The Lake of Dead Languages (16 page)

It didn’t seem such a far leap—from my actual poverty to their assumed negligence.

“You’re a cinch for the scholarship,” Matt told me walking back to their home that Friday. “The only other one eligible financially is Lucy.”

“Well, then Lucy will get it,” I said.

“Lucy’s lazy,” Matt said, loudly enough for Lucy, who was walking up ahead, to hear. I thought she’d get mad, but instead she plucked a scarlet maple leaf from an overhanging branch and, looking coyly over her shoulder, bit down on its stem like a flamenco dancer holding a rose between her teeth. Matt skipped up to her and, clasping her into tango position, spun her around the lawn of one of the big mansions. They waltzed through the neat leaf piles the gardeners had raked together, kicking up red and gold maelstroms, until Matt dipped her low over a bed of yellow leaves and let her drop there in a graceful swoon.

“See,” Matt said, turning back to me. I had stayed on the edge of the sidewalk, standing still under the gold waterfall of leaves. “She needs some competition.”

Then he grabbed me, one arm firm around my waist, the
other holding my hand straight out in front of us, his cheek, cool in the crisp fall air, against my cheek. As he spun me around, the red and gold leaves blurred together like the wings of the Firebird in my ballet book. His breath, against my cheek, smelled like apples.

“Now, repeat after me,” he said in rhythm to our dancing,
“Puella, puellae, puellae …”

I repeated dutifully, shouting the declension as we spun around the lawn. When we came to a standstill, Lucy was on her feet, watching us, red and gold leaves sticking out of her hair like a chaplet of beaten gold. Everything else seemed to keep spinning except for her steady little figure.

“See,” she said, “you’ve got it memorized.”

“But I don’t know what it’s for.”

Lucy and Matt exchanged a look and then he plucked one of the leaves from her hair and, with an elaborate sweep of his arm, presented the leaf to me.

“Puer puellae rosam dat,”
Lucy said.

“What?” I asked.

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” Matt translated.

“Boy—
puer
—is in the nominative case, so it’s the subject, he’s the one doing the giving,” Lucy said.

“Girl—
puellae
—is in the dative, so she’s the indirect object of the verb—the one who receives the action of the verb. The rose,” Matt twirled the scarlet maple leaf between his fingertips so that for a moment I thought I was looking at a rose,
“Rosam
is accusative. It’s the direct object of the verb—the thing that’s being given.”

“See, you can mix it all up,” Lucy said.

Matt jumped around me and stood on my right side and held the rose, the leaf, out to his right. Lucy pointed.
“Puellae puer rosam dat.
It still means …?”

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” I replied.

Matt transferred the leaf into his left hand and held it between us.

“Puellae rosam puer dat?”
Lucy asked.

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” I answered.

Matt held the leaf over his head. “Get it?”

I nodded. For the first time I actually did understand.

Matt bowed to me and handed me the maple leaf, which I slipped carefully into my pocket.

“Good girl,” he said. “Now, let’s get home. It’s getting dark.” Matt linked his left arm in mine and Lucy linked her right arm in mine and we walked the rest of the way up River Street, chanting the first declension into the cool, blue evening air.

T
HE HOUSE AT THE END OF
R
IVER
S
TREET WAS NOT A
mansion, but rather the sort of cottage you’d expect the seven dwarfs to live in. It had originally been the gatehouse for the Crevecoeur Mansion. When the estate became a girls’ school, the gatehouse was sold separately to the school’s first headmistress. How it passed into the Toller family I never knew.

The downstairs rooms were always a disappointment to me. They were furnished in the same overstuffed and overpolished colonial style as my own house. But whereas my mother regarded each chair and end table as a prized possession, there was an air of disregard and neglect in Hannah Toller’s decorating. It looked as if the furniture had been picked off the showroom floor with no regard for what my mother called “color coordination.” Ugly brown plaids vied with blue and red chintzes. The curtains were a particularly horrible shade of mustard. While neat, the place looked unloved.

From that first day we spent as little time as possible downstairs. I was introduced to their parents and allowed to exchange strained conversation with them for the length of time it took Lucy to heat up some hot cocoa and Matt to raid the cupboards for cookies. I saw immediately why no one
could forget that Lucy was not Cliff Toller’s daughter. In fact, it was hard to imagine Lucy issuing from either of the Tollers. Cliff Toller was large and red-haired; his hands, especially, seemed huge to me. Hannah Toller was small, like Lucy, but looked so dull, with mousy brown hair and unmemorable features, that one could only think of her as a genetic neutral that would require some divine visitation in order to have produced Lucy. I remembered my mother had told me that she’d conceived Lucy in that one year she had gone to Vassar and I imagined some blond scion encountered at a Yale/Vassar mixer.

When Lucy and Matt introduced me, Mrs. Toller’s dull brown eyes lit up for a moment. “Jane Hudson,” she said my name slowly, much as my mother had pronounced Lucy’s name. “Margaret Poole’s girl?” I nodded.

“I went to school with your mother,” she told me. “Everyone thought she’d be the one to win the Iris Scholarship, but on the day of the exam she didn’t come to school.”

I shrugged. “Maybe she was sick,” I said, but I knew that probably wasn’t what happened. My father had told me that my grandmother didn’t want her to go to Heart Lake, but I hadn’t known until now that she must have kept her home the day of the exam. I tried to imagine what my mother must have felt that day, after studying for the exam, to be kept from what must have seemed her only chance to get out of Corinth and a life of dreary millwork.

“And what do you think of your teacher?
Domina
Chambers?” Hannah Toller asked me.

“Oh, she seems wonderful,” I gushed. “So elegant and …” I struggled for the right word, “… and refined.”

“Refined? Yes, I guess you could call her that.” And she went back to stirring some pungent-smelling stew on the stove.

“Mother went to school with Helen Chambers,” Lucy explained as we trooped up the steep stairs. “First at Heart Lake, and then for one year at Vassar.”

“Oh?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say and I
was glad that Lucy and Matt were ahead of me on the steps or they would have seen me blushing and known I’d heard the whole story about Lucy’s birth.

“Yeah, she got the Iris Scholarship when she was our age,” Matt said.

“I guess that’s why she wants Lucy to have it,” I said.

I saw Lucy and Matt turn to each other at the top of the steps. Matt whispered something and Lucy shook her head as if she were angry at what he had said. I was glad to be able to change the subject by exclaiming over their rooms.

“You guys are so lucky,” I said a little too loudly. “It’s like your own private hideaway. It’s like the attic in
The Little Princess.”

“Yeah, Lucy’s the princess and I’m the little serving girl she lets clean up after her.”

Lucy scooped up a pile of dirty laundry on the landing and tossed it at Matt. “As if you picked up anything ever.”

The rooms
were
messy. Lucy’s room, on the right side of the stairs, was tiny, with hardly enough room for a single bed and a small bureau. This was why, she claimed, she’d encroached into Matt’s room on the other side of the stairs. You’d have thought from the freefall of clothes and books and swimming goggles and ice skates and loose paper and teacups and half-eaten apples that they shared his room.

Lucy had even pushed her desk over to Matt’s side so that they could study better. The desks faced each other on either side of the window—“so we both get a view,” Lucy told me. “We fought terribly over it.” That first day they found an old table for me and placed it between their desks facing the window.

“She’ll get distracted looking out the window,” Lucy said.

“She won’t,” Matt countered. “Will you, Jane?”

They both turned to me and I looked out the window from which I could see the river running between tall white birches, their yellow leaves catching the last light, like a band of sapphires set in gold.

I looked back at their eager faces. “No,” I told them, truthfully. “I won’t be distracted.”

I
STUDIED WITH THEM EVERY DAY AFTER SCHOOL THROUGH
out the fall term and sometimes on Saturdays until Christmas break. I had been afraid that without the excuse of studying together Matt and Lucy would disappear from view over the long vacation. My relief at their invitation to go skating was tempered only by having to admit to them I didn’t have skates. I’d always relied on the rented ones at the public rink.

“You can have my old ones,” Lucy told me. “Your feet are smaller than mine.” Surprisingly, she was right. Although she was tiny everywhere else, Lucy had unusually long feet. I tried on her skates and found that with an extra pair of socks they fit perfectly.

“Do you think it’ll be thick enough?” Lucy asked Matt as we followed a little stream called the Schwanenkill west into the woods, our skates slung over our shoulders. Although we hadn’t gotten much snow yet, the temperature had been below freezing since Halloween. The Schwanenkill was frozen except for a small rivulet down the middle that scalloped the edges of ice on either side. The ground felt hard to me as I struggled to keep up with them. The stream bank was icy and twice I slipped and broke through the thin ice and felt the cold water seep through my thin-soled sneakers.

Matt and Lucy wore the rubber-soled boots they’d gotten from L.L. Bean for Christmas, so they could crash through the ice and water heedlessly. I think that if they had noticed I was wearing Keds, they wouldn’t have taken me into the woods that day, but they could be unobservant that way. She was careless about how she dressed, more often than not wearing one of Matt’s soft corduroy shirts with her faded blue jeans. It didn’t matter, though, because she looked good in whatever she wore.

After we had walked about a quarter of a mile we came to
a small wooden hut on the southern end of Heart Lake. When I realized where we were I grew nervous.

“Isn’t this private property?” I asked.

Lucy opened the door of the hut while Matt eased himself down the steep bank to test the ice.

“I suppose so,” Lucy answered with a yawn. I followed her into the hut. It was too dark at first to make out much, but then she opened the two double doors at the opposite end and the small space was filled with the late afternoon sun reflecting off the icy surface of the lake, which came up to the very edge of the building. I noticed that the sun was only a little above the line of hills behind the Crevecoeur mansion on the west side of the lake. It would be dark soon. The walls on either side were lined with deep shelves. Lucy stretched herself out on one of the shelves as if she had come for a nap instead of a skate.

“But no one’s ever caught us,” she said. “And it’s the best place to skate. We even have our own skating lodge.” She twirled her hand around in the mote-filled air, indicating the little hut.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“It’s the old Schwanenkill icehouse,” Matt said, coming into the hut and swinging his skates onto the end of the shelf where Lucy was lying. “The Crevecoeurs used it for storing ice harvested from the lake.” He swept a handful of sawdust from the shelf and sifted it through his gloved fingers. “They packed the ice in sawdust and it lasted till summer.” He pointed to a rotting wooden ramp that led from the double doors down to the ice. “They used that ramp to haul up the ice they cut from the lake. Our father used to help with the ice harvest.”

“You’re a fund of historical information, Mattie. How’s the ice today?” Lucy asked without opening her eyes.

“It’s a bit choppy at the mouth of the Schwanenkill. I think there’s a spring there that feeds into the stream and it keeps the ice from forming solidly above it. But if we skirt around that we should be all right.”

He was already pulling his boots off as he spoke and Lucy, although still supine, brought one heavily booted foot up to her opposite knee and began lazily pulling at her laces.

I looked out at the surface of the lake, which was turning a pale Creamsicle color in the setting sun. It was hard to see well with the glare, but I thought I saw dark patches, like bruises on an apple, which could have been soft spots or just shadows on the ice.

“I hear the lake is really deep,” I said conversationally. I’d kicked off my Keds but I was still twisting the skate laces through my fingers.

“Seventy-two feet in the middle,” Matt answered proudly, as if he had made the lake, “but this side’s pretty shallow near the shore. You stay right behind me, Jane, and if there’s a thin spot I’ll let you know by going through first.” He grinned at me with the utter, unthinking confidence of a fourteen-year-old boy. “You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?”

I nodded earnestly, not sure if he were kidding or not.

“Good, because I’m not sure about this one.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Lucy. “It would probably be too much trouble for her. She probably wouldn’t want to get her feet wet.”

Lucy swiped at Matt’s shin with the tip of her skate blade. He jumped off the bench and lunged out of the icehouse with Lucy right behind him. When they reached the ice their jerky movements suddenly smoothed and lengthened. I saw Lucy catch up with him and grab his parka hood so roughly I thought they’d both plummet headlong through the ice, but instead he turned around, caught her hands and spun her into a graceful pirouette.

I was tempted to stayin the icehouse. Even if I hadn’t been worried about the ice I knew I would never be able to keep up with them. But then I remembered Matt’s trusting smile.
You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?
Of course, he’d been kidding, but I realized at that moment, as I tightened
my laces until they hurt, that if Matt and Lucy were in danger there was no point at all to me being safe on the shore.