(It’s perhaps worth noting that Shelly Harper and Harper Harper weren’t talking at the time this podcast was recorded.)

  * Also known as Spite Manor. (We’ll get to that.)

  * In case you’re not familiar, think of an orangerie as a kind of showy greenhouse/conservatory. It was Harold Brookhants, before his death ceased his involvement in the plans for the school, who had insisted on naming it The Orangerie. (As you’ll see, Readers, Harold Brookhants had a real thing for French pretentions.)

  * I promise it’s the last time I’ll ask, but please remember this name, dear Readers.

  * Also known as angel’s tears. (A hint, perhaps, of things to come.)

  * Refer to the March 8 entry in The Story of Mary MacLane to see Eleanor’s model for these incantations.

  * Proper olive eating was another of Mary MacLane’s interests, detailed in her January 28 entry.

  * The Story of Mary MacLane: from the January 26 and January 18 entries, respectively.

  * Famous British explorer of the era, who, as it happens, had died two years earlier. (But not, thankfully, in the Brookhants Orangerie.)

  * And something they haven’t done again since the day portrayed in this chapter.

  * This was undoubtedly the Yellow Credenzas’ high-water mark. They broke up in 1999.

  * Even with the oversize puppets and costumes and stage antics, the band’s most defining gimmick was that they changed their name every show, and always to a portmanteau involving the name of some city or town in California. They’d been Modestofu; the Santa Monica Gellers; OakLandSharks; EnciNosferatu; and, Audrey’s favorite, the Santa Anais Nins.

  * Did you know, Readers, that Truman Capote worked on his guest list for the Black and White Ball for months? Months. He’d add a name, cross it out, and add it again, depending on his whims and a particular would-be guest’s recent behavior toward either him or other guests more important to him than the wrongdoer in question.

  * The moment that sealed the deal on their friendship came one afternoon when they’d been seated near to each other at a school assembly. A girl named Amber Blankenship had, to the great amusement of her friends, called Harper a man-dyke. Harper responded simply enough with “That’s an oxymoron.” And that might have been that, but Eric then turned to the girl and offered this: “See, Amber, you’re such a fucking moron that even your insults fall under that category.”

  * The Story of Mary MacLane January 15 entry.

  * Mary MacLane herself had this kind of luck to go along with her talent. If we’re calling it luck, and Harper herself always called it that when telling her own story.

  * Alex to Libbie and Alex to us. Always.

  * But, like, with benefits.

  * Here’s how Libbie Brookhants characterized that moment in her diary: It was almost as if Leanna didn’t want the book to hear what she was saying about it.

  * It was Miss Hamm (who felt she had bonded with Clara’s mother during a campus visit) who wrote a letter outlining her concerns about the hold she believed Mary MacLane’s book had over the girl. In fact, it was the receipt of that letter, in concert with cousin Charles’s ravings, that was the cause of Clara’s last-minute trip to Newport, so that Mrs. Broward could issue her ultimatum about ridding Mary MacLane, and Florence Hartshorn, from her daughter’s life.

  * This was the very same house, astute Readers, that Elaine Brookhants Kessler now owned, the house where Merritt Emmons wrote The Happenings at Brookhants.

  * The fact is, Readers, that despite its official name, and no matter how many times that name was repeated back to them, none of the locals (or Brookhants students) referred to this house as Breakwater. Instead they knew it as Spite Manor. This was because of its then architectural innovation. The Providence firm that designed the house had, at Harold Brookhants’s instruction, incorporated into it a strange, hexagonal tower, wide enough to hold its own staircase and not much else until you reached its top, where it expanded into a domed room. Most resembling a lighthouse or a windmill—but offering none of either of those structures’ services—the tower was originally constructed in the 1700s, when a fight occurred between the brothers who then owned and farmed the land.

  Not long after, with the brothers no longer speaking, the younger of the two, Jonathan Rash, took great pains to construct this odd tower in a precise location in relation to his brother’s home. As the tower neared completion, its primary purpose was discovered: he’d built it to block his brother’s best views of the ocean. And in this Jonathan Rash was successful. The elder brother, Samuel Rash, could now see only slices of blue, slim lines of waves, from his home’s windows—mostly he saw just trees. And tower. Eventually, Samuel sold his portion of the farm and left the state. But the tower, now known by locals as the Spite Tower, remained.

  By the time Harold Brookhants purchased the property in the 1870s, both of the original Rash farmhouses had—through the destructive modes of abandonment, time, and weather—crumbled to their foundations and been overtaken by the creep of the woods. The Spite Tower, however, which was watched over and tended to by Little Compton residents proud of their local history of Rash actions done in the name of spite, still remained. And Harold Brookhants was also quite taken with the tower’s story, so he had his initially puzzled architects incorporate it into their plans.

  Once the build was complete, and if you were viewing the house from its front, the tower looked like some kind of turret jutting up from the structures’ right side. This was, thanks to good design, somehow less incongruous with the home’s traditional New England shingle-style architecture than you might think.

  * Years before, the Eckharts had also come to Rhode Island from Pittsburgh, from Harold’s much grander estate there. In the Pittsburgh house, the Eckhart family had accounted for just three of many more household staff. But they just so happened to be three of Harold’s personal favorites, so once Breakwater was complete, he’d brought them with him to Rhode Island to run it.

  * Written by Brookhants students and added to and kept alive by area locals, the Brookhants yellow jacket chant was originally seven stanzas long. Over the years—especially during and after the tragedies—verses were added, modified, dropped. One of the more controversial verses was:

  You stung their arms, their legs, their backs—

  Attack! Attack! Attack!

  The lips where our dear girls would kiss—

  you were sure not to miss.

  * In the parlance of the Wells household, Readers, PAD stands for preaudition diarrhea.

  * It would.

  *

  * Really, Readers, it was primarily Sara Dahlgren who had brought them these things. And she’d brought them mostly for Libbie.

  * The truly priggish creator and enforcer of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and namesake for the term comstockery (censorship). In 1873, Congress passed a law named after him that made transporting “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material a crime.

  * A stereoscope was an instrument that allowed its user to view specially made cards in 3D. Think first-gen Instagram, Readers.

  * Sara Dahlgren’s pet name for Libbie.

  * In case, like Merritt before watching Audrey’s, you’ve never seen any, think a self-promotional commercial for actors featuring some of their best scenes. Best being subjective, Readers.

  * There were three Hazels enrolled at Wellesley at that time, and though the calculations used to determine their ranking was rather unclear, everyone seemed to agree on said ranking—including the three Hazels themselves.

  * White space, here, intended as visual representation of the vat of wholly bemused and angry (for Merritt, anyway) silence following Bo’s bewildering news.

  * Well, or who now lived there, at any rate. The distribution of Harold’s assets, after his death, had been prolongated, litigious, and unpleasant, to say the least.

  * Libbie hoped it was beautiful, anyway. She thought about France often, in all seasons, and needed to believe that it was beautiful and better there at all times. Better than here, at any rate.

  * Also known as a wild blue anemone, Readers.

  * The opening sentence of the preface to the popular advice book Side Talks with Girls (1895).

  Ruth Ashmore was the pen name of Isabel Allderdice Sloan Mallon. Though it should be noted that the concept of respectable lady-advice columnist Ruth Ashmore came from the male editor of a newspaper who wrote the Ruth Ashmore columns himself until he could find a “woman-writer” he judged as up to the task. (Of course he did, Readers. Of course he did.)

  To give you a sense of the book’s intended audience (WASPs), the topics covered, as named in the chapter titles, included: “Girl Life in New York City,” “The Girl Who Uses Slang,” “The Elder Sister in the Home,” and “The Girl Who Goes A-Visiting.”

  Of particular interest here: chapter IX, “What Shall a Girl Read,” and chapter XI, “Your Own Familiar Friend,” which details the dangers of girl-on-girl crushes.

  * To remind you: the character Caroline played in the House Mother movies.

  * Some of the details are just as disturbing as you probably want them to be, like the series of bizarre incidents surrounding the film The Omen. Here’s just one of them: the girlfriend of the special effects engineer—the man who rigged the film’s elaborate decapitation scene—was later decapitated herself in a car accident in Belgium while the engineer was driving. It happened near a road sign that showed 66.6 kilometers to the next town.

  * Carlos Burr’s review of Big Yard, Quiet Street happened to contain Bo’s personal favorite summary of his style: “Think Wes Anderson directing a remake of The Shining, only set it in suburbia and ask Shirley Jackson to consult.”

  * From its IMDB description: “When a precocious child goes missing on the short walk between home and her grandmother’s apartment, her father retraces her route and discovers an increasingly terrifying and macabre world hidden beneath the veneer of the commonplace.”

  * They tried, for a short while, to again exchange their constant stream of letters, but Alex did not easily digest the news of Libbie’s various exploits, and soon there remained only an inconsistent trickle of correspondence between them.

  * It is perhaps worth asking, Readers, if one is truly an original if one only seeks to be so in the likeness of other originals.

  * Which is saying something, Readers, because the Packards had always been rather insufferably proud Chicagoans. Go Cubs.

  * Only the Brookhants Orangerie did not yet exist, though I think you get my meaning here.

  * Today, due largely to the success of Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City, the Columbian Exposition is often discussed alongside Chicago’s then-lurking serial killer, H. H. Holmes, and his nearby murder hotel. However, many types of crimes, both violent and petty, were committed at and around the fair. Perhaps this is why it did not attract too much attention, at the time, that a Russian couple, Gleb and Irina Belevol, who were listed as running vendor booth number 117 (painted dolls), were reported missing by the fair’s end. Multiple witnesses saw the Belevols retrieve their badges and vending license and set up their booth. Some even remember them working there during the first weeks of the fair. But then, Readers: poof. A dual disappearance. The Belevols were gone.

  * Did she intend this as a pun, Readers?

  * Simon Everett IV?

  * Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor’s attempt at drawing the gates around the, in her mind, true blue bloods, the old-money and manners names in New York society, as opposed to the gate-crashing new-money crowd. (If you’re thinking that it’s all rather stupid, Readers, so did Harold Brookhants.)

  * He commanded for the Union in the Civil War, for fuck’s sake.

  * For now, let me try to condense the full of Harold Brookhants’s oddities into a single story that illustrates how rashly he would spend his money to fulfill even his most unconventional desire. Though history (incorrectly) gives the credit for the following dubious scheme to William Waldorf Astor (or Lord Astor, as he was known in Britain, where he lived), it was actually Harold himself who came up with the idea, which was to have a giant redwood tree, one that had grown for centuries in Northern California—and was nearly thirty-five stories tall, with a base forty-four feet in diameter—felled. Harold did this with the sole purpose of having a table-sized slice cut from the trunk and then shipped all the way to Pittsburgh so that he could have it lowered by crane into the home he was constructing, obviously before its roof was put on. For years after he used it as a séance table, one that could comfortably seat up to fifty guests. And he used it often.

  So while Lord Astor did later make a drunken bet about the size of Californian redwoods, and then had a tree of his own felled, and a table-sized section of its trunk shipped to his London house (the ocean voyage probably adds to the appalling excess of the story, which is why Astor’s version gets remembered), it was actually Harold Brookhants who set the precedent.

  * Troubling, isn’t it, what the addition of an r does to that word?

  * For reasons that will soon become clear: this is how Alex had been referring to herself in her head since Eleanor Faderman had died.

  * Despite its simplicity, to Alex, this was the most egregious change of all.

  * Alex had several pet theories about the missing page, but the most likely of them (she thought) was that it contained handwritten instructions for some Plain Bad Heroine Society ritual or invocation, and that it had been deliberately removed by one of the club’s remaining members to keep it from being discovered after the book was found with the bodies. That or Eleanor had simply taken it, for purposes unknown.

  * It’s true, Readers, that Harold Brookhants had never hidden his interest in the Rash brothers and their famous feud. As you know, he’d incorporated that feud’s resulting tower into his otherwise modern home. It’s also notable that, though money was certainly no barrier, Harold chose to purchase land in Little Compton for his summer estate. This when nearly all of his friend-enemies were building their much grander homes in more fashionable Newport.

  * Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who lived together for fifty years at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. During that time, their cottage and gardens were visited by a host of authors, thinkers, and doers, some of whom wrote poems and other tributes to them. And since that time, more authors, thinkers, and doers have argued about what, precisely, Lady Eleanor and Miss Sarah were to one another, except for two women who clearly braided their lives into one.

  * Merritt had taken the time to pair pictures with exactly four of her phone contacts. Harper Harper was one of them. Merritt’s father, who hadn’t had an active cell phone number since three weeks after his death, was another.

  * Yeah, so perhaps not the students’ best work.

  * Capote’s too-charming-and-beautiful-to-be-believed tragic heroine in Answered Prayers.

  * Harper had never before heard that specific term, but the Happenings at Brookhants art department boasted two greenskeepers: crew members tasked with dealing with horticulture and landscaping. Layla’s specific domain was all things Orangerie.

  * Samples:

  Come on, flowers, now let’s get in formation.

  And

  You know you’re the shit when you need all that pollination.

  And

  ’Cause if you like it, then you probly should have watered it—

  Don’t be mad because you didn’t fucking water it.

  Yeah, they weren’t great, Readers. Calm down about it.

  * As in Arden Cleary, the Academy Award–nominated director of Dirt Town.

  * By end of day tomorrow, said Layla the Greenskeeper.