Laura found a splotch of blood on my bedsheets and began to weep. She concluded that I was dying. I would die like Mother, she sobbed, without telling her first. I would have a little grey baby like a kitten and then I would die.
I told her not to be an idiot. I said this blood had nothing to do with babies. (Callista hadn't gone into that part, having no doubt decided that too much of this kind of information at once might warp my psyche.)
"It'll happen to you one day too," I said to Laura. "When you're my age. It's a thing that happens to girls."
Laura was indignant. She refused to believe it. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.
There's a studio portrait of Laura and me, taken at this time. I'm wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me: I have, noticeably, what used to be calledbosoms. Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile, as if the two things are the same: it's a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father's. We were afraid of them, but did not know how to avoid them.
Father had decided, correctly enough, that our education had been neglected. He wanted us taught French, but also Mathematics and Latin-brisk mental exercises that would act as a corrective for our excessive dreaminess. Geography too would be bracing. Although he'd barely noticed her during her tenure, he decreed that Miss Violence and her lax, musty, rose-tinted ways must be scrubbed away. He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core. He didn't understand why we liked what we liked. He wanted us turned into the semblances of boys, one way or another. Well, what do you expect? He'd never had sisters.
In the place of Miss Violence, he engaged a man called Mr. Erskine, who'd once taught at a boys' school in England but had been packed off to Canada, suddenly, for his health. He did not seem at all unhealthy to us: he never coughed, for instance. He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.
It was soon clear that inattentiveness and staring at Mr. Erskine's forehead would not rid us of him. First of all he gave us tests, to determine what we knew. Not much, it appeared, though more than we saw fit to divulge. He then told Father that we had the brains of insects or marmots. We were nothing short of deplorable, and it was a wonder we were not cretins. We had developed slothful mental habits-we had beenallowed to develop them, he added reprovingly. Happily, it was not too late. My father said that in that case Mr. Erskine should work us up into shape.
To us, Mr. Erskine said that our laziness, our arrogance, our tendency to lollygag and daydream, and our sloppy sentimentality had all but ruined us for the serious business of life. No one expected us to be geniuses, and it would be conferring no favours if we were, but there was surely a minimum, even for girls: we would be nothing but encumbrances to any man foolish enough to marry us unless we were made to pull up our socks.
He ordered a large stack of school exercise books, the cheap kind with ruled lines and flimsy cardboard covers. He ordered a supply of plain lead pencils, with erasers. These were the magic wands, he said, by means of which we were about to transform ourselves, with his assistance.
He saidassistance with a smirk.
He threw out Miss Goreham's tinsel stars.
The library was too distracting for us, he said. He asked for and received two school desks, which he installed in one of the extra bedrooms; he had the bed removed, along with all the other furniture, so there was just the bare room left. The door locked with a key, and he had the key. Now we would be able to roll up our sleeves and get down to it.
Mr. Erskine's methods were direct. He was a hair-puller, an ear-twister. He would whack the desks beside our fingers with his ruler, and the actual fingers too, or cuff us across the back of the head when exasperated, or, as a last resort, hurl books at us or hit us across the backs of our legs. His sarcasm was withering, at least to me: Laura frequently thought he meant exactly what he said, which angered him further. He was not moved by tears; in fact I believe he enjoyed them.
He was not like this every day. Things would go along on an even keel for a week at a time. He might display patience, even a sort of clumsy kindness. Then there would be an outburst, and he would go on the rampage. Never knowing what he might do, or when he might do it, was the worst.
We could not complain to Father, because wasn't Mr. Erskine acting under his orders? He said he was. But we complained to Reenie, of course. She was outraged. I was too old to be treated like that, she said, and Laura was too nervous, and both of us were-well, who did he think he was? Raised in a gutter and putting on airs, like all the English who ended up over here, thinking they could lord it, and if he took a bath once a month she'd eat her own shirt. When Laura came to Reenie with welts on the palms of her hands, Reenie confronted Mr. Erskine, but was told to mind her own business. She was the one who'd spoiled us, said Mr. Erskine. She'd spoiled us with overindulgence and babying-that much was obvious -and now it was up to him to repair the damage she had done.
Laura said that unless Mr. Erskine went away, she would go away herself. She would run away. She would jump out the window.
"Don't do that, my pet," said Reenie. "We'll put on our thinking caps. We'll fix his wagon!"
"He hasn't got a wagon," sobbed Laura.
Callista Fitzsimmons might have been some help, but she could see which way the wind was blowing: we weren't her children, we were Father's. He had chosen his course of action, and it would have been a tactical mistake for her to meddle. It was a case ofsauve qui peut, an expression which, due to Mr.
Erskine's diligence, I could now translate.
Mr. Erskine's idea of Mathematics was simple enough: we needed to know how to balance household accounts, which meant adding and subtracting and double-entry bookkeeping.
His idea of French was verb forms and Phaedra, with a reliance on pithy maxims from noted authors. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait -Estienne; C'est de quoi j' ai le plus de peur que la peur -Montaigne; Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna ®t point -Pascal; L'histoire, cette vieille dame exalt ©e et menteuse -de Maupassant. Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains -Flaubert. Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s' est fait femme -Victor Hugo. And so forth.
His idea of Geography was the capital cities of Europe. His idea of Latin was Caesar subduing the Gauls and crossing the Rubicon, alea iacta est; and, after that, selections from Virgil's Aeneid -he was fond of the suicide of Dido-or from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the parts where unpleasant things were done by the gods to various young women. The rape of Europa by a large white bull, of Leda by a swan, of Danae by a shower of gold-these would at least hold our attention, he said, with his ironic smile. He was right about that. For a change, he would have us translate Latin love poems of a cynical kind. Odi et amo -that sort of thing. He got a kick out of watching us struggle with the poets' bad opinions of the kinds of girls we were apparently destined to be.