The Lake of Dead Languages (22 page)

The whole school, practically, was on the ice in the afternoon after classes. We were only allowed to skate in the shallow cove below the mansion lawn. Miss Pike set up orange cones to mark off the safe area. She wore heavy black hockey skates and moved like a polar bear across the ice.
Some of the teachers, like Miss Macintosh and Miss North, teetered nervously around the marked-off circle and then quickly found their way to the log benches on the shore and the iron cauldron of apple cider set on a small bonfire. Others were surprisingly graceful. Miss Buehl, for instance, performed daring pirouettes and traced figure eights around the cones with her arms clasped behind her back. Her short, dark hair crinkled in the dry air with electricity. Once, when she passed me, I felt a spray of ice hit my face and I could see a glittering trail of ice crystals following her like the tail of a comet.

Domina
Chambers had a more modest style, but was equally proficient on the ice. She was certainly the most stylish of the skaters. She wore a sky blue Nordic sweater that brought out the blue in her eyes and trim black ski pants. Her skates were gleaming white with alpine flowers stitched into the leather. I’d never seen skates like them and once I overhead her tell Miss Buehl that they had been a gift from a family whose son she’d tutored in Geneva. She and Miss Buehl often skated together, their arms crossed and linked. They took turns teaching the younger girls and I noticed that Miss Chambers made a special effort with Albie. I thought at first that Albie was an odd choice for
Domina
Chambers to choose as a favorite, but then I learned that Lucy and Deirdre’s tutoring had paid off.

“Albie is our star Latin scholar,” I overheard
Domina
Chambers telling Miss Buehl as she helped the girl to her feet after yet another fall. When she got to her feet the poor girl wobbled pathetically at first, her ankles caving painfully in, but by the end of that winter she could make it around the skating circle with a serviceable choppy stroke that made up in speed what it lacked in grace.

Domina
Chambers asked me, almost every day, why Lucy wasn’t skating with me and every day I gave her the same answer.

“She sleeps after class because she’s up so late studying.” It wasn’t difficult to believe.
Domina
Chambers surely noticed
the dark rings under Lucy’s eyes and her tendency to drop off in class.

“She’s so very dedicated.”
Domina
Chambers made a clucking noise. “Tell her she mustn’t work so hard.” She said it as if it were my fault. I noticed Albie, behind her, listening.

“Oh you know Lucy,” I said, “she wants to do well. All your students do,
Domina.”
I could see a little smile on Albie’s face. Did she know, as I did, that Lucy spent her nights in the woods and on the lake?

“But she’s not like you, Jane. Let’s face it, you’ll have to slave to achieve even a tenth of what Lucy’s capable of.” With that remark, my teacher spun on the ice and stroked away, the spray from her skates shimmering in the still, cold air.

Albie stood on the ice looking up at me, a small feline smile stealing over her usually dull features.

“You’d better get in, Jane,” she said. It was the first time I’d ever heard her use my name. “I think you’ve got wind-burn. Your face is all red.”

O
NE NIGHT IN
F
EBRUARY
I
RETURNED TO OUR ROOM AFTER
working in the dining room and found a corniculum tacked to the door. I knew it was a sign from Lucy to Deirdre that the boys would meet them at the lake. I knew the sign wasn’t for me, but I decided to treat it as if it were. I decided to follow them. I pretended to be asleep when Deirdre and Lucy left the room. I waited until after the last bed check and then went to the window and listened for them climbing down the drainpipe. I put on long underwear and my heaviest jeans—the only ones without holes in their knees—and two sweaters, an old turtleneck and a blue Fair Isle cardigan
Domina
Chambers had given Lucy for Christmas.

I went around the east side of the lake so I wouldn’t meet them on the trail. It meant climbing over the rocks on the Point to avoid Miss Buehl’s house. Ice had filled the glacial cracks in the rock, making the footing precarious. It would be easy, I thought, for a person to fall to her death here.

I made it down to the swimming beach and looked across the lake to where the icehouse would be on the other side. I thought I saw a glimmer of light coming from the opposite shore. Maybe they had made a bonfire. I imagined Deirdre, Lucy, Matt, and Ward toasting marshmallows over a small fire and drinking hot cocoa. I amended the picture to beer and joints. Still, it was a homey scene in my mind. Why couldn’t I be a part of it? If I cut across the ice I’d be there in minutes. But then, I thought it might be dangerous to cross the whole lake.

I followed the path around the east side of the lake. As I walked I became warm under the two sweaters and parka. I took off the cardigan and wrapped it around my waist, but then I felt hot and itchy. I decided to leave the sweater on the side of the path and get it on my way back. I realized the temperature must be rising. I looked out over the lake and noticed that a white fog was hovering above the ice. I was glad I hadn’t tried to cross it.

By the time I reached the icehouse the fog from the ice had crept into the woods and I had trouble seeing the path ahead of me. Twice I walked right into an overhanging branch and scratched my face. The second time something metal brushed against my face. I reached up and retrieved from the tree branch a bundle of hairpins—a corniculum. From the palm of my hand the horned face seemed to leer up at me. I stopped to get my bearings and listen for my friends’ voices.

I heard voices, then, coming from the lake. It was a boy and girl, but I couldn’t tell if it were Deirdre and Matt, or Ward and Lucy. I could hear the scrape of ice skates on the ice and someone laughing. I stepped off the path into the deep snow to get closer to the lake. The snow gave way slushily under my feet and soaked my jeans. I couldn’t tell, in the fog, when the snow gave way to ice, but suddenly my feet slid out from under me and I skidded out onto the lake.

I tried to get up but slipped again. The ice felt greasy under my gloves. I crouched there and looked around me.

The ice fog had grown so thick I couldn’t even make out the bank, which I knew must be only a few feet behind me. But which direction was that? I’d lost my bearings when I fell and couldn’t be sure which direction was the bank and which led out farther onto the lake. What was clear to me, though, was that the ice was beginning to melt.

I listened again for the voices of the skaters, but heard instead a low moan. I felt the sweat under my long underwear turn icy. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, but mostly from beneath me. From under the ice. I thought of the stories the senior girls told at the bonfires. That the faces of the Crevecoeur sisters had been seen peering up from beneath the lake ice.

I looked down half expecting to see the upturned face of a long dead girl trapped beneath the ice, but all I could see was a white void of fog. I heard, though, another moan accompanied by a rhythmic thumping that seemed to reverberate deep inside my body. This time, though, I was almost sure it came from a spot ahead of me on the ice.

I crawled toward it. As I moved through the fog on my hands and knees I imagined what was out there. I imagined wraithlike shapes emerging from under the ice to pull me down—girls with jagged icicles hanging from their tangled hair and malice in their drowned eyes. Once I heard something on the ice behind me and when I turned I thought I saw a shape, a thickening in the white fog like a clot in cream, moving away from me, but then it was gone and the only sounds on the lake came from the opposite direction. I turned and crawled toward the sounds and bumped into something wooden.

It was the icehouse door, hanging partially open over the ice. I’d made it back to the shore. The moans had led me back.

I pulled myself up, using the door for balance, and looked into the icehouse.

The only light came from a candle on one of the ledges. It
cast into shadow on the opposite wall the hull of the boat rocking rhythmically as if buffeted by an invisible current.

I couldn’t make out the shape of the girl lying in the hull of the boat. The boy above her was clearly outlined in the shadow on the wall, but I couldn’t tell who he was either. He wore something over his head and shoulders, a hood or mask that fell in shapeless folds. The shapes springing from his head were clear. They were horns, stiff and branching like a stag’s.

W
E OUGHT TO DO SOMETHING FOR
M
AY
D
AY
,” Deirdre said.

She was sitting on the windowsill blowing smoke rings out the open window. It was raining hard and each time the wind blew a spray of rain sifted across the room over Lucy, who lay on the floor reading
The Crystal Cave,
and over the desk where I sat. The pages of my journal were damp and smeared. “April is the cruelest month,” I wrote in peacock-blue ink that bled through the paper and stained the scratched, wooden desk. The glue in the binding of my Wheelock’s Latin Grammar had melted in the damp and the pages had all sprung free.

After the night I had gone out onto the lake the spring rains had begun, pitting the ice and turning the paths into small rivers of snowmelt. The skating season was over.

Now it was April, but the only sign of spring was the mud that seeped into everything.

Lucy rolled over onto her back and stretched her legs up, pointing and flexing her bare toes. “There’s the Founder’s Day picnic,” she said, yawning lazily. “And the Maypole dance.”

India Crevecoeur’s birthday fell on May 4, but Founder’s Day was always celebrated on May Day. This year India
Crevecoeur herself was coming to celebrate her ninetieth birthday and the school’s fiftieth anniversary. To celebrate there would be a traditional Maypole dance. In the Music Room, next to the family portrait of the Crevecoeurs, there hung a sepia-toned picture of girls in starched, high-necked white dresses standing in two neat circles around a Maypole. They each held the end of a ribbon attached to the top of the Maypole. The girls in the outer circle faced one way, the girls in the inner circle faced the opposite way. There was a girl in the right corner of the picture whose dress hem was blurred, as if she were swaying, impatient for the dance to begin. Otherwise, it was hard to imagine these girls frolicking around the Maypole. The picture looked more like a military procession.

“They’ll sanitize the whole damned thing,” Deirdre said, tossing her cigarette carelessly out the window.

“Hey, someone might see that,” I complained.

Deirdre rolled her eyes and hopped off the window ledge. “There’s a foot of mud under our window, Janie. You’d have to be an archaeologist to excavate that cigarette butt.”

“What do you mean
sanitized?”
Lucy asked, her brow wrinkled.

“A May Day dance should be performed at dawn. Naked. Or at least in flimsy nightgowns. It’s a pagan fertility rite,” Deirdre explained.

“Everything’s a pagan fertility rite with you …,” I began, but Lucy shushed me, so I wrote in my journal, “Deirdre is such a slut.”

“We should go out at dawn in white robes and bare feet,” Deirdre said, “and wash our faces in the dew. It’s said if you wash your face in the dew at dawn on May Day you’ll be granted eternal beauty. Think about it, Jane, it’s cheaper than Clearasil.”

I felt my skin go itchy where scabs had formed over old blemishes. My skin had erupted in the fetid spring air.

“They also say that if a girl goes out on May Day dawn togather
flowers, the first boy she meets on the way back to the village will be her heart’s true love.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask who “they” were, but I didn’t. I liked this story. It had a nice element of chance to it. Who was to say I wouldn’t run into Matt first?

“We’d need a Maypole,” Lucy said.

“There’s one in the drama department closet,” Deirdre said. “They used it last year for
The Maypole of Merry Mount.”

“And a May Queen,” Lucy said.

“I think it should be Lucy,” I said, anxious to be included in this outing.

“Of course we still need a stag-king,” Deirdre said, nudging Lucy’s leg with her foot. “He was part of the May Dayrite.”

“We’ll let the boys decide who it’ll be. He’ll be masked, so no one will know,” Lucy said. Then she turned to me. “We’ll have three to choose from because our cousin’ll be in town that weekend.”

I
N THE END ALL THREE BOYS AGREED TO WEAR THE STAG
mask. Deirdre made the extra masks in art class. When Miss Beade complimented Deirdre on her stitching (Deirdre was good at precise things like sewing and rolling joints), Deirdre told her the masks were for an extra credit assignment in Latin class. That was how
Domina
Chambers got word of our plans.

She asked us to her rooms in the mansion for tea. We’d been there before, but usually with several other girls from the class. This was the first time we’d been singled out as a group. We spent a lot of time discussing what we should wear. Lucy insisted that Deirdre wear a bra and she told me to wear my hair up. She herself wore an old plaid skirt, which I think had belonged to her mother, and a pale yellow cashmere sweater that I had never seen before.

When we got to
Domina
Chambers’s room I was glad we had spruced up a bit.
Domina
Chambers had put out her good china tea set (Deirdre reported later that the pattern was
“Marlow” by Minton—she’d turned her teacup over when
Domina
Chambers wasn’t looking) and Mrs. Ames had sent up a tray of tea sandwiches and freshly baked scones. When we’d come with the other girls it had been paper plates and store-bought cookies.

“I got into the habit of afternoon tea when I was at Oxford,”
Domina
Chambers said when we’d all been poured a cup of tea. “The habits we form when young may last a lifetime. You girls have a good start studying Latin. Learning one form of discipline teaches one to be disciplined in other areas of life. Like diet for instance …”
Domina
Chambers glanced at Deirdre who was heaping clotted cream on her second scone. “And telling the truth.”