The Body in the Ivy (8 page)

Her parents had repeated the same arguments for Max they had used with Rachel. “You need a quality, well-rounded liberal arts education. Education is for life. You want to be ignorant?” Rachel had proposed she and Max take classes at NYU or the New School, but her parents wanted them to “have a taste of campus life.” “The city will still be here when you come back,” her father had said. “Campus life”—it sounded like porkpie hats and raccoon coats, the Harvard-Yale game, undergraduates drinking too much, and panty raids. No, thank you.

Yet here she was and Max would be following. Not Pelham, of course. He was applying early decision to Harvard. She was sure he'd get in. He'd scored two 800s on his SATs; had a 4.5 GPA, because of his AP courses; tutored at a settlement house—and then there was his music. She figured she was at Pelham as a legacy; her grades hadn't been so hot, although she had decent scores. It never seemed to matter. Only the music mattered. She'd get through the year, and then Max would be at Harvard or someplace else in the Boston area. They'd worked it out. Maybe Brandeis. This was her only consolation: Max close by, especially if he had
a car. Maybe she could say she wouldn't stay at Pelham unless her parents gave Max a car. He'd have to get a license, but that couldn't be hard. Look at all the idiots who passed the test. A car would mean freedom. They could get rid of it when he graduated and moved back to the city.

She took her guitar out of its case. The dorm rooms didn't have locks—in case of fire, supposedly. More likely for random bed checks. Men were allowed in your room on Sundays from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., with the door ajar ten inches, and three feet on the floor at all times. When she'd read that to Max and their friends from the rulebook, they'd had a great time thinking of all the things you could do and still obey the letter of the law. “Better bring ‘Twister,'” advised her friend Sally, who was off to the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia.

Rachel had composed a piece for high school graduation and found herself playing it softly. What would happen if she skipped the meeting? Her Big Sister, a girl from Scarsdale who was engaged to someone at Dartmouth, would come looking for her. She couldn't feign illness. Not this early. She'd save it for something worse. She put the Martin guitar back in its case. Tomorrow she'd walk into town. There was bound to be a hardware store or maybe a bicycle shop where she could get some kind of lock to attach to the bar in the closet. It wouldn't discourage a serious thief, but would keep away anyone who might think her precious instrument was available for a few rounds of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”

There was a knock at the door. Rachel glanced in the
mirror. Her oval face looked paler than usual. She swept her straight, black hair into a clip at the nape of her neck.

“Coming,” she said with all the enthusiasm of Marie Antoinette stepping into the tumbrel.

 

The living room of the housemother's suite at Felton was furnished with an eclectic mix of Chippendale and Gothic Revival custom furniture, supplemented by Mrs. MacIntyre's own penchant for chintz-covered, overstuffed armchairs, appropriate receptacles for her ample frame. Ensconced in one, she greeted the girls as they filed in, the Big Sisters from the junior class chatting noisily, the freshmen quiet as mice, clutching their Bluebooks, pens, and notepads. Appropriate to the periods represented, the lighting was poor, casting shadows on the wood-paneled walls. The diamond-paned windows were partially obscured by heavy, maroon velvet drapes. Little of the brilliant sunset outside penetrated the Pelham sanctum.

“Now, ladies, I believe we are all here, so let's begin, shall we? Oh, wait, here's one more.” Mrs. MacIntyre had seen the doorknob turn. Not much got past her.

Maggie Howard was sitting on the floor by the fireplace facing the door. She had her notepad open and her Bluebook turned to the first page. She'd underlined what she thought were the most important points throughout the book. “Honor Code” on page 1 was underlined twice. She looked up at the late arrival and gave a start. She was the most beautiful girl Maggie had ever seen off a movie screen, and apparently the rest of the room felt the same way. Everyone was staring as hard as she was.

The girl had dark brown hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders. She was as tall as Maggie, about five eight, but the physical similarity ended there. A white polo shirt that might have been her brother's or a boyfriend's was tucked into navy linen Bermuda shorts, emphasizing her tiny waist. Slender, but not skinny. Maggie instantly felt ten pounds heavier and wished she hadn't indulged in that second slice of Pelham Fudge Cake (see recipe, p. 322) at dinner. But what was most striking about the girl was the color of her eyes. They were violet. Contact lenses? Somehow Maggie didn't think so. Long dark lashes emphasized the color. Not even the hint of a zit on her glowing face—and when she smiled, as she did now, a small dimple appeared.

“You must be Mrs. MacIntyre. I am so sorry. Daddy was being tiresome and insisted we stop in New Haven to meet some old classmates of his who were dropping their sons off. Mother, Elaine—that's my sister, she's in Crandall—and I begged him not to, but he said it would just take a minute; of course it didn't. Then no one seemed to be able to find a phone, and rather than take even more time, we simply came on along. Please forgive me.” She smiled again. “Oh, how silly, I almost forgot. I'm Hélène Prince, but call me Prin—everybody does.”

She waited, bowing her head ever so slightly for the housemother's reaction. The Pelham Bluebook had two pages devoted to penalties for being late: late returns from vacations, late returns from absences, to name two categories. Being late to Freshman Orientation wasn't named specifically. Perhaps it had never occurred before. Mrs. MacIntyre took a moment or two before say
ing, “A Pelham student should always have a dime in her shoe to make an emergency phone call. Public telephones are readily available. However, the only person you have hurt so far is yourself, by missing the opportunity to meet your fellow freshmen. I will check with your sister's housemother at Crandall to be sure she feels as I do that we can excuse your lateness this time.” She paused, then softened the tone of her remarks. “Sometimes it's difficult to keep Elis in line.”

A few of the juniors laughed and one said, “Did I hear correctly? Mrs. M. casting aspersions on a Yale, not Harvard, man?”

“I'll be sure to get that dime,” Prin said, glancing down at her soft shocking-pink Pappagallo flats. A dime would have to go below the sole of her foot or make an indentation in the leather.

She walked across the room and sat down in an empty space on the floor next to Maggie. She smelled faintly of cigarettes and something else, something minty. Maggie, who could only reliably identify her own Jean Naté and her mother's precious Chanel No. 5, wasn't sure whether it was perfume or Life Savers. The question was solved when Prin took out a roll and offered one to Maggie. Not sure whether it counted as food—not allowed in the common rooms, unless at tea on Friday afternoons or some other college-sponsored event, and surely the housemother's living room would be included in the prohibition—Maggie shook her head, but tried to look pleasant so as not to offend the goddess next to her. Maggie had become good at looking pleasant over the years. Girls liked her and at her prep school she had been awarded all sorts of posts by her peers,
attaining the status of head girl—the school had mimicked its British counterparts since its inception—during her last term. It suddenly became very important that this girl, her
sister,
like her, too, and Maggie stuck her hand out for the roll as soon as Mrs. MacIntyre was looking the other way. Prin seemed about to laugh, and Maggie wondered why, but as she sucked on the candy, the housemother's words soon drove the thought from her mind.

“You've all read the book. Why do we need to go over it? Anyone?”

“So we won't disgrace you, Mrs. M.,” a tall redheaded Big Sister said.

“Don't be so smart, Cynthia.” Obviously the redhead was a favorite. “But you're not far off. Replace disgracing me with each of you and there's your reason. The sign-outs, the hours, in short, the rules, may seem old-fashioned, but you're here to learn. And not just academics, but how to make your families proud—how to contribute to society.”

Rachel Gold knew if she didn't tune this woman out, she'd have to leave. In loco parentis—that's what the rules were really for. To keep Pelham parents' precious daughters safe, and virgins if possible. That's what they wanted, even her own, supposedly more liberal, parents. The parents who had gone nuts when they discovered she'd let a male friend from school sleep on the floor of her room when he was locked out of his apartment by accident. His parents had been away and he'd been at a concert with Rachel and Max. He could have slept on Max's floor, but her room was much larger. It never occurred to Rachel that her parents would be up
set. It wasn't as if she'd been having wild, passionate sex with him. Now she was sorry she hadn't. If Pelham was the punishment, then the crime should have been worthwhile.

“Our house president, Sarah Stevens, will pass out blank sign-out sheets and we'll go over it together, then tomorrow night you'll do one on your own to hand in.”

And so it began. After covering every possible contingency—“What if your date doesn't tell you ahead of time where you're going?” to “What happens if I put the wrong time, say we've switched off daylight savings?”—the group adjourned to the dining room for vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce and toasted almonds, the “Pelham College Special” at Bailey's Ice Cream Parlor in the center of the village.

Classes didn't start until Thursday and the next three days were filled with appointments and events. The freshman class was addressed by their dean, the dean of the college, the dean of students, and finally the college president herself. Maggie's head was in a whirl. She'd passed her posture picture—a strange experience where she stripped to her underpants, had marks made on her spine with some kind of fluorescent adhesive patches, then entered a dark cubicle after which there was a flash of light and a photo produced, all to check for any curvature that might require a special phys ed class. Similarly, she passed the speech test, although one of her new friends, Sandy Shaw, a pretty girl from West Virginia with a charming lilt to her voice that Maggie envied, failed. The New England accent that always brought President Kennedy to mind was apparently not considered a handicap, nor was the British accent of
several classmates—but the South, New Jersey, and certain sections of New York were beyond the pale. Florence Howard had erased any trace of the Midwest from Maggie's speech, until she could have qualified for an anchor position on the nightly news anywhere in the country.

Sandy was enrolled in the speech class, but told Maggie that the moment she was home, her accent would be back—or else. It had been hard enough to convince her family to let her come North to Pelham, and surprisingly hard to leave them when the time came, but “If I come home talking like y'all—‘all of you,'” she'd added pointedly—“that will be the end of it.”

Then there were tryouts for the choir, various other smaller vocal groups, including Pelham's answer to the Whiffenpoofs, the Pelham Pearls; team tryouts, clubs to join. Maggie felt as if she were at a banquet table, and she always had trouble resisting a tempting dish.

Tuesday morning, Prin tapped her on the shoulder as she was finishing her breakfast. She wished it had been the day before when she'd limited herself to coffee and half a grapefruit, but the popovers this morning had been more than she could resist. Each dorm had its own kitchen and Felton was known for its baked goods—and yearly contribution to the freshman ton.

“We're all meeting in the laundry room tonight at nine after the sing-along or whatever it is.”

Freshmen were meeting in the auditorium to learn the traditional college songs. They had until Sunday to create their own class song, which would be performed at the all-college chapel service.

“What for? And why the laundry room?” Maggie asked.

“We have to talk about the class elections and it's the only place big enough for all thirty-four of us.”

“Okay. I'll tell Bobbi.”

Maggie and her roommate were getting along fine. Roberta—“Bobbi”—Dolan was from Pennsylvania, bluntly explaining that her parents were working-class people who'd struck it rich when her father, who had never been to college, invented and patented a type of truck suspension that apparently all trucks had to have. Bobbi didn't know too much about it. All she knew was that one minute she was sharing a bathroom with five other people and the next she had her own. Like Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Dolan had decided on Pelham for her only daughter and enrolled Bobbi in private school. She confessed she had liked her public school better and that it had been really hard to leave her friends; she was thirteen at the time and never stopped feeling like the new girl. She was very happy to be at Pelham, where everyone was a new girl. Bobbi had no prior connection to Pelham, like Maggie. When she'd heard this, Maggie had thought about all the legacies. There had been a special tea at the college president's house on Sunday afternoon for alums and their daughters. Florence Howard told Maggie, “Someday you'll be bringing your own daughter,
my
granddaughter, to that tea.” It was a rare moment of mother-daughter bonding. Maggie vowed to be at the tea, and felt just as excluded as her mother did.

The laundry room was cozy—warm and filled with the scent of Ivory Snow. Prin and her roommate, Phoebe Hamilton, a shy girl from Bedford Hills, New
York, who was rumored to be as smart as she was rich—and she was very rich—were sitting side by side on one of the washing machines. Prin was braiding Phoebe's rather lifeless, mousy brown hair into one long braid down her back. It didn't improve Phoebe's looks much but was obviously making her feel good. Two spots of color had appeared in her normally wan cheeks and her pale gray eyes were shining. Girls who hadn't claimed seats on the appliances were leaning against the walls or sitting on the floor. Someone was passing around a big bag of chips. The noise was loud, but not deafening. There was a lot of laughter. Four girls Maggie didn't recognize as being in Felton entered and were warmly greeted by Prin.