Others said she didn’t know, hadn’t seen.
And Clara herself could never say again.
Certainly, she would have been sweating, in the heavy afternoon heat of that bruised day, and this would have been part of the call to the first yellow jackets who found her. And unfortunately, everything about her clothing—the day dress with ruffled lace, the shoes more slipper than not—was most unsuited for an activity like running through the woods. Though it should be said that Clara often found her clothing unsuited for activities with Flo, usually just because she had too much of it on.
Flo herself solved the problem of unsuitable women’s clothing by wearing the castoffs of her older brother. Or sometimes Flo’s mother, when she hadn’t spent all of her monthly allowance from Flo’s grandparents, would even buy Flo a pair of pants or men’s boots. But then Flo’s mother was a sculptor, and her friends were all artists, most of them European. She liked to find ways to flout convention and usually supported the same instincts in her daughter. (When, Readers, she was remembering to remember that she had a daughter.)
Clara’s parents, on the other hand, were fourth-generation Americans shaped predominately by the conventions of their gilded social class. A few smart investments—steel and timber did the trick—and they’d watched their inherited wealth grow to numbers so high that even they could scarcely conceive of them. As such, they had a fastidious respect for the orderly following of the rules and systems from which they benefited. It all made them feel quite secure in the correctness of their position within the social order, and security was Clara’s mother’s favorite feeling, outranked only by virtuous womanhood. (She was cousin Charles’s favorite aunt, after all.)
That terrible afternoon, Charles, wanting to slow Clara, had perhaps called out to her, announcing his gaining presence. Surely his voice would have been as startling to her as the drift of a phantom, her path suddenly narrower—the low branches more like claws, her breath too shallow for her pace.
Even before what happened happened, Brookhants students had plenty of stories about those woods. They had stories about Samuel and Jonathan Rash, the brothers who had farmed the land more than a hundred years prior, stories about their spite-filled feud and its strange, resulting tower.
The students also had stories about the fog that gathered and hung in the woods, heavy as gray hopsacking dunked in a well. It blew in from the ocean only to drape itself over every leaf and briar, filling gaps and crevices, lingering for too long and hiding too much. And they of course had stories about the yellow jackets, everywhere, always, the humming of the yellow jackets, the flick of them about you. The woods were haunted, the students said. The woods were the source of sinister nighttime things that might scuttle their way across the lawns and up a vine-choked wall and in through your open window, until they were at the foot of your bed, now stomach, now pillow.
But you had to cross through the woods to get to the orchard, and usually, at least for Clara, every single time before this time, the orchard had been worth it.
The orchard, with Flo, and with Flo’s hands and mouth, too.
It’s worth mentioning that some of the Brookhants students also had stories about Flo and Clara. There were several girls who knew them well, their friends—girls who joined their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. And there were others, many others, who admired them. A few who probably envied them. But there was also a group, small but not insignificant, who felt quite bothered by them, who were wary of them; wary of their ideas and passions and the boldness with which they seemed to claim them.
Maybe this small but not insignificant group was even afraid of them.
The Black Oxford is an apple more associated with Maine than with Rhode Island. It was a somewhat old-fashioned and unusual variety, even in 1902, but you could still find them then in various places across New England. Brookhants was one of those places. Its orchard had nearly two dozen trees sprouting plum-black apples, like something planted by a witch in a fairy tale.* The orchard was a place that, before Flo, Clara had visited only once or twice in her previous years of Brookhants education. But then came black-apple-eating, soft-kissing/hard-kissing, well-traveled, sure-of-foot-and-voice, fluent-in-Italian-and-adequate-in-French, and just generally delirious-making Flo. And came Mary MacLane’s book. And everything changed.
(Though not in that order. The book came first.)
This was something else the onlookers later argued about: Was Clara carrying the book when she took off toward the woods that day?
That a copy, a much-loved and underlined and page-marked copy, was found near the bodies, is undisputed. The Story of Mary MacLane (the scandalous debut memoir of its namesake nineteen-year-old) had a deep crimson binding when the dust jacket was removed. A red book was not hard to spot when left almost indecently splayed against a cluster of ferns so enormous they looked like half-opened green parasols. Even in such a gruesome scene, the book stood out. Much was later made of the underlined section it was found opened to:
I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.
—And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak.
It was no secret on campus how enthralled with that book both Flo and Clara were. (And, more broadly, with Mary MacLane herself.) As you likely already know, they’d formed the Plain Bad Heroine Society as a way to show their devotion.
But who brought the book into the trees that day isn’t as certain as the fact that a copy was with them in their final moments. Some of the onlookers said Clara was carrying nothing at all on her march from the motorcar, while others swore that they saw the book gripped in her hand as she crossed the lawn. Though she’d been seen with it so frequently that school year, it’s natural to wonder if they might have imagined that part.
It was, after all, the book, the one that brought her and Flo together, the one that said, printed there on the page, the things Clara had once believed were her private thoughts alone. It was the book that Clara so often thought that truly, truly, she could have written herself. She could have had it sewn to her palm and still be unencumbered by it.
And if you asked Clara’s mother, she would have told you that Clara might as well have had that vile book sewn to her hand for the length of their summer in Newport, because there it had been, day in and day out.
Later, when Clara’s traveling case was searched—for it had been left there on the ground next to the car* where Charles had dumped it—no copy of The Story of Mary MacLane was found. This would seem to suggest that Clara Broward did take her book with her into the woods that day.
It would seem to suggest that, except for this: in a letter sent after her daughter’s unfortunate death, Mrs. Broward told her sister, in great detail, of the cold comfort she had taken in burning Clara’s copy of that hateful book in the flames of her bedroom fireplace. She wrote that she began at page one, tore it free, fed the fire, and continued on until the red binding flapped empty, like a mouth with no teeth. And then she burned the empty mouth.