“Robins and maybe wrens,” Icy said. “Finches, too, I think. They make that high little chirp, fast, like old women gossiping.”
“They sound like piccolos to me,” said Jean. Suddenly, like a whip, a twig snapped across her face. “Ouch!” she cried. It stung and made her eye water. She gulped air and lost her footing, but stumbled ahead quickly in order to keep her hand on Ellen’s shoulder.
“Sorry.” Ellen’s voice was breezy.
That word, so casual, stung her, too. She blinked her eyes and wiped away the wetness. This was the third time today. Why couldn’t Ellen—or anybody—remember? Unless, of course, she let it happen on purpose. That was too awful to think—that people could be like that. Just let Ellen try walking through the woods blind and let’s see what she does. It hurt to swallow. She tried to think about something else—about how the woods smelled fresh and piney. When Icy walked ahead of her, though, it never happened. She could relax more then. If only they were walking in a different order.
Off to the left she heard other voices. “Hi-lo inni minni kaka, um chow chow, oo pee wawa, ay-dee, ai-dee, oo-dee, you whooo?” The Camp Hanoum call. It sounded pretty silly, she had to admit, but kind of musical, too. She joined in when the girls in the line chorused back. The chattering up ahead increased, sign that two pathways merged.
“We’d better hurry,” someone said, “or Luddy will be upset.”
Mrs. Luddington gave a piano concert once a week and she didn’t tolerate latecomers. Secretly, the girls looked forward to the big cry. Every week Miss Throstle, the singing teacher, sang the same soppy love song. They all mopped their eyes appreciatively each time and joined in on the chorus. By the last verse everyone was sobbing with their arms around each other. Not to miss this week’s tears, they stepped up their pace.
“Jean, stop,” said Icy from behind, grabbing her forearm to make her. “Listen.” Arm in arm they stood immobile while the others went on ahead. A loon called far out on the lake. They both sucked in their breath and didn’t move until they were sure it had finished.
“Doesn’t it just give you the creepies?” Jean asked.
“Yeah, wonderful.”
“Mysterious.”
“Eerie.”
“Spooky.”
“Lonely,” said Icy, stretching out the “o.”
“He only knows a minor key. That’s why he sounds so—haunting.” Jean made her voice quaver on the last word. The air moved coolly through her hair and they stood together breathing-in the natural world.
“You know, Jeanie, when the wind blows, the under parts of the leaves turn up and they look all silvery.”
“Which leaves?”
“Poplar, I think,” Icy said, pulling her along.
To Jean, the concerts were the highlight of the week. On the way out to the barn she felt the last faint afternoon sunlight on her face and the spongy earth softening her footsteps. That told her they were in the clearing. Icy helped her over the stile and across the meadow. She stepped in a squishy spot and took a huge step afterward to avoid it with her other foot. Soon she heard girls talking. “We’re at a big old barn,” Icy told her the first time they’d come there. “It has wide double doors that open onto the meadow. It’s kind of like a stage.” Icy was good about describing things. They bunched up a mound of crunchy pine needles and settled in, smelling the woodsy, humid earth. A needle stuck Jean sharply and she sucked her finger.
Girls nearby burst into laughter, even though no one said anything. “What’s so funny?” Jean asked.
The laughter died. “Oh, nothing.”
She knew, though. Probably somebody did something funny or made a face, and explaining it was too much trouble. It wouldn’t be funny anymore. That happened often. She let out a breath, drew her knees up under her chin and waited for the music.
That blind girl, she thought again.
She was glad to sit next to Icy. It felt as though she’d known her a long time.
Luddy announced she would begin with Brahms. Each week was a different composer. Luddy told the girls about the composers’ lives so that Jean began to link the names with the music. There was something thrilling about hearing a piano outdoors, the notes mixing with the breeze and insect sounds.
That night in the musty canvas tent, the melody of Brahms’ Lullaby played in her mind and mingled with the crickets. She thought of all the things they’d done this summer, how they stretched their days long into late northern sunsets to fit in so much—singing lessons, hikes in the woods, bird and plant identification, storytelling, swimming, boating, quiet afternoons weaving in the crafts center when the others were playing tennis. Weaving she could do. While she sat high at the big loom, the aroma of wool made heavy by the humid forest, her fingers moved over the tightly drawn warp and threw the shuttle. She could feel the patterns made by threads of different thicknesses. The weaving room was peaceful. She could relax for a while by herself and she didn’t have to keep up with the others. She liked being with other girls, but sometimes it was nice to be alone. Tennis was a silly old game anyhow. Running around after a ball for a while and then what do you get? Nothing. But in the weaving room she was producing something, making a scarf for her dresser back home.
She rolled onto her side and her cot creaked. Her sleeping bag scraped against her sunburned knees. The scratchy tingle reminded her of how the sun beat down for three solid days on the river. Small price for the chance to be out in a canoe with the others. She had done her share of paddling, too. Her aching arms told her that. She liked the rhythmic sound of the paddle against water and the little forward thrust each time the water gurgled. For those nights on the trip they slept with their bedrolls right on the ground, the scent of night and leaves so clean it made her nostrils open enough to imagine she smelled the cold purity of the stars. It felt free and new and even a little wild. Probably wilder than Father thought she’d be. That pleased her oddly, and she relished the new sensation.
Near her, a cricket cried out urgently against the background of frogs. She heard Icy shift positions on the other cot.
“Icy, are you still awake?”
“A little.”
“I can’t sleep.” She sighed. A breeze came through the open tent flap. “That cricket must be right in our tent.”
“The frogs are having a competition,” Icy mumbled. “Too many frogs to sleep.”
“No. Too many thoughts.” She lay still for a few moments listening to Icy breathe. “I can’t believe I didn’t want to come.”
“Why didn’t you? I couldn’t think of anything else since last summer.”
“Afraid.” The word stood out alone against the night sounds and surprised her. She knew now she had been ready for what the summer held. Father had been right. Camp Hanoum taught her many things. Here she learned to love the natural world however she could—through the feel of the rough bark of a hickory, the smell of certain leaves crushed in her hand, the honk of the last Canada geese heading north, the coolness of lake water passing between her fingers. She had done most of what the other girls did. She was even bitten by mosquitoes just like everyone else.
“Did you get any new bites today?” she asked Icy.
“Yeah. Two or three.”
“Me, too.” Lake water lapped rhythmically against the shore outside their tent. “Why do you think those girls still don’t know my name?”
Icy didn’t say anything. Then she wiggled around on her cot. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t look at them when they’re talking.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You’ve got to turn your head toward anyone speaking. Let people see on your face what you’re thinking. That’s what everyone else does. Otherwise you look dull and uninterested and nobody will want to talk to you.”
It stunned her. No one in the last two years, not even Mother or Lucy, her own sister, had thought to tell her that. She wondered how she looked. She could remember her face a little, kind of round with thin lips and brown eyes, but she couldn’t remember any expressions. She moved her face around, opened her eyes wide, narrowed them to slits, smiled a little, then a lot, drew her eyebrows together in what felt like a frown, stuck out her lips in a pout, pulled them inward and tried to imagine what she looked like.
Nobody else had to think about what their face looked like. This was just one more thing. Loons didn’t know the difference between people. They sang just to sing. Sun and breezes touched them all. But people, they knew the difference, and not very many would she ever find, like Icy, who would get beyond that difference. So that was it. All her life, all the summers ahead, and the winters, she would have to work harder at just plain living.
Chapter Three
Jean opened her bedroom window wide. A slight breeze brushed the lace curtains against her bare arm. The sound of katydids meant the end of summer at Hickory Hill. It felt good to be home.
She gathered a monstrous pile of dirty clothes, almost everything from her suitcase, walked into the hallway and dumped it down the laundry chute. In the next room she heard Lucy laughing with Mary, one of the maids, a hefty Irish girl who Jean thought could scare an army. She knew Father and Mother didn’t approve of their daughters getting friendly with the maids, but they did it anyway when Mother was away at the DAR, the Red Cross, or the Colonial Dames. The maids were fun. There was something real about them that made them different from Mother’s friends.
“What’s going on in there?” she asked.
“Oh Jean, you’ve got to hear this. It’s a scream,” Lucy said. “Tell her, Mary.”
“Last weekend I went home to Hartford for a night,” she began again in her husky voice. “It was raining hard, not a night for strolling. A man followed me when I went to the station and got on the same train as I did. When I got off, he did too. When I got on the bus, he got on and sat behind me again. I didn’t dare look around, but I knew he was there. Then he got off at the same stop I did and walked behind me on the same streets.”
“Weren’t you scared?” Jean asked. “I’d be petrified.” She faced in the direction of Mary’s voice and tried to make her face show concern, as Icy had said.
“Of course, but by the time I got to my corner, I was just angry. I was going to teach this hooligan a lesson.”
“How?” Consciously, she raised her eyebrows. It felt silly, but she had to do it.
“I folded up my umbrella and gave him a couple of whacks over the head that sent him sprawling. The next morning my neighbor Katy called in a tizzy and told me never to walk home from the bus alone at night again. She said her brother hadn’t come home the night before. Some thug had walloped him and they found him passed out in the gutter on the corner.”
They all laughed again, and Jean felt a smile come naturally. “Your life is one big adventure,” she said.
She walked dreamily back to her room. The maids really lived. They were out there rubbing elbows with the world. If the universe consisted of Hickory Hill, Camp Hanoum and nothing else, she’d be supremely happy. But what about the rest of life? In a few weeks school would start and that meant struggle. She remembered what Bristol High looked like—dull gray stone with wide steps up to heavy double doors, like a prison or some dead museum. Absolutely forbidding. The old gray castle, everybody called it. It seemed like a fortress to her even when she could see it. Now it would be worse. Now she would have to go there. How could she ever be a part of it? If only Icy lived in Bristol.
One noon months later, the wooden-sided station wagon chugged up the hill from Bristol High. Girls packed inside crooned “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”
“Everybody but you thinks Rudy Vallee’s a lot better than Lanny Ross, Jean,” said Louise Barnes, sitting next to her in the front seat.
“But have you ever heard Lanny Ross sing ‘Moonlight and Roses?’ I just swoon.”
“You just have a crush on him.”
“That’s not true. His voice is divine.”
“But that’s all he’s got. Rudy Vallee was a Yale man.”
“So what?” Jean heard Henry stifle a laugh and it gave her courage. “That doesn’t make any difference, does it, Henry?”
“Leave me out of this, girls. I’m just driving.”
Father had taught Henry, their gardener, how to drive just so he could go down the long hill and across the Pequabuck River every day to bring Jean home for lunch. For Jean, walking both ways would have used up the whole lunch break. No one else at Bristol High got such service, so even the ritzy gang from the Hill all wanted a ride. Boys climbed in back, hung on to the running boards and jumped off when Henry got to their street. It was one time every day she could depend on for camaraderie.
The trip back to Bristol High after lunch would be another matter. Since Father had decided that she could walk that, she needed someone to walk with her. Every day she dreaded the pressure of finding someone to guide her back after lunch. Louise, the richest girl on the Hill, lived closest. “Will you walk back with me after lunch?” Jean asked her in a low voice.
“Oh, I can’t today, Jean. Ken wants to walk me back.”
It had been the same yesterday and the day before. Not just with Louise, but with all the Hill girls. Even Lucy had her own crowd. She wasn’t just asking for someone to walk with. It was as though once a day she was asking for friendship. But friendship wasn’t something you should have to ask for.
“I’ll walk with you,” a soft voice from the back seat offered. It was someone she didn’t even know, a girl named Lorraine Dion who was eating lunch at her boyfriend’s house on the Hill that day. The offer caught her off guard.
“Thanks.” She couldn’t figure it out. She’d heard that Lorraine lived across town, near the Irish section. Why wouldn’t she want to walk back with her boyfriend, like Louise did? Jean felt odd, like she was being used for something. Maybe it made Lorraine feel important to be needed by someone on the Hill. Well, at least it took care of today.
The next morning before school Lorraine appeared at the front door. “I’ve come to walk Jean, I mean to walk with Jean to school,” she said to Mary at the door. Jean couldn’t understand it. Yesterday Lorraine hadn’t mentioned she would come this morning. She wondered how far she’d walked already.