23
Diana
The Emlen Academy sat high on a hill above a small town in New Hampshire, which it seemed to look down upon with lordly disdain. Or maybe that was just Diana’s frame of mind. She parked in the visitors’ lot and checked her appearance in the rearview mirror. Lipstick bright against her pale face, a skirt and a blouse and a blazer. In her purse, a letter she’d written herself, on Boston University stationery, which she’d made by cutting and pasting the school’s letterhead and logo onto a plain piece of paper. Diana Carmody is researching the history of single-sex boarding schools in New England. She’d given the English department’s phone number and made up a professor’s name, hoping that no one would ask for credentials and that, if they did, just the letter itself would be enough.
She got out of the car and began walking up the hill, crossing the snow-covered quad. She knew the names of all the buildings, the location of the library, the history of the school. She’d sent away for application material, and the eight-page glossy brochure had told her everything she could have ever wanted to know about Emlen, from the size of its endowment to its most recent construction projects and capital campaigns to its most prominent alums. Eighteen state governors, United States senators, a Nobel Prize winner, five Supreme Court justices, abolitionists and architects, a smattering of movie stars and NHL players, authors and lyricists, a billionaire tech mogul, and a semi-famous rapper were all Emlen men. George Washington had visited Emlen in 1789, when it was still a seminary and not yet a prep school; John F. Kennedy had given a speech there while campaigning in 1960.
Diana walked uphill, looking around, trying not to stare or do anything that would mark her as an outsider. Some of the kids looked like they’d snuck into their parents’ closets and were playing dress-up, in ties or jackets or blazers and pumps. Some already carried themselves with an air of entitlement; nothing so obvious as noses in the air; just a subtle way of walking and holding themselves that telegraphed, I’m better than you are. But others were just teenagers, kids like any other kids, with gangly frames or acne-afflicted skin, laughing and horsing around. Diana paused to read a metal plaque on a post outside one of the classroom buildings. On this ground, the Emlen Academy was founded in 1898 for the purposes of instructing America’s most promising young men, teaching them to aspire to knowledge and good works.
Good works, she thought, and snorted so loudly that a few of the boys turned to look at her, before shrugging and continuing on their way.
She followed a slate path to the Harwich Library, where the librarian barely gave her a glance, and didn’t ask to see any paperwork. “The yearbooks and the back issues of the alumni quarterly are in the first sub-basement,” he said, and pointed toward a staircase. Twenty minutes later, Diana was ensconced in a wooden carrel, with its own lamp and a pile of alumni magazines, as slick and well-produced as anything on a newsstand. She picked one up, leafing through it. The cover story was a profile of an Emlen graduate who ran a neurobiology lab, illustrated with a shot of the guy in a white lab coat and a confident smile. A “Letter from the Dean” appeared on the front inside page. Letters from alums, short pieces about professors, a long story about the football team, interviews with students for the “On Campus” column. She flipped to the back, where the “Class Notes” section was, and learned that Alfred Cutty of the Class of 1939 had celebrated his ninety-eighth birthday at the Whitechapel Retirement Center, and that Mrs. Elizabeth E. Ferris （wife of the late Stanhope Ferris） was planning on attending Reunions at This Happy Land, which Diana learned was what alumni called Emlen. The line, she learned, came from the school’s alma mater:
Dearest Emlen, like no other;
On your ground your sons shall stand
With gladdened hearts, to share with brothers
Mem’ries of this happy land
That ditty was now referred to as the Old Alma Mater, and a new, gender-neutral one was now officially the school’s song, but the nickname had stuck.
She put the magazines aside and picked up the book she’d found, a copy of the 1987 Emlen Emblem, the school’s yearbook. She settled her hands on its embossed leather cover and took a few breaths, grounding herself: her feet on the carpet-covered floor, her bottom in the curved wooden chair, her hands on the pages. She started with Henry Shoemaker, the boy she’d known as Poe. Looking at this senior picture felt like taking an arrow through her heart. Poe looked just like she’d remembered, with his clear eyes and his curly hair. She read through the half-gibberish of the inscription beneath his name, a dozen lines of dates and initials and barely veiled references to beer and pot and parties, FENWAY PARK ’84 and IS THERE A PROBLEM, OFFICER and BEER PONG OLYMPIAN and I CLIMBED MOUNT KATRINA. CAPE COD HERE WE COME, one of the lines read, and she’d swallowed hard, briefly dizzy, tasting bile in her throat.