PART TWO

First Ice

 

Chapter Eleven

W HEN I FIRST MET MATTHEW AND LUCY TOLLER I thought they were twins. Not that they looked all that much alike. He had the sandy red hair, blunt jaw, and stolid build of the Tollers, while she was fair and lithe and sharp-featured like one of the water nymphs in my copy of Tales from the Ballet. It was in their gestures and the way they moved their bodies—like one person in two sets of limbs—that they so deeply resembled each other.

I first noticed them the summer before ninth grade. My mother, having decided I ought to meet some West Corinth kids before being thrown in with them at Corinth High School, had gotten me a job as a counselor at the swim club. How she thought spending a summer wading calf-deep in the tepid, citrinous water of the kiddie pool would gain me entrée into the world of doctors’ and lawyers’ children, I do not know. What it did gain me was a view, through the bitter-smelling box hedge, of the deep end and the high dive where I could watch Matt and Lucy Toller practice their dives and race freestyle in the lap lane. No one ever seemed to win those races; they were more like synchronized swim events. They swam, shoulder to shoulder, their bodies tilting for breath at the same angle like two planets pulled by the same moon, their white elbows cresting the water like the two wings of one enormous swan.

WHEN I GOT TO HIGH SCHOOL I FOUND OUT TWO THINGS about the Tollers. One was that they were not twins; Matt was thirteen months younger than Lucy. He had been allowed to start kindergarten early because, Lucy told me, he had pitched such a fit when she started school without him. Hannah Toller had gone to the principal and told him she’d either have to keep Lucy back a year or let Matt start early. So Matthew started kindergarten six months shy of his fifth birthday.

The second thing I found out about the Tollers was that although Matt and Lucy lived on the west side of the river (in Corinth it’s the river and not the train tracks that divide the haves from the have-nots), they fit in with the West Corinth kids no more than I did. Their father, Cliff Toller, was a paper salesman at the lumber mill—a job only a few rungs above my father’s job as factory foreman. Still, the Tollers seemed to live a little better than other salesmen’s families. They had a small but picturesque house on River Street where the doctors and lawyers lived. They belonged to the swim club and Matt and Lucy took piano lessons with the music teacher at Heart Lake. My mother assumed that Cliff Toller must do well on commission and she chastised my father for not having the wherewithal to move into a sales job. When Lucy Toller befriended me on that first day of ninth grade my mother was pleased. Perhaps not as pleased as if one of the doctors’ or lawyers’ children had invited me home to their River Street mansion, but it was a start.

As for me, I was so relieved when Lucy asked me to bring my tray to their table I had to blink away tears before I could say yes. I was standing at the end of the check-out line, balancing a tray heavy with sloppy joes and canned fruit and two waxy milk cartons. (“You get two on the lunch program, honey,” the cafeteria lady had loudly informed me, “you might as well take them.”) The smell of the sweet, orangy meat was making me feel dizzy while kids streamed around me to their places, as sure of where they were going as water knows to flow to the ocean. I saw where I belonged. There was the table with the East Corinth kids: the boys in flannel shirts and jeans cuffed at the bottom for extra wear, the girls in plaid skirts a little too short or a little too long and Peter Pan blouses with darning stitches at the collar. I knew them and I knew they’d make a place for me—not with the enthusiastic hugs and smiles with which the West Corinth kids greeted one another after summers apart at tennis camp, but with the resigned shift of kids from big families making room for one more.

Those afternoons I had spent at the West Corinth Swim Club were shimmering and fading like heat haze just as I felt a cool hand slip under my elbow and pull me out of the current.

“Don’t I know you from the pool?” she said, in a small, clear voice I had to lean toward to make out.

I nodded at her, afraid if I talked I might start to cry. I noticed that her pale hair was tinged green from her summer spent swimming in the chlorinated water and her eyelashes and brows were bleached white from the sun.

“Do you want to come sit with us? I think we’ve got our next class together. Did you sign up for Latin? There’s only eleven of us and the rest are all that crowd’ll be taking it for their SAT scores and to get into law school.” She spoke in a rush I could barely understand.

I followed her to a table in a far corner beneath the cafeteria’s only window. Her brother Matt actually half rose from his seat to greet me. They both had brought their lunches—identical brown paper packets of cheese and apples and Thermoses of hot cocoa.

“You were right, Mattie,” Lucy said, polishing her apple on her sweater sleeve. “She’s in Latin.”

I couldn’t remember telling her, but of course she had known all along.

Matt gave me a long appraising look. “So why did you sign on?” he asked.

He made it sound like I’d joined the foreign legion. The truth was that signing up for Latin, instead of the usual French or Spanish, had been, like most of what I did, my mother’s idea. She’d heard that the lawyers and doctors urged their kids into Latin to boost their SAT scores.

“French and Spanish are common,” my mother told me. “You’ll meet more interesting children in Latin.” My mother’s ambitions for me were a puzzle, because they didn’t seem to come from any belief in my ability. I often felt like a piece in a game that she was moving around on a board. When I achieved some goal she’d set out for me—the best reading scores in sixth grade, a part in the school play—she seemed mistrustful of the success.

“She wants those things for you because her mother wouldn’t let her try for anything,” my father once explained to me. “Your mother could have gotten a scholarship to Heart Lake, but her mother made her give it up. I hate to speak badly of your grandma, Janie, especially as you’re named for her, but Jane Poole was an awful cold woman. She hated the Crevecoeurs after she was let go. Your mother wants more for you, but when you look like you’re going to get it, I think she must hear old Jane’s voice telling her it’ll come to no good.”

Of course I couldn’t tell Matt and Lucy any of this.

I searched my head for anything I knew about Latin. They spoke it in church, I knew, but we were Presbyterians, not Catholics. There were those movies with chariot races and gladiator fights where the actors’ words didn’t quite match the movement of their lips, but somehow I didn’t think Matt and Lucy spent their Saturdays eating Cap’n Crunch in front of the TV. They probably went on nature hikes and read books with nice leather bindings instead of the tattered paperbacks mended with yellow tape I borrowed from the town library.

I remembered then that one of those books I had borrowed that summer had been a collection of Greek and Roman myths. I hadn’t thought it was as good as my beloved Tales from the Ballet, but I had liked some of the stories.

“I like mythology,” I said. “The gods and all and those stories of people turning into something else… like the one about the girl who turns into a spider… ,” I blathered on, mashing my fork into my sloppy joe, turning the meat and bread into an even more unappetizing mess.

“Arachne,” Matt said.

“Ovid,” Lucy said, even more mysteriously.

“Metamorphoses,” they both said at the same time.

“That’s good.” Matt held his apple up between us and closed one eye as if I were a far away object and he was taking my perspective. “Of course we won’t get to it first year.”

“Oh no, it’ll be all grunt work with declension endings and conjugations, but Domina Chambers says if we study hard she’ll let us read extra bits. I want to do Catullus and Matt’s keen on Caesar—just like a boy, right? And she’ll help us study for the Iris Scholarship for Heart Lake—only Matt’s not eligible because he’s a boy. But she says there’s no harm in him studying with me as he’ll be a help. Perhaps you’ll want to join us?”

I felt I was already listening to a foreign language more arcane than Greek or Latin. I hadn’t understood half of what she’d said—I had never heard of Ovid or Catullus or Domina Chambers—but it was a little like listening to opera on public radio. I didn’t always understand the story, but I liked how listening to it made me feel. I liked how the weak sunshine that came through the dirty cafeteria window made Matt’s sandy brown hair turn a fiery red and Lucy’s pale, greenish hair glow like burnished gold. I liked being with them.

I think that if they had been asking me to join the foreign legion instead of only inviting me to study Latin with them, I would have followed them into the desert willingly.

 

Chapter Twelve

T HE IRIS SCHOLARSHIP—NAMED AFTER THE CREVECOEUR daughter who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918—was awarded to the freshman girl from the town of Corinth who scored the highest on her Latin exam. It was a sop, my mother told me when I came home that first day of ninth grade, to the town’s resentment of the school. When, in the early seventies, the Corinth Public School Board threatened to cancel the Latin program due to low enrollment and a scarcity of qualified teachers, Helen Chambers, a Heart Lake alum and newly appointed classics teacher there, volunteered to teach the Latin class at Corinth High.

We were her first public school class, she told us that first day, and as such responsible for whatever impression of public education she would take away with her. We also turned out to be her last public school class, so I assume the impression she took away with her was not favorable.

Helen Chambers was unlike any teacher I had ever seen before. The teachers we got in Corinth generally fell into one of two categories. There were the plump, motherly women in shapeless Dacron dresses and cardigans embroidered with ABCs and apples (or whatever was in season: pumpkins at Halloween, candy canes at Christmas) who showed lots of film strips and drew happy faces on returned papers. Then there were the sternish old maids in Orlon sweater vests, scratchy wool skirts, and support hose pooling around their thin ankles who lectured in monotones and gave detention for falling asleep in class. Occasionally, some young woman just out of the State Teacher’s College came to Corinth for a few years. Such was Miss Venezia, my kindergarten teacher, who looked like Snow White and gave me Tales from the Ballet. But if they were any good they went on, as Miss Venezia did, to better jobs in Albany or Rochester.

Helen Chambers was neither young nor middle-aged. Instead she resided in a suspended state between the two. She was tall and fair, with the sort of blond hair that turns silver instead of gray and which she swept up in an elegant twist like an actress in a French movie. She wore, invariably, black—a color ill-suited for days spent in front of a chalkboard, but then I can’t recall ever seeing her use the chalkboard.

She conducted her classes, I realized later, like college seminars. That first day she had the eleven of us pull our desks into a circle, which she joined. She gave us each a plain gray cloth-bound book and told us to turn to chapter one to review the first declension. She timed us on the watch brooch pinned, like a nurse’s, above her heart. When five minutes had elapsed she told us to close our books and recite the declension of puella, puellae, one at a time, around the circle. She ticked off points in a small leather notebook for each mistake we made. Lucy and Matt were the only ones who got it right.

Afterward she read us a poem by Catullus about a girl who keeps a sparrow in her lap, which makes her boyfriend jealous. Ward Castle made a rude gesture at Lucy and was told he could sit in the hall for the rest of the class. She told us to memorize the first declension and the present indicative active of laudo, laudare for tomorrow and dismissed us by saying “Valete discipuli.”

Lucy and Matt responded by chanting “Vale, Domina” and the rest of us muttered some approximation without having the slightest idea what we were saying.

The next day our class size had dwindled to nine, by the end of the week: seven. Aside from Matt and Lucy and me, the rest were the children of doctors and lawyers whose parents had told them they had to stay in Latin to get into law or medical school.

After two weeks I had memorized the first declension, but I hadn’t the slightest idea of what a declension was. But I was happy chanting the words with Matt and Lucy walking down River Street after school.

I was happy, truth be told, to be walking in the opposite direction from my own home. I wouldn’t have to pass the mill with its sickening smell of fresh-cut lumber and its yellow pall of smoke. My house was down the hill from the mill and every day of my life I had woken up to that oversweet smell and the yellow smoke staining the sky outside my bedroom window. The lumber trucks went past my house, rattling the windowpanes and making the vases of artificial flowers on the coffee table tremble. My mother waged an everlasting war against the sawdust that my father brought home on his boots and work clothes. She made him take off his clothes in the mudroom and wash his head under the garden hose even when it was so cold that the water froze in his hair and beard. Still the sawdust crept in, forming tiny drifts in the corners and speckling the china bric-abrac and tickling the back of your throat. At night I could hear my father, who breathed that dust all day, coughing so hard that the iron day bed he slept on in the sewing room rattled. When I came home in the afternoons my mother would be dusting and railing against the sawdust and the mud and my father’s salary and the cold.

“This is the last place on earth I thought I’d end up,” she told me again and again. Since it was the place where she started out, I never understood her surprise over finding herself here.

When I told her I’d be going home with Lucy Toller that Friday I saw her take in the name and roll it around in her mind, measuring its worth like a pound of sugar.

“She’s a bastard, you know.”

I don’t think I had ever heard my mother use a word like that. She always said cursing was common.

“Illegitimate, I mean,” she said, seeing I didn’t understand. “Cliff Toller’s not her daddy. I knew her mother, Hannah Corey, in school. A smart girl. Maybe too smart for her own good. She got the Iris Scholarship.” Maybe that was why she didn’t like Hannah Corey. “She even got into one of those fancy women’s colleges, but she came back after a year with a baby and wouldn’t say boo to anyone about whose it was. Cliff Toller married her all the same and gave her a nice little house on River Street. I wouldn’t have picked her daughter as first choice for a friend, but you might meet some of her friends on River Street.”

I didn’t tell my mother that Lucy and Matt didn’t seem to have any other friends.

“She’ll probably win the Iris this year and then you’d know someone at Heart Lake.”

“Lucy says I could have a shot at the Iris,” I told my mother. “She says we’ll study together.”

My mother gave me a long look so that now I felt like the pound of sugar. I couldn’t tell if she had never thought of me having a chance for the Iris Scholarship until now, or if she’d been planning for me to go after it all along. After all, I was a good student, although more out of a slavish need to please my teachers than from any innate talent.

“The Iris Scholarship,” she said. Like all her goals for me she looked at it with both desire and mistrust.

“Well,” she said, “that would be something. But I wouldn’t set my heart on it.”

From the start, though, I think I did just that: set my heart on the Iris Scholarship. I’d never seen the school even though I’d grown up only a mile from its gates. I’d seen, though, the Heart Lake girls come into town to browse the drugstore for magazines and try on lipsticks at the makeup counter. They’d try on half a dozen shades and then wipe their mouths clean before going back to the school. I thought there must be a rule against makeup, but then I noticed how resolutely plain they were in their dress. Even when the school abandoned their uniform, the girls seemed to be wearing one. Plaid kilts and pastel sweaters. Down vests in the winter, like loggers. Scuffed penny loafers worn down at the heel. My mother always said you could tell a lady by the heels of their shoes, but there was something about these girls—maybe the perfectly straight teeth, the way their hair gleamed, the discrete flash of gold on earlobes and throat, and, most of all, a carelessness combined with confidence—that told me that the backs of their shoes might be worn to the nub but they’d never be, what my mother called, “down at the heels.”

It didn’t seem such a far leap—from my actual poverty to their assumed negligence.

“You’re a cinch for the scholarship,” Matt told me walking back to their home that Friday. “The only other one eligible financially is Lucy.”

“Well, then Lucy will get it,” I said.

“Lucy’s lazy,” Matt said, loudly enough for Lucy, who was walking up ahead, to hear. I thought she’d get mad, but instead she plucked a scarlet maple leaf from an overhanging branch and, looking coyly over her shoulder, bit down on its stem like a flamenco dancer holding a rose between her teeth. Matt skipped up to her and, clasping her into tango position, spun her around the lawn of one of the big mansions. They waltzed through the neat leaf piles the gardeners had raked together, kicking up red and gold maelstroms, until Matt dipped her low over a bed of yellow leaves and let her drop there in a graceful swoon.

“See,” Matt said, turning back to me. I had stayed on the edge of the sidewalk, standing still under the gold waterfall of leaves. “She needs some competition.”

Then he grabbed me, one arm firm around my waist, the other holding my hand straight out in front of us, his cheek, cool in the crisp fall air, against my cheek. As he spun me around, the red and gold leaves blurred together like the wings of the Firebird in my ballet book. His breath, against my cheek, smelled like apples.

“Now, repeat after me,” he said in rhythm to our dancing, “Puella, puellae, puellae…”

I repeated dutifully, shouting the declension as we spun around the lawn. When we came to a standstill, Lucy was on her feet, watching us, red and gold leaves sticking out of her hair like a chaplet of beaten gold. Everything else seemed to keep spinning except for her steady little figure.

“See,” she said, “you’ve got it memorized.”

“But I don’t know what it’s for.”

Lucy and Matt exchanged a look and then he plucked one of the leaves from her hair and, with an elaborate sweep of his arm, presented the leaf to me.

“Puer puellae rosam dat,” Lucy said.

“What?” I asked.

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” Matt translated.

“Boy—puer—is in the nominative case, so it’s the subject, he’s the one doing the giving,” Lucy said.

“Girl—puellae—is in the dative, so she’s the indirect object of the verb—the one who receives the action of the verb. The rose,” Matt twirled the scarlet maple leaf between his fingertips so that for a moment I thought I was looking at a rose, “Rosam is accusative. It’s the direct object of the verb—the thing that’s being given.”

“See, you can mix it all up,” Lucy said.

Matt jumped around me and stood on my right side and held the rose, the leaf, out to his right. Lucy pointed. “Puellae puer rosam dat. It still means… ?”

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” I replied.

Matt transferred the leaf into his left hand and held it between us.

“Puellae rosam puer dat?” Lucy asked.

“The boy gives the girl a rose,” I answered.

Matt held the leaf over his head. “Get it?”

I nodded. For the first time I actually did understand.

Matt bowed to me and handed me the maple leaf, which I slipped carefully into my pocket.

“Good girl,” he said. “Now, let’s get home. It’s getting dark.” Matt linked his left arm in mine and Lucy linked her right arm in mine and we walked the rest of the way up River Street, chanting the first declension into the cool, blue evening air.

 

Chapter Thirteen

T HE HOUSE AT THE END OF RIVER STREET WAS NOT A mansion, but rather the sort of cottage you’d expect the seven dwarfs to live in. It had originally been the gatehouse for the Crevecoeur Mansion. When the estate became a girls’ school, the gatehouse was sold separately to the school’s first headmistress. How it passed into the Toller family I never knew.

The downstairs rooms were always a disappointment to me. They were furnished in the same overstuffed and overpolished colonial style as my own house. But whereas my mother regarded each chair and end table as a prized possession, there was an air of disregard and neglect in Hannah Toller’s decorating. It looked as if the furniture had been picked off the showroom floor with no regard for what my mother called “color coordination.” Ugly brown plaids vied with blue and red chintzes. The curtains were a particularly horrible shade of mustard. While neat, the place looked unloved.

From that first day we spent as little time as possible downstairs. I was introduced to their parents and allowed to exchange strained conversation with them for the length of time it took Lucy to heat up some hot cocoa and Matt to raid the cupboards for cookies. I saw immediately why no one could forget that Lucy was not Cliff Toller’s daughter. In fact, it was hard to imagine Lucy issuing from either of the Tollers. Cliff Toller was large and red-haired; his hands, especially, seemed huge to me. Hannah Toller was small, like Lucy, but looked so dull, with mousy brown hair and unmemorable features, that one could only think of her as a genetic neutral that would require some divine visitation in order to have produced Lucy. I remembered my mother had told me that she’d conceived Lucy in that one year she had gone to Vassar and I imagined some blond scion encountered at a Yale/Vassar mixer.

When Lucy and Matt introduced me, Mrs. Toller’s dull brown eyes lit up for a moment. “Jane Hudson,” she said my name slowly, much as my mother had pronounced Lucy’s name. “Margaret Poole’s girl?” I nodded.

“I went to school with your mother,” she told me. “Everyone thought she’d be the one to win the Iris Scholarship, but on the day of the exam she didn’t come to school.”

I shrugged. “Maybe she was sick,” I said, but I knew that probably wasn’t what happened. My father had told me that my grandmother didn’t want her to go to Heart Lake, but I hadn’t known until now that she must have kept her home the day of the exam. I tried to imagine what my mother must have felt that day, after studying for the exam, to be kept from what must have seemed her only chance to get out of Corinth and a life of dreary millwork.

“And what do you think of your teacher? Domina Chambers?” Hannah Toller asked me.

“Oh, she seems wonderful,” I gushed. “So elegant and…” I struggled for the right word, “. . . and refined.”

“Refined? Yes, I guess you could call her that.” And she went back to stirring some pungent-smelling stew on the stove.

“Mother went to school with Helen Chambers,” Lucy explained as we trooped up the steep stairs. “First at Heart Lake, and then for one year at Vassar.”

“Oh?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say and I was glad that Lucy and Matt were ahead of me on the steps or they would have seen me blushing and known I’d heard the whole story about Lucy’s birth.

“Yeah, she got the Iris Scholarship when she was our age,” Matt said.

“I guess that’s why she wants Lucy to have it,” I said.

I saw Lucy and Matt turn to each other at the top of the steps. Matt whispered something and Lucy shook her head as if she were angry at what he had said. I was glad to be able to change the subject by exclaiming over their rooms.

“You guys are so lucky,” I said a little too loudly. “It’s like your own private hideaway. It’s like the attic in The Little Princess.”

“Yeah, Lucy’s the princess and I’m the little serving girl she lets clean up after her.”

Lucy scooped up a pile of dirty laundry on the landing and tossed it at Matt. “As if you picked up anything ever.”

The rooms were messy. Lucy’s room, on the right side of the stairs, was tiny, with hardly enough room for a single bed and a small bureau. This was why, she claimed, she’d encroached into Matt’s room on the other side of the stairs. You’d have thought from the freefall of clothes and books and swimming goggles and ice skates and loose paper and teacups and half-eaten apples that they shared his room.

Lucy had even pushed her desk over to Matt’s side so that they could study better. The desks faced each other on either side of the window— “so we both get a view,” Lucy told me. “We fought terribly over it.” That first day they found an old table for me and placed it between their desks facing the window.

“She’ll get distracted looking out the window,” Lucy said.

“She won’t,” Matt countered. “Will you, Jane?”

They both turned to me and I looked out the window from which I could see the river running between tall white birches, their yellow leaves catching the last light, like a band of sapphires set in gold.

I looked back at their eager faces. “No,” I told them, truthfully. “I won’t be distracted.”

I STUDIED WITH THEM EVERY DAY AFTER SCHOOL THROUGHOUT the fall term and sometimes on Saturdays until Christmas break. I had been afraid that without the excuse of studying together Matt and Lucy would disappear from view over the long vacation. My relief at their invitation to go skating was tempered only by having to admit to them I didn’t have skates. I’d always relied on the rented ones at the public rink.

“You can have my old ones,” Lucy told me. “Your feet are smaller than mine.” Surprisingly, she was right. Although she was tiny everywhere else, Lucy had unusually long feet. I tried on her skates and found that with an extra pair of socks they fit perfectly.

“Do you think it’ll be thick enough?” Lucy asked Matt as we followed a little stream called the Schwanenkill west into the woods, our skates slung over our shoulders. Although we hadn’t gotten much snow yet, the temperature had been below freezing since Halloween. The Schwanenkill was frozen except for a small rivulet down the middle that scalloped the edges of ice on either side. The ground felt hard to me as I struggled to keep up with them. The stream bank was icy and twice I slipped and broke through the thin ice and felt the cold water seep through my thin-soled sneakers.

Matt and Lucy wore the rubber-soled boots they’d gotten from L.L. Bean for Christmas, so they could crash through the ice and water heedlessly. I think that if they had noticed I was wearing Keds, they wouldn’t have taken me into the woods that day, but they could be unobservant that way. She was careless about how she dressed, more often than not wearing one of Matt’s soft corduroy shirts with her faded blue jeans. It didn’t matter, though, because she looked good in whatever she wore.

After we had walked about a quarter of a mile we came to a small wooden hut on the southern end of Heart Lake. When I realized where we were I grew nervous.

“Isn’t this private property?” I asked.

Lucy opened the door of the hut while Matt eased himself down the steep bank to test the ice.

“I suppose so,” Lucy answered with a yawn. I followed her into the hut. It was too dark at first to make out much, but then she opened the two double doors at the opposite end and the small space was filled with the late afternoon sun reflecting off the icy surface of the lake, which came up to the very edge of the building. I noticed that the sun was only a little above the line of hills behind the Crevecoeur mansion on the west side of the lake. It would be dark soon. The walls on either side were lined with deep shelves. Lucy stretched herself out on one of the shelves as if she had come for a nap instead of a skate.

“But no one’s ever caught us,” she said. “And it’s the best place to skate. We even have our own skating lodge.” She twirled her hand around in the mote-filled air, indicating the little hut.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“It’s the old Schwanenkill icehouse,” Matt said, coming into the hut and swinging his skates onto the end of the shelf where Lucy was lying. “The Crevecoeurs used it for storing ice harvested from the lake.” He swept a handful of sawdust from the shelf and sifted it through his gloved fingers. “They packed the ice in sawdust and it lasted till summer.” He pointed to a rotting wooden ramp that led from the double doors down to the ice. “They used that ramp to haul up the ice they cut from the lake. Our father used to help with the ice harvest.”

“You’re a fund of historical information, Mattie. How’s the ice today?” Lucy asked without opening her eyes.

“It’s a bit choppy at the mouth of the Schwanenkill. I think there’s a spring there that feeds into the stream and it keeps the ice from forming solidly above it. But if we skirt around that we should be all right.”

He was already pulling his boots off as he spoke and Lucy, although still supine, brought one heavily booted foot up to her opposite knee and began lazily pulling at her laces.

I looked out at the surface of the lake, which was turning a pale Creamsicle color in the setting sun. It was hard to see well with the glare, but I thought I saw dark patches, like bruises on an apple, which could have been soft spots or just shadows on the ice.

“I hear the lake is really deep,” I said conversationally. I’d kicked off my Keds but I was still twisting the skate laces through my fingers.

“Seventy-two feet in the middle,” Matt answered proudly, as if he had made the lake, “but this side’s pretty shallow near the shore. You stay right behind me, Jane, and if there’s a thin spot I’ll let you know by going through first.” He grinned at me with the utter, unthinking confidence of a fourteen-year-old boy. “You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?”

I nodded earnestly, not sure if he were kidding or not.

“Good, because I’m not sure about this one.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Lucy. “It would probably be too much trouble for her. She probably wouldn’t want to get her feet wet.”

Lucy swiped at Matt’s shin with the tip of her skate blade. He jumped off the bench and lunged out of the icehouse with Lucy right behind him. When they reached the ice their jerky movements suddenly smoothed and lengthened. I saw Lucy catch up with him and grab his parka hood so roughly I thought they’d both plummet headlong through the ice, but instead he turned around, caught her hands and spun her into a graceful pirouette.

I was tempted to stay in the icehouse. Even if I hadn’t been worried about the ice I knew I would never be able to keep up with them. But then I remembered Matt’s trusting smile. You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane? Of course, he’d been kidding, but I realized at that moment, as I tightened my laces until they hurt, that if Matt and Lucy were in danger there was no point at all to me being safe on the shore.

There’s always that first step in skating, from dry ground to slick ice, when it just seems impossible. Impossible that two thin blades of metal will support you, impossible that because its molecules have begun to dance a little slower water will hold you up. There was no railing here, as at the rink, to bridge that gap between solid and liquid, only the imperceptible giving way of earthbound gravity to free fall.

I took a few tentative strokes out onto the ice and then remembered what Matt had said about staying away from the Schwanenkill. I looked for them and saw that they were skating along the lake edge toward the northeast cove, probably to avoid being seen from the mansion on the west side of the lake. I would have liked to get a closer look at the mansion, which I had never seen before, but with the sun setting behind it I could make out little except a low, dark bulk squatting on its rise above the lake. When I looked away there were dark spots burned into my vision, and it took a moment to locate Matt and Lucy under a pine tree that spread its boughs above the lake. Lucy waved at me, but Matt, standing behind her, reached up over Lucy’s head and pulled a branch, releasing a shower of snow down the back of her neck. Lucy shrieked and spun around to grab him, but he was already gone, skimming the edge of the lake with a swift hockey player’s glide.

Lucy knelt on the ice and gathered together a snowball. When she got to her feet she must have realized she’d never catch up with him. He was already on the western edge of the cove where three rocks broke through the ice. She must have decided that the only way she’d catch up to him would be to cut directly across the cove.

She was halfway across the cove when one of the shadows I’d noticed before darkened and opened beneath her. Matt, on the other side of the lake, was turned the other way. I don’t remember deciding to move forward, but I found myself a few feet away from the ice hole.

She was in it up to her waist, her elbows propped on the edge of the ice to hold herself up. I slid one heavy skate toward her and a crack like forked lightning spread between us. Behind her, Matt turned and saw us. He started to skate, not directly toward us, but back along the shore, the long way.

I crouched to my knees and then lay myself down flat on the ice. I moved slowly, but still the ice hit my chest like a wall and sucked all the breath out of my lungs. I reached my arm out but I was still a foot short of her hand. Her fingertips, which had been straining toward mine, relaxed and she shook her head at me. Then one elbow cracked through the ice and her left shoulder slipped under the water. She made a sound like a wounded bird and I thought I heard its echo until I realized it had come from Matt, who was behind me now. I slithered forward, scraping my chin on the rough ice, and caught her right hand. She grabbed my wrist with more strength than I would have imagined existed in those tiny hands.

Behind me I heard Matt’s hoarse whisper telling me—her? us?—to hold on and then I felt a tug at my feet. As he pulled, she got her left arm onto the ice and I grabbed that one, too, only she had no grip in that hand so I grabbed her wrist. Her wrist felt so cold and brittle I thought it might break, but I held on even after her legs cleared the ice and her body was out of the water.

Matt dragged us like that, both of us flat on the ice, back to the shore. When we were both on dry ground he told me I could let go, but he had to pry my fingers away from her wrist and her fingers away from mine. When she let go I realized I had no feeling in my left arm. I couldn’t even lift it to help hold her up on the walk home so Matt picked her up and carried her the quarter mile back.

It was only after Dr. Bard (who lived two houses down from the Tollers) had examined Lucy and given her an injection of penicillin to ward off pneumonia that he happened to notice how I was holding my arm. When he took my jacket off he saw I had dislocated my shoulder—the bone had been pulled clean out of its socket.

 

Chapter Fourteen

O NCE SET, MY SHOULDER HEALED RAPIDLY, AND EVEN though it still hurt, my mother didn’t see any reason for me to miss school. It was too bad, she said, that I had always written with my left hand, so this was a good opportunity for me to learn to use my right hand better. I told her I would try, but when I was in school I switched back to writing with my left hand even though the act of writing sent shooting pains through my arm. That arm never felt quite the same.

Lucy was worse off. Despite the penicillin injection, she developed pneumonia from her fall in the lake and was out of school for the whole month of January and some of February. Matt was out of school a lot, too, although I don’t think he was sick. I just don’t think he could bear to leave Lucy alone all day.

I went to the Tollers’ house after school every day to drop off Lucy’s homework until Domina Chambers told me that she would drop the work off herself on her way back to Heart Lake. I grew shy, then, of visiting even though Matt and Lucy had always acted happy to see me. I thought they had forgotten all about me when, on my fifteenth birthday, Domina Chambers gave me a package wrapped in plain brown paper. I waited until my study hall and then sneaked away to an unused corridor where I’d found a window seat looking out over the school’s unused courtyard—an air well really—a place I could be alone if I didn’t mind burning my bottom on a hot radiator and freezing my arms against the cold windowpane.

There were two packages inside, one contained a beautiful fountain pen and a bottle of peacock blue ink. These were from Lucy. I put those aside and ripped open the second package. It was a notebook, the black-and-white kind you could buy in the drugstore for a quarter. I opened it and read Matt’s note on the inside cover, written on the lines provided for a classroom schedule: “To Jane. Still waters run deep. From, Matt.” He’d said that to me once when I told him I’d like to be a writer but I worried about not having enough to say. “You’re quiet, but you’re observant,” he’d said. “Still waters run deep.”

I filled the pen with ink and wrote on the first page, “Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink…” The nib of the pen caught on the page and ink splattered on the paper and my blouse. The effort to write made my whole arm ache and I wondered if Lucy realized it would be so hard for me to use it.

“. . . and Matt gave me this notebook.” I looked at the notebook and tried to think of something poetic I could say about it. It was a cheap exercise book, a brand the town sold because it was made by the paper company that owned the mill. The black-and-white pattern on the cover was supposed to look like marble, but to me it looked like ice on the river in spring, when the ice began to break up and the broken shards traveled downstream to the mill. In the summer the river was choked with logs heading toward the mill to be made into paper—maybe the very paper between these covers and the cover itself—so that holding this book was like holding a piece of the river, and the forests up north, and the ice formed in the high peaks.

I looked out the window at the bleak abandoned courtyard. It was full of the things that kids threw from classroom windows, discarded mimeos and thick felt erasers that had split in the middle and curled up on themselves like small dead animals.

“I’ll never have any other friends like them,” I wrote. I waited for the ink to dry and then ran my fingers down the page. That’s when I noticed the ragged edge along the inside seam of the book. A page had been torn out. I wondered what Matt had written that he had decided to rip out.

I DECIDED TO VISIT THE TOLLERSHOUSE THAT DAY TO thank Matt and Lucy for their presents. When I got there I found Domina Chambers having tea in the kitchen with Hannah Toller. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her there; I knew she was dropping off Lucy’s work, but I had imagined her literally dropping Lucy’s assignments on the Tollers’ front stoop and hastening on her way up Lake Drive to the school. I hadn’t pictured her having tea with Hannah Toller. They looked so odd together: Helen Chambers like a Nordic ice queen and Hannah Toller in her housedress like a drab peasant. But there they were, not only sharing tea but apparently sharing intimate conversation. Their heads were nearly touching as they leaned over some large book of photographs.

“Ah, Clementia, we were just talking about you. Come sit down with us.” I winced at the sound of my Latin name, which I hated. We didn’t get to pick our own Latin names in Domina Chambers’s class. Rather they were doled out to us according to a strict system. Domina Chambers told us what our names meant (I never saw her consult a baby name book; she seemed to know the meaning of all names) and then gave us a Latin name which had an equivalent meaning.

Lucy was easy because it meant, like her own name Helen, light, and so Lucy would use the same Latin name Helen had at school: Lucia.

Jane, she told me, came from the Hebrew for merciful, which was Clementia in Latin. Floyd Miller and Ward Castle spent the rest of the year calling me Clementine.

I sat next to Mrs. Toller and looked down at the table. The book resting between them was a yearbook and it was open to a picture of two young girls with their arms around each other’s waists. The girls wore strapless evening gowns and little fur stoles. Off to the side a young man in a tuxedo smiled at the girls. He was blond and handsome and looked, I noticed with a little shock, a lot like Lucy.

“Our freshman winter formal,” Domina Chambers said, closing the heavy book. I saw the year 1963 printed on the cover. “You knew that Hannah and I were at Vassar together, didn’t you?” Domina Chambers lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. “Only Hannah wasn’t so happy there, were you, dear?”

“College is not for everyone,” Mrs. Toller said quietly.

“No, of course it isn’t. What do you think, Clementia, is college for you? Or should I say: Are you for college? Perhaps the state teachers college in New Paltz? You’d make a very competent teacher, I think, and we always need good Latin teachers.”

I nodded. What she described was the pinnacle of my career ambitions, but on Helen Chambers’s lips it suddenly sounded dreary and ordinary.

“Now our Lucia on the other hand… I see her as a Vassar girl, and then she’ll go to the city and work in some arts-related field—publishing, I think, with her preciseness and gift for language. If we can only get her into Heart Lake, she’ll be a sure thing for Vassar.”

“It’s a ways away,” Mrs. Toller said.

“Nonsense! Three hours on the train. She can come home on the weekends—when she’s not too busy studying or going to football games and mixers at Yale or taking in the museums in the city. We were always encouraged in Art History 105 to spend as much time as we could at the museums.”

“Mattie’ll half die missing her,” Hannah said with an edge in her voice I hadn’t heard before. “Have you thought of that, Helen?”

“Well, Mattie will just have to get used to doing without her. He’ll get plenty of practice when she comes to Heart Lake next year. Now the thing to do is make sure she’s ready for the exam. You’re here to study with her, aren’t you, Jane?”

I nodded and smiled, glad to be called by my real name for once. “Oh yes, after all, I’m taking the exam, too.”

Domina Chambers reached across the table and patted my hand. “Of course you are, dear, and I’m sure you’ll do very nicely on it.”

I DID DO VERY NICELY ON THE EXAM. IN FACT, I ACED IT. Looking back, I think I set out to do just that—ace the exam—that day sitting at the Tollers’ kitchen table with Helen Chambers, if only to prove to her that I was better than she thought I was—better than someone who does nicely and goes to teachers college. I wrote in my journal that same night, “Teachers college is OK, but what I’d really like is to go someplace like Vassar. And to do that I have to get the scholarship to Heart Lake. I don’t think Lucy would really mind—after all, she’s the one who’s believed in me all along.”

I outlined a study schedule on the back cover of my notebook. I gave myself six weeks to memorize all of Wheelock’s Latin. After my parents would go to bed I got up and sat by my bedroom window studying by flashlight. My mother turned the heat down at night so it was cold in my room. When I looked out the window I couldn’t see the mill past the ice crystals spreading across the black panes. When the lumber trucks passed on the road in front of our house the glass shook and the ice patterns spread like a flower opening. Sometimes when I looked up from Wheelock and saw the ice crystals on the windowpane I imagined the picture I’d seen in the Vassar yearbook, only instead of Helen Chambers and Hannah Toller I pictured Lucy and me, our arms wrapped around each other, smiling into the camera. And off to the side, handsome in dark evening clothes, Matt looked on. Of course, he’d come visit on weekends from wherever he went to college—Yale, maybe, or Dartmouth because, he said, he liked the idea of going to a college founded by an Indian, and he’d heard they had a big Winter Festival.

Each night I ticked off the declensions and conjugations and sententiae antiquae I’d committed to memory in my black-and-white notebook. My fingers turned peacock blue with the ink from Lucy’s pen—the same color as the rings under my eyes.

I thought I’d be nervous for the exam, but instead I felt eerily calm and detached—as if I were recalling something I had done a long time ago.

I was frightened, though, when the results were announced, at what Lucy’s reaction would be. When Helen Chambers made the announcement at school assembly and the whole school applauded I looked down, as if I were modest, but really it was because I was afraid to look at Lucy or Matt who were sitting on either side of me. But then I felt a small hand creep into mine and squeeze. I looked up at Lucy and saw that she was smiling at me with what I can only describe as a look of euphoria. She was genuinely thrilled for me.

It was then that I started to cry, not, as everyone assumed, out of happiness at winning the scholarship, but because I knew how much better she was. Test or no test, she was the one who deserved to go on to Heart Lake and Vassar, not me. I would tell them all that she should have the scholarship. I would tell them all that I had cheated. Hadn’t I? If not on the test, then on Lucy?

But then Helen Chambers raised her hand for silence.

“Since the days when India Crevecoeur invited millworkers into her home for educational symposiums, the Heart Lake School has always tried to preserve a friendly relationship between town and gown.” There was a smattering of polite applause, which I waited through impatiently. I was wondering if I had the courage to turn down the award in front of the assembly or if I should do it quietly after the ceremony.

“But never has their generosity so overwhelmed me as it has tonight.” There was a hush in the audience as we all wondered what she meant. “I’ve been informed by the Board of Trustees that because of the outstanding performance of another student, this year the Iris Scholarship will be awarded, for the first time since its inception, to two students: Miss Jane Hudson and Miss Lucy Toller.”

I turned to Lucy and threw my arms around her. Mixed with my genuine joy that we would be at Heart Lake together was craven relief. I wouldn’t have to turn down the scholarship. I’d been taken off the hook. Pressing my cheek to hers I could feel that she, too, had begun to cry.

 

Chapter Fifteen

L UCY AND I WERE ASSIGNED TO A THREE-PERSON SUITE, called a “trip” by the Heart Lake girls. All the dorm rooms at Heart Lake were triples. My mother had always warned me to watch out for threesomes. “One always gets left out,” she told me in a way that made me understand that the one was likely to be me. India Crevecoeur, the school’s founder, thought differently. She believed that pairing girls off in twos encouraged “exclusionary friendships inconducive to the goals of community and cooperation.”

“They’re afraid we’ll turn lezzie,” our new suite-mate, Deirdre Hall, told us. “Apparently India Crevecoeur never heard of a ménage à trois.”

Deirdre Hall came as a surprise to me. She didn’t look anything like the Heart Lake girls I’d admired trying on lipsticks at the Corinth drugstore. She arrived in torn, bell-bottomed jeans and a sheer gauzy top through which I could see her nipples.

“They’ve stuck the scholarship students together,” Lucy explained to me. “Although I can’t imagine what she won a scholarship for—unless it was for being fast.”

“You mean like in track?” I asked.

“No, I mean like in bed. Can’t you see the girl’s a slut?”

Most of what we heard from Deirdre Hall had something to do with sex. She pulled from her army green duffel bag a veritable library of sex tomes: the Tantra Asana, The Sensuous Woman by J., The Joy of Sex, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, even a huge tattered copy of the Kinsey Report appeared Mary Poppins–like from the inexhaustible duffel. She decorated the walls and ceiling of the single with Balinese tapestries depicting enormously endowed men performing acrobatic sex with pointy-breasted, jewel-encrusted women. Even her seemingly innocent collection of oriental tea tins proved sexual in nature.

“This tea is an aphrodisiac,” she informed a horrified Lucy. “Of course the real aphrodisiac is in here.” She opened up a large cask-shaped tin that was decorated with a landscape of golden mountains. Inside was a pungent-smelling brownish herb. “Does pot make you horny, too?” she asked us.

Lucy wasn’t the only one offended by Deirdre’s sexual references. She drove Helen Chambers to distraction by finding sexual references in every other Latin word.

“Domina?” she said on the first day of class. “As in dominatrix?”

When Domina Chambers told her that the translation of praeda was booty, Deirdre asked, “Booty? As in ass?”

“No,” Domina Chambers replied, “as in loot from a conquest.”

I am sure that Helen Chambers regretted that the second-year Latin curriculum devoted so much attention to the poet Catullus.

“His girlfriend’s name was Lesbia?” Deirdre asked incredulously. “As in…”

“No,” Domina Chambers interrupted, “as in the island of Lesbos, home of the Greek poetess Sappho. Catullus was acknowledging his literary debt to the Greek lyric poets.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t Sappho like a famous dyke?”

“Sappho did write some beautiful love poems to women. We don’t know that her sentiments were expressed… er… physically.”

I had never seen Miss Chambers so rattled.

“I bet she’s one,” Deirdre told us when we were translating our Latin together that night.

“One what?” Lucy asked.

“A lezzie.” Deirdre held up her right hand and wriggled it like a fish. She was wearing a silk hand-painted kimono that her parents had sent her from Kyoto. It was patterned in pale blue and turquoise waves through which swam beautiful red and gold carp. There were slits under the wide sleeves through which I could see Deirdre’s bare breasts, like two fish escaped from the kimono’s pattern.

“Domina Chambers is not a lesbian,” Lucy had responded coldly, looking away from Deirdre’s exposed breasts. “My mother went to school with her and she says that Helen Chambers was one of the most popular girls at Vassar. She spent almost every weekend at Yale.”

“So why didn’t she marry one of those Yalies?” Deirdre asked. I could tell that Lucy had piqued her interest. We could all picture, I think, Helen Chambers, in a sweater set and pearls, riding the train to New Haven. A boy in a tweed jacket—or maybe a letter sweater—would meet her at the station.

“She devoted herself to scholarship,” Lucy answered, “to the classics.”

“Then why isn’t she a professor at some college? Or an archaeologist digging up Etruscan artifacts? I mean teaching high school Latin is hardly an exciting career.”

I could tell that Lucy was troubled by this question. There was something about Helen Chambers that didn’t quite add up. Even though there was a tradition of alumnae returning to Heart Lake to teach, Helen Chambers stood out just a little from the other old girls. From Lucy’s mother, we knew that after Vassar Helen Chambers had gone to Oxford. She had lived in Rome for several years at the American Academy on the Janiculum Hill and published articles in learned philological journals on Etruscan vases and lacunae in ancient texts. Then she’d come back to New York to complete her doctorate at Barnard. Unlike our other teachers, Helen Chambers was embarked on an illustrious career, but just when it seemed that she had broken free of whatever gravitational pull the school exerted on its alumnae, she had abandoned the doctorate and taken the job at Heart Lake.

“Maybe she was broke,” Deirdre said.

“No.” Lucy shook her head and wrinkled up her nose. The idea of Helen Chambers’s life being determined by base financial considerations was distasteful to her. “I think it had something to do with a failed love affair. I think she was in love with a married man and in order to break it off she had to leave the city.”

I remembered the yearbook picture I had seen on the kitchen table. The handsome blond man smiling at Helen Chambers and Hannah Toller. The man who looked like Lucy. It occurred to me that the story Lucy was telling might be Hannah Toller’s story. Perhaps she was the girl who left her married lover, bore Lucy in secrecy and shame, and came home to Heart Lake.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. I could tell she liked Lucy’s story. She was beginning to be won over by the mystique of Helen Chambers. “Maybe they still meet when she goes into the city. She can’t spend all her time shopping and going to the ballet.”

Lucy considered. “Perhaps they meet, just once a year, for drinks at the Lotus Club.”

“For old time’s sake,” Deirdre said.

Lucy smiled at her. After weeks of her offending Lucy, I was alarmed to see that Deirdre Hall might also be capable of charming Lucy. But then, as usual, Deirdre went a bit too far (overkill, Lucy would say).

“Yeah,” Deirdre said, “and then, for old time’s sake, they go upstairs and get laid.”

THROUGHOUT THE FALL SEMESTER OF THAT SOPHOMORE year Lucy and Deirdre vied with each other like dancers pulling back and forth in some elaborate tango. Although they seemed to hate each other, they couldn’t stay away from each other. I understood how Deirdre might be won over by Lucy. Everybody was. At the lower school, where Lucy worked as an aide, the younger girls all adored her. When we met her there after our last class, the children followed Lucy out the door, begging for another story, a song, a hug. One girl, a pathetic-looking creature with pinched features and hair as colorless as dried straw and with the sadly apt name of Albie, used to follow us back to the dorm. It was unnerving the way she’d materialize in the woods. Deirdre would yell at her and stamp her foot the way you would to scare away a stray dog, but Albie wouldn’t even flinch. Only when Lucy would go up to her and whisper something in her ear would she leave, vanishing behind the pine trees as quickly and silently as a cat.

“Poor kid,” I said one day, more because I saw that Lucy had been gentle to her than because I really felt sorry for her. “What an awful name.”

“Thanks,” said Lucy, laughing, “I gave it to her. I told her it would be her Latin name when she started Latin next year, so now she insists everyone call her that. She just needs a little attention. Her dad died when she was little and Albie says her mother’s nervous, which I think means she’s in and out of mental hospitals. Every time Albie’s not doing well her mother thinks it’s the school’s fault and she switches her to another school. She’s only ten and this is her fourth school.”

“Please, I’m gonna bawl,” Deirdre said, lighting a cigarette. “The kid is creepy and she’s getting in our way. It’s like she’s spying on us.”

This was a concern because we had begun to roam the woods when we were supposed to be in evening study hall. Our first forays into the woods were Deirdre’s idea. She wanted to find a place to smoke, cigarettes at first, and then pot. I was surprised that Lucy went along with these expeditions—Lucy refused to even try a cigarette or a joint—but I soon realized that Lucy felt confined by the regimentation of Heart Lake. She had grown up wandering the woods with Matt, eating when she wanted, sleeping late and missing school if she wished to. She hated, she told me, having to be around people all the time. She hated the goals of community and cooperation.

Deirdre, an old veteran of boarding schools, proved to be an expert at subverting and eluding the rules. “Sign into study hall and then excuse yourself to go to the head. We’ll meet in the bathroom next to the Music Room and slip out the back door. They’ll never miss us.”

It seemed to me that we could have done that without Deirdre, but if we were caught, Deirdre always came up with a quick and reasonable cover.

“Jane just got her period, Miss Pike,” she explained to the swimming coach one night when we were discovered in the woods behind the mansion. “We’re going back to the dorm for a sanitary napkin.”

“We’re looking for tadpoles, Miss Buehl,” she told the science teacher when she found us sneaking down to the swimming beach. “Your lecture on metamorphosis was so inspiring.”

She had a flair for the dramatic. After we heard the story about the three sisters at the Fall Bonfire she immediately said we had to get out to the farthest rock at midnight under a full moon and say a prayer to the Lake Goddess so we would be spared from the Crevecoeur curse.

“How can we?” I asked. “You can’t get there by jumping from the other rocks. Can’t we make our sacrifice from the first rock?”

“No, it has to be the third one,” Deirdre said.

Lucy agreed. “Domina Chambers says that three is an enchanted number. And that the hero must always undergo a series of difficult tests, like the labors of Hercules, to prove himself.”

“We’ll swim to the rock,” Deirdre said. “We do it all the time in swim class.”

“But at night? We don’t even have suits.” We were issued swim suits for class, thick cotton one-pieces that billowed in the water and made all but the slimmest girls look hideous.

Lucy laughed. “Who needs suits? Gosh, Jane, you’re so conventional sometimes.” I saw Deirdre smile. I remembered what my mother always said: “In a threesome one always gets left out.”

“If you’re scared you can stay in the room,” Lucy said.

I was scared, but I wasn’t going to stay in the room. For this expedition we needed more time than study hall allowed. Deirdre planned it all. After lights out we would each, one by one, go down the hall in our nightgowns to the bathroom and then we’d leave by the bathroom window, which was at the back of the dorm, facing away from the lake. We’d cut through the woods behind the lower school, and then climb over the rocks on the Point to avoid being seen by Miss Buehl, who lived in the cottage at the top of the steps leading down to the swimming beach.

“But then how will we get down to the swimming beach?” I asked. “The entrance to the stairs is right across from her front door.”

“There’s a way to climb from the Point down to the swimming beach,” Lucy said. “Matt and I did it a couple of years ago when we sneaked onto the campus to go swimming.”

“Why doesn’t he sneak onto the campus now and join us?” Deirdre asked. “I mean, you miss him so much and all.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Lucy said. “Maybe another time.”

That first night we went out to the rock was unseasonably warm and curiously still for mid-October. I was sure we’d still be cold, so I wore my heaviest flannel nightgown. Deirdre wore the hand-painted kimono, which shimmered like water in the moonlight. The red and gold carp seemed to swim under the tall pines. Lucy wore a plain white Tshirt that came down below her knees and probably had belonged to Matt originally. The two of them, walking ahead of me on the path, looked like figures on a vase. I felt absurd in my stiff flannel gown with its print of teddy bears and hearts.

We stopped in the woods and Deirdre lit a joint. She handed it to Lucy who, much to my surprise, took a long, deep drag on it. She handed it to me and, still holding the smoke in, said in a tight voice, “Remember what Domina said about the Delphic oracle?” I remembered Helen Chambers’s lecture on the ancients’ use of hallucinogenic herbs. So you condone drug use, Domina, Deirdre had asked. The ancients used it for sacred, not recreational, purposes, our teacher had answered.

I took the joint and placed it, gingerly, to my lips. I wondered if I could just pretend to smoke it, but both Deirdre and Lucy were waiting to see the tip of the joint flame red. I inhaled and held the smoke in my lungs, the way Deirdre said you had to. I also remembered that she said most people didn’t get high their first time.

We smoked that joint until it was a tiny, burning nub, which Deirdre held delicately between her long fingernails. When I was sure it was all smoked down, Deirdre turned the roach around so that the lit side was in her mouth, and motioned for Lucy to come closer. Lucy, who was quite a bit shorter than Deirdre, tilted her face up to Deirdre’s, so close it seemed they might kiss, and Deirdre blew a long stream of smoke into Lucy’s open mouth. I was amazed at how well they did it. And then I realized it couldn’t have been the first time.

I didn’t think I was high, but the rest of the walk seemed bathed in a different light. The forest floor, covered with pine needles, glowed golden and seemed to roll up to meet my bare feet. The white trunks of the birch trees flicked by me like the blades of a fan slicing the shadows, spilling splashes of white into the darkness of the woods. It was as if a white figure flitted in between the trees beyond the path, but when I stopped to look for it there was nothing in the dark and silent woods.

When we came to the Point, the domed rock we clambered over glittered as if studded with diamonds. I found myself lost in its rough, crystally texture as we climbed down to the limestone ledge and from there to the swimming beach. It was better than looking over the edge at the sheer drop down to the water.

It took me longer than the others to make the climb down. By the time I was on the beach they were already in the water. Deirdre’s pale silk kimono was draped over a rock and Lucy’s Tshirt lay crumpled at the edge of the water. I pulled the heavy flannel nightgown over my head and stood for a moment, shivering on the shore.

I could see them, a little ways out in the water, gold and white like the beautiful carp in Deirdre’s kimono. They had reached the third rock, which was the only one flat enough to climb up on, and Deirdre was pulling herself up, clumsily flopping on the rock. Lucy turned toward the shore and treaded water. When she saw me she raised her hand to wave and I saw her sink a little, her lips just touching the black surface of the lake. I remembered a line of poetry Miss Macintosh had read to us. They’re not waving, it went, they’re drowning. There was something in me that made me want to stand there and see how long Lucy would wave. How far she would sink.

But then I shook myself, dispersing the chill, and walked into the water. I plunged in to get the worst of the shock over with, and swam fast to warm up. I was a good swimmer. One of the strongest in the class, Miss Pike said, although, she would inevitably add, my form could use work.

I swam a little past the rock, showing off a bit. When I approached the far side of the rock, though, I found that the rock was sheer at this end, the water too deep to touch bottom. Lucy and Deirdre had to each take a hand to haul me up.

“Good work, Jane,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, Jane, you’re braver than I thought,” Deirdre said.

We sat on the rock for a few minutes looking out over the still, moonlit lake. I didn’t feel cold anymore. The climb and the swim had warmed me up. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel afraid either. The third rock was past the Point, and so we could have been seen from the windows of the mansion, but I imagined that if someone, say Helen Chambers who had an apartment on the top floor of the mansion, had looked out her window and seen us, three naked girls on a rock in the middle of the lake, she would have thought it was a vision. I imagined that we looked like the three graces in the painting by Botticelli Miss Beade had shown us.

As if responding to a prearranged signal, we all stood up. Lucy slid her arm over my shoulder and Deirdre, on my other side, slipped her arm over Lucy’s. I pulled my arms up to clasp theirs, but instead I kept lifting them—they felt weightless, as if pulled by the moon—until my hands were suspended over their heads. We hadn’t talked about what form our “prayer” to the Lake Goddess would take. “We’ll let the spirit of the moment move us,” Lucy had said. I had imagined it would be Lucy or Deirdre who would think of what to say. They were both better at that sort of thing. But now, with Lucy and Deirdre at my side, I felt stronger than I ever had before. My mother was wrong. Three was a magic number.

“Spirit of the Lake,” I said. “We come here in the spirit of friendship. We don’t ask for special protection.”

I saw Lucy nod. It was what Domina Chambers always told us. The ancients believed they must first humble themselves before the gods. The greatest sin was hubris.

I knew then what form the prayer should take. “All we ask,” I said in a high, ringing voice that seemed to echo off the stone face of the Point, which towered above us, “is that whatever happens to one of us, let happen to all of us.”

 

Chapter Sixteen

W E NEED A STAG-KING.” DEIRDRE HELD THE HAIRPIN figurine we had recently dubbed a corniculum in her fingers and wriggled it in the light from the window. A minute before she had been dancing around the room to the Allman Brothers singing “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio, but then “Seasons in the Sun” came on and she switched it off.

Lucy looked up from Graves’s The White Goddess and nodded. “Like Cernunnos,” she said. “The horned one, the antlered king.”

“Like Actaeon,” Deirdre said.

“Actaeon was slaughtered by his own hounds,” I said. It was junior year. Deirdre had read an article in Ms. magazine about matriarchal cultures and goddess worship. She spent most of Latin class pestering Domina Chambers about “the patriarchal canon” she adhered to. “At the very least,” she told our teacher, “we should be doing Ovid’s Art of Love instead of boring old Metamorphoses.”

I picked up my translation for the next day’s class and read aloud: “ ‘Now they are all around him, tearing deep their master’s flesh.’ His dogs ate him alive.”

Deirdre shrugged. “Domina Chambers said he got what he deserved for spying on Diana in her bath.”

“But it was an accident,” I told her. “Look, even Ovid says so, ‘The fault was fortune’s and no guilt that day, for what guilt can it be to lose one’s way.’ ”

Lucy sighed. “Don’t be so literal, Jane. We’re not going to hunt some poor boy down and eat him.” Deirdre giggled and Lucy gave her a look that silenced her.

“It’s a symbolic rite of renewal. The goddess joins with the stag-king and the community is granted fertility and good fortune.”

“Yeah, the goddess and the stag-king get it on.”

“Well, are we going to take that part literally?”

“I certainly hope so,” Deirdre said.

“Then who gets to be the goddess?” I asked.

Deirdre jingled the hairpins so that they sparkled in the sun and she wiggled her hips like one of the Balinese dancers on the tapestries that decorated her room. “Who do you think? Who around here looks like a fertility goddess?”

“The goddess is the lake,” Lucy said reprovingly. “The stag-king will swim in the lake, like a baptism, and that will appease the Lake Goddess.”

“Oh.” Deirdre looked disappointed. She tapped the hairpin that dangled from the “mouth” of the top hairpin so that it swung in a wide arc. “Is our stag-king also going to be symbolic or do we at least get a real boy?”

I saw Lucy considering. We both knew which boy Deirdre had in mind. Although Lucy and Deirdre had been friends, more or less, since that night sophomore year when we all swam in the lake, Lucy still hadn’t let Deirdre spend any time with Matt. She had met him the couple of times. Matt had come to Friday tea and the Founder’s Day picnic, but Lucy had always been careful to keep Deirdre from spending too much time with her brother.

“He’s adorable,” Deirdre had confided to me. “I see why you like him. Have you ever… you know… done anything with him?”

“He’s just a friend,” I said, “and my best friend’s brother. I don’t think of him that way.”

Deirdre eyed me skeptically. Just as she had a way of finding sexual meaning in the most innocuous Latin phrase, so she could inject sexual context into the most innocent friendship. Over the year we had been at Heart Lake she had posited illicit liaisons between the groundskeeper and Miss Buehl, Miss Buehl and Miss Pike, Miss Macintosh and Miss Pike, Miss Beade and three of the senior girls, and the class president and the captain of the swim team. She had taken it for granted from the beginning that I had a thing for Matt.

I suppose she was right. Pressed between the pages of my Tales from the Ballet I kept the red maple leaf he had given me on that first walk home. It wasn’t a rose, but he had pretended it was when he gave it to me, so wasn’t it almost as if it were a rose? I’d saved other things, too. The pebbles he gave me when he was teaching me to skip stones on the lake, notes he’d written me in Latin class when we were still at Corinth High, and a skate key he’d dropped in the icehouse and thought was lost. I kept them with my journals under a loose board beneath my desk. Not even Lucy knew about my hiding place or the things I wrote in my journal about Matt.

“I think Lucy misses him,” I wrote in my journal. I’d used up the first notebook he’d given me and bought a new one that was just the same. I had sat a long time with the fountain pen poised over the lined paper before adding, “I miss him, too.”

Since we’d been at Heart Lake we’d seen less of him. I knew Lucy missed him terribly. For the whole first year she had slept in one of his old hockey jerseys, and sometimes at night, after she thought I was asleep, I heard her crying. If she hadn’t been afraid of Deirdre going after him I think she would have thought of some way of seeing him more. After all, he lived less than half a mile from the school—only a quarter mile from the far end of the lake—and he knew every inch of the woods surrounding Heart Lake.

“I bet Matt would be interested in the Cernunnos legend,” I said.

Both girls looked at me as if they had never heard of a boy named Matt. I half expected Deirdre to say, “Matt who?”

Lucy sighed. “Actually, Mattie’s more interested in chemistry and physics these days.”

After Lucy and I had gotten the Iris Scholarship, Helen Chambers had given up on her experiment with public education, and Corinth High School had, in turn, given up on its Latin program. Matt seemed forlorn without Latin until he discovered physics.

“All he talks about these days is the temperature/density relationship in water and the molecular structure of ice. He’s keen on seeing the lake freeze.”

“Well,” Deirdre said, “he can watch for the lake to freeze and we can reenact the rite of the horned god. Hey, do you think that’s how we got the expression horny?”

“We can’t make Matt swim in the lake,” Lucy said. “It’s already too cold.”

“They do it in Russia,” Deirdre said. “But yeah, it’s even getting too cold to hang out outside. If only we had some kind of shelter. The changing room at the swimming beach would be perfect, but they lock it up over the winter.”

“There’s the icehouse,” I said. “We could meet there.”

Lucy’s head jerked up. Belatedly I remembered that Matt and Lucy had made me promise not to tell anyone that they used the icehouse.

“What icehouse?” Deirdre asked. “It doesn’t sound too appealing.”

“It’s not,” Lucy said flatly. “It’s just a little hut on the other end of the lake where the Crevecoeurs used to store ice harvested from the lake. It’s a good twenty-minute walk away.”

“Is there anything in it?”

I shook my head no, but Lucy was nodding. “The county extension agent keeps her rowboat there, but she only comes once a week, on Tuesdays, to take water samples.”

I looked at Lucy in surprise. I hadn’t been to the icehouse since we had all gone skating last winter. Apparently she and Matt had been there without me.

“A boat?” Deirdre said. “Cool. We could have our stag-king rite on the water. When can your brother meet us there?”

I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH LUCY TOLD MATT ABOUT THE horned god, but he was excited about what he called the first ice club. We met at the icehouse the last weekend in November.

Matt brought a Thermos of hot chocolate. Deirdre brought a joint. Lucy brought blankets. We sat in the hull of the extension agent’s rowboat using her life jackets for pillows. We’d decided it was too dangerous to take the boat out; someone might see us. Matt insisted that we keep the doors at the end of the hut open so we could look at the lake, even though it made the hut unbearably cold. It was beautiful though. Lying in the hull of the boat, looking out the doors, it seemed as if we were on the water. Across the lake we could see the stone wall of the Point jutting into the lake like the prow of a gigantic ocean liner bearing down on us. After a few hits, I felt as if we were gliding toward it.

“The lake has already begun the process of freezing,” Matt told us. “This first stage is called overturn. As water gets colder it gets denser, so it sinks and the warm water rises to the top.” Matt made circles in the air with his hands. “But—and this is the part that’s really amazing—if water continued getting denser as it froze the lake would freeze from the bottom up.”

“It doesn’t?” Deirdre asked.

Lucy gave her a scornful look, but Matt continued his explanation patiently.

“If it did that all the fish and other creatures would die. But what happens is that at four degrees Celsius water becomes less dense. That means that ice is actually less dense than water.”

“I may be too dense to get this,” Deirdre said, passing Matt the joint. “Science was never my thing.”

I was surprised at Deirdre putting herself down like this in front of Matt. I thought she would want to impress him. It was weird, too, because Deirdre wasn’t dense about stuff like this. She was actually pretty good at science. If she hadn’t spent most of her time getting stoned and thinking about boys, she would have gotten all A’s. As it was, she did almost no work and still got B’s.

Matt took a hit off the joint and passed it to Lucy, then he reached across me and took Deirdre’s hands in both of his.

“It’s like this.” He turned her right hand so that its back lay against the palm of her left. I saw Deirdre wince, but she didn’t complain and I don’t think Matt noticed he was hurting her.

“This is what a water molecule is like above four degrees Celsius. The two hydrogen atoms fit together like two spoons lying in the same direction. When people lie like that they call it spooning.”

I imagined lying next to Matt like that. I imagined what it would feel like to lie against his back, against his broad swimmer’s shoulders, and bend my knees to fit into the space where his knees bent. I wondered if Deirdre was imagining the same thing. Why hadn’t he used my hands for his demonstration? Why hadn’t I said I was dense?

“The oxygen atom lies alongside the two hydrogen atoms,” he added, balling his hand like a fist against the palm of Deirdre’s right hand. “But at four degrees Celsius the hydrogen atoms flip around.” Matt turned Deirdre’s right hand over so that her palms were facing each other as if in prayer. “See that space between your hands,” he tickled the inside of her palms and she giggled. “There’s a little pocket between the atoms now. That’s why ice is lighter than water.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

Matt dropped Deirdre’s hands. I was hoping he would take mine, but instead he made two peace signs with his fingers and held them up.

“Tricky Dick,” Deirdre said. She had a cartoon tacked to her wall of Nixon holding his fingers up in two V’s.

He lowered his fingers so they were pointing out, into the center of the circle we made inside the boat. “You can also think of it like this. Each water molecule is made up of three atoms—two hydrogen, one oxygen—so it’s like a triangle. When water is liquid, the molecules just lie on top of each other like this.” He lay one peace sign over another. “But at four degrees Celsius, the hydrogen molecules flip around because they want to touch.”

“Oooh,” Deirdre cooed. “Lezzie molecules.”

“Jesus, Deir,” Lucy said, “only you could make hydrogen bonding sexy.”

“Well, it is kind of sexy,” Matt admitted. “I mean it has to do with attraction. In a water molecule, the positively charged nuclei of these three atoms are stuck together by negatively charged electrons. But the oxygen atom is so greedy for the attention of electrons that it strips the two hydrogen atoms of their negative charge. That makes the hydrogen atoms attracted to other electrons, like the oxygen atom in another water molecule. That’s why water is liquid. When water freezes, the hydrogen bonds hold each molecule apart.”

Matt reached out both his arms and took my hand and Lucy’s. “You guys hold hands, too,” he said.

I saw Lucy reluctantly take Deirdre’s hand and Deirdre took my hand.

“Now hold your arms out straight.”

We had to shuffle around in the boat a little to make space so we could all hold our arms out straight. The boat rocked on the wooden floor of the icehouse. It was a good thing, I thought, that we weren’t doing this on the water.

“See how we take up more space now,” Matt said. “We’re ice.”

“My ass is ice,” Deirdre said. She released Lucy’s and my hands and stood up. The boat lurched toward her and then, when she stepped out of it, careened away from her. Lucy and I both fell against Matt. I felt Matt’s arm around me, steadying me.

“Hey, you broke the molecular bond,” Matt said.

“I always was a great ice breaker,” Deirdre said, shimmying her shoulders and hips. Even under a sweater and down jacket you could see her breasts swaying. I realized she hadn’t worn a bra. I looked at Matt and it seemed his gaze also rested on Deirdre at about chest level.

“I think that concludes the science portion of the evening,” Deirdre said. “And now for the sacred rite of the horned god. Got your antlers ready, Matt?”

Matt held up his fingers in V’s again, but this time he held them over Lucy’s head. “I always thought Lucy would make a good deer,” he said. “She’s about as brave as one.”

Lucy shook his hands away and got up out of the boat. She stood at the doorway of the hut and stretched her arms over her head. She was wearing a pale blue ski parka that glimmered against the cold black water. She was like a deer, I thought, leggy and lithe. I thought of a line from Book Four of the Aeneid. It’s when Dido realizes that Aeneas doesn’t love her anymore and he’s going to leave her. “Qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,” I recited, impressed at myself for remembering the Latin.

With her back to us, Lucy took up the passage, reciting it to the lake. As she spoke Deirdre moved next to her and held her arms up, too. I stayed in the boat with Matt. He had put his arm back around my shoulder.

“Quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit pastor agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum nescius: illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo,” Lucy recited.

“Wow,” I said. “How’d you remember all that?”

Lucy shrugged. “It’s my favorite part.”

“Might an ordinary mortal ask for a translation?” Matt asked.

“Just as when a deer pierced by an arrow from some shepherd, who unknowing leaves in her the flying iron, wanders the woods and mountain glades with the deadly shaft still clinging to her flesh,” I told him. I had left out a bunch of words, but that was the gist of it. “It’s like, even though she runs away the thing that’s going to kill her stays with her. She can’t escape her fate.” I was surprised to hear my own voice quiver. It had always gotten to me, the way Dido was doomed to kill herself from the moment she set eyes on Aeneas.

Matt squeezed my shoulder and I felt his lips brush the side of my face. “You’re a sweet kid, Jane,” he whispered in my ear, “but I think these two might rip me to shreds, so I better hightail it.”

He was gone before I knew it; only the sway of the empty boat and a damp spot on my cheek where his lips had brushed told me he’d been there a minute ago. Deirdre and Lucy ran after him. I could hear them, laughing and shrieking through the woods. I could have caught up with them, but instead I lay back in the boat and watched the moon move from behind a cloud. The rocky prow of the Point, as if awakened by the cascade of white light, seemed to glide toward me, silent as an iceberg in a still, black sea.

 

Chapter Seventeen

O N THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS BREAK I CAME BACK to our room from dinner and found a corniculum tacked to the door. I was surprised because it was so cold, but Lucy said we couldn’t miss the solstice because it would be a propitious night for the first ice to form. It was a windless night and the full moon seemed unusually close and bright.

“It’s going down below zero tonight,” Deirdre said. “We could get frostbite. And besides, I feel awful.” Deirdre sneezed and blew her nose. She had gone to the infirmary that day and the nurse had excused her from her last final and said she should stay in bed until it was time to catch her train home.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Lucy said. “How about it, Jane? Are you afraid of the cold?”

Truthfully, I didn’t relish the idea of going out in the cold. I felt like I was coming down with whatever Deirdre had. We’d stayed up late studying for finals all week. Deirdre had produced a white powder that she said was crystal methedrine. She showed Lucy and me how to snort it through a straw. It burned my nostrils and made me feel cold and brittle.

“I wouldn’t want to disappoint Matt,” I said. “I guess I’ll go. I’ll just put on some long underwear.”

Lucy turned to Deirdre, who was boiling water on her hot plate. When the water came to a boil she poured a little into a willow-patterned teapot and swished it around. Then she dumped the water out onto the window ledge. Because she had been doing this all winter unusual ice structures had formed.

“Oh well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Mattie.” Deirdre knew Lucy hated it when she called him Mattie. “But I suggest we all have some tea before we go.” Deirdre opened several of her tins and put a pinch from each one into the teapot.

“Someday she’s going to poison us,” Lucy said to me.

“Or herself,” I suggested.

Deirdre smiled and filled the teapot with steaming water. “Only if I meant to,” she said. She tapped the lid of a small, red lacquer box. “I have some stuff that would put a person to sleep for a long winter’s nap.”

Deirdre poured out the tea into three china cups. She handed one to me and one to Lucy.

“But I would never do that to you guys,” she said. “I mean, you guys are the best friends I’ve ever had. One for all and all for one, right? E Pluribus unum.”

Deirdre held up her steaming teacup and we all clinked cups together.

The tea actually made me feel better. It coursed through my veins like the warm currents that you sometimes swam through in the lake. I could imagine the glow in my blood staving off the winter chill. We waited that night until after the last bed check and then pulled jeans and sweaters over our long underwear. The hard part was holding on to the drainpipe when we climbed out the bathroom window. I had to take off my mittens to get a good grip and the metal was so cold that my clammy hands nearly stuck to it. Even after I put my mittens back on my skin felt raw. And not just the skin on my hands. The fire Deirdre’s tea had lit in my blood had turned into an icy trickle. My whole body felt flayed by the cold.

We followed the path around the west side of the lake. A few inches of new snow had fallen that evening so the path looked clean and bright in the moonlight; I felt like I could see each individual crystal. The path had narrowed between two low walls of snow so we couldn’t walk three abreast. Sometimes I walked behind Lucy and Deirdre and sometimes Deirdre would run forward on the path and Lucy and I were next to each other. I thought to myself that my mother really was wrong about threesomes, that the balance between us was always shifting, not set in stone. Sometimes, though, I missed how it was when it was still Lucy and Matt and I.

Just before we reached the end of the lake I heard a movement in the woods. I stopped to peer into the maze of pine trunks and the long shadows they cast on the white snow. I watched the shadow of a branch swaying in the wind and then realized that there was no wind. The branched shape suddenly detached itself from the shadows and moved away from me, flitting over the white surface of the snow.

I turned back to the path to find Deirdre and Lucy but they had walked on without me. They must have rounded the end of the lake because they were nowhere in sight along the path. When I turned back to the woods the branched shape had vanished. I figured it must have been a deer. Nothing else could move so swiftly and silently.

Or else Deirdre really had added something to the tea and I was hallucinating.

The thought was terrifying. Had Deirdre drugged me and then somehow gotten Lucy to go along with abandoning me in the woods? What might I see next? I turned around quickly and my eyes caught a movement in the trees—a glitter like fireflies drifting through the pine needles. Only it was the dead of winter; there were no fireflies.

When I rounded the end of the lake I thought that must be it—I was hallucinating—because standing on the path with Deirdre and Lucy were three hooded figures.

Deirdre detached herself from the group and came skipping toward me. She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to one of the hooded figures. She was babbling something in my ear that I found difficult to make out. There were too many things wrong here for me to sort out: too many people and it should have been Lucy, not Deirdre, taking my hand and making sure I was included.

One of the hooded boys—they were just boys, I realized now, all three of them wearing hooded sweatshirts beneath their down parkas—nodded gruffly to me and I realized I had missed hearing his name. I noticed, though, that he had the same square jaw and ruddy complexion as Matt, even the same height and build, and it occurred to me that he must be the cousin from downstate I was always hearing about. I understood then why Deirdre was so anxious to pair me up with him. Deirdre the matchmaker. He wouldn’t do for Lucy because he was Lucy’s cousin.

I turned to the other three on the path: Lucy, Matt, and Ward Castle. Jesus, I thought, whatever possessed Matt to bring Ward Castle? Lucy had barely endured his insults throughout ninth-grade Latin. His favorite epithet for her was “Loose Toe-Hair.” She called him “Wart.”

“Hey, hey, hey, my darling Clementine,” he warbled to me. “How’s it hanging?”

Behind Ward I saw Matt wince. “You remember Ward Castle,” Matt said to me. “Ward’s my lab partner this year. He said he wanted to see the lake freeze.”

“Yeah, I’m here for the chemistry lesson,” Ward said.

Had Matt really believed Ward was interested in seeing the lake freeze? For the first time it occurred to me that Matt could be too trusting.

“Oh, we’ll be experimenting with an assortment of chemicals.” Deirdre had somehow worked her way around Matt’s cousin and Ward and repositioned herself next to Matt. She lit a joint and passed it to Matt. “Shall we start with some cannabis before the sacred rites begin?”

“Sacred rites?” Ward asked. “Like sacrificing a virgin?” Ward put his arm around Lucy and pulled her to him. The night was so still I could hear the rustle their down coats made rubbing against each other. Lucy’s head barely reached his armpit. She smiled up at him sweetly.

“Yes,” she said, “we’re going to sacrifice a virgin. A boy virgin. Any volunteers?”

I could see in the bright moonlight Ward turn as white as the snow.

“Hey, it’s a little cold out here for that stuff,” he said. “I thought you said you had a place.”

Matt jerked his chin in the direction the path led. “Yeah, it’s up here. We just have to cross the stream.” He turned and we followed.

We walked in twos now: Matt and Deirdre, Lucy and Ward, me and the nameless cousin, who seemed mute as well as nameless. He’s probably mortified to be paired with me, I thought. No doubt he had been taken with Deirdre before I showed up on the path. That was why Deirdre had been so anxious to pair us off, because if she got stuck with the cousin, I’d get Matt. And I knew that was the last thing she wanted.

The Schwanenkill was nearly frozen, but when I was halfway across it my foot broke through the ice. I would have fallen if the cousin hadn’t grabbed my elbow and steadied me. It was tricky, too, getting up the opposite side. He scrambled up the bank deftly, with more grace than you’d expect from a boy his size.

He’s probably terrified of ending up alone with me, I thought, as I struggled up the slippery bank. I’d taken my mittens off so I could grab tree branches to pull myself up, but my hands were still sore from climbing down the drainpipe and I couldn’t get a grip. My throat felt raw, whether from cold or holding back tears I wasn’t sure. I looked up, expecting the cousin to be well on his way to the icehouse, but instead he was standing at the top of the bank, his feet angled into the snowy slope for purchase, his arm stretched out toward me. I took his hand and was surprised to feel warm skin. He’d even taken his glove off to grip my hand better.

“Thanks,” I said when he’d pulled me to the top of the bank.

He shrugged and mumbled something. God, he was even clumsier and shier than I, I thought, but before he let go of my hand I felt his broad thumb stroke the inside of my wrist and the movement sent a warm electrical current through the core of my body, reigniting the warmth that had started that night in Deirdre’s tea.

We got to the icehouse, but the door was shut. I reached for the handle, but he stopped me.

“Uh, maybe they want some privacy,” he said.

“The four of them?” I asked incredulously.

He turned his head up the path and I saw two figures just disappearing over a rise. From the disparity in their heights I guessed it was Lucy and Ward. That left Matt and Deirdre in the icehouse. And it left me and the cousin out here in the cold.

“Where do you think they’re going?” I asked.

“Lucy said something earlier about sneaking back into the dorm. You two share a room?”

I nodded. I couldn’t imagine Lucy and Ward together, but then a lot of things had happened this night that I hadn’t been able to imagine. The cousin rubbed his hands together and blew into them to warm his face.

“I guess you’d like to get inside,” I said. “There’s a supply shed on the lower school playground…”

“You know, I’d like to see if Mattie’s right about the ice. I’ve lived near frozen ponds all my life, but I can’t say I’ve ever been there when the ice formed.”

I looked at the lake. It was black and still, but as far as I could tell, unfrozen.

“We could go to the swimming beach,” I said. “The boathouse is locked, but there’s a place in the rocks that’s almost like a little cave. At least it would be sheltered, and we can see the lake from there.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

We walked the rest of the way in silence, but it didn’t feel like an uncomfortable silence now. Once I thought I saw something moving in the woods and I was glad I wasn’t alone. I was glad, too, when we got to the top of the swimming beach steps that I didn’t have to warn him to be quiet so Miss Buehl wouldn’t hear us from her house. I led the way down the steps and showed him the hollow in the cliff wall behind the second sister stone. Part of the cave was under water, but there was a raised ledge along the cliff wall you could follow to get inside and then there was a flat rock above the water where two people could sit. It was out of the wind, but as soon as we sat down I started to shiver.

“Do you think we could make a little fire without attracting attention?” he asked.

“We can’t be seen from the mansion or the dorms here,” I told him. “And Miss Buehl is probably fast asleep.”

We gathered some branches and pinecones from the beach and banked them against the cliff wall. He took out a wooden match and lit it by striking his fingernail against its sulfur tip. Then we sat with our backs against the cliff and watched the lake. When he saw I was still shivering he put his arm around me and I put my head against his chest and closed my eyes.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes the fire was out. I looked at the boy next to me and in the shadow of the cliff it could have been Matt. I slipped my hand out of my mitten and with the backs of my fingers I stroked the side of his face, along the jawbone, just under his ear. He stirred at my touch and moved into the light that angled into the cave. In the dim gray light of dawn I saw that this wasn’t Matt, and wouldn’t ever be.

I became aware of a numbness spreading through my legs and I got up to get my blood moving. From the east, where the sun was rising, a flock of Canada geese were moving through the sky. I watched them land on the lake and, instead of skidding into the water, stand on its surface. I moved closer to the edge of the cave and saw that a thin layer of ice covered the water. I hugged myself against the cold and against the sense that I had missed something.

 

Chapter Eighteen

A FTER CHRISTMAS BREAK MATT AND LUCY’S COUSIN went back home. The three of them had come looking for me on New Year’s Day to take me skating, but my mother had turned them away at the door, saying I had chores to attend to, so I never did see the cousin again. I was disappointed, at first, that I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to him, but then, remembering that moment at dawn when I’d touched his face, I was relieved. I knew I’d be embarassed every time I saw him, even if he had been asleep.

By the time school started again the lake ice measured a good three inches. By all rights, we should have disbanded the first ice club. But we didn’t. When the ice was thick enough Matt suggested we turn the first ice club into a skating club. Deirdre was none too happy about this development because she didn’t know how to skate.

“You don’t have to come,” I told her, sharpening my blades. I still had the skates Lucy had given me. I’d changed from thick socks to thin in order to get into them this year. I hoped that my feet had stopped growing.

“Oh, is that right, Clementine? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

I’d noticed that Deirdre was a little on edge since Christmas break. She’d spent it with an aunt in Philadelphia because her parents hadn’t been able to leave their new post in Kuala Lumpur. Her aunt had told her, though, that she’d have to spend spring break on campus and she’d been enrolled in a boarding school in Massachusetts for the summer. I think that the sense of being shuttled between institutions and apathetic relatives was beginning to get to her. The only person she seemed sympathetic to those days was, oddly, “Lucy’s little shadow” as she called Albie, the lower school girl who still dogged our steps around the campus.

“I thought she gave you the creeps,” I whispered to Deirdre one day when I came back to our room and found her helping Albie with her Latin homework. I didn’t think she could hear me—the girl was in Deirdre’s single; Deirdre had come out to borrow Lucy’s Latin dictionary—but she looked up at the two of us and I realized it probably was obvious that we were talking about her.

“Hey, Albie,” I called. “So, you’re in Latin now. Salve!” The girl looked at me for a long moment and then looked down at her book without answering. There was something about her appearance that struck me as strange, stranger even than usual, and then I realized what it was: She was dressed all in white, a white blouse and a white pleated tennis skirt.

“Why is she wearing all white?” I scribbled on a page in my journal, which I showed to Deirdre.

“It’s Miss Macintosh’s influence,” Deirdre wrote back. “She told the girls about Emily Dickinson always wearing white.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” I wrote.

Deirdre shrugged and went back to Albie, shutting the door of the single behind her. Later, Deirdre complained to Lucy that I’d made Albie feel uncomfortable.

“Uncomfortable? How do you think she makes me feel—she looks like a ghost and won’t even talk to me?”

“I wish you girls would quit bitching at each other,” Lucy snapped. Deirdre and I both looked up in surprise, more at Lucy’s choice of words than her tone.

“Lucy, dear,” Deirdre cooed, “what have you been picking up from Ward Castle? Nothing contagious, I hope.”

Lucy flung her skate down on the floor. The serrated tip of the blade gouged a deep scratch into the wood floor.

“We don’t all give out on the first date, Deir.” Lucy grabbed her parka and stormed out of the room. I grabbed mine and followed her without looking back at Deirdre.

I found her on the path in front of the dorm, stalled in the crossroads between three paths. There was the path that led to the lower school, the one that led to the mansion, and the one that led to the lake. They had each grown a good foot narrower since Christmas break. It was hard now to walk even two abreast.

Lucy kicked at the thigh-high wall of snow. I put my hand on her arm, but she shook it off and suddenly, like a deer bolting from cover, she vaulted the snow mound into the woods. Half her leg disappeared into the snow but, miraculously, she kept on moving, surging out of each deep hole like a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke.

I clambered over the snow wall and tried to follow her, staying in her deep footsteps. I couldn’t keep up with her though. By the time her trail led me to the lake she was gone—I couldn’t tell which way. I looked out over the lake, looking for breaks in the ice, but there were none. I stood at the shore, listening to the sounds the ice made. The new ice made a skittering noise, as if a thousand mice were scurrying just below its surface. It made me nervous. I felt like something was crawling up my legs. I spun around and caught a glimpse of the girl Albie just ducking behind a tree.

“Hey,” I called, “have you seen Lucy out here?”

I saw half a face appear from behind a pine tree. One icy blue eye stared at me.

I took a step toward her, slowly, the way you’d approach a wild animal.

“Hey,” I said again. It was the way I’d talk to a scared animal. “You know me; I’m Lucy’s roommate. I’m looking for her.”

The girl didn’t move, but I had the sense she’d spring away if I moved an inch closer.

“You like Lucy, don’t you?” I said. “I like her, too. I’m just trying to help her.”

The blue eye narrowed, the way a cat’s eye half closes when it’s about to pounce.

“No, you’re not.” Her voice was surprisingly clear and strident in the cold air. It sounded like the scratching sounds on the ice behind me. “You just like her brother.”

“I think you’re confusing me with our other roommate, Deirdre.”

Albie smiled. “Yes, she likes him, too.”

“You certainly notice a lot.” I thought about what Deirdre had said about her, how she’d grown up in boarding schools and had no real family. Although I had a family it didn’t always feel that way. Since I’d come to Heart Lake my parents had seemed like distant strangers. My father, I think, was shy of the manners and clothes I’d acquired here; my mother, who I’d thought would be pleased that I was moving up in society, seemed disappointed I hadn’t made any friends other than Lucy and Deirdre. It occurred to me that Albie and I had something in common. She was the kind of girl I should be reaching out to, the way that Lucy had reached out to me back in ninth grade.

“I bet you know a lot of stuff about the girls here,” I said. I only meant to draw her out, but I saw right away that she’d taken it the wrong way.

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not telling you.” She practically spat the last word.

“Hey.” I moved a step forward, “I didn’t mean…”

I heard a crack behind me and turned back to the lake. For a moment I thought I saw a hole in the ice, but then the clouds moved and I saw it was only a shadow. When I looked back Albie was gone. She’d disappeared as quickly as the shadow that I had seen on the night of the solstice, and I wondered if it could have been Albie then. But the girl was only eleven or twelve. Surely she wasn’t running around the campus alone at night.

I made my way back to the dorm, sticking to the paths this time. When I got back to the room I found Deirdre and Lucy sharing a pot of tea and trying on skates.

“Hey, Jane,” Lucy said as I came in. “What do you know, my old skates fit Deirdre, too.”

AS THE ICE THICKENED THE SOUNDS IT MADE CHANGED, from a nervous skittering to a low-pitched moan I could hear even in my room. I listened to it, alone, on the nights Deirdre and Matt and Lucy and Ward went skating on the lake. It sounded to me like a woman keening and for some reason it made me think of India Crevecoeur and the daughter she had lost. I knew by then that it had been only the one daughter—Iris, for whom my scholarship had been named—who died in the influenza epidemic, but still the groans and wails the lake made could have been the sound of a legion of mothers grieving for a legion of daughters.

Deirdre was only interested in using the skates at night, so I was free to take them during the day. I felt squeamish sliding my feet into them, the way I felt putting on bowling shoes or stepping into the thick cotton swimsuits issued by the school. I’d never minded when I knew Lucy had worn them first. Now, though, I could feel how Deirdre’s wide ankles had stretched out the uppers and I imagined the rough leather liner was darker with her sweat. I wore heavy socks again and pulled the laces so tight I broke two pairs and had to knot them together again.

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 windburn. Your face is all red.”

ONE NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 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.

 

Chapter Nineteen

W E OUGHT TO DO SOMETHING FOR MAY DAY,” 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 to gather 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 Day rite.”

“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.”

IN 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.”

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.

IT WAS ONLY FIFTY-FIVE DEGREES AT DAWN ON MAY 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.

IT 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 my hands 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.

He was four steps below me, his head bent down, watching his footing on the slippery rock. I saw that beneath the white skull he wore the brown felt mask, but at the nape of his neck I could see his hair: sandy brown hair that just then turned fiery red in a ray of light that skidded across the lake from the eastern shore. I noticed, too, his shirt, a hockey jersey with the name “Corinth Lions” emblazoned on the back. Matt’s team. Behind him I saw Deirdre run left into the woods, pursued by one of the masked boys. Lucy stood facing her masked partner and then she turned and walked into the water and started swimming. I didn’t stay to watch if Ward would swim after her. It was hard to imagine him braving that cold water, but maybe that was what she was counting on. By taking to the water, she’d issued him a challenge.

I turned and ran across the path and into the woods. I skirted behind the lower school and the dorm and then headed west. I knew that once I got past the road there was a large tract of pathless woods, an old grove of giant hemlocks that Matt had once told me was one of the few patches of virgin forest in the area. I felt sure he would know I was heading there and that he’d know why. It was one of the few places where we were sure to be alone and, I knew, one of his favorite places. I wanted him to know that I knew it was him under the deer skull.

The sun was up now, streaming through the morning mist from behind me. I saw the first young hemlocks appear. As I ran, the hemlocks grew taller and the undergrowth thinned. The trees were spread out and evenly spaced like a colonnade. I was running through a wide avenue between the towering trees and their shadows, stretched out in front of me like a black pattern laid out on the gold forest floor. Echoing my own footsteps and the sound of my heart were the footsteps and ragged breath of the boy following me.

I came to a clearing and slipped on the hemlock needles. I lay on my stomach panting until I felt a hand on my shoulder turning me over.

We were both breathing so hard neither of us could talk. The deer skull mask was gone, but he still wore the brown felt mask Deirdre had made. My hood had fallen back.

He stroked my arm and took my hand as if to pull me up, but I pulled him down. He half fell on me, but he moved one leg in between mine to keep his full weight off me. I moved underneath him and felt the heat of his skin beneath his clothes. I touched, with the back of my fingers, a strip of bare skin above the waistband of his jeans, stroking the red-gold hairs, and he moaned. He lowered himself on me and I moved down so that my shift bunched up underneath the small of my back. I could feel the small, flat needles against my bare skin and see the slanting sun streaming over his back as he came inside me.

When we were done the sun was just above his shoulder and shining in my eyes, blinding me. I burrowed my face into his collarbone and felt the damp felt of the mask brush against my cheek. I could see the green thread Deirdre had used to stitch the seam and the small green heart she’d embroidered at the edge of the fabric. She’d used a different color for each mask. “So you’ll know your heart’s true love,” she had said. I was just about to ask him to take off his mask when I heard voices. I felt him stiffen. He got to his knees and snapped his jeans closed. I pulled my shift down and raised myself on my elbows to listen.

“As you can see the undergrowth has become progressively thinner. This is because the fallen needles of the hemlock make a thick, acid mulch in which the seeds of most plants cannot germinate.”

“Miss Buehl,” I whispered. “You have to get out of here.” He got to his feet and held his hand out for me, but I waved him away. “Go!” I hissed. “I’ll distract them.”

He seemed confused, for a second, about which way to go. The voices were approaching us from the north. I pointed south and said, “You can get back to the icehouse that way. Just make sure you make it off campus before they catch you.”

Again he seemed to hesitate. It occurred to me he didn’t like leaving me so abruptly after what we had just done.

“It’s all right, Matt,” I said, “we’ll talk later.”

He must have been reassured, because he turned and left instantly. I watched him running through the woods and then lost sight of him behind one of the hemlock trunks just as a troop of lower school girls burst into the clearing. As soon as they saw me the girls began screaming. Miss Buehl rushed to my side and knelt down beside me.

“My God, who did this to you? You’ve been butchered.”

For a minute she really frightened me. What I had done with Matt had been painful and I knew there might be blood, but when I looked down at my shift I was shocked to see that it was bright red. My hands and arms, too, were stained and lurid in the morning sun. I felt faint and for a moment I think I did lose consciousness, but then I heard a familiar voice.

“Die,” she said. I looked up and standing over me was Albie. She was holding a long strand of red crepe paper that she rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. “Look,” she said holding a crimson hand up in the sunlight, “Dye. It’s just dye.”

 

Chapter Twenty

M ATT WAS CAUGHT JUST OUTSIDE THE ICEHOUSE BY the extension agent who had come to use her boat. So, Lucy explained to me, it wasn’t really my fault because even if Miss Buehl hadn’t come upon us in the hemlock grove he still might have run into the extension agent on his way home.

It was kind of her to try to make me feel better, but we both knew she was lying. That first sight of me, in my torn and “bloody” shift, had sparked a hysteria not easily quelled even when the “blood” turned out to be crepe paper dye. Three of the lower school girls on Miss Buehl’s nature walk were so traumatized at the sight of me they had to be sent home. Not Albie though, because she had no home to go to. She sturdily related the whole story to anyone who would listen. To give her credit, she always ended by explaining I hadn’t been covered by blood after all, but somehow, the way she told it, the fact that I was covered with red dye came to sound even more lurid.

It didn’t help, either, that Miss Pike found Deirdre’s wine flask on the swimming beach and correctly assessed the contents as a mixture of cooking sherry and opium.

Still the scandal might have remained localized if it hadn’t been for the Founder’s Day picnic. I imagine that the dean and her staff debated long and hard that morning over whether to cancel the picnic or not. The problem was that this year India Crevecoeur had been invited to the Maypole dance. How to explain to our ninety-year-old founder that because a boy had been caught wandering the campus in a deer mask and bloodied shirt (the crepe paper dye again), and several girls were found half-naked and reeking of alcohol and opium, Heart Lake’s traditional Maypole dance might suddenly look like a pagan rite? By noon that day there was already talk in town that there was a campus cult that lured innocent boys into drugged sex orgies.

Deirdre laughed when she heard the rumor. “Oh, like they need to be lured into that.” We were sitting outside the Music Room, waiting to be called in to see the dean. Hurriedly we had agreed to say there’d only been Lucy’s brother (since Ward and Roy had gotten away unseen) and we’d asked him to play a part in a May Day pageant that we planned to perform later at the Founder’s Day picnic.

“What about the wine flask?” Deirdre hissed as Miss North came out of the Music Room and signaled for Deirdre to come in alone.

“Just say you bought it used and it must have had the opium in it already,” Lucy told her. “I mean, how much trouble can you get in for stealing some cooking sherry?”

Lucy shook her head as Deirdre followed Miss Buehl into the Music Room. “God knows what she’ll say.”

A few minutes after Deirdre went in, the door to the Music Room opened and Albie came out. She must have been called in to relate her story about finding me covered with dye again. She came over to us and I actually thought she might be about to apologize for causing such a stir. Instead she spoke to Lucy.

“You won’t get kicked out, will you?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Besides, I live just down the road. Even if they kicked me out of the school I could come back to visit.”

Albie shook her head. “You wouldn’t though. Girls always say they’ll stay in touch when they switch schools, but they don’t.”

“Yeah, but this school’s different. It’s in our motto.”

Albie looked confused. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t know what Lucy was talking about either and I wondered if she was still high from the opium. But Lucy got to her feet quite steadily and led Albie to the front door. She pointed to the fanlight above the door where the morning sun was shining through the colored glass. The words of the motto glowed like molten gold, but you couldn’t read them of course—they were backward from this side of the door.

“You know what that says?” Lucy asked.

Albie shook her head.

“Cor te reducit,” Lucy said. “It means ‘The heart leads you back.’ It means no matter where you go after you leave this place your heart will always bring you back here. It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I’ll always be here for you, too—me and Deirdre and Domina Chambers and Jane…”

I saw Albie frown and look over her shoulder at the mention of my name. I tried to smile encouragingly. Truthfully, Lucy’s speech had touched me, too.

“Go on now,” Lucy said, pulling open the heavy door and holding it for Albie. “Go back to your room and don’t worry. And don’t ever forget what I told you.”

The girl nodded and left. Lucy came back to the bench and slumped down beside me. I could tell her little speech had worn her out. I noticed that her hair was still damp from her morning swim in the lake. We’d been allowed to change our clothes, but there hadn’t been time to shower. Lucy had told me to wear my nicest outfit and when she wasn’t happy with what I’d picked gave me something of hers to wear. The plaid skirt she’d given me was a little too short and I kept pulling on its hem to cover more of my bare legs, which still had streaks of red dye from the crepe paper streamers. Lucy, in a dark blue jumper and turtleneck, looked proper as always, except for a piece of grass caught in her damp hair. I picked it out of her hair and noticed that there was a light film of sawdust on the back of her neck.

When the front door opened I sniffed at the spring air like a prisoner who may only have a few hours of sunlight left to her. What I smelled, though, was something like talcum powder and moth balls—a distinctly old-ladyish smell. Outlined against the bright gleam of lake, a small, bent figure stood in the doorway making little clucking sounds with her tongue. As she moved into the foyer her pale blue eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall above our heads and then settled on me and Lucy. As old as the woman was there was something unnervingly steady in her gaze. I had been scared about being questioned by the dean, but suddenly I wished it were my turn to go into the Music Room.

The front door opened again and Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade rushed in—I’d never seen either teacher move so fast. Miss Macintosh’s hair was coming undone from its chignon and Miss Beade’s face was bright pink.

“Mrs. Crevecoeur,” they both exclaimed. “We thought you were waiting for us to escort you to tea.”

“This was my home for forty years. What makes you think I’d need escorting,” the old woman answered without turning to look at the two flustered teachers. “Who are these girls and why aren’t they in the Maypole dance?” She waved her cane at us and came closer. “In trouble, are you?”

Lucy and I looked at each other and then at our teachers who hovered behind India Crevecoeur.

“Actually,” Miss Macintosh said, moving to Lucy’s side, “these girls are our two Iris Scholarship recipients. They expressed a desire to meet you and um…” I could see Miss Macintosh, who had begun so well and so boldly, was running out of innovations. Luckily Lucy, always cool in awkward social circumstances, came to her rescue.

“To thank you for the great privilege of attending Heart Lake,” she said, rising to her feet. For a second I thought she might even curtsy, but she merely held out her small hand, which Mrs. Crevecoeur, switching her cane to her left hand, took briefly and then let drop.

“This is Lucy Toller,” Miss Beade said, coming to Lucy’s other side and standing almost directly in front of me. “One of our finest students. Miss Chambers says she’s the best Latin student she’s ever had.”

“Toller, eh? Your mother’s Hannah Corey, isn’t she?”

Lucy nodded.

“The Coreys are cousins of the Crevecoeurs, if you go back far enough. You’ve got the same blue eyes my girls Rose and Lily had.”

I couldn’t see Lucy’s expression, but I imagined she was smiling modestly. I was hoping no one would notice the bits of sawdust that clung to the backs of her bare legs. I was too busy staring at Lucy’s legs to notice that Mrs. Crevecoeur’s attention had swerved in my direction.

“And who’s this girl lurking in the shadows here? Didn’t anyone ever teach you to stand in the presence of your elders, girl?”

Blushing, I got up and squeezed myself in between Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade to hold out my hand to the old woman. As I stood I saw the old woman’s pale blue eyes widen, the pupils enlarge and darken. For a second I was afraid I’d missed a button on my blouse or she’d noticed the red streaks on my leg. She looked at me in a way that made me feel naked.

“Who are you?”

“Another Iris recipient, Mrs. Crevecoeur,” Miss Macintosh patiently explained, clearly thinking the old woman had forgotten what she’d been told five minutes earlier. “Remember, there were two of them last year…”

“I’m not senile,” she snapped. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Jane Hudson,” I answered.

The washed-out blue eyes narrowed. “Who was your mother?”

“Margaret Hudson.”

“Her maiden name, child,” she said impatiently.

“Oh,” I said, “Poole.”

For a moment a film seemed to lift from the eyes. I could see how blue her eyes must have been.

“Your grandmother worked for me,” she said, “as my maid. I never thought I’d see her granddaughter here at Heart Lake.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like I’d been caught impersonating my betters—a serving girl found trying on her mistress’s fine shawl. I guess it was a shock for the old lady to find her maid’s granddaughter attending her school. But wasn’t that what the Iris Scholarship was supposed to do? Give us poor town girls a chance? I looked up at Mrs. Crevecoeur, prepared to offer some explanation, an apology even, but her eyes had drifted to a spot two inches above my head where, no doubt, she’d been accustomed to focus her gaze when talking to servants such as my grandmother.

I must have been overtired, because what I said wasn’t very polite. “Well, here I am. Better late than never.”

That wrenched her eyes down to meet mine. She gave me a curt nod and a tight smile. “Yes,” she agreed, as Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade each took a thin arm—suddenly she looked frail and very tired—and herded her off toward the Lake Lounge. I heard her as she left muttering to herself, “Better late than never. Ha!”

The door to the Music Room opened; Deirdre came out and, without looking at me or Lucy, hurried out the front door. Miss North came out of the Music Room and told Lucy that it was her turn to come in. Left by myself, I got up and paced the hall. I tried to distract myself by looking at the old photographs on the wall, but there was little in the dour faces of the Crevecoeur ancestors to hold my attention. At least not until I came to the picture directly above the chair where I had been sitting. There was India Crevecoeur again, in a smaller copy of the family portrait that hung in the Music Room. Yes, I could see the resemblance, the square jaw and haughty tilt of her chin. Both her older girls had it, too, only the youngest, Iris, skulked in the shadows. I moved closer and looked at the servant who hovered over Iris fixing her bow and for the first time recognized her. It was my grandmother, Jane Poole. That’s what old Mrs. Crevecoeur had been looking at over my head—her old servant who’d unexpectedly spawned an interloper to her precious school. “Well,” I thought, settling back in my chair to await my summons to the Music Room. “I might not be here long.”

NONE OF US WERE EXPELLED THOUGH. THE HARSHEST PUNISHMENT for the May Day affair, as we later referred to it, fell on Matt. What Lucy hadn’t figured on when she’d tried to persuade her to take the blame for the wine flask, was Deirdre’s history of boarding school expulsions. Heart Lake was her third boarding school in six years. Each successive school had been a little less prestigious, a little shabbier, than the last. Heart Lake was, at least, still a reputable school, but Deirdre knew that if she admitted that the flask was hers she would be kicked out of Heart Lake. What kind of school, on what frozen outpost, she might go to next Deirdre had no desire to discover. She might even end up on the Canadian border at St. Eustace’s—or St. Useless, as the girls called it—known as the school of last resort—where they sent you when no other school would have you.

She told the dean the flask belonged to Matt.

“After all,” Deirdre explained later to an enraged Lucy, “he doesn’t go here. What can they do to him?”

Heart Lake, of course, couldn’t do anything to Matt Toller, but Domina Chambers, as his mother’s old friend, could. True to her word, Domina Chambers had let us take the consequences of our actions without intervention from her. But when she heard that Lucy’s brother had brought drugs onto the campus, she stepped in. She went to Hannah Toller and told her, in no uncertain terms, that Matt mustn’t be allowed to compromise Lucy’s chances of making something of herself. Obviously, Heart Lake wasn’t far enough away to protect Lucy from her brother’s bad influence. And since Lucy couldn’t be sent farther away, there was only one solution. Matt must be sent away.

When Lucy told me what she had overheard in her house, I reassured her that nothing would happen right away. After all, there were only six weeks left to the school year. Surely they wouldn’t send Matt away until the fall. And by then the whole incident would have died down and the Tollers might relent.

But Domina Chambers was adamant. On May 4, Matt took the train south along the Hudson to Cold Spring, where he was to attend the Manlius Military Academy for Boys. I didn’t even get to see him before he left.

As miserable as I was at Matt’s expulsion from Corinth, Lucy was inconsolable. In fact, the aftermath of May Day seemed to leave her physically sick. She lost her appetite entirely and grew thin. Mrs. Ames, frantic to “put some meat on those twigs of bones” as she put it, stuffed Lucy’s book bag with freshly baked biscuits, which Lucy promptly tossed into the lake.

“An offering to the Lake Goddess?” I asked her one afternoon when I found her standing on the Point lobbing biscuits into the water.

She turned to me and I saw that besides how thin she had grown, there were dark blue circles under her eyes and her skin had a greenish, sickly pallor. Her hair, once bright and shiny, hung lank and tangled around her face. She looked like someone three feet underwater, like a drowned person.

“Don’t you think we’re getting a little old for that stuff, Jane?” she asked me. Then she turned and walked into the woods.

Even though she said she no longer believed in the Lake Goddess, I heard her praying to someone in the night. The first time it happened I thought I was dreaming. I awoke to an incessant whispering and when I opened my eyes I saw something crouched at the foot of Lucy’s bed. The figure was so small and compact I imagined for a minute it was a succubus, like the demon in Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” which Miss Beade had shown us in art class. No wonder, I thought groggily, Lucy has looked so worn out: that thing is sucking the life blood out of her.

That thing, though, was Lucy. With her knees drawn up to her chest and Matt’s old hockey jersey pulled down to her ankles, she was rocking back and forth, muttering something I couldn’t make out.

I wondered if I should go to her, but there was something so private, so naked, about her grief, I felt I would be intruding.

I didn’t know whom to go to.

Deirdre and Lucy weren’t on speaking terms since the wine flask incident. Nor did Deirdre seem upset by what had happened on May Day. She ate heartily and had put on weight in the last few weeks. She’d thrown herself into her schoolwork, anxious to redeem herself after the threat of getting thrown out. When I tried to talk to her about Lucy she answered brusquely, “Miss prima donna should get over it. She’s just pissed I took her boyfriend on May Day.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know? I was with Ward, which means she ended up with Roy. I’ll tell you this: Ward wasn’t sorry. He told me Miss Ice Princess—that’s what he called her—would hardly let him touch her all those nights we were taking turns in the icehouse.”

I thought about the scene I had witnessed in the icehouse. I’d always hoped the masked boy had been Ward. I told myself that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Matt and I had been together on May Day.

I even tried talking to my mother about Lucy when I went home for Memorial Day weekend.

“If I were you I’d quit worrying about that Toller girl,” she told me. “She’ll land on her feet. You ought to be thinking of how you can help out around here. Charity begins at home.”

I expected the lecture to go on, but it ended abruptly with a coughing fit. My mother had been running the carpet sweeper over the threadbare living room rug while we talked. She kicked at its unraveling hem and muttered through her coughing, “Damned sawdust.”

I looked at the rug. I couldn’t see any sawdust, but my mother’s hand on the sweeper’s handle did look yellow. I looked at her and noticed for the first time how sallow and worn-out she looked, as if after a lifetime of living in the paper mill’s shadow the sawdust had crept under her skin.

“Are you feeling all right, Mom?”

She put her hand on the back of her hip and leaned back. “I could use a little help around here.”

My mother had told me what to do my whole life, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her asking for help.

“School will be over in two weeks,” I said. “I’ll be able to help out then.”

I waited to see if she’d mention any summer job. For the last three years she’d gotten me a baby-sitting job with one of the West Corinth families.

“I think your father could use you around the house this summer,” she said, and then resumed sweeping up the invisible sawdust.

I FINALLY WENT TO THE ONE PERSON WHO, I WAS SURE, would share my concern over Lucy— Domina Chambers.

I waited for her after her last class and walked back with her to the mansion.

“Yes, I’ve noticed she’s lost weight fretting over Matthew. She’s got a sensitive nature, not unlike myself. I can never eat in times of sorrow. Not like your other roommate, eh? Nothing seems to interfere with Miss Hall’s appetite.”

I smiled nervously, unsure of how I was supposed to respond to comments about a fellow student’s eating habits. It seemed, somehow, inappropriate. I steered the conversation back to Lucy.

“She doesn’t sleep either. I’m worried about her.”

“Yes, I am, too. I have a plan, though. Don’t worry, Clementia, I’ll take care of Lucy.”

We’d gotten to the mansion steps. Sitting on the bottom step, hugging her books to her chest, was Albie.

“Ah, Alba, I’d nearly forgotten it was your tutoring day.”

Albie glared at me as if Domina Chambers’s forgetfulness was my fault. Domina Chambers turned back to me. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about Miss Toller?”

I saw Albie curl her lip back and I realized it sounded as if I had been telling on Lucy. I blushed, not only because I looked like a snitch, but because I had a sudden, unbidden image of all that there was to tell: Specifically, the picture that came to mind was of the masked and horned figure in the icehouse.

I shook the picture away. Why had I thought of it? But then I realized what had reminded me of that night. It was Albie’s sweater, a blue Fair Isle cardigan several sizes too big for her. It looked just like the one I’d borrowed from Lucy; the one I’d left hanging from a branch on the side of the path.

“Miss Hudson?” Domina Chambers repeated my name. “Are you satisfied?”

I tried to think of something to say that would make it clear to Albie that I was only looking out for Lucy. “Well, school’s almost over and Matt will be home for the summer,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll feel better then.”

“Oh, no.” Domina Chambers shook her head so hard some strands of silver hair came loose from her chignon. “The military academy has had such an excellent effect on Matthew his parents have enrolled him for the summer program. As for Lucy, I have other plans for her summer.”

IT TURNED OUT THAT D OMINA CHAMBERS’S PLANS FOR Lucy involved taking her to Italy for the entire summer break, where she had a grant to study at the American Academy in Rome. Lucy would accompany her and have the opportunity to see the art and architecture of ancient Rome firsthand.

“She says it will be excellent for my classical studies when I go on to college. Of course, I’ll major in classics. I’m also supposed to study Italian. On the weekends we’re going to Florence and I’m supposed to memorize like every painting in the Uffizi.” Lucy was packing her suitcase. I was sitting on her bed looking out the window at the lake. We’d started swimming classes these last few weeks of school and I’d thought about coming back out to the lake over the summer and swimming, but now I wondered if I would do it alone, without Matt or Lucy.

“Do you have to go?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t your parents let you stay if you asked to?”

Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make? Matt’s not here anyway.”

I’m still here, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Lucy did rouse herself enough to realize she might have hurt my feelings.

“And you’re always so busy over the summer anyway, Jane. Hasn’t your mother hired you out as an indentured servant?”

I shook my head. “No. She seems to want me to stick around this summer.”

“Gee, that’s a change. Well, think of it this way, at least you’re not being shipped off to some other boarding school, like Deirdre or Albie. Your summer can’t possibly be as bad as theirs is going to be.”

But Lucy was wrong. When I came home after the last day of school I found my father home from work in the middle of the day. He sat me down in the living room and told me that my mother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had six to eight months to live.

 

Chapter Twenty-one

O VER THE SUMMER I WATCHED AS MY MOTHER LOST thirty pounds and most of her strength. By August she was barely able to get out of bed to use the bathroom. She lay, sunken and yellow, waiting for me to bring her meals she couldn’t eat and complaining about the way I prepared them or how long it took me to bring them. She never complained about the cancer or the pain, which I knew about from the way she sometimes drew her lips back from her teeth, but if I had hoped that sickness would put an end to my mother’s endless complaining about me, I would have been sorely disappointed.

She complained about the way I dressed and the way I wore my hair. “You look like a deranged old maid,” she told me one day. My hair was pulled back in a sloppy bun, which was as close an imitation of Domina Chambers’s chignon as I could manage, and I was wearing a plaid gym kilt and a salmon-colored button-down shirt that Matt had given to Lucy and Lucy had given to me. “Is this why I sent you to that fancy private school, so you can look like a freak?”

I could have pointed out that she hadn’t sent me anywhere; I had earned the scholarship for Heart Lake on my own. But then I looked at her. She had lost most of her hair to chemo by then and her arms had grown so thin that they fell back from her shoulder bones and disappeared under the covers, making her look like a double amputee. Her legs, on the other hand, had swollen to twice their normal size. Ballooning under the covers they looked like one bloated appendage. A mermaid’s tail. That’s what she looked like: a bald, yellow, armless mermaid. This was the person calling me a freak.

So I told her that this was the way the girls dressed at Heart Lake and, Lucy had told me, at college. I tried to distract her by reading to her my college application essays. I showed her my SAT scores and explained how good they were. I told her that Miss Buehl thought I had a very good chance of getting a scholarship to Vassar.

“Another scholarship,” she said, looking out at me through her yellowing eyes. “That’s all they’ll see you as: the charity student. It’ll never make any difference. You’ll always be the housekeeper’s granddaughter. Mill folk. That’s what my mother tried to explain to me, but I wouldn’t listen. Now look at me, I can’t even die without the sound of that infernal mill pounding in my ears.”

The sound of the logs being processed into lumber and paper had always been a low hum in the background of our lives that I’d long ago stopped hearing. I tried to close the windows so she wouldn’t hear it, but it made the house insufferably hot, and the hum of the mill seemed to vibrate through the windows. Each time a lumber truck passed our house it made her old iron bed shake and she would wince in pain from the motion. Sometimes, when I heard the sound of gears shifting on the hill beneath our house, I would try to hold the headboard to keep it from shaking, but then she accused me of shaking the bed myself.

My father found me one day sitting on the floor outside her room.

“Try not to mind the things she says,” he told me. “It’s the cancer talking, not her.”

I tried not to listen to her, but by the end of the summer I felt as if everything in my world had shrunken and wasted away.

So accustomed was I to the look of sickness that it was something of a shock, then, to see Lucy on the first day of school. Apparently Domina Chambers had been right about the salutary effects of Italy: Lucy had bloomed over the summer. She’d put on weight, especially in the hips and chest, her skin was golden and her hair, pulled back in a new elegant twist, shone like the Mediterranean sun.

“All that pasta and olive oil,” she said unpacking silk shirts from Bellagio and sweaters from Harrods (they’d stopped in England for two weeks on the way back) and beautiful leather shoes.

“My God, you’ve got tits,” Deirdre announced the minute she saw her. “Why does everything I eat go to my ass?”

I expected Lucy to make a snide comment—Deirdre had gained even more weight over the summer—but instead she smiled benignly and said, “Helen says if we all ate like the Mediterraneans we’d be much healthier. She’s going to start a Mediterranean cooking club. Do you want to join with me, Deirdre?”

And so, along with all the other surprises, I found that Lucy had apparently forgiven Deirdre over the summer and wanted to be friends again.

“Matt’s doing fine at military school,” Lucy told us. “He spends the weekends at Aunt Doris’s house. He says Roy asks about you, Jane.”

“Oh?” I said, feigning nonchalance. I would have been happier to hear that Matt himself was asking for me, but perhaps this was just his oblique way of communicating.

“He’ll be back for Christmas break,” she said. And that was all. As if seeing her brother twice a year was suddenly just fine with her. “Oh, and he says he was sorry to hear about your mom,” she added. “We both are.”

“Yeah,” Deirdre chimed in, “tough break.” And then they were back to making plans for the year. Cooking class and a cross-country ski club—“Helen says it’s chicer than downhill skiing”—and a play.

“Helen says that when she was here they did Aristophanes’s The Frogs in the lake,” Lucy told us.

“In the lake?” Deirdre asked. “What a hoot! We’ve got to do it.”

Lucy and Deirdre kept busy that fall, pursuing extracurricular activities with a near frenetic zeal. I couldn’t participate in most of the activities because I was expected to spend my afternoons and weekends at home. I was most disappointed about not being in the class play. They’d decided, instead of The Frogs, to do their own version of Iphigenia based on Euripides’s two plays, Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. They called it Iphigenia on the Beach.

It came about because when our Greek tragedy class, which Domina Chambers and Miss Macintosh taught together, read Iphigenia in Aulis, Deirdre was furious that the play ended with the girl’s death.

“It just sucks,” Deirdre blurted out, “It’s so… so patriarchal. They kill this innocent girl so these men can go off and fight their stupid war, which they’re fighting all because some impotent jerk couldn’t satisfy his wife in the first place.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know, Miss Hall, that Euripides apparently agreed with you. Although I doubt he would have phrased it in quite the same words.” The class giggled and I noticed Miss Macintosh furiously scribbling notes in her lesson plan book. Someone wondered aloud what the Greek for “sucks” was. I’d noticed that even Domina Chambers seemed more tolerant of Deirdre since Lucy had warmed to her.

“How do we know that Euripides felt that way, Miss Chambers?” Miss Macintosh asked. I noticed that Miss Macintosh eschewed the title Domina.

“Euripides wrote a second play called Iphigenia in Tauris in which Iphigenia reappears and tells us that just before the priest would have slit her throat she was spirited away by Artemis to the island of Tauris and a deer was sacrificed in her place.”

“Cool,” said Deirdre.

“Why don’t we read that one next?” asked Lucy.

I saw Miss Macintosh stabbing her finger at her carefully prepared syllabus (I believe we were scheduled to read Medea next), but Domina Chambers answered without a glance in her direction.

“Excellent idea, Miss Toller. We shall.”

And so we read Iphigenia in Tauris. Deirdre was disappointed that Iphigenia’s stay in Tauris wasn’t the goddess/
commune she’d thought it would be. Instead, Iphigenia, as a priestess of Artemis, is forced to sacrifice any shipwrecked sailors who are unlucky enough to wash up on the Taurian shore. But Lucy loved the play. Iphigenia’s brother, Orestes, and his friend Pylades, come to the island, but because Iphigenia doesn’t recognize him she prepares to sacrifice him at the altar of Artemis. Lucy loved the scene where Iphigenia and Orestes talk about how they’ve lost, respectively, a brother and a sister without knowing that they’ve already found each other.

“A perfect example of dramatic irony, wouldn’t you say, Esther?” Domina Chambers asked Miss Macintosh, who sullenly agreed. Since having her syllabus preempted she’d retreated into an incommunicative funk at the back of the room where she kept copious notes in her lesson plan book. I knew, too, that she hated when Domina Chambers ignored school protocol and referred to her colleagues by their first names in the presence of students.

“I know it’s corny, but it gives me the chills,” Lucy said. “She almost kills her own brother.”

Their identities are revealed only when Iphigenia recites a letter for Pylades to bring home to Greece. “A greeting comes from one you think is dead. Your sister is not dead at Aulis.” Lucy begged Domina Chambers to let the class do the play.

“We can do it on the swimming beach,” she said. “We can use one of the rocks as the altar at Aulis and Artemis can appear on a boat to take her to Tauris. One of the rocks can be Tauris…”

I noticed Miss Macintosh lift her head from her lesson plan book and raise her hand to object. “We couldn’t possibly. Think of the insurance problems. Girls falling in the lake…” As she spoke I imagined it: stola-clad girls getting tangled in their sheets and sinking to the bottom of the lake. But Domina Chambers was not one to be swayed by conventional concerns. She waved a hand in Miss Macintosh’s direction as if she were batting away an annoying insect. I noticed Miss Macintosh turn pink above her white high-necked collar. Domina Chambers admitted that the plays were not her favorites and she thought the addition of a happy ending for Iphigenia was pure soap opera melodrama; however, she thought the material lent itself to reinterpretation.

“We should always recall,” she lectured, “that the Greek playwrights felt free to bend the mythic material to their purposes—as Shakespeare did—” here she shot a meaningful look at Miss Macintosh. “And so, why shouldn’t we?”

Of course, Lucy was chosen to play Iphigenia. Deirdre played Orestes. They wanted me for Pylades, but I couldn’t make enough rehearsals, so they got another girl. All the speaking parts were taken by seniors. The swim team played the chorus. They stood in a lifeboat, led by Miss Pike, who looked splendid in a Greek stola. She insisted on holding a lifesaving float in case any of the girls went overboard, but she managed to hold it in such a way that it looked like some kind of heraldic icon.

We all wanted Domina Chambers to play Artemis. She demurred at first, recommending Miss Macintosh, as a sop, I think, to her wounded feelings, but when Miss Macintosh stoutly refused, she agreed.

Although I couldn’t be in the play I helped Deirdre with the costumes. We made a gold helmet embossed with an owl for Miss North, who’d agreed to play Athena, and a silver helmet with a moon and deer etched in tin foil for Domina Chambers. We already had a deer mask for the deer who takes Iphigenia’s place at the altar. We used one from May Day. I noticed it was the one with the green heart embroidered on it.

The problem, as I heard Deirdre and Lucy discuss day after day, was how to make the switch—the deer for Iphigenia—dramatically. Deirdre suggested the priest could fling a sheet over Lucy and then she could slip under it and get in the boat with Domina Chambers.

“But everyone will see me wading up to the boat. It ruins the effect. And where’s the deer going to be before she slips under the sheet? There’s no backstage, you know.”

“Hey, you’re the one who was so hot to do it on the swimming beach!”

I had to admit I almost enjoyed hearing them bicker. But then Deirdre came up with a brilliant solution.

“If we use the second stone as the altar the deer can wait in the cave behind it. When I throw up the sheet you can slip in the water and swim underwater to the boat. The deer can swim underwater to the rock and pop up under the sheet.”

Lucy liked it. The only problem was getting someone small and agile enough to play the deer. Someone who was also a good swimmer and wouldn’t mind sitting still in the cave throughout the whole play.

“I know just the right girl,” Deirdre woke us both in the middle of the night to announce. “Albie. She’s small and she can move without making a sound. And she’d do anything for Lucy.”

On the day of the performance my father agreed to come home early from work to take over watching my mother. The play was timed to end at sunset and so I found myself sitting by my mother’s sickbed anxiously watching the sun sink over the lumber mill smokestacks.

“You think by staring at it you’ll stop the sun in the sky,” I heard my mother’s voice from the bed behind me. I had thought she was asleep.

“They’re doing a play on the swimming beach,” I told her.

“On the beach? What nonsense. It was no lucky day you won that scholarship. You should be learning practical things not wasting your time with rich girls. You’ll never be more than a servant to them, that’s what my mother always told me…”

“Lucy’s not rich.” I was only able to interrupt my mother’s tirade because she had run out of breath. She started to wheeze now, impatient to answer me. I helped her sit up and gave her a drink through a straw.

“You wait,” she said when she’d regained her breath. “Lucy’ll come into her share of wealth some day and then see how much you’re worth to her.”

I’d have asked her where Lucy was going to get this money, but my father came home and I could tell by the angle of the sun that I’d already missed most of the play. I ran all the way up River Street and then cut behind the Tollers’ house and followed the Schwanenkill to the south end of the lake. I could see when I got to the icehouse that the play was still going on. I started out along the eastern side of the lake, but I realized I would miss the whole thing by the time I got to the swimming beach. I knew where there was a rock on the east shore where I could sit and watch at least the end of the play. I wanted to see how they managed that last scene.

As it turned out, I had a perfect view of the stones. I could see, as I settled myself on the rock, that the second sister stone was covered with a white sheet that glowed a fiery red in the light of the setting sun. It looked exactly like the bloodred altar it was supposed to represent.

From where I sat I could see things the audience was not supposed to see. It didn’t ruin the effect, though, when a hand reached out from the cave and tugged the sheet away, revealing the prone shape of a naked girl tied to the rock. I could hear, over the still water, the gasp of the audience on the swimming beach.

“Jesus,” I thought, “Domina Chambers really is fearless!” But then I realized, as the rest of the audience must have soon discovered, that Lucy was wearing a pale pink swimsuit that clung to her newly ample figure like a second skin.

The chorus’s dinghy swayed erratically as a figure in a robe with a gold foil mask disembarked and waded through the thigh-deep water over to the rock. The players had been lucky that the warm weather had lasted this long, but still I didn’t envy the actress playing the priestess who had to stand in this water. I stretched out on my rock and dangled my hand in the water. It felt icy.

The robed figure lifted a dagger and held it above Lucy’s white arched throat. Just as the blade came down toward her throat, the priestess lifted her left arm and her long trailing sleeve hid the victim from the audience. There was a scream that echoed off the wall of the Point and rippled over the still water and a bright spray of blood splashed the priestess’s robe. Even from where I sat it looked so real that I stood up and tried to see Lucy sneaking into the cave behind the stone. But the setting sun was in my eyes, turning the water such a lurid red I could almost believe it was Lucy’s blood flowing into the lake. Barely a minute passed, but it felt like an eternity. I looked toward the beach and could see that many in the audience had also gotten to their feet and were craning to see what was behind the priestess’s robe. And then the priestess swept away her arm again and we saw, in Lucy’s place, a slaughtered deer, blood dripping from its torn neck. At almost the same moment a small boat rounded the Point and we saw Lucy at the prow, swathed in scarves the color of the sunset. Behind her stood Artemis holding a chaplet of gold above Lucy’s head. The boat was rowed by Miss Buehl in a short toga.

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.

 

Chapter Twenty-two

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 LUCY HADNT 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 community college 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 fairy tale 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.

As I walked along our hall I stripped off my coat and scarf. How had Deirdre and Lucy been able to stand it? It was like a sauna in here. When I put my hand on our doorknob it was warm to the touch.

I heard, again, the sound of crying as I opened the door. On the bed under the window—Lucy’s bed—someone was lying under the covers with her back to the door. I thought it was Lucy and that she must have been the one who was crying, but as I crossed the room I heard the sound again, and another sound, like metal scraping metal. I turned in that direction just as the door to the single opened and saw in the doorway, not Deirdre as I expected, but Lucy.

She was wearing a red flannel shirt—Matt’s, I thought—that was so big on her that when she held up her arms and put a hand on either side of the doorjamb, the shirt covered the whole doorway. If she hadn’t been so short she would have blocked my view of the single. I could see, though, over her head, but I couldn’t see why she was trying to block my view. Then we both took a step forward at the same time and nearly collided.

“Jane,” she said, “what are you doing back?”

“My mother died,” I said, as if that explained everything. I was looking at Deirdre’s single, trying to figure out what was different about it, but the only thing I could see that was different was that she had gotten a new bedspread. A red bedspread. I didn’t even notice that Lucy wasn’t saying the things she should have been saying, like “I’m so sorry” or “How terrible.” I took another step toward the room so that I was on the threshold and realized that what I was looking at wasn’t a red bedspread. It was a sheet soaked in blood.

I looked at Lucy and then at the body under the covers on Lucy’s bed.

“She’s asleep,” Lucy whispered. She took my hand in her small hand and pulled me into the single. She had to pull quite hard because I didn’t want to go in there. I’d forgotten what a strong grip she had.

She closed the door behind us.

I stood over the bed and noticed that the blood had soaked through the mattress.

“She tried to kill herself?” I asked.

Lucy looked up at me for a moment and then shook her head. “Yes, it’s Deirdre’s blood,” she said, “but she didn’t try to kill herself. She was pregnant. She had a baby.”

“Deirdre was pregnant? How could that be?”

“You remember last year, the nights we spent out at the lake, and May Day. I think it was May Day because she didn’t go out all those weeks it rained and I think the baby was early, it was so small…”

I grabbed her arm and shook it. I noticed how thin her arm felt under the big shirt. “She had the baby here?” I said, her words finally sinking in. “Alone?”

Lucy looked offended. “I was here,” she said, “I stayed with her all night.”

“Why didn’t you go to the infirmary?”

“She begged me not to. She said they would definitely throw her out and put her in a reform school this time. What could I do, Jane? And then it came so quick. I think because it was so small…”

It was the second time she had mentioned the baby’s size, but small or not it surely wasn’t invisible.

“Where… ?”

Lucy looked over at Deirdre’s bureau and I followed her gaze to the large metal tea tin, the one decorated with golden mountains that Deirdre used to store her pot.

“It wasn’t breathing,” she said. “It was born dead.”

My knees felt suddenly watery as if the tendons holding them together had just melted. I brushed my hand against my face and it came back wet. The one window in the single was opaque with water condensation. I walked over to the window and wrenched it open. I leaned out the window and threw up onto the ledge.

Lucy came up behind me and put a cool hand on my forehead. She held my hair back until I had finished throwing up and then sat me down on the inside ledge. She held me by the shoulders until I stopped shaking.

“Fuck, Lucy, we’ve got to tell someone.”

She shook her head. “They’ll throw her out for sure. What good will it do?”

“But what if she’s still bleeding.” I looked at Deirdre’s bed. Could a person lose that much blood and be all right?

“I gave her a sanitary napkin and it seemed like most of the bleeding stopped an hour ago. I think she’ll be all right.”

“But what are we going to do about that?” I pointed at the tea tin. “We can’t just leave it there.”

“Of course not,” Lucy said reasonably. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The ground’s too frozen to bury it…” For some reason I thought of my mother’s body lying in a funeral home’s refrigerator in Albany, waiting for the spring thaw. I tasted bile in my throat and would have thrown up again if Lucy hadn’t placed two cool hands on either side of my face. Looking into those blue eyes of hers I suddenly felt calmer.

“You understand why we have to take care of this, Jane? It’s not just for Deirdre, it’s for Matt, too.”

“But he wasn’t with her on May Day,” I said.

“He was the only one caught that morning and Deirdre will say it was him. Remember how she caved in on the wine flask. It will ruin Matt’s life forever.”

“But if the ground’s frozen…”

“But the lake’s not,” she said, “we can sink it in the lake.”

 

Chapter Twenty-three

W ELL HAVE TO TAKE THE BOAT,” LUCY SAID AS WE were leaving the dorm. “It’s the only way we can be sure it sinks deep enough.”

“It” was the way Lucy referred to the thing in the tea tin. She had placed the tin in her gym bag and carried it, not by the handles, but cradled upright in her arms—the way a person would carry a cake in a box.

Before we left the room I checked on Deirdre. She was sleeping soundly, her lips moist and parted, her cheeks pink in the overheated room. She didn’t look like a person bleeding to death, but like someone drugged.

“I gave her some of that tea she’s always saying is such a good sleep potion,” Lucy told me. I noticed the red lacquer box lying empty beside the bed. “She’ll be OK.”

When we left the dorm I turned onto the path but Lucy steered me into the woods. “We can’t risk taking the path,” she said. “We might run into someone.”

The campus felt deserted. I knew that some teachers stayed on over break. Miss Buehl, for instance, tended her lab experiments and followed animal tracks in the snowy woods. There was a groundskeeper and Mrs. Ames, but I imagined that the workers from the town, like my taxi driver, would have gone home by now rather than risk getting caught out here in the storm.

Lucy’s footpath through the woods was so narrow we had to walk single file. At first I kept my eyes on her back, on her pale blue snow parka, but my gaze kept drifting to the navy blue gym bag that she cradled over her right hip. Although I couldn’t see it in the bag I kept picturing the tin. The gold mountains under a blue sky. A green lake in the foreground.

I turned my eyes to the path. It had been trod into the snow over many weeks and then frozen into a knee-deep crevasse—a miniature of the ones in the film strip on glaciers Miss Buehl showed us. I thought of the weeks it took Lucy to make the path and wondered if it would be filled in by the approaching storm.

We came out at the south tip of the lake, not far from the Schwanenkill. When I looked up I noticed for the first time that there was a thin sheet of ice covering the lake.

“Damn, it must have frozen just last night,” Lucy said, more to herself than to me. She shifted the gym bag to her left hip and eased herself down the bank. She swayed in the deep, untrodden snow and I thought that I should offer to hold the gym bag, but I didn’t.

Lucy stretched one leg down to the lake’s surface and tapped it with her booted toe. A splintering sound echoed across the lake.

“How thick is it?” I called and heard my words echo hollowly. I looked up at the sky and saw that the ominous green clouds hung low over the lake like a shallow dome. I felt as if Lucy and I were being pressed between the sky and snow-covered ground, like autumn leaves ironed between two sheets of waxed paper.

“Not very,” Lucy said coming back up the bank. “It’s thinnest where the Schwanenkill flows out of the lake. I think we can break the ice with the boat oars.”

First we had to cross the stream, which was only partially frozen. Lucy, usually so surefooted, seemed unbalanced by the weight she was carrying on her hip. I pictured her falling and dropping the bag and the tin snapping open.

“Here,” I said, crossing the stream ahead of her, “take my hand.” I planted one foot in the middle of the stream and felt the icy water creeping through the soles of my boots. I noticed when I took her hand that Lucy was shaking.

We made it to the icehouse only to find that the door was locked.

“The extension agent must have locked it after she saw Matt here on May Day,” Lucy said. We hadn’t used the icehouse this winter. “But I doubt she could have locked the doors on the lake side because they don’t close completely. We’ll have to go around.”

I looked at Lucy and noticed how pale she was; her skin had a greenish cast to it, as green as the snow-laden sky. After all, she had been up all night with Deirdre and the shock of witnessing that birth—a stillbirth, no less—was no doubt beginning to tell on her. I was suddenly filled with hatred for Deirdre. Why should we have to clean up her mess? But then I remembered that we were doing it for Matt, too.

“I’ll go,” I said. “You stay here and rest on this rock.”

Lucy nodded and sat down on a large flat rock. She hugged the gym bag to her chest and closed her eyes.

I went down to the edge of the lake and studied the narrow ledge of mud and ice that ran in back of the icehouse. I noticed that one of the doors was wedged partially open—just as it had been on the night I’d approached it from the ice.

I came back around and called to Lucy. “This door is open.” I heard “open” echo across the lake. “But the front door is probably padlocked so I’ll have to get the boat out onto the water and bring it to shore.”

I half expected Lucy to object. I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to get the boat out by myself. But she only nodded and lay back on the rock, one hand resting on the gym bag by her side.

I made my way along the icy edge of the lake, one hand on the wall of the icehouse. Both my feet were soaked by the time I reached the open door and pulled myself into the small hut. I was relieved to see that the rowboat was still there, with both its oars lying in the shallow hull. The prow of the boat was facing the lake.

I opened both doors and then went to the rear of the boat, took a deep breath, and pushed. At first nothing happened, but then I heard a scraping noise as the boat inched forward on the wooden floor. I crouched down and put my shoulder to the stern and pushed again. The scraping sound changed to a crash that was so loud in the echoing silence of the lake that I was sure someone from the school must have heard it. I looked across the lake toward the cliff wall of the Point and for a moment thought I saw a figure standing on the rock. I thought of Miss Buehl in her cottage just beyond the Point. But then the figure vanished and I couldn’t be sure if I’d imagined it or not.

I looked down and saw that the boat was drifting out into the lake.

I lunged after it, caught the rear, and pulled it back to the shore. My jeans were now soaked up to my knees, so I figured I might as well wade through the water, guiding the boat with me until I’d gotten it past the icehouse. By the time I’d pulled it halfway up onto the shore I couldn’t feel my toes anymore. I trudged up the bank, the wet sucking sound my boots made somehow familiar. I paused and saw in my mind my mother’s hospital room and heard the wet gurgle of the pump that cleared her lungs of fluid. I felt suddenly, of all things, immeasurably sleepy and I think that if I had been alone I would have lain down in the soft snow and taken a nap under that pillowy green-gray sky.

But from where I was I could see Lucy lying on the rock and the navy blue gym bag lying beside her. I shook myself awake and approached her. She didn’t move at my approach even though the sound my boots made scraping through the crusted snow seemed unbearably loud to me. I looked down at her and saw that she had fallen asleep. Again I was startled by how pale she looked, her eyelids and lips blue in the cold, shimmering air. I shook her arm and her eyes snapped open.

“I’ve got the boat,” I said.

She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about, but then she noticed the gym bag and nodded her head. She got up slowly, swayed unsteadily, and sat back on the rock.

“We need some rocks,” she said.

It was my turn to look at her uncomprehendingly.

“To weigh it down,” she explained, gesturing toward the bag.

I looked around but of course any rocks that might have been there were two feet under the snow.

“In the stream,” she said. “There are always rocks at the bottom of the Schwanenkill.”

I turned back to the stream, expecting her to follow me, but she stayed seated on the rock. At the stream’s edge I knelt in the snow and took my gloves off. I reached into the middle of the stream, I was into it up to my elbow before my fingers grazed the bottom. I felt frozen mud and something hard and round. I pulled up a smooth, round rock about the size of my fist and laid it on the stream bank. When I’d found about a dozen rocks I stuffed them into my pockets and went back to Lucy.

I emptied the rocks onto the flat rock next to where she sat and she nodded.

“That’ll do it,” she said. Then she slid the tea tin out of the gym bag and opened the lid.

Inside there was a tiny white baby about the size of a small cat. Its skin was nearly translucent, gleaming blue and pink like an opal. Its eyelashes and the light hair on its scalp were sandy red. Lucy picked up a rock and wiped the mud off on her jeans. Clean and dry the rocks were a beautiful greenish bluish gray—the color hazel eyes were sometimes. Lucy arranged them around the baby as if she were packing eggshells in tissue paper. Then she took out a white cloth from her pocket, shook it out, and smoothed it over the baby. It was one of the linen napkins from the dining room, stitched with a heart and the school’s motto: Cor te reducit. The heart takes you back. Not a bad requiem for the little thing about to be buried in the lake. Then she closed the lid and fastened the metal catch.

“We ought to wrap something around it to make sure it doesn’t open. Do you have any string?”

I shook my head. String? What the hell was she thinking? She opened her coat and felt the top of her jeans. “I’m not wearing a belt,” she said. “Are you?”

I opened my coat and unthreaded my belt through the belt loops of my jeans. It was made of thick, webbed cotton—I’d bought it at the army/navy store in town—with an adjustable brass buckle.

“Perfect,” Lucy said, tightening the belt around the tin and fastening the buckle. “That should hold. Let’s go.”

I had to help Lucy into the boat while she held the tin. This time I did offer to take it from her but she shook her head and held on to it more tightly.

I pushed the boat into the water and then hopped in and grabbed the oars. I turned the boat around so the prow faced the lake and I faced the shore rowing. Lucy sat behind me. When the boat grazed thicker ice she directed me.

“There’s a path of thinner ice that goes all the way through the lake,” she told me, “it must follow the underground spring.” I remembered the day we had skated here and she had gone through the ice. The place she had gone in must have been over the spring.

Twice we had to stop and I had to pass her one of the oars to chop the ice. I was afraid, each time, that she’d drop the oar into the lake and we’d be stranded out here.

“It must be deep enough here,” I said after we were stopped by the ice for the third time, but she shook her head and battered the ice with the oar. The chopping sounds reverberated against the layer of heavy clouds and the rock wall of the Point. The jutting prow of the Point seemed close now and I could see, a little to the east, one of the three sister stones emerging from the ice, standing like a silent witness to our deed.

“We’re more than halfway across the lake,” I said. “We’re getting too close to the other shore.”

Lucy stopped hammering with the oar and looked behind her. Her hair was so damp with sweat that it had frozen together in clumps and when she swung her head back to face me I could hear the sound her frozen hair made brushing against her nylon parka.

“OK,” she said, “here.”

We both looked down at the tea tin sitting in the bottom of the boat. The blue sky over golden mountains looked to me like a dream of summer during winter. I looked up at the lowering black-green sky above us and tried to remember what such a sky looked like. Lucy knelt down in the bottom of the boat and picked up the tin. She tried to hold it in one hand while using one hand to brace herself against the rim of the boat to get up. The boat careened toward the east shore and then swung back to the west, sluicing us with icy water.

“Jesus,” I said taking the tin from her, “let me have that.” I heard the stones knock together inside the tin. The whole thing felt lighter than I expected and I wondered if it would really sink to the bottom. “Let’s get this over with,” I said. I balanced the tin on the edge of the boat and looked at her. She nodded.

I leaned over, holding the tin parallel to the water’s surface in a patch Lucy had cleared of ice. I didn’t like to think of it flipping over and sinking to the bottom upside down. When it was a few inches from the surface I let it go. I watched it sink below the water and saw the blue sky and gold mountains turn pale green and then vanish into the green-black depths of the lake. I stared for a moment at the shards of white ice floating on the black water until I noticed that white crystals were beginning to fill in the black spaces. I thought the water was freezing again in front of my eyes and I was afraid that when I looked back at how we had come the path across the lake would be sealed with ice. But when I looked up I saw that the path back to the icehouse hadn’t closed. It was the green sky above that had opened up to disgorge its burden of snow, a stream of snow so thick it felt as if the sky were falling down upon us.