The Finishing School Page 16

  “Oh yes, she was beautiful,” remarked Ursula dryly. “It frankly disappointed her that I wasn’t, and she let me know it. I didn’t please her much in any aspect. I was too rough, too curious, too talkative—you name it. She used to say I should have been the boy, and Julie the girl. Julie got her looks, plus a certain aristocratic finish of feature she didn’t have. Now, here I am with Father.” She hurried me on to another photograph. “I took after his side completely, in personality as well as looks. See? Same nose, same chin, same forehead … though you can’t see his for his hat in that picture.”

  I studied the picture closely. His hat shadowed his face. But I could tell from his outline and the way he stood that he thought well of himself. The girl next to him was about ten, gawky as a stringbean. They were arm-in-arm, looking very pleased with their DeVane-ness, I decided. I wondered where the mother had been? Holding the camera? Or already inside the insane asylum?

  Then Ursula showed me her father’s old room. “It’s the official guest room now, only”—she laughed sharply—“we have yet to have a guest.” This room also faced the road and had a single narrow dormer window. The wallpaper was faded red, embossed with a pattern. Everything was neat and forbidding: you could somehow tell there had been no sheets under the bedspread for a long time. “Father died in this room,” Ursula said matter-of-factly. “It was his wish to die at home, so I took care of him myself. Except for the last few months, when it was necessary to have nurses.”

  “My grandfather died at home, too,” I said. “It’s more expensive with the nurses, but my mother felt the same as you did.”

  “That’s right, child, you’ve had some experience of these things.” She put her arm around me and briefly hugged me to her. I felt glad for this new thing we had in common, even though it involved death.

  “And now, before I take you to my room, which is still in what Father called the ‘brand-new’ part of the house, because it wasn’t built until 1770, I’ll take you to the old quarters.”

  At the end of the hall was a thick door. Ursula opened it, and we stepped down a stone stair into a room with a fireplace and walls of whitewashed stone. There were a lot of bookshelves with law books, and metal file cabinets, and a massive old rolltop desk and swivel chair.

  “Father always called this ‘the office,’ because he worked in here at night. All those file cabinets you see are filled with his correspondence with DeVanes. After Julie’s career is launched, I may go through all that stuff and compile a sort of history. Make it into a book. Several members of the Huguenot Society are working on their family histories. It will give me a project for my old age.” She winked at me. “I use this room as my office now. I keep all the accounts, bill the parents of Julie’s pupils—he’s hopeless with finances, artists usually are. When it gets chilly, I build myself a fire in the fireplace and sometimes in the evenings turn off the light and imagine what it must have been like, back in the late sixteen hundreds. You see, when our ancestor Chrétien DeVane built this house, it was just the kitchen and this room above, which was a storage loft. The family lived and slept downstairs. There used to be a connecting stairway, but some later ancestor bricked it up. Do you see that door in the south wall there? It’s what they call a mow door. In the old days, the farmers would load the grain from the fields right from their wagons into this loft. And see the two iron hooks in those ceiling beams? We think they must have hung their meat on those hooks. When we were children, we played in here on rainy days, and I made Julie a swing and hung it from the hooks. Sometimes we would pretend to be our ancestors and sleep in here and toast our supper in the fireplace. That was after we lost our mother, of course. She would never have let us spend the night in here. She thought it was a horrible damp place and begged Father to demolish this whole side of the house and build a nice ‘modern’ wing. My poor mother had absolutely no sense of history. Of course, it wasn’t her history. That probably made the difference.”

  She continued to talk of her ancestors when we went to her room, about how she sometimes dreamed about floating through this house at night and being able to see it as it had been at different times in the past. Her room was the brightest and most cheerful to me, especially after “the office,” which seemed overrated. Maybe if Chrétien DeVane had been my ancestor, I would have felt different. But I cared more about the living members of this household, especially the one whose room I was now in. I had been fantasizing for weeks about the room she would have, though I had pictured something more formal, with lots of heirlooms. The simplicity came as a surprise, but an appealing one. Except for a big, bowlegged old dresser with a tilting mirror, the room had none of the heavy brown furniture of the other bedrooms. It hadn’t as much light as the mother’s old room, because it didn’t have the wide corner window of that one, only the dormer window facing the fields. But the walls were a warm ivory color and the wide, uneven floorboards had been varnished with a glossy enamel. The high single bed was like a girl’s bed—or a nun’s: neat and narrow and self-sufficient. Except a nun would not have piled all those colored pillows on it. There were a little table and shelves full of books beside the bed. A whole shelf was in French. I got an impression that this room was her place for keeping herself free, even though she was still living at home, in the house where her family had always lived. Keeping herself open … for future turns of “luck.” On one wall was a small pencil drawing, elaborately framed; it was of some crumbling fortifications. On another wall was a poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet.

  She saw me notice the drawing. “That’s my poor handiwork. Those crumbling ruins are all that’s left of the DeVeines’ medieval stronghold in Burgundy. I drew it from memory, in London. It was after I had heard that Marius had been killed. I sat for hours, one night, sketching that little picture as a sort of memorial. I was remembering all the nights we had climbed up to those ruins in the moonlight and made passionate love.”

  I stood respectfully before the drawing, having visions of them making passionate love. I was glad my back was to her.

  Then, in that expert way she had, she turned the mood completely. She picked up a hairbrush and ripped it through her hair, which had dried exactly as she had left it after the pond. “Why didn’t you tell me I looked like a fright?” she demanded.

  “Because you don’t. I think you look … charming.” I sat down on the edge of her bed and watched her. Her nostrils flared as she brushed; she was charged with a fierce energy. “I wish I had thick, curly hair. I’d have it cut just like yours.”

  I saw her pleased reflection. She said casually, “Oh, Julie and I play barbershop once a month. It takes him a minute and a half to do mine. I simply wet it and part it down the middle and he goes snip, snip, snip in a straight line. It’s the cut that suits me best. His hair takes much longer. I have to sculpt it back from his face, in layers. I’m the only one who can do justice to his fine, silky hair. But you wouldn’t be you, with my unruly mop. It wouldn’t go with your looks.”

  “Why not?” I wanted to find out what she thought I looked like.

  She laid down her brush and turned from the mirror to study me. “You have an intensity in your face … an ardent quality. Too much furl would distract from it. Yes, ardent is a good word for you, though it isn’t a word people use much anymore. Our language has shrunk sadly since Shakespeare’s day. But ardent suits you perfectly.”

  “I’m not a beauty,” I said. “My mother is much prettier than I am.” I was torn between wanting her to like me better for having one more thing in common with her, and wanting her to disagree with me and tell me I was beautiful.

  She put her head to one side, considering me.

  “You aren’t beauty-contest material, no,” she finally pronounced. “But I can tell you this, Justin. You’re nice to look at. You’ve got a face that is definite and expressive and sometimes deep. To know you is to love the way you look. If you should ever distinguish yourself in this world, yours will be the kind of face that your ad
mirers couldn’t imagine looking any other way. I hope we’ll remain friends. I’m genuinely curious to see what you will make of your life. Now, let’s go down and see if we can find some string for your poster.”

  Julian was still playing when Ursula accompanied me to the back door of the kitchen. He had been going from one piece straight into another, the whole time we had been upstairs. The constant presence of the music had made everything I had seen and heard more vivid and dramatic. I was sorry to be leaving it.

  “Thank you for the poster,” I said, as we stood just outside the house. “Thank you for the afternoon.”

  Ursula was gazing down the slope of lawn to the fields. In the far field, the one that now belonged to the Cristianas, two men were unloading posts from a truck.

  “I may as well walk you to your bike,” she said.

  As we walked toward the pine forest, we saw that the two men were Abel Cristiana and his son Ed.

  “To speak or not to speak,” Ursula said. “That is always the question. But, as Julie is safely indoors, I think we will go over and say hello. Your friend might be hurt if you snubbed him. They’ve seen us, now.”

  “Why does Julian hate him so?”

  “For many reasons. Cumulative reasons. It all started a long time ago, when Julie was a boy and had this pet raccoon named Daisy. Daisy would come to our terrace every evening and Julie would feed her by hand. After she had eaten, she would put her front paw with its long black toenails on his hand. She was really quite tame, and Julie loved her. Then one night she didn’t come, and, well … what had happened was, Abel trapped raccoons and sold their pelts, and when Julie went over and confronted him, Abel admitted he might have gotten Daisy. He offered to show Julie the pelts drying in the barn, and Julie came home in tears. He said he had recognized Daisy and that Abel was a stupid yokel and a brute. Later, there were more things to fuel his hatred, but I can’t go into them now. I was furious with Abel, too, because Julie was so crushed, but now I understand that there are certain cruelties that are part of living in the country—especially when you are hard up. Country people, especially when they are poor—and the Cristianas used to be poor—will kill deer in order to eat venison and will trap animals to sell their pelts. It’s a matter of their survival over the animal’s—that’s the way they see it. Abel didn’t go stalking Daisy personally, but Julie never forgave him and looked for reasons to hate him after that. Also, their values are very different: Julie is an artist; Abel is a farmer.” She lifted her hand in a casual greeting as we approached the Cristianas, and father and son stopped what they were doing. Ursula, acting like a benevolent queen come to inquire into the conditions of the serfs, professed great interest in the progress of the fence-building. She wanted to know which horses would be grazing in the new field. I thought she was showing off, a little. Was it for my benefit? Mr. Cristiana answered her questions gruffly and did not look at her much. Ed said hardly a word. He gave me a funny look when Ursula referred to me as her friend. After a few minutes of awkward exchange, during which Ursula did most of the talking, all four of us parted with relief.

  I was still living so strongly in the events of the afternoon with Ursula and Julian that my party that evening on Mott’s houseboat was insubstantial to me. It almost seemed it was being held for another girl, and I had to pretend to be that girl so they would not be disappointed. There were presents and a cake and we roasted hot dogs over a charcoal grill on deck. Becky and a little girl named Floreen, who lived in one of the shanty houses above the creek, had blown up balloons and tied them to the railings of the houseboat. Becky seemed charmed by this untidy little girl, and kept reminding us in her high, expressionless voice, “Floreen and I were down here all afternoon blowing up these balloons while the rest of you were at home primping for the party.” She cast frequent fond and protective glances at her little protégée. When I was opening my presents, someone made the mistake of asking Floreen where she had found the cute little pincushion shaped like a Chinaman. She bared sadly neglected little teeth, and said flippantly, “I nicked it from Woolworth’s.” There was an agitated silence. “Does that mean she stole it?” I heard Jem ask our mother. “I’m sure she was just joking,” murmured my mother. But later in the summer, Becky invited Floreen to our house, and when she left, Aunt Mona announced she was missing some costume jewelry from her bedroom, and from now on, Becky had better just play with her new friend down at Mott’s houseboat. On the evening of my party, I suspected that Becky had invited the shabby little girl to annoy me, but now I don’t think so, at all. Becky’s attentive patronage of Floreen may have been the first signs of the inclination that would lead her to her career. Even today I am mystified by Becky’s continued indifference to me, but she certainly isn’t indifferent to the youthful offenders she works with. She must care, to get the results that she does, and to win their confidence.

  “Were there carpets in any of the upstairs rooms?” Aunt Mona asked me, as we sat eating our hot dogs on the houseboat.

  “I think there was one in the father’s room,” I said. “But the most interesting room was this real old one they call ‘the office.’ Their ancestors used to store grain up there, and there are still these two huge iron hooks on the rafters where they used to hang their meat. Ursula told me that when her brother was little she made a swing for him and hung it from those two hooks.”

  “What about their rooms?” Aunt Mona wanted to know, not at all decoyed by what I had hoped would satisfy her curiosity about the upstairs. She was no more taken with “the office” than I had been. She was after news of the living inhabitants.

  “Oh, they were just dormer bedrooms,” I said. “His had a lot of old pictures in it, and hers was just … a nice, neat bedroom, with some colored pillows on the bed.”

  I didn’t want to share Ursula’s room with my aunt, didn’t want to give her a mental picture of the place where Ursula had told me, “To know you is to love the way you look.” With the little drawing of the ruins on the wall. And the passionate music downstairs. “But the really interesting room, from a historical standpoint, was that old ‘office’ with the hooks in the rafters. She says she sometimes sits in there and imagines what it was like, back in the sixteen hundreds, when that room and the kitchen below were Chrétien DeVane’s entire house.”

  Aunt Mona wiped the corners of her mouth with her paper napkin. “I suppose it’s natural that you should be drawn to the one with all the history,” she said, with obvious disappointment. “Why, when you think of it, that old meat room, or whatever it was, is older than all your celebrated Southern historical homes by over a century. I wonder what it is like to know who your ancestors were as far back as she does. Not that it seems to have made her or her brother any great shakes, but it undoubtedly gives you a certain arrogance. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had grown up with that arrogance.”

  Later in the evening, when we were roasting marshmallows on sticks, Mott hovering protectively by in case some child got too close to the flame, another guest showed up: a Mr. Elmendorf, with a booming voice and a cigar, whom Mott introduced as “Wilbur.” He was an older engineer at IBM and recently widowed. He was also the owner of the houseboat Mott had rented. When Mrs. Elmendorf was alive, they had spent their weekends on the houseboat and sometimes taken it on trips as far as West Point. Wilbur Elmendorf spoke of the houseboat, which looked like a floating box, as though it were a trim clipper ship on the high seas. He used lots of nautical terms and always referred to his late wife as “The Skipper.” He said he couldn’t be more pleased that a former Navy man like Mott was looking after things aboard. I remember he and Mott talked about Mott’s adventures on the submarine that torpedoed all the Japs, and Mr. Elmendorf explained to us that he would have given anything to be in the Navy, but that he was practically blind in one eye as a result of a childhood injury. Jem wanted to know why the bad eye didn’t look blind, and Mr. Elmendorf told him jovially that in bright daylight you could see a slight diff
erence between the eyes. Then he asked Mott if he’d heard the story about the time Mr. Watson, Sr., had dropped into the men’s room at IBM’s Poughkeepsie site and discovered an employee disregarding the sign over the sink.

  “Mr. Watson said, ‘Excuse me, young man, can you read?’ The man said, yes sir, of course he could read. ‘Well, will you read that sign to me?’ the founder of IBM asked. ‘Yes sir. It says “Please Wash Hands Before Returning to Work.” ’ ‘Well, why don’t you obey it, then?’ asked Mr. Watson. ‘Oh sir,’ said the employee, relieved, ‘I’m not going back to work, I’m going to lunch!’ ”

  Mr. Mott laughed so hard that he looked as if he were in pain. He laughed the way people laugh when a story is told about someone who means a lot to them: they go out of control sometimes. I remembered Mott’s laughter a few days later, when Mr. Watson, Sr., died and IBM closed all its sites and Aunt Mona took a day off from the travel agency so she could be with Mott. He was completely broken up by the death of the old man, she said. “That man was like a father to Mott.” She said Mott had wept and talked about the orphanage again. She said that even when people couldn’t live as man and wife anymore, they could share each other’s pain. A few days later, Mr. Mott was back in Lucas Meadows, mowing our lawn, his stolid figure guiding the machine with concentration, as if it were the most important thing in the world to cut even swaths that merged with one another. It was hard to imagine him lying face down on his bunk bed in the houseboat, sobbing into his pillow, but not as hard as it had been before I had seen him laugh like that. After the death of Mr. Watson, Mott became more solicitous of our family than ever, as if by doing double duty as a father he could console himself for being so hopelessly fatherless.