The Virgin Suicides (11 page)

Many people objected to the articles and television shows, coming as they did so long after the fact. Mrs. Eugene said, “Why can’t they let her rest in peace,” while Mrs. Larson lamented that the media attention had come “just when things were getting back to normal.” Nevertheless, the coverage alerted us to danger signals we couldn’t help but look for. Were the Lisbon girls’ pupils dilated? Did they use nose spray excessively? Eye drops? Had they lost interest in school activities, in sports, in hobbies? Had they withdrawn from their peers? Did they suffer crying jags for no reason? Did they complain of insomnia, pains in the chest, constant fatigue? Pamphlets arrived, dark green with white lettering, sent out by our local Chamber of Commerce. “We thought green was cheerful. But not too cheerful,” said Mr. Babson, who was president. “Green was also serious. So we went with it.” The pamphlets made no mention of Cecilia’s death, delving instead into the causes of suicide in general. We learned that there were 80 suicides per day in America, 30,000 per year, that an attempt or completion happened every minute, a completion every 18 minutes, that 3 to 4 times as many males completed suicide but 3 times as many females attempted it, that more whites than nonwhites completed suicide, that the rate of suicide among the young (15–24) had tripled in the last four decades, that suicide was the second leading cause of death among high-school students, that 25 percent of all suicides occurred in the 15–24 age group, but that, contrary to our expectations, the highest rate of suicide was found among white males over 50. Many men said afterward that the board members of the local Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Babson, Mr. Laurie, Mr. Peterson, and Mr. Hocksteder, had shown great prescience in predicting the negative publicity the suicide scare would bring to our town, as well as the subsequent fall in commercial activity. While the suicides lasted, and for some time after, the Chamber of Commerce worried less about the influx of black shoppers and more about the outflux of whites. Brave blacks had been slipping in for years, though they were usually women, who blended in with our maids. The city downtown had deteriorated to such a degree that most blacks had no other place to go. Not by choice did they pass our display windows where trim mannequins modeled green skirts, pink espadrilles, blue handbags clasped by gold frogs kissing. Even though we’d always chosen to play Indians and not cowboys, considered Travis Williams the best kickoff returner ever and Willie Horton the best hitter, nothing shocked us more than the sight of a black person shopping on Kercheval. We couldn’t help but wonder if certain “improvements” in The Village hadn’t been made to scare black people off. The ghost in the window of the costume shop, for instance, had an awfully pointed, hooded head, and the restaurant, without explanation, took fried chicken off its menu. But we were never sure if these developments had been planned, because as soon as the suicides began the Chamber of Commerce turned its attention to a “Campaign for Wellness.” Under the guise of health education, the chamber set up tables in school gymnasia, giving out information on a variety of hazards, from rectal cancer to diabetes. The Hare Krishnas were allowed to chant bald-headed and serve sugary vegetarian food for free. Mixed in with this new approach were the green pamphlets and family therapy sessions at which kids had to stand up and describe their nightmares. Willie Kuntz, whose mother took him to one, said, “They weren’t going to let me out of there until I cried and told my mom I loved her. So I did. But I faked the crying part. Just rub your eyes until they hurt. That works, sort of.”

Amid the increasing scrutiny, the girls managed to keep a low profile at school. Various sightings of them at the time merged into a general image of their careful cluster moving down the central hallway. They passed beneath the great school clock, the black finger of the minute hand pointing down at their soft heads. We always expected the clock to fall, but it never did, and soon the girls had skipped past the danger, their skirts growing transparent in the light coming from the hall’s far end, revealing the wishbones of their legs. If we followed, however, the girls would vanish, and, looking into classrooms they might have entered, we would see every other face but theirs, or would overshoot their trail and end up in the Lower School amid a meaningless swirl of finger paintings. The smell of egg tempera still brings back those useless pursuits. The halls, cleaned by lonely janitors at night, were silent, and we would follow a pencil arrow some kid had drawn on the wall for fifty feet, telling ourselves that this would be the time we spoke to the Lisbon girls and asked them what was troubling them. Sometimes we caught sight of tattered kneesocks rounding a corner, or came upon them doubled over, shoving books into a cubbyhole, flicking the hair out of their eyes. But it was always the same: their white faces drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadn’t been looking for them at all, that we didn’t know they existed.

We have a few documents from the time (Exhibits #13–#15)—Therese’s chemistry write-ups, Bonnie’s history paper on Simone Weil, Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid
t
’s and
b
’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching
L
’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the
u
and the barbed-wire
x
. Julie Winthrop also used to skip gym and spent many classes with Lux in the girls’ locker room. “We used to climb up on the lockers and smoke,” she told us. “You couldn’t see us from the ground, and if any teachers came by, they couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from. They usually thought whoever was smoking had already left.” According to Julie Winthrop, she and Lux were only “cig friends” and didn’t talk much on top of the lockers, too busy inhaling or listening for footsteps. She did say that Lux had an affected hardness that might have been a reaction to pain. “She was always saying, ‘Fuck this school,’ or ‘I can’t wait until I get out of here.’ But so did lots of kids.” Once, however, after they were finished smoking, Julie jumped down off the lockers and started out. When Lux didn’t follow, she called her name. “She still didn’t answer, so I went back and looked on top of the lockers. She was just lying there, hugging herself. She wasn’t making any sound. She was just shaking like she was really cold.”

Our teachers remembered the girls during this period in various ways, depending on the subject they taught. Mr. Nillis said of Bonnie, “It was pre-cal. We didn’t exactly get touchy-feely”; while Señor Lorca said of Therese, “A big girl! I think smaller, maybe happier. That is the way of the world and men’s hearts.” Apparently, though not a natural at languages, Therese spoke in a credible Castilian accent and had a great capacity for memorizing vocabulary. “She could speak Spanish,” Señor Lorca said, “but not
feel
it.”

In her written response to our questions (she wanted time to “ponder and deliberate”), Miss Arndt, the art teacher, said, “Mary’s watercolors did possess what, for lack of a better word, I will call a ‘mournfulness.’ But in my experience, there are really only two kinds of children: the empty-headed ones (Fauvist flowers, dogs, and sailboats) and the intelligent ones (gouaches of urban decay, gloomy abstractions)—much like my own painting in college, and during those three heady years in ‘the Village.’ Could I foresee she would commit suicide? I regret to say, no. At least ten percent of my students were born with modernist tendencies. I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse? I’m forty-seven years old and live alone.”

Day by day, the girls ostracized themselves. Because they stayed in a group, other girls found it difficult to talk or walk with them, and many assumed they wanted to be left alone. And the more the Lisbon girls were left alone, the more they retreated. Sheila Davis told of being in an English study group with Bonnie Lisbon. “We were discussing this book
Portrait of a Lady
. We had to do a character sketch on Ralph. Bonnie didn’t say much at first. But then she reminded us how Ralph always keeps his hands in his pockets. Then, like a jerk, I go, ‘It’s really sad when he dies.’ I wasn’t even thinking. Grace Hilton elbowed me and I turned purple. It got totally quiet.”

It was Mrs. Woodhouse, the headmaster’s wife, who came up with the idea for the “Day of Grieving.” She had majored in psychology in college and now, twice a week, volunteered at a Head Start program in the inner city. “They kept writing about the suicide in the paper, but do you know we hadn’t mentioned it once in school all that year?” she told us nearly twenty years later. “I’d wanted Dick to address the matter at Convocation, but he felt otherwise and I had to defer. But little by little, as the volume rose, he came around to my view.” (In fact, Mr. Woodhouse had addressed the subject, if obliquely, during his speech of welcome at Convocation. After introducing the new teachers, he had said, “It has been a long, hard summer for some of us here today. But today begins a new year of hopes and goals.”) Mrs. Woodhouse broached her idea to a few departmental heads during dinner at the modest ranch-style house that came with her husband’s position, and the following week proposed it at a full teachers’ meeting. Mr. Pulff, who left shortly thereafter to pursue a job in advertising, recalled a few of Mrs. Woodhouse’s words that day. “ ‘Grief is natural,’ she said. ‘Overcoming it is a matter of choice.’ I remember it because I used it later for a diet product: ‘Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.’ Maybe you saw it.” Mr. Pulff voted against the Day of Grieving but was in the minority. The date was set.

Most people remember the Day of Grieving as an obscure holiday. The first three hours of school were canceled and we remained in our homerooms. Teachers passed out mimeographs related to the day’s theme, which was never officially announced, as Mrs. Woodhouse felt it inappropriate to single out the girls’ tragedy. The result was that the tragedy was diffused and universalized. As Kevin Tiggs put it, “It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.” Teachers had latitude to present material of their own choosing. Mr. Hedlie, the English teacher who rode his bicycle to school with his trouser cuffs secured in metal clips, handed out a collection of poems by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Deborah Ferentell remembered a few lines from one poem entitled “Rest”:

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs
.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies
.

The Reverend Pike spoke of the Christian message of death and rebirth, working in a story of his own heartrending loss when his college football team failed to clinch the division title. Mr. Tonover, who taught chemistry and still lived with his mother, was at a loss for words on the occasion, and let his students cook peanut brittle over a Bunsen burner. Other classes, dividing into groups, played games where they envisioned themselves as architectural structures. “If you were a building,” the leader would ask, “what kind of building would you be?” They had to describe these structures in great detail and then make improvements. The Lisbon girls, stranded in separate homerooms, declined to play, or kept asking to be excused to go to the bathroom. None of the teachers insisted on their participating, with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds. At midday, Becky Talbridge saw the Lisbon girls together in the girls’ bathroom in the Science Wing. “They’d brought chairs in from the hall and they were just sitting there, waiting it out. Mary had a run in her nylon—can you believe she wore nylons?—and she was fixing it with fingernail polish. Her sisters were sort of watching her but they seemed pretty bored. I went into the stall, but I could feel them out there and I couldn’t, you know, go.”

Mrs. Lisbon never learned about the Day of Grieving. Neither her husband nor her daughters mentioned it when they returned home that day. Mr. Lisbon had of course been present at the teachers’ meeting when Mrs. Woodhouse made her proposal, but accounts differ as to his reaction. Mr. Rodriguez remembered him as “nodding his head, but not saying anything,” while Miss Shuttleworth recalled that he left the meeting shortly after it began and never returned. “He never heard about the Day of Grieving. He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat,” she said, still quizzing us on rhetorical constructions (in this case, zeugma) which we had to identify before being excused from her presence. When Miss Shuttleworth came into the room for her interview, we stood in respect as we always had, and even though we were approaching middle age, a few of us balding, she still referred to us as “infants,” as she had in her classroom so long ago. She still had the plaster bust of Cicero on her desk and the imitation Grecian urn we had given her upon graduation, and still exuded the air of a powdered celibate polymath. “I don’t think Mr. Lisbon knew about the
Dies Lacrimarum
until it was well under way. I passed by his classroom during second period and he was at the blackboard, in his chair, instructing. I don’t think anyone had had the fortitude to acquaint him with the day’s activities.” Indeed, when we spoke to him years later, Mr. Lisbon possessed only a vague memory of the Day of Grieving. “Try decade,” he told us.

For a long time no one agreed on the success of the various attempts to address Cecilia’s suicide. Mrs. Woodhouse thought the Day of Grieving had served a vital purpose, and many teachers were pleased that the silence around the subject had been broken. A psychological counselor came on staff once a week, sharing the small office of the school nurse. Any student feeling the need to talk was encouraged to go. We never did, but every Friday peeked in to see if any of the Lisbon girls met with the counselor. Her name was Miss Lynn Kilsem, but a year later, after the rest of the suicides, she disappeared without a word. Her degree in social work turned out to be fake, and no one is sure if her name was really Lynn Kilsem, or who she was, or where she went off to. In any case, she is one of the few people we haven’t been able to track down, and in the characteristic irony of fate, one of the few people who might have been able to tell us something. For apparently the girls went to see Miss Kilsem regularly on Fridays, though we never saw them amid the paltry medical supplies of that poor excuse for a nurse’s office. Miss Kilsem’s patient records were lost in an office fire five years later (a coffeemaker, an old extension cord) and we have no exact information regarding the sessions. Muffie Perry, however, who had been using Miss Kilsem as a sports psychologist, often recalled seeing Lux or Mary in the office, and sometimes Therese and Bonnie as well. We had a great deal of trouble locating Muffie Perry herself, owing to the many rumors involving her married name. Some said she was now Muffie Friewald, others Muffie von Rechewicz, but when we finally dug her up, tending the rare orchids her grandmother had bequeathed to the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, she told us her name was still Muffie Perry, period, as it had been in the days of her field hockey triumphs. We didn’t recognize her at first, what with the sucking vines and thick creepers, the misty hothouse air, and even when we cajoled her to stand under the artificial grow lamp, we saw that she had swelled and puckered, that her great goal-scoring back was hunched, but that her tiny teeth in their bright gums were unchanged. The decadence of Belle Isle contributed to our gloomy reappraisal. We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island, stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red-white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed, splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew in patches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop tops tied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken-brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic moneys still ran high, but since her death the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world.