The Finishing School Page 17
I still have two of the presents from that birthday. One of them is, of course, my grandmother’s pearl necklace. When fastening the clasp around my neck, I almost always think of her. And sometimes I ask myself the unwelcome question that Ursula planted in my mind on my fourteenth birthday: Was she so sure of who she was that she never had to pretend, or did she have no private life? And I find myself defending my grandmother to Ursula. “Don’t you understand,” I tell her, “that his saying she would behave exactly the same way when nobody was looking was his way of saying he trusted her? Why can’t we leave it at that? Why can’t we leave her private life alone?” But, nevertheless, Ursula has left her mark there, as she has on so many other places.
The other present I had completely forgotten about until, several years ago, on a visit, my mother brought it to me, wrapped in tissue paper, in a corner of her suitcase. “I found this little book of yours,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet, the way you faithfully put down everything.” It had a pink cover, a pink very similar to the color of those old “Raspberry Ice” walls in Lucas Meadows. “My Personal Life” was embossed in fancy letters on the front. Inside the cover I found birthday greetings from Aunt Mona and Becky in my aunt’s handwriting. It was a pert sort of teen record, with illustrations and printed headings for the teenager to write under. There were pages reserved for “This Year’s Movie Record,” for “My Wardrobe,” “That’s My Family,” “Friends, Classmates, Chums,” and “Heart Thermometer” (“Rate your love life for the year! Which boyfriend rings the bell?”).
I didn’t remember being given this book on the houseboat, though it surely must have been among the gifts I unwrapped along with Floreen McEvoy’s pincushion stolen from Woolworth’s. I must have thanked my aunt and cousin for it, even if I secretly scorned those insidious, regimental headings that took away your freedom for organizing your own thoughts and feelings. (“ ‘Peeves and Problems’: Every year brings its own special little [and big] problems. Write here in this space, in private and in detail, just what those problems are.”)
How Aunt Mona must have loved discovering that book in some store. I can see her now, turning to the first page, where there is a decorated, heart-shaped “frame,” all ready for a photograph of the “teen” in question to paste in of herself over the caption “Me, Myself, and I.” I can see Aunt Mona, her earrings quivering slightly, scanning the “Message to You” on the facing page (“… Before you can be a woman, you must grow up in four ways: physically [your body]; emotionally [your feelings]; intellectually [your mind]; socially [your dealings with others]. These are the Big Four. They are a large order, and that is why so much has been written about you. You are now in the greatest growing period of your life …”).
I can hear Aunt Mona thinking to herself, maybe even muttering under her breath, “Now, if I had had a cute book like this to help me organize my feelings when I was growing up, what mightn’t I have made of myself by now?”
But whatever I secretly thought of “My Personal Life” on the night Aunt Mona gave it to me, I was to write on most of its pages. For a period of five years, starting sometime during my fourteenth summer, I was to document my wardrobe, accomplishments and goals, height and weight, peeves and problems, friends and movies. I was earnestly to answer the questionnaires (“Rate Your Personality Quotient,” “How Much Do I Cost?”) scattered strategically through the little pink book. As I turn its pages as a grown-up, I am amazed at how many of the specific, everyday details of those years I have forgotten: yet, even as the book recalls them to me, they seem to have happened to another young person, a quite ordinary girl who uses expressions like “Nuts!” and “Heck,” and whose entries too often take on a shallow, insincere tone that makes me wince. From the evidence of this record, I must have been claimed by the world of “Raspberry Ice” and the milkmaids before we left the village of Clove. How did this happen? When did they actually get me? Surely not until the end of that summer, after I had buried the crumpled poster of the Normandie, along with the little blue bottle, deep in the garbage can one afternoon, turning my mind away, in the act of doing so, from all that was too volatile and hurtful and strange in “the greatest growing period of my life.”
Now, in the light of all I am trying to recover, I take out “My Personal Life” from its tissue paper and search thoroughly, under all the headings of the year concerned, for clues to Ursula. There is only a single mention of her, located, fittingly enough, in the “Notes” section, the one place in the book where the teenager’s thoughts are allowed to roam free from any preorganized compartments. The sentence, written in my acquired Ursuline handwriting of that summer, says: “I have made a new friend this summer who I admire a lot because she is sweet, interesting, and funny.”
I stare at that commonplace sentence written by yesterday’s teenager. I will it to render up all the passions and fears I know lie waiting for me in the silt of the reclaimed past.
VII.
What do I want from Ursula now? Why does she again, after twenty-six years, dominate my thoughts?
I could say: It’s because I’m between plays. Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit. During a play, you are somebody else as well as yourself. Often this character becomes more definite and real to you than the quotidian self you face every morning in the mirror. You are possessed by your role. It is a form of possession you encourage to happen, because it heightens ordinary life; it makes you feel larger than just yourself. And it does wonders for your stage performance. However, when the play is over, you are in limbo. With no one for you to inhabit, with no one to inhabit you, you may get depressed, or go looking for action, any kind of action to keep you from feeling ordinary again. Actors between plays are notorious trouble-seekers. Acting addicts you to dramatic intensity, to a need for everyday life to have a shape. When you don’t have a play to stimulate you and satisfy these requirements, you go out and stir up reality, trick your life into patterns of drama. Once—and not so long ago, either—I married someone after playing Ann Whitefield to his Jack Tanner in a Shaw summer festival. When the marriage ended six months later, we both admitted that we had chosen to confuse each other with our stage roles, because it had been a time in both our lives when we could not bear to go back to being just ourselves again.
Of course, dwelling on Ursula … becoming infatuated with her memory … is a lot less destructive than marrying an illusive Superman. But why now? It interests me to puzzle it out while I mark time between roles. Why, ever since I had that powerful dream about her, have I become obsessed with recalling her, summoning back the way she was then, and the girl I was, the girl with all those feelings she didn’t know what to do with? Why have those old scenes I avoided thinking about for years become my most alluring task?
Is it because I am reaching that dangerous age, the “traditional danger point” that Ursula spoke of so warily, when people must either take some new risk or congeal?
If so, what is the risk involved here? What is “Ursula” trying to teach me or make me do?
And why should I feel so close to her, so strongly in touch with her, after all the years of recalling her with reluctance, discomfort, shame? God knows I don’t want to be her, and yet in some way I do. She had an arrogance, a precipitance, a flair for improvisation I wish I had. It seems strange to me that I, not she, became the actress. Of course she was an actress, to the very marrow of her bones, but she made her own life into her role.
A dangerous proposition.
It’s as if I were preparing myself for two roles in the same play, two roles I couldn’t possibly fill at one time: the role of the enchanted young girl with all those seething erotic and spiritual energies not yet channeled, and of the older woman who, thwarted by a too-narrow existence, was nevertheless able to enchant.
No, it’s something more. It’s as if, in allowing myself full recall of the power she had over the girl Justin, I am trying to take on that power, to beam it back onto myself as an ad
ult and as an actress, until it infuses me and I become bright with it.
Yesterday I rented a car and drove upstate to the village of Clove. There is a thruway now, and the trip took a little more than two hours. It seemed wrong to get there so quickly. I felt I had cheated by returning to the past on a modern route. I got off at the Kingston exit and drove the old road for the eight-mile stretch into Clove. Things began to look less modern and I felt better. There were still extensive tracts of farmland, many already plowed and awaiting their crops. There were the same old stone houses along the road, some now bearing prominent New York Historical Landmark signs, but at least they hadn’t been torn down—or painted white. Then I had to remind myself that Ursula’s house would no longer look as it had when I had last seen it: for Aunt Mona, several years after we had moved away from Clove, had written that a department store executive had bought the DeVane house and whitewashed the stones and put a cathedral ceiling with skylights above the old, dark kitchen. Which meant, of course, tearing out that ancient upper room where the family of Chrétien DeVane had stored their grain and hung their meat and where Ursula had hung the rope to make her little brother a swing. The department store executive must have heard some part of the DeVanes’ story: “… you can’t keep people from gossiping in a small, rural place like this,” Aunt Mona had written, “but we real-estate people sure kept mum about the whereabouts of that last awful episode. So it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other whether he heard it from someone else and wanted to do away with that room, or that his wife took one look at that crummy kitchen and said she wouldn’t so much as fry a piece of bacon till she had her cathedral ceiling. I know, it’s a shame to destroy the lines of an old historical home like that, but when you pay the price he paid (my commission alone was over $5,000), I guess you feel you’ve got the right to put your own convenience and comfort above some snobbish family’s past that came to nothing but ruin and sorrow.”
The main street of Clove had changed much less than it might have in twenty-six years. There was the library, itself an old stone house, where I had spent several rainy afternoons reading about Huguenots in order to be closer to Ursula DeVane. There was the old movie theater—now remodeled into offices shared by a lawyer and a veterinarian—where Ed Cristiana and I had gone to the movies that one time, at the end of the summer. Terwiliger’s market was gone—a branch bank stood in its place. The post office, formerly a prefabricated structure with a tin roof, now made its respectable headquarters in a solid brick building. But, just as in the old days, “town” was only a couple of blocks in a road leading to and from bigger places; and before and after those blocks, farmland still stretched on both sides.
I drove on to Lucas Meadows. Nature and individuality have reasserted themselves there, and it is no longer the prairie of uniformity I remember. Trees have grown up around the houses. Different homeowners have declared their personal tastes by adding wrought-iron trellises, toolsheds, and birdbaths, or little plaster gnomes that sit cross-legged on the grass. The houses themselves no longer adhere to the old consecutive color scheme, and I had some trouble locating our old house: it is now a shiny coral-pink. When I lived in Lucas Meadows, I dreaded being engulfed by sameness. Now, having escaped to return as an onlooker in a rented car, I missed its neatness; I missed, perversely, a certain purity expressed in all those bandbox-trim houses and lawns seeking to blend themselves into an anonymous little enclave of upscale democracy. I counted only two lamps in all of the picture windows I passed, but would I, at fourteen, have felt less threatened by this new, cheerful heterogeneity of houses every color of the rainbow, and trellises and gnomes?
Then on to Old Clove Road. Farmlands still, but a new element in the landscape that wasn’t there before: mobile homes. It had seemed longer, the twisting, hilly road, when I traveled it on my bike. Some important trees are gone; others have grown up in different spots, and the light falls differently. Even the contours of the land are altered in places.
I am up on the Cristianas’ place before it seems possible. Well, they have certainly endured. Evidences of prosperity everywhere. Two new horse barns down in the field below the house. An elaborate system of fences cordoning off different groups of horses. New paint and a new roof on the main house. Another ranch-type frame house across the road, where Turk’s paddock used to be. A sign as large as a movie screen in the front yard of this house reads:
CRISTIANA THOROUGHBRED FARM
I can see a small group of men gathered around a van from which a horse is being unloaded, down by one of the new barns in the field. They are too far away for me to tell whether there is anyone I knew among them. And, if there were, what would I say? If I were to park my car and walk down to them and introduce myself as Justin Stokes, the adult version of the girl who frequented this road quite a lot during one summer in the fifties, how could they possibly be glad to see me? How could they be anything but resentful and embarrassed, considering the reminders I would bring with me?
I go on. Down the hill. Around the curves. Across the little wooden bridge. I am beginning to think: This stretch is uncannily as it was, except it is too early for leaves on the trees …, but then I come to the haywagon road, which has a chain across it and a No Trespassing sign hanging from the chain, and I see that the road-front part of the pine forest that led to Ursula’s pond has been cut away to make room for a long, tan mobile home with brown trim. A family is very much in evidence: several small children playing in the dirt yard beneath a clothesline, and a young, overweight woman watching them sullenly as she sits slumped on the steps of the trailer.
And so, on, around that final curve, and, oh God, there it is. I pull into the driveway and sit in the car with the ignition still on and gaze on the inglorious sight: the old rough stones mere lumps beneath the whitewash that has been painted over the entire house. And the incongruous cathedral ceiling with its skylights rising out of the old part of the house, that first simple farm cottage built in the late sixteen hundreds. And—the final badge of betrayal—the For Sale by Century 21 sign jammed into the derelict lawn.
I switch off the engine and get out of the car, determined to honor to the dregs this rendezvous with the past for which I have driven a hundred miles. Should I lock the car, or take my purse? I am annoyed with myself for having such petty thoughts. A heroine in a film, having been moved by the changes in an old, beloved landscape, would eschew thoughts of personal property and stride off into the past without breaking the mood.
But today the past is more elusive than I had expected. The sun is under clouds and a helicopter flies low overhead. Its metallic, chopping sound agitates the birds. Some of the old trees around the house look as if they might come down with the next storm. I remember this place best all in green. The lilacs were out when, in the beginnings of my obsession with Ursula, I researched the house twice each weekday from the bus. Oh, that’s another change: the lilacs are gone. Now, who in his right mind would cut down lilacs? Or did the department store executive’s wife take a dislike to them because they had grown too tall and shaded her cathedral ceiling? What has become of the department store executive and his wife? Did the house reproach them in some way for violating its integrity? Or did they become disenchanted with it, or with each other, or both?
I walk slowly down the slope, my purse slung over my shoulder by its strap. It is an expensive purse. Julian DeVane would have had to teach twenty piano lessons for the price of this purse. If Ursula were watching me now from an upstairs window, she would laugh. “Dear Justin, you are certainly more encumbered than you were the first time you came down that slope. Do you remember yourself, all in white, the way you poked out your elbows and turned in your toes? You’ve got more assurance now, of course, but do tell me: who do you think is going to steal your purse in the middle of the country?” But Ursula is not here, not even in spirit. In fact, I can feel her absence from this place as strongly as though she were making a statement.
The terrace is all co
ming to pieces. Bluestones upended or missing; Father DeVane’s painstaking symmetry destroyed. There’s no trace left of any garden, only brambles, weeds, and last year’s leaves. Someone has left a large tree stump on the terrace. At first I think maybe a tree has grown up through the stones, but no, I can move it with my foot. Now, why would anyone want to leave a loose tree stump in the middle of a crumbling terrace? Vandals? Someone out to do a little wood sculpture, then abandoning the effort before he’d even cut into the wood? There are too many changes here, too many incongruences that have nothing to do with what I came to find. What I came to find is not here. Did I have to drive one hundred miles, and another hundred back, to discover that memory does not reside in places? Places have their own continuing lives. Memory lives in the brain of the rememberer. What had I expected, anyway? To drive up in my rented car and see, as through a mist, the house as it had been when I rode by on the school bus all those years ago? Ursula DeVane and her brother sitting down here like royalty in their two lawn chairs, then slowly turning toward me the faces of twenty-six years ago? In an Ingmar Bergman film it might have happened; but not here, not today.
Yet there, beyond the Cristianas’ prosperous fields and fences, are the mountains. The same as they were. Give them another few hundred years, perhaps, and they’ll be altered, too. But, for now, they are just the same as they were the afternoon Ursula and I looked at them from this terrace and she promised she would take me up to the old hotel and to the tower. And then that day, in late August, we went. It was our last good day together but we didn’t know it. We walked along the woodland trail, and she told me about Julian’s broken career. And about how, when she was only ten, she had betrayed her mother. And then we arrived at the old hotel. We went in, and for some silly reason I said I didn’t need to go to the bathroom, although I did. When she came back, she teased me into relenting, and while I was gone she saw some old man and called him a memento mori, and, as we ate our lunch in a little thatched hut overlooking the lake, she gave her famous speech about congealment.