We did not like aristocrats.
Naturally, being Italian, Fiamma was Roman Catholic, Miss Lacey went on, but she would attend religious services with the rest of us. She begged us to be gentle with her and to be mindful of her background. She said Fiamma had what she called a breathing disorder. Miss Lacey knew so much about Yeats, but little about young girls.
On the subject of R.C.’s
We stood on the dry lawn during break, the sun warming our shoulders. We sipped hot tea from tin mugs and ate what we called squashed flies and stubbed the square toes of our lace-up shoes in the red sand. Bobby Joe picked her nose and maintained that the Pope kept all his old jewels locked up in vaults in the Vatican, while everyone else starved. Di told us her mother said Catholic nuns buried their babies in the backs of convent gardens. Sheila said her aunt told her those nuns were walled up in cellars when they sinned.
Meg, who was an R.C. herself, looked as if she were going to cry. She said she had never heard of such things, and she was sure no Catholics would do them, and anyway, what did being walled up alive mean?
“If you have done something really bad like having sex, they build a wall around you and leave you in there all alone in the dark to die, slowly, standing up. You can’t even sit down to die,” Sheila said, enjoying the drama of it all.
“They do that?” Meg’s heavy lips trembled.
Fuzzie said, “Don’t worry, they won’t do that to you, Meg, even if you are an R.C., because you’re beautiful and good as gold.”
“She’s not that good,” Ann whispered to Sheila.
On Meg’s bedside table she kept the photo of her mother and father with their five girls. The girls were all in faded dresses, and they seemed almost identical, sitting or kneeling on the ground, with their flat, pansy faces uplifted, showing off their slanting eyes and their heavy lips and their dark curls. All the girls were smiling, except for the youngest, who would die young of scarlet fever and was very nearsighted and did not seem to be aware that the photo was being taken, because her eyes were closed.
From the side of her thin mouth Ann whispered to Sheila that Meg’s Catholic parents were not as perfect as Meg thought they were. Meg had confessed to her in a moment of confidence – Ann was good at getting our confidences with her probing questions, and Meg was not match for her – that her father beat his five girls once a week. He beat them with a sjambok out on the veranda, leaning over the back of a chair. They were beaten both for the sins they confessed and for the ones they did not.
Bobby Jean, who had been in a convent school, said Catholics were always trying to convert you in order to keep your soul from rotting in hell for eternity.
Lizzie said her mother said Protestants were rational and educated and kept their places of worship tastefully bare, whereas R.C.’s were superstitious and ignorant; they resorted to beads and candles and ghastly pictures of Christ, bleeding, with thorns around his head and nails in his hands.
We had all learned about Bloody Mary in history and how she killed so many Protestants because they wouldn’t convert. We had all read a poem by the greatest poet in the English language, a poet who was even greater than Yeats, according to Miss Lacey, in which he asks God to avenge the saints slaughtered by the R.C.’s.
Perhaps Fiamma had seen some slaughtered, and that was why they had sent her away from her lovely villa, which was near a blue lake and mountains, Di suggested.
“We better watch out, the Catholic princess might want to slaughter some of us,” Bobby Joe said.
It was then that Ann had one of her blinding revelations. She whispered to Sheila, “Miss G is going to like this new girl, you wait and see.” She saw it in a flash.
What are cracks?
We held our breath, we shut our eyes,
We felt our heads spin.
Our souls escaped into the skies,
We heard a frightful din.
In the dark we saw diamonds;
Miss G sallied down the aisle.
She touched us with her hands
And bore us aloft, awhile.
Miss G was our crack. When you had a crack you saw things more clearly: the thick dark of the shadows and the transparence of the oak leaves in the light and the soft glow of the pink magnolia petals against their waxy leaves. You wanted to lie down alone in the dark in the music room and listen to Rachmaninoff and to the summer rains rushing hard down the gutters. You left notes for your crack in her mug next to her toothbrush on the shelf in the bathroom. If you accidentally brushed up against your crack and felt her boosie, you nearly fainted.
We all knew how to make ourselves faint. The teachers did not know we made ourselves do it, though they suspected we did. They even had a doctor brought in to examine us, but he said there was nothing wrong with us. He said he had never seen such a healthy group of growing girls. We did look healthy. Our skins were gold with all the sunshine, and our hair and teeth looked very white in contrast. Weekdays in the summer term we wore short-sleeved white blouses with round collars and brown tunics with their big R’s embroidered on our chests and our long brown socks. Our tunics were worn four inches from the ground, measured kneeling, so you could see our knobby knees. In winter we wore long-sleeved blouses and ties.
We took turns fainting in chapel. Before communion, while we were on our knees and had not had any breakfast, we breathed hard a few times and then held our breath and closed our eyes. We sweated and started to see diamonds in the dark. We felt ourselves rush out of ourselves, out and out. Then we came back to the squelch of Miss G’s crepe-soled boots as she strode along the blue-carpeted aisle to rescue us. She made us put our heads down between our knees, and then she lifted us up and squeezed our arms.
We leaned against her as we went down the aisle and felt her breath on our cheeks and the soft swell of her boosie. Our hearts fluttered, and we saw the light streaming in aslant through the narrow, stained-glass windows: red and blue and yellow like a rainbow.
Miss G led us out into the cool of the garden. We sat on the whitewashed wall under the loquat tree in our white Sunday dresses and undid the mother-of-pearl buttons at our necks. Miss G sat on the wall beside us and smoked a cigarette, holding it under her hand, so Miss Nieven would not notice if she came upon her suddenly. When Miss G told us to, we took off our panama hats and set them down on the wall. Then we leaned our heads against her shoulder. We got to sit there under the cool, dark leaves of the loquat tree and feel the breeze lift the hems of our tunics very gently and watch Miss G blow smoke rings, until she asked if we felt all right now. Her voice was deep and a little hoarse, like a man’s.
Why Miss G called us to her room
She called us to her room at night,
She made us drunk on wine.
We searched the truth with all our might;
For her we write these lines.
In our flannel pajamas and plaid dressing gowns and flat leather slippers we huddled in Miss G’s doorway and halfway down the long corridor, trembling and whispering. Why had Miss G summoned the twelve of us? She had never done so before this evening.
We were all whispering, looking at the faded reprints of Dega’s ballet paintings, and waiting until she finished her conversation. We could hear her speaking and laughing on the telephone. To overhear her conversation better, Sheila, who was nosy, tried to get near the door. We gathered she was talking to the witty Mrs. Willis, the science teacher, who was her intimate friend at that time. Late Mrs. Willis became her enemy. Her best friends often became her enemies, because they betrayed her and took advantage of her great generosity, she said.
She was generous in many ways. Bobby Joe told us how Miss G sat by her bed in the sanatorium – a small, white building, set among blood red hibiscus bushes, where we were sent when we were ill – when she had the chicken pox. Bobby Joe forgot her itching Miss G told her about a man she had fallen in love with when she was nursing in Whales during the war. She massaged his privates for him. Bobby Joe rubbed her small, strong hands together to show us what Miss G showed her.
Was it possible that Miss G had chosen us for her team? We wondered. We knew she banished girls whenever they disappointed her. Nor did they even know how they had disappointed her, or if they were to leave for good or simply to step aside for a while. Had she banished all the girls who had been there before us?
Fuzzie said that when she had gone to the san at the beginning of the term for her physical examination, the nurse had weighed her and measured her fluttering chest and slipped her cold, dry fingers under Fuzzies’s warm, sticky armpits and held the ends of the tape measure together, asking her to inhale and measuring her again. “Miss G will want you,” the nurse had told her, because she could expand nicely. Now she hummed a hopeful tune, wearing her vest under her plaid pajamas, and twisted and spoke of the four B’s: Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and Burls.
Expanding nicely was not the only reason Miss G chose girls for her team, Ann muttered mysteriously from over her shoulder, while standing on tiptoe to examine the Degas prints with a critical eye.
Meg said she thought Miss G chose the best-looking girls in the school for her swimming team. Sandra du Toit, who was already on the team, was certainly good-looking. And we, too, were good-looking, weren’t we, Meg suggested, surveying our group with a benevolent eye.
We were good-looking. How could we not have been, growing up half-wild in fresh air, sunshine, and heat? Meg, of course, was particularly good-looking with her heavy, red lips, her slightly slanting, dark eyes, her slim waist, and her full bust. At fifteen, she looked lovely, even in her faded, shapeless pajamas.
Di flipped her fine, blond hair back from her face and stood on her long, slender legs, complaining to Meg about the wait. Ever since her father committed suicide in the bath, Di’s thin lips dipped at the corners. She maintained Miss G chose girls who were rich and could contribute to the team fund. Some of us were rich: she had inherited her father’s money. Fuzzie’s father, who had inherited her mother’s money when she died in a fire, had lots of money; Sheila’s father, a timber baron, died of a heart attack and left all his money to her mother, who took to the bottle.
Ann, who was very poor, said Miss G probably chose anyone who could be useful to her. She helped Miss G with her correspondence and with the swimming-team quarterly, which told the school about its triumphs.
No one could think why Miss G had summoned the Trevelyan twins, who were not rich or pretty or useful, with their white hair sticking up on their heads like straw and their snub noses. They stood arm-in-arm, twisting about and putting their hands between their legs and wanting to go to the toilet. They were still horse-mad at twelve and tied their belts around Mary’s waist and made her run around the garden, playing horsie and pretending to whip her. Perhaps Miss G chose them because they were orphans and had no one to turn to, Fuzzie whispered to Lizzie, the tall, elegant girl who spoke with an English accent.
Finally, Miss G covered the receiver with one hand and told us we might enter her room and find a perch. We filed in solemnly.
Miss G had acquired a room as large and as pleasant as Miss Nieven’s. The bay windows were open to the evening light, which fell onto the silver jug of wet roses.
We could see through the big bay windows across the terraced lawns as far as the river on one side, and on the other up the green-gray hill as far as the pool. Unlike Miss Nieven, who kept her room shuttered and dim, Miss G always let in the sunlight. She believed it necessary to combat her skin malady, something mysterious with a Greek name, contracted as a child, that made her scratch from time to time.
Miss G sat in her wicker chair before her desk in her khaki jumpsuit and scratched at the bristles on the back of her neck in the evening light of her big, open room. She was slim and athletic. She seemedtall, although she was not as tall as Di. She had fine, tapered fingers and what she called good bone structure: high cheekbones and an aquiline nose. Her eyes were wide-spaced and large and as dark as night. They were mysteriously shaded by thick lashes and had a beautiful expression when she was carried away, which she often was. Her forehead was broad and generous, and her hair as glossy as a gypsy’s. Her mouth had no droop but was firm and straight. Two deep lines ran from her nose to the corners of her lips. She was wearing what she always wore when she was not wearing her black bathing suit: her starched khaki jumpsuit, with a hand-embroidered belt, and her famous highly lacquered boots with crepe soles. Her clothing was always spotlessly clean and well-pressed and starched, and it made a whispering sound like the sea as she moved.
Sitting on the carpet with clammy, clenched hands and dry mouths, or perching on her bed like birds, we waited expectantly, gazing up at her, our name tags pricking our necks. There was no scratching or picking there; only stillness and docility. Miss G had bribed Mrs. Looney, our matron, with boxes of chocolates and nylon stockings to allow us to stay up at night in her room. She glowed, we thought, as though a halo surrounded her head. She spoke fast and impatiently, as though there were little time left.
“Shut the window, Radfield,” she ordered. She always called us by our surnames, as though we were boys.
We watched avidly as she took out two straw-covered demijohns of wine from her cupboard. She mixed the red and the white, pouring from both containers at once into a big white pitcher, with a glug-glug, something we had never seen anyone do before. She gave us glassful after glassful and told us to drink up. In vino veritas, she said. She liked to quote in Latin or from Shakespeare. She told us she was an autodidact, which meant that she had learned everything by herself.
She told us that whatever happened in her room was to remain a secret. We were not to tell anyone. We were not to fidget, not to ask questions, not to speak at all unless spoken to, and not to get up to go to the bathroom.
“I need your whole attention, if we are going to accomplish the great things I have in mind for you,” she said, lighting a cigarette. When we had all solemnly promised to obey – we would have promised her anything – she informed us in a matter-of-fact tone that she simply needed some new blood. She was choosing twelve new girls for the team: us.
The whole room, with its bright yellows and blues and its large photos of Miss G’s Welsh terrier, who died of some horrible disease, spun around. It was only afterward that we thought of the twelve girls whose places we had taken, especially Sandra, our head girl, a beauty, tall and brainy, slender and athletic, with red-gold hair, who had been Miss G’s favorite, and who was suddenly banished.
