The Lake of Dead Languages (27 page)

Just then there was a loud crack. I was so taken up in the play that for a moment I thought it was a sound effect, but then I looked behind me and saw the eastern sky split by a lightning bolt. On the lake, the masked figure of Artemis held her hands up to the sky and in a voice magisterial
enough to carry across the water to my rock proclaimed, “So speaks Zeus! Instead of taking this girl to Tauris I will take her to Olympus where she will live among the gods.”

At a nod from Artemis, Miss Buehl turned the boat around and headed back around the Point. I was marveling at
Domina
Chambers’s adept improvisation when I realized that the rest of the actors were not coping quite so well with this unplanned finale. Rain came down like a curtain falling over the last act. The audience fled shrieking up the steps of the swimming beach while the chorus beached their dingy and took shelter in the boathouse. Only the priestess remained standing in the water next to the slain deer. Under the priestess’s soaked robe I could see the outline of two familiar breasts. It was Deirdre. She started wading toward the beach.

She was halfway to the beach, her back to the stone, when the figure in the deer costume sat up and started struggling with the ropes that tied her to the rock. I could see her mouth was open, but her cries were drowned out by the roar of the rain. Through the curtain of rain I thought I saw her looking toward me. She lifted an arm as if to signal me, but it only made her lose her balance. The top half of her body slipped off the rock and into the water. I stood for what must have been only seconds knowing the fastest way to reach her would be through the water, but I remembered how cold the water was. I turned, instead, into the woods and ran along the trail to the beach. It took longer than I thought it would because of the rain and the mud. I was sure that when I got there I’d find the girl drowned.

I ran down the steps so quickly I slipped and missed the last five or six steps. I landed flat on my stomach on the beach, my face ground into the wet sand. When I got up I saw Lucy and Deirdre dragging a wet brown figure out of the water.

They dropped her next to me and I reached out and took off the mask. “You,” Albie spat at me. “You ran away into the woods to let me drown.”

Lucy and Deirdre both looked from Albie to me. I tried to explain what happened, but my mouth was full of sand.

Lucy put her arm around Albie. “Jane would never run away from someone who needed help,” she told Albie as she helped her to her feet. I was grateful for Lucy’s defense of me, but as Albie slumped against Lucy and let herself be led from the beach, she gave me a look over her shoulder that I understood to mean she didn’t believe a word of it.

T
HE STORM THAT CLOSED THE FINAL ACT OF
I
PHIGENIA ON
the Beach
also brought an end to the warm weather. Lucy’s good mood vanished with the advent of the Canadian cold fronts and the first snows. The first thing I noticed was that she stopped wearing the beautiful clothes
Domina
Chambers had bought for her in Europe. She wore, instead, an oversized sweatsuit Matt had sent her from military school.

“It keeps me warm,” she told me.

Another piece of odd behavior was that when the heavy snows began in November she refused to stay on the paths.

“I feel like a rat in a maze,” she said. “I’m going to make my own tracks.” And she’d leap over the banked snow at the woods’ edge and take off, leaving me and Deirdre on the path.

“What we need,” Deirdre said one night as we were working on our Tacitus translations, “are cross-country skis. Then we could go anywhere.”

Lucy looked up from her Tacitus. I saw Deirdre’s face light up at even the prospect that she had recaptured Lucy’s attention. “She’s even more desperate for her friendship than I am,” I wrote in my journal. “I feel sorry for her.”

“Yeah, but where will we get the skis?” I asked.

“We’ll have a bake sale,” Deirdre said, “and raise money for a cross-country ski club.”

The bake sale was a financial success but it failed to revive Lucy’s flagging spirits. Where before she had given up food and sleep when she was depressed, now she did little except eat and sleep.

When the cross-country skis were delivered, she mustered some interest, but instead of practicing with the club, she took off through the woods by herself.

“What do you think is wrong with her?” I asked Deirdre one day in early December. We were skiing through the woods on the west side of the lake. Miss Buehl and
Domina
Chambers were leading the group. As soon as the teachers were out of sight, Lucy had taken off south without a word to me or Deirdre. Deirdre and I had paused on top of a rise and watched her go.

“Didn’t you know?” Deirdre said. “Matt’s not coming home for Christmas.”

“You mean their parents won’t even let him come home for Christmas?”

Deirdre shook her head impatiently. “He’s going on a skiing trip with his cousin. I think Lucy’s really hurt that he’s
chosen
not to come home. It’s like he’s avoiding her.”

Or me, I thought. Wasn’t it more likely that it was me he was avoiding? We were skiing through a part of the woods with little underbrush. I looked up at the sky, which was white and swollen with impending snow, through a green feathering of branches. We were in the hemlock grove through which Matt had chased me on May Day. I looked ahead and saw that the narrow grooves the skiers had made before us led to the clearing where Matt and I had made love.
Made love?
Could I really go on calling it that? He hadn’t even bothered to call or write me or get a single word through to me since May Day. For all he knew, I could have gotten pregnant that morning.

“She’s so upset about it she says she’s going to spend the break here on campus.”

“Alone?” I asked.

“I said I’d stay with her.”

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My eyes were stinging and I suddenly felt unbearably cold. I dug my poles into the snow and swung my left ski out at a forty-five-degree angle to the tracks. Deirdre moved out of my way.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going back,” I told her. “My feet are cold.” She didn’t say a word as I stomped out a semicircle in the snow. When I’d repositioned my skis in the tracks I pushed off down the hill, my skis moving easily in the tracks we’d already laid.

I
WAS HURT THAT
L
UCY HADN
’
T ASKED ME TO STAY ON
campus that Christmas. We’d stayed on campus Christmas break sophomore and junior year earning extra money by helping Mrs. Ames clean the dorms. But Lucy hadn’t said anything to me about staying this year. As it turned out, I wouldn’t have been able to stay even if she had asked. The day before Christmas break my mother was admitted to a hospital in Albany and my father picked me up after my last final to drive down there. He’d been to the dorm already and gotten my suitcase.

“Your friend said to wish you a Merry Christmas,” he said. “If you want, I can wait while you go say good-bye.” I shook my head no. I didn’t even ask which
friend
he meant.

It was snowing hard on the Northway and my father responded to my questions about my mother with monosyllabic grunts. I finally gave up and let him concentrate on the slippery road. When we pulled into his sister’s house on the outskirts of Albany he turned to me. I thought that now he would tell me how long—how little—my mother had to live, but instead he said, “You mustn’t mind the things she says to you. It’s the cancer talking.”

He’d said this before and I knew he meant it to be a comfort, but I just couldn’t believe it anymore.

“But she’s always said these things to me,” I complained, ashamed at how whiny my voice sounded. “Why does she hate me so much?”

My father looked away from me. “If it seems like she’s never gone out of her way to make you feel wanted, it’s because she’s always wanted you to get out. Not end up like she did—trapped.”

“Then why didn’t she ever leave?”

“She tried. She tried all her life. When she was in high school she studied for that scholarship that you got, but then her mother wouldn’t let her take it.”

“Why not?”

My father sighed. “When they turned the old Crevecoeur place into a school your grandma lost her job there. She must’ve parted on bad terms with the people up at Heart Lake, because she’d never have mention of them, or the school, in her house. Your mother still managed to get a scholarship for the state teacher’s college, but by then your grandmother was sick and she had to stay and take care of her. Then she met me … and we had you …”

As my father’s voice trailed off I realized for the first time that I was the reason my mother had gotten trapped in the little mill town she hated so much.

“I know it’s hard for you, the way she talks to you, Janie. But you gotta try not to take it to heart. It’s the way her mother talked to her. You just try not to listen. I mean, listen with your ears, but don’t take it in here.” He tapped my sternum with his blunt, stubby finger. “And remember that underneath it all your mother’s always wanted the best for you, she just doesn’t know how to go about getting it for you.”

I tried in the next days, while I sat in a chair by my mother’s bed, lulled to sleepiness by the watery gurgle of the pump that drained her lungs, to feel some sense of gratitude toward her. But all I could think was that I would have traded everything—Matt and Lucy and Heart Lake and Vassar and whatever shimmering mirage of a future I’d imagined—for one
good word from her. “Dear God,” I wrote in my journal, “I’ll give up everything for one good word from her. I’ll drop out of Heart Lake and go back to Corinth High. I’ll enroll in communitycollege and take a secretarial course. I’ll get a job in the mill and maybe, if I’m lucky, marry someone like Ward Castle.” I reread what I’d written and then crossed out “someone like” and promised God I’d marry Ward Castle himself.

But although my mother remained lucid and conscious to the end she said nothing to me. Finally, on the day before New Year’s, she took her last breath and closed her eyes on me forever.

Because the ground was frozen, my mother’s remains would be stored until spring when she could be buried. There was a short memorial service held on New Year’s day at the Presbyterian church my aunt’s family attended. Afterward we went back to my aunt’s house and I nodded politely while my father told relatives I didn’t recognize how proud my mother had been of me.

Later that night he took me aside and told me that he’d be staying at his sister’s house for a while. He might even look into a job at the glove factory where my uncle worked. If I didn’t mind that. I could still come down to Albany on weekends if I liked.

“To tell you the truth, Janie, I’m sick to death of that sawdust. I thought gloves might make a nice change.”

I told him I thought it was a fine idea, and not to worry about how I spent my weekends. I’d be busy studying for finals and college entrance exams. In fact, I was a little anxious to get back.

“Of course you are,” he said with such obvious relief that I had to remind myself he was only happy I had something to take my mind off my mother’s death. It wasn’t as if he were trying to get rid of me. “You can go back tomorrow. If you’re not afraid of taking the train back yourself,” he told me. It occurred to me that with all the stress he had been under my father probably didn’t remember that it was still Christmas
break, school didn’t start until the second week in January. It seemed unlikely to me that he would have so blithely sent me back to a deserted campus.

I didn’t tell him his mistake. I took the fifty-dollar bill he removed from the pocket of his ill-fitting dark suit and told him I wasn’t afraid at all. After all, it was the same train I’d be taking to college next year.

I thought of that, the next day, riding the train north along the Hudson, the river a dark gray ribbon rimmed with pale green ice under a pearly sky. Because we shared the same name I’d always thought of the river as a blood relative, and it seemed right, somehow, that my future lay along its banks. Matt’s school was just an hour or so south. In a matter of months I’d follow the river to Vassar and then, who knew? Perhaps I’d follow the river farther south to New York City. There my imagination reached its limit; I’d never been to New York City. But as I watched the chunks of pale green ice float downriver, even as the train took me in the opposite direction, I thought of a description from a fairytale I’d read once of a palace formed of the drifting snow, its windows and doors cut by the wind, its hundred halls all blown together by the snow. The Snow Queen’s palace with a frozen lake at its center. And even though I was moving in the opposite direction, I felt like I was traveling toward my future.

When I reached Corinth I took a taxi to the school. The taxi driver said there was a Nor’easter on the way that was expected to drop several feet of snow on the southern Adirondacks. He jabbed his finger at the windshield, at a bank of clouds massing in the north. The sky had an ominous green tinge to it. When we got to the school he helped me get my suitcases into the lobby of the dorm but he didn’t ask if I wanted help getting them upstairs. He must have had a moment’s compunction about leaving me, though.

“Are you sure you’re all right here?” he asked me, eyeing
the empty desk where the dorm matron usually sat. “Is there anyone here?”

“Oh, my friends are here. They’ll help me with my bags once I let them know I’m back,” I told him. I’d pictured myself lugging my suitcases up the two flights of stairs, but suddenly I knew I was far too anxious for that. A great sense of urgency had overtaken me. Maybe it was just the weather: the drop in air pressure, those strange green clouds, that expectant sense of snow coming. I left my suitcases in the lobby and ran up the stairs.

On the second landing I paused and listened. I had thought I heard someone crying. But when I listened, all I heard was the hiss of the steam radiators. I remembered then that the maintenance crew always turned the heat on full blast over vacation to keep the pipes from freezing. Last year, Deirdre had left three pillar candles in her room and they had all melted. The funny thing had been that they had all melted differently. The red one had sunken into itself so that it looked like a Hershey’s kiss. The purple one had keeled over sideways like the leaning tower of Pisa. The blue one looked at first like nothing had happened to it at all, but then we realized that while the outside shape had stayed the same, the wax had dripped out from the inside and pooled on the floor, leaving behind a hollow column.