The Uses of Enchantment Read online

  She passed the West Salem Cemetery, its wrought-iron gate painted a wet seal black and glinting beneath the overcast sky. Three blocks later Mary passed through the Semmering Academy brick gates, past the marble plaque with the school’s motto VOX IN DESERTO, “A Voice in the Wilderness,” the “wilderness” part always a bit of a misnomer. Yes, there used to be farmland surrounding the Gothic Revival brick structure built in 1891 by the philanthropic Semmerings, but by the time Mary attended the motto had been colloquially rephrased as VOX IN SUBURBO, the farms having been sold off by impoverished heirs to subdividers, the fields replaced by cul-de-sacs that looked from the catwalk on the academy roof like a series of asphalt crop circles. Semmering Academy had been famously endowed by the Semmerings for the purpose of “educating the savages,” of whom very few remained and those who did expressed little interest in learning French and geography; ten years later, the enrollment at three, the academy’s mission shifted slightly from educating savages to educating girls.

  Mary stashed her bike by the back Dumpster. She stood in the shadow of Semmering and reflected how much it resembled a sanitarium from this vantage point, with its barred rear windows and its ominous smokestack and its sinister industrial hum. The back door opened to expel a trio of girls, their skirts longer than in the days when Mary was a student, hanging nearly to mid-knee and so gaping around the waist that each hip-swaying step revealed flashes of stomach. They didn’t notice Mary, standing by the Dumpster. They didn’t even look glancingly in her direction. Mary slipped inside and walked the length of the fluorescent-lit basement hall, through the old cafeteria, now an empty art classroom. The room smelled of paint and glue, the walls papered with mooning charcoal self-portraits.

  Mary walked up the north staircase, onto the main floor, past the main office and the bulletin board. Behind the closed doors of the classrooms she could hear the muted clacking of chalk, the incantatory drone of the teachers. She found her old locker, 4565. She spun the lock, still remembering the combination (13–23–12).

  The locker opened.

  Mary stared at the familiar interior, at the mushroom-painted metal, at the rust spot on the lower shelf in the shape of Alaska minus its archipelago tail. Part of her wanted to read this empty locker as an homage, but of course she knew the opposite to be true. The headmistress, Miss Pym, was famously thorough when it came to eradicating threats to her academy’s reputation, a thoroughness that even took the form of forbidding the future assignation of Mary’s locker to any Semmering student, just as she had forbidden the future assignation of Bettina Spencer’s locker to any future Semmering student after Bettina burned down the library in 1972. Both stood as empty as the Greenes’ mausoleum. But Miss Pym was less superstitious than she was wise to the ways that young girls infected one another, usually through silly coincidence, and with all the discerningness of pink eye in February. She wanted no new outbreaks of publicized bad conduct on her watch, and thus had gone out of her way to minimize contact between Mary and the girls who followed her.

  So it was not out of any tenderness toward Mary that Miss Pym suggested, once Mary returned to school the fall of her senior year, that she eat her meals in an empty and unmonitored classroom. She allowed Mary to quit the history club without the usual hecticness of notes and signatures, she expressed no concern that Mary spent afternoons alone in the woodshop making three-peg coatracks and lidless boxes because that was all the shop teacher was willing to teach girls how to make. Mary was allowed by Miss Pym, in a school that prized distinction, to become unnotable to the point of invisibility.

  Then Miriam was published in the winter term of Mary’s senior year, and everything changed.

  Within two weeks of its publication, Miriam became a best seller in Boston and the surrounding towns and was featured in the front window of every suburban bookstore, stacked beside a four-foot cardboard cutout of Dr. Hammer wearing a black turtleneck and looking more like a diet pioneer than a therapist. The Semmering students carried the book around school, reading passages aloud in the hallways and in the cafeteria. Miss Pym attempted to ban the book from the school grounds out of respect for Mary and her privacy, but in fact Mary knew that Miss Pym found the subject matter potentially inciting. Here was a girl—another Semmering student, no less—who had faked her abduction. Who had craftily engineered a situation in which she was not only a highly pitied victim (for a time) but had managed to star in her own pop psychology book, thereby securing her status as teenage idol of subversion. The teachers, however, were so excited that the students were treating with such reverence a book rather than a new slipcover for their Bermuda bag that they were hesitant to discourage this newfound, and presumably delicate, enthrallment, for fear of scaring the girls off of books for good.

  Instead of banning Miriam, Miss Pym offered to provide Mary with a private tutor so that she could study from home for the remainder of her senior year.

  Mary accepted.

  In retrospect, however, the tutor was a mistake. Mary’s remove from the battering, equalizing social milieu of high school—where any person encountered on a daily basis becomes tiresome, no matter how many books are written about them—only heightened her mystique. Had Mary remained at Semmering, no doubt the furor and the reverence would have subsided much sooner. Instead it was as if she’d disappeared anew, and any Mary spottings were gathered like clues to a new mystery. Miriam continued to be toted through the Semmering hallways in a talismanic manner, much to Miss Pym’s unarticulated misery.

  But perhaps nobody suffered so much as her mother, who had at first tried in every way to minimize the reverberations of her daughter’s abduction. Yet when Miriam was first published—a book that claimed Mary, despite what she’d implied, had been neither abducted nor sexually abused—her mother’s enthusiasm to remove the “raped girl” suspicions overrode her formerly crazed need for privacy on the matter. Better a liar, her mother figured, better the disturbed perpetrator of a grand-scale hoax than an innocent victim of sexual assault. Though Mary’s role in Miriam was supposed to remain anonymous, her mother told the women in the Boston Wellesley alumnae group. She told her former dorm mates who lived as far as away as Hong Kong, her historical society colleagues, the government officials to whom she made her monthly pardon phone call on behalf of Abigail Lake. While everyone within the Semmering community knew of Miriam’s actual identity, Mary’s alias was now guaranteed to be known throughout Greater Boston and beyond.

  While her mother succeeded in clearing her daughter of the “raped girl” suspicions, she simultaneously called far more public scrutiny upon her daughter and her family than before. In an effort to reverse these damages, her mother changed to an unlisted phone number, she posted a sign to the front gate threatening to sue interlopers for trespassing. This failed to intimidate anyone. In a fit of frustration, her mother listed 34 Rumney Marsh with a real estate agent and became tyrannical about the beds being made, the clothes being put away, the sink being kept clean of dishes. The first prospective buyer, a librarian-looking woman in her forties, peered around the house absently and inquired, “Isn’t this the house where Miriam lives?” The house came off the market the next day.

  Her mother, however, didn’t know how good she’d had it, the months that Miriam ruled her life, before the whole family was ruled by Roz Biedelman’s far more invasive investigations. Her mother had no idea how her attempts to control the details of Mary’s abduction would come undone. Who could have known? Whoever would have guessed the extent to which a stranger will go to ruin a person’s life under the guise of saving it?

  Mary heard footfalls, the squeak-suck squeak-suck of sensible shoes. She closed the locker soundlessly and searched for a hiding place. She wasn’t a student cutting class. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but she was, it was true, enjoying her illicit-feeling run of the place. She slid behind the door to an empty classroom—the very classroom, in fact, where she’d studied junior English with Ms. Wilkes who, judging from the
posters (Plath, Sexton), was still in residence; either that or her successor was an equally fervent worshipper of locally suicidal female poets.

  The squeak-suck paused, swiveled, continued toward Mary. Through the window in the door Mary saw a six-foot-tall woman wearing a thigh-length cardigan and a wool skirt, her neck curving up and then forward, her gray head dangling low like a heavy Christmas ornament from a too-slight branch. She swabbed at her nose with a tissue produced from her sweater cuff; a throat lozenge clicked against the insides of her teeth.

  Squeak-suck squeak-suck squeak-suck.

  Mary stepped from behind the door.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  Miss Pym didn’t hear her.

  “Excuse me.”

  Miss Pym turned and glared disbelievingly at the woman who seemed to have stolen her own trick of materializing from nowhere.

  Miss Pym raised a dryly inquiring eyebrow.

  “I…” Mary walked closer to Miss Pym. Miss Pym’s eyes watered, the blues a permanently irritated hay-fever blue.

  “Did you sign in with the front desk? All visitors must sign in with Miss Vernon. Are you a prospective parent?”

  She doesn’t recognize me, Mary thought. Then: Christ, do I really look that old?

  “I…no,” Mary said.

  “What can we do for you then?”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Biedelman,” Mary said.

  “Dr. Biedelman’s office is on the second floor,” Miss Pym said. “Had you signed in at the front desk with Miss Vernon, as visitors are clearly instructed to do, she might have saved you the goose chase.”

  “I came in the back door,” Mary said.

  “What?” Miss Pym nearly screamed the word. She was going deaf, Mary thought, and no surprise—she had to be nearing eighty now, despite the fact that she didn’t appear any more gray or hunched or desiccated by age than she had when Mary was a student. “The back door…” Mary repeated.

  “So you said. How did you get in the back door? The back door is always locked.”

  “Some smokers,” Mary offered, wondering if Miss Pym would think she was a tattletale.

  Miss Pym hmmphed to herself, as though something she’d long suspected had been confirmed.

  “Is Dr. Biedelman expecting you?” she asked.

  “I called earlier but…”

  “We’re experiencing switchboard problems. I apologize on behalf of the local telephone company, ‘run’ by a consistent lot of underachievers. I’ll take you to Dr. Biedelman’s office.”

  Miss Pym led her back toward the main office—She’s going to make me sign in, Mary thought. But Miss Pym took a left at the end of the hall, leading Mary up the main stairs to the second floor. Her palms prickled. Was she really going through with this? Miss Pym may not have recognized her, but there was little chance that Roz Biedelman wouldn’t instantly know who she was. Miss Pym’s brain had been inundated with girls for thirty years; her concern was only for their present selves, those selves technically under her watch, and unless they grew up to become distinguished in a field, in which case they would be contacted to appear at fund-raiser dinners, she was not terribly interested in what became of them after they left Semmering, particularly if they “failed to yield.” Miss Pym delivered her famous “failure to yield” matriculation speech each fall, an accusatory exercise in inspiration that had always left Mary feeling like one of the neglected apple trees to the west of the Semmering playing fields, gnarled remnants from a long-ago-subdivided orchard, their only offering a handful of dense brown apples that rotted before they could mature.

  “You’re friends with Dr. Biedelman?” said Miss Pym, holding open the stairway door once they reached the second floor.

  “Professional acquaintances,” Mary said.

  “Dr. Biedelman has proven a marvelous addition to the faculty. We’ve had no troubles with the students in years. I don’t know how she does it.”

  “Pills?” Mary offered.

  Miss Pym paused on the landing. “At Semmering, we believe that each girl has been given the tools by which to overcome her own obstacles. It merely takes a dedicated person to teach her how to best outwit her own worst tendencies. This is our pedagogical as well as our psychological approach, one that most parents subscribe to. Last year we had the highest application rate of any preparatory school in the Greater Boston area.”

  “Impressive,” said Mary, wondering if Miss Pym had forgotten that she’d denied being a prospective parent.

  “I’m not ashamed to boast, especially since it took nearly a decade to regain our status as the area’s top school. Scandal does nothing for the admission numbers. Especially while we had the reputation for producing disturbed mendicants.”

  Mary was reminded of the so-called vagrant who had broken into the Greenes’ mausoleum. Miss Pym had spent her life eradicating mendicants and vagrants, and yet when faced with a person accused of being both, Miss Pym was touchingly blind to this fact.

  “Disturbed mendicants,” said Mary lightly. “In a school like this?”

  Miss Pym’s face condensed into a wry smirk. “The school is hardly to blame. It’s the mothers. If I had my way, Semmering would be a boarding school with limited parental visits. Mothers do not know how to raise girls. Boys, well, boys are like rubber balls. You can drop them and you can hurl them against a wall. You can resent them intensely. They are such dim creatures they don’t even have the wherewithal to be ruined. But girls…girls, mishandled, are a menace.”

  Miss Pym blinked rapidly.

  “I take it you don’t have any daughters yourself,” Mary said, knowing for a fact that Miss Pym was childless.

  “I have hundreds of daughters,” Miss Pym. “I do a perfect job of raising them. And do you know the trick of it?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “I don’t love a single one,” she said.

  Miss Pym gazed directly at Mary. Mary gazed directly at Miss Pym.

  Miss Pym looked away.

  “But consider the discussion of mendicants part of our buried past. Far be it from me to exhume it. By the way, Dr. Biedelman is often at the hospital in the mornings. But she should be back by now.”

  Mary trailed Miss Pym up the final stretch of stairs and onto the second-floor hallway. Miss Pym paused in front of a door with a pane of safety glass. The hall was noiseless, even the echoes of Miss Pym’s footsteps had squeaked themselves down to nothing. As Miss Pym shook her hand free from her sweater, Mary experienced the world slowing to a near halt. Miss Pym’s hand balled itself into a fist, preparing to knock. She cocked it back. Mary tensed, as though she herself were about to be struck. Just before Miss Pym’s hand began its forward plunge, the end-of-class bell rang. Her hand jerked back. Four bomb-tickingly anticipatory seconds passed before the classroom doors blew open up and down the hall. Girls piled into the narrow corridor, their screeching and thundering accompanied by a deep structural rumble, the bricks threatening to collapse under their aggressive gaiety.

  Mary found herself pushed against a row of lockers before being gradually sucked down the hallway as though by an undertow; she bucked against it, fighting her way back toward Miss Pym, who surveyed the hysteria disapprovingly from her naturally higher perch.

  “Lunch!” she called out to Mary, now a good ten feet away.

  Miss Pym lifted her oversized hand and, again, balled it into a fist. I could just disappear, Mary thought. She could relent to the tide of girls, she could turn around and allow herself to be sucked into the vortex. Within seconds she could be funneled down the staircase, tossed out the basement door and onto Regina’s bicycle. Within seconds she could be pedalling home.

  Mary played with the possibility; she allowed herself to be pulled even farther down the hall. But then she tensed herself, fighting her way back through the current. She watched as Miss Pym knocked on Roz’s door. Once. Twice.

  The door remained closed.

  The crowd thinned and changed, the decibel level dropped, th
e deafening echo replaced by the angry rattle of a stuck locker door, the enervated shuffle of an acne-ridden loner.

  Miss Pym knocked again. Three times. Four. She regarded her watch crossly.

  “It seems Dr. Biedelman is still out,” she said. “Would you like to leave her a note?”

  “No thank you,” Mary said.

  “She might be at her office in the city,” Miss Pym said. “I’ll have Miss Vernon call for you.”

  “Really, it’s not that important,” Mary said.

  Miss Pym shrugged disapprovingly. Clearly Mary was a woman without much desire or follow-through. Clearly she was a woman who had yet to learn how to outwit her own worst tendencies, who would fail to yield if she hadn’t failed already.

  Mary trailed Miss Pym through the doors, down the main staircase, to the main entranceway.

  Miss Pym paused and waited, impatiently, for Mary to leave.

  “Thanks,” Mary said. “I appreciate your help.”

  “Not at all,” said Miss Pym. “I like to help where I can. My opportunities, as you’ve surely heard, are numbered.”

  Mary started. She was dying, Miss Pym—of course she was. It explained her unusual melancholy, her willingness to talk civilly to a stranger who had broken her rules.

  Miss Pym noted her mistaken assumption.

  “My board wants new blood,” she said. “Such a disgusting term. My board, previously unbeknownst to me, is a pack of vampires. I chose the people with the sharpest teeth, not foreseeing they’d one day use them to bite me in the neck.”

  Miss Pym scrutinized the filigreed copper chandelier overhead. Three of the bulbs had blown.

  “I am,” she said tonelessly, “a very stupid woman.”

  “I think,” Mary said, “that this is the natural evolution of things.”

  Miss Pym sniffed. “Stupidity is not natural. Blindness is not natural. You must think I’m incapable of seeing the deception happening in front of my own eyes.”