The Uses of Enchantment (12 page)

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?

M
ary 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, the 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.”

She leered at Mary meaningfully.

“I don’t think that,” Mary said.

“This is the price I pay for enjoying myself,” said Miss Pym. “Did you know what I was doing when I met you today? I was
enjoying
myself. I like to walk the hallways during class. The girls think I’m trolling for truants. But the truth is I’m nearly brought to tears by the turbulent sensation of all that…potential.”

Miss Pym’s eyes remained hard and dry.

“You understand,” she said. “You were one of those girls once.”

Mary froze.

“I didn’t grow up here,” she offered hastily.

“But you were once a girl of potential,” said Miss Pym wistfully. “Weren’t you?”

Miss Pym unraveled the tissue from her cuff. She daubed her nose.

“I forgot,” said Miss Pym. “Why did you say you were visiting Dr. Biedelman?”

“I didn’t,” Mary said numbly.

“Well. I don’t imagine you’ll find what you’re looking for here. Next time, however, be sure to sign in with Miss Vernon.”

Miss Pym vanished through the office doors, leaving Mary alone in the hall. Through the floorboards she could feel the vibration of the cafeteria activity and hear the hiss of the steam heat from the school’s ancient radiators. Her arms began to sweat, her neck to itch. She fled through the front doors into the escalating cold. As she hurried over the flagstone walk, she experienced the unnerving sensation of being observed, a ribbony needle inserted between her shoulder blades. She glanced back at the school’s façade. Miss Pym’s dark ostrich shape watched her through the many-paned office window, her menacing figure seeming to Mary suddenly more frail and more transitory than the skeletal and half-frozen leaves that lined the walk. Mary raised a hand—a thank-you gesture, a regretful goodbye—but Miss Pym receded from the window without acknowledging her.

Notes

MARCH 4, 1986

M
ary was not my first patient to have attended Semmering Academy, an institution responsible for educating some of the area’s most exceptional women. It was famously said in the 1930s, “Behind every successful Bostonian stands a Semmering woman.” It has more recently been said that behind every Semmering woman stands its current headmaster, Miss Dorothy Pym.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Miss Pym, Semmering became known as one of the most rigorous girls preparatory academies in New England, a status that remained uncontested until the events of 1971–72. In the fall of 1971, sophomore Bettina Spencer and her friend, Melanie Clark, mysteriously “disappeared” from the school grounds, causing considerable uproar within the community; two weeks later, the girls materialized in the parking lot of the Boston commuter train. Bettina, who became my patient, admitted early in the course of our work together that she had been drugged and forced to commit involuntary sexual acts by a masked man who bore an exact resemblance to the school’s then field hockey coach.