The Finishing School Page 13

  I had succeeded so well in creating her by my side that I had almost become Ursula. It seemed to me that not only could I speak as she would speak, observe as she might observe, but also feel as she would feel. I was so much into my strange little game that when Mr. Cristiana passed me and said, “How are you?” I hesitated. Was I supposed to speak to him? What could I say that would not make a certain brother furious? But my manners recalled me to myself, and I smiled at the red-faced farmer, who looked uncomfortable in his suit and tie, and answered, “Fine, thank you.”

  Then Ed came over, with his bouncy country walk. He pretended he had just seen me. I wasn’t sorry to have some real person to stand talking with me in front of all these people, even though he was blushing and shifting his feet. He said that once they got ahead on those fences they were going to put up all around their new land, maybe we could go to the movies some night. That would be fun, I replied graciously, thinking how odd it was that he should seem so young. I felt as if I were someone decades older, hiding inside the body of a young girl. This feeling was accompanied by an agreeable surge of power. It was as if I had given myself an immunity from self-consciousness, through my exercise of impersonating Ursula DeVane.

  On the morning of my fourteenth birthday, I woke up with a disturbing image of my grandfather. One year ago today, on the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday, I had gone in to see him. Following his stroke, he had been moved downstairs to his study. The rented hospital bed was like a sinister intruder standing among his familiar furniture and the shelves filled with his medical books and bound monographs on the daily lives of Negro slaves.

  My grandfather was sitting up in the bed. Since his illness, he had grown too small for his pajamas. His day nurse, Thad, a jovial black giant of a man, bustled about the room on crepe soles. I sat down by the bed and asked my grandfather how he was feeling that day. He did not answer, of course, but his eyes grew bright and intense with that look which had substituted for speech since his stroke. Thad, who was replacing some records in their cardboard jackets, told me they had been playing some music. “He love that Bach. Ain’t that right, Doctor Frank?”

  My grandfather’s eyes shone at Thad.

  I began the difficult task of making conversation with someone who had helped teach me the art but who now could not utter a word. I believed that he understood everything because he watched my face closely as I spoke. I attempted to keep up a lively account of what was going on in the rest of the house, what my parents and Jem had given me for my birthday, how there would be a cake this evening, and how I planned to blow out the candles in this room before Thad went off duty. As I told him these things, I had to work hard to keep any sign of strain or pity out of my face. My grandfather was famous for his “face-reading.” It was said that he could look at a patient’s face and diagnose the state of health at once. My grandmother told a story about how, when they were newly married and on a visit to her people in South Carolina, they had walked into a party. After speaking to the hostess for a few minutes, my grandfather took my grandmother aside and said, “Honora, that woman is going to die soon. I wonder if she knows.” My grandmother told him that this woman had been red-faced and bug-eyed for years. “Besides, Frank, you can’t very well go up to her and say, ‘Pardon me, but I think you are going to die soon.’ It would ruin her party.” “You’re right,” agreed my grandfather. But the woman did die soon after that party.

  The afternoon of my thirteenth birthday, I knew that my grandfather was never going to get any better than he was then. We would never go off together on our excursions again, never wander around some old plantation draped in Spanish moss and then go purposefully to the slave cabins, whose dirt floors and meager proportions always excited my grandfather far more than the grand designs of the big houses the tourists came to see. He would let me measure the dimensions of a floor or a narrow window, while he wrote down my figures in his notebook. We would speculate about what it had been like to be a slave living with a large family in these cramped quarters. Once he led me into imagining it so well that I stamped my foot and exclaimed furiously, “I think if I had been them I would have killed somebody!” “No,” he said, “nine times out of ten you wouldn’t have. You probably wouldn’t even have run away. You would have stayed on and done your work, maybe steaming with resentment if you had one kind of temperament, maybe dreaming of a life in which things would be better, if you had another kind. You see, what interests me about these folks, Justin, and why it pays me to study them, is, well, two things: they seem, on the whole, to have been a wonderfully resilient people; and they had an enviable capacity for apprehending the world of the spirit. The more I study the ways they managed to survive as families and keep their hopes up, even in their captivity, the more I admire them.”

  He talked to me that way, like an equal, like a fellow researcher. He encouraged me to imagine the lives of others. Most of the cruelty and neglect that went on in the world, he said, boiled down to the simple fact that someone just wasn’t imagining how the other fellow felt.

  That my companion of so many hours, this wise, compassionate man who had helped form my mind, had been reduced to the helpless figure in the bed, with his shining gaze fixed dependently on my flow of words, which he could neither direct nor answer, seemed a very cruel thing. “God works in strange and mysterious ways,” I had been taught, but I remember wondering that afternoon if God had been imagining how the other fellow felt when he inflicted this stroke on my grandfather.

  When the visit was over, I kissed the top of his head, which was pink and warm under his thin hair, and started upstairs to my room. But I was stopped halfway up by the sounds coming from behind the closed door of my parents’ room. They were sounds I had heard before, the usual accompaniment to adult passion. But when my mother uttered a high, sharp cry, I knew I could not just continue up the remaining stairs and walk past their door to my room. Even if I tiptoed, the floor would creak and they would know I had heard. So I went quietly back downstairs and outside. I walked to the corner mailbox, past the famous sewer grating where my mother had deposited my grandfather’s check to Sweet Briar. I crossed over to the shady side of the street and waved to some ladies kneeling in the dirt, planting flowers in the new beds around the famous historic home where George Washington’s only sister had lived after her marriage. The ladies gave one another knowing looks as I passed. They were members of my late grandmother’s garden club, and they knew there was more dying going on in our house, the slow kind of dying in which someone you loved who was no longer even himself anymore might live on for years, depleting the family savings. I crossed back into the sun again so I would not overhear anything they were saying.

  When I got back to the house, I found Jem, still in pajamas from his nap, peeking through the keyhole of my grandfather’s study. Thad had put on some more Bach, which came soothingly to my ears after the hot walk.

  “There’s something strange going on in there!” whispered Jem, excitedly motioning me over.

  “What do you mean?” My heart started beating faster: was my grandfather dying this very minute? How horrible my parents would feel if they learned that he had died while they had been enjoying themselves in bed!

  “Look! Look in there!” urged Jem, pointing to the keyhole.

  I knelt down and put my eye to the keyhole. At first I didn’t see anything, though I felt the floor under me vibrating rhythmically. Then my vision adjusted to the tiny focus and I saw Thad’s white clothes drifting past. It was Thad dancing to Bach. I was just about to ask Jem what was so strange about that—Thad dancing, to amuse and soothe my grandfather—when I noticed a foot in a bedroom slipper dangling close to Thad’s hip. Then I realized Thad was dancing with my grandfather in his arms. I caught a glimpse of his frail pink head resting against the big Negro’s starched white bosom. My grandfather’s eyes were closed and on his lips was the smile of an innocent child.

  It was this image I woke to, on the morning of my fourteent
h birthday, surrounded by “Raspberry Ice” and the clubby smiles of the milkmaids. Was I better off or worse off, this time last year? I asked myself, going up and down the stairs on Washington Avenue in memory, hearing the sounds of my parents’ lovemaking (but why was my father home that day? It was a weekday. Had he come home for my birthday?) and the scratching of the ladies’ trowels in the flowerbeds of Kenmore, and then the sweet, stately strains of “Sheep May Safely Graze,” which led to that disconcerting vision through the keyhole. “Oh, it’s all right,” I had said to Jem. “Thad is just dancing with Grandfather. It’s something they like to do.” But the sight had bewildered me. It was as if my grandfather had abdicated from us all, escaping to the bosom of Abraham via the bosom of Thad. That day, I knew I had lost the best man in my life. I had started off my life thinking he was my father. And then, when I was three, and they started telling me how my daddy would be coming home from the war soon, I could not comprehend: wasn’t the daddy in our house the man my mother called Daddy? Why should there be another one? When they tried to explain that, no, the person they called Daddy was my granddaddy, I had screamed and cried, “No! No! No!” With their cruel insistence on nomenclature, it was as though they were trying to take him away from me.

  I had never loved my father as a father. It was not his fault that I had found the father who suited me best before I ever met him. The man who came home from the war seemed too young, too easygoing, too mercurial to be a father. He sat around strumming a banjo and singing. He could not keep his hands off my mother. The two of them slept late every morning. “Poor things haven’t had their honeymoon,” my grandmother told me matter-of-factly, as though I had been a contemporary of hers and we were indulging the two younger people. With my father, existence was uncertain. You never knew when he would breeze in—or out. Or when he would take my mother with him. When they left for Charlottesville “so he could have his college,” as my grandmother put it, I felt relieved. The house was peaceful again. I found I could romanticize my father in absentia. “My father is charm personified,” I told my school friends, quoting my grandmother, even down to her little sigh at the end, suggesting she was a bit overwhelmed by all that charm. Maybe I would have grown to admire him for his own merits if he had not skidded fatally on a wet road coming home to us that weekend, his company car filled with watches, bracelets, and class rings. He had been so cheerful, so sure it was all going to work out, after my grandfather’s death. We had one another, didn’t we? We had a roof over our heads—and a mighty fine roof, at that: my father loved the house on Washington Avenue; all his life, he had wanted to live in such a house, he told Jem and me. In those few months between my grandfather’s burial and my father’s accident, he gave us little pep talks about the wonderful life we were all going to have after he’d made some money. He played his banjo in the evenings and taught us funny songs, some of which were a little risqué. They were songs he had learned in the Army, he said, as if that made them all right.

  Oh those dirty drawers that Maggie Murphy wore;

  They were baggy at the knees,

  They were size forty-threes …

  That was Jem’s favorite. When we sang it, he cackled and howled and held his stomach. Then our father laughed. Once he laughed so hard, he fell off his chair and hit his head on the radiator and was out cold for a few minutes. My mother rushed in and bathed his bleeding head with a washcloth. She seemed angry. “Oh Rivers, not again!” she said.

  This phrase came back to me as I lay steeped in memories on the morning of my fourteenth birthday. Was that why he stayed home from work on the morning of my thirteenth birthday? Because the evening before had been another of those “Oh Rivers, not again” evenings?

  And what about the night on which he had been killed? Had it been the rain’s fault? Or had it been one of those “Oh Rivers, not again” nights?

  It seemed to me that I had known from the beginning that my father was not to be trusted. He was the man who had charmed my mother into marrying him, and without whom I would not have existed. But beneath his charm lay the weakness that would kill him and uproot us from our home. Why had he been weak? When had it started? When had his drinking started? The first time I remember kissing him, he had had bourbon on his breath.

  I was shocked at the waves of resentment that rolled over me now. Why did he have to come back from the war and spoil our lives? I thought. But even if he hadn’t come back, if he had died a heroic death, could that have stopped my grandmother’s cancer from growing silently in her until it was too late to save her? Could it have prevented my grandfather’s stroke? And if my father had died in the war, we wouldn’t have had Jem, of course. It would have been just my mother and me, alone in the house on Washington Avenue: my mother unable to earn a living, and all those bills to pay. Wasn’t it possible that she and I would still have ended up here, in the house of Aunt Mona? How awful to think that even forked destinies could end up at the same place.

  And then I was struck by a blasphemous thought that shocked me even more than my resentment against my father: Why, if my grandfather had been such a superb diagnostician, able to walk into a party and see that a strange woman was going to die … why had he not been able to spot the illness growing in my grandmother, whom he slept beside every night and looked at countless times every day?

  It was just after this low moment, in which my own thoughts had set me at odds with cherished illusions in my past, that my mother knocked softly on the door and entered my bedroom.

  “You aren’t feeling ill, are you?” She must have seen the remnants of my struggles on my face.

  “No, ma’am. I’m just lazy, I guess. What time is it?”

  “After ten. The postman’s already been here.” She bent down and gave me a kiss. “Happy birthday. This came for you.” She placed a small, brown-wrapped parcel on top of my covers, and I glimpsed my name in a bold, loopy script. In the upper-left-hand corner was a number on Old Clove Road.

  “It’s from your friend, I think,” my mother said, rather shyly, as if she were afraid of trespassing. “Did you tell her it was your birthday?”

  “No, she asked me when it was. I guess it’s easy for her to remember because June fourteenth was the day she sailed for France.” I said all this in a slightly bored voice, to keep my mother from seeing how interested I was in the package. But I didn’t want to open it in her presence: I had no idea what it might be.

  “Well, come on down when you’re ready, and I’ll make you some breakfast,” said my mother. “It’s just the Stokeses at home today. Mona dropped Becky off at her father’s boat on the way to work.”

  “But it’s a weekday. Becky goes to her father on Saturday.” How unfriendly of Becky, not to stay home on my birthday. I would have stayed home for hers out of politeness.

  My mother read my look. “Perhaps she has things to do. We’ve all been invited for a cookout on Eric Mott’s houseboat this evening. Something a little special. I know you take after your grandmother in some ways, and Honey always liked to have a hint of warning when people were planning surprises for her.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But please act surprised this evening. Only, I didn’t want you to go around all day thinking we’d forgotten you.” She gave a sidelong glance at my package. “Well, I’ll be downstairs, awaiting my breakfast orders,” she said.

  As soon as she had closed the door, I slipped the string off the package, admiring the way my name looked in the bold, slanty script. One dramatic stroke crossed the t’s in both names. The capital J and S were extravagant productions that I made up my mind to imitate in future, when signing my name. I would also copy her Greek e, which made Stokes look more exotic.

  Then I tore off the brown paper, being careful not to damage any of the writing. Inside a cardboard box stuffed with tissue paper was a small, squarish bottle made of thick blue glass. A strange gift, I thought, but then she was an unconventional person. Folded beneath the bottle in its little cradle of ti
ssue paper was a sheet of white stationery with a whole page of writing in the bold, upslanting hand.

  While over in New Paltz for a Huguenot Society Meeting, I spotted this in the window of an antiques shop. It reminded me of our entertaining discussion of favorite (and unfavorite) colors, and I could see this stalwart little bottle perched on your window ledge asserting its blueness. We loved having you for tea. You are quite one of us! Julie also has something for you, he found it the other day while looking for his childhood volume of Beethoven sonatas. It was too unwieldy to send through the post, so we’ll give it to you when you come again, which we hope will be soon. Happy Birthday!

  Ursula

  P.S. The chill is off the pond now and it’s very agreeable.

  She had been out somewhere, but had thought of me. Even he, in search of some old music, had thought of me. They really did like me; they felt I was “one of them.”