Given these abilities, it wasn’t difficult for Eleanor Faderman to filch the copy of the book that returned with the bodies and then keep quiet about it, too. She had her chance due to the carelessness of a Pinkerton hired by Flo’s mother to investigate her death. That detective had been disinterestedly thumbing through the book as he waited to speak to Principal Libbie Brookhants about the tragedy. He was new to the Pinkerton agency and unhappy with this assignment: the deaths of Clara and Flo were, of course, gruesome and terrible, but he believed they were also wholly accidental, a cruelty of nature. When the principal finally opened her door to invite him in, the detective left the copy of the book on the table outside her office.
Our Eleanor Faderman watched him do this.
And that was that: the book was now hers.
Eleanor hid it in the back of a potting cupboard in the Brookhants Orangerie,* a glinting expanse of glass and light jutting off one side of Main Hall. Seven mornings a week, Eleanor worked in The Orangerie, tending to the plants and, in the winter, feeding firewood to its elaborate and cantankerous heating system. Most mornings, she was the first to arrive there, setting its gas lamps glowing if the thin light of pre-dawn wasn’t enough to see by—which it usually wasn’t. (While some structures at Brookhants had by then been electrified, The Orangerie was not among them.) Once she could see, Eleanor donned her work pinafore to water and feed, treat for pests, and pluck away death and deformity from branches and stems.
Those more mundane tasks complete, she indulged in The Orangerie pursuits she liked best: cutting and bundling herbs and picking any ripe fruits to later send to the kitchen staff for preparation. She did this only if the cook had left her a note telling her how many sprigs of thyme or blades of chives were required for that day’s meals. And, despite her fellow classmates’ complaints about the blandness of the Brookhants cuisine, most mornings the cook had left her a note, and Eleanor, snipping shears in hand, wandered the rows of herbs, fragrant and dense, relishing in her tiny harvests as she carefully twined them into bundles and left them in a basket next to the note that named them.
On some of those mornings, Eleanor Faderman also snuck a piece of fruit for herself. Not often, mind you. During the gray snowpack of winter in Rhode Island, an orange—a ripe, full-sized orange hanging from a tree branch—was a kind of miracle. Even those Brookhants students who didn’t spend much time in The Orangerie could have been counted on to throw fits if they had believed one of their classmates was stealing their portion of its bounty. But occasionally, Eleanor kept her eye on a runty lime, say, one hidden by its tree’s bright leaves, one she felt she could nip without anyone missing it. Save Miss Trills, perhaps.
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: