In One Person

shrug was something she’d picked up from Mrs. Kittredge.
    “Knowing Kittredge, I suppose he got tired of it,” Elaine had said. She was packing her bags for what would be her sophomore year at Northfield—fall term, 1960—and we were in her bedroom in Bancroft. It would have been late August; it was hot in that room. The lamp with the dark-blue shade had been replaced with a colorless job, like the desk lamp in an anonymous office, and Elaine had cut her hair short—almost like a boy’s.
    Although the phases of her going away would be marked by an increasingly conscious masculinity in her appearance, Elaine said she would never be in a lesbian relationship; yet she told me she’d experimented with being a lesbian. Had she “experimented” with Mrs. Kittredge? If Elaine had ever been attracted to women, I imagined how Mrs. Kittredge might have ended that, but Elaine was vague about it. I think of my dear friend as someone doomed to be attracted to the wrong men, but Elaine was vague about that, too. “They’re just not the sort of men who last,” was how she put it.
    A S FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHS : The pictures Elaine sent me of her three years at Northfield are the ones I have kept. They may be black-and-white or color, and utterly amateur snapshots, but they are not as artless as they first appear.
    I’ll begin with the photo of Elaine standing on the porch of a three-story wooden house; she doesn’t look like she belongs there—perhaps she was only visiting. Together with the name of the building, and the date of its construction—
Moore Cottage, 1899
—there is also this hope expressed, in Elaine’s careful longhand, on the back of the photograph:
I wish this were my dorm
. (Apparently, it wasn’t—nor would it be.)
    On the ground floor of Moore Cottage, there were wooden clapboards, painted white, but there were white-painted wooden shingles on the second and third floors—as if to suggest not only the passage of time but a lingering indecision. Possibly this uncertainty had to do with Moore Cottage’s use. Over the years, it would be used as a dormitory for girls—later, as a guesthouse for visiting parents. From the spread-out look of the building, there were probably a dozen or more bedrooms—far fewer bathrooms, I’ll bet—and a large kitchen with an adjoining common room.
    More bathrooms might have made the visiting parents happier, whereas the students (when they lived there) were long accustomed to making do with less. The porch, where Elaine stood—she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of herself—had a contradictory appearance. What use do students have for porches? In a good school, which Northfield was, students are too busy for porches, which are better suited for people with more time for leisure—such as guests.
    In the picture of herself on the porch at Moore Cottage—it was among the very first of the photographs Elaine sent me from Northfield—maybe she felt like a guest. Curiously, there is someone in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms overlooking the porch: a woman of indeterminate age, to judge her by her clothes and the length of her hair—her face lost in the shadows, or obscured by an unclear reflection in the window.
    Also among the earliest photos Elaine sent me from her new school, which was, in fact, a very
old
school, was that picture of the birthplace of Dwight L. Moody.
Our founder’s birthplace, alleged to be haunted
, Elaine had written on the back of this photo, though that can’t be the ghost of D.L. himself in a small upstairs window of the birthplace. It is a woman’s face in profile—neither young nor old, but definitely pretty—her expression unknown. Elaine, smiling, is in the foreground of the photograph; she appears to be pointing in the direction of that upstairs window. (Maybe the girl was a friend of hers, or so I first imagined.)
    Then there’s the picture labeled
The Auditorium, 1894—on a slight hill
. I guess Elaine meant “slight” by Vermont standards. (I remember it as the first of the photos where the mystery woman seemed to be consciously posed; after seeing this picture, I began to look for her.) The Auditorium was a red-brick building with arched windows and doorways, and with two castle-size towers. A shadow cast by one of the towers fell across the lawn where Elaine was standing, near the trunk of an imposing tree. Sticking out, from behind the tree—in sunlight,
not
in the tower’s shadow—was a woman’s