The Lake of Dead Languages (2 page)

I recognize the paper she uses by its ragged edge where it’s been pulled out of the thread-stitched notebook. If she’s not careful, pages will start to come loose. I know because I used the same sort of book when I was her age, the kind with the black-and-white marbled covers. When I look down at the page I think I’ve got another piece of her journal, but then I turn it over and see the other side is blank. Athena’s homework is on a separate page at the bottom of the stack and I’ve lost track whether the page I’m holding is one that was just handed in or was already in the folder. I look back at the page I thought was her homework. There is a single line of tiny, cramped writing at the top of it. The ink is so pale that I have to move the paper into the light from the window in order to make it out.

You’re the only one I can ever tell.

I stare at the words so hard that a dim halo forms around them and I have to blink to make the darkness go away. Later I’ll wonder what I recognized first: the words that I wrote in my journal almost twenty years ago, or my own handwriting.

I
MAKE THE STUDENTS IN MY NEXT CLASS RECITE DECLEN
sions until the sound of the other words in my head is a faint whisper, but as I walk to the dining hall the words reassert themselves in my brain.
You’re the only one I can ever tell.
Words any teenager might write in her diary. If I hadn’t recognized my own handwriting there would be no cause for alarm. The words could refer to anything, but knowing what they do refer to I can’t help but wonder how someone has gotten hold of my old journal and slipped a page of it into my homework folder. At first I had thought it must be Athena, but then I realized that any of the girls could have handed me the page when she handed in her own assignment. For that matter, since I left the homework folder on my desk overnight and the classrooms are unlocked, anyone might have slipped the page into my homework folder.

I know that that particular page is from the last journal I kept senior year, and that I lost it during the spring semester. Could it have been on the property all this time—hidden under the floorboards in my old dorm room perhaps—and Athena or one of her friends has now found it? The thought of what else is in that journal floods through me and I have to actually stop at the foot of the mansion stairs and lean on the railing for a moment before I can start up the steps.

Girls in plaid skirts and white shirts coming untucked from the blue sweaters tied around their waists stream around me as I make my way up the stairs toward the massive oak doors. The doors were designed to intimidate. They are outside the human scale. The Crevecoeur family, who donated the mansion to the school, also owned the paper mill in the nearby town of Corinth. India Crevecoeur ran a tea and “improvement society” for the female mill workers. I picture those mill girls, in a tight gaggle for warmth as much as for moral support, waiting outside these doors. My own grandmother, who worked at the mill before working as a maid for the Crevecoeurs, might have been among them.

When I won the scholarship to come here I wondered what the Crevecoeurs would have thought about the granddaughter of one of their maids attending their school. I don’t think they would have been amused. In the family portrait that hangs in the Music Room they look like dour, unhappy people. Their ancestors were Huguenots who fled France in the seventeenth century and eventually made their way here to this remote outpost in upstate New York. It must have been a shock to them—this wilderness, the brutal winters, the isolation. The fanlight above the door is plain glass now, but when I went here it was stained glass: a red heart split in two by a green fleur-delis-handled dagger and the family motto in yellow:
Cor te reducit
—The heart leads you back. I’ve always imagined them waiting for some deliverance from this savage place, to France, or God perhaps. But since I have found myself back at Heart Lake—a place I swore I’d never
return to—I’ve begun to think the heart in the motto is the lake itself, exerting its own gravitational pull on those who have once lived on its shores and bathed in its icy green water.

T
HE FACULTY DINING ROOM IS IN THE OLD
M
USIC
R
OOM.
When I went to Heart Lake the scholarship students worked in the kitchen and served the teachers at meals. Some years ago the practice was discontinued as it was considered demeaning to the scholarship students. I never minded though. Nancy Ames, the cook, always gave us a good meal. Roasts and potatoes, creamed vegetables and poached fish. I never ate so well in all my life. She saved us the rolls she baked fresh for every meal. She gave them to us wrapped in thick linen napkins embroidered with the Heart Lake crest, which we were to remember to return. Walking back through the cold dusk—that last year at Heart Lake resides in my memory as one endless winter dusk—I felt the warmth of them in my pocket, like a small animal burrowed for shelter against my body.

Now the school uses paper napkins and the teachers serve themselves from a buffet. Tuna fish salad and packaged bread. Carrot sticks and hard-boiled eggs. What hasn’t changed, though, is the mandatory attendance for all faculty. It was a tenet of India Crevecoeur, Heart Lake’s founder, that the teaching staff be a community. It is an admirable goal, but on days like today I’d give much to be able to take my sandwich out to a rock by the lake with no one but Ovid for company. As I enter the room I give India’s image in the family portrait a resentful look, which she, snug in the bosom of her large family, disdainfully returns.

The only empty seat is next to Myra Todd. I take out a stack of quizzes to grade and hope they will keep her from commenting on third period’s early dismissal. Half the teachers at the long table have a similar stack of paperclipped pages at which they peck with their red pens in between
bites of tuna fish. When I take out mine, though, I see I still have the journal page with my handwriting on the top of the stack. I hurriedly fold it and stick it into the pocket of my plaid wool skirt just as Myra leans across me for the salt shaker. I have to remind myself that she’d have no reason to think anything of those enigmatic words even if she did see them. Unless she’s the one who found my old journal.

I steal a glance at her to see if she’s paying undue attention to my stack of papers, but she is placidly chewing her sandwich and staring into the middle distance. Under the smell of tuna fish and stale coffee I catch her distinctive smell—a whiff of mildew as if she were one of her own science experiments left too long in the supply closet over Christmas break. I’ve always wondered what peculiar health condition or faulty laundry procedure is the cause of this odor, but it’s hardly the kind of thing you could ask a person as prim and proper as Myra. I try to imagine what she would do if she came upon my old journal, and I am pretty sure she’d take it straight to the dean.

I try to imagine what Dean Buehl would make of my old journal. Celeste Buehl was the science teacher when I went to Heart Lake. She was always kind to me when I was her student—and she was more than kind when she gave me this job—but I don’t think that kindness would survive a reading of my senior-year journal.

When she comes in today I notice how much she’s changed in the twenty years since she was my teacher. I remember her as slim and athletic, leading nature hikes through the woods and skating on the lake in winter. Now her broad shoulders are rounded and her short, cropped hair, once dark and springy, looks lifeless and dull. Myra Todd picks the moment of the dean’s entrance to mention third period’s early dismissal.

“Jane,” she says loudly, “your third-period class disturbed my senior lab this morning. We were at a very delicate stage of dissection. Mallory Martin’s hand slipped and she nicked her lab partner with a scalpel.”

I know Mallory Martin by reputation. My girls call her Maleficent. I somehow doubt the incident with the scalpel was an accident.

“I’m sorry, Myra, I’ll tell them to be quieter. They get so keyed up for these exams.”

“The thing to do is give them extra problems when they finish their tests. That way they won’t be so anxious to finish early.” Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers this pedagogical advice and resumes scoring a pile of quizzes with a thick red marker. The tips of his fingers are stained red with the marker, and I notice the color has bled onto his sandwich.

“I let the girls write in their journals,” Gwendoline Marsh offers in a small voice. “It helps them to have an outlet and it’s part of their grade.”

“And just how do you grade these journals?” asks Meryl North, the history teacher who already seemed as ancient as her subject when I was a student here. “Do you read their private thoughts?”

“Oh no, I only read the parts they want me to—they circle the parts I’m not supposed to read and mark them
private.”

Meryl North makes a sound between a laugh and a choke and Gwendoline’s pale skin reddens. I try to catch Gwen’s eye to give her a nod of encouragement—she is the closest thing to a friend I have here at Heart Lake—but she is resolutely staring down at a worn volume of Emily Dickinson.

“They do seem to be under a lot of stress,” I say, more to cover Gwen’s embarrassment than because I want to open this particular line of conversation. There were two suicide attempts last year. In response, the administration has instituted weekly faculty seminars on adolescent depression and “How to detect the ten warning signs of suicidal behavior.”

“Anyone in particular?” The question comes from Dr. Candace Lockhart. Unlike the rest of us at the table she has no stacks of papers to grade or texts to study for next period. Her fingers are never stained with ink, her exquisitely tailored dove gray suits never tainted with the ugly yellow chalk dust
that the rest of us wear like a wasting disease. She’s the school psychologist, an office that did not exist in my day. There is an aura of secrecy surrounding her appointment here. I’ve heard some of the faculty complain that Dean Buehl hired her without going through the proper channels. In other words, without giving the resident faculty a chance to gossip about her credentials. There’s a whiff of jealousy about the complaints, to which I am not immune. The rumor is that she is conducting research for a groundbreaking study on the psychology of adolescent girls. We all suspect that once her research is done she will leave us for private practice, a glamorous lecture circuit with appearances on “Oprah,” or perhaps a tenure-track post at an Ivy League college—some existence more appropriate to her wardrobe. In the meantime, she resides among us with her pale, almost white, hair, blue eyes and thin, ascetic figure, like a lilac point Siamese slumming with drab tabbies.

Poor Gwen, in her faded Indian print jumper and fussily old-fashioned high-necked white blouse, looks especially dowdy in comparison. Although Candace Lockhart and Gwen Marsh are both in their early thirties, the effects of teaching five classes a day, not to mention sponsoring half a dozen clubs, have left their mark on Gwen. Her complexion is muddy, her hair limp and going gray at the roots, her blue eyes washed out and bloodshot. Candace, on the other hand, clearly has time to get her hair done (that platinum blond can’t be entirely natural) and
her
blue eyes are as clear and cold as lake water.

I am sufficiently unnerved by those blue eyes to make a mistake. Of course, I should say, “No. No one in particular.” But instead I name a name. “Athena … I mean Ellen … Craven. I noticed today that she has an awful scar on her arm.”

“Well, yes, I know about that of course. That’s old news and not surprising given Ellen’s history.”

I should be glad for her dismissal, but something in the way Dr. Lockhart’s blue eyes glaze over, already looking
past me toward whatever illustrious future fate has in store for her, irks me. I am forever thinking I am past such vanities and finding that I am not.

“Some of the pictures she draws on the back of her homework assignments are … well … somewhat disturbing.”

“You let your girls turn in homework with pictures on the back?” Myra Todd looks up from her stack of papers, appalled, only to meet Dr. Lockhart’s cool look of disdain. Gratified to have someone else silenced by those eyes, I go on. It has occurred to me that this is exactly what I should be doing. My responsibility as Athena’s teacher, as an especially trusted teacher in whom the girl confided, demands that I seek help for her emotional problems. To whom else should I refer those problems than the school psychologist?

“Disembodied eyes with tears turning into razor blades, that kind of thing. I suppose the images aren’t unusual …”

I notice that the rest of the table has grown quiet, and it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be talking about my student in front of the entire teaching staff. Dr. Lockhart must think so, too.

“Perhaps you should come see me in my office to talk about Athena. I’m in my office by seven. Why don’t you come in before your first class?” Dr. Lockhart suggests.

She no doubt sees my reluctance to agree to this early appointment—I am thinking of the lake swim I try to take each morning before class—and so she adds this last piece of admonishment.

“It’s crucial we address any preoccupation with death or suicide immediately. These things have a way of turning into trends, as I’m sure you know from your own experience here, Miss Hudson. Don’t you agree, Dean Buehl?”

Dean Buehl sighs. “God forbid that happen again.”

I feel blood rush to my cheeks as if I had been slapped. Any thoughts I had of protesting the early-morning meeting are gone now, and Dr. Lockhart seems to know that. Without waiting for my answer she rises from her chair and adjusts a pale blue shawl over her suit jacket.

“I especially want to know if that Crevecoeur sisters legend …” The rest of her words are drowned out by the bell ringing to signal the end of lunch hour and the scraping of chairs being pushed back from the table.

Dr. Lockhart, unencumbered as she is, glides out of the dining room while the rest of us gather books and shoulder heavy canvas bags. Gwen especially seems to list to one side from the weight of her book bag. I ask if she needs some help and she pulls out a thick manila envelope and hands it to me.