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 does 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.