I knew why my father told me this story. Dad had been a member of the Ivy Club at Princeton, the eating club Hobey Baker had joined back in 1912. Dad would have learned his insider’s mythology there. Writing from Cottage Club, the eating club next door, F. Scott Fitzgerald had borrowed Hobey’s middle name, Amory, for the hero of This Side of Paradise. The story my father told was not to him tragic. It was about a kind of mastery.
I too found self-destruction more interesting than bad luck. I admired it. Nothing was taken from Hobey Baker, I calculated, nothing visited upon him that he didn’t ordain. The only thing he’d ever had to give up was his own future.
I could die. That was a choice. My father might even understand.
I didn’t skate to Rick Banner’s name. After Royce finished the kissing sprints and let us go, I changed in silence and left the locker room alone. When I was halfway to the rink doors I heard someone behind me, quietly, sneakers on the rubber mats. I stiffened, waiting. Would I be hit? Spit upon? How soon until they laughed?
My follower caught up and threw an arm around me. It was Sarah Devens, superstar. She had never touched me before. We’d never exchanged more than a friendly hello.
“Hey, Lace,” she said, resting her arm heavily across my shoulders. She was shorter than I was and seemed endlessly powerful.
I did not reply, just waited.
Sarah sighed, a long and sad sound. We walked together. After a few more paces, she pulled me in to her in a kind of sideways hug and stayed with me like that for a moment. I ached to hear what she would say next. I could not so much as offer her a word of my own.
But she withdrew, and when I looked back she was with our team captains and others, including Candace, and they were stony. I was no glutton. I would not ask for more. I took Sarah’s moment of solidarity and turned it over in my mind. I remembered the weight of her arm on my shoulders.
I still don’t know what she might have meant to say, if there was anything else she had meant to confer. I never asked. Sarah Devens killed herself four years later, but we haven’t gotten there yet.
Crack-ups at St. Paul’s were almost always observed in retrospect, beginning with the rector’s announcement in Chapel that a student had withdrawn from the school, for the rest of the semester or for good. A brilliant ballet dancer would get thinner and thinner until one day we learned she’d gone home on a health leave, and then, on the walk to the Schoolhouse from Chapel, her hallmates would reveal the details. A suicide attempt with pills, usually—she’d swallow everything she could get her hands on, prescribed and unprescribed, and wait to be found. One student arranged herself holding her mother’s picture on her chest, as though she were in her coffin already. Nobody succeeded while we were students there.
Or a boy would get caught “partying”—alcohol or drugs—in such a conspicuous way that it was clear he wasn’t even pretending to adhere to school rules. It was difficult to know when behavior was truly manic, because we all worked all the time anyway in our fever to perform, and sometimes this pace extended to rule-breaking, too.
Withdrawal from the world was the final course of action, and this was the progression I’d been witnessing in my hallmate Elise, close up, without realizing it. When I felt her starting to disengage from our friendship, panic moved in my stomach. It couldn’t have been disapproval of me—she was anything but judgmental, and sex was a field she considered expansive and ill-suited to shame. I hadn’t wronged her, had I? I wondered whether she might, hearing great gossip about me, have felt left out, not learning from me what everyone else seemed to know. In a similar position, I might have suffered such a petty injury. But that wasn’t it either.
Elise refused breakfast, lunch, and most dinners, managing to buy snacks from the student Tuck Shop during its open hours mid-morning. She stopped carrying Simone and Jean-Paul around with her. Because I was so impressed by her, I found a happy explanation for everything: She wanted to be left alone with her sophisticated thoughts. She had moved past French existentialism and was weighing which intellectual movement to embrace next. She realized that the quality of our existence is only a matter of perception. And so on.
Then, in February, Elise withdrew completely—left the school and went home.
I got a note. She added our favorite quotations at the bottom: “Be always drunken.” And, from Religion’s latest assignment, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Her handwriting was elegant, long and sloping, almost masculine in the way she compressed open spaces and crowded her lines to take up room on the page. In my large, careful hand I copied her quotations onto separate pieces of paper and taped them over my bed. Down the hall, Maintenance retrieved her school-issue cot from the basement and removed the tacks that had held her scarves over the windows. They dialed down the radiator and left the room bare and cold.
I was again nominated for the Ferguson Scholarship. I cringed when my name was read. I worried that the sound of it, released in the chapel, would remind people how they hated me.
My sixteenth birthday was approaching. What did I want? Sweet sixteen, my parents said. Sweet sixteen, said Mrs. Lane. Sweet sixteen, said my adviser, Mrs. Fenn. Did I have any requests?
I am not sure if
