Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,17,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
“Oh, Max, please leave it,” Libbie said, watching him now awkwardly attempt to hold the dripping clumps, like a child who’s hauled snowballs indoors.
“Sorry, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said, dropping it again.
“I think it might be best to send for the doctor,” Libbie said. “Just to be cautious. For a fever to be causing her such confusion so quickly—”
“Not today we won’t,” Caspar said. Libbie hadn’t realized he was still lingering in the entry hall with them, snow in his dripping beard.
She turned to him unhappily. “We won’t?”
“None would make it,” he said. “Anthony Harton’s crew will come when they can to help clear the school road,” he added. “But it won’t be passable today.”
“Not even by tomorrow if it keeps on like this,” Max said.
Libbie hadn’t expected this news. She could, of course, see that it was very unpleasant outside, but she’d been thinking the storm would only delay her arrival at Brookhants, not prevent it entirely.
Hanna was back, already swishing the mop through the snowmelt on the floor. “Adelaide didn’t know what she was saying,” she said again. “She needs only to rest.”
“It seems she’s been given just the day for that,” Libbie said. She tried to sound cheery about this, but it rang false. She had to get to Brookhants.
There were, of course, logistical matters that needed her attention, meeting with the trustees, drafting a formal letter to all parents apprising them, in official terms, of the bad news. And they would have to handle the newspapermen, hopefully better than they’d done with Flo and Clara.
But it was the immediate aftermath of this peculiar tragedy that Libbie was most concerned with, especially as it pertained to any gossip about the book, any questions raised or alluded to. It made her itchy and sour to be kept away from her school, unable to control its goings-on. No doubt Leanna Hamm would right now be in the dining hall, riling her colleagues as they tried to eat their toast, or worse: asking the somber and sleep-deprived students what they remembered about The Story of Mary MacLane and its influence on Eleanor Faderman, and on Florence and Clara, too. Soon Miss Hamm would be rounding up any lurking copies for some rash action she was planning. Perhaps a bonfire in the winter-drained fountain? Libbie could easily imagine the worst from Leanna Hamm and now she couldn’t even get to campus to counteract it.
“I shouldn’t have left my girls last night,” she said. “I’d be there now.”
“We did not leave the girls,” Alex said, coming down the wide staircase from the second floor. (Never to be confused, Readers, with the twisty, cramped, and book-lined staircase leading to the tower.)
Libbie had been hoping she wasn’t yet awake.
“They have every other instructor at their disposal.” Alex smiled but her tone did not match it. “It snows here each winter, and yet each winter we’re all so surprised to find it unpleasant.”
“I’ve never known it to snow like this,” Caspar said.
“Addie mentioned her snowshoes,” Libbie said, thinking aloud.
“When did that come up in conversation?” Alex asked. “And why?”
Libbie ignored her and turned to Max. “Do you think they might fit me? Well enough for just one trip?”
“I think they would . . .” Max said. It was clear there was something else he wasn’t saying. Max’s face was usually a signal flag for his thoughts.
“Adelaide would rather I not borrow them,” Libbie said. “Is that it?”
“Oh no, that’s not—” Max said, shaking his head with wide eyes in an effort to be most convincing. “Addie would want you to use them as much as you like. It’s just—” Again he stopped short of saying the thing he wanted to say.
“It’s bad out there, Mrs. Brookhants,” Caspar said. “Very.” Max nodded at this.
“I can see that,” Libbie said. “That’s why I thought of the snowshoes.”
“Yes, ma’am . . .” Now it was Caspar trailing off.
“They’re trying to tell you that it’s worse than what even Adelaide’s magical snowshoes can solve,” Alex said. “It’s not a trip we can make today.”
“Is that it?” Libbie asked the men. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I think Miss Trills has it right,” Caspar said. “It isn’t a day for travel, even on a short road.”
“Here we are in the great twentieth century and I can’t get across my own land to my students,” Libbie said. “Is that the full of this morning’s report?”
“I might go for you, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said, determined to be the one to offer a solution.
“That’s an idea,” Caspar said.
“And why would it be right for you to do so but wrong for me?”
Max started to answer, but Libbie cut him off with a wave of her hand. “No, please don’t say. If I could go, that would be the thing. You in my stead does me no good. Though I thank you for the offer, Max. And with Addie ill.”
“Adelaide’s ill?” Alex asked. “What’s happened to her?”
No one seemed interested in going through that again, and so she was answered by Hanna with: “Only a touch of fever. She’ll be right as rain tomorrow if she gets the sleep she needs today.”
The day’s disappointments now dispensed, Hanna and her mop and Caspar and Max all went about their work. Other than Libbie, only Alex remained, looking out the window at the swarming snow.
Libbie turned to slip up the tower stairs, but as she did, Alex said, “You didn’t sleep.”
“If you know that it must be because I kept you awake.”
“You didn’t,” Alex said. “I couldn’t sleep thinking of Eleanor and the angel’s trumpets. She knew the risk. I’m sure she must have.”
“That they’re poison?”
“Yes, but more than that—that they would kill her, all that she ate.”
“You mean to say what?” Libbie would not be the first to use the word.
Alex shook her head as if to clear a thought. “What have you done with the book?”
“Which?” Libbie asked.
“You know which. I think it’s past time I read it and now the snow’s given me a day to do so.”
“Is your memory so short as that?” Libbie asked, trying for nonchalance. “We read it only this summer.”
“That was your diversion,” Alex said. “Not mine.”
Now Libbie was indignant. “Surely even you can remember Sara Dahlgren reading aloud its most relevant entries?” She gestured toward the dining room. “Right here. At dinner? She stood on her chair. Katharine was laughing so much she choked on her cocktail.”
“Isn’t Katharine often choking on her cocktails?”
For a moment, Libbie considered the worth of continuing in this vein. She decided that it was better to try than not to do so. “Later that night I recall us both being quite inspired by what we’d heard. Sara teased us the next morning about how quickly we’d rushed off together. Or have you no memory of that, either?”
“Vulgarity has never suited you, Libbie,” Alex said, her voice a notch lower and her eyes casting about for Hanna. “And yet you’re so determined to keep trying it on.”
“I’d say that I wear my vulgarity better than you do your priggishness, but I’m no longer certain that’s true. It quite suits you.”
They looked at each other unhappily. Outside the wind snarled to match.
“We’re both tired and quarrelsome,” Alex said, as if she was now being the reasonable one. “Let’s not give in to it. I don’t want the copy from Sara Dahlgren’s performance, anyway. I want to read the copy we found last night with Eleanor Faderman. Where is it?”
“It’s on my desk,” Libbie said, sighing and again starting up the tower stairs. “Come fetch it.”
“Yes, I think I will,” Alex said, taking a step or two in the same direction. And then she stopped, fully planted herself, and looked up the narrow tower stairs as they twisted into dim light. �
�Are you working now?”
Libbie had anticipated this reaction. Unlike Harold, Libbie’s departed husband-of-happenstance, Alex did not find the story of the Rash brothers and their Spite Tower charmingly representative of ye olde New England. Truth be told, Alex had always found the tower unsettling—a place to avoid in the otherwise well-appointed house. Because of this, she left its dominion solely to Libbie. Which Libbie was grateful for, and sometimes took advantage of.
Like now.
She stopped climbing and turned to face Alex below her. “I still have to write the Fadermans—and I don’t know what that will take from me. If you’d prefer, I can send the book with Hanna when she brings my tray.”
“Yes, that’s fine,” Alex said, retracing the steps she’d just taken. “I’ll be in the parlor.”
Libbie was pleased by the success of her deflection, however momentary. The tower stairs were as good as a drawbridge and moat, she thought as she climbed the rest. Any additional time granted to her was necessary. The book was there on her desk, just where she’d placed it hours before, and she still didn’t know what to do with it.
She pulled the shawl from the back of her chair and wrapped it over her shoulders before sitting. It was much colder here in her perch atop the tower, the world outside its windows still a swirling white void. She flipped through the book, letting the pages fall against each other until she found what she wanted: the March 5 entry.
Again, she stared at it. Alex was far too clever not to notice it. And Alex, being Alex, would also understand how to read it. Sara Dahlgren was a lot of things, but cunning code maker was not among them.
This entry, one of the book’s controversial anemone lady passages—this was proof of Libbie’s lie. It showed what she had done, right there on the page in ink. A Pinkerton might be able to handle the book and not discern her culpability, but the same could not be said for Alex. Her Alex. This was the page that connected Libbie to the book, because it was her book.
Or it was once, at any rate.
Before she gave it to Flo and Clara.
They’d come to her office to ask permission to form their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. It was the morning after the hailstorm and she’d been busy with the groundskeepers, sorting out the damage, so she’d been unable to make time for them. They’d instead made an appointment for the following day. They were so excited! And smitten, it was clear. In the giddy rush of their pink-cheeked crush, they so reminded Libbie of herself and Alex, once upon an earlier time.
Charmed by these students, Libbie had, at some point during her busy day, thought to bring them her personal copy of Mary MacLane’s book. She’d surprise them with it. She knew that copies of the book were scarce at Brookhants, that some teachers (like Leanna Hamm) had even told students that they were banned from campus, though that wasn’t true. (At least not at the time.)
If Flo and Clara were surprised by this gesture, by their own Principal Brookhants not only owning such a book but giving it to them, they did not show it. At least not to Libbie.
But even as she handed it to the girls—and before that, when she’d plucked it from the bookshelves lining the tower—Libbie knew Alex wouldn’t approve. It was one thing for their students to be such champions for the book. It was quite another for their principal to seem to endorse it, and the things it said.
And now, of course, and now . . .
Well, someone like Leanna Hamm would make much out of the bad fact that it was Libbie’s own copy that kept turning up with dead Brookhants students. And perhaps it wouldn’t only be Leanna Hamm who felt that way.
Libbie knew it wouldn’t.
She’d been so pleased with herself and her decision, her secret support of these girls in crush, that she’d quite forgotten about the book’s March 5 entry and how it exposed her. She’d forgotten about it, that is, until her copy was found in the woods with Flo and Clara and the questions about who had brought it there had bloomed, and with them the examinations of its marginalia.
And then she’d remembered.
Under any other circumstance, Libbie would have been disappointed with what the students had done to her book. It was positively filled with scribbles—in ink and pencil both, passages underlined and circled, others marked with stars or hearts or cryptic notes written above or below the print.
Perhaps they had never intended to return it to her, but under the strange and terrible circumstances that did return it, Libbie Brookhants was grateful for those markings. If they hadn’t been there, her connection to it would have already been discovered. The book had been handled by many people before Eleanor had stolen it. But as it was, Libbie was still the only one who knew. And now that she had it again, she planned to keep it that way.
* * *
Last August was only the third time that their friends—the friends who were most like Libbie and Alex—had come to Spite Manor to visit. This was just a few months prior, but now, with all that had happened since, it seemed impossibly long ago: a full week of sunbake and salted skin, of sand in their hair—sand all over the house, really, on the floors and in the bedsheets—all of them eating too much peach ice cream out on the porch because they could not stop themselves from doing so. It was rich and sweet and deliciously cold. It made their teeth and temples ache.
The night Sara Dahlgren had read those passages from Mary MacLane’s book the lot of them were, Libbie remembered, a little bit drunk and a lot sun silly from their day. The Eckharts were away at Max and Adelaide’s wedding in Pittsburgh, so Libbie and her friends had enjoyed the full run of the staffless house and were already stripped down to their nightgowns and silk robes, nothing at all on underneath. Sunburned Alex had even deigned to wear the striped boy’s nightshirt Sara bought for her in Spain, though she’d blushed and laughed at it when Sara had given it to her.
It was meltingly hot, each of Spite Manor’s windows open with the ocean crashing outside, all of them lolled around the dining table, goading each other on.
Their friends* had delivered to them all manner of gay surprises from the Continent: poems and novels, a book of nude drawings, and a set of artistic stereo cards purchased from the private stock of a prominent Parisian photographer. In those images, women in top hats and tails had their arms around each other, and women in far less clothing had their mouths upon each other.
“Good thing I decided not to invite Anthony Comstock,”* Libbie had joked when the stereoscope* was passed her way and she had the chance to view the most explicit of the photos.
“Can that whiskered rhinoceros really still be at it?” Sara had asked.
“He’s even worse than before! They gave him an ounce of power and he’s spun it into a pound of tyranny.”
“Have I ever told you that I had the great displeasure of meeting him once at a benefit?” Sara asked.
“We know!” Katharine said, trying to cut short the story they’d all heard, which never worked with Sara.
“Although that particular evening did also then offer me the very great pleasure of voicing a number of new obscenities in Mr. Comstock’s pitiful presence. I don’t think he even had time to write them all down for his records, so many came his way at once.”
“We’ve heard this before!” Katharine shouted again.
More drinks were mixed, more Comstock-condemned materials passed around.
However, for once the biggest success of the evening’s sapphic show-and-tell did not belong to the fashionable Europeans and their artistic photographs. On this night the winning item was as young and brash as its country of origin: American Mary MacLane’s portrayal, a book Sara told them she’d sought out as soon as she’d arrived stateside the month before.
“And that was all quite fortuitous,” Sara had said. “Something out of a novel. Did I tell you? My regular bookseller didn’t have a single copy left in stock—and I’d gone there especially for them. He said he would have to order them for me and I didn’t know if I’d have them before I had to leave New
York and I was most vexed about that and was walking up Lexington, pouting, trying to think where else to look, and I ran into the most interesting woman selling them from a folding table right there on the sidewalk. Can you believe it? I practically stepped on her.”
“You think every woman you meet is the most interesting woman you’ve met,” Alex said, to the group’s particular delight because Alex did not usually speak this way, not even to Sara Dahlgren.
“Not every woman, Alex.” Sara blew her an exaggerated kiss before continuing. “As it was, this interesting woman sold me five copies. I would have taken more, and I told her that, but I couldn’t carry them, and unlike my regular bookseller she did not offer delivery.”
“You don’t say,” Alex said. “How remarkably uncouth of the woman on the sidewalk with the folding table.”
“What a queer thing to be selling on the street,” Katharine said. “Where do you think she came from?”
Sara smiled like this was the best part. She shook her head. “Clearly a woman with a head for sales. Anyway, you should be very grateful that I was so willing to play pack mule, because I am now giving you one of the copies that I hauled up Lexington that day.”
“Aren’t we the lucky ones?” Libbie had said, squeezing Alex’s leg beneath the table and then leaving her hand there on Alex’s bare thigh.
That night, the group of them had first giggled, then howled, as Sara read aloud Mary’s continued beseeching of the devil. Fed by this audience of rummy women, Sara grew more and more animated in her performance. Eventually she climbed atop her chair and practically sang the entries she’d been saving for her finale: Mary’s erotic desire for Fannie Corbin, her anemone lady.
At first, they all also pretended to find these passages worthy of more titters. But this was only to save face. They were, each to a listener, stirred.
For Alex and Libbie in particular, Mary’s bold declarations of lust kindled a shared longing. It was a longing additionally charged by the company, the photographs, the cocktails—but its greatest fuel came from their own memories of who they had been, and what they had been to each other, all those years before when they were Mary’s age, or just about: the year they had discovered the previously unmapped landscape of their desire.