Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  For Erica,

  THE HEROINE WHO HAS ALWAYS HELD MY HEART

  Epigraph

  Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it.

  —MARY MACLANE, The Story of Mary MacLane

  To be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.

  —TRUMAN CAPOTE, Answered Prayers

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: I Await the Devil’s Coming

  Excerpt from The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane

  One Macabre Afternoon to Begin

  Meet Your Plain, Bad Heroines Three

  About That Missing Copy of Mary MacLane’s Book

  Tinseltown

  How to Import a Martian into Your Contacts

  And Now: A Strange and Ugly Thing That Happened in the Not-So-Distant Past as Told on the Internet Not Even an Hour After It Occurred

  Harper Harper’s Costume Life in DTLA

  Bodies Piling Up. Snow Piling Up. But Where to Place the Blame at Brookhants?

  Across Town, a Scuttle

  Playing Dress-Up Dinner

  Whatever Happens: Know They’ll Always Have the Dumpsters

  Gray Dawn, Bleak Mo[u]rning

  The (Unofficial) Chemistry Read

  Things Are Not All That Pleasant Out by Bo Dhillon’s Pool

  The Happenings at Brookhants—Audition Scene 2

  Our Three Heroines Alone Together at Last

  The (Real) Chemistry Read

  Fin De Siècle Meet Cute

  Harper and Merritt Go on an Impossible Los Angeles Date

  Libbie Brookhants Takes a Bath

  Interlude: Side Talks with Girls

  Side Talk #1: Bo Dhillon Makes His Case

  Side Talk #2: Harold Brookhants Makes His Case

  Part Two: The Happenings at Brookhants

  What to Make of This Arrangement?

  Alex Sees Things in Stereoview

  Typist’s Block

  The Players Assemble

  An Undesirable Morbidness

  Road Apples

  Trifle with the Trifle

  Even in East Bumblebuzzard, Rhode Island

  A Tower Tour, a Carpet Picnic, a Sound in the Night

  Finally, Someone Tends to Those Fucking Plants

  No More Necks

  Tricky Thicket

  Apple Bruise

  Updates from the Set of The Happenings at Brookhants as Told Online

  Uh-Oh, It’s Magic

  Ava in the Orchard

  Providence

  Elaine Brookhants, Socialite and Philanthropist, Dies at Age 81

  Esse Quam Videri

  The Red Carpet After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Emily M. Danforth

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  I Await the

  Devil’s Coming

  Excerpt from

  The Story of Mary MacLane*

  by Mary MacLane

  Though I am young and feminine—very feminine—I am not that quaint conceit, a girl: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,—girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,—and all that sort of thing.

  I missed all that.

  * * *

  And then, usually, if one is not a girl, one is a heroine—of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine, either. A heroine is beautiful—eyes like the sea shoot opaque glances from under drooping lids—walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man—always with a man—eats things (they are always called “viands”) with a delicate appetite, and on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements—indeed, I have never seen any one walk so, except, perhaps, a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears.

  No, I am not a heroine.

  There never seem to be any plain heroines except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have, let there be a dozen mad wives upstairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing—high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I’m sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But, anyway, I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.

  One Macabre Afternoon to Begin

  It’s a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after.

  Maybe you think you already know this story because of the movie made of it. Not so, but you’ll discover that soon enough. For now, let me acquaint you with Vespula maculifrons: the eastern yellow jacket. If you’re imagining some do-gooder honeybee humming about the pastel pages of a children’s book, don’t.

  Eastern yellow jackets are aggressive when provoked, relentless when defending their underground home. They don’t make honey, but might I offer you instead the desiccated insect paste they use to grow their masses? A given colony’s workers are all stinging, sterile females who, in autumn—when they’ve been laid off from their busywork and can sense that the coming freeze will bring their deaths—just want to fly around, bored and gorging on carbs. (But then, don’t we all?) Because they also feed on carrion, some people refer to them as meat bees. That’s technically incorrect, but it sounds good.

  Most crucially for our purposes here, you should know that when they’re in distress, yellow jackets release a pheromone to call on potentially thousands of their angry friends to help them come get you.

  In this case the you was Clara Broward and my God was she ever in love with Florence “Flo” Hartshorn. And my God did that fact ever upset Clara’s wretched cousin Charles, who was just now chasing Clara through the thick woods surrounding the Brookhants School for Girls. The air in those woods was weighted with the scent of fern rot and ocean tide, apple mash and wet earth. And more than that, it was humming with the trill of yellow jackets. A few were probably already swirling around Clara like dust motes sprung from the beating of a rug, their buzzing pitch threaded to her pulse as her messy steps propelled her toward a clearing, and the Black Oxford orchard, where apples felled in a recent storm now spoiled in the heat.

  And it was hot, the day humid and gray—one of those overripe summer days that sometimes linger into fall. And waiting there in the orchard with those spoiling black apples, lolled beneath a tree with juice dripping from her chin, was Flo—the love of Clara’s young life. A life about to end.

  Two lives about to end, careful Readers.

  We know that the year was 1902, and the state the tiniest in the nation: Rhode Island. We know that the Brookhants fall term had been in session for six weeks. An
d we know that Clara took off into that section of woods, onto the orchard path, because several of her classmates watched her do it. She’d just been delivered back to campus after a weekend stay at her parents’ house across the water in Newport, a house that they were then readying to close for the season.

  Cousin Charles had been the one tasked with driving Clara to campus. More than a few students had noted this because what he’d driven her in was still something of a loud and chugging novelty, even for the wealthy Brookhants population: a gas-powered automobile. And not just any automobile, but a Winton—same as the Vanderbilts—which is exactly why Charles had gone out and bought the damn thing, along with the even stupider driving goggles that went with it. And he was, of course, wearing them when they pulled through the Brookhants gates, and then, as he slowed, he pushed them up, which smooshed his hair back into a nest atop his horrible head. Maybe some of the girls had, in fact, later said that he looked rakish and fine, but for now let’s discount their certainly incorrect opinions.

  The important thing to know is that Charles and Clara were arguing as they arrived. And they continued to argue, the onlookers said, as he parked his loud contraption in the circle drive before Main Hall. They seemed to say their goodbyes very unhappily, Charles lunging from the car before gathering Clara’s belongings only to dump them on the ground, all the while continuing to lecture her. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat and pouted there, his arms folded tight across his chest, his dumb face bitter as a cranberry and nearly as red.

  But whatever the commands she’d just been given, Clara did not stoop to gather her things and go inside her dormitory, as one might have expected of her.

  As, it seems, Charles was expecting of her.

  Instead, she left the pile of clothing and cases and walked a few yards to a cluster of her gape-mouthed fellow students. She then asked where she could find Flo. Several of those students, including a third-year, Eleanor Faderman,* told her to try the orchard. They told her that’s where Flo had been headed earlier.

  With this news, Clara started her march across the wide lawn, which ended in a playing field rimmed with woods: where began the orchard path.

  During these moments, stupid Charles still stewed behind the steering wheel, his great engine chugging. But he did not then pull down his goggles and drive away from campus. Instead, he watched Clara. Watched, disbelieving, each step she took away from him and toward the tree line.

  And then she disappeared completely into the dark mouth that was the path’s entrance.

  This is where the onlooking classmates begin to differ in their accounts. Some later insisted that Clara knew her knuckle-dragging cousin had left the car to chase after her. Those students claimed that she’d started to run even before reaching the woods, seeing or sensing Charles coming fast behind.

  Others said she didn’t know, hadn’t seen.

  And Clara herself could never say again.

  Certainly, she would have been sweating, in the heavy afternoon heat of that bruised day, and this would have been part of the call to the first yellow jackets who found her. And unfortunately, everything about her clothing—the day dress with ruffled lace, the shoes more slipper than not—was most unsuited for an activity like running through the woods. Though it should be said that Clara often found her clothing unsuited for activities with Flo, usually just because she had too much of it on.

  Flo herself solved the problem of unsuitable women’s clothing by wearing the castoffs of her older brother. Or sometimes Flo’s mother, when she hadn’t spent all of her monthly allowance from Flo’s grandparents, would even buy Flo a pair of pants or men’s boots. But then Flo’s mother was a sculptor, and her friends were all artists, most of them European. She liked to find ways to flout convention and usually supported the same instincts in her daughter. (When, Readers, she was remembering to remember that she had a daughter.)

  Clara’s parents, on the other hand, were fourth-generation Americans shaped predominately by the conventions of their gilded social class. A few smart investments—steel and timber did the trick—and they’d watched their inherited wealth grow to numbers so high that even they could scarcely conceive of them. As such, they had a fastidious respect for the orderly following of the rules and systems from which they benefited. It all made them feel quite secure in the correctness of their position within the social order, and security was Clara’s mother’s favorite feeling, outranked only by virtuous womanhood. (She was cousin Charles’s favorite aunt, after all.)

  That terrible afternoon, Charles, wanting to slow Clara, had perhaps called out to her, announcing his gaining presence. Surely his voice would have been as startling to her as the drift of a phantom, her path suddenly narrower—the low branches more like claws, her breath too shallow for her pace.

  Even before what happened happened, Brookhants students had plenty of stories about those woods. They had stories about Samuel and Jonathan Rash, the brothers who had farmed the land more than a hundred years prior, stories about their spite-filled feud and its strange, resulting tower.

  The students also had stories about the fog that gathered and hung in the woods, heavy as gray hopsacking dunked in a well. It blew in from the ocean only to drape itself over every leaf and briar, filling gaps and crevices, lingering for too long and hiding too much. And they of course had stories about the yellow jackets, everywhere, always, the humming of the yellow jackets, the flick of them about you. The woods were haunted, the students said. The woods were the source of sinister nighttime things that might scuttle their way across the lawns and up a vine-choked wall and in through your open window, until they were at the foot of your bed, now stomach, now pillow.

  But you had to cross through the woods to get to the orchard, and usually, at least for Clara, every single time before this time, the orchard had been worth it.

  The orchard, with Flo, and with Flo’s hands and mouth, too.

  It’s worth mentioning that some of the Brookhants students also had stories about Flo and Clara. There were several girls who knew them well, their friends—girls who joined their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. And there were others, many others, who admired them. A few who probably envied them. But there was also a group, small but not insignificant, who felt quite bothered by them, who were wary of them; wary of their ideas and passions and the boldness with which they seemed to claim them.

  Maybe this small but not insignificant group was even afraid of them.

  The Black Oxford is an apple more associated with Maine than with Rhode Island. It was a somewhat old-fashioned and unusual variety, even in 1902, but you could still find them then in various places across New England. Brookhants was one of those places. Its orchard had nearly two dozen trees sprouting plum-black apples, like something planted by a witch in a fairy tale.* The orchard was a place that, before Flo, Clara had visited only once or twice in her previous years of Brookhants education. But then came black-apple-eating, soft-kissing/hard-kissing, well-traveled, sure-of-foot-and-voice, fluent-in-Italian-and-adequate-in-French, and just generally delirious-making Flo. And came Mary MacLane’s book. And everything changed.

  (Though not in that order. The book came first.)

  This was something else the onlookers later argued about: Was Clara carrying the book when she took off toward the woods that day?

  That a copy, a much-loved and underlined and page-marked copy, was found near the bodies, is undisputed. The Story of Mary MacLane (the scandalous debut memoir of its namesake nineteen-year-old) had a deep crimson binding when the dust jacket was removed. A red book was not hard to spot when left almost indecently splayed against a cluster of ferns so enormous they looked like half-opened green parasols. Even in such a gruesome scene, the book stood out. Much was later made of the underlined section it was found opened to:

  I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies rarely,
if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.

  —And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak.

  It was no secret on campus how enthralled with that book both Flo and Clara were. (And, more broadly, with Mary MacLane herself.) As you likely already know, they’d formed the Plain Bad Heroine Society as a way to show their devotion.

  But who brought the book into the trees that day isn’t as certain as the fact that a copy was with them in their final moments. Some of the onlookers said Clara was carrying nothing at all on her march from the motorcar, while others swore that they saw the book gripped in her hand as she crossed the lawn. Though she’d been seen with it so frequently that school year, it’s natural to wonder if they might have imagined that part.

  It was, after all, the book, the one that brought her and Flo together, the one that said, printed there on the page, the things Clara had once believed were her private thoughts alone. It was the book that Clara so often thought that truly, truly, she could have written herself. She could have had it sewn to her palm and still be unencumbered by it.

  And if you asked Clara’s mother, she would have told you that Clara might as well have had that vile book sewn to her hand for the length of their summer in Newport, because there it had been, day in and day out.

  Later, when Clara’s traveling case was searched—for it had been left there on the ground next to the car* where Charles had dumped it—no copy of The Story of Mary MacLane was found. This would seem to suggest that Clara Broward did take her book with her into the woods that day.

  It would seem to suggest that, except for this: in a letter sent after her daughter’s unfortunate death, Mrs. Broward told her sister, in great detail, of the cold comfort she had taken in burning Clara’s copy of that hateful book in the flames of her bedroom fireplace. She wrote that she began at page one, tore it free, fed the fire, and continued on until the red binding flapped empty, like a mouth with no teeth. And then she burned the empty mouth.