The Lake of Dead Languages (23 page)

Lucy took a sip of tea and set her teacup in its saucer, which she balanced on her knee. “Miss Beade told you about the masks,” she said.

“Yes. I was rather surprised to hear about an extra credit assignment, seeing as I don’t believe in extra credit.”

Deirdre opened her mouth to say something, but
Domina
Chambers was looking at Lucy now and I think we all realized that she was waiting for her to explain. I was sorry it had fallen to her and amazed at how calm she seemed.

“We’re planning a May Day rite,” Lucy told our teacher. “For dawn. Of course, we’re not allowed out of our dorm rooms at dawn, so we had to keep it a secret.”

“A May Day rite?”
Domina
Chambers took a sip of tea and smiled. “How lovely. We did the same thing in our time. In fact, your mother and I used to slip out of the dorm in nothing but our nighties and swim across the lake on May Day morning.”

“You must have frozen your asses …”

I kicked Deirdre so hard she spilled her tea on her blouse. Thank goodness Lucy had talked her into that bra.

“Yes, it was most bracing,”
Domina
Chambers said, still addressing Lucy as if she were the only one in the room. “Do you have a Maypole?”

“We do. We … borrowed it from the drama department.”

“That gaudy thing? I would have thought a freshly cut birch sapling would have been more suitable, but I suppose it will do.”
Domina
Chambers sighed and for a moment I thought she was planning to actually join us for our May Day festivities. I wondered what she would make of our stag-king.

“Ah, to be young again,” she said. “Well, I understand now why you had to tell a fib to Miss Beade. Of course, she would never understand.”

“So you’re not going to turn us in?” Deirdre asked.

Domina
Chambers turned to Deirdre, looking surprised that she was still in the room.

“I mean, it is against the rules,” Deirdre said.

“Weren’t you paying attention when we read
Antigone,
Miss Hall? The same rules do not apply to everyone. When Antigone performed the burial rite for her brother, even though she was breaking Creon’s decree, was she wrong?”

“No,” Lucy answered, “because she owed that to her brother.”

“Exactly.
Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?
The true tragic heroine is above the commonplace laws of the masses.”

“I always figured Antigone didn’t have a chance,” Deirdre said. I could tell she was anxious to show
Domina
Chambers that she had gotten something from the play. “I mean, what with her mother being her grandmother and her father being her half-brother …”

Domina
Chambers waved her hand dismissively. “There’s far too much attention paid nowadays to the incest theme in the plays. The Greeks weren’t as squeamish about such matters as we are. After all, Antigone is betrothed to her first cousin, Haemon, and no one mentions that.”

“Yeah, but Oedipus did put his eyes out when he realized he’d married his own mother.”

“And killed his own father. The Greeks were very clear on
what a child owed a parent. But incest … well, Zeus and Hera are, after all, brother and sister. And Sir James Frazer tells us in
The Golden Bough
that in countries where the royal blood was traced through women, the prince often married his sister to keep the crown from going to an outsider. Of course, when wrongful incest did occur it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice to the goddess Diana.”

“Why Diana?” Lucy asked.

“Because incest is supposed to cause a dearth … droughts and famine … so it makes sense to make atonement to the goddess of fertility.”

“But I thought Diana was a virgin,” Deirdre interrupted. “How can a virgin be a goddess of fertility?”

Domina
Chambers waved her hand again as if Deirdre were an annoying insect. “You persist in thinking in black-and-white terms, Miss Hall. It’s a very simplistic way of seeing things. Diana is a goddess of nature, and hence, fertility. It was believed she shared the grove of Nemi with Virbius, the King of the Wood. Their sacred nuptials were celebrated each year to promote the fruitfulness of the earth. There’s your May Day rite. Not some silly circle dance around a gilded pole.”

“So this King of the Wood,” Deirdre asked, “is he kind of like the stag-king? I mean, he wore horns?”

“Yes,”
Domina
Chambers answered. “Diana Nemesis is associated with the deer. It’s likely that the stag-mummers of medieval May Day rites derived from this tradition.”

I saw Deirdre and Lucy exchange a knowing look.
Domina
Chambers had just confirmed the way they had chosen to celebrate May Day. I wondered what our teacher would think if she knew just how literally her students were taking her lesson. But then, I wasn’t sure anymore if what Deirdre and Matt, and Lucy and Ward, had been doing in the icehouse and planned to do in the woods on May Day dawn would shock
Domina
Chambers.
Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?
I had a pretty good idea of the things
Domina
Chambers would disapprove of: sloppy Latin translations, Lipton tea, synthetic fabrics. But sex with a masked stranger in the woods? I couldn’t tell.

We finished our tea and sandwiches and scones.
Domina
Chambers played for us a recording of Stravinski’s
Rite of Spring
to get us in the mood, she said, for our May Day rite. She promised she wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone of our plans.

“But if you’re caught,” she told us at the door as we were going, “you’re on your own. You must always accept responsibility for your actions, girls.”

We all laughed and said we were ready to do just that.

I
T WAS ONLY FIFTY-FIVE DEGREES AT DAWN ON
M
AY DAY
(according to the thermometer nailed to a tree outside Miss Buehl’s cottage), but at least the rain had stopped. The ground was still muddy, though, and the woods were damp and misty, so we decided that the best place to set up the Maypole was the swimming beach.

“Otherwise it’ll be more like mud wrestling than Maypole dancing,” Deirdre said. “Not that I’m adverse to a little rolling in the mud.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Lucy told her. “We’ll have to split up after the Maypole dance.”

The plan was for the three of us to carry the Maypole down to the swimming beach and perform the ceremonial circle dance around the Maypole in the middle of which we would be “surprised” by the three boys dressed as stag-mummers. We would then flee, being careful to go in three different directions. Since the boys would be masked, we decided it was only fair that we be disguised as well, so Deirdre attached hoods to the simple white shifts she had sewn for us.

“Of course it will be obvious which one is Lucy,” Deirdre said, holding up the shift she had sewn for her. “She’s so
small. Ward’ll pick her out in a minute, which is a good thing. We wouldn’t want Lucy ending up with her cousin after all.”

“It’s a symbolic rite, Deir. You don’t have to really do anything. You’re scaring Jane.”

Deirdre smiled at me. “Oh, I don’t think Jane’s scared. After all, since she and I are the same height, she might end up with Matt and I’ll end up with the cousin …”

“He has a name—Roy.”

“Roy,” Deirdre repeated. “Roy from Troy.”

“Cold Spring,” Lucy corrected. “Our aunt Doris lives in Cold Spring.”

“Whatever. He looked pretty cute, the little I saw of him. But maybe Jane has her eye on him after the night they spent together.”

“I told you: We just sat on the beach and watched the sun rise. Actually, I watched the sun rise. He slept.”

“Wore him out, eh, Janie?”

I blushed. Not because of Deirdre’s teasing, something I was well used to by then, but because I was remembering stroking the boy’s cheek … pretending he was Matt.

I
T WASN
’
T EASY CARRYING THE MAYPOLE DOWN THE STEPS
to the swimming beach. Deirdre went first, then Lucy, and I brought up the rear, which meant I had the part of the pole decorated with flowers. They were cheap plastic flowers, spray-painted silver and gold by the drama department, and they scratched against my bare arms and blocked my view of the steps.

“Take it easy,” I heard Deirdre hiss from below. “You’re going to skewer me with this damned pole and that’s not how I planned to spend the morning.”

It was hard to believe it would be morning soon. We’d left the dorm at 4:30 so it must have been close to 5:00, but the sky was still pitch dark. Below us I could hear water lapping against the rocks, but not even a glint gave the lake away.
Deirdre had looked up the phase of the moon and found it was a new moon.

“I think that’s supposed to be bad luck,” she said, “but who knows?”

I only knew I had reached the beach when moss-covered rock gave way to wet sand, and even then my bare feet were so numb I could hardly tell the difference.

“Heave ho!” Deirdre called. “Raise high the roof beam, carpenter!”

I heard Lucy’s small voice inquire if that were from Sappho while I pushed the pole into an upright position and felt it sink into the sand. Deirdre pushed it deeper into the sand and Lucy knelt at the base and mounded more sand around the pole.

“We don’t want it to fall over,” Lucy said.

“No, a wilting Maypole would definitely be unpropitious,” Deirdre agreed. “Plague and barrenness would certainly follow.”

“Why do we want fertility anyway?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not like any of us want to get pregnant.”

“Well, I’m on the Pill so it’s not bloody likely,” Deirdre said.

“Really?” I asked. I wondered where Deirdre had managed to get a prescription for birth control pills.

“She forgets to take them half the time,” Lucy said. “So she’s just messing up her hormones for nothing.”

Usually I would have been more disconcerted to realize that Lucy and Deirdre had such a store of confidences than at the news that Deirdre had access to birth control. But the subject had been bothering me lately.

“I guess it’s not likely you’d get pregnant the first time …”

“Jesus, Janie, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it. Look at you, you’re shaking like a leaf. Here, take a swig of this.”

Deirdre had brought a wine flask made out of goatskin that she had bought at the army/navy store in Corinth.

“What’s in it?” I asked, eyeing the greasy-looking sack suspiciously.

“I pinched some cooking sherry from Mrs. Ames and added a few herbs.”

I put my mouth around the grooved metal screwtop and tasted, first, copper, then sweet almond-flavored wine, and finally, as an aftertaste at the back of my throat, something bitter and grassy.

“As Horace says:
Nunc est bibendum,”
Deirdre said, passing the flask to Lucy. “Now is the time for drinking.”

Lucy tilted her head back and took a long, deep swallow. Her hood fell back and in the dim light I could just make out her pale forehead and see that she had painted some kind of design there. But then her hood fell forward as she lowered the flask and the design was hidden in shadow before I could make it out.

“Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus,”
Lucy said in a husky voice I barely recognized. “Now is the time to beat the earth with a liberal foot.”

“In other words: Now is the time for dancing.”

Deirdre released the crepe paper ribbons that had been wrapped around the pole. They hung limply in the still, damp air. Although the sun still hadn’t appeared across the lake, the darkness had paled to a pearly gray. Looking out over the lake I still couldn’t tell where water and air met.

Deirdre held up a limp ribbon and stomped the ground with one foot.

“Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus!”
she commanded, and Lucy, stomping her feet, took up the chant. We hadn’t rehearsed what to say as we danced around the Maypole. I also searched my head for some appropriate Latin and came up with nothing but the first declension.

“Puella, puellae, puellae,”
I shouted. I thought Lucy and Deirdre would make fun of my choice, but they took up the declension with me.

“Puellam, puella, puella.”

It sounded oddly right.
Girl, girl, girl,
we chanted as we half-skipped, half-danced around the pole,
girl
in all its grammatical permutations.

Then, suddenly, Deirdre skidded to a stop, spraying sand up my legs. She held her hand up for silence. I listened, and heard, above the thud of my heart and the lap of the lake water, footsteps on the rocks. I thought they came from the steps, but when I peered into the gray mist in that direction I heard another sound behind me; again, footsteps on the rocks, but this time they came from the lake. Someone was on one of the sister rocks.

Deirdre passed the flask around and we each took a long drink. I tasted, this time, the bitter grassy taste first and then the sweet and then the metal.

Deirdre tossed the flask into the darkness outside our circle.
“Puer, pueri, puero,”
she whispered.

“Puerum, puero, puer,”
Lucy chanted.

Boy, boy, boy.

We began to dance again, but in the opposite direction, so that the ribbons we had wrapped around the pole now came undone. The damp crepe paper clung to my arms and brushed against my face, clammy as seaweed. Pieces came off and clung to my shift. I felt the wet strands tangling between my legs and when I tried to kick them away I lost my balance and fell.

When I got to myhands and knees I was looking toward the lake. I saw, through the lightening mist, a figure balanced on the second stone. A figure with the head of a stag. I took a deep breath and told myself it was just a boy in a deer mask, but then the figure leaped off the rock and with one bound landed in the shallow water and I saw that he wasn’t wearing the brown felt mask Deirdre had sewn in art class. He was wearing the bleached skull of a tenpoint buck.

I screamed and somehow scrambled to my feet.

I heard Deirdre and Lucy scream, but their screams were theatrical.

“Aiaiai,”
Deirdre keened somewhere off to my left. To my right, Lucy made a whooping sound like a crane calling to its mate. I felt sure they hadn’t seen the boy with the skull. Still, that was all he was, surely, a boy with a skull mask. I was running up the steps, though, away from him. Only when I reached the top did I look back to see if he was still following me.