The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

“There is an excellent private sanatorium in Pittsfield,” Dr. Beede said, while young Dr. Peachie put away his stethoscope in his big leather bag. “You would be very comfortable there. Westfield has a large facility. Hadley . . .”

She was shaking her head. “Do you see how absurd it would be,” she said, “and what a bad example it would set my students, if I let dying distract me from my study of death? I will do very well where I am.”

“At the very least you must stay away from the children,” he said.

“And young ladies,” said Dr. Peachie, gallantly.

The Headmistress followed his glance to me, regarded me blankly for a moment, then turned back to the old doctor. “No one in this school is afraid of death.”

“Nonetheless, to persist, when you know—I’m sure you would not want—the risk of infection—it would be tantamount to murder.”

“Of course,” she said, but her eyes slid to me—me!—and a smile flickered over her lips. I beamed back.

Tuberculosis took, like an old story, its predictable course. She grew gaunt. Her hair thinned. Her skin tightened over her skull; her eyes became enormous. She gathered herself for her cough like a horse for a jump. Then she gave herself to it, sometimes for hours. The brownish stains on her handkerchief could no longer be taken for anything but blood; bright red ones dappled the old.

Despite the implications of that smile (perhaps I had imagined it), she was seldom to be seen in a classroom now, and she ate alone in her office, though her portrait still stared down on the laden tables of the refectory, or didn’t, or whatever. What strength she had, she poured into abstruse ruminations on the structure of the necrocosmos. The day came when the students trooped outside for morning review and found someone else standing in her customary place. I heard one member of faculty whisper that she had lost the thread.

I reported this to her, of course, and she took appropriate measures, which is why we now have a new instructor of Posture Arts.

Having studied her as closely as I had stood me in good stead. Nearly every day, now, I was called upon to act as go-between, submitting queries and interpreting her often gnomic replies. I did not allow others to see how much I had to extrapolate and even invent to make up for her omissions. For the Headmistress rarely spoke now, at least not in the usual sense, nor was she interested in listening, in the usual sense.

In another sense she was listening harder than ever. She had moved on from the commonplace larynx to more out-of-the-way passages, conjecturing that nostrils, pores, tear ducts too might afford passage to the dead. (Also excretory organs, but I shall not dwell on that indecent interlude.) How strange and funny it was to see her press her ear to a child’s nose. As it had from time to time over the years, the infidel thought pricked me: Could all this be a joke? If she had given any indication that she knew how droll she looked—but she never did.

Formerly, poring over the world like a cryptographer, she had looked for patterns as proof that there was meaning in the mess. Now she cared only for anomalies, aberrations. Flubs and blunders, misprints and mispronunciations: She combed through good English in search of bad. Perhaps a lack of pattern was itself meaningful, perhaps the world addressed us in an infinite, unrepeating language of nonce words. If so, a slip of the tongue might be closer to this first, true language than all our iterations. So she made sure that there was always an eavesdropper with a notebook, usually MacDougal or Whit, to take down additions to the lexicon. I am ashamed to say that we made a game of cooking up new ones. Though perhaps she would not have minded that, come to think.

She had never been particular about her appearance and now she became even less so. Her great crowblack dress was stiffened and glazed with spills, all the more because the napkin she wore as a bib did not by any means catch every last spatter when she coughed. Stale bed-smell until she spat blood, then sudden red iron pong.

I am smelling her hemoglobin, I thought. How can she say that a person is only breath, only words? Look how she is a body.

But as if she had caught my thought from the air, she now turned from the spoken word to its material by-products. When we met her in the hall, she would sometimes ask us to stop, and would intrude a small spatula into our mouths, scraping samples from the roof of the mouth, under the tongue, and around the tonsils. “Evidence . . . particulate speech . . .” she muttered. “Nonnarrative time . . . outside the calendar!” We were required to submit our pillowcases to her laboratory once a week.

Once I came into the office to find some fifteen or twenty mouth objects laid out in rows on a stained hand towel. Her hand hovered over one, wandered to another, back to the first, caught it up. She looked up. “Time of day . . .” She placed the object in a new position, squinted at it. “Location too, perhaps? Orientation? I am disgusted with myself that I neglected to document . . .” She glared at the object, glanced up, irritably restored the object to its original position. “Why are you not at your typing station, Grandison? I desire you to record some notes.”

But her investigations led her steadily farther from the mouth. It was marvelous to see her, when she was unaware of being observed, run her fingers lingeringly through the crumby talc of insect parts and excrements, dust and dander and human hairs that collected in the corners of all the windowsills in that vast, never fully clean building, then bring them up to examine, clinging to her fingertips, a section of a fly’s leg, a shard of a yellowjacket’s casing. She could be seen drawing up Rapunzel locks of muddy hair from the dark throats of the sinks, or rolling dust bunnies into twists of sticky twine between her palms. Once I came upon her examining a dead mouse the cat had left on the portal of her office. “Here, fold this into your handkerchief and dispose of it,” she said. I bore it away. Its body was as light and hard as an apricot pit, its little claws raised in mock surprise. What had she seen in it?

Timidly reproved by Miss Exiguous for these researches: “So unbecoming . . . and perhaps not quite germane?” the Headmistress snapped back, “The dead are not so costive, that they make only rare expenditures among the living, dropping their coinage stingily into the mouths of mendicants. Probably the dead, having achieved a greater kinship with the material world, no longer see such a profound difference between you, Dotty, and the skin on milk or—or a blob of warm cow dung.”

“My dear, really . . .”

If you shed the parochial attachment to the human vessel, and even more specifically to the mouth as the privileged portal of meaning, couldn’t you find speech anywhere stuff was? Material objects were merely a less lively form of language.¹⁹ Increasingly she preferred it to our common tongue.

Perhaps this was because she was dying. “Lately,” I heard her tell Miss Exiguous, “I seem to have more in common with antlers and mushrooms than with other people. More and more, I see myself as a jumble of stuff”—she stopped to spot a handkerchief with blood—“only accidentally haunted by a self. But not for long. If you cannot keep from making those absurd noises, Dotty, you may leave us.”

The window shuddered, rain slapped against it, then slid silently down. She turned her head and looked out at the noiselessly thrashing boughs. From her rib cage came a seething sound, as if she were filled with bees or flames. I stared at her in mingled dread, pity, longing. But for what? Visions came to me and were discarded faster than I can type these words: Here I was on my knees with my head in her lap, her hand on my hair, cuticles catching in my curls—here curling naked on her naked chest, a baby again—or the other way around, rocking the infant Headmistress in my own arms—here pricked out of my shell like a snail and swallowed—here pitched into the pupil of her eye, as bright and insubstantial as a spark, to extinguish myself against her retina . . . It was nothing real or possible that I wanted but an indescribable perfect presencing, a recognition so absolute that no gesture was necessary or adequate to it. If this was love, I doubted it. But it was something.

“Why are you staring at me, girl?”

“No reason. I am ready.” I wound a sheet of paper into the typewriter with such force that, not being laid in quite straight, it twisted and puckered and tore. Silently I ripped it out again and wound in another.

I raised my head and met her steady look. But she did not ask what was wrong, and in a moment she had resumed dictation.

When had I realized what would have been clear enough from the beginning, if I had let myself see it—that my advancement had only one possible conclusion: my own extinction? We burn the self like clinkers in this engine. Eventually there is only the train, no one aboard. A nobody rushing headlong into nothingness. And this is not even a problem, this is the cause to which we are sworn. Only a failed student preserves the illusion that success is possible, and this is one reason many of us fail, for sure: to save the fantasy of success from the corrosive reality of it. Others of us are drawn after it. That it is an illusion doesn’t lessen its appeal. No, not at all, it is all the stronger for it. Only an illusion has such power to persuade; only an illusion is clear and lasting and discrete enough. But the illusion, bright as it is, also contains all the evidence we need to discredit it. For what would it mean to reach the top?

To best all the other students and even the teachers, recommending myself to the Headmistress to the point that she chose me as her successor. (The two meanings of succeed here converge. That sort of thing is never an accident.)

And to succeed her, what would that mean?

To cease to be who I have been, to become somebody else. Specifically, her.

So whose, then, would be the glory I would gain?

Once in a dream the smooth brown skin of my right forearm split to expose a deeper layer of a creased and dappled beige. I beheld it with revulsion but not surprise. But I had other dreams in which I was struggling in a dim confused place and, when I fought my way free at last, saw that the heavy folds sliding down my legs were that same beige. So: A dehiscence, yes, but whose?

Sometimes, after I had carried off some deceit, I felt a surge of criminal confidence. Why forfeit everything to be her, when I could fake it? Already I had mastered her little turns of phrase, the offended air with which she polished her lorgnette. I could imitate the carriage of her head, erect, except when she was thinking hard, and then thrust forward and her shoulders raised. Her gulping cough. The stridor of her breath, when she was trying not to cough. How her hand shook when she lifted a glass of paregoric or a pen, and how, when she came upon Finster without warning, she went, for a moment, as still as a rabbit. I knew which of her books held the underlined phrase ungraspable phantom of life; I knew which cabinet concealed the mutilated remains of a Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Shock Therapy Machine, and which a charred and blistered enamel vase; I could produce, in fact, every item on the list of proofs by which her successor would be known. I could replicate her signature. More easily than she could, now that she trembled so. Oh yes, I could be her. Better than she could be herself.