Invitation to a Bonfire Read online

Thanks to an anonymous tip, Register reporters were on the scene when the children were finally released and sent on to their new American homes on a quiet night in December. Two hundred small figures were removed from the boat, huddled beneath coats and blankets, before being placed into waiting vans and taken to the nearest train depot. Although the crowd was told the orphans were young and sick, bystanders eager for a closer look continued to press toward the children, and flashbulbs popped regularly in the darkness. One onlooker even waved a knife in the air while declaring himself “ready to act” if necessary, and though this man was quickly subdued by authorities, there were some present who questioned whether his actions were those of a crank or a hero.

  Three years later, we are still left with the same uncertainties. Was it charity to place these children with American families, or a boondoggle of the greatest order? Did they grow up to contribute productively to their households, or did they wait and watch for the moment they might undermine them? With the Furies still closely guarding their whereabouts, we’re still no closer to finding out.

  Zoya

  19.

  When I was one of them, the girls of the Donne School all seemed unique to me, each equipped with her own set of interests (which I knew of) and hidden talents (which I sometimes suspected), and peculiar embarrassments (which I rarely understood), not to mention a pair or two of infrequently laundered pajamas. They all had names: Jenny Hollinger, Leonora Torrance, Margaret Rathburn, Cindy Pink. Josephine Toff and Ashley Pearson, Regina Anderson and Leah Wills. It was only once I joined the staff that they became as one to me, a sea of girls washing forward out of classroom doors, dredged back into seats with the chime of a bell. Totally tidal and predictable. Utterly furious in their force.

  It’s true I endured my fair share of snubbing as a student—as I’ve said, I didn’t really have friends. But it was accepted that I was supposed to be there. A little exotic, a little pathetic. Their mascot European exile with her heavy accent (embarrassing: I rid myself of this as soon as I could) and quietly ridiculous turns of phrase. Many fellow students recognized me as Margaret’s roommate, and put me under their wing for that reason, helping me pick the one good dessert from a table full of sticky canned puddings, or stopping me outside the bathroom to point out the toilet paper attached to my shoe. (It took me years to get the hang of throwing soiled tissue into the toilet instead of a wastebasket, as I’d been taught to do back home. Especially considering the dented tins placed in every stall for items of feminine hygiene; how was I supposed to know the difference? Lucky for me, none of the girls ever knew. I think I’d have been lynched, or would, at the very least, have acquired a sickening nickname.) At graduation we all wore black gowns and hugged on the lawn, creating a tableau not unlike my original dreams of the Donne School, but in reverse. Good-byes, not hellos. Dark clothing, not white. Still quite tender.

  I expected things to carry on more or less the same way when the new semester started and I began my work in the greenhouse, after spending the summer reading horticulture periodicals and receiving daily tutorials from John O’Brien. Yes, it was unusual for a graduated senior to remain on campus, but I was hardly older than the rest of the girls. In fact, most of the returning students already knew me: as a former upperclassman, albeit an unpopular one. In perhaps the last gasp of my socialist-optimist naïveté, I really thought this familiarity would work to my advantage.

  The first day was flush with move-ins, slammed car doors. I heard shrieks of greeting as I trudged to and from the greenhouse, carrying sacks of fertilizer and seedling pots from the back of John’s pickup. We were behind our original schedule, still fixing things into place, but were confident about finishing on time, and anyway it added visibility to the project, having us work so vigorously in such plain view. Already that morning we’d scrubbed the glass clean and checked all the window seals, and we’d spent the past two weeks testing how well the space held its temperature when set to various levels: mild, tepid, hot, steaming. I had a hanging basket of spray bottles, some full of water, some nutrient-rich soil enhancers, some a mild dish soap solution to discourage pests. One had nettle tea. Now we were bringing in the plant life, and I felt an unexpected wave of maternal awe. Holding a flat of young tomatoes, I wanted to cry at the great vulnerability there at my fingertips. The spice smell, the fragile stems, the sticky hairs—it all combined, for me, into something quite infant-like, a cold and shivering tray of children being shuttled away from the only home they’d ever known. I wondered what it was like for them to ride in the bed of a truck, en plein air. If it was stunning. If they felt fear. Rocking gently back and forth like children on the deck of a boat in a storm. But never mind.

  After we’d settled the fruit and vegetable selection, the more glamorous flora would be brought in. Some I was planning to start from seeds: a tree called Voon’s banana that I had found in a catalogue, which purported to grow complexly flavored fruit and electric-pink flowers; some blue-tipped asters and iceberg superiors to use in floral arrangements around the school. But the administration didn’t want to wait around for sprouts; they wanted showy color right now. They wanted pop. And who could blame them? Already families were mustering outside the new structure, trying to peer in through the foggy glass. By the afternoon we’d be crowded over, and if everything went to plan, the first impression people had when walking into the greenhouse would be of entering another world, steamy, rich, and bright. Parents would imagine their own young flowers blooming under the care of the Donne School masters, and students would picture themselves in a wild new jungle of possibility. The opening of the greenhouse should, I’d been informed, set the tone for the whole school year.

  By lunchtime I was sweating, my hair tied up in a messy bun. I thought I heard my name called once or twice, but whenever I turned to wave hello I found myself alone, a pack of girls bustling away down the path with their heads pressed together and hands clasped tight. Giggling, punching one another in the arm. It always went that way on the first day, I told myself, with unions resumed and pacts re-sealed; and so if I felt a prickling on the back of my neck or an uncomfortable rumbling in my stomach whenever a set of eyes homed in on me only to divert sharply away, I ignored it. At noon I ran my hands under the greenhouse tap, wetting the blue bandanna John had given me to tie around my neck and wiping the dirt and sweat from my face. I had a year’s pass to the dining hall, and although I’d also bought a hot plate and kettle with an advance on my salary, there was no time to cook for myself before the large exotics arrived. I’d need to be on hand to supervise where they were placed, how they were arranged; to make sure the watering system was correctly installed, and that there were fans angled around the room to provide proper airflow to every corner.

  “Lunch?” I said to John. All summer we’d eaten together midday, choosing from the bare-bones selections the cafeteria provided for the year-round staff, and I knew that with students and parents present the food would be more carefully prepared, a table of fresh-baked pies—apple, cherry, peach, pecan—set out to accompany the beef stroganoff and chicken à la king. “Just a quick one.”

  “Oh, in there?” He frowned towards the dining hall. “No, hon. Siobhan packed me a sandwich. There’s some to share, if you want.”

  I considered the offer. Eating in the greenhouse was faster and easier; we’d finish in time to double-check our staging plan before the first truck showed up, and make sure no interlopers snuck in before the unveiling. It made sense, and I knew I ought to say yes. But I couldn’t help feeling the reflected glow of the new semester on my skin—an afterglow, really, in my case—and wanting to take part to whatever degree I could. The festival air was so familiar that I half expected Margaret to turn the corner and give me a perfunctory wave. Plus, I knew the limitations of my own cooking, and didn’t look forward to the months of scrambled eggs and sardines on toast that stretched ahead of me. A mouthful of hot food would do me good, I was sure.

  “Ok, I’ll see you in half an
hour, then,” I said. John raised his eyebrows and dug around in the knapsack he’d thrown into a corner several hours ago, pulling out a pastrami on rye.

  “Your funeral,” he told me. A strange choice of words, or so I thought at the time.

  20.

  Approaching the dining hall, my toes and fingertips tingled with goodwill. So many people hugging hello and good-bye. Such a fever of affection. None of the girls remembered yet that they’d have coursework beginning the very next day, long afternoons with mimeographed articles and eight A.M. classes to pull themselves out of bed for. They saw only the intermezzo: timing things just right to hand off notes in the hall between Geometry and European History II; the late nights of punch-drunk study parties that made seven-thirty alarm clocks so impossible. Spying a cute boy in town and pretending to have business the same direction he was strolling, coming up with terrible excuses to walk past the public high school or the arcade—or, if their tastes ran a bit more to silver, past the Eagles Club. All summer the campus had felt empty and bleak, but now it was home again.

  As I picked up my tray, one of the cooks spotted me from across the room and gestured furiously. John O’Brien and I often stayed to chat with the ladies over coffee, so I knew them all by name. This was Hilda, and running up behind her was a younger worker named Nadine. I waved back and flashed them a smile. Just then, someone knocked into my left elbow, sending my tray skittering onto the floor. “Oh!—” I said, as a group of students pushed ahead of me towards the entrée line. They didn’t look my direction, just tossed their hair and kept on chatting—something about wanting to avoid the leftovers, which didn’t make sense, since this was Welcome Day. I assumed they hadn’t seen me, and grabbed a new tray, sliding behind the threesome and grabbing a plate of stroganoff on a fresh bed of noodles. Hilda shouldered her way through the hungry crowd and ran over to me. She grabbed my elbow and steered me away from the line, picking up a piece of strawberry rhubarb (New flavor! was still all I thought) on the way to a table in the far corner of the hall.

  “Why are you here?” she hissed.

  “Lunch?” The confusion must’ve shown on my face, though a dim glimmer of awareness was starting to break through. All around the room, groups of students and even a few parents were taking peeks at me from the corners of their eyes.

  “But not now,” Hilda said. “The vultures are out.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I tucked a napkin—cloth, for today only—onto my lap and took a bite of pie. As a graduate I felt quite adult, and had decided I was allowed to eat dessert first if I wanted. “Who’s a vulture?”

  “Hmm,” said Hilda. She watched me eat the pie, my face growing pinker with each mouthful. Leftovers, the girls to the right of us whispered. So sad. So pathetic. It’s putting me off my appetite. I finished the pie and turned to my proper lunch, but before I could make much headway an entire table of third-years walked up and clattered their trays down next to me, a few scrapings left on each plate. My cheeks were now quite red and hot.

  “The kitchen’s right there,” I said. The bus tubs, where you were supposed to place your dishes for washing, were still almost empty.

  “Ohhhhh.” One of the girls, who I thought was named Kay, stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “We knoooooow, but we just thought you were looking for scraps.” She smiled, her eyebrows aloft with innocence. “We wanted to help!”

  I looked down at my food, and then over to Hilda. Her face was stern and set.

  “Come on, you ninnies,” she said. “Do your own dirty work.”

  Kay smiled wider, coming around to retrieve her tray. Her hair was yellow and tied back in a braid, which she flipped over her shoulder like a mink.

  “You know,” she said, “we thought we already did.”

  Hilda and I watched each girl flounce up and remove her tray, scraping the extra food carefully into a trashcan before placing their plates in the tubs. They tsked about the waste, but we didn’t make another sound until all of them were done and gone. It was only then I realized they’d taken my tray, too. My eyes stung, but I blinked and kept my gaze steady.

  “You know, Nadine used to be a Donne Girl.” Hilda spoke with a casual air, as though the idea had popped into her head for no reason. She looked at Nadine, who was back in the kitchen, then nodded at me. “Scholarship, like you. Her people are from Appalachia.”

  “Really.” I didn’t know where Appalachia was, but I could guess its character. Barren. Blighted. Or anyway nothing like the glittering towns that gave birth to Kays and Margarets. Farm horses instead of dressage. Oatmeal by necessity instead of for improved digestion.

  “Mmmhmm. She liked art history. Still does, as a matter of fact. Sometimes goes into the library museum after hours to look at the prints. But anyway,” Hilda swatted aside the idea of the school’s prize archival collection, “when she was done with her studies, she didn’t have much in the way of options. Go home to her momma. Try and find some work. She always used to cook for her cousins, and that was how she ended up staying here.”

  We both watched Nadine in the kitchen for a moment, humming to herself as she dropped plate after plate into a sink of soapy water. Something must’ve told her she was being observed—a tickle behind the ear, or a twitch at the base of the spine, goose over the grave—because she looked up all of a sudden and caught my eye. Her expression was hard to read.

  “Things can go ugly fast,” Hilda mused. “People can be ugly.” I thought she might say more, but she didn’t. Just put a hand on my shoulder before standing up and retying her apron, then disappeared back through the kitchen’s swinging door to help Nadine finish up the wash.

  21.

  Thank god Margaret wasn’t there amidst the vultures—she’d never see me this way, through the eyes of these girls. As far as she knew I’d picked up my bag and left town at the same time as the rest of our classmates, landing days later in a whole new life. She and I had discussed our post-graduation plans just once, and she accepted my vague answers with disinterested poise, perhaps filling in the details for herself. That’s what I hoped now. Her expectations of me naturally weren’t too high, but maybe she pictured me doing something secretarial. Not in New York, but maybe Pittsburgh or Detroit—big, if not the biggest. Not the finest, but still fine. I knew she planned to spend the summer on Cape Cod helping her mother decorate their new beach house before heading to Sarah Lawrence in the fall. My name would be disappearing from her memory by now, reduced to a faint buzz in the back of her brain. But at least the buzz would be a pleasant one. Oh, you, she’d think. And then she’d turn to the next topic. Something with a little more zip.

  I hurried back into the greenhouse, shutting the door behind me with a slam and leaning against it to catch my breath. John turned from the length of sprinkler pipe he was fiddling with, and gave me an assessing look.

  “That bad?”

  “Why,” I asked, “didn’t you tell me it would be like that?”

  “I thought you knew.” He shrugged. “You lived here for two years. You didn’t notice they were all stuck up?”

  I went over to the table of seedlings and ran my finger along a green bean vine curling up a thin stake in its terra-cotta pot. The stake, piked deep. The vine, slowly strangling the pike. Yes, I knew the Donne girls were snobs, but I didn’t realize they were cruel. I’d never worked for them before. I don’t know if I can do this, I almost said, but my thoughts were interrupted by a honk from outside, and the rumbling of an engine, cut short. My exotics. I took a breath and tied the bandanna back around my neck for protection from the afternoon sun.

  The next few hours passed quickly. We organized the plants not just by color but by region, creating biomes in each corner. One full of palms and banyans and birds of paradise, African iris and beehive ginger. One for the American southwest desert with ocotillo and aloe and agave, and even a small saguaro, which would cause me endless stress. For the southern belles we had orchids, honeysuckle, and a few tobacco plants
—plus a Venus flytrap, which I’d assumed was from somewhere with deep jungles, but I learned was actually from North Carolina, and simply couldn’t resist. I was reminded of childhood summers, when heat and effort erased the very hours from the clock. Spot-checking the sugar beet leaves for insect eggs, turning the soil, beginning the harvest, my mother handing out jugs of cold water with a hint of lemon and a breath of vodka to encourage the blur of minutes into days.

  John and I ran around, wrangling both citrus and rhizome. While we worked I had no time to think, though I wouldn’t realize this until later, and wouldn’t learn to cultivate it as an escape for longer still. My body, though, must’ve felt the relief and grabbed hold of it. By the time everything was in place I was breathless—from exertion, yes, but even more so from excitement. Snobs or not, the students and parents would have no choice but to be bowled over by our display. As the sun fell low, the greenhouse filled up with pink and orange light, burnishing the already rich colors and softening the edges of the leaves. I half expected to dissolve into the haze, leaving no trace behind but a pair of dirty shoes.

  As the first visitors trickled in, drawn by the Welcome Day itinerary printed out for them by the school’s planning committee, my expectations were more or less gratified. Mothers oohed and aahed at the flowers, and fathers poked the moist soil with an air of gardeners’ camaraderie. The girls looked bored, or calm and sly. But they kept their mouths shut, which was enough. I began to think we’d achieved a coup, John and I. We’d set the tone for a year of mute appreciation.

  The girls came in waves according to class, freshmen and their eager shepherds first, seniors last. And it was only with the latter of these groups that the tide in the room began to change. The air grew stuffier. I noticed more touching of the plants: girls tweaking stems and leaving half-moons in the leaves with their fingernails. My polite coughs gained nothing, but neither did my overt displays of authority: whenever I asked someone to refrain from shredding the foliage, I was met with a blank and ruthless stare. “Me?” the girl would say. “I didn’t even realize.” The greenhouse garden represented hundreds of hours of work, from research and selection to the careful setup of the past afternoon. But more than that, it was my livelihood. It was my life. Every plant, from the most familiar strawberry to the most outlandish vine, was a part of me. It was all I had. And they—who had so much more by comparison—knew it.