The Lake of Dead Languages (33 page)

She asks what year I’m looking for and when I tell her 1963 she gives me a scrutinizing look.

“You don’t look that old,” she says.

I laugh. “I certainly hope not. I was class of ’81.” I realize as I say it how glad I am to have those digits to name. Unlike Hannah Toller. “No, I’m looking for a friend … for a friend’s mother.”

“Oh,” she says without interest. She pads back to her desk and picks up Dante at any old place and yawns into the book.

I run my finger down the list of names. Most of the names, I see, are in bold type followed by another name in lighter typeface. The names in bold are maiden names, the ones following are married names.

When I get to Helen Chambers’s I see it, too, is in bold. So Helen Chambers got married after she left Heart Lake. I’m surprised but also somehow relieved.
Watch out you don’t turn out like Helen Chambers,
Dr. Lockhart had said to me. Well, maybe she didn’t turn out so bad after all. Maybe there was a life for her after Heart Lake.

But then I see that the record keepers have made a mistake. The name following Chambers in light typeface is Liddell. Someone must have mistaken her middle name for a married name. I pull my finger across the page to locate her address, but instead my finger comes to rest on a single word: deceased. It is followed by the date May 1, 1981. She died only four years after leaving Heart Lake. Dr. Lockhart was right after all. Helen Chambers had ended badly.

W
HILE WALKING TO MY CAR
I
NOTICE THE GIRL FROM
the library leaving the building. She is wearing a light denim jacket and carrying a heavy backpack. I offer her a lift back to her dorm and she tells me she lives in the student housing across Raymond Avenue. I remember the complex is a good mile’s walk from campus and again I urge her to take a lift from me. I see her assess me and decide I’m probably not dangerous—after all, I’m Jane Hudson ’81. She is quiet, though, in the car. I ask who she’s reading the Dante for and she names a medieval history professor I had junior year.

“When you do your term paper include a map of Dante’s underworld and compare it to a map of Virgil’s underworld,” I tell her. “He loves that kind of thing—the geography of imaginary places—I think there’s even some name for it …”

“Really? Thanks, I’ll remember that.”

Then she gets out of the car and runs quickly up the steps of the dilapidated housing complex. I remember that these units had been built as temporary housing five years before I came here. They were already falling apart then. I wait until she’s inside and I see the lights go on, and then I drive back to the main road and, from there, to the Taconic.

I am sorry, after a few miles, that I didn’t take the better lit and straighter Thruway. The road is icy, especially on the
curves. Each time the back of my car fishtails on the slippery road my stomach lurches. I keep thinking about the astounding coincidence of Helen Chambers and Lucy Toller both pretending their babies belonged to someone else. Is it just coincidence though? I think of the two of them. Both beautiful with the kind of rarefied beauty of a fairy-tale princess. It was more than their beauty though; it was a certain look they each had of possessing some secret charm. They inspired, in others, not only admiration but the desire to please and emulate. I’ll never know what Lucy said to Deirdre to convince her to let me think the baby was hers, but I can imagine the way Lucy looked when she asked. And I realize that if Lucy had asked me to say the baby was mine I would have. And it wasn’t just me and Deirdre who idealized Lucy. There was that younger girl, Albie. I remember how mad she was at me when we went back to the infirmary and found Lucy nearly half dead on the steps.

W
E FOUND
L
UCY CURLED IN A BALL ON THE INFIRMARY
doorstep, like a cat locked out in the cold. It broke my heart to think how long it had taken me to bring her help.

“I’m sorry I was so long,” I told her, but she didn’t wake up.

“How could you leave her here?” The voice at my ear was so low I thought it was my own conscience, but it wasn’t, it was Albie.

“I had to go find help,” I tried to explain, but Albie shook her head.

“You left her to die,” she hissed at me, leaning close so Miss Buehl and
Domina
Chambers couldn’t hear, so close that I felt her hot spit prick my skin.

I watched in silence as
Domina
Chambers picked her up while Miss Buehl unlocked the door. What could I say? Maybe Albie was right. I should have stopped Lucy from cutting herself. I should have come back sooner. I should never have left.

Inside the infirmary, Albie switched on the light and ran to get the things Miss Buehl asked for. She seemed to know her
way around. Everyone seemed to have something to do but me, so I sat down on the extra bed across from where they put Lucy and watched. They went to work quickly, peeling away the cotton cloth from Lucy’s wrists, getting her out of her wet clothes, taking her blood pressure.

“She’s stopped bleeding,” Miss Buehl reported. “Thank God she didn’t sever the arteries.”

“But doesn’t she need stitches?”
Domina
Chambers asked.

“Yes, but I can do that. Don’t worry, Helen, I’ve done it before. What I’m worried about is her blood pressure. It’s quite low. Do you have any idea how much blood she lost, Jane? Had she been bleeding long when you found her?”

I shook my head. I thought of the blood on the sheets, but remembered that wasn’t Lucy’s blood.

“We found her right away,” I said, trying to remember the story we’d agreed upon. “She went into Deirdre’s single and we heard her crying so we went in.” I had heard crying, I remembered, but when Lucy had opened the door her eyes had been dry.

“We?” Miss Buehl asked.

I pushed away the memory of what really happened and concentrated on what we’d agreed upon. “Yes, me and Deirdre Hall.”

“Well, then, where is Miss Hall?”
Domina
Chambers asked.

“She stayed in the dorm.” I realized now that this was a weak spot in our story. Why had Deirdre remained behind? I knew the real reason—to dispose of the bloody sheets—but what reason had we agreed upon?

“Um, she was so upset and the blood was on her bed, so she stayed behind to clean it up.”

Domina
Chambers clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Imagine thinking about such a thing while your roommate is bleeding to death. There’s something very off about that girl. At least you had more sense, Jane.”

I smiled at the rare compliment even though I knew it
wasn’t fair to Deirdre, and caught Albie glaring at me again. It was almost as if she knew that Lucy had told Deirdre to stay behind to get rid of the sheets.

“So there must have been quite a bit of blood,” Miss Buehl said. She was bending over Lucy, peeling back her eyelids and listening to the pulse at her throat. “I wish we could get her to the hospital for a transfusion but I’m afraid that will be impossible in this storm. The phone lines have been down and the roads closed for hours.”

“Is there anything else we can do, Celeste?”
Domina
Chambers asked. I noticed she was shaking and thought it was probably from the cold, and yet the room felt quite hot to me. “Will she be all right?”

“I’ll give her a saline drip to get some fluids in her. That should help her blood pressure. Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait. I’d feel better if she regained consciousness.” Miss Buehl shook Lucy’s shoulder and called her name. “Maybe you should try, Jane, you’re her best friend.”

I got up off the bed and walked across the room. It seemed like a long way. I noticed that the floor was slanting. I knelt down by Lucy and called her name. Amazingly, she opened her eyes.

“Jane,” she said.

“It’s OK. Lucy, we’re in the infirmary.”

“You’ll stay here?” she whispered to me. “Don’t go back to the dorm.”

I was so touched that she wanted me to stay that my eyes filled with tears and the room went all blurry. Then it went black.

I’
D BEEN TOUCHED WHEN
L
UCY HAD ASKED ME TO STAY AT
the infirmary, but of course the real reason, I realize now, is that she didn’t want me to talk to Deirdre. She had to make sure Deirdre went along with the plan to pretend that the baby was really hers.

It is one thing, though, to assume the parentage of a baby
lost in childbirth, and another to drop out of college and raise someone else’s baby. As I make the trip from Vassar to Corinth, less than 150 miles but worlds apart, the person I think more about is Hannah Corey Toller, class of—. Class of Nothing. Why had she agreed to take Helen’s baby, return in shame to her hometown and raise a child not her own?

It’s this question that plagues me as I drive slowly down River Street looking at the big Victorian houses set back on their snow-covered lawns. Most still have their Christmas lights up and the colored bulbs spill jewel-like pools onto the sparkling snow crust. At the end of the street I pull up opposite the gatehouse on the intersection of Lake Drive and River Street and turn off the car so as not to draw attention to myself. Really, though, I needn’t be so cautious; it doesn’t look as if anyone is in the old Toller house. Not only are there no Christmas lights, but there are no other lights on in the house. The house has a general air of neglect—the driveway hasn’t been plowed since the last snow and one of the shutters has come loose from its hinges and hangs from the window askew. I remember that I used to think the house looked like Snow White’s cottage, but now I think it looks more like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.”

I wonder if anyone has lived in it since Cliff and Hannah Toller died in that car accident. It happened my last year in college and I read about it in an Albany newspaper. They had been driving back from Plattsburgh when a freakish May snowstorm swept across the Adirondacks. Their car was found at the bottom of a deep ravine. The newspaper made a big deal out of the fact that, like their children, the Tollers had died together.
DOUBLE DISASTER STRIKES TWICE FOR ADIRONDACK COUPLE,
the headline read.

I remember feeling unsurprised at the Tollers’ fate. It was harder to imagine the two of them going on after losing both their children.

But only one of them was their child.

I wonder if at the end they thought of Lucy as an interloper
—the changeling who dragged their own child to his death.

Just as I put my hand on the ignition key I see a light come on in the house and a figure pass behind a curtained window. It comes so hard upon my thinking of Lucy as some fiendish demon that the sight strikes me as a reproach—and indeed, there is something in the profile silhouetted in the top floor window that reminds me of Lucy. I feel that rush of cold and inability to breathe that marked the panic attacks I experienced in my twenties. I turn on the car and put the heater on high, but the cold persists and now I am sweating as well. I’m too afraid to drive like this. I look at the house again to reassure myself that the figure in the window is not Lucy, but the window is dark again. Instead, a rectangle of light appears in the doorway and a woman steps out into the deep, unshoveled snow and walks straight for my car. She taps on my window before I fully take in that it’s Dr. Lockhart.

“So you decided to come back,” she says when I lower the window. “Better to face your demons, eh?”

I wonder what demons she is referring to, but I am determined, for once, not to let her control the direction of the conversation.

“What are you doing in the Toller house?” I ask.

Dr. Lockhart smiles. “It’s not the Toller house anymore, Jane. This is where I live.”

“You live here? But …”

“Where did you think I lived, Jane? In one of those cozy little apartments in the mansion? I don’t think so. In my profession it’s very important to maintain a distance. And I like my privacy. These boarding schools can be such fishbowls. Fascinating to study as cultural microcosms, but such parochial bores to live in twenty-four hours a day. Doesn’t it get to you sometimes, being
watched
all the time?”

I hadn’t thought of myself as so visible, but when I think of the events of the last semester I realize that I have felt
observed.

“From whom did you buy the house?” I ask, if only to steer the conversation away from last semester. She straightens up and glances back at the house. I can tell she is surprised by the question.

“From the estate. The house was empty for many years …” She trails off and I decide to pursue the subject if only because I’ve never seen her look this uncomfortable.

“Since the Tollers died? Maybe people thought it was an unlucky house, everyone who lived there is dead now.”

“I’m not superstitious, Jane. People make their own fates. Believing this house is unlucky is like … like believing in the three sisters legend. It’s the superstition that causes the problem. If Melissa Randall hadn’t read about the three sisters legend in your journal she might still be alive today.”

There is a note of triumph in her last comment. Finally, she has brought our conversation to where she wants it. I can’t avoid talking about the events of last semester now.

“I told you and Dean Buehl that someone had my journal. What else was I supposed to do?” I ask.

“You should have told us what was in your journal: sex with masked strangers, sacrificial rites, a dead baby in a tea tin …”

“I take your point, Dr. Lockhart. Yes, I should have told someone, but it was a rather unusual circumstance. What would you think if pieces from your old journal started appearing on your desk?”

“I wouldn’t know because I’ve never kept a journal. I would never be so foolish to commit such incriminating evidence, if I had ever done such things, to writing.” I can believe it. She doesn’t look like she’d give anything away.