The Lake of Dead Languages (17 page)

There’s always that first step in skating, from dry ground to slick ice, when it just seems impossible. Impossible that two thin blades of metal will support you, impossible that because its molecules have begun to dance a little slower water will hold you up. There was no railing here, as at the rink, to bridge that gap between solid and liquid, only the imperceptible giving way of earthbound gravity to free fall.

I took a few tentative strokes out onto the ice and then remembered what Matt had said about staying away from the Schwanenkill. I looked for them and saw that they were skating along the lake edge toward the northeast cove, probably to avoid being seen from the mansion on the west side of the lake. I would have liked to get a closer look at the mansion, which I had never seen before, but with the sun setting behind it I could make out little except a low, dark bulk squatting on its rise above the lake. When I looked away there were dark spots burned into my vision, and it took a moment to locate Matt and Lucy under a pine tree that spread its boughs above the lake. Lucy waved at me, but Matt, standing behind her, reached up over Lucy’s head and pulled a branch, releasing a shower of snow down the back of her neck. Lucy shrieked and spun around to grab him, but he was already gone, skimming the edge of the lake with a swift hockey player’s glide.

Lucy knelt on the ice and gathered together a snowball. When she got to her feet she must have realized she’d never catch up with him. He was already on the western edge of the cove where three rocks broke through the ice. She must have decided that the only way she’d catch up to him would be to cut directly across the cove.

She was halfway across the cove when one of the shadows I’d noticed before darkened and opened beneath her. Matt, on the other side of the lake, was turned the other way. I
don’t remember deciding to move forward, but I found myself a few feet away from the ice hole.

She was in it up to her waist, her elbows propped on the edge of the ice to hold herself up. I slid one heavy skate toward her and a crack like forked lightning spread between us. Behind her, Matt turned and saw us. He started to skate, not directly toward us, but back along the shore, the long way.

I crouched to my knees and then lay myself down flat on the ice. I moved slowly, but still the ice hit my chest like a wall and sucked all the breath out of my lungs. I reached my arm out but I was still a foot short of her hand. Her fingertips, which had been straining toward mine, relaxed and she shook her head at me. Then one elbow cracked through the ice and her left shoulder slipped under the water. She made a sound like a wounded bird and I thought I heard its echo until I realized it had come from Matt, who was behind me now. I slithered forward, scraping my chin on the rough ice, and caught her right hand. She grabbed my wrist with more strength than I would have imagined existed in those tiny hands.

Behind me I heard Matt’s hoarse whisper telling me—
her? us?
—to hold on and then I felt a tug at my feet. As he pulled, she got her left arm onto the ice and I grabbed that one, too, only she had no grip in that hand so I grabbed her wrist. Her wrist felt so cold and brittle I thought it might break, but I held on even after her legs cleared the ice and her body was out of the water.

Matt dragged us like that, both of us flat on the ice, back to the shore. When we were both on dry ground he told me I could let go, but he had to pry my fingers away from her wrist and her fingers away from mine. When she let go I realized I had no feeling in my left arm. I couldn’t even lift it to help hold her up on the walk home so Matt picked her up and carried her the quarter mile back.

It was only after Dr. Bard (who lived two houses down
from the Tollers) had examined Lucy and given her an injection of penicillin to ward off pneumonia that he happened to notice how I was holding my arm. When he took my jacket off he saw I had dislocated my shoulder—the bone had been pulled clean out of its socket.

O
NCE SET, MY SHOULDER HEALED RAPIDLY, AND EVEN
though it still hurt, my mother didn’t see any reason for me to miss school. It was too bad, she said, that I had always written with my left hand, so this was a good opportunity for me to learn to use my right hand better. I told her I would try, but when I was in school I switched back to writing with my left hand even though the act of writing sent shooting pains through my arm. That arm never felt quite the same.

Lucy was worse off. Despite the penicillin injection, she developed pneumonia from her fall in the lake and was out of school for the whole month of January and some of February. Matt was out of school a lot, too, although I don’t think he was sick. I just don’t think he could bear to leave Lucy alone all day.

I went to the Tollers’ house after school every day to drop off Lucy’s homework until
Domina
Chambers told me that she would drop the work off herself on her way back to Heart Lake. I grew shy, then, of visiting even though Matt and Lucy had always acted happy to see me. I thought they had forgotten all about me when, on my fifteenth birthday,
Domina
Chambers gave me a package wrapped in plain brown paper. I waited until my study hall and then sneaked away to an unused corridor where I’d found a window seat
looking out over the school’s unused courtyard—an air well really—a place I could be alone if I didn’t mind burning my bottom on a hot radiator and freezing my arms against the cold windowpane.

There were two packages inside, one contained a beautiful fountain pen and a bottle of peacock blue ink. These were from Lucy. I put those aside and ripped open the second package. It was a notebook, the black-and-white kind you could buy in the drugstore for a quarter. I opened it and read Matt’s note on the inside cover, written on the lines provided for a classroom schedule: “To Jane. Still waters run deep. From, Matt.” He’d said that to me once when I told him I’d like to be a writer but I worried about not having enough to say. “You’re quiet, but you’re observant,” he’d said. “Still waters run deep.”

I filled the pen with ink and wrote on the first page, “Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink …” The nib of the pen caught on the page and ink splattered on the paper and my blouse. The effort to write made my whole arm ache and I wondered if Lucy realized it would be so hard for me to use it.

“… and Matt gave me this notebook.” I looked at the notebook and tried to think of something poetic I could say about it. It was a cheap exercise book, a brand the town sold because it was made by the paper company that owned the mill. The black-and-white pattern on the cover was supposed to look like marble, but to me it looked like ice on the river in spring, when the ice began to break up and the broken shards traveled downstream to the mill. In the summer the river was choked with logs heading toward the mill to be made into paper—maybe the very paper between these covers and the cover itself—so that holding this book was like holding a piece of the river, and the forests up north, and the ice formed in the high peaks.

I looked out the window at the bleak abandoned courtyard. It was full of the things that kids threw from classroom windows,
discarded mimeos and thick felt erasers that had split in the middle and curled up on themselves like small dead animals.

“I’ll never have any other friends like them,” I wrote. I waited for the ink to dry and then ran my fingers down the page. That’s when I noticed the ragged edge along the inside seam of the book. A page had been torn out. I wondered what Matt had written that he had decided to rip out.

I
DECIDED TO VISIT THE
T
OLLERS
’
HOUSE THAT DAY TO
thank Matt and Lucy for their presents. When I got there I found
Domina
Chambers having tea in the kitchen with Hannah Toller. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her there; I knew she was dropping off Lucy’s work, but I had imagined her literally
dropping
Lucy’s assignments on the Tollers’ front stoop and hastening on her way up Lake Drive to the school. I hadn’t pictured her having tea with Hannah Toller. They looked so odd together: Helen Chambers like a Nordic ice queen and Hannah Toller in her housedress like a drab peasant. But there they were, not only sharing tea but apparently sharing intimate conversation. Their heads were nearly touching as they leaned over some large book of photographs.

“Ah, Clementia, we were just talking about you. Come sit down with us.” I winced at the sound of my Latin name, which I hated. We didn’t get to pick our own Latin names in
Domina
Chambers’s class. Rather they were doled out to us according to a strict system.
Domina
Chambers told us what our names meant (I never saw her consult a babyname book; she seemed to know the meaning of all names) and then gave us a Latin name which had an equivalent meaning.

Lucy was easy because it meant, like her own name Helen, light, and so Lucy would use the same Latin name Helen had at school: Lucia.

Jane, she told me, came from the Hebrew for merciful,
which was Clementia in Latin. Floyd Miller and Ward Castle spent the rest of the year calling me Clementine.

I sat next to Mrs. Toller and looked down at the table. The book resting between them was a yearbook and it was open to a picture of two young girls with their arms around each other’s waists. The girls wore strapless evening gowns and little fur stoles. Off to the side a young man in a tuxedo smiled at the girls. He was blond and handsome and looked, I noticed with a little shock, a lot like Lucy.

“Our freshman winter formal,”
Domina
Chambers said, closing the heavy book. I saw the year 1963 printed on the cover. “You knew that Hannah and I were at Vassar together, didn’t you?”
Domina
Chambers lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. “Only Hannah wasn’t so happy there, were you, dear?”

“College is not for everyone,” Mrs. Toller said quietly.

“No, of course it isn’t. What do you think, Clementia, is college for you? Or should I say: Are you for college? Perhaps the state teachers college in New Paltz? You’d make a very competent teacher, I think, and we always need good Latin teachers.”

I nodded. What she described was the pinnacle of my career ambitions, but on Helen Chambers’s lips it suddenly sounded dreary and ordinary.

“Now our Lucia on the other hand … I see her as a Vassar girl, and then she’ll go to the city and work in some artsrelated field—publishing, I think, with her preciseness and gift for language. If we can only get her into Heart Lake, she’ll be a sure thing for Vassar.”

“It’s a ways away,” Mrs. Toller said.

“Nonsense! Three hours on the train. She can come home on the weekends—when she’s not too busy studying or going to football games and mixers at Yale or taking in the museums in the city. We were always encouraged in Art History 105 to spend as much time as we could at the museums.”

“Mattie’ll half die missing her,” Hannah said with an edge
in her voice I hadn’t heard before. “Have you thought of that, Helen?”

“Well, Mattie will just have to get used to doing without her. He’ll get plenty of practice when she comes to Heart Lake next year. Now the thing to do is make sure she’s ready for the exam. You’re here to study with her, aren’t you, Jane?”

I nodded and smiled, glad to be called by my real name for once. “Oh yes, after all, I’m taking the exam, too.”

Domina
Chambers reached across the table and patted my hand. “Of course you are, dear, and I’m sure you’ll do very nicely on it.”

I
DID DO VERY NICELY ON THE EXAM.
I
N FACT,
I
ACED IT.
Looking back, I think I set out to do just that—ace the exam—that day sitting at the Tollers’ kitchen table with Helen Chambers, if only to prove to her that I was better than she thought I was—better than someone who does
nicely
and goes to teachers college. I wrote in my journal that same night, “Teachers college is OK, but what I’d really like is to go someplace like Vassar. And to do that I have to get the scholarship to Heart Lake. I don’t think Lucy would really mind—after all, she’s the one who’s believed in me all along.”

I outlined a study schedule on the back cover of my note-book. I gave myself six weeks to memorize all of Whee-lock’s Latin. After my parents would go to bed I got up and sat by my bedroom window studying by flashlight. My mother turned the heat down at night so it was cold in my room. When I looked out the window I couldn’t see the mill past the ice crystals spreading across the black panes. When the lumber trucks passed on the road in front of our house the glass shook and the ice patterns spread like a flower opening. Sometimes when I looked up from Wheelock and saw the ice crystals on the windowpane I imagined the picture I’d seen in the Vassar yearbook, only instead of Helen Chambers and Hannah Toller I pictured Lucy and me, our
arms wrapped around each other, smiling into the camera. And off to the side, handsome in dark evening clothes, Matt looked on. Of course, he’d come visit on weekends from wherever he went to college—Yale, maybe, or Dartmouth because, he said, he liked the idea of going to a college founded by an Indian, and he’d heard they had a big Winter Festival.

Each night I ticked off the declensions and conjugations and
sententiae antiquae
I’d committed to memory in my black-and-white notebook. My fingers turned peacock blue with the ink from Lucy’s pen—the same color as the rings under my eyes.

I thought I’d be nervous for the exam, but instead I felt eerily calm and detached—as if I were recalling something I had done a long time ago.

I was frightened, though, when the results were announced, at what Lucy’s reaction would be. When Helen Chambers made the announcement at school assembly and the whole school applauded I looked down, as if I were modest, but really it was because I was afraid to look at Lucy or Matt who were sitting on either side of me. But then I felt a small hand creep into mine and squeeze. I looked up at Lucy and saw that she was smiling at me with what I can only describe as a look of euphoria. She was genuinely thrilled for me.