Catherine House Read online

  “Mad you weren’t invited to the party?” Theo said.

  “That was not a party,” Yaya said. “And those girls were skanks.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Theo said.

  She gave him a wedgie. He cursed and grabbed his crotch.

  A hush fell over the hall. Our attention shifted to the administrators’ dais. Viktória was standing.

  “Welcome to our winter festival,” she said.

  She smiled over the assembly.

  “I am so pleased to gather with you all on this cold evening,” she continued. “Here at Catherine, we’ve always believed in the power of rhythm. The rhythm of the day—classes and teas, work and sleep. The rhythm of the seasons. The rhythm of our voices and hearts. These rhythms bind us to ourselves, to each other, and to our environments. And these festival nights, the nights when we take a special moment to drink and eat and laugh together in celebration of these vital rhythms—well, they have always been my favorite nights in this house.”

  She was looking down at her hands. Her face barely moved as she spoke.

  “Tonight, we celebrate the precious quiet of wintertime,” she said. “And how lovely is this time of silence and work and anticipation and decay?” She looked up. “Here at Catherine, we know not to fear death. Because even in death, there is life. Death is not the black night, but its white moon. The honeyed egg of rebirth.”

  Her voice was low. She had a slight unplaceable accent.

  “So please,” she said, “let us praise tonight, this room, and each other. Let us feast and be glad in the darkest of times.”

  She raised her glass.

  “To winter,” she said, “and to tonight.”

  We sipped.

  As she sat down, M. Neptune, the director of the new materials concentration, placed his hand on her arm. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell from her expression that he was whispering in her ear.

  “At least it was a short speech,” Yaya said as the aides distributed tureens of vanilla pudding. She spooned some onto her plate.

  “Short now,” Theo said. “But wait until our coming in. That’s when things get crazy.”

  “Our—coming in?” Baby whispered.

  “Yeah. It’s … I don’t know. Something we do in a couple of weeks.”

  “Why hasn’t Kimmy told us about it?”

  “Kimmy doesn’t tell us anything,” Yaya said, stirring at her pudding with a disconsolate frown. Something seemed to have upset her. “No one tells us shit.”

  Baby wasn’t eating her pudding, either. I touched her shoulder.

  “Well,” Theo said, soft enough that we all had to lean in to listen, “according to Crystal—”

  “Hold up,” Yaya said. “Who’s Crystal?”

  “One of the skanks,” Nick whispered.

  Theo gave him the finger. “According to Crystal, our coming in is in a couple of weeks, in, like, the middle of the night. She made it sound like some kind of ceremony. And apparently it’s what separates us from the upperclassman. After it happens, we’ll start going to sessions.”

  “Sessions?” Yaya said.

  “Friday-night dinners.”

  “So it’s an initiation ceremony,” Nick said.

  “An initiation ceremony?” Yaya said, raising her eyebrow. “We’ve been here four months. Isn’t it a little late for that?”

  Theo shrugged. “Crystal wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

  We all looked at each other. None of us smiled.

  Baby pressed her palms tight against the table. She looked like she was going to be sick.

  The pudding tureens were whisked away.

  *

  That winter, I would find myself staring at something—a bottle of shampoo maybe, or a crisp stack of Tshirts, or, through a cracked door, two aides laughing as they waxed a classroom floor—and it would hit me: I was inside. The shampoo, the Tshirts, and the aides’ murmurs were all secret, private things. I was inside. And the rest of the world was out.

  The outside world had always had a vulgar curiosity about Catherine. Every few months some magazine published a “Catherine CULT: EXPOSED!!” editorial or a conspiracy theorist on TV raved about how the Catherine graduate network controlled Chinese money market rates. I didn’t remember the details of their speculation. Why would I? I didn’t think any of it was true. And even when I’d applied, I was sure I’d never be accepted.

  Now that I was here, I wished I remembered the specifics. What was Catherine’s secret?

  “There is no secret,” Henry Vu said over a lunch of radishes and salmon salad sandwiches. Henry, a nebbish Ashley first-year, had slunk to our table for the day. He blew his nose into a napkin. “It’s only a school,” he mumbled as he finished, wiping away the snot. “The only reason our graduates are so impressive is because they worked extraordinarily hard to get into Catherine, they worked hard while they were here, and they worked hard afterward. Catherine is … secluded, yes, but it’s not like we’re stuck in this house forever. We do graduate eventually. Professors publish from their research here and aides come and go. This isn’t, like, Area 51. Tabloids want some—some sexy story of what goes on here, but the truth is we’re just studying. A lot. That’s it.”

  “Nah, that’s not it,” Anna Montgomery said. I liked Anna. She was a frank, casual girl, sunny-blond and muscular. She looked like she spent her summers hiking mountains and building boats with her dad. She was leaning back in her chair now, balancing on its two back legs with boyish ease. “No way is this a normal school. Sure, aides come and go, but have you ever seen of one of them give an interview? I bet they sign ironclad confidentiality agreements. And yeah, Catherine kids graduate and go on to live successful, normal, happy lives. But in those successful, normal, happy lives … none of them ever talks about what actually happens in the house. I mean, did you see Gardner on Barbara Walters? He wouldn’t shut up about the Norfolk disaster or Rengate, but as soon as she started going for his college years, zilch. That’s nuts.”

  Henry shrugged, poking at a radish. “It’s a different kind of school, sure. Obviously, with all the, um, racial diversity, the progressive admission systems. And the syncretic curriculum. This is what happens when a school is founded by Transcendentalists instead of Puritans. You end up with a very special student body, and an administration that likes getting those very special students stupidly, transcendentally drunk. But really, the house and its history, it isn’t some big secret. You could read about it in any book on higher education in America. Yes, Catherine is a somewhat radical school. But it’s just a school.”

  “Maybe,” Anna said. “But remember how the grads spoke about the house during our admissions interviews? The way our graduates feel about Catherine, and the way we’ll feel someday—the way some of us feel already …” Anna stopped. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, thoughtful. “Listen,” she finally said, “we don’t have a football team. We don’t have any grad schools, so most of our research is pretty pedestrian. This place is gorgeous, but the admins obviously care more about luring us here with free tuition than keeping up the house—did you hear there was another leak in the Ashley parlor? We don’t have old colonial history like Harvard or Yale. And even if we did, like you said, we’re not supposed to fetishize the past or whatever. We don’t even invite our graduates back for reunions or anything. Really, we have no idea why we do half the meals and festivals and other shit we do. But doesn’t it seem like everyone who goes to Catherine leaves … just … in love with this house?” Anna shrugged. “I don’t know. But you don’t know, either. There’s something here. Some special kind of power.”

  Henry’s face twisted in a delicate sneer. “Everyone’s sentimental about their college years,” he said. “The ‘shortest, gladdest years of life.’ There’s nothing special about that.”

  Anna took a bite of her sandwich. “We’re not mentioning the obvious thing,” she said with her mouth full.

  “What’s that?”

 
She nodded at the students clustered on the other side of the hall.

  I’d already come to recognize the new materials concentrators. There were only about twenty of them; Baby was right to say that it was Catherine’s most exclusive course of studies. The concentrators stuck to their own, as if by spending so much time together in the lab they forgot how to socialize with anyone else. They wandered the halls in a hollow-eyed pack, whispering as they rushed between classes and labs and huddling together at their own table in the great hall. That’s where they were now, murmuring over something I couldn’t make out. I craned to look. It was a toy, a blue wooden spinning top.

  “If you want to study new materials, if you don’t think the whole thing’s a joke, you come to Catherine,” Anna said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why a lot of us are here.”

  “Are you applying?” I said. “To the concentration?”

  Anna looked at me as if she had only just realized I existed. She was braiding her hair into a thick plait. “Well, yeah. I could study, like, American literature or whatever at a much easier school. One where I could go to the movies or call my parents on the phone. But ever since I was a little kid, and I saw those videos from the Shiner report … I knew it couldn’t have all been faked. And I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Plasm. That’s the magic ingredient. That’s what makes Catherine special.” She nodded at Henry. “It’s like you said, Catherine was founded by Transcendentalists, not Puritans. This school has always been about plasm study, even if we were calling it something else back then—pneuma or chi or telesma or whatever. Cosmo-electric energy. And maybe nobody was taking us seriously back then, and certainly no one takes us seriously now. But if you do believe in the future, in future materials, this is where you belong.”

  Henry was still poking at a radish.

  I stood up.

  Anna turned to look at me. “What’s up?” she said.

  “I,” I said, “am going to calculus.”

  As I left, I glanced over at the new materials concentrators. They weren’t more attractive than everyone else; their eyes were shadowed with fatigue and their hair was greasy. But there was something powerful and electric in the way they hunched together. They were laughing now at some joke I couldn’t hear from our side of the room. The top lay forgotten on its side.

  Could my stiff little Baby really become one of them someday? One of those powerful, electric boys and girls?

  I’d heard the concentration was so selective that they usually chose only two or three students per class. So there should be about five of them at that table, not twenty. And some looked older than twenty-two.

  I remembered, suddenly, a nine o’clock news story from months or years ago. Parents claiming Catherine had kidnapped their children, teary-eyed mothers pleading, begging someone to care. Catherine was supposed to be a three-year school. But those families said their children were never coming home. I guessed they must have been in the new materials program.

  Plasm had never interested me much. I knew that it was once thought to be a revolutionary discovery, some incredible future of materials, chemistry, life, whatever. But it all seemed so vague. Was plasm even visible? Was plasm anything? It’d been years since Catherine released the Shiner report, though, like Anna, I remembered watching the footage during a TV special. I remembered the demonstrator’s careful hands as she pressed the thermometer-like pins along the shattered porcelain vase; I remembered the porcelain’s spectral hushing noise as it fused itself back together.

  But that was years ago. Since then, there had been some scandal about M. Shiner and his research, something that put the whole project into question. I wasn’t sure what it was about. All I knew was that the Shiner report was now considered a joke, and Catherine was supposed to have stopped its experimental program. I’d heard other research clinics had tried to reproduce his results, and none were successful. Whatever magic material Catherine had discovered was gone. If it had ever been here at all.

  I grabbed a plum from the dessert service on my way to Calculus II. I ate it in class as the professor wrote out differential equations on the chalkboard. The sound of his chalk clicking sounded like soothing rain. I laid my head down and closed my eyes.

  *

  It was too early in the morning. I clenched my hands against my head. The hallway throbbed with professors scuffling in from the snow, shuffling between offices with mugs of tea. Everything smelled like mildew. I hadn’t slept. I was still drunk.

  “Ines,” M. Owens said.

  I looked up. He was standing over me with a steaming teacup, his lips twisted into an elegant frown. He was a gray, aristocratically ugly man with thick, jowly cheeks and pinkish eyes that turned down at the corners. He always looked a bit morose.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Please,” he said, “come in.”

  I stood, knees creaking. I swayed.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he said as he set down his tea. Most professors didn’t get their own offices, but advisors were afforded special privileges. The luxury suited him. He’d lined his windowsill with three snowy white orchids and covered the floor with an Oriental rug that must have been plush at one time but was now threadbare in patches.

  “Never better,” I said, sitting in a drab crimson velveteen armchair. “I like your tie.”

  He glanced down at the tie. It was navy and patterned with tiny flamingos. “Thank you. My wife gave it to me.”

  I curled up my legs. “You must have a nice wife.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I bet she cooks you nice soups. Like minestrone.”

  “Corn chowder, generally.”

  I could imagine her. She was an art teacher, probably, with skinny arms, a braying laugh, sandy graying hair tied under a kerchief. The kind of woman who did jigsaw puzzles and watched Jeopardy! and took their chocolate Lab for twilight walks on the beach, and, every morning, sat down with a cup of coffee and wrote M. Owens a letter.

  I knew faculty jobs at Catherine were coveted positions. And they were usually just two-year terms. But I couldn’t imagine being a grown-up and choosing this life.

  I leaned my head in my hand and stared at his tie. “I like flamingos.”

  M. Owens sipped his tea as he pulled a file from the stack on his desk and flipped it opened. He spent a long time on the page, eyes sliding down the sheet, then back up again, finger pressed against his lip.

  I rubbed my temple.

  “Ines,” he said, after spending what felt like an eternity paging through the rest of the file.

  “Yes?”

  “My dear … what happened?”

  I shifted in my seat. “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? Well, let’s see.” He flipped back. “You had a very interesting high school transcript. Not perfect, and I see your grades took quite a dip senior year, but still interesting, promising. I can certainly see why M. González recommended you. Your project essays, your interviews …” He flipped through more pages. “All lovely, really, very lovely. But now. You failed two classes last semester, and barely passed the others. And judging by your midterm reports, this semester will be even worse. So, Ines, please.” He looked up. “What happened?”

  I couldn’t answer. My brain was swimming.

  M. González. Not “mister.” That meant he’d attended Catherine himself, maybe even been a teacher here. I hadn’t realized, though now it seemed obvious. His creativity and genius for chemistry, his fierce concern over everything and everyone, even me. The way the other teachers always spoke of him with either savage jealousy or strange, extraordinary reverence. Of course he’d gone to Catherine.

  Why had he never mentioned it? Or had he, and I’d forgotten? No, I would have remembered if he’d shared something so personal. He enjoyed talking about his travels and nights out dancing, but always skirted over anything intimate and specific. Once, walking past the teachers’ lounge, I’d overheard someone say that his mother had been diagnosed with p
ancreatic cancer, but he’d never mentioned it to me. Were his years at Catherine as private as that?

  And why had Mr. González recommended me? I couldn’t imagine. He probably regretted it now. As soon as he’d opened his condo door to find me there, after that night in the hotel—when he looked me up and down and saw me, really saw me, for the first time—he must have realized what a mistake he’d made.

  At least he hadn’t told Catherine what I’d done.

  M. Owens leaned back in his chair. “What do you want out of this experience?” he said. “Out of being here, at Catherine?”

  A freezing rain pittered against M. Owens’s window. He stared at me with his hands folded.

  “We see this often,” he finally said. “When young adults are so isolated, so removed from their parents, friends, and communities. It is a change. A total structural change. Of course that has its effects. We do expect some growing pains.” He tapped my transcript. “But this …” He shook his head. “This is a truly disappointing performance.”

  I scratched my knee. He was still staring at me.

  “You are antisocial,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You are unproductive.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are lazy. Do you disagree?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I don’t disagree.”

  He swirled his tea.

  “You could do well here, Ines,” M. Owens said. “You must know that, somewhere deep inside. You applied, didn’t you? You wrote the project essays, you sat in hour after hour of interviews, you told us your whole life story, however reluctantly. And you were accepted. And you came. You could do well here. But to succeed at Catherine you’re going to have to do more than pass through the gate.”

  He had stopped swirling his tea.

  “You must choose Catherine,” he said. “Not just once, but every day. Choose to be here. Choose to study. To make friends. To succeed. To wake up every day and be alive, and go to work. It’s not an easy thing to do. It can be very hard. But you can do it. I know you can.” He leaned forward, eyes unblinking. “The question is, do you want to? Or do you want to spend the next three years stupid and drunk?”