The Finishing School Read online

  “Well, he was okay. I mean he was nice to me.” I hesitated, torn between loyalty to him for Ursula’s sake and reluctance to offend my aunt. “He seemed kind of moody, but he’s probably a very talented musician. Maybe he’s even great. She thinks he may be a great artist.” The more I said, the more I could feel the magic drain out of the afternoon.

  “Talented musician, maybe, but great he’s not,” pronounced my aunt, folding her arms combatively over her bony chest. “If he were great, he’d be flying around the world giving concerts and playing with big orchestras.”

  “Well, that’s her plan. She hopes he’ll be playing in public again in two years. She has big ambitions for him; he got wonderful reviews in Argentina, but now he’s withdrawn from the world for some reason. He seems kind of … haunted.”

  “Haunted-schmaunted,” said my aunt, with a vigorous shake of her plumage. “Acting like some sort of superior hermit is just a good way to hide failure. Besides, there was no competition to speak of in Argentina during the war. Only Nazis and Nazi sympathizers would go there and perform. And even if he was the best thing in Argentina, that was almost fifteen years ago. Great artists aren’t suddenly ‘discovered’ when they’re already middle-aged.”

  My heart felt heavy for Ursula. Surely she had considered this: this practical side of things that my aunt was always reminding you of.

  “And whatever kind of ‘artist’ he is,” Aunt Mona went on, “doesn’t excuse him for being rude and thoughtless. Or for showing contempt for pupils he’s being paid good money to teach.” She pinned me with her quick, nervous eyes, and her gold hoop earrings swung faintly with her indignation. “You don’t think it excuses him, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said honestly, “I don’t.”

  My aunt relaxed. “That’s good. I told your mother you were a sensible girl. We had a talk about your going over there today. She said you were so set on going that she didn’t like to say no, but she asked me if I thought these people were okay for you to know; I hadn’t spoken too kindly of them. I said, ‘Louise, I’ve known Justin going on two months now, I’m a close observer of people, and in my opinion she’s a smart, sensible girl. She’s been brought up to tell right from wrong. Now, for some reason, she’s taken a shine to Ursula DeVane, and Ursula DeVane seems to have taken a shine to her. I think we can trust Justin to get what she can out of knowing this woman, who is a cultured person, whatever airs she puts on—and leave the rest alone. I don’t have any use for the brother,’ I said to your mother, ‘but since Justin isn’t going to be taking piano from him, he can’t do her much harm, he can’t ruin music for her the way he did for Beck. You’ve got to remember,’ I told your mother, ‘that you grew up surrounded by cultured, educated, well-bred people who knew how to behave and had been places. Who knows what I might have made of myself by this time if I had had a few of those people take an interest in me and want to polish me up? Now, there’s not a whole lot of polish in Clove, so I say let’s give Justin her chance to pick up what she can.’ And Louise agreed. ‘That’s why I’m here, Mona,’ your mother told me, ‘so that Justin and Jem can have their chance.’ ”

  I left the house feeling compromised. I went up to the empty farmhouse with my peanut butter sandwich and sat glumly on the back steps, trying to figure out what had been saved and what had been lost during the exchange with my aunt. So much of my life in those days seemed to be occupied with trying to keep track of my soul’s progress (or lack of it) upon a confusing map where adults had already charted their conflicting ideas of reality. Gone forever were the earlier times when I had been conveyed securely along by the cherished traditions of authorities I loved and never thought to question. Those authorities were mostly dead now, and though I could still rely on their advice to guide me through small social crises (such as how to begin a conversation with a brusque farmer who was driving me home in his truck), I found them less useful when it came to choosing how I would (how had Ursula put it?) “respond to the unique demands of the moment.”

  My talk with Aunt Mona had muddied things. I had a horror of getting muddied, because I was afraid I would lose sight of myself. And, once that happened, I might turn into just anybody. It was all part of the same fear that made me uncomfortable about living in Lucas Meadows with the lookalike lamps in the picture windows and the milkmaids surrounding me with their insinuating smiles that seemed to say: “Come on, now, stop resisting and just be one of us!”

  So before I could allow myself the luxury of going over the hour I had spent with the DeVanes and committing to memory all the gratifying moments as well as the tense and mysterious ones, I had to sit on the old farmhouse steps and determine how clear I was to myself after my encounter with my aunt.

  My skin prickled when I recalled her horrible phrase “taken a shine to.” It cheapened what I felt toward Ursula, and what I believed she reciprocated. It reduced our affinity to some kind of showy, whimsical fondness between a young girl and an older woman. But what really disgusted me was Aunt Mona’s assumption that because I was “smart” and “sensible” I would be able to “get what I could” out of knowing Ursula and “leave the rest alone”—as one might skim the cream off a bottle of milk that had already turned sour below. (Not that I thought Ursula had turned sour below; I had no idea what my aunt meant by “the rest.”)

  Was this what “smart, sensible” people did in the world, then: use parts of people and throw away the rest, the parts they didn’t need? That would mean you saw other people as if they were those pull-apart building toys Jem loved: take the pieces you need to build what you want, and throw the rest back in the box.

  That meant human beings weren’t necessarily seen by others as whole persons, but only as negotiable parts.

  If Aunt Mona saw Ursula as just her “culture,” which could be used to “polish me up” so I could get ahead in the world, then what might someone see me as? I tried to think what part, or parts, Ursula might want from me.

  The trouble with the “parts” theory was that it reduced things. It took away the vibrant, undefinable connection and left you with just … parts. Those things Ursula had said to me, about how she felt we were fated to be good friends despite the great difference in our ages; and about how we would influence each other’s lives (or did she only mean that she saw herself as influencing mine? I couldn’t be sure from the way she had said it, I was too timid to ask): where did you fit such words, and the vibrations they set going in your imagination, into the “parts” scheme of things? I didn’t want to fit them, didn’t want to mix the rarefied air of the DeVanes with my aunt’s down-to-earth atmosphere. But how to keep them apart, when I lived with my aunt, when I felt myself even now being infected by her sensible skepticism. (Was it too late for Julian DeVane to realize his sister’s dreams of glory for him? Was she throwing her life away, avoiding her own life somehow, by dedicating her ambition and driving force to the service of his art?)

  Divisions, divisions.

  For most of that summer I would be divided, commuting between prosaic Lucas Meadows and seductive Old Clove Road, making an effort—which got harder as the summer progressed—to render unto the Stokes-Mott world, with its practicalities and family duties, what it required of me, while secretly preserving my highest loyalties for the DeVane kingdom, with its long-standing prides and alienations, its private fantasies, and its obsessive dreams.

  After my tea with the DeVanes, there were two more weeks of school, filled with those kinds of end-of-term activities that keep you busy without really involving you very much. Class periods were constantly being preempted by a glee club concert, a 4-H fashion show. There were a few exams, which I thought were insultingly easy, though I did not make top scores on any of them. In those two weeks, a sort of golden, dusty boredom descended on me as soon as I entered the school each morning, and it stayed with me until I got on the bus to go home. The windows of the classrooms were open, and one or another of the meadows surrounding the school was constan
tly being mowed; a girl with hay fever sneezed and sneezed until the tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Although Ann Cristiana was always friendly when we met in the halls, and though Ed found a pretext almost every day to stop and talk, I could not shake the feeling that this part of my life did not really matter; I would form no friendships here that would carry through the years. Even though this was supposed to be our home now, I couldn’t imagine myself ever feeling connected to it in the permanent way I would always be connected to Fredericksburg, to the house on Washington Avenue, to the schools I had attended there, to the friends I had made, even though it had not been heartbreaking to leave these friends behind. During my last two years in Fredericksburg, my friendships had been under certain restraints, owing to the slow dying first of my grandmother and then of my grandfather. Though I continued to see my friends at school and go to their parties, it would not have been seemly for me to offer hospitality at our house or to get too involved in any particular friendship when the grandparents who had raised me, and who were so loved and respected in town, were living out their final days. Yet I could imagine myself meeting these friends at some later time in my life, taking up with them where we had left off; whereas something in me knew that the Cristianas, or any other young person I might get to know in the village of Clove, would not last any longer than this period of my life lasted: it was just an interim to be survived between the past that I loved and the future that would surely compensate me for my endurance of present miseries and boredoms.

  I say “something in me knew,” but I may be attributing to myself more prescience than I had. Maybe I’m confusing psychic knowledge with retrospective knowledge; it’s a mistake frequently made. But I remember believing firmly that Clove would be temporary for us, that something would step in and save us from living out our lives here. Whether I believed this because I wanted so badly to believe it or because I “felt something,” I can’t honestly say. As I review these memories in painstaking detail, trying to see what was true and not flinch from those truths, I’ve even speculated whether my “possessed” behavior toward Ursula was a semiconsciously contrived ploy on my part to make my mother see that she ought to take me away from Clove. But no, that’s going too far; that would make me a monster, like little Mary Tilford in The Children’s Hour, who wrecks a school and the lives of two women in order to keep from being sent back to the school. I was not a monster—not that kind of monster, anyway. I told no lies; I even kept from my mother the extent of my preoccupation with Ursula. I loved Ursula more than I loved my mother that summer, and I didn’t want my mother to know it. Yet she did give much thought to the older woman with whom I spent so much time. She worried, I know she did; I could tell Ursula DeVane was often in her thoughts just by the kinds of “casual” questions she would ask me when I came home.

  But children trying to protect themselves from real or imagined assaults on their integrity have been capable of monstrous things. I remember how shocked I was when Ursula told me, later in the summer, how, at the age of ten, she had betrayed her own mother. I thought she had been something of a monster, even though I could see her side of it, how it had seemed to her as a child.

  Now I am struck by the appalling similarities between what Ursula did to her mother and how I contributed to Ursula’s tragedy. Not that I planned anything ahead of time, as she had done; I was as unconscious of what I was bringing about as the young Ursula had been resolutely conscious. Yet I did bring it about. Without me, it wouldn’t have happened. But I couldn’t have been the agent of destruction if the props for that destruction had not been set into place, some of them years before. And who more than Ursula had set them up? It was almost as if she needed me, recognized me from the first, as the perfect, daughterly agent of her retribution. In many ways, didn’t she groom me for that role during most of the summer? Or is that going too far?

  In following the natural flow of my memories as they leap forward, then draw back, then leap forward again, I am digressing from what I want to do most. I want to go back and claim the girl I was—the girl Ursula DeVane chose for her special friend, that summer in Clove. I want to take myself through the summer as it unfolded, allowing myself no conscious lies or glossings-over, but only the wisdom of retrospect. Recently I read a passage in a memoir by the actress Florida Scott-Maxwell, who became a playwright and, after that, a Jungian analyst. “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours,” she writes. “When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.” I want to be fierce with reality.

  One of the end-of-school events was my cousin Becky’s ballet recital, held at the Grange Hall, which had the biggest stage in Clove. It was this event that Becky had been working toward during all those hours of practice in her room, and I was frankly curious as to how good a show she would put on. Despite her chilly reception of me into their house, I did not wish her to fail. In fact, I had made up my mind that if she was good, I would be the first to tell her so. Maybe then she would relent toward me a little.

  It rained steadily all the day of the recital, and yet a large, cheerful crowd showed up at the Grange Hall, shaking out their umbrellas at the door and acting as though they couldn’t have asked for anything better. Mr. Mott explained to us that many of these families had just put in their summer crops and to them this soft, constant, all-day rain had been a godsend.

  I remember watching Mr. Mott as he escorted us, one at a time, from the car to the Hall under his large black umbrella. He took Becky in first, so she could warm up backstage; then he came back for Aunt Mona, who consented to hold on to his arm in an arch way; then he took my mother in, and then me, and, last of all, Jem. I remember how my uncle looked as he scrunched his tall, awkward body low so as to cover Jem better with the umbrella. And I saw that, far from considering all these trips a chore, Mr. Mott was in his element. His bland, unmemorable face grew brighter with each plodding trip he made from car to porch, sheltering the current dependent from the rain. I understood then that Mr. Mott’s happiness and self-esteem were measured in terms of how useful he could make himself to others. Were there many people like that in the world, people who, instead of just assuming they would be appreciated for themselves, knew that they must barter for love with the services they performed? Once Aunt Mona had told me, in her frank style, that she had married Mott because she knew he was the kind of man she could trust to take care of her, no matter what.

  Obviously, then, Mr. Mott was one of those people other people valued only for some “parts.” And he looked as though he knew this. He looked as though he woke up every morning and asked himself: “What valuable service can I perform at the IBM site today, so my co-workers will say: ‘What would we ever do without Mott?’ ” Or, “I wonder what I can do for the folks over in Lucas Meadows, so they’ll be grateful, so maybe even Mona will miss me a little.” At what point in his life had Mr. Mott decided he wouldn’t be lovable enough just as himself? Did it happen back at that orphanage, where they made him come down to breakfast wearing his wet sheet?

  I felt sorry for Mr. Mott. He was the first adult I can remember pitying. Yet I couldn’t like him. There was something intrusive about his helpfulness. Could it have been that I sensed—and sensed rightly—that his helpfulness might one day come at exactly the wrong time?

  Becky did dance better than the other girls. She was rot one of those born dancers whose movements serenely mock the clumsier world, but she performed her number with a learned, determined grace. Her face wore a secure expression, as if while dancing she inhabited a place free of the daily irritations that exasperated her: she did not raise her eyebrows or smirk or grimace in the usual Becky fashion. I could not wait for the recital to be over, so I could go backstage and congratulate her. I am not sure that I didn’t make myself see her dancing as better than it was in order to justify doing this. My cousin had at first intrigued me, then hurt my pride; but what Ursula had said—about Becky
’s feeling I was a threat to her—had made me magnanimously ready to try again.

  As soon as the recital was over, I pushed my way backstage with the crush of parents and siblings and told Becky I thought she was wonderful. I went further than I had meant to and added: “Watching you made me feel jealous. I wish I had something I could do so well.”

  But as I told her this, Becky’s eyebrows shot up and her small mouth twisted in an incredulous smirk, as if to say: “What on earth do you want from me now?” Yet when my mother came up and hugged Becky and said quietly in her ear, “You were the best one, by far,” my cousin got a fixed and earnest look on her face and asked worshipfully, “Did you really think so?”

  I turned away, disgusted with myself for having let Becky snub me once again, and wandered about the Hall. The dancing teacher, Mrs. Roosa, whom Ursula had called “Imogene,” from the old one-room-school days, was surrounded by gratified parents. I thought then of Ursula, with that lift of spirit one feels when remembering something pleasant. She was the only person whom it inspired me to think about. She was the most interesting person in the village, and she found my company worthwhile. What a shame she was not here tonight, but why would she attend a recital where, as she would put it, little girls expressed themselves and got rewarded for it? She would be at home, in the old stone house where DeVanes had always lived; she would be doing something interesting—perhaps with her brother’s music in the background, whatever music matched his mood of the evening—in one of the rooms I had never seen.

  I pretended Ursula strolled beside me, making ironic comments on the people, pointing out things I might not have noticed by myself. “Imogene certainly seems pleased with herself,” she would say, “but why shouldn’t she be? Everything went beautifully. The record player was always on cue backstage, and the parents got their money’s worth. Oh look, there are your young Cristianas, and here was I thinking you all alone like a waif in a strange land. Did you see how Ed saw you, then pretended not to, so he’ll have time to prepare what he’ll say when he ‘officially’ sees you? Ah, the whole family’s here tonight, even the pregnant mother. Abel and I went to the one-room school, you know, with Imogene and my brother. Did you notice how little Jenny Cristiana was counting under her breath in that number she shared with your cousin? Listen to how those IBM parents are chiming in with their comments about ‘this much-needed rain’: that’s to show that they are not just interlopers who draw better salaries than everyone else in the county, but that they have entered into the spirit of the community. Ah, yes, Justin, a nice, safe evening. Now the little girls can go home under their parents’ umbrellas, their ballet shoes clutched in a paper bag, and not once has anybody been inconvenienced by the threat of real Art.”