Gossip of the Starlings Read online

  Gossip of the Starlings

  a novel by

  Nina de Gramont

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  For Danae and Leslie

  Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person “the world today” or “life” or “reality” he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

  JOHN KNOWLES

  A Separate Peace

  Contents

  FALL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  WINTER

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  SPRING

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  Preview of The Last September

  FALL

  1

  NOW, WHEN I SEE teenage girls laughing. When I see them loosed on a summer evening—their limbs tanned and gossamer, their imagined freedom radiating like nuclear light—I can’t help but fast-forward two decades or more. I know the curve of their bones has already made an imperceptible bow to gravity. I see the decay in slow motion, even or especially through those stunning and immortal years.

  But Skye could see it then. At seventeen, she spoke about her childhood with the most yearning nostalgia, like an old woman looking back at youth.

  “I used to swim past Tautog Rock in October,” she told me, sitting in the open window of my dorm room. “I used to ride my bike down Scargo Hill without ever touching the brakes.”

  She threw out her arms—so freckled and slender, they might still have belonged to that ten-year-old, tearing around Cape Cod.

  I sat on the floor, cutting lines of Colombian cocaine on top of my toaster oven. With the flourish of a Japanese chef, I used a razor blade to fan, dice, and separate. The coke was fine and completely pure. It coursed through our bodies with none of the usual side effects: no gas or worried jaws. Only wide open lucidity, exhilaration, confidence.

  “Fearless,” Skye said, pronouncing the word with greed, as if the quality had long since left her, and she would spend the rest of her life chasing it down.

  The autumn air hung behind her in complete darkness. If headmasters were smart, they would employ floodlights—no shadows anywhere, to slip between. But at the Esther Percy School for Girls, we saw not a glint of orange or red from outside, just heard the wind soughing through brilliant leaves.

  “But it’s okay,” Skye said. “Nobody stays young forever, right?”

  I laughed and said, “I don’t think you’re ready for dentures just yet.”

  She stretched in the dimly watted light. The strap of my white eyelet nightgown—bought by my mother in Paris—slid off her shoulder.

  “At our Cape house,” she said, “we’ve got powder post beetles in the beams. You can hear them at night, gnawing away like little buzz saws. Sometimes I think I hear them in my bones. Chzz chzz chzz.”

  I lifted the toaster oven toward Skye, and she collected her long, red curls. With a plastic straw, stolen from the dining hall and snipped in half, she inhaled a line. Before tonight, Skye had never done coke—or any drug, other than sips from her father’s wineglass. But she wielded the accoutrements with surprising grace. When the line vanished, she sat up and ran one finger across the bridge of her nose—her face smooth and white as a teacup.

  She sniffed and shivered, then asked me if I believed in an afterlife.

  “Sure,” I said.

  What I really believed in was this life, continuing on indefinitely. Sweet, acrid powder melted and dripped down the back of my throat. I blinked like an animal—completely and deliciously awake. What we lacked was a fire to dance around. Deer to chase down and slay. Instead of this small wooden room and the most simplistic metaphysics.

  “Me too,” Skye said. “I believe in heaven.”

  “But you don’t have to be good to get in,” I said.

  Skye laughed—a piping sound, loud but not easy. She climbed down from the window and held out her hand for a turn with the razor. I watched her press the sharp edge into the powder, her brow furrowed with a perfectionist’s concentration. Determined to master this new skill.

  From the other side of the room, I heard a knock and a sleepy voice. One of the conditions of my admittance to Esther Percy was sharing a wall with the dorm counselor.

  “Catherine?” Ms. Latham called. Skye swept the toaster oven—as forbidden as the contraband on top of it—under my bed. It was a perfunctory gesture. Ms. Latham was far too lazy and kindhearted to put on a bathrobe, walk around to our entrance, climb the stairs, and catch us. Instead, she always accepted whatever explanation I called back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I must have been dreaming.”

  We turned out the light and crawled into my single bed. With the covers pulled to our chins, we blinked at the ceiling, completely awake. Our limbs twitched against each other with restless clarity.

  Skye had crept here after evening bells, navigating the wide lawn and gnarled oaks, her sneakers caked with mud and pine needles. I lived in White Cottage, on the old part of campus, with clapboard siding and black shutters. Skye’s room lay on the other end, where dark wooden buildings had slanted skylights and low flush toilets.

  At my last school, we’d snuck out to boys’ dorms or they had come to us. At Esther Percy, there were some girls who traded labored breath and bare skin. But most of us, like Skye and me, traded secrets. I missed my boyfriend John Paul—pining patiently for me at Waverly—but a part of me preferred this more intense intimacy: fueled by disclosure and a feeling of permanence. I knew that any boy, no matter how loyal, would ultimately be fleeting. While we, the girls, would stay friends forever.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Skye said. “If anything happens to me, I’ll come back and fill you in. Tell you what it’s like.”

  “Me too, you,” I said.

  She laughed, another loud burst. Growing up, she had often traveled under the imposing watch of bodyguards—and so had faced her mortality early. She probably didn’t consider me important enough for serious peril.

  “Hush,” I reminded her.

  “Unless you get thrown from a horse,” she whispered, “I don’t think you’re going anywhere. And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “I will,” I insisted. “I promise.”

  My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I could see Skye raise her brows doubtfully. I was better at keeping secrets than sharing them. In the past few weeks, she had handed me every exciting detail of her infamous and unjust expulsion, while I’d revealed only the dullest outline of my exile. I never corrected her assumption that I’d been expelled from Waverly. I told her almost nothing about my family and less about my friends. I refused to tell her where I got my coke.

  So in this instance, she would not take me at my word. “Blood oath?” she said.

  She opened her hand to reveal the razor blade, still resting against her fingers. I held out my hand obediently, waiting for a gentle slice of my thumb; but Skye did herself first, carving from the base of her middle finger to her wrist.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  She sat up and cupped her fingers to catch the blood, which gathered in her palm—voluminou
s enough to sip from. I felt a sharp rush of nausea—the kind that usually accompanies one’s own grave injury. The green of Skye’s irises was almost entirely swallowed by black pupils. I listened to her shallow quiver of breath and regretted this corruption—which I’d never meant to be so complete.

  “Now you,” she said. “Hurry up.”

  I took the razor and held it over my palm. My hands didn’t shake, which surprised me. But I did hesitate.

  “Come on,” Skye hissed, faintly maniacal.

  “Shut up,” I said. And scratched a faint, horizontal line, one third the length of hers. I had to squeeze it to bring out blood, but Skye thrust her hand into mine like our wounds were equal.

  “There,” she said, our hands creating one man-sized fist, Skye’s blood trickling between our fingers. “It’s a pact.”

  I got a T-shirt from my top drawer, which she wrapped around her hand. She settled back in bed, holding the ballooned cloth against her chest like a battle veteran. If I’d been able to see clearly in the darkened room, I’m sure her fair cheeks would have been flushed with color and an eerie sort of pride.

  Skye’s hair fanned out across my pillows, and her breath quickened. Something inside me went gray, as if I’d lost more blood than I’d realized.

  My premonition lit the room as if we’d struck a match. Its glow settled around her in a flickering updraft. And I thought that whatever story we had together—Skye and I—she would be dead by the end of it.

  2

  IN THE FALL OF 1984 there were three teenage girls whose names we all recognized. Phoebe Cates, who skipped—with a smiling mouthful of braces—through our outgrown subscriptions to Seventeen. Brooke Shields, who had disrobed on film at the exact moment our own bodies became a desperate source of uneasiness. And—in Massachusetts, at least—there was Skye Butterfield: who had appeared on campaign podiums since her head barely grazed her father’s elbow. Who became particularly visible in that election year—when the world’s fate teetered in the Sturm und Drang of the cold war, and her altruistic transgressions worked to the best advantage of her father’s campaign.

  “Why can’t you be more like Skye Butterfield?”

  For years, mothers across the state had issued this demand during the evening news, pointing to our senator’s beautiful and accomplished daughter. Her curly ponytail and tailored wool coat. Her direct gaze and her straight, obedient shoulders. Her merit scholarships and her wholesome, supportive smile.

  None of these mothers had recanted when she was suspended from Devon, after writing a series of English papers for a student on a football scholarship. They only sighed in heightened esteem, wishing their own children’s misbehavior could be so high-minded. A few months later, Skye made headlines again—expelled this time, for sneaking away from school to protest Chanticleer, a plant that produced plutonium triggers. Even the more conservative parents appreciated her bravery and selflessness. At a press conference, the sag of her shoulders looked more instructed than sincere; she stared at the ground with fixed determination as her father rushed to eloquent and modest defense. Douglas Butterfield had never seemed like a practiced politician, but completely sincere—never more so than when speaking on his daughter’s behalf. Not so much defending her actions as casting the reasons behind them in a compassionate and admirable light.

  The local media had run away with both stories, with the tacit blessing of Senator Butterfield’s campaign. Skye’s rogue charity for the scholarship student only legitimized her father’s status as handsomer-than-a-Kennedy-and-just-as-liberal. And his opponent in the Senate race supported Chanticleer—a position that Skye’s protest made increasingly unpopular.

  The cameras loved Douglas Butterfield more than ever: shining and honest, generous to share the mantle of crusader. And we, Skye’s peers, loved him, too—believing entirely in the promises he made from the glossy palette of the television screen.

  Not that we often watched the news. Prep school was its own insular world. TV sets lived far away—at home. None of us listened to the radio. What little political awareness I had amounted to a certainty that Ronald Reagan’s reelection would presage a nuclear holocaust. Our president’s hoary, schoolboy demeanor inspired nightmarish visions of underground silos across the Midwest, shuddering open to launch their warheads.

  THE MORNING AFTER OUR blood pact, Skye didn’t show up for English, an absence made especially noticeable by our teacher’s preoccupation with her empty seat. Mr. November was Esther Percy’s youngest faculty member, just two years out of Haverford, and one of only a few males. With a slight, youthful build and an unremarkable bearing, his most impressive quality was his wife—who played guitar, sang in a lilting contralto, and rarely deigned to address the students directly. Any crushes we had on Mr. November bore deep connections to Mrs. November’s elusive cool.

  That morning he scanned the room for Skye at regular intervals, finally interrupting his own lecture on The Great Gatsby to question me directly. “Catherine,” he said, “it’s not like Skye to be missing. Do you know if she’s all right?”

  I shrugged and shook my rattled head, certain that my sudden and violent blush communicated everything: the coke, the wounded palm, and the sleepless night, along with the fear that Skye had been seriously damaged in a way that would not only be irreversible but traced back to me.

  Mr. November returned to topic with a wistful and deflated air, as if Daisy Buchanan had somehow managed to remove herself from the text. I tried to remember if he’d been as concerned the week before, when Laura Pogue-Smith had come down with the flu.

  By late afternoon classes had ended and I still hadn’t seen Skye. I thought about going by her dorm room, but instead punished myself by riding in a sitting trot around and around the outdoor ring. It was an exercise in battling wills—not only against my own discomfort, but against my horse’s longing to break into a gallop. Pippin was an eager, high-strung animal, never easily contained. I squeezed the reins insistently and ground my heels down deep: perversely enjoying the clattering of my bones, which had been awake for thirty-six hours straight—enduring classes and communal meals. My teeth felt like icicles, ready to shatter on impact. My brain moved through a foggy sludge, and a deep and anxious guilt scuttled beneath my rib cage. I imagined an important nerve in Skye’s palm severed, or an essential facet of her self-image lost—and feared that she had awoken so appalled by her swollen hand and altered state that she’d rushed to the headmistress and turned us both in.

  I returned Pippin to his stall and walked back to the main campus, dragging my crop along the dusty road. In good weather my hometown in western Mass was just a two-hour drive from Esther Percy’s southern Vermont campus. Everything felt familiar. Wood smoke dissipated in the New England air. The mulchy, grass scent of manure. A light, horsey steam rose from the sweat on Pippin’s bay coat, and a kaleidoscope of damp leaves wilted beneath my boots. The deep, dull sun of midautumn pulsed on my bare neck, hair pushed under my helmet, and the unlikely heat snaked down my spine even as afternoon darkness loomed.

  My head pounded, my vision separated into pixels, and I imagined crawling into the bed my mother had covered in goose down and French linen on the day she’d left me here.

  Skye stood on the steps of White Cottage, waiting for me. My footsteps quickened with the need to inspect her, but relief had already descended. From a distance, she could easily be mistaken for an adult, her height and carriage belonging to a different league than the rest of us. But with every step closer, she lost a year—her face so smooth and round that her features looked delicate to the point of unformed, like a very small child’s. The air around her crackled with wellness—physical health and beauty—so that despite the thick, professional gauze encasing her hand, it seemed ridiculous that she had ever been the subject of my concern.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked. We knew from Lisa Zuckerman’s miscarriage that the school nurse could not be trusted.

  “I said I was helping you in
the barn and cut my hand on a rusty nail. She gave me a tetanus shot.”

  “Probably not a bad idea,” I said, trying to remember the razor blade’s origin.

  I pulled off my helmet and shook my stringy hair loose. At Esther Percy, with no boys around, we prided ourselves on going days without showering. But now I longed for a hot bath, followed directly by twelve hours of sleep.

  “Okay,” Skye said, when I told her this, and followed me upstairs like she’d be joining me in both. I didn’t object. On our first day at Esther Percy, Skye had chosen me—inexplicably striding across the dining hall to slide her tray next to mine and sit down beside me. The rest of the girls had looked on in envy. I had yet to shake the sense of privilege her friendship afforded me.

  At the top of the stairs, we politely averted our eyes from Amanda and Amanda—my across-the-hall neighbors—kissing in their doorway. Skye stepped over my threshold and picked her way through the general debris, the week-old laundry and stolen dining-hall plates.

  “I like this place better in the dark,” she said, and sat on the edge of my unmade bed, looking prim in khakis and a Peter Pan collar.

  “I don’t know how you can be so chipper,” I said.

  Skye’s eyes were green and bright, her complexion fine. No evidence of our debauchery. Whereas my own lank, blonde looks stared back from the mirror, decimated—eyes rimmed with pink, their pale blue faded to gray. My clavicle protruded violently beneath a blotchy neck, making my slender face appear gaunt and waifish.

  “That was fun last night,” Skye said. “I felt so wide awake. I still haven’t slept. Have you?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m not quite as happy about it as you are.”

  “I like it,” she said. “This restlessness. Even this hangover. It’s exciting.”

  Skye had already told me everything about herself. I knew that her daredevil streak long preceded the new urge to rebel. She had skied Tuckerman’s Ravine in blinding snow. She had sailed to Nantucket in heavy wind. On a hiking trip in Colorado, she had not backed away when she came upon a bear, but walked up close for a better look. Skye had a careful eye for detail, and I could picture the animal exactly: a young black bear, rangy and lean, his winter coat shedding and rumpled. Returning Skye’s curious regard as he gnawed on a stick of hackberries.