Santiago was no older than twenty and good-looking enough, in a dark, exotic way, that the girls in the dorm giggled when they saw him walking by.
I don’t recall who began teasing Ginny about the boy. Perhaps it was Mary Ann Mason, but soon several of the girls were calling Ginny “Mrs. Ferreira,” because that was his last name. Ginny rolled her eyes at them and said they were silly gooses and she was simply being polite.
Which I suppose was true enough, but in those days, and at a girls’ college, it seemed very forward to be waving hello at the handyman and his assistant. Carolyn found it vulgar, but also amusing, and therefore kept her teasing to a minimum.
Later on, some said Ginny ran away with him.
Later on, others theorized that he’d killed her, but this in the lowest of voices.
What do I remember about him, about her, in those two months before her disappearance? Was there a dark gleam in his eye, a nervous tic, an indication of a monster lurking behind the pleasant façade?
No, there was nothing of the sort.
He was polite, but aside from that first conversation in the kitchen, they did not interact much. When it came to men, Ginny’s heart was firmly set on Edgar Yates. He phoned every other day and Ginny rushed downstairs to the house phone and spent a good half hour talking to her boyfriend, no matter the glares from other girls who were expecting calls.
There were no “gentlemen callers”—that’s what the house mother dubbed all men—allowed inside the dorms, so when Edgar Yates popped by on the weekends during visiting hours, Ginny had to come down the stairs and greet him in the foyer. Men had to sign in and out at the front desk and sit in the large parlor with their dates. A monitor made the rounds to ensure everyone behaved properly.
People were strict back then, and women were carefully policed. It’s no wonder, then, that dances were monumental events. They provided the girls with a chance to have fun and to escape the nine o’clock curfew the dorm mothers carefully enforced. On dance nights, we might stay out until eleven.
We had the Freshman Hop, the Sophomore Cotillion, and all manner of dances, but the Halloween Ball was one of the biggest events of the year at Stoneridge, and that went on until midnight.
It was an electrifying time for all the girls, with everyone competing to wear the best costume and secure the handsomest date. I didn’t have a large budget, so I dressed myself in a black bat maskand a black cape, and Ginny wore a shepherdess costume. She looked like a girl out of a nineteenth-century Romantic painting.
“What’s Edgar’s costume?” I asked.
“He wanted something original. I told him to come as the Red Death,” she said as she adjusted the neckline of her dress and looked in the mirror. “Since you were reading Poe just a while ago, I had the image of it fresh in my mind. But you know Edgar, he’s waited until the last minute and I’m afraid he’s going to cut two holes into a bedsheet and pretend he’s a ghost.”
In the end, Edgar Yates was outfitted as a dashing highwayman, with a long coat and a tricorn hat. He’d offered to give a ride to the other boys who would be joining us, including Benjamin Hoffman, my partner for the event. He was a young would-be journalist currently employed as a copyboy, whom I quite liked for his acerbic wit. He was not the type of man who’d try to make amorous advances. Boys could get quite pushy after dances, emboldened by the music and the night air, and their kisses and embraces did not appeal to me.
Benjamin was the perfect young man to squire a girl around a party, because he had no interest in seducing one. For a while, I thought his desires might be focused on men, just as I was charmed by young women, but Benjamin turned out to be a confirmed bachelor who avoided all romantic entanglements.
Our dances took place at Cohasset House, a building in the Beaux Arts style where the dean resided, which had a ballroom and a baronial dining room that had both been decorated for the occasion, with many jack-o’-lanterns, orange and yellow crepe paper, and cutouts in the shape of black bats to provide the stately house with a festive air.
The Halloween dance was a brilliant, dizzying affair. The dean had hired a tireless band that played the latest tunes and everyone dressed themselves in extravagant costumes hoping to win a prize.
Carolyn was the star of the night, disguised as Marie Antoinette in a pink-and-white dress with a huge, heavy necklace around her slender throat. She’d come to the Halloween party with David Dundy, a medical student, but hardly spent any time with him,instead whirling around with a dozen other men. She even danced three dances with Edgar Yates, and her outrageous flirting raised an eyebrow from Benjamin while David looked at Carolyn with sorrow. He’d probably expected to spend the evening with Caro in his arms. His Don Juan costume, with the great plumed hat, was bitterly ironic.
“David, you have supper at the Willows every month, is it true what they’re saying about Mr. Wingrave’s cotton mill?” Benjamin asked him.
We were sitting together, sipping glasses of punch, watching the students laugh and twirl. Benjamin had taken off his skeleton mask and was toying with his long cape.
“What are they saying?” David replied.
“That he’s in dire straits. That he must sell.”
“Why would he be in dire straits?” I asked, shocked by Benjamin’s comment. “Carolyn’s family do very well for themselves. Their mill is magnificent.”
Carolyn’s entire life was magnificent. Not only did she own the prettiest shoes and dresses I’d ever seen, but she’d treated me to dinner more than once, bought me that new typewriter, and discussed her future plans, which included a long tour of Europe.
“The Wingrave Manufacturing Company has been in trouble for a long time. Wingrave hasn’t updated the equipment in ages, they’re running with outdated machines. The place is cold, you have the poor weavers working with their sweaters and their coats on because he won’t provide heat or fix the drafts. Drafts in mills cause static electricity, it dries everything up and ruins the cloth. You can’t keep the tension on the corduroy,” Benjamin said. “Any weaver will tell you as much, but they cut their corners, pinch their pennies at that place. During the war Wingrave could get away with it because the army needed uniforms and such, so he had many orders, but those days are over.”
“You seem to know a lot about the cloth business, Mr. Hoffman,” Ginny said politely.
“Mills were numerous in Massachusetts once, Miss Somerset,” he said. “Several people in my family worked as dyers and bobbinboys, although the business is lousy nowadays and folks like Wingrave fight tooth and nail to stop the workers from unionizing and improving their lot.”
“Mr. Hoffman is a champion of the workingman,” David said as he lit a cigarette. “No doubt he’s thinking up a story about the plight of the mill workers. Well, you’re not going to quote me about any of Mr.Wingrave’s business dealings for some great scoop.”
“I don’t write stories, David. I haul copy from one room to the other,” Benjamin said. “As I said, I have friends and family in the mill business, and the rumors around Temperance Landing are multiplying. I’m curious, that’s all.”
