Notes on a Silencing

red-bound volume must be her private copy—my mom used hers in services too—but Ms. Radley rarely wore her clerical garb. She taught Religion and violin, and was mother to two students at the school, a girl older than I was and a boy younger. There was no Mr. Radley, as far as I could tell. She wore her dark hair short, with sprays of gray creeping out from her temples. Her lean body and utilitarian clothes were mannish in a way I found appealing but did not yet recognize as queer. All I sensed was a quiet objection—an objection to everything collared and exalted. I had watched her carefully from my chapel seat but had never been lucky enough to have a reason to talk with her. I couldn’t think what to say—Hey, my mom’s a priest too?

Ms. Radley embraced Marion and nodded her head in greeting to me. I sat quickly.

We were the only two students there. No matter. Ms. Radley led us as if there were a hundred people in the space, speaking the service clearly and carefully.

What a nice thing, I thought, to come to Chapel on Sunday evenings. What a quiet hideaway this is. Again I had the feeling I so often had at St. Paul’s, that I had stumbled upon a dedicated practice that my peers had discovered for themselves—in the art studio, on a playing field—and thought it remarkable not least because I had failed to find such a practice of my own.

When Ms. Radley spoke certain prayers, her voice, already a bit hoarse, took on extra air. I leaned in to listen:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or

weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who

sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless

the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the

joyous; and all for your love’s sake.

Marion and I said, “Amen.”

It was not a prayer I’d heard before. I decided that anyone who spoke the words work and watch and weep the way Ms. Radley did was someone I needed to be close to. She said them with her whole mouth, intently. I had never thought about the word weep much before. I’d considered it for wounds, perhaps—something unsightly. Nobody I knew wept. When we were upset, we cried. We sobbed. We blubbered or bawled, we got hysterical, we freaked out. Her voice made me consider whether there might be honor in sorrow.

But the words that stirred me most were shield the joyous. I said goodbye to Marion and walked back to my dorm with my arms wrapped tightly around my core. The sun was down and I was chilled, walking across campus, and far from joyous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt even halfway happy. Maybe this is why the phrase struck me as so generous and so wise. Of course the weeping needed protection—but the joyous too? I considered the notion that good fortune was tender. It soothed me to think that compassion might be aimed at the lucky. Maybe it gave me a way to feel I mattered. Even if I was not reveling in the riches of school, even if I was not among the dancing heirs, I might serve as a shield for those who were. Caroline. Samantha. Brooke. Maddy. Marion. Everyone who belonged there, everyone who was kind. I thought I could settle for that.

Every Sunday I went back to hear the reedy tones of Ms. Radley’s work or watch or weep this night.

I asked Marion how I should approach Ms. Radley about advising my Independent Study Project, or ISP, on biochemical depression and the creative genius. It was a pretentious topic, I knew—just the memory of myself on the ski lift, hand intact, pride inflamed, rattling on about aesthetic sensibilities made me wish a blizzard had come up just then. But in the proposal I was working up, I didn’t intend to claim either depression or genius. I meant to construct the inquiry to have enough novelty and grain to pass muster with the faculty who approved such projects. The main point of it all was to be left alone. (Hence independent project.) And it was informed by my own experience, however flimsily. I had, after all, taken Prozac for about ten months, which allowed me to borrow a small portion of authenticity, though I mentioned nothing about this to anyone. The drug hadn’t made me feel any different. But the experience had caused me to begin to pay attention to the fact that a new, partially scientific notion of “biochemical depression” had taken root in the popular imagination, or at least in as much of it as I could monitor through periodicals in the school library.

This was all before the internet, with only a newly computerized card catalogue and a librarian to help me access databases better suited to doctoral candidates. I followed book to article to book like a set of torches on a tunneled hall. My investigations began, of course, with The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath was every sad Waspy girl’s patron saint. We all but knew her: look at her face! She’d have been on the field hockey team! After Sylvia’s dreadful end I moved on to Ted Hughes, imagining it was sophisticated of me to leave the girl and join the men. Everybody knew “Daddy,” but who knew “The Hawk in the Rain”? From there I encountered a range of English poets: Stephen Spender’s crew, including Auden as a young man, before he’d been bloodlessly anthologized. I glanced past Virginia Woolf, whose intelligence and self-possession frightened me—I placed a marker there, to return to when I was older—and came back the long way to the T. S. Eliot of our Religion class.

Still, women’s verse appealed to me more: Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin. Mom told me that as a child in Rome she had played with a girl named Jorie Pepper who was now the poet Jorie