DANNY HAD LEFT as soon as classes were over, not staying the rest of Bay Farm’s unusually long (for a private school) year, for the beautiful ceremonies the last week of school, the graduation of those Danny’s own class was about to replace. Maude remembered the year before, when it was like falling in love with the place. She had come into a sense of ownership. For this year’s madrigals and lushness and frenzy of preparations, she was like an established matron, replete in her requited, sealed, and approved love. But in all of this she felt both the absence of her love and a connection to him: the school had brought them together, and everyone there saw them as representatives, in a sense, of each other.
Then the year ended. Maude, once again working at the public library, alone in the artificial town with her father, felt marooned, lifelines snapped. Weesie too was unavailable, busy in a museum intern program in the city that Mary Jane had arranged for her.
As a few sad irises struggled through the weeds of the back-yard, Maude was still waiting for Danny’s first letter. Instead, through the slot in the pink front door came a letter from Bay Farm, addressed to Milton and Nina, saying that, due to the increase in the Pughs’ income, Maude’s scholarship had been reduced for the following year.
Milton handed it to Maude to read and dropped the bill that came with it into the trash.
“Daddy—what are you doing?”
“Well, at prices like that, we’re certainly not sending you back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we can’t afford it.” With that, he turned and went up to his studio, where in moments the classical station and the happy scratching of brushes could be heard.
He had recently discontinued a number of his classes. Though he had more than enough canvases for several shows, he was painting, with the upcoming show in mind, a group of pictures to hang together. He didn’t have to tell Maude that he was buying time with the painting sales, time for his own work. Still. There had to be more money. The school said so. They saw the tax returns.
As when someone close to you dies, it takes a while, sometimes a long while, for the fact of this disappearance and absence to be believed as death, so Maude at first did not absorb the news that she would not be returning to Bay Farm. There wasn’t any something-else. Every once in a while she stopped herself, to make it real, to remind herself: she caught herself planning what she was going to do for her next Selected Work week and then remembered: right, I won’t be doing that; that won’t be happening. She fantasized what she would wear for graduation and then remembered. She thought of which teachers she had hoped to have for certain courses, which school jobs, evening programs, a certain person she had just begun a tentative friendship with—it was as if each element, large and small, had to be fondled and considered in detail for her to say goodbye—and she couldn’t say goodbye.
One afternoon in the library, working the untrafficked check-out desk, she composed a letter on the library scratch paper (old notices Xeroxed on yellow paper, cut into eighths and stacked blank side up) with the stubby eraserless pencils the library supplied for jotting down call numbers. It addressed her headmaster, but it was a love letter to the school, or a eulogy. She wrote about what Bay Farm meant to her—what she had learned there, how great the people were, how she wished she were going back. She used a whole stack of the little chrome-yellow slips. Later, when she was typing out overdue notices, she typed the letter.
She imagined the decision as all in the hands of the headmaster, a genial, ineffectual fellow who, in truth, putting his hands nervously in his pockets and looking away the few times he had spoken to her, found Maude Pugh discomfitingly intense and cosmopolitan. But she thought: a plea of love like that, surely they would forgive the tuition, make some arrangement, let her stay. Teachers—except the ones who couldn’t stand her—valued her, she knew it. She was practically a faculty stepchild! Faculty children went to the school free . . .
Within hours of dropping it into the jaws of the blue metal mailbox, she wished she could pull the letter back.
When an envelope came through the door, she felt a pang of fear and then a thumping, slightly nauseating relief that was almost the same as disappointment. The flimsy overseas envelope with its florid, exotic stamps was from Danny. She rushed into her room and lay on the bed with it against her chest until her heart slowed, as if she could absorb him through the paper. But she couldn’t wait to see what he had to say.
“Oh, Maude, I miss you and love you,” it began. “I wish you could be here so I could share this with you in a real way,” his clear, flowing, fountain pen-blue script read. What he then described reminded Maude of films she had been shown in elementary school UNICEF programs, of African children with yaws. The surroundings had been dusty and squalid, the children crying or befuddled, their mothers impassive, the few men shown who weren’t doctors making sharp, angry gestures. She couldn’t imagine feeling welcome there, but Danny said it was amazing how friendly everyone was.
Mostly the letter was about the other kids in the program and the leaders and—since it was written almost on arrival—about their twenty-hour trip on a cheap propellor-plane flight, followed by a ride in the back of an open truck with their frame knapsacks and duffel bags. “There’s only one word for a bunch of rich kids singing ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More’ in the back of a truck on a barely existing track through an African jungle: surreal.” There had been a rat in the back of the truck, enormous, and they had shooed it out, shrieking and making cracks.
Dear Danny,
I can’t put enough into that “Dear.” It sounds so pathetic. I imagine the feeling of your skin, touching your cheeks, and then I can’t stop imagining, and so I’ve been in bed all afternoon, not sleeping. Sweaty. It’s incredibly hot here, and I try to think what it’s like there and if it’s even worse, and right away I’m with you under that mosquito net (I hope there’s a mosquito net and not with a hole in it—please don’t get malaria). Being there with you in my mind, it is hours before I come back to this room or the reality of this letter. The only reality we have right now. The only us. I feel as if, while you’re there, you’re so far away. Of course you are far away, but I mean you are going away while you’re there, changing, while I’m in the same place, not changing. I’ll try not to whine. It’s a sin to despair, I remember.
Maude sat with her pen over the tissuey air-mail paper she had bought with her library money for writing to Danny. How could she convey the is ness of it all? What she wanted was to convey herself; transport herself. But should she even be writing? He thought she was a Bay Farmer, and she wasn’t. Just a girl from Levittown.
The pen was slippery with sweat and humidity. At the library she had a fan, but in her room the wet, heavy air seemed part of the general oppression of the household. On a pad she added up the amount she would earn for the summer and subtracted it from the amount of tuition. It left over a thousand dollars. Two Milton Pugh paintings, she figured; one, maybe; but she couldn’t think how she could make the money. Which was really the only solution.
She was embarrassed to tell Danny any of this. If he were there, she could tell him, and he would make up the difference by caring. But he seemed remote in more than miles. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe she’d made a fairy tale of him.
She had written pages of longing for him in a letter already sent, which he probably had not yet received. She pushed down the weightless page. The sheet of ruled lines that considerately came with the stationery showed through clearly. She lifted her hand off the stationery and watched the lines cloud and become diffuse. She felt that it would take just nothing, the merest slip, for her to end up like the hapless painters Saul Partridge and Immerman. She’d always thought art would save her, if nothing else did. Maybe they had too.
She had biked home from the library with groceries from the Grand Union in the shopping center and as usual made dinner for her father and herself. Planning meals and trying out new recipes offered the chief variation of her days, and she found herself focusing on it in the slow hours, looking at The New York Times Cook Book in the library, thinking about making a scallion soufflé with the onion grass that grew in the empty lot and wondering whether that would go well with the string beans dangling in the garden and looking up different ways to cook them. And then they ate the increasingly elaborate and accomplished meals in silence.
"My goodness, look at that,” Milt said when she brought the soufflé to the table. She thought of soufflés as something fancy, upper-class and unknown. She hadn’t realized it was considered a bit of a triumph to get one to rise, particularly in a dented aluminum pot. She couldn’t understand why cooking had eluded her mother—all you had to do was follow the recipe. It was so much easier than art. It always turned out.
“Well, Maude, you could be a professional chef if you wanted.”
Maude looked as if she smelled something bad instead of steamy egg and baked Gruyère. He would never have said something like that to Seth—Seth who would be lucky to be able to be a chef. He’d be glad for Seth to carry on and be an artist, he wouldn’t regard Seth as competition . . . She didn’t let her eyes rise to her father’s gaze. Yes, he would like it if I were a cook. He wants me not even to try.
It seemed dangerous to let him know her thoughts or anything she might want: he was sure to keep her from having something, if he thought she wanted it. Seth always said what he wanted and he always wanted too much. With big fights, he got much of what he wanted in the end. But with her, she only got what she wanted if she kept it a secret.
Nevertheless, she let out, “I don’t want. As you know.”
Though it was even more perverse than that, what happened inside her. It suddenly seemed glamorous to be a professional chef, attractive; and at the same time an utter attack on her that he should suggest it; that he saw her that way.
That was the first time he called her the Ice Princess. As in, “Well. The Ice Princess speaks. Not good enough for you, is it? You think you’re so high and mighty. Think you’re better than where you come from. Just see how long that lasts, now that you’re not at that cockamamie school.” As if she had done something to hurt him
Before July ended, Maude heard from the headmaster. He said he was so moved by her “lovely letter”; she described the specialness of Bay Farm so well; could he, he wondered, have her permission to reprint passages as part of the next alumni fundraising appeal?