In One Person

shapely leg. Her foot, which was pointed toward Elaine, was in a dark and sensible shoe; her kneesock was properly pulled up to her bare knee, above which her long gray skirt had been hiked to mid-thigh.
    “Who’s the other girl, or woman?” I’d asked Elaine.
    “I don’t know who you mean,” Elaine replied. “
What
girl or woman?”
    “In the pictures. There’s always someone else there, in the photographs,” I said. “Come on—you can tell me. Who is it—a friend of yours, maybe, or a teacher?”
    In the photo of East Hall, the woman’s face is very small—and partially hidden by a scarf—in an upper-story window. East Hall was, evidently, a dormitory, though Elaine didn’t say; the fire escape gave it away.
    In the picture of Stone Hall, there is a clock tower of that copper-green color, and very tall windows; it must have had warm light inside, on those few ungray days in the school-year months in western Massachusetts. Elaine is somewhat awkwardly positioned at the far side of the photograph; she is facing the camera, but she is standing almost perfectly back-to-back with someone. You can count two or three extra fingers on Elaine’s left hand; holding her right hip is a third hand.
    There’s the one of the school chapel, I guess you would call it—a massive-looking cathedral with one of those big wooden doors inlaid with cast iron. A woman’s bare arm is holding the heavy-looking door open for Elaine, who seems not to notice the arm—a bracelet on the wrist, rings on both the pinkie and the index finger—or maybe Elaine didn’t care whether or not the woman was there. One can read the Latin engraved on the chapel: ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCVIII . Elaine had translated this on the back of the photo:
In the year of the Lord 1908
. (She’d added,
Where I want to get married, if I’m ever desperate enough to get married—if so, please just shoot me
.)
    I believe I love best the picture of Margaret Olivia Hall, Northfield’s music building, because I knew how much Elaine loved to sing—singing was one thing her big voice was born to do. (“I love to sing until I cry, and then sing some more,” she once wrote to me.)
    The names of composers were engraved between the upper-story windows of the music hall; I have memorized the names. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini. In the window above the
u
in
Gluck
, which had been carved like a
v
, was a headless woman—just her torso—wearing only a bra. Unlike Elaine, who is leaning against the building, the headless woman in the window has very noticeable breasts—big ones.
    “Who is she?” I asked Elaine, again and again.
    If you didn’t know it already, the music building with the names of those composers was an accurate indication of how sophisticated a school Northfield was; it put a place like Favorite River Academy to shame. It was a quantum leap heavenward from what Elaine had been used to at the public high school in Ezra Falls.
    Most of the prep schools in New England were single-sex schools at that time. Many all-boys’ schools provided faculty daughters with a tuition stipend; the girls could attend an all-girls’ boarding school, and not be adrift in whatever public high school served the community. (To be fair: The public schools in Vermont were not all as bad as the one in Ezra Falls.)
    As a result of the Hadleys’ sending Elaine to Northfield—at first, at their expense—Favorite River did the right thing: It provided what amounted to vouchers for its faculty daughters. I would never hear the end of it from my crude cousin Gerry—namely, that this change in policy had happened too late to rescue her from the public high school in Ezra Falls . As I’ve said, Gerry was a college girl that same spring when Elaine traveled to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. “I guess I would have been wise to get myself knocked up a few years ago—provided the lucky guy had a French mother,” was how Gerry put it. (I could easily imagine Muriel saying this when Muriel had been a teenager—although, after staring nonstop at my aunt’s breasts in
Twelfth Night
, it was terrifying to think of Aunt Muriel as a teenager.)
    I could describe other photographs that Elaine sent me from Northfield—I’ve kept them all—but the pattern would simply repeat itself. There was always a partial, imperfect image of another woman in the pictures of Elaine and those impressive buildings on the Northfield campus.
    “Who is she?