Riddance. Shelley Jackson
music, if that is what it was, came to a stop—inhumanly sudden, inhumanly simultaneous, I thought—and the other children now turned on me their shining eyes all at once, like one manifold insect.
“I had thought to make a show of joining in,” I said at last, turning to face the instructor and squaring my shoulders, “just to spare myself the embarrassment of admitting that not only had I intruded on your lesson but I did not know where I was supposed to be instead. But the truth is that I have only just arrived”—indicating my suitcase. I had spoken with uncommon assurance and without stammering, and in my surprise at this circumstance I felt a silly smile spread across my face.
“What is that to grin about?” he said. “If you don’t belong here, remove yourself. Go speak to the Intake Coordinator at once.”
I picked up my suitcase. Seeing that the instructor was already raising his ruler, I cleared my throat: “Excuse me, I don’t know how to find the Intake Coordinator, please.”
He swung around with a look of outrage and banged his ruler on the table again. This time, the tip broke off and jumped away, and so did I. I was standing in the hall, morosely inspecting the other doors for a clue, when one opened. “There you are,” said the foot-faced woman, very red, the hairs on her lip and her cheek all standing out. “What on earth have you been doing?”
She must be the Intake Coordinator, I thought, and followed her silently into a small office containing a desk, a daybed with a furry throw of an indeterminate color and material messily bunched up on it, and beside it a pair of great black puissant shoes. Now she threw herself down on the daybed, drawing up her stockinged feet and tucking her robe under them, and thumped the space beside her with a heavy hand. “A little nap wouldn’t hurt.” Then she tucked her hair behind her ears and laid her head down on her arm. In less than a minute she appeared to be sleeping. Her chin trembled slightly as she ground her teeth.
This was very strange, but I did suddenly feel a great tiredness, so I sat down, gingerly, on the edge of the bed. After a moment the white arm of a cat reached out from under the bed and delicately clawed my ankle, catching in my sock, so that the fabric stretched out in a point and then snapped back. I slid my feet out of my shoes and curled up on the very edge of the daybed, so that no part of me touched the woman behind me, from whom a comforting warmth nonetheless reached me, and fell asleep in turn.
Readings
from “A Visitor’s Observations”
We are fortunate that a scholar of what we would today call linguistic anthropology visited the Vocational School during the Founder’s lifetime and was able to report on what he saw there. Unfortunately nothing more is heard from him3 after the truncated text—scarcely more than a pile of handwritten notes toward a book never written, and in no particular order—that appears here for the first time, discovered by myself in a mixed lot of old papers auctioned off by the Cincinnati branch (two old biddies) of the American Spiritualist & Temperance Society. As its length may try the reader’s patience, I have broken it into sections; those eager to read them consecutively may of course do so by skipping ahead. —Ed.
How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School
I credit my involvement with the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children to a difficulty with the letter M.
Born into the hardworking, hardheaded middle class, educated expensively by the indifferent benevolence of a wealthy great-aunt to whom my parents applied for aid, and who had (and sought) no nearer relation to me, I had found myself a niche in the same small college in which I had recently completed my own graduate studies, dutifully inserting into the minds of the young what had been inserted into mine by my predecessor, recently and opportunely retired. I knew myself to be fortunate but was a martyr to indigestion and, dare I say it, boredom. But in my thirties, something put a period to my boredom in a most unwelcome way: I developed a stutter. How this delighted the young m-m-misses and m-m-misters who were my students, and how I suffered! It was in the search for a remedy that I came across a promotional publication of the Vocational School.
I found, not a cure, but a thesis.
I had long speculated that language had its origins in mourning. Without the desire to speak to and of the beloved dead, we would not have troubled to supplant simple grunts and gestures with words. Everyday necessity cannot account for the disproportionate ostentation of every known language. We do not need descriptive flourishes to say, “’Ware tiger!” or “Give me food!” No, language is the equivalent of those great monuments to the dead—your Sphinxes, your pyramids—the construction of which mulcted generations of the living.
I smoothed the pamphlet on my desk, and copied down an address. Here, finally, was direct evidence of the link between language and loss. If the Vocational School did not mourn their losses, since for them the dead never really departed, that did not confute my hypothesis. They had merely abbreviated the passage from loss to language, achieving consolation so quickly that the grief was never felt. And yet grief lay behind everything they did. I believed that before I ever saw those dark cornices thrusting into the oblivious blue of a summer sky, the stricken eyes locked in that imperious face.
On the Architecture of the Vocational School
The Vocational School is a huddle of mostly elderly buildings, much abused by the weather, and dank even in summer. The Chapel of the Word Church is the one recent addition. (As I came up the drive, I glimpsed above the dilapidated carriage house the Chapel’s narrow spire, like a finger raised to shush the sky.)
Did I say that language was like those great works of memorial architecture erected by the ancients? I found that for the Vocational School, architecture was language. Beyond the Chapel’s arched doorway was an introduction in three dimensions to Vocational School philosophy. The building alluded in its form to both Speaking Ear and Hearing Mouth. The nave was tiered, or one might say whorled, like an ear, and the vault ridged like the roof of a mouth. The children seated in the nave made up the Tongue. (Dressed identically in red flannel short pants, jackets, and caps, they looked a bit like those quaint statuettes known as Gartenzwerge.) Members of the faculty designated as Teeth, wearing peaked cowls of starched flannel of an ivory hue, lined the first tier above them and occasionally descended to impose discipline. Circulating freely through the congregation, the Salivary—advanced students, wearing large, pink, papier-mâché collars resembling the Egyptian usekh, and representing the pharyngeal opening—distributed gags, erasers, and other devotional items.
At the focus of the theater, the Analphabetical Choir was ranged in ascending tiers to left and right of a great hole, angled downward, and terminating out of sight of the congregation, with at the bottom a stoup kept brimming with the saliva of the devout, collected in spittoons throughout the ceremony. (I have contributed my tittle of froth.) In front of the hole, though not blocking it from view, was a standing screen of black paper with a small aperture through which the heavily rouged mouth of the Headmistress might address the congregation. The disconcerting effect was of a mouth, on the verge of being swallowed by a much larger mouth, turning back to utter a few last, barely audible words—“Don’t do it!” perhaps, or more mundanely, “White vinegar is sometimes efficacious in removing stains.”
If the Chapel was an educational tract, what was the main school building? The original structure, formerly the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, dates back to 1841, almost sixty years before the school was founded, but in it the lines of a once-dignified building in a restrained Victorian style have been lost under additions so peculiar as to raise doubt in the mind of at least one observer as to whether they could be described as architecture at all, or might not better be classed, to quote Jim Jimson’s Notable Architectural Abortions of Old New England, as “biological growths of the persuasion mushroom.”4 But those who, suspending judgment, pass under its preposterous porticos to amble down its hallways and faint in its fainting rooms