The Lake of Dead Languages (15 page)

As for me, I was so relieved when Lucy asked me to bring my tray to their table I had to blink away tears before I could say yes. I was standing at the end of the check-out line, balancing a tray heavy with sloppy joes and canned fruit and two waxy milk cartons. (“You get two on the lunch program, honey,” the cafeteria lady had loudly informed me, “you might as well take them.”) The smell of the sweet, orangy meat was making me feel dizzy while kids streamed around
me to their places, as sure of where they were going as water knows to flow to the ocean. I saw where I belonged. There was the table with the East Corinth kids: the boys in flannel shirts and jeans cuffed at the bottom for extra wear, the girls in plaid skirts a little too short or a little too long and Peter Pan blouses with darning stitches at the collar. I knew them and I knew they’d make a place for me—not with the enthusiastic hugs and smiles with which the West Corinth kids greeted one another after summers apart at tennis camp, but with the resigned shift of kids from big families making room for one more.

Those afternoons I had spent at the West Corinth Swim Club were shimmering and fading like heat haze just as I felt a cool hand slip under my elbow and pull me out of the current.

“Don’t I know you from the pool?” she said, in a small, clear voice I had to lean toward to make out.

I nodded at her, afraid if I talked I might start to cry. I noticed that her pale hair was tinged green from her summer spent swimming in the chlorinated water and her eyelashes and brows were bleached white from the sun.

“Do you want to come sit with us? I think we’ve got our next class together. Did you sign up for Latin? There’s only eleven of us and the rest are all that crowd’ll be taking it for their SAT scores and to get into law school.” She spoke in a rush I could barely understand.

I followed her to a table in a far corner beneath the cafeteria’s only window. Her brother Matt actually half rose from his seat to greet me. They both had brought their lunches—identical brown paper packets of cheese and apples and Thermoses of hot cocoa.

“You were right, Mattie,” Lucy said, polishing her apple on her sweater sleeve. “She’s in Latin.”

I couldn’t remember telling her, but of course she had known all along.

Matt gave me a long appraising look. “So why did you sign on?” he asked.

He made it sound like I’d joined the foreign legion. The truth was that signing up for Latin, instead of the usual French or Spanish, had been, like most of what I did, my mother’s idea. She’d heard that the lawyers and doctors urged their kids into Latin to boost their SAT scores.

“French and Spanish are common,” my mother told me. “You’ll meet more interesting children in Latin.” My mother’s ambitions for me were a puzzle, because they didn’t seem to come from any belief in my ability. I often felt like a piece in a game that she was moving around on a board. When I achieved some goal she’d set out for me—the best reading scores in sixth grade, a part in the school play—she seemed mistrustful of the success.

“She wants those things for you because her mother wouldn’t let her try for anything,” my father once explained to me. “Your mother could have gotten a scholarship to Heart Lake, but her mother made her give it up. I hate to speak badly of your grandma, Janie, especially as you’re named for her, but Jane Poole was an awful cold woman. She hated the Crevecoeurs after she was let go. Your mother wants more for you, but when you look like you’re going to get it, I think she must hear old Jane’s voice telling her it’ll come to no good.”

Of course I couldn’t tell Matt and Lucy any of this.

I searched my head for anything I knew about Latin. They spoke it in church, I knew, but we were Presbyterians, not Catholics. There were those movies with chariot races and gladiator fights where the actors’ words didn’t quite match the movement of their lips, but somehow I didn’t think Matt and Lucy spent their Saturdays eating Cap’n Crunch in front of the TV. They probably went on nature hikes and read books with nice leather bindings instead of the tattered paperbacks mended with yellow tape I borrowed from the town library.

I remembered then that one of those books I had borrowed that summer had been a collection of Greek and Roman
myths. I hadn’t thought it was as good as my beloved
Tales from the Ballet,
but I had liked some of the stories.

“I like mythology,” I said. “The gods and all and those stories of people turning into something else … like the one about the girl who turns into a spider …,” I blathered on, mashing my fork into my sloppy joe, turning the meat and bread into an even more unappetizing mess.

“Arachne,” Matt said.

“Ovid,” Lucy said, even more mysteriously.

“Metamorphoses,”
they both said at the same time.

“That’s good.” Matt held his apple up between us and closed one eye as if I were a far away object and he was taking my perspective. “Of course we won’t get to it first year.”

“Oh no, it’ll be all grunt work with declension endings and conjugations, but
Domina
Chambers says if we study hard she’ll let us read extra bits. I want to do Catullus and Matt’s keen on Caesar—just like a boy, right? And she’ll help us study for the Iris Scholarship for Heart Lake—only Matt’s not eligible because he’s a boy. But she says there’s no harm in him studying with me as he’ll be a help. Perhaps you’ll want to join us?”

I felt I was already listening to a foreign language more arcane than Greek or Latin. I hadn’t understood half of what she’d said—I had never heard of Ovid or Catullus or
Domina
Chambers—but it was a little like listening to opera on public radio. I didn’t always understand the story, but I liked how listening to it made me feel. I liked how the weak sunshine that came through the dirty cafeteria window made Matt’s sandy brown hair turn a fiery red and Lucy’s pale, greenish hair glow like burnished gold. I liked being with them.

I think that if they had been asking me to join the foreign legion instead of only inviting me to study Latin with them, I would have followed them into the desert willingly.

T
HE
I
RIS
S
CHOLARSHIP—NAMED AFTER THE
C
REVE
coeur daughter who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918—was awarded to the freshman girl from the town of Corinth who scored the highest on her Latin exam. It was a sop, my mother told me when I came home that first day of ninth grade, to the town’s resentment of the school. When, in the early seventies, the Corinth Public School Board threatened to cancel the Latin program due to low enrollment and a scarcity of qualified teachers, Helen Chambers, a Heart Lake alum and newly appointed classics teacher there, volunteered to teach the Latin class at Corinth High.

We were her first public school class, she told us that first day, and as such responsible for whatever impression of public education she would take away with her. We also turned out to be her last public school class, so I assume the impression she took away with her was not favorable.

Helen Chambers was unlike any teacher I had ever seen before. The teachers we got in Corinth generally fell into one of two categories. There were the plump, motherly women in shapeless Dacron dresses and cardigans embroidered with ABCs and apples (or whatever was in season: pumpkins at Halloween, candy canes at Christmas) who showed lots of film strips and drew happy faces on returned papers. Then
there were the sternish old maids in Orlon sweater vests, scratchy wool skirts, and support hose pooling around their thin ankles who lectured in monotones and gave detention for falling asleep in class. Occasionally, some young woman just out of the State Teacher’s College came to Corinth for a few years. Such was Miss Venezia, my kindergarten teacher, who looked like Snow White and gave me
Tales from the Ballet.
But if they were any good they went on, as Miss Venezia did, to better jobs in Albany or Rochester.

Helen Chambers was neither young nor middle-aged. Instead she resided in a suspended state between the two. She was tall and fair, with the sort of blond hair that turns silver instead of gray and which she swept up in an elegant twist like an actress in a French movie. She wore, invariably, black—a color ill-suited for days spent in front of a chalkboard, but then I can’t recall ever seeing her use the chalkboard.

She conducted her classes, I realized later, like college seminars. That first day she had the eleven of us pull our desks into a circle, which she joined. She gave us each a plain gray cloth-bound book and told us to turn to chapter one to review the first declension. She timed us on the watch brooch pinned, like a nurse’s, above her heart. When five minutes had elapsed she told us to close our books and recite the declension of
puella, puellae,
one at a time, around the circle. She ticked off points in a small leather notebook for each mistake we made. Lucy and Matt were the only ones who got it right.

Afterward she read us a poem by Catullus about a girl who keeps a sparrow in her lap, which makes her boyfriend jealous. Ward Castle made a rude gesture at Lucy and was told he could sit in the hall for the rest of the class. She told us to memorize the first declension and the present indicative active of
laudo, laudare
for tomorrow and dismissed us by saying
“Valete discipuli.”

Lucy and Matt responded by chanting
“Vale, Domina”
and the rest of us muttered some approximation without having the slightest idea what we were saying.

The next day our class size had dwindled to nine, by the end of the week: seven. Aside from Matt and Lucy and me, the rest were the children of doctors and lawyers whose parents had told them they had to stay in Latin to get into law or medical school.

After two weeks I had memorized the first declension, but I hadn’t the slightest idea of what a declension was. But I was happy chanting the words with Matt and Lucy walking down River Street after school.

I was happy, truth be told, to be walking in the opposite direction from my own home. I wouldn’t have to pass the mill with its sickening smell of fresh-cut lumber and its yellow pall of smoke. My house was down the hill from the mill and every day of my life I had woken up to that oversweet smell and the yellow smoke staining the sky outside my bedroom window. The lumber trucks went past my house, rattling the windowpanes and making the vases of artificial flowers on the coffee table tremble. My mother waged an everlasting war against the sawdust that my father brought home on his boots and work clothes. She made him take off his clothes in the mudroom and wash his head under the garden hose even when it was so cold that the water froze in his hair and beard. Still the sawdust crept in, forming tiny drifts in the corners and speckling the china bric-a-brac and tickling the back of your throat. At night I could hear my father, who breathed that dust all day, coughing so hard that the iron day bed he slept on in the sewing room rattled. When I came home in the afternoons my mother would be dusting and railing against the sawdust and the mud and my father’s salary and the cold.

“This is the last place on earth I thought I’d end up,” she told me again and again. Since it was the place where she started out, I never understood her surprise over finding herself here.

When I told her I’d be going home with Lucy Toller that
Friday I saw her take in the name and roll it around in her mind, measuring its worth like a pound of sugar.

“She’s a bastard, you know.”

I don’t think I had ever heard my mother use a word like that. She always said cursing was common.

“Illegitimate, I mean,” she said, seeing I didn’t understand. “Cliff Toller’s not her daddy. I knew her mother, Hannah Corey, in school. A smart girl. Maybe too smart for her own good. She got the Iris Scholarship.” Maybe that was why she didn’t like Hannah Corey. “She even got into one of those fancy women’s colleges, but she came back after a year with a baby and wouldn’t say boo to anyone about whose it was. Cliff Toller married her all the same and gave her a nice little house on River Street. I wouldn’t have picked her daughter as first choice for a friend, but you might meet some of her friends on River Street.”

I didn’t tell my mother that Lucy and Matt didn’t seem to have any other friends.

“She’ll probably win the Iris this year and then you’d know someone at Heart Lake.”

“Lucy says I could have a shot at the Iris,” I told my mother. “She says we’ll study together.”

My mother gave me a long look so that now I felt like the pound of sugar. I couldn’t tell if she had never thought of me having a chance for the Iris Scholarship until now, or if she’d been planning for me to go after it all along. After all, I was a good student, although more out of a slavish need to please my teachers than from any innate talent.

“The Iris Scholarship,” she said. Like all her goals for me she looked at it with both desire and mistrust.

“Well,” she said, “that would be something. But I wouldn’t set my heart on it.”

From the start, though, I think I did just that: set my heart on the Iris Scholarship. I’d never seen the school even though I’d grown up only a mile from its gates. I’d seen, though, the Heart Lake girls come into town to browse the drugstore for
magazines and try on lipsticks at the makeup counter. They’d try on half a dozen shades and then wipe their mouths clean before going back to the school. I thought there must be a rule against makeup, but then I noticed how resolutely plain they were in their dress. Even when the school abandoned their uniform, the girls seemed to be wearing one. Plaid kilts and pastel sweaters. Down vests in the winter, like loggers. Scuffed penny loafers worn down at the heel. My mother always said you could tell a lady by the heels of their shoes, but there was something about these girls—maybe the perfectly straight teeth, the way their hair gleamed, the discrete flash of gold on earlobes and throat, and, most of all, a carelessness combined with confidence—that told me that the backs of their shoes might be worn to the nub but they’d never be, what my mother called, “down at the heels.”