm. That’s not a Latin name.”

  “I know, but I let them pick classical names and this year the girls all wanted goddesses.”

  “That’s very interesting. Are they into goddess worship? Do you talk about that in class? Goddess worship? Pagan rites? Wicca covens?”

  “Wicca covens? What would that have to do with Latin?”

  Dr. Lockhart shrugs. Her coat slips off one thin shoulder and I see that the blood goes at least halfway down her sleeve. It is hard to imagine how Athena could have lost that much blood and still be alive, but then I remember another white room with blood: It was Deirdre Hall’s room, where Lucy had slit her wrists on Deirdre’s bed. When I first came into that room after Christmas break I thought Deirdre’s mother had sent her a red bedspread for Christmas.

  “You’d be surprised what some teachers—teachers I’m sure must mean well—consider relevant to the curriculum. The digressions they indulge in—”

  “I haven’t been preaching New Age witchcraft to my students, Dr. Lockhart.”

  “I’m not saying that, Jane. I know you care about the girls, but you might not realize how much influence you have over them.”

  “Are you saying that it was something I said to Athena that made her do this?”

  “Why are you getting so defensive, Jane?”

  “I’m upset,” I tell her. “I can’t believe Ellen would do a thing like this.”