Everybody Rise (18 page)

Knowing all this, Evelyn was startled to discover what Preston Hacking actually looked like. It was the Alumni Appreciation Day assembly, and the headmaster had asked Preston to say a few words about being fourth generation at Sheffield. Rather than the dark-haired and dashing guy she had come to imagine him as (his directory photo was blurry, and taken from a strange angle, allowing Evelyn to add all sorts of dramatic flourishes), she realized he was the tall, skinny fellow with wavy blond hair and alabaster skin that she'd seen lounging about on campus benches dressed in sweaters with elbow patches. He was of the cool kids, absolutely, but also seemed eccentric in a way that Evelyn envied.

Evelyn herself was neither eccentric, nor cool, nor anything at Sheffield. That was clear on her second day there, Tryout Day: the Key Association in the library, the Ben Jonson Players in the experimental theater, the Federalist Society in the Academy Building, the Indian dance troupe Aananda in the JV squash courts. Evelyn, with her piano background, had long had hopes of being in the theater. One bad morning in Bibville, though, Barbara had said that she was singing flat, and Evelyn had stopped singing. She went from chorus roles in Bibville middle-school musicals to painting the backdrops, thinking maybe she could direct or something someday. Before eighth grade, she'd tried once more, as she'd wanted to attend music camp in Virginia, but her mother took one look at the brochure's cover, showing a plump girl singing, and said that these theater people needed to spend some time getting exercise outdoors. Babs enrolled Evelyn in tennis camp again that summer instead.

Evelyn worked up the nerve on that second day of Sheffield to go to the arts center and hear about the upcoming theater season, but when her hand was on the auditorium door, she heard a girl talking about how she had played Young Cosette in the touring production of
Les Miz
over the summer. She almost ran back to her dorm. It was clear to Evelyn by the end of the tryouts that a handful of students was already picked for stardom. A freshman in Wyckoff had done an amazing job as a soccer forward that morning and was going to be a three-sport prep. The Cosette girl, a prep in McGeorge, was favored for Sarah in the fall production of
Guys and Dolls
. Evelyn sensed she had been cast in her Sheffield role without attending a single tryout: Girl in Background #4.

Barbara had somehow procured her own copy of the Sheffield student directory, and in addition to asking about Preston, she would quiz Evelyn about James Scripps Robinson or Sarah Monaghan Lowell. “The Scrippses started the art museum in Detroit,” she would say. Or, “We had a Lowell girl at Hollins a year or two ahead of me. I think she went on to marry a de Puy.” Preparing for her mother's inquiries, Evelyn learned the signs—the Tuxedo Park addresses, the old-money family names even for towns like Cleveland—that worked as a decoder ring for this world. Sometimes, on scraps of paper she'd tear and throw away immediately afterward, she'd try out her name with some of the more august surnames: Evelyn Beegan Cushing, Mrs. James Cady Robinson (Evelyn). But she mostly sat in front of
Reality Bites
or
Four Weddings and a Funeral
or whatever the dorm head had gotten from the video store that week and listened to the knots of girls in the common room next door singing Lisa Loeb.

It was Sarennes that changed Evelyn's social fate at Sheffield. Barbara observed Evelyn over the summer break after her prep year, Evelyn's nose in a book and fingers on the piano keys, and determined that her daughter was, if anything, even less social than she had been prior to Sheffield. Barbara decided immersion therapy would work best, tracked down Mrs. Germont, who headed the fall term-abroad program in Sarennes, France, in Alsace, and petitioned for Evelyn to be a last-minute addition to the program. The idea almost paralyzed Evelyn when her mother told her about it, as she knew who was going on the term, namely Preston Hacking and his pals.

Evelyn was placed with a baker's family above the small town bakery, with a stern matriarch who would get up at 4:00
A.M
. and acted as though Evelyn was her paid assistant. The matriarch spoke French initially, apparently in order to get the fees for a boarder, but it was all Alsatian once the Sheffield faculty had gone, and Evelyn could barely understand anything the woman was saying. Evelyn's first day with them was a Sunday, when the bakery was closed and, despite being dragged to a long and boring Lutheran service, Evelyn didn't have to do much. On the second day, the woman woke Evelyn at five o'clock so Evelyn could stand guard downstairs and accept the pots of stew from the ladies of the town. The baker then covered them in rounds of raw dough, and the ladies would return after doing their washing and chores for their baeckeoffe, and Evelyn, smelling of fatty meat and flour, wondered how quickly she could get out of this.

On her third morning as an indentured Alsatian servant, Evelyn decided she would sneak into town and use the phone at the restaurants to find out about flights home. The street at dawn looked empty, but then she saw Preston Hacking loosely leaning on a broom handle in front of a door frame down the street. Evelyn's instinct was to turn and go toward town in the other direction, so she wouldn't have to embarrass herself with a strangled hello. But that would add several minutes to her trip, and she had to be back before Madame returned from her morning errands. So she pushed herself forward, waved her hand inelegantly from across the narrow cobblestone street, and, in a voice that sounded false and high to her, shouted, “Hello!”

They had not spoken so far on the trip, Preston hobnobbing with his own group of friends, but he looked up with something like interest.

“What a place,” he said, in his lockjaw dialect. “What on earth am I doing with a broom in my hand this early in the morning?”

She had to fight her urge to give a flat smile and jog away. She sucked in the cool air. “Manual labor?”

“Manual labor. That is correct. We're paying these Frenchmen to let us stay here, and they not only don't appreciate the money, they wake me at the crack of dawn and put this item in my hand. Do I look like a street sweeper?”

“A well-dressed one.” Evelyn waited for Preston to ignore her comment, but instead Preston smiled and kept the conversation going.

“There is no such thing. No such man. Certainly not I. What are you doing at this ungodly hour? Off to wring the neck of a chicken?”

“I was actually going to go to the restaurant.”

“The food's that bad in your homestay?”

She giggled nervously and took a few halting steps across the street toward him. “To use the phone, actually.”

“Calling Mumsy to bail you out?”

“Well, no, actually. I was going to call the travel agent.”

He slapped the broom handle. “I dig it. Going straight to the source to break free from this prison camp. Won't your parents be alarmed when you show up at home unannounced?”

“I hadn't really thought it through. Maybe they'll be happy?”

“After what this forced-labor program cost? Doubtful.”

“Well, maybe I'll have the agent send me to Paris for a while, then.”

Preston laughed, and Evelyn felt her cheeks redden and the flush spread throughout her body. She couldn't believe she had made someone like Preston laugh. She was here, talking to one of the most popular uppers—and, seemingly, keeping him entertained—when she had spent a whole year barely talking to boys at all. She wished someone were filming it, so she'd have evidence of social success that she could look back on during those long nights in her dorm.

“I like it. Escape to Paris, fully funded by the 'rents. They'll never be the wiser. Evelyn, right?”

“Right.”

“Evelyn what?”

“Beegan.”

“Beegan. What is that, Irish?”

Evelyn shifted her weight to her back foot. “Korean. Russian. African.”

Preston smiled and released the broom handle, balancing it carefully against the doorframe. “Multiethnic. How modern. I'm going with you. I want to see if escape is indeed possible.” He stepped over a small puddle, and his loafers shone even in the low light as he joined Evelyn in the street.

At the bar, he'd bought both of them thick, almost chewable coffees, as she—having forgotten about the time difference—left a message for the travel agent in Easton who'd arranged her flights.

She ended up not needing the flight out. That night, Evelyn heard hoots from below her window, and she dropped to the floor, crawling over so she could see who was there and why they were making fun of her. It was Preston with Charlotte Macmillan, an international-set girl from Evelyn's dorm who was rumored to have gotten restrictions for sneaking into James Ying's room after hours. They were with a few other “coolies,” as they were known at Sheffield, and they didn't seem to be jeering at her. Preston was actually calling for her to come out with them. She stood up, waved, and joined them.

As the term went on, she found it surprising and comforting to finally have friends, a group, people who didn't mind her and maybe even liked her. She sent pictures to her mother of her with actual humans. There were other kids in the Sarennes program who were odd and said weird things and wandered by themselves among the Loire Valley châteaus on weekend trips, and she wasn't one of them. She was part of something. She constantly monitored herself to make sure she wasn't being annoyingly overbearing or too dull and played her role well as the easygoing straight man to the antics of Preston and the others.

When she returned to Sheffield, she wasn't quite popular, but she had a place. One of the Sarennes girls said she would be perfect for lightweight crew and took her down to the boathouse on the first day of spring term, and the coach said she should be a natural with her build. Then she had another new group of friends to sit with and make inside jokes with and fling Ammonoosuc water at and sing with on the bus to weekend races at Groton and Kent. Now Charlotte was flopping down next to her in the dorm common room and asking her if she wanted to order Delvecchio's chicken-finger subs. Charlotte asked Evelyn to room with her for upper and senior years so they could get the “hot-doub,” the fourth-floor double with a balcony and a hidden back closet where Charlotte could smoke cigarettes. Evelyn now had a reference tag on her, friends-with-Preston, that made her stand out among the masses at Sheffield.

Her mother came up for Easter weekend Evelyn's lower spring and insisted she invite a friend to dinner. “Mommy, what do you think about taking out a whole group?” Evelyn suggested.

“What group?” Barbara asked.

And Evelyn let each name drop like a hard candy into an eager mouth: Preston Hacking, Charlotte Macmillan, Nick Geary—Preston's best friend from middle school who was visiting from Enfield that weekend.

Barbara decided to make a night of it and hired a car to drive the teenagers and herself to Portsmouth, signing each of their faxed permission slips with a flourish and taking them to a riverside restaurant. Nick, hearing that the Saturday-night plan was to go to Portsmouth with someone's mother, found a pot dealer he knew from Brookline and got high before the drive but charmed Barbara nevertheless. Preston did have that chocolate martini, and Evelyn remembered her mother ordering wine for the rest of them. The fact that Evelyn had managed to gather together a group from Brookline and Beacon Hill (Barbara was not as impressed with Charlotte, who wore the albatrossian pigtails that night) made Evelyn feel like she was going to explode with achievement. To suddenly have friends, and to have your mother seeing you have friends, when all your life you'd been a social fumbler—Evelyn wanted that evening outing to last for hours.

*   *   *

“I do remember that martini, actually,” Evelyn said. “I wouldn't think Babs would slip liquor to underage students, but there you go.”

“I am quite looking forward to seeing her again,” Preston said.

“You're getting a triple scoop of Beegan tonight. My father's also coming.”

“Charlotte,” Preston said, “did you hear that we will see the Yeti-like Mr. Beegan tonight?”

Charlotte looked oddly pale. “I didn't know your dad was in town, Ev.”

“He's decided late in life to be a Sheffield alumni supporter. What can I say?” Evelyn said.

“His legal practice—” Scot began to say in his trumpetlike voice, but Charlotte quickly cut him off.

“So the old Muscovite opened with pawn to where?” she said.

Dale bustled in a few minutes later, accompanied by the assistant director of alumni affairs, whom he had never met but who was nevertheless laughing her head off at something he was saying. Especially among the silver-fish schools of New York males, all in sensibly understated gray suits, Dale stood out. Today, he wore a suit that looked like it was made of denim with a bright pink pocket square; he should have had an antique stopwatch dangling from his neck. Even at home, his look was ostentatious, and Evelyn wondered how he managed to draw attention to himself in New York, where people wearing leg warmers or Druid robes barely merited a second glance. He saw Evelyn and bade farewell to the assistant director with, evidently, one more hilarious joke.

“Well, hi, there, honey. This city of yours is as hot as Hades, isn't it?” he said. He hit the “idn't” particularly hard.

“Dad, you remember Charlotte and Preston? And this is Scot,” Evelyn said.

Dale, who hadn't seen Charlotte and Preston since Evelyn's Sheffield graduation, and who, to Evelyn's recollection, hadn't once asked about them, didn't pause. He looked each of them in the eye as he shook hands. “Charlotte, you're looking pretty as ever. Preston, thanks for looking out for my little girl in the big city. Scot, it sure is a pleasure.”

Charlotte was shifting her weight. “Nice to see you, Mr. Beegan. I'm just going to go grab some food. Does anyone want anything? No? Okay,” she said, and she darted off.