Missing Lucile by Suzanne Berne

Author:Suzanne Berne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2010-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

WHAT LUCILE ENCOUNTERED AT WELLESLEY

Algebra. Taught by Professor Ellen Hayes, who stunned a Sunday crowd at Houghton Memorial Chapel by announcing that “God himself cannot change the laws of mathematics.” Her freshman year, Lucile studied Ration and Proportion in Higher Algebra and the Theory of Exponents including Imaginaries, Radicals, and Equations involving Radicals. Also Inequalities. Useful at Wellesley, a place Calvin Coolidge called “a political hotbed of radicalism.” A college founded on the revolutionary theory that women could be educated as well as men, and deserved to be. (Ambrose Bierce on education: “That which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.”)

Also a place where people were fond of discussing inequalities.

The Barge, Barnswallows. In September of 1907, Lucile takes a train from Cincinnati to New York to Boston, where she has to change trains again at South Station for a rackety ride out to the town of Wellesley, twenty miles to the west. She is seventeen. I don’t know whether she traveled to Wellesley alone, but it’s quite possible that she did. At the station she is met by “the Barge,” a dolorous-looking black carriage in which Wellesley College students and their baggage are conveyed down Washington Street. The Barge clatters through the stone pillars and past East Lodge, swaying alarmingly, and halts suddenly at the steps of College Hall. Lucile climbs carefully down from the Barge, aware than an intellectual waterway has just been crossed. Maple leaves are beginning to turn red; the breeze in the east feels cooler than it had in Cincinnati, and when she looks up at the five stories of College Hall the sky above seems bluer, higher. Somehow academic.

She is given a key and directed to a house half a mile down the Weston Road, where her baggage has already been deposited. No one greets her when she arrives, but she finds her room at the top of the stairs and enters with a feeling of trepidation and relief. For a few minutes she stands by the window looking out at a spreading oak tree, listening to other girls rustling about in nearby rooms, a door closing, someone laughing downstairs. Then visitors begin to arrive. Hats crowd her doorway. Are you a freshman? From Ohio? Do you want to join the Ohio Club? Do you play an instrument? Do you sing? Lucile is bombarded with invitations. Social groups, student government, the Consumers League, the College Settlement Association, the Christian Association, Bible Study. Framed by the window behind her, oak leaves toss in a sudden hectic breeze. The door to her room closes at last; shafts of sunlight advance across the carpet.

Sitting on the edge of her still unmade bed, twisting a white cotton handkerchief (Aunt Ida has provided her with ten, hemmed but not monogrammed, her prediction being that all ten will be lost before Christmas), Lucile considers the options. She is nervous about being at college; she is homesick. Bible Study would be a reassuring choice. The Consumers League would make her feel right at home.

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