All Souls (7 page)

“You make me sick. There are practically buildings named after you there.”

Anna Mazur said, “Oh, to lose all that beautiful hair!” Anna's own sparse colorless hair sparked when she so much as touched it.

“Hair grows back,” Miss Hodd said.

“Not that color,” Anna Mazur said.

Miss Hodd said, “I let the nines write after morning meeting today. Nobody wanted to do grammar. Listen to what Camilla Berkey wrote: ‘Helplessness scrubs us all clean of any hope we had of doing something, but the doctors are still dirty. They must not be touched with the sponge. No, they must not.'”

Mr. Dell, who was not at the coffee, was mentioned by Mrs. Van de Ven as reading to his daughter. They had just started
Mansfield Park.

And how did Mrs. Van de Ven know this? Mrs. Morton wondered.

“I asked,” Mrs. Van de Ven replied.

The gathered fluttered and some of the mothers looked sad, but Mrs. Morton said, “That's Fanny Price, isn't it? It's a most unfortunate name.” Mrs. Morton's deep, druggy, slow voice made several of the mothers
laugh. The sound of Mrs. Morton was funny, as was the fact of how rich she was and well-read.

Mrs. Cohen took Mrs. Van de Ven aside and spoke softly, “Think of it this way: When Nanda Morton wakes up each morning, she has made more money than most of us will make in a year.” Mrs. Cohen said, “And you know what that means, don't you?”

“I know what that means,” Mrs. Van de Ven said. “It means Suki Morton is going to Brown.”

“Oh please!” said loudly and in exasperation from another part of the room.

Theta Kovack had heard it all before and had juggled to come in late to work for this acidic coffee and reckless talk.

“Look at them, a class of forty girls,” said Mrs. Quirk, the college adviser, “and all of them will find a college. The job is to make the right fit.” Mrs. Quirk said it was important to encourage daughters to finish their essays before Christmas break!

Mrs. Saperstein and Mrs. Song wore wise, relieved expressions as their daughters had applied for early admission. These mothers didn't have to worry about essays anymore. “Thank god!” was what they said.

That poor Astra Dell. She was losing all that hair now, wasn't she?
How, Theta Kovack wondered, had Astra Dell entered the conversation happening just behind her; but the girl had, thanks to Mrs. Van de Ven, who
seemed absorbed by the subjects of Astra Dell and the girls making themselves sick at Norris-Willet.

Car pushed and smoothed and rearranged the food; she made patterns.

“Look, Carlotta, if you're not going to eat it—” Mrs. Forestal began, but all the air she had to argue with hissed out of her, and she sat quietly, seeming very small and vacant at the other end of the table.

What were other people drinking over the Thanksgiving weekend? Miss Wilkes was drinking amber ale, and Lisa Van de Ven took a sip. (“I shouldn't but how else can I get inspired to write my essay?”) Alex and Suki were drinking skim-milk lattes. Mrs. Van de Ven ordered pinot grigio for lunch with Mr. Dell. “He looks so thin!” she told her husband at the Post House for dinner. She explained that the doctor was willing to take a risk, “a combination of surgery, internal radiation, external radiation, a couple of chemo . . . ,” but Mr. Van de Ven cut her off. They were eating, for
heaven's sake, weren't they? “You may be,” she said, “but I am drinking.”

 

At the senior parents coffee, Mrs. Van de Ven said she was becoming an alcoholic!

The senior parents coffee had been very well attended. The college adviser, Mrs. Quirk, was at the coffee to answer any last questions about applications and what parents might expect for the next few months. Although the questions and advice seemed much the same as those of two weeks before, the mothers attended to what sounded rewound and repeated. Car Forestal's name did not come up. (It never did!) A number of mothers could have told stories about Carlotta Forestal or about other girls from different schools, but only Mrs. Cohen recounted to the group whatever horror she had heard was happening at St. Catherine's and Norris-Willet, and again several mothers bemoaned their helplessness.

Lisa Van de Ven sat in the kitchen in the best chair. “What the hell is this?”

“I don't know,” her mother said. “Leave it if you want. I don't care.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“‘Oh, Mother' what?”

“I know what you're thinking.”

“Do you?”

“I do.”

“I wonder.”

Anna Mazur came to the disappointed part of the Tim Weeks story and said, “I'm not pretty, Mother.”

Her mother was silent on the phone.

“We're more like brother and sister than anything else.” Anna sighed and asked her mother, “What do you think?”

Her mother thought that only baked or handmade gifts should be exchanged between staff and students at Christmas.

Anna said, “That's the rule, but people break it all the time.”

“That's right,” her mother said. “You got that ugly scarf last year.”

“Yes, Mother. That ugly scarf from Hermès.”

“It had stirrups all over it.”

Anna said, “I don't know what to think about Tim.”

“I'll tell you what,” her mother said. “Don't think about him.”

The news on December 15 was bad—Astra still off-limits; and good—early admits to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Trinity, all confirmed. Four girls were in college! School was over for them.

Kitty Johnson, who was waiting to confer with Mrs. Quirk about colleges, said to Car, “If you thought Sarah Saperstein was insufferable before Harvard, imagine what she'll be like now.”

“Ny Song, too.”

Kitty lowered her voice to confide in Car the decision she had made to avoid her adviser's elective. “I'm not taking O'Brien's course.”

“Good idea.”

“I'm taking Hodd's Families in Distress,” Kitty said.

 

Miss Hodd, in another classroom, slid her battered
Warriner's
to the corner of her desk and launched herself into the middle of the classroom in her castered chair, one leg up on the seat, chin on her knee, all the better to listen to how the seniors in her English class felt about the news that Astra Dell was sicker.

“A whole group of crying juniors passed me in the hall. They didn't even look like the kind of people who would be her friends.”

“They weren't Astra Dell's friends.”

“A lot of people aren't really crying for her; they're putting on an act.”

Marlene's head was at a whistling boil when she waved good-bye from behind the window to Astra's room—and Marlene was wearing paper shoes, cap, and gown—so what did the nurses wear? she wondered. Someone had to go into that room. Marlene waved good-bye, mouthed, “Merry Christmas,” then shuffled away in those paper shoes, relieved to be well and leaving the sleepy, balding creature in a pom-pom hat Kitty Johnson had knit the sick girl when it went out at school that Astra was losing her hair. First lines to college essays occurred to Marlene: “Walking along the hospital corridor to see my sick friend was an unsettling experience.” Possible, but there was her dad essay, the one she had started: “My father looked me in the eyes and asked, ‘Are you ready?' ‘No,' I replied, and he pushed me overboard, and I sank deeper and deeper into a cold, enchanted realm.” Her father had pushed her into China Lakes, but Marlene had always wanted to go scuba diving, and who was to say she had not?

Five of the graduates from the class of '96, home from college, came to see the last day of school and the Christmas spectacle when 536 girls from grades k through twelve gathered in the auditorium, the seats retracted for the occasion, and in the middle of the room, the fake Christmas tree with its paper-chain decoration. The fifth, sixth, and seventh graders gathered in the balcony with their teachers while the other grades filed in: big sisters and little sisters, starting with the seniors and their kindergarten charges, hand in hand, an endless coil of girls wearing red and green accessories, candy-cane tights, and tinsel in their hair—“I'm one big present, just for you!” Gillian Warring mouthed to Mr. Weeks in the balcony. Around and around, the elevens with the first grade, the tens with the second, on and on, the students came while most of their teachers sat on the stage of the auditorium. A few of the old favorite Christmas and Hanukkah songs to begin—“You would surely say it glows, like a lightbulb!”—and then Miss Brigham in a Santa's hat, front and center on the stage, read from
The Polar Express.
Then some more songs until everyone's favorite moment: “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” when the first grade began, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,” and the kindergarten girls, no bigger than feathers, were held up by
their senior sisters to squeak, “Fa la lah.” The dreaded moment, of course, was “Five golden rings,” when the fifth-grade girls leaned over the balcony with their wagging hands outstretched and shrilly pitched the song. The sixth and seventh graders tried to outshout each other, and the teachers, predictably, frowned, but “Five golden rings!” always put the song on high, and there it stayed with some slight mumbled diminishment in the upper grades as the ninth grade mimed nine maids a-milking until, the moment anticipated, and the seniors stood, some of them already crying, and began their own Christmas medley—playful digs at teachers and Quirk, of course, and college horrors. The girls were often off tune and uncertain of the lyrics so recently composed. “Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock, you might just think our essay's a crock . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What could she write to Astra in the moment that would not be wrong?

 

Dear A,

Maybe you feel like it has been a waste to have spent your life practicing for what turns out to be nothing. But you are lucky in some ways because you will know what it is like to die, and the rest of us will spend our lives wondering. I know that this isn't comforting at all, but I'm sure you'll be getting enough of that from others, and soon it will stop meaning anything. So I want to talk to you about your dying. I know you have envisioned your own funeral before. People missing you. People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent.

 

Car had faltered over other letters, but this one she sent.

Mr. O'Brien was wearing his Irish pants, the thick Donegal tweed number that Suki and Alex always said must have made him sweat in manly places. In the overheated classrooms, Mr. O'Brien was wearing these pants, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up.

“Oh,” Suki whispered, “he is so hirsute.”

“You know the ugliest words, Suki.”

 

Mr. O'Brien was reading aloud again, “‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / and Mourners to and fro . . .'” He was leaning over his desk in his scratchy-looking pants and plaid shirt and talking about the speaker's point of view, asking his students if they had contrived an afterlife or heaven for themselves. “What does Emily Dickinson seem to be proposing here? The floating
then,
the narrative word, at the end, by itself, in the poem with lead boots and space, what does that lonely term suggest?” And he repeated the lines, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down— / And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing—then—'” and he said again, “‘then.'” Mr. O'Brien was asking the seniors in English, section Z, what was Emily Dickinson saying about the prospect of heaven? Kitty Johnson was taking notes, sensing her own funereal headache was on the way, not quite looking at Mr. O'Brien, but listening to Ufia hold forth on how scary
the poem was because there was no satisfaction for the dead. No eulogy overheard, only scraping chairs and shoes.

Alex whispered to Suki, “I got up at seven to make this class only to be informed there is no fucking heaven.” Alex was circling a circle in the center of her notebook, a vacancy, a black hole that grew larger as she spoke. “I mean, this is swell. Nothing to look forward to. I should have guessed.”

Nothingness again, that odorless gas again; Marlene, in the back row, felt sick. She wasn't reading this poem with Astra. This poem would be an assignment Astra could do with someone else. Let someone else, let Car explain it, for Astra would insist—did insist, asked for whatever was said and done in class—because she planned to graduate with her class. “My minister visits. He keeps my spirits up,” so Astra had said to Marlene, and who was she to suggest a darker outcome?