Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
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Miss Alexandra Trills* (as dull as she was tall, which was very, thought Eleanor) was the faculty member in charge of The Orangerie. But Miss Trills would never tell. Probably. (Surely not if she believed that such an offense had only happened once.)
Though her morning tasks were many, Eleanor Faderman had them routinized and usually finished with time to herself before breakfast. Imagine, if you will, the pleasure of having a space like The Orangerie all to yourself, with no more work to be done and no demands made upon you. Especially in a place like Brookhants, with your fellow students everywhere: shouting down the hall and snoring in their beds, blowing their noses in the lavatory, whispering secrets behind you in the classroom. Eleanor Faderman went from a house filled with sisters to a boarding school filled with students, and can we blame her, Readers, for carving out a daily slice of quiet all to herself in the most beautiful place on campus? A place of fuchsia blooms dripping from planters, a place where students recited their verse in front of trellised vines of poet’s jasmine, a place of sunlight and glass and green—and everywhere, everywhere, the fragrance of blossoms.
The sun now up and The Orangerie windows full of light and glint, Eleanor might take her stolen lime, or a bit of bread saved from the previous evening’s meal, or even a single spearmint leaf, and wedge herself in a corner nook she’d discovered behind a massive zinc planter growing a near-to-twenty-foot Brugmansia suaveolens, more commonly known as snowy angel’s trumpet tree.*
Here, from her wedge, Eleanor could see without being seen. Here she might suck on her mint leaf and daydream. Here she might study her Latin (what a chore, Latin), or write a letter to someone back home (probably her sister Carrie). Here she might read, often that, and pleasantly lose herself to other worlds and times—to other selves.
Here, hidden, she might observe those who came to The Orangerie without them ever knowing she was watching: Miss Trills checking on her freesias—gah, Miss Trills—or maybe Grace O’Connell, who was a morning wanderer, a sophomore the other students thought friendly and admirable. And Eleanor thought so, too. Privately she thought this.
Grace O’Connell had a wide, pleasant face and a heart-shaped mouth. Grace O’Connell had a smile she offered so easily, though this fact did not cheapen it. Eleanor thought Grace especially lovely when Grace thought she was alone, as she did those mornings she happened into The Orangerie right before breakfast, palming the weight of a lemon, or standing, eyes closed, in a warm square of sunlight.
If, like so many Brookhants students, Eleanor had been the type to send bags of mixed sweets and lockets of hair to her classmates, Grace O’Connell would have been the classmate to whom she’d have sent them. Or she could have easily sent her a flower message. Those were still popular among the Brookhants girls. Mary Peril, in Eleanor’s dorm, had the very latest flower dictionary and was always reading aloud from it—yellow acacia for secret love; or spearmint for a general warm sentiment; tulips to declare one’s feelings—and Eleanor, of course, had the best access to flowers on campus. But Eleanor Faderman didn’t participate in the elaborate courting rituals of her fellow classmates. She did not send tokens of affection. She did not write poems proclaiming her adoration and then practice reciting them in front of the jasmine, hoping to be overheard. And she did not pick and present bouquets of flowers to suggest her secret feelings.
She kept her secret feelings secret.
There were other students too that Eleanor might see, had seen, in The Orangerie. Seen without herself being seen by them, I mean.
Flo.
Clara.
Flo and Clara together, thinking they were alone.
It is said that after she stole the book found near their bodies, the copy of Mary MacLane’s book gone missing, Eleanor Faderman changed.
Of course, every student at Brookhants that year felt changed by what had happened to Flo and Clara. And the faculty felt the same. Some traditions, like the typically hours-long Halloween game of Witch in the Woods, were abandoned, considered too sinister to be held in the shadow of their deaths. More generally, for weeks after, the campus was hushed, the students tentative with one another and even with themselves.
But Eleanor’s change was both more acute and more specific. She became first enchanted by, and then rather obsessed with, Mary MacLane’s words. Which is to say, careful Readers: with Mary MacLane’s thoughts and prejudices, her desires and complaints. At least as Mary presented them in her portrayal.
Flo and Clara together, thinking they were alone.
No more spying on Grace O’Connell. No more fingers sticky with stolen lime juice. Now Eleanor rushed through her tasks. She overwatered, underwatered, pinched good growth with bad as she clumsily twisted rotten leaves from stems. She even ignored the spider mites and whiteflies, the mealybugs and caterpillars, each determined to eat of and burrow in the plants she was supposed to be caring for. All so that she could take the red book from its hiding spot and get back to her own behind the planter of angel’s trumpet, so that she could wander the barren hills of Butte, Montana, with Mary MacLane as she beseeched the devil to come and rescue her:
I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting—and when some one comes over the barren hill to satisfy the wanting, I will be humble, humble in my triumph.
What at first might have been only the call of the sensational mixed with the macabre—that is, a chance to read the scandalous musings of a scandalous girl, musings that Eleanor’s two dead classmates had been wholly preoccupied with, and to read them from the very copy of the book found with their bodies, the copy they’d marked up and pored over—eventually became something else entirely.
The more of Mary MacLane’s words Eleanor read, the more each seemed to bewitch her—causing her to see her own world, her own self, anew. The effect was as sure as had she placed a pair of Mary MacLane glasses at the end of her nose: Eleanor’s vision was changed.
Eleanor Faderman had read many books in her short life. She had read books that she enjoyed and books that bored her. She had read books that made her disputatious and books that soothed her. She had read histories and poetry, philosophy and science. And she had read novels. It was, after all, usually novels that she chose, at least when choosing for herself, and so many different kinds of novels at that—adventurous orphans and brave battle-goers; careful, teasing courtships and once-ripe friendships gone to rot.
Eleanor Faderman knew many books. But never before had she read a book that seemed to know her.
By that I mean, Readers, to know her in ways she did not yet know herself, could not have named, would likely have denied, even, until Mary MacLane spoke them from her pages. And sometimes it was as if Flo and Clara were reading the book along with her. Eleanor could, if she listened past the blood in her ears, only just hear their voices saying the sentences aloud, there in her corner beneath the angel’s trumpet tree. Sometimes she could almost feel the two of them pressed in against her in that small, hidden wedge—one on either side—the three of them reading together in almost unison. (Almost because Flo was always a beat behind.)
On those occasions, Eleanor couldn’t even remember turning the pages in Mary’s book. Perhaps she hadn’t, she’d think later, fighting to stay awake at her desk in a class. Yet somehow she’d moved through the entries, Mary’s true words coming one after the next.
Our Eleanor ingested those words daily. She read and reread them. She coveted them, even becoming fleetingly preoccupied with things like brown sugar fudge, Napoleon, and her fellow classmates’ toothbrushes, because in her pages Mary MacLane was preoccupied with these things.
She also repeated, often, Mary’s statement, The words are only words with word meanings. Several students later remembered Eleanor saying this—usually as a mumbled response to conversations in which she was only peripherally engaged in the first place. Or not engaged in at all until she inserted herself with that statement. I suppose it do
es have a kind of one-size-fits-all pliability—but rather a bleak one, no?
Even more disquieting, students recalled that during this period, Eleanor would repeat to herself—as some sort of incantation or prayer—phrases of this sort:
From girls with sunny confidence; from the maddening interference of mothers; from strawberries hazed in mold, surprising me with bites of rot, Kind Devil, deliver me.
From the lazy opinions of my sisters; from serpents hiding in the wallpaper; from my grandmother’s preoccupation with her silver sardine dish, Kind Devil, deliver me.
From the fine, blond hairs of May Hart, which are perpetually lodged in her Tiffany hairbrush; from the smug wearers of cameo rings; from chivalrous young men who carry old beliefs, Kind Devil, deliver me.*
As November became December and winter clenched its fist around Brookhants, Eleanor Faderman offered these quiet incantations with such frequency that her classmates found them less and less disturbing. Eventually they came to be seen as more tic than threat, more background noise than warning.
Previously Eleanor’s classmates might have called her capable if standoffish, clearly intelligent if also disinterested in their affairs. Now Eleanor often appeared to them as drowsy and unkempt, sometimes even wearing her planting pinafore, with its soil and leaf stains, to classes, instead of hanging it on its designated hook at the back of The Orangerie. Students also noticed that Eleanor’s black pupils too often filled her eyes like the shiny, oversize olives she muttered about eating correctly.*
Stranger yet, her limbs seemed to operate limply.
One student later remembered: “I saw her once, right before it happened. We were out near the fountain on our way to class, and she was ahead of me still in her work apron. There was an awful wind that day and we were all in such a hurry. I feel that I can’t quite describe it as I should, but seeing her was somehow like watching a farmer carry a large sack of grain across a field—cumbersome and shifting. Except Eleanor herself was the sack of grain. I mean that she was carrying her own body that way. Or it was carrying her that way? I don’t quite know. I only know that I noticed it and other students did, too.”
Because she was so fully absorbed in Mary’s world, Eleanor spent even less time in her own. By now her Orangerie tasks were entirely forgotten. No watering, no feeding, no grooming of plants. She might still bundle the requested herbs for the kitchen, but she handled even that task hastily if she managed it at all.
Despite her obsession with Mary’s book, though, it appears Eleanor refused to remove the copy from The Orangerie. This, of course, meant that she spent even more hours there to be with it. Soon she was slipping from her bed and past the other sleeping girls at four in the morning, then three and two—moving like a specter down the dark hallways.
The Orangerie would have beckoned to Eleanor even before she reached it, its walls of glass letting in the moonlight, so the whole space would be washed in silver, a hue she could have seen when still the length of a corridor away. The mass of plants would be only shadows and outlines at that distance, their blooms and leaves appearing alien and dense, like a series of black explosions frozen mid-kaboom.
This all went on for more days than it should have, Readers. Eleanor’s teachers commented on her tranced state in their classes, her drowsiness and confusion. She was sent to the sickroom on four separate occasions, pronounced anemic (she wasn’t), and, for reasons unclear, forced to endure salves of Smedley’s Chillie Paste applied to her arms, legs, and trunk. She fell asleep during supper, during lectures. She had never been particularly outgoing, had never made an outsized impression on the Brookhants world, but now she was nearly as vaporous as fog.
During this period, Grace O’Connell—whom, despite her crush, Eleanor had scarcely ever spoken to—approached Eleanor when the two were in the same stairwell after choir practice, a practice during which Eleanor had sung so many incorrect words in what was essentially a monotone that their frustrated director, Miss Hamm, eventually released them early with the parting plea: “Please get some rest, girls. Heaven knows you need it!”
Grace, her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder there against a stream of departing classmates, said, “Is anything the matter, Eleanor? If you need someone to tell, it could be me.”
Grace O’Connell later said that Eleanor Faderman seemed to register her hand as if she could see it without feeling it—as if she somehow no longer inhabited the body it was touching.
“Nothing to tell,” Eleanor said, now turning to face Grace, who flinched, she couldn’t help it, at the enormous size of Eleanor’s pupils. And something else: a sweet scent that emanated from her.
“I only listen,” Eleanor added. “And I watch, too. People are abominable creatures, Grace. There is nothing in the world that can become so maddeningly wearisome as people, people, people!”*
Grace O’Connell was understandably confused and upset by this interaction, and she did tell Miss Hamm about Eleanor’s glass bead eyes and the way her body seemed somehow more like a carcass than a life, but she herself did not try again with Eleanor.
And then it was too late to try.
By all sound reason, the plants in The Orangerie should have suffered during this period. That or Miss Trills should have noticed the deficit in their care and made up for it, mentioning as much to Eleanor and inquiring about her lapse.
But during those days of Eleanor’s enchantment, The Orangerie positively thrived. The fiery blooms of a once-spindly abutilon plant grew to the size of bonnets and were picked and worn thusly by some of the girls. The Citrus limon Ponderosa trees offered up eight- and nine-pound lemons, and the kitchen began serving lemonade or lemon pie so often that students began to expect such delights. And that expectation alone, Readers, in Rhode Island, in winter, in 1902, was plainly absurd. The poet’s jasmine vines snaked themselves up and around and over the surfaces of The Orangerie, all the while blooming obscenely—truly, obscenely—their blossoms so profuse that it became difficult to navigate the space without their petals brushing your body, their soapy scent wafting.
In fact The Orangerie was so verdant, so fragrant, that the whole campus recognized and remarked upon its change. Faculty members would group together at its doorways and say things like, “If it keeps on like this, we’ll have to send Mary Kingsley in to map it.”*
Of course, Readers: it could not keep on like that forever.
Of course, Readers: Eleanor Faderman could not keep on like that, either.
Please remember too that most of these things were only said about Eleanor Faderman, and were only said to even be known about Eleanor Faderman, after the fact.
The fact of her death, that is.
Given what you now know about The Orangerie during this time, it won’t surprise you to hear that the Brugmansia suaveolens tree growing from the planter that provided Eleanor’s hiding space was more lush with blooms than it had been since being planted there some nine years prior. Those blooms were over a foot in length, hanging in heavy clusters like suspended groups of milk glass vases.
Angel’s trumpets emit a honeyed perfume, one that might have been missed for all the other flowers in The Orangerie right then, but not by Eleanor. This is because they shed their scent at night, and by now, Eleanor Faderman was largely a nocturnal creature, one who could only dimly recollect the translation of the plant’s Latin name: suaveolens, “with a sweet fragrance.” That sweet fragrance clung to her clothing and hair. For hours after her visits she carried the scent of angel’s trumpet.
We cannot be certain that Eleanor Faderman knew just how deadly angel’s trumpets are; it’s also quite possible that she did know this. It wasn’t so many years before that there had been a kind of trend that took place during the long afternoon hours in the parlors of bored women of high social standing: stirring a few drops of angel’s trumpet pollen into one’s tea before settling back to enjoy the rather pleasing delirium that followed. (Or supposedly pleasing delirium, anyway.) And Miss Trills did later
say that Eleanor knew some of the attributes of The Orangerie’s various plants better than she herself did. (Though it’s possible that Miss Trills was only showing kindness to the dead when she said that.)
Brugmansia pollen might, by the pinch, produce a (dubiously) pleasant delirium. However, it’s also true that when ingested in more significant quantities it produces a writhing, foam-mouthed, sticky-sweated state of violent hallucination and paralysis that can, if untreated, lead to death.
On December 7, 1902, Eleanor Faderman was found approximately two hours after she was noted absent from the evening meal. It was later discovered that Eleanor had actually been absent the whole day, but given her recent bouts of illness, she was incorrectly believed, by students and faculty alike, to be either in bed or in the sickroom (or in bed in the sickroom), and the matter was not further investigated until made mention of during the meal, which was, it must be said, a particularly bland mutton pie served with a side of roast squash. (Despite a request for tarragon and thyme, no bundles of herbs had been delivered to the kitchen that morning.)
What was eventually made clear is that Eleanor Faderman hadn’t been seen by anyone then living at Brookhants since bedtime the previous evening, which was now some twenty hours before.
Of course, The Orangerie was immediately searched. Where else would anyone think to look for Eleanor Faderman? However, she was not found there, so searches continued elsewhere on campus, including those made by a warily intrepid party of lantern-carrying faculty members who agreed to take on the dark woods, starting, most unfortunately, with the Tricky Thicket.