The Education of Bet Read online

  I write to you before we ship out. Curiously enough, I do not know yet where my ultimate destination will be, only that we are leaving soon. When I asked an older gentleman in my regiment where we might be going, he said that it could be almost anywhere, and he provided me with a long list of possibilities: the North-West Frontier, Burma, Abyssinia—really, he said we might wind up anywhere! When I inadvertently expressed some mild shock—for some reason, I had expected that everyone who joined up all went to one place—the older gentleman laughed and said, "It isn't easy running the world, you know!"

  So, not knowing where I will soon be departing for, not knowing what sort of night sky I will be gazing up at a month from now—it is all an adventure to me!

  Please do write back, to the general address I will provide below. I am told that it sometimes takes the post a long time to catch up with men in the service, but eventually it does find us!

  And please do not worry in the slightest. I am healthy and well fed and, most of all, happy. And I owe it all to you.

  Your brother in spirit,

  Will

  "Is something wrong?" James's voice startled me.

  "I'm sorry, what are you talking about?" I'd been so caught up in reading Will's words, I had not heard James come in. Now I hurried to put the letter in my desk, fearing he would see that damning salutation at the top of the page: Dear Bet.

  "It's just that..." Here James gestured to the corners of his eyes, as though I were a deaf person and he was seeking to make me understand. Then he further explained, "You look as though you have been crying."

  It was only then that I realized that tears had sprung to my eyes as I had read Will's letter. The cause? Did I need just one? I missed him dreadfully, because he truly was my brother in spirit and I felt so alone where I was now. I missed him because I was often confused by the new life I was living and he was no longer here to help guide me. And yet I was glad for him, because obviously he had found happiness.

  "Oh, no," I said, brushing the tears abruptly from my cheeks. "It is just all the dust in here." I waved my hand around the room. "I have always been bothered by dust."

  James looked around pointedly. In fact, our room was spotless, kept so by our zealous matron and housekeeper, Mrs. Smithers. Mrs. Smithers was responsible for, among other things, arranging our tea, seeing to it that our boots and shoes were polished and left at the ready beneath our beds, and ensuring that fresh linens were regularly distributed. Except for the tops of the wardrobes, which she could not reach, she dusted everywhere; she had a passion for dusting that bordered on obsession. A pleasant enough woman, she did take the execution of her duties to extremes.

  "Then there's nothing wrong at home?" James prompted.

  "Why should there be anything wrong at home?"

  "You were reading a letter, and you did look"—he paused, perhaps reluctant to accuse me of crying again—"something. And most letters do come from home, so I simply assumed..."

  Now I understood. Wanting to correct his misapprehension, and perhaps in part because I was so proud of Will, I enthusiastically explained the situation to him.

  "Not at all!" I said. "The letter was from a friend who recently entered into military service!"

  "Capital!" James said, matching my own enthusiasm as he took a seat on the edge of his bed. "I have always wondered what military life was actually like."

  I proceeded to tell him some of the highlights from Will's letter, omitting of course what Will's true relationship to me was, and not mentioning the fact that he was the real Will Gardener that James was supposed to be sharing his room with.

  But as I prattled cheerily on, James's face, which had been so eager when I first started talking, began to fall.

  "What is the matter?" I finally asked with no small exasperation, grinding my chipper narrative to a halt.

  "Only that your friend is telling you a pack of lies," he said with a rare blush.

  "What?" I was outraged.

  "Oh, I believe the part about him being made a drummer—that is the sort of menial job the military would give to a young man with no experience. But the rest? All that about the wonderful food and the good accommodations and all the fellows being just capital? Lies. All of it."

  I had never understood before why boys got into physical scrapes with one another, prompted to fisticuffs by some offense, real or imagined. But I certainly understood it now. I wanted to throttle James. For the implied aspersion on Will's character. For the smug look on his face.

  But before I could react, either with my fists or with words, James went on.

  "I have read many accounts of life in the military, and nothing your friend says, save that part about being a drummer, rings true."

  I saw it then: the truth in what he was saying. Writing to Paul Gardener as Will, I myself had told a pack of lies about how things were at the Betterman Academy. I had told those lies because I did not want to hurt him, did not want him to worry. Why, then, should it be so surprising that Will would treat me the same way? It made me wonder what the true state of affairs was for Will in his new life.

  Still, realizing that Will had lied while James had told the truth did not make me any less angry with James. When kings received bad news, they rarely directed their immediate displeasure at the source, which might be miles or even countries away; instead, they unleashed their wrath upon the bearers of the tidings.

  "Well!" I said heatedly. I decided that my initial good impression of James, my sense that he was someone I would like to be friends with—all right, I had also found him intensely attractive—had been false. Upon better acquaintance I concluded that I did not like him half so much as I'd thought. "You did say you wondered what military life was actually like. And now that I have given you one such account, you tell me about contrary accounts you have read in books!" I never would have guessed that I, who loved books so much, could invest so much contempt in the word books. "So, perhaps, it is your books that are lying!"

  At first, James just sat there, stunned. Then a look of exasperation came over his face. Perhaps upon better acquaintance, he had concluded that he did not like me half so much either? Perhaps he no longer wished to be friends?

  I immediately regretted my hasty words. For if I didn't have James for a friend here, who would I have? It was a frightening thought, the idea of being that alone.

  I had always hated swallowing my pride, yet I did so now.

  But as I opened my mouth to say something conciliatory, James stormed from the room.

  ***

  There was so much for me to acclimate myself to at the Betterman Academy, I had precious little time to spare for lesser things, like, say, the annoyances of roommates. Roommates who were annoying because they could become as unreasonably exasperated as, say, I could.

  For one thing—all right, two—there were Latin and Greek. I had had little experience with either, but thankfully, many of my classmates seemed to find them one big mystery as well. We each struggled independently with our own individual vulgus, English paragraphs that we were supposed to translate into Latin. Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey—the two works might have been interchangeable as far as most students were concerned, since to those same students, the epics were merely words to be translated back and forth, as though all of education could be reduced to rote learning. Livy, Virgil, Euripides—to the other students, they were just unpleasant, often confusing jobs to be finished.

  I must confess that I attacked these tasks with more eagerness than most of my classmates, earning me no small amount of criticism from Hamish and Mercy. They seemed to find it particularly worthy of comment when, in a different lesson, one touching on the works of Shakespeare, I showed a marked interest in Twelfth Night, the play about a young woman named Viola who masquerades as a young man when circumstances dictate.

  "Perhaps Gardener would like to masquerade as a young woman," Hamish said with a sneer from somewhere behind me.

  "Oh, Gardener already seems someth
ing of a young woman to me," I heard Mercy respond. Mercy, in his endless attempts to ingratiate himself with Hamish, constantly tried to improve upon Hamish's insults to others. Sometimes, and in this instance thankfully for me, since it provided a needed distraction, Hamish would instead grow annoyed with Mercy, as though he feared that Mercy was seeking to wrest primacy from him.

  As they began to fight between themselves, I gave a sigh of relief, even as I noted that seemingly innocent things on my part—like showing an interest in a play about mistaken identity—could be a source of problems.

  And there was no shortage of problems for me at the Betterman Academy.

  Take, for instance, singing.

  We had academic lessons five days a week and half a day on Saturday. This meant that by the time Saturday night came, the boys were eager for entertainment, and entertainment, at least at the Betterman Academy, meant singing. From the hidden bottled-beer cellar that Mercy kept stocked—one of his chief values to Hamish, I quickly learned, along with the hampers of wine and game Mercy frequently received from home—beer would be smuggled in as, one after another, we took turns exhibiting our vocal talents. In front of the fireplaces in the great room at the bottom of Proctor Hall, mugs were knocked together in toasts and much hand-shaking went on following the better performances. The problem was that everyone was expected to perform, and, despite my talent for imitating speaking voices, I could not sing to save my life.

  "Oh, Gardener!" Hamish covered his ears. "Please stop that infernal racket! You sound like a regular Jenny."

  I had learned that when someone wanted to make particular fun of a boy, he would call him by a girl's name, as though being a girl were the worst thing possible.

  "Don't we have penalties for people who sing poorly?" Mercy suggested, placing a thoughtful finger to his lower lip.

  In a minute, he was trailing behind Hamish as the two raced from the room.

  "You might want to run for it now, before they get the blanket," one of the younger boys advised me.

  "There's no point in him running," Little said resignedly, as though I weren't even there. "They always catch a person."

  Little was right. Before I'd realized that I might be in danger for the crime of being a poor singer, Hamish and Mercy had returned.

  And that's when I learned all about tossing, which is exactly what it sounds like: they put a person in a blanket and then they toss the person. I also learned quickly that it only hurts the person when he or she is dropped, and, further, that the ones doing the tossing get really mad if the one being tossed refuses to kick and struggle and scream. I refused to do any of those things, and so by the time Hamish and Mercy were done with me and I'd survived my first tossing, they clearly hated me even more than when they'd put me in the blanket.

  And where was my roommate, James, through all of this?

  Why, he was in our room, of course.

  For that was one other thing I'd learned in my short time at the Betterman Academy: the rules that applied to the rest of us—like compulsory singing on Saturday nights and, in the case of younger or new students such as myself, remaining in the corridors for long hours on alternating nights in case a more senior boy wanted something—didn't apply to James.

  ***

  Two weeks into my stay at the Betterman Academy, disaster struck.

  I should have anticipated it, and yet I had not: there was blood on my sheets.

  After my first night at school, when I'd realized that boys commonly dressed and undressed in front of one another, I'd trained myself to rise early enough so that James was still asleep, moving about the room as noiselessly as possible while hurrying into my clothes so he'd never catch a glimpse of what I looked like without them.

  But on that morning I realized that my usual strategy was futile. One look at my sheets—and he would surely see them, for it would be supremely odd for any Betterman boy to make his own bed, a task always left for the housekeeper—and I'd be exposed. It was challenge enough getting dressed before he arose, especially having to bind my breasts, which I let spring free at night once I was sure he was asleep; the morning's added challenge of having to find suitable cloths with which to stanch the flow made the whole an impossibility.

  As I lay there, feeling the familiar dull ache in my lower abdomen and cursing myself—how could I not have foreseen this?—I heard him stir.

  I looked over to see him propping himself up on his elbows and emitting a large early-morning yawn.

  "Well, here's a novelty," he observed. "You usually get up so much before me that I'd grown to believe either you sleep in your clothes or you never sleep at all. Is something wrong?"

  Oh, the understatement!

  "I'm not feeling well today," I said, sheets and blankets pulled up tight under my chin so he could see nothing. "I think I may need to skip first lesson."

  "Skip first lesson?" he echoed. "Almost no one ever does that. Old Man Peters won't be happy."

  "Old Man Peters is so old, I doubt he'll even notice one less student," I quipped.

  "I suppose," he conceded, rising and stripping off his nightshirt as he did so.

  Every time he did that, it was as though he were doing it for the first time, and I had to force my eyes away from the sight of him naked.

  "What do you think it is," he said as he stood before a basin, still maddeningly naked, washing his face, "this thing that has you feeling not well?"

  "Did you eat the meat at dinner?" was my rejoinder.

  "It is sometimes best avoided," he admitted ruefully, pulling out fresh clothes.

  He proceeded to don them at such a leisurely rate, I was tempted to scream, Oh, will you just get on with it and get out of here? But of course I couldn't do that.

  "Can I get you something before I go?" he asked, at last tying his tie. Thank God! "Perhaps some plain toast or a cup of tea? I could ask Mrs. Smithers—"

  "I'll be fine," I snapped, cutting him off. "Really, by second lesson, I'll be right as rain."

  He studied me for a moment, as though I were a curiosity.

  "Huh," he said finally. "It must be a wonderful thing, knowing the exact moment one will be well again."

  As soon as the door shut behind him and I heard his booted feet head down the corridor, I sprang out of bed and immediately locked the door.

  Turning around, I saw the damning red stains on my sheets, but I couldn't do anything about that just yet. First, I needed to stanch the bleeding.

  My nightshirt was a dead loss, I saw as I whipped it off; I rolled it into a ball and tossed it to one side. Then I sought out the stack of washing cloths that Mrs. Smithers left along with our fresh linens every day. I selected one that looked to be about the right size and thickness.

  Back at Grangefield Hall a year ago, when I'd experienced my first bleeding, it was one of the maids, Sara, who'd done what my mother would have done had she still been alive: explained to me the regularity of the monthly flow, how it related to the making of babies, and what to do about the bleeding. She'd given me special pieces of cotton fabric, about two feet by one foot in measure, the central foot or so composed of a thicker terry-cloth material. Sara had folded it into thirds and shown me how to wear it.

  Of course, no specially designed pieces of cloth would be available to me here unless I stole them from Mrs. Smithers's rooms—and such a theft might look suspicious—so I had to make do as best I could with what was available.

  Once that was in place, I dressed quickly, collected the sheets, and made straight for Mrs. Smithers's rooms, feeling it best to deal with her as directly as possible while recognizing that in the future I'd need to anticipate my monthly flow so as not to repeat the occurrence.

  Mrs. Smithers was about forty years of age and rotund (she didn't seem to mind the food that most of us hated); her graying hair poked out from under her bonnet.

  She eyed me suspiciously as I explained about the sheets.

  "Impetigo," I said with a nervous laugh, naming a diseas
e I'd read about. "It causes unpredictable bleeding sometimes, but it can also be a bit contagious." Another nervous laugh. "So you might just want to burn those."

  "Will this be happening often?"

  "Oh, no!" I reassured her.

  "But I thought you just said it was unpredictable?"

  "Yes, well, but I have been getting a lot better in recent years. You should have seen me when I was just a little tyke!" I held out my hand, illustrating the height of this imaginary little tyke. "I used to bleed like a geyser regularly! But now?" I shrugged. "Almost nothing."

  The way Mrs. Smithers was eyeing me, I realized I was talking too much, too fast.

  "Yes, well ... sorry to have been a bother! Thank you!" I said, rushing from her presence.

  Back in my own room, I grabbed the soiled nightshirt and hid it beneath my jacket; the location of the bloodstain on it might have been too suspicious if I'd given it with the sheets to Mrs. Smithers. Outside, I hurried to the wooded area behind one of the less-used playing fields and scrabbled in the dirt until the evidence was buried. It was only then that it occurred to me that once a month I would need to find a way to steal several cloths from Mrs. Smithers's supply, and all of those would need to be buried out here as well. And then of course I would need to find excuses to explain to James why sometimes the supply was short. Perhaps I would need to invent a strong wine habit for her?

  It was so much to think about, so much to do—and to address one little item!

  One little item that I had foolishly not considered, despite all my planning.

  My eyes filled with tears at the frustration of it all. Will had been right, I thought, angrily wiping away the tears: my harebrained scheme indeed.

  As I slid into my seat a few minutes later, just in time for second lesson, James glanced over at me.

  "You said you'd be well again by second lesson, and now I see that you are," he said. "I guess you were right. You do know your own body."

  It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

  ***

  I survived several days of my own inconvenient bleeding, but I was still miffed at James for saying Will's letter was a pack of lies. Just because he appeared to have forgiven me for my exasperating behavior, returning to his usual state of unflappable calm, did not mean I had to be equally forgiving. Now that I was reassured that we were still some form of friends, I'd taken to spending more time with Little.