The Lake of Dead Languages (3 page)

“Oh, thank you, Jane, I was going to ask if someone could type these student poems up for the literary magazine. I’d do it but my carpal tunnel syndrome’s acting up.” She lifts up her arms and I see that both forearms are wrapped in Ace bandages. All I’d meant to offer was to carry something for her, but what can I say?

I transfer the heavy folder from her bag to mine. Now I’m the one listing to one side as we leave the Music Room, and Gwen, lightened of her load, hurries on ahead to class. I trail behind the rest of the teachers thinking about what the psychologist had said about preoccupation with death and suicidal trends. I picture my students with their skull jewelry and kohl-rimmed eyes.

The nose rings and skull jewelry and purple hair may be new, but this preoccupation with suicide is not. Like many girls’ schools, Heart Lake has its own suicide legend. When I was here the story would be told, usually around the Halloween bonfire at the swimming beach, that the Crevecoeur family lost all three of their daughters in the flu epidemic of 1918. It was said that one night the three girls, all delirious with fever, went down to the lake to quench their fever and drowned there. At this point in the story, someone would point to the three rocks that rose out of the water off the swimming beach and intone solemnly, “Their bodies were never found, but on the next morning three rocks appeared mysteriously in the lake and those rocks have from that day been known as the three sisters.”

One of the seniors would fill in the rest of the details as we younger girls nervously toasted our marshmallows over the bonfire. India Crevecoeur, the girls’ mother, was so heartbroken she could no longer live at Heart Lake, so she turned her home into a girls’ school. From the school’s first year, however, there have been mysterious suicides at Heart Lake. They say that the sound of the lake lapping against the three rocks (here the speaker would pause so we could all listen to the sound of the water restlessly beating against the rocks) beckons girls to take their lives by throwing themselves into the lake. They say that when the lake freezes over the faces of the girls can be seen peering out from beneath the ice. The ice makes a noise like moaning, and that sound, like the lapping of the water, draws girls out onto the lake’s frozen surface, where the sisters wait to drag the unsuspecting skater through the cracks in the ice. And they say that whenever one girl drowns in the lake, two more inevitably follow.

If the legend is still circulating, as Dr. Lockhart fears, there are a few things I could tell my girls. I could tell them that the Crevecoeur family did lose their youngest daughter, Iris, but she didn’t drown. She caught a chill from a mishap during a boating party with her two older sisters and died of the flu in her own bed. I could also tell them that nineteenth-century drawings of the lake show the three rocks, which were called, by early settlers, the three graces. But I know that the harder you try to dispel a legend the more power it gains. It’s like Oedipus trying to avoid his fate and running headlong into it at the crossroads. And once I begin to talk about the legend they might ask if there were any suicides when I went to school here. Then I would either have to lie or tell them that during my senior year both my roommates drowned in the lake.

I might even find myself telling them that since then I have always felt the lake is waiting for the third girl.

B
ETWEEN TEACHING AND TAKING CARE OF
O
LIVIA AFTER
school, the question of who has found my old notebook recedes to background noise. I can hear the question whispering at the edge of my consciousness, but I push it away until I can concentrate on it.

That night I scramble eggs for Olivia and me. After dinner we wash out the eggshells for an arts and crafts project for her nursery school. Olivia holds the shells under the running tap water and then hands them to me. I surreptitiously scoop out the transparent jelly that still clings to the hollow cups and set them into an empty egg crate. She explains to me that not just birds come from eggs. Snakes and alligators and turtles also come out of eggs. Even spiders.

“Charlotte made a sack for her eggs and Wilbur carried it home from the fair in his mouth,” she tells me. I remember that her preschool teacher, Mrs. Crane, is reading
Charlotte’s Web
aloud in class. They’ll study spiders and eggs at the same time and visit a local farm to see pigs. It’s an excellent preschool program, one of the perks of working here.

I set the crate aside on the counter to dry.

“And then Charlotte died,” Olivia finishes.

“That’s a sad part, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh. Can I watch some TV before bed?”

“No, it’s time for your shower.”

Olivia complains bitterly about no TV, about the fact she has to take a shower because the cottage we’ve been given by the school has no bath, and, for good measure, she throws in the fact that her father isn’t here to read to her. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that he hardly ever read to her anyway, that he was usually at work far past her bedtime, but of course I don’t. I tell her that her father will read to her when he sees her the weekend after next, which requires a lengthy consultation with the calendar before she grasps the time frame of every other weekend visitation.

By the time her shower is finished it is past nine o’clock and my throat is raw from teaching all day and arguing with a four-year-old. Still, I can’t really weasel out of reading to her after that remark about her father. I go into the spare bedroom where I’ve stacked the boxes of books and papers and find one of my old children’s books, a collection called
Tales from the Ballet.

Olivia is intrigued with the idea that this is a book I had as a child.

“Did your mommy give it to you?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her, and wonder how I could possibly explain to her that my mother would never have spent money on anything so frivolous as books. “One of my teachers. Here, she wrote something to me.”

Inside on the flyleaf my kindergarten teacher had written, “To Jane, who dances on ice.”

“What’s that mean? Dance on ice.”

“Ice skating. Mommy used to be a pretty good ice skater. I used to skate on this very lake when it froze in the winter.” “Can I skate on the lake when it freezes?” she asks.

“Maybe,” I say. “We’ll see.”

I flip through the pages of the book looking for a story she’ll recognize—“Cinderella” or “Sleeping Beauty” perhaps—but then the book falls open to a page marked with a dried maple leaf, its once vibrant scarlet faded now to palest
russet. “This one!” Olivia demands with that odd certainty of four-year-olds.

It’s “Giselle.” My old favorite, but not the one I would have chosen for Olivia.

“This one has some scary parts,” I say.

“Good,” Olivia tells me. “I like scary parts.”

I figure I can edit out anything too scary. I stop to explain why Giselle’s mother won’t let her dance and then I have to explain what it means to have a weak heart. She likes the part about the prince disguised as a peasant—“Just like in ‘Sleeping Beauty’”—and is sad when Giselle dies. I am thinking I will just leave out the part about the Wilis—the spirits of girls disappointed in love who seduce young men and make them dance until they die—but when I turn the page to the picture of the wraithlike girls in their bridal dresses, Olivia is instantly in love with them. Just as I was at her age. This had been my favorite picture.

So I read on. Through the part where the girls dance with the gamekeeper, Hilarion, and lure him into the lake to drown, and up to where the queen of the Wilis tells Giselle she must make Albrecht, her false lover, dance to his doom.

“Will she?” Olivia asks, her face pinched with concern.

“What do you think?” I ask her.

“Well, he did make her sad,” she says.

“But she loves him, let’s see…”

Giselle tells Albrecht to hold fast to the cross on her tomb, but he is so entranced by her dancing that he joins her. But because of Giselle’s delay, he is still alive when the church clock strikes four and the Wilis return to their graves. “And so she saves him,” I tell Olivia, closing the book. All I’ve left out are the last two lines of the story, which read, “His life had been saved, but he has lost his heart. Giselle has danced away with it.”

W
HEN
O
LIVIA HAS FALLEN ASLEEP
I
TAKE OUT THE PIECE OF
paper folded in my skirt pocket. As I unfold it I am sure that
I will see now that the handwriting is Athena’s, or Vesta’s or Aphrodite’s, anyone’s but my own. But as I stare at the words again there is no escaping the truth. I recognize not only my own handwriting, but the ink—a peculiar shade of peacock blue that Lucy Toller gave me, along with a fountain pen in the same color, for my fifteenth birthday.

Still holding the paper, I go into the spare bedroom to find the box marked “Heart Lake.” I tear at the packing tape and rip open the box so hastily that the sharp edge of the cardboard slices into my wrist. Ignoring the pain, I pull out the stack of black-and-white notebooks inside.

There are three of them. I started them in the ninth grade when I first met Matt and Lucy Toller, and faithfully kept a new one each year through our senior year at Heart Lake.

I count them as if hoping that the fourth one will have miraculously rejoined its companions, but of course it hasn’t. I haven’t seen the fourth notebook since spring semester senior year, when it disappeared from my dorm room.

At the time I thought someone in the administration had confiscated the notebook. I spent that last term at Heart Lake sure that it was only a matter of time before I was called into the dean’s office and confronted with the truth of everything that had happened that year, and what I had said at the inquest. But the summons never came. I attended the graduation ceremony and the reception on the lawn above the lake, standing apart from the other girls and their proud families, and afterward I took a taxi to the train station and a train to my summer job at the library at Vassar, where I had a scholarship for the fall. I decided that the notebook must have gotten lost. Sometimes I told myself that it had slipped out of my book bag and fallen into the lake and the lake had washed away all the blue-green ink until its pages were as blank as they were on the first day of senior year.

I open the first notebook and read the opening entry.

“Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink for my birthday and Matt gave me this notebook,” I had written in a
flowery script that tried to live up to the fancy pen and ink. There were blotches, though, where the pen’s nib had caught the paper. It had taken a while to get used to that pen. “I’ll never have any other friends like them.”

I almost laugh at the words.
Other friends.
What other friends? When I first laid eyes on Matt and Lucy Toller I had no other friends.

I take out the folded paper and smooth it out next to this page. The handwriting is surer and blotch-free, but the words are written in the same beautiful shade of blue-green.

I go outside to watch the moon rise over Heart Lake. I think, not for the first time, that I must have been crazy to come back here. But then, where else had I to go?

When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live?” he asked. “For God’s sake, Jane, you were a Latin major. If you leave this house you’ll be on your own.”

And I had thought of Electra’s line, “How shall we be lords in our own house? We have been sold and go as wanderers.” And right then I knew I’d go to the only homeland I’d ever had: Heart Lake.

I started to work on my Latin, which I hadn’t touched in years. At night I studied from my old Wheelock textbook, picking away at case endings and verb conjugations until the unintelligible jumble of words sorted itself out. Words paired up like skaters linking arms, adjectives with nouns, verbs with subjects, inscribing precise patterns in the slippery ice of archaic syntax.

And always the voices I heard reciting the declensions and conjugations were Matt’s and Lucy’s.

When I had reread Wheelock twice, I applied for the job at Heart Lake and learned that my old science teacher, Celeste Buehl, had become dean. “We’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers,” she told me. I remembered that Miss Buehl had been good friends with my Latin teacher. No one was sadder than she when Helen Chambers had been let
go. “But then we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” “Old girl” was how they referred to an alumna who came back to teach at Heart Lake. Celeste Buehl was an “old girl,” as were Meryl North, the history teacher, and Tacy Beade, the art teacher. “Your generation doesn’t seem interested in teaching. I haven’t interviewed a graduate since I became dean, but I can’t think of anyone better to take the job than one of Helen Chambers’s girls. Luckily my old cottage is free. It will be perfect for you and your daughter. You remember it, the one above the swimming beach.” I remembered it all too well.

And although the idea of living here was at first disturbing, I’ve come to treasure my view of the lake. It’s only a few yards from my front door to the Point, the stone cliff that bisects the lake, giving it its heartlike shape. From where I stand now I can see the curve of the swimming beach, white in the moonlight, and the stones we called the three sisters rising out of the still, moonlit water.

I go inside and look at Olivia sleeping. The moonlight comes through her window and falls on her tangled hair. I smooth back her hair from her forehead and rearrange the twisted sheets so she’ll be cooler. She stirs and moans softly in her sleep, but doesn’t call my name as she would if she were anywhere near waking. I know she might wake up later, at two or four perhaps, but I’m almost positive she’ll sleep undisturbed for the next few hours.

I go back outside and down the steep stone steps that lead from our house to the lake. Every night I do this and every night I’m amazed at myself for taking the chance. Of course I know I shouldn’t be leaving Olivia alone for even these few minutes—fifteen, twenty minutes, at most, I tell myself, what could happen? Well, I know what could happen. Fire, burglars, Olivia waking up and getting frightened when I don’t come to her call, wandering out into the woods … my heart pounds at the images of disasters my mind so easily conjures up. But still I walk down the steps barefoot, feeling
through the soles of my feet when the stone steps become damp from the mist off the lake and then slimy with the moss that grows over the stones.