The Lake of Dead Languages (37 page)

When I got back to the dorm I ran into Deirdre in the hall just outside our room. “Oh good,” she said when she saw me. “Maybe the shrinks can spend some time picking your brains. I’m tired of explaining that I’m not suicidal.”

Lucy was coming out of the single when I came in the suite. “Did you just run into Deirdre?” she asked me. “I thought I heard you talking in the hall. What was she saying to you?”

I told her what Deirdre had said. I was a little disappointed in Lucy’s greeting, but then I guessed she was preoccupied.

“She’d better hope the shrinks don’t get a hold of this,”
Lucy said, holding up a notebook covered in red Chinese embroidered silk.

“Is that Deirdre’s journal?” I asked, a little surprised that Lucy would be snooping.

“I don’t think you could call it a journal,” she said, “more like a book of the dead. She keeps quotes about death in it. Listen to this, ‘He who saves a man against his will as good as murders him.’”

“Horace,” I said. “Didn’t
Domina
Chambers give us that quote?”

“Yes, half the quotes in here come from Helen. Honestly, I don’t think it would look good for her if Deirdre did kill herself. I’ll have to talk to her at dinner tonight.”

I must have looked baffled. “Oh yes, since my so-called suicide attempt Helen has insisted I eat with her every night. Frankly, it’s driving me batty. She keeps asking me questions about my ‘outlook,’ as she calls it, and giving me mimeos of poems that are supposed to cheer me up. Only they’re pretty morbid, too. Here.” Lucy put down Deirdre’s journal and picked up a folded sheet of paper with blue printing on it. She read aloud. It was Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” We’d had it in Miss Macintosh’s class last term. What struck me now were the last lines: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

“You know,” I said, “those last lines remind me of the three sisters story. The way the girls are supposed to be lured to the lake to kill themselves by the sound of the water lapping against the rocks.”

“How clever of you, Jane. I thought exactly the same thing.” Lucy folded the sheet in two and laid it on her bed next to Deirdre’s journal.

“Aren’t you going to put that back?” I asked.

“Oh, I guess,” Lucy said, yawning. “Would you do it for
me? It was in her bureau in the top drawer. I’d better go now. Helen hates it when I’m late.”

When Lucy left I went into Deirdre’s single and replaced the journal in the top drawer of her bureau. I felt nervous and, I realized, not just because I was afraid of Deirdre catching me with her journal. It was the bed. I was afraid to look at it, afraid that when I looked at it the blood would somehow still be there. But when I did force myself to look at it I saw only rumpled sheets—Deirdre almost never made her bed—and a blue and gold Indian bedspread that used to hang on the ceiling over the bed. The Balinese dancers were still dancing on their tapestries as if nothing unusual had ever happened in that bed. I thought I saw a splotch of red over one of their breasts, but when I looked closer I saw it might be part of the pattern.

I went back into the room I shared with Lucy and noticed that my suitcase had been stored underneath my bed. I pulled it out and opened it. It was empty. I opened my bureau drawers and found my clothes neatly folded (more neatly than I remembered packing them that last morning in Albany) and put away. Under one stack of clothes I found my journal. I leafed through it, wondering if Lucy had read my journal, too, and what she’d have made of what I’d written. There was nothing bad about her in it, but there were embarrassing things, like how jealous I’d felt of Deirdre and Lucy’s friendship and how much I missed Matt. As I read through it I was startled by how much of what I had written could be misinterpreted. So many of the things I had written could mean so many different things, depending on who the reader was. I read through parts pretending I was Lucy or Deirdre or
Domina
Chambers or Miss Buehl—or even myself when older—and with each new “reader” what I had written shifted in meaning as if it had been translated into another language.

I’d better put it back under the floorboards, I thought. But first I wrote about what happened the night I came back from Albany. It felt risky committing to paper that awful moment
when I watched the tea tin sink into the lake, but there was something in me that needed to get it out, if only to my journal. “You’re the only one I can ever tell,” I wrote. And then I hid the journal under the loose floorboards beneath my desk.

I tried to do a little Latin translation, but the words swam in front of my eyes and I started seeing spots. At first they were only small glints of light, like gnats flying in front of my eyes, and then they merged into one large sun spot that spread across my vision like a hole burning through a home movie. I closed my eyes and lay down on my bed, but I could still see the burning spot on the inside of my eyelids. Even when I fell asleep I saw the light. I dreamed it was Miss Buehl’s porch light and I was crossing the woods to reach it, only I went the wrong way and ended up back at the Point. I slipped on the icy rock and fell into black space flecked with white sparks. Snow, I thought in my dream, but then the darkness turned green and the flecks of light were golden silt drifting down to the bottom of the lake. I looked up at a pattern of white shards on black; I was under the broken ice, which, even as I watched, knit back together, sealing me beneath it. Drifting down beside me was a tea tin painted with golden mountains and blue skies. It turned as it sank, spinning like a leaf, and then, when it reached the bottom, its lid slowly opened.

I
T
’
S THAT SAME FEELING
—
OF LYING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE
lake looking up at the underside of the ice—I have lying in my room, my vision blurred, the snowscapes on the window screens like distant mountains. I think of Deirdre, of how the ice must have looked to her as she sank into the lake. In my dreams I try to tell her that I know now that the baby wasn’t hers, but when I reach for her she turns away from me, just as Dido turns away from Aeneas when he meets her in the underworld.
The dead sure are a whiny lot,
Vesta had said. But she was wrong. The dead are silent.

When my vision clears, I feel curiously energized. I decide
to go skating. I had been afraid that part of Dean Buehl’s “forget the past” campaign might include banishing ice skating, but I had forgotten how much she liked to skate.

“Best thing for these girls,” she says on an unusually mild day in late January. “Exercise. Fresh air. And just look at this ice! Best ice we’ve had in twenty years.”

“Coldest January in twenty years,” Simon Ross, the math teacher, says gliding by on hockey skates, “until today, that is. A few days like this and that’ll be it for the skating season.”

“It’s supposed to get cold again tonight,” Gwen Marsh says, backskating a circle around me.

“But first we’re going to get some sleet and icy rain,” Meryl North, who is skating with Tacy Beade, says. “We might have a real ice storm on our hands.”

I turn to say something else to Gwen, but she’s gone. I wonder if I’ve offended her in some way. Since I’ve been back she’s been distant. I had thought at the beginning of the school year that we might be friends, but I realize now that I’ve done very little to build on the promise of that friendship. As I watch my fellow teachers skating together in pairs and small groups I realize how little I’ve connected to anyone here at Heart Lake. It’s the same feeling I had walking back from the infirmary senior year, that I hadn’t bothered making other friends because Lucy had always been enough. And, in a way, she’s kept me from making friends all these years. At first, I told myself, because I was afraid of being hurt again. But later it was because when I did come close to someone I would hear Lucy’s cool assessing voice, criticizing something about my new acquaintance. This one was too fat, that one was too earnest, this one a little loud, that one just plain dumb.

I tried to ignore the voice, but it put a distance between me and the girls I might have befriended. Who might have befriended me. It wasn’t as if there were that many candidates.

I make an effort today to talk to everyone. I skate with Myra Todd and listen to a long drawn-out tirade against animal rights activists. I discuss a plan for a reenactment of an
old-fashioned ice harvest with Dean Buehl. I catch up to Gwen, who’s skating now with Dr. Lockhart, and offer to help with the literary magazine. I join Tacy Beade and Meryl North and ask Miss Beade if she’d come give a lecture on classical art to my juniors. She says she’s busy right now with plans for ice sculptures to accompany the ice harvest, but will be happy to come later in the year.

“It’s time to turn back, Tacy,” Meryl North says. “See, we’re at the Point.”

“Oh,” my old art teacher says, “yes, of course.” That’s when I realize, watching Meryl North steer Tacy Beade along the ice, that Beady can hardly see. I remember watching her set up her art room, everything in its place, and wonder how long she’s been losing her sight and how long she would keep her job if the board knew. Meryl North must realize I suspect something because, as we skate back toward the mansion, she chatters enthusiastically about the coming ice harvest. I notice, though, that she keeps confusing the dates and at one point I realize she thinks it’s 1977 and I’m still a student here. When Dr. Lockhart and Gwen Marsh skate by, Meryl North says, “There goes your little friend.” It’s sad, I think, that my two old teachers have lost the aptitudes most important to their fields: the art teacher, her sight; the history teacher, her sense of time.

My ankles have begun to hurt, but when I see Athena and Vesta I skate toward them. Vesta is wearing a fleece headband that makes her lavender-red Little Mermaid hair stick up in spiky points. Athena is wearing a Yale sweatshirt over red plaid pajama pants. Her mottled hair, which is now about half brown and half black, makes her look like an Australian sheep dog. I realize, skating toward them, that I’d far rather talk to them than to any of my colleagues.

As I skate closer, I notice someone else approaching the two girls and it gives me pause. I try to slow my forward progress by digging the serrated tips of my skate blades into the ice, but instead of slowing down I trip and sail headlong
into Roy Corey, who has reached the girls just as I do. I slam hard into his chest and I’m sure we’re both going down, but instead I feel his arm curve around my waist as we spin across the ice.

“All right,
Magistra!”
I hear the girls cheering me on, as if I had just completed a double axle instead of nearly crashing to the ice. And I do feel suddenly graceful, with Roy’s arm around my waist, but then he takes away his arm and crosses his arms behind his back. We skate side by side, but not touching, around the western edge of the lake. I’m impressed with how well he skates and then I remember him telling me, all those years ago, that he’d grown up skating on these ponds. Just like Matt. At the thought of Matt I catch the tip of my blade on the ice and pitch forward. I see the hard white ice speeding up to my face but he catches me just in time.

“Whoa,” he says, “are you OK?”

“Sorry,” I say, “my eyes still aren’t so good. I had a little accident with some deicer.”

“Yeah, Dean Buehl told me. I called last week to ask you a few questions.” I remember suddenly that he is a police officer and that he probably isn’t here just for the ice skating.

“A few questions?” I ask. “What about?”

Before answering I see him look quickly around us. We’ve stopped just where the Point juts into the lake, not far from where the third sister rock curves out of the ice like the back of a whale arrested mid-dive. The rest of the skaters are in the west cove. They’re too far away to overhear us, but I see he still looks nervous.

“Wasn’t there a cave around here,” he asks, turning to face me. “You took me to a cave that morning.”

It’s the first reference he’s made to that night we spent together and it makes me blush. But why? Nothing happened. He was asleep when I touched his face. I notice that he’s blushing, too. Was he asleep?

“There are a bunch of caves in the Point,” I say, “but I think the one you’re talking about is over here.”

I lead him to a shallow opening in the cliff wall just where the ice meets the shore. It’s not even really a cave, just an indentation in the rock covered by an overhanging ledge and partially blocked by the second sister stone.

He wedges himself into the tight space and pats the rock by his side. Embarrassed, I squeeze in next to him. He takes up quite a lot more space than he did when he was boy. But then, so do I. Only the view from the cave hasn’t changed. I can see the tall stone casting a long shadow on the ice, which the setting sun has turned a creamy orange. The cave itself is full of this orange light, reflecting off the ice and onto the limestone walls.

Roy is also looking at the view from the cave. When he looks back at me I guess I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about the last time we were here.

“So what did you want to ask me?” I ask. I wonder if I should have asked to have a lawyer present. I almost laugh out loud imagining a lawyer crammed into this narrow space.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking this isn’t your typical interrogation room. Can I assume this won’t be a typical interrogation?”

He doesn’t smile, neither does he confirm or deny what I’ve said. “I’m just trying to get a few things straight in my head,” he says, “about Deirdre Hall’s death.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I’ve been going over your journal …”

“I thought you said there was nothing to incriminate me in there. I believe your exact words were ‘You had no idea what was really going on.’”

“Well, maybe I didn’t give you enough credit. I read over the part about Deirdre’s death and I think there was something you felt uncomfortable about. I want you to tell me what happened that night.”