Old Lovegood Girls Read online

  In hallowed halls removed from strife

  Where they may seek the mental life:

  Reflect and learn,

  Reflect and learn

  The lights dimmed. The organ struck up a sinister dirge with offstage gunshot noises and cries of agony. “However, fate had other plans,” intoned Miss McCorkle as Horace Lovegood. “Just as my school was nearing completion, the War Between the States broke out and the building became a Confederate hospital.” Instead of seeking an education, local daughters covered their curls with nurses’ caps and rushed onstage in bloodied aprons bearing unpleasant-looking pans. And rushed off again.

  Lights up once more, and a masked, leotarded figure danced out from the wings, removed Horace Lovegood’s top hat and shrouded his shoulders with a fringed silvery shawl, then danced off again. Standing tranquilly in front of the backdrop of the school, the bareheaded founder (Miss McCorkle had expertly slicked down her hair) explained to the audience he was now “speaking from his final resting place.”

  “Following the War came Reconstruction, and our noble building was once again appropriated, this time by the federal government to house the local Freedmen’s Bureau. More dark days were to follow during which much careless damage was done to the premises. However, Lovegood College at last opened its doors to young ladies in 1872. I missed that opening by seven years, though I hung on till the age of ninety. However, there it is … there they are …”

  The founder’s ghost departed, and girls in billowing Victorian dresses replaced him. They silently strolled back and forth in front of the painted Doric columns, then dropped gracefully to the ground to freeze into a tableau vivant.

  A tall figure rose from the audience and mounted the steps to the stage, her narrow ankles wobbling slightly in her high-heeled pumps. It was the mournfully beautiful Miss Maud Petrie, Lovegood’s English and Composition teacher. Fingering the throat of her high-necked blouse and looking on the verge of some great emotion, she said that the poem she was about to read had been written by Mary Louisa Summerlin, “who was Lovegood College’s class poet of 1918.” Miss Petrie drew a paper from the deep pocket of her flowing skirt, put on her reading glasses, which hung on a chain around her neck, and embarked on “The Melodies of Lovegood College”:

  I dreamed I climbed the curving stair

  To visit our old room

  The moonlight shone on my old bed

  Dispelling present gloom.

  Delivered in Miss Petrie’s mournful, cello-like voice, the elegiac poem floated through the chapel’s darkened air, leaving behind scattered images and phrases.

  Lingering on the lawn till early dusk …

  Midst friendship’s gentle bonds …

  The stars blink out, one by one,

  Around the rising moon …

  Far removed from stir and strife …

  Precious hours of lonely musings …

  The moonlight falls upon my bed …

  When I am at my journey’s end,

  I’ll climb the curving stairs …

  In the darkened chapel Feron was trying not to think about the life before her present life. Each made the other seem like a fantasy. The sentiments composed by the starry-eyed class poet had to contend against degrading phrases that might last Feron’s entire life.

  —Your mother is a congenital liar.

  —My mother is a genital liar.

  —Ha, ha! And that, too. That, too!

  —You don’t think. So I have to think for you.

  —You act like you’re so grown up, but you wouldn’t last an hour outside my house.

  —It’s my right.

  —You are legally my property.

  Feron was also thinking about the girl who sat beside her on the chapel bench. Was a person like Merry born with her openheartedness, or was it seeded and grown, year after year, by people who had raised her to choose the generous and the true, themselves building on some rich soil of forebears?

  But what if you had been raised by disappointed people who were always telling you they had expected a better life than this, who had withdrawn into themselves and took shortcuts with truth when it served their needs?

  If one escaped those influences, was it possible to put on a good disposition, like a costume, and practice and practice until no one, except yourself, knew what you had been like before?

  4

  “Take that wing chair, Feron. It was the girls’ favorite chair in my office at Saxon Hall, when I was headmistress there. Are you settling in at Lovegood?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think so.”

  “You and Meredith Grace seem to get on well. Or Merry, as she likes to be called.”

  “Yes, we get along very well.”

  “In my experience, roommates go one of four ways. They don’t get along at all. Or they find each other compatible enough, but each makes her own friends. Other roommates adopt a friend between them and form a threesome. Then there are some who form an immediate bond and prefer the company of each other. You and Merry seem to have done that.”

  “Merry is easy to be with. There’s nothing underhanded about her. We’re comfortable together.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Now, Feron, I finally received the transcript from your high school. Top grades for three years, then nosedive, then a flatline of incompletes …”

  “Yes, ma’am. It was not a good time. The incompletes, they were because I left school.”

  “Your principal kindly sent a letter with the transcript. He wanted to be sure I was aware of the stresses you’d been under. The letter revealed nothing I hadn’t heard already from your uncle in our phone conversation, but it’s always useful to have another point of view. Meanwhile, I’ve had a word with your teachers here at Lovegood. It’s all satisfactory, even from Mrs. Sprunt.”

  “I’ve always had trouble with math.”

  “Mrs. Sprunt says it’s because you missed some crucial steps in geometry, but she says you’ll catch up.”

  “I hope so.”

  “So far, Lovegood seems to be working out for you. Perhaps this is the place for me to add that you can count on a discretionary ear in this office if ever you feel the need to say more about that stressful period of your life.”

  Here Susan Fox chose not to go ahead with her Saxon Hall method, where she had coasted on her imperiousness and acted confidently on her instincts. At Saxon Hall, she would have risked it. (“Tell me, Feron, what was it like to sleep outside in that Chicago park? How did you keep warm? What were your thoughts?”) Either the girl would be disarmed and plunge into confidences, or she would draw back, but what was there to lose? The confident headmistress at Saxon Hall, before her comedown, would have waited and tried again.

  However, this was Lovegood, where a humbled Susan Fox, starting afresh, was schooling herself in the safer southern art of evasive overlay. “You know, Feron, there’s not much that can surprise me after years of listening to girls’ stories from the chair you are sitting in now. Will you remember that?”

  “I will, Dean Fox. Thank you.”

  “Florence. Please come in.”

  “Yes’m, I’ll just catch my breath.” Florence Rayburn, Lovegood’s senior cook, had not climbed the majestic curving staircase to the dean’s office since their meeting a year ago.

  “Take a seat, Florence.” Dean Fox waved her toward the wing chair.

  “You carried that chair all the way from Boston.”

  “You remembered! Yes, girls seem to feel at home in that chair. Not too at home, however. The high back keeps a person nice and straight.”

  The dean congratulated herself as the cook settled into the upright confines of the wing chair. Last year when invited to sit down, Florence had frozen, her countenance betraying a reluctance close to recoil.

  We’re stepping over a line here, the dean remembered thinking. So be it, she thought this year, let’s find more lines to step over.

  “Florence, I’ve had some ideas, if you’ll indulge me. You recall ou
r discussion about potatoes last year?”

  “I sure do. All that peeling every single day, but the girls, they love their mashed potatoes.”

  “Have you heard of this new prepackaging?”

  “You mean like those TV dinners?”

  “This is more recent. Someone peels the potatoes, cuts them up, seals them in a package, and freezes them. You simply open the package and drop the contents into boiling water. I’m proposing we purchase, say, a week’s worth—we’d have to work out the numbers—and mash them up and see how they taste. See how they taste to the girls. Are you willing to experiment?”

  “Yes’m, but …”

  “We’ll see how they go over with the girls. Now here’s my next brainstorm, if you’ll bear with me. I want the girls taking the business courses to have some real-life experience with running an enterprise rather than only working out imaginary problems in the classroom. I’d like you to show them how you go about ordering foodstuffs, calculating quantities and prices, allowing for built-in problems like breakage and spoilage—and whatever else a cook in charge of a kitchen has to allow for.”

  “Would it be all the business girls?”

  “Not all at the same time, certainly not. We’d schedule them in twos or threes. They would take notes and go back to class and type up their reports and make their calculations. Would you be willing to show them how you run your kingdom?”

  “Just so it’s not around the meal times.”

  “Oh, certainly not, we’d work out the most convenient times for you. Are you willing to try?”

  “I never heard of anything like it, Dean Fox, but I’ll do my best.”

  “Thank you, Florence.” The dean stood up from her desk, and the cook promptly vacated the wing chair. “We’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve arranged things.”

  Above the dean’s desk hung the Lovegood College coat of arms, anonymously embroidered by someone who knew an impressive variety of stitches. Even Winifred Darden could not furnish the name of the accomplished needlewoman whose work had predated Winifred’s own arrival. (“When I came here thirty-one years ago, it was hanging on that wall where the sun was bleaching out its colors. It shows to much better advantage on the shady wall behind your desk.”)

  The school’s motto was ESSE QUAM VIDERI. “To be rather than to seem.” The dean’s first impulse had been to move the coat of arms to another shady wall and replace it with art more to her taste. Above her desk at Saxon Hall had hung winter and summer versions of a stately colonial home. She had bought them in an antique shop and reframed them in handsome oak. When asked by an early visitor whether the house in the pictures had been in her family, she had thought “why not?” and from then on had equivocated. “No, I found them in an antique shop, but they remind me of my grandparents’ house.”

  She’d had no qualms about transferring the dour portrait of Horace Lovegood looking choked by his double cravat to an outside waiting room wall. But days and weeks went by, and the embroidered coat of arms still hung in its pride of place. It seemed to have set its will against hers. I was here long before you were and will be hanging here long after you’re gone.

  ALTIORA PETO was the Saxon Hall motto. “I seek higher things.” Most people in Susan Fox’s previous life, including herself, had been striving fiercely to live the reverse of the Lovegood motto, to seem rather than to be. And yes, there had been a time to seem, a time to climb, digging in with your fingernails, beating out the others, staking your claim on “higher things,” preening your seem-worthy-self atop your pinnacle. Until the fall from grace into the dreary lowlands of humiliation and self-hate. Florence’s recent colloquial use of the verb to carry evoked a droll image of herself, Susan Fox, trudging down life’s great highway, lifting her skirts to cross the Mason-Dixon line, hauling the proven wing chair on her back.

  5

  “In the Middle Ages, a fiefdom was the estate or domain of a feudal lord,” said Miss McCorkle. She dictated rapid-fire from her five-by-eight notecards, and the girls wrote as fast as they could in their notebooks because that was the way she ran her classes. The more words from Miss McCorkle’s brown-edged cards you corralled into your notebooks, the easier Friday’s quiz would be. “However, in modern usage it has come to mean an area over which somebody has control.”

  Lovegood College itself was a collection of little fiefdoms. Miss McCorkle controlled what went on in her Quonset hut, which had been meant to serve as her temporary classroom only until Lovegood’s new wing was finished in 1947. But she stuck with her Quonset hut, approving of a trek through the outdoors for young bodies, the mental stimulation of putting on a wrap and leaving one place for another. The hut was a reminder of the one-room schoolhouse of her childhood. On extra-cold days she kept two kerosene heaters going and wore her McCorkle tartan scarf wound around her neck until, heated by her own teaching, she tore it off like a dancer removing a feather boa. To hammer a concept into their souls, she startled them with inventive scenarios. (“When you lose track of what has gone before, or don’t bother ever to learn it, you might as well fling open the gates of your city and invite the barbarians in for tea.”)

  Meanwhile, over in “the new wing,” as it was still being called a decade later, Dr. Phillips, PhD, presided over his Bible fiefdom (Pop quiz on 1 Samuel: Q. How did Samuel answer the night voice three times? A. “Here am I.” 1 Samuel 3:2. Q. How did Samuel answer after Eli advised that the voice might be the Lord calling him? A. “Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears.” 1 Samuel 3.9)

  And the beautiful Miss Petrie, MA in English, who had them for both Literature and Composition, was perhaps reading aloud to her classes in her mournful cello voice, and Dr. Alistair Worley, PhD in psychology, was leading the girls in animated discussion of how today’s mimeo topic, still smelly and damp off the machine, had relevance to their lives: struggles of famous characters with discordant personalities and divided selves (St. Augustine, Tolstoy, Paul Bunyan, Persephone), or juicy highlights from Freud’s analysis of Dora—and an unforgettable session on the subject of virginity sparked by an assigned magazine story whose last line read: “But there was one thing Queenie missed.” Dr. Worley offered free evening counseling sessions to any girl who volunteered to type up his stencils and run them off on the machine.

  A front-facing downstairs room in the main building was home to the math and science classes of Mrs. Eloise Sprunt, who had studied to be an architect but married her professor instead. She had been won over at first sight by the classic lines of Lovegood’s old brick building, had gone to the trouble of looking up the architect’s 1858 drawings, and found, of all things, an attached sketch of the proposed school. (“After Hart House, Richmond, built 1610.”) There in the old sketch were the same double-sash windows as the ones in her classroom, the same front elevation, and the four Doric columns. Lovegood’s architect had been inspired by a Stuart mansion, not a Georgian one, as she had first assumed. Now widowed, her children in their thirties, she lived in a smart downtown apartment she had remodeled herself, and walked to work. Any girl who had the temerity to protest that she’d never been good at math or science earned the “Sprunt scrunch,” a facial expression somewhere between pity and scorn. In her twelve years at Lovegood College, Mrs. Sprunt had yet to fail a student in either subject, including trigonometry and physics. She trusted in their hidden reserves, once she got them past the old shibboleth that math and science were “men’s subjects.”

  6

  Merry Jellicoe knew she looked forward, more than she should have, to sinking into the dark embrace of her bed after Lovegood’s lights-out bell. Stretching her legs beneath the cool sheet, she first rejoiced in having gotten through another day. Then she would view the eastern night sky outside her window. She prided herself on having offered Feron the first choice of beds, though she had known she was running a serious chance of losing the window.

  If it was a moon night, she could calculate, thanks to Ritchie and his compass, where it would be hanging in the sk
y at home. If there were only the stars, she would arrange the constellations as they would appear above Jellicoe’s distinctive five black barns. When it was overcast or raining, she had her home visions for that, too.

  Except for church camp, she had never slept away from home. And Ritchie had been with her at church camp, so when she was feeling choked with homesickness there, she would head over to the junior division “to check on my little brother.”

  In her first days at Lovegood, she went around with the choking feeling. As she had confided to Dean Fox in their conference, she did her best to hide it from others.

  “A person my age should be over being homesick,” she told the dean.

  “Missing your home usually indicates you’ve been happy there.”

  “We’re very close as a family. There’s only the four of us, but we do a lot of things together. All of us work on the farm during the busy season. My younger brother and I will take over Jellicoe Enterprises one day. That’s why I was sent here instead of Meredith, where Mama went. I’m named after her college, you know, but Lovegood has more advanced business courses.”

  “Yes, we can be proud of our business school. It’s too bad more girls studying liberal arts don’t cross over and partake of the business courses. Who among us couldn’t improve herself with the basics of accounting, not to mention shorthand?”

  “I love my stenography class. Every day, I master more of the symbols. It’s like, I don’t know, being prepared for a secret society.”

  “An inspired comparison. What other courses do you like?”

  “Oh, Literature and Composition. I love Miss Petrie. Everybody does. When she reads Paradise Lost aloud you can hear a pin drop. And in Composition, she shows us how a great short story got that way. It’s nothing like my high school English classes. And I guess I like History because Miss McCorkle has such an original way of making you remember things.”