Miss G had suggested we ask Fiamma to help decorate the dormitory with the flowers: “You know, Fiamma is wonderful with flowers.” When we told her what we were planning, Miss G’s eyes had turned brilliant, and she had said longingly. “Italians are very artistic. They have the imagination, the flair. They are full of surprises.” Then she had brought forth the business about no repression of libidinal urges and how repression led to aggression and told us to let our imaginations soar, our emotions rule our hearts.
And to our surprise Fiamma had acquiesced, rising obligingly from her bed and mixing goldenrod with lavender in big jars by the windows. We discovered her gift with her hands that night. When she had finished with the flowers, she piled up fruit and tins of sardines in the basins along the center of the dorm. Finally, she helped us with our disguises.
Naturally, Ann was designated as our reader. She perched in the windowsill with her torch, intoning the lilting verses of “The Eve of St. Agnes” in her monotonous, nasal voice and blowing her nose from time to time. While she read, we acted out the poem: we ated and drank and discarded our clothes as Madeline does, before we climbed into our beds to wait for our imaginary lovers. We hid behind doors or under our beds in the role of the real lover, Porphyro.
Di, in her panama hat, tilted at a rakish angle, and galoshes, danced up and down the dormitory with Meg, holding her around the waist and turning her around and around. Fuzzie sang madrigals with flowers in her red curls. The Trevelyans shimmied around the dormitory completely naked, hugging one another like lovers, their thin shoulder blades like white wings in the moonlight.
By the end of the feast we were all wandering about half naked, our makeup smudged, crushed flowers in our loose hair. We were drunk on the juice and wine. We sweated and giggled and sighed, playing the lovers in one another’s beds. Then the batteries on Ann’s torch failed, and she had to stop reading the poem.
What many of us were to remember best was the white, full disk of the moon. There was thunder and lightning, but no rain. Fuzzies, who was always particularly sensitive to smells, was to remember those of the flowers, mingled with those of hot, sweating bodies, which increased as the night went on.
Why the game of St. Agnes’s Eve?
Our robes drifted to our knees.
Half-hidden like mermaids in seaweed,
We dreamed awake and saw
In fancy, Miss G, fairest of all.
“The Eve of St. Agnes” was our favorite poem, although, or perhaps because, Miss Lacey had said we would do much better to read Milton’s “Samson Agonistes.” Of course, our feast did not take place on St. Agnes’s Eve. We did not know when that holiday was. Ann maintained it was probably in December or, anyway, sometime in midwinter, because the poem speaks of such bitter cold. Now it was midsummer for us, and thus the appropriate time.
We wanted, insofar as possible, to make the feast resemble the one in the poem. We wanted to have the same sort of food – the candied apple, the quince, the plum, but in the end all we could procure was the usual midnight feast food: tins of condensed milk and sardines and peaches in sweet syrup. Of course, we had no beadsman, no beldame; we had no Porphyros for our Madelines, but we made believe.
When the detective asked us about the feast, we told him about the food and the alcohol, but no one mentioned Di jumping out of the cupboard in her galoshes and painted mustache and panama hat and not much else, in her role of Porphyro, and climbing into bed with Meg, where they made the sorts of noises they associated with love. No one spoke of passing the pineapple juice to Fiamma, or of her drifting drunkenly around the dormitory, stumbling blindly into the basins in the center of the room.
No one mentioned Miss G.
Who was invited to the feast and why?
Only the girls on the swimming team were invited, naturally. We were all there: Fuzzie, her sheet slipping down her plump, shiny hips, and her daisy chain tilting into her eyes as she sang madrigals; Pamela, half asleep in pajamas tied with a belt around her thin waist, eating peaches, the syrup dripping down her arm; Ann, sitting up in the window seat with her yellow torch and her thick glasses, her collarbones protruding from the sheet tied around her neck, blowing her nose; Di, in pajamas and galoshes, sporting a painted mustache; Meg with a scarf tied tightly across the lilt of her full breasts, lisping softly in Di’s ear; the Trevelyans in nothing at all; Lizzie, elegant in white pajamas; Mary in her riding boots and plumed hat, pretending to be Porphyro arriving at the castle on his wild steed “with heart on fire”; and Sheila, spending her time eating tinned sardines and dreaming of love and death.
What Fiamma did at the feast
Around a neck a knot she ties,
She drapes a sheet around.
While her loss draws nigh
With daisy chains we are bound.
None of us knew exactly what cards Fiamma was playing at the midnight feast. We do know that we asked her to join in with us, and to our surprise she did so with enthusiasm. Perhaps she had simply been waiting to be asked, or perhaps the dressing up made her think of her father, who was still languishing in some small hospital somewhere, suffering from increasingly high fever, Miss G said.
Fiamma told us that her father had once taken her to Venice during the carnival season. Everyone dressed up in costumes with masks, so that no one could tell who they were. They had kept their costumes a secret even from one another. Fiamma had made her own costume. She had dressed up as a mermaid with a wonderful tail and mask, and in the crowd of people and the confusion, her father had asked her to dance, not knowing who she was.
Fiamma threw herself into our preparations. She used our sheets, blankets, and scarves to make us look like knights and ladies from long ago. She draped our sheets around us, tied scarves around our heads, and threaded a flower through a plait, standing back to survey her handiwork critically. Instead of jewelry she used the flowers we had stolen from the cutting garden and hidden in the bathroom under the stairs. She made flower chains for our ankles and wrists and forehead, splitting the stems with a knife and linking them together.
She made up our faces so that we hardly recognized on another. She outlined our eyes with dark pencil and flecked our cheeks with gold paint, so that those of us who were playing Madeline looked like angel. The Porphyros – usually the taller girls: Di, Mary, Pamela, and Lizzie – wore pajama trousers and loose shirts and raked panama hats and, sometimes, galoshes or boots. Fiamma painted their upper lips with black pencil to make them look like men. Like a magician she transformed us. We felt like the inhabitants of some strange, distant land, and in our anonymity and the half dark of our dormitory, we could do anything, say anything, be anything we wanted. We were wild and free. Afterward, because of the heat and sweat, much of the makeup ran, streaking our faces like those of savages.
Fiamma, too, was transformed. We would always remember her, pretending to be the beadsman, telling her rosary on her knees and shivering with cold in the hot dormitory. She looked suddenly old, her smooth brow wrinkled, as though her whole life had passed her by, and she had become the ancient beldame, hobbling blindly down the moonlit dormitory, leaning on a stick for a cane and warning an imaginary Porphyro of the dangers in the house.
Saying, “Mercy, Porphyro! Hie thee from this place:
They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!”
Other staff members who knew about the feast
We found out afterward that Miss Lacey was awakened by the noise. She told Sheila, her favorite, that she had heard a noise coming from Kitchener, but she remembered the midnight feasts of her own youthful schooldays and smiled indulgently, thinking we should be allowed some freedom – after all, this was not the Middle Ages. She decided it was better not to interfere.
The night watchman, John Mazaboko, the tall Zulu from Natal, who was later to die tragically n his room in a fire, said he heard a noise coming from Kitchener but considered it was not his role, a black night watchman in a white girls’ school, to report on them.
He also heard footsteps in the very early hours of the morning, when the sky was a faint pink. He was wandering up and down the gravel path under the ancient oaks, the light of his torch punching holes through the dark of the hydrangeas. He looked up and saw a blond girl wrapped in a striped towel, drifting toward the pool in the dawn light.
He said that he called out, “Sala khale,” the Zulu greeting, telling her to go carefully, but when she did not respond, he did not follow her, because he, too, had been drinking skokiaan to pass the interminable hours of the empty night, and he thought he might have seen a ghost.
What Miss G did at the feast
None of us had ever seen Fiamma drink so much. She drank from the tin of condensed milk, the thick liquid trickling down her chin. She drank glass after glass of the spiked pineapple juice, which the Trevelyans passed her. She drank the white wine mixed with red that Miss G had provided. She broke a glass, and we had to try to scoop up the pieces with our bare hands in the half-light so that no one would cut her bare feet.
The Trevelyans said afterward that they’d heard what no one else had, a first soft knock on the door, and they said that when they heard it, they had a feeling of anticipation and dread. They feared that it would all end badly.
Then there was a louder knock, which everyone heard. We all kept very still, and some of us, who were naked, crouched down behind the basins, which Fiamma had filled with food and which were now almost empty. The door opened slowly, and Miss G appeared. She loomed, barefooted in her jumpsuit, a long, dark shadow in the light from the corridor. She shut the door behind her quickly and stood there, legs apart, hands on her hips, staring at the disorderly scene in the moonlight. We were all standing around drunkenly, half naked, linked in pairs, flowers in our loose hair, or false mustaches running into our mouths.
She called for Fiamma. She called again, and Fiamma emerged slowly from the shadows. She tottered forward, or perhaps Bobby Joe pushed her, though Bobby Joe denied it later. Bobby Jean, who became a social worker, said she saw her twin pull Fiamma from beside the bed where she was hiding when Miss G called for her. Then Fiamma floated forward. Everyone else was too drunk to speak.
We did recall that Fiamma had remained half naked since early in the evening. Her sheet had slipped down to her waist, baring her full, white bosoms. Her hair was loose. Her crown of daisies tilted across her brow into one eye. Her gold eye shadow was smudged, her lipstick, spread wide like a clown’s. Like all of us she smelled of alcohol and sweat.
We moved away from her, as Miss G strode toward her and grabbed her by the arm and held her close as though she were smelling her. She placed her hands on Fiamma’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. Then she picked up a scarf that had fallen to the floor and slung it around Fiamma’s neck like a halter. “Now you come with me,” she said and led her away like a horse. Fiamma stumbled forward blindly. We watched in amazement as the door opened, and they disappeared into the garish neon light.
It was after Fiamma had gone that the batteries in Ann’s torch went dead, and only moonlight remained. We clasped one another deliriously in it; we stroked one another’s skin, our soft new breasts; we rolled around in one another’s beds and pretended to be Fiamma and Miss G and made the sorts of noises we hoped they were making at last.
Part Five: Disappearance
What happened on the day of Fiamma’s disappearance
On the day Fiamma was to disappear, she rose at dawn to swim. Ann saw her sit up in her bed in the silence of the sleeping dormitory. In the faint light she already looked like a specter in her soft, long-sleeved nightdress that she had washed, despite regulations, so that the school soap would not aggravate her sensitive skin. Her heavy hair was plaited down her back in a long, limp rope. She told Ann, speaking softly so as not to awaken the others, she had dreamed that she was swimming through the still, trapped water of her lake at home, the mist rising from its gray surface. She felt her body buoyed up by the water and slowly spinning free, escaping into the cool air. She rose, she soared. But when she awoke under her white sheet, she was soaked with sweat.
Ann had acquired a reputation as a remarkable interpreter of dreams, because she had read Freud’s dream book, but she did not attempt to interpret that one.
Fiamma said that she had hardly slept, but she was going swimming. Ann reminded her it was Sunday, and she was not supposed to practice but to dress for chapel. Miss G would not be up this early, anyway. “I need to cool off,” Fiamma said.
Ann watched her remove her nightdress and wander around the disarrayed dormitory, already hot, thought as hot as it was to become that day. Adorned only with the camphor bag, which trailed on the end of a string, bouncing against her back, she skated her hand across the identical iron bed ends, lined up side-by-side, looking for her racing costume. Her once-proud step, arched and smooth, as if she had never worn shoes, seemed to Ann to have lost its spring. She picked her way with the blank gaze of the sleepwalker, lips slightly parted.
Ann couldn’t help staring at her firm white bosoms, the smooth swell of her stomach. She felt the affliction of her own bony body, thick neck, protruding collarbones, shortsightedness. She imagined Fiamma on her hands and knees, begging for mercy.
Fiamma stepped unsteadily into her thin, black racing costume. She tied a striped towel about her waist and picked up her green plastic cap by the buckle from a heap of dead flowers.
Fiamma said nothing about the events of the night before as she walked slowly barefooted past Ann, along the length of the dormitory called Kitchener, now looking like a trash heap, and out the door into the gold light of the early December moring.
In chapel that day
Twelve of the thirteen girls on Miss G’s team trooped in late for Sunday chapel. Fiamma was not among us. Ann had promised Fiamma that she would wait for her at the door, but when she did not arrive, Ann came in with the rest of us. We stumbled in one behind another, our hated heads bent. We were all still dazed; we floated up the blue velvet carpet that lines the center aisle, sweating, light-headed, dry-mouthed, and nauseated.
The twins, who had been up later than anyone, had come in through the side door and were still clumsily arranging the carnations, lilies, and baby’s breath in two identical silver flutes on the altar. As scholarship girls, they were made to perform certain functions in the school, despite their lack of artistic ability.
