The Finishing School Read online

  The next thing I knew, I was in a conference room with an elated Mott, who projected his slide show on a screen while I drank a cup of Karen’s coffee out of a paper mug and ate a piece of lemon sponge cake left over from the reception for new employees that had taken place that morning. It was very good cake. I sat in the dark and looked at black-and-white pictures of the two-hundred-acre farm this place had been before IBM bought it and turned it into a site. I watched the buildings being built. I saw an early “IBM Family Day” on the site, which Mott told me we had all attended, though I had no memory of going. Mott’s steady, measured tone accelerated as he began to show slides of the top-secret project in which he had been involved. What Mott had been doing, that summer when he mowed our lawn every Saturday, and checked Aunt Mona’s car under the hood, and played dutiful uncle to his fatherless niece and nephew, was maintaining the vacuum tubes of an enormous secret computer being readied for the military. “It was a top-secret job … top secret,” he repeated, pausing at the black-and-white slide of himself, the old “colorless” Mott with a crew cut so extreme it looked as if his head had been shaved. His face looked so young to me now, in the slide. He wore overalls over his clothes and was kneeling raptly—that is the only word for it—beside a console of vacuum tubes. “See, we had two identical systems trading off every twenty-four hours. Every day it was my job to go over those tubes. If one gave out, I had to find it and replace it. We had to replace about five hundred tubes every month. When we shipped the first system down to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, I was sent down with it to show the Air Force how to do the maintenance process. I don’t suppose you remember that week when I was away. It was the last week in June. I’ll never forget it, because it was the week after old Mr. Watson died.”

  Of course I didn’t remember it. It must have been one of the highlights of his life: Eric Mott, orphan boy, sent to help install the first computerized air-defense system. On his deathbed, he would probably be remembering that important week in his life. A week in which I had been thinking of myself as the center of the world, and that the most important place to be, in that world, was at the pond, at our “Finishing School,” with Ursula DeVane.

  God, how needed Mott must have felt as he instructed the Air Force how to check and recheck that maze of crucial vacuum tubes! He must have seen himself as an angel of surveillance: watching over those tubes that would maintain the computer’s ability to survey the free summer skies of North America and sound an instant alert at the first darkening threat of the Russian menace.

  Maintenance and watchfulness. Protect what you have. Watch out for your nearest and dearest. Mott’s religion had served him well at work and had spilled over, that summer, into off-work hours. Children must be protected from rotting farmhouses that sat empty, useless, too near to their development. If a niece did not come home at dusk, and she had no light on her bicycle, then Eric Mott was naturally the one to go after her.…

  “It’s still a fine system,” Mott was saying. “The SAGE system is still ninety-nine percent reliable. It’s used now to catch drug traffickers, mainly. We still have a SAGE depot, for spare parts, right here on the site. I’m in charge of that, too. If anybody with a SAGE needs spare parts, we’ve got ’em.”

  He switched on the lights in the conference room and began putting away his slides.

  I said, “Mott, I went over to the DeVane house today. It looked terrible. That department store executive seems to have robbed it of its soul.”

  Mott continued organizing his slides carefully into a round container with slots. “Yep, Mona thought they made a mess of it, too. They didn’t stay more than a couple of years. Did all that work and tearing up, and then only came weekends. After that, Mona resold it to a New York dermatologist. He only used it as a weekend home as well. But he sold it after a year, himself. Said it was too dark … those little dormer rooms upstairs. Said the place gave his girlfriend bad dreams. It was an IBM listing for a while, but IBM families never took to it. Not enough closets and only one bathroom. And now that area has come down. All those mobile homes, like you said.”

  “The Cristianas seem to be doing very well.”

  Something in the tone of my voice made Mott look up. “Abel Cristiana died several years back,” he said. “Heart attack. I went to the funeral. He’d been out feeding the horses; then he came in for dinner, helped himself to some string beans, and just fell over in his chair. Went just like that, with his family all around him. Not the worst way to go. They made a good thing out of that horse farm. Everybody in the family worked hard, and it paid off.”

  My head was starting to ache with the unsaid. Had I come here to listen to tales of SAGE and the Cristianas’ family solidarity and success?

  “I wish I knew what happened to her,” I said.

  He knew whom I meant.

  “I’ve often wondered myself,” he said. “I never liked the brother much, but who would have wished that on her? If it hadn’t been for … well, her other unfortunate attachment, she could probably have stayed on, made a go of it somehow. But she felt the community was against her. And when he wouldn’t see her again, not even to speak, I guess that hurt bad. She said to me once, when I went over to help her out with something, she said, ‘Eric, I’ve become a—’ What was the word she used? I wish I could remember that word. Anyway, she said she felt betrayed all around.”

  It was an effort to pretend not to be surprised. “You saw her, then? After it was all over?”

  “Oh, yes. I felt kind of responsible. After all, if I hadn’t come after you that night, things might have been different. I’m not saying the whole thing wouldn’t have blown sky-high sooner or later, but I wouldn’t have felt responsible then. So, that winter, when she was so down on her luck, I would make it my business to drop by sometimes, after work. Just to … you know. Once I found her sitting there in the freezing house wrapped in blankets. She’d made a fire for herself, but it was smoking, the wood was wet. The furnace had gone off, and she wouldn’t call anybody. Said she didn’t like to call people after work hours because that’s what lonely old women did to get attention. It was just a short circuit in the thermostat—I was able to fix it—but she would have sat there all night in the cold if I hadn’t come by.”

  “Oh God,” I said, imagining her in the freezing house. Worrying about her image.

  “Yes,” Mott said. “I don’t know how she lasted there as long as she did. But, the way things were, she had to sell out sooner or later. I was sorry to see her go. She was very nice to me, grateful when I’d stop by. We had interesting talks. She was a fascinating woman.” He studied his fingernails.

  “Aunt Mona never wrote that you saw her,” I said.

  He gave me a sheepish look over the little black mustache. Sheepish, but at the same time rather proud. “I never told Mona. She might not have understood. You’ve got to remember, I was still hoping to get back with Mona. I kept hoping, you know, for years. But … hell, Justin, I was a man. I was a human being, with human needs.” Now he was soliciting me with his eyes. What was he trying to tell me? I could not meet his eyes; I looked past his left cheek, at a blackboard set up behind his chair. “She was a damned interesting woman,” he concluded, with emotion.

  Oh God, Ursula, would just anybody do? Any admirer? Any comfort? Any audience?

  I forced myself to look at Mott, taking him in as the comforter of a fascinating woman. That was twenty-six years ago. He had been in his thirties. Maybe he hadn’t been as boring as I had thought. The dyed hair and the little mustache had not yet come into being. He was a youngish engineer, quietly self-satisfied by the knowledge of his secret, nationally important function. He was manly, reliable, and kind, stopping in regularly to ask her if he could be of use. And she? What was she, really? A brilliant woman, thwarted by family and fate—and self? Or a colorful failure who was able to fascinate a young girl, as well as some married and lonely men in the neighborhood?

  “Did she ever tell you where
she planned to go after she left Clove?” I asked.

  “She was pretty mysterious about it.” He laughed nervously. “Maybe she was afraid I might pick up and follow her, or something.” He gave me a coy look, to see if I had read his meaning: so poor Mott had been smitten, too. “She talked a lot about Europe. She said her values were more European than American. She had a whole lot of names of other DeVanes—her father had kept up some kind of correspondence with DeVanes all over the world, she said—and she told me she might go and look some of them up. You know, she may have done all right for herself, Justin. When she left Clove, she had enough capital to last her several years, what with the sale of the house, and the land, and the furniture, even after she’d paid off that second mortgage at the bank. I happen to know that grand piano went for several thousand, by itself. Now just think: an interesting woman like that calls you up one day, or comes to your door, and you find out she’s your distant cousin, or you have the same name. Wouldn’t you want to help her out? You’d want to help out a woman like her even if her name was Jones and yours was Smith.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you’re probably right.” I felt strangely cheated. Mott was probably closer on her trail, in his speculations, than I had been, all these years, in imagination. I had created only variations of defeat for her. But, according to Mott, she might have managed to turn her luck, DeVane-style, as in the motto, from her ruler to her weapon. If she could have been Mott’s lover, why couldn’t she have had other lovers after him as well? Maybe she had discovered a rich European DeVane and married him. Or found other finishing schools to teach in, entertaining fresh young audiences with tales of her interesting history, making whatever adjustments to it that suited her at the time. Who was to know what was true? (Hadn’t I, years after she had told me what George Bernard Shaw had said to her about her portrayal of Joan, come across the identical words in Sir Kenneth Barnes’s autobiography? Only Shaw had been describing Sybil Thorndike, not Ursula DeVane. “Sybil will be all right,” Shaw had told the principal of the Royal Academy, “if she remembers that in the third scene Joan does not know she is going to be burned to death in the sixth.” When I came across that passage, I felt betrayed at first. Then I looked for ways to exculpate Ursula. When she had been at the Royal Academy, she had probably heard the story. Or, when it came time for her to play Joan, maybe Shaw had come to watch her—he was still around in those days—and maybe he had said, “You know, Ursula, I once told Sybil …,” and Ursula, in later tellings, had simply left out Sybil and made the story her own. But then a whole new abyss of doubt had opened up: how could I be sure Ursula had gone to the Royal Academy? How could I be sure any story she had ever told me had been true? And yet, what did it matter now? What would be changed? She had left her imprint on my life.)

  “… but you took it hard,” Mott was saying. “We were all pretty worried about you for a while, you know.”

  “Well, you see I survived,” I said dryly. “In fact, I’ve reached the point in life when I can see it from everybody’s side. I can understand why every one of us behaved the way we did, and probably couldn’t have behaved any other way. In acting, we call it playing true to character.”

  “I could still kick myself for not getting down there to see you in that play. I promise to come to the next one. When will it be?”

  “Well, I can’t promise another Broadway hit—those don’t happen very often. I’m doing Lady Macbeth in June. It’s outdoors. Have you ever heard of Shakespeare in the Park?”

  “No, but it sounds nice. Maybe—”

  “And then I’ll be spending the summer in Williamstown. I’ll be doing several plays. A Pinter—but you might enjoy the Shakespeare in the Park better.” I couldn’t quite see Mott watching me play Ruth in The Homecoming. He would shake his head afterward and say, “What a strange play. This professor brings his wife back to England to meet his father and brothers, and before you’ve even got everybody’s name straight, she’s lying on the couch with one of the brothers and agreeing to be a prostitute to help the family out with expenses. Now, surely that isn’t realistic. I wonder why Justin agreed to play such a strange part.”

  “I’ll try to get down. Maybe Becky and I … have you seen Becky lately?”

  “We had lunch a couple of months ago. I always have to phone her, but she always comes. She is very involved in her work.”

  “Yes. But, do you know, Justin, some of those kids have killed people. One or two of them have killed a parent.”

  “I know, but she seems to feel perfectly at ease with them. She’s very respected in her field, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes.” Mott looked briefly bewildered. “But she doesn’t have a family of her own.”

  “Well, look at me. I don’t, either. It just doesn’t work out for some people.”

  Mott looked as though he would like to ask me something, then obviously changed his mind. “Would you like another piece of cake?” he asked instead. “There’s such a lot left over. All the new employees seem to be watching their weight.”

  I told him I had to be heading back to the city.

  “It’s been good to see you, Justin.” We stood up. “I thought for a long time you hated me.”

  “Oh, Mott.” If I ever hated him, I didn’t anymore. Hate this bland little man with dyed hair and a mustache? I couldn’t even remember when I hated somebody last. Maybe it would be a good thing to feel such a violent, astringent emotion again. “I don’t hate you. I don’t hate anyone.”

  As he walked me back through the closed-circuit-monitored halls, he confided shyly to me that he planned to be married again. “I’m going to retire next year and then we’ll tie the knot. She’s a fine gal. Her late husband worked on SAGE, too. We’re going to buy us an RV and hit the road. See something of the world before we get too old.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Congratulations. What’s her name?”

  “Dorothy,” he said proudly, making a minute adjustment to his tie.

  I wished him and Dorothy every happiness. He walked me all the way to my car and then stood and watched until I had deposited the “gold coin” that let me out of the parking lot.

  As I drove south on the thruway, I thought about hate and other intense emotions. It worried me that the sheer force of all those youthful passions and furies seemed to belong to somebody else’s youth. Had I become too socialized, too modulated, somewhere along the way? Or was it simply that I had been able, increasingly, to put those feelings into my acting? Would I, if I hadn’t made it as an actress, have become a dangerous person, dangerous not only to myself but to others? What would I be doing if I hadn’t become an actress? Making up tales of my past to impress whoever would listen? Looking for ways to dramatize my environment—and whoever happened to be living in it—to keep myself from going dead?

  But why was it that Ursula was still more vivid to me as a person than I was to myself? She shimmered before me in all her elusive mystery, making my life, even with its steady devotion to craft, its dedication to what she called “a life of art,” seem unexciting by comparison.

  I am the failure and she is the success, I thought. I liked the sound of the phrase. It had that nice, rich, hyperbolic ring. But did I really believe it? Wasn’t I overdramatizing to give myself a maudlin interlude on the thruway, to force a shapely, tragic-ironic conclusion on a day that had been disappointingly inconclusive in its parts?

  I turned on the car radio and fiddled with the dial. I was close enough to the city to get my favorite classical music station.

  Then one of those things occurred that make me wonder where coincidence really ends and fate begins. The Chopin “Scherzo in B-Flat Minor” invaded the car. I had turned in at the place where the pianist begins to build those rapturous sequences that ascend in scale and volume toward the stunning finale. That this music which Ursula had loved best in her brother’s repertoire should come to me now, at the end of this particular journey when I had been tramping around their terr
itory, trying and failing to summon their ghosts, was uncanny. It moved me to tears. It was the piece she had planned for him to play last on the program on the night of his triumphant comeback. As things turned out, it was the last piece he ever played, and only one other person heard it.

  VIII.

  What was the source of her witchery? Did all of it emanate from her? Or did I invest her with part of it?

  “I have made a new friend this summer who I admire a lot because she is sweet, interesting, and funny.” That was the best I could describe it with my adolescent vocabulary. As I wrote that sentence in the “Notes” section of “My Personal Life,” what was I trying to capture with those everyday words? I know acuter ways of describing people now. My perceptions of human beings are more complex, I like to think. But can I now, through mere words, get any closer to the essence of her charm?

  It had something to do with her elusiveness, her mercurial, protean qualities. I was never sure of her, but I was never bored by her, either. She was never, from one visit to the next, quite the same. I could not pin her down even visually. Sometimes she would look extraordinarily young; sometimes old. She could appear as a sprite or a tomboy or an aging spinster. In a single afternoon she could be amused and benevolent, severe, abstracted, imperious, childish or snobbish, funny, sarcastic or downright spiteful. She could also be poignant and vulnerable. One minute I was her confidante: she would be relating to me her latest schemes for Julian’s comeback, which she and a manager in New York were going to arrange for the winter season one year away. She could be discussing with me, as though my ideas and opinions really counted, what ways “we” might employ to fill up the hall, and which pieces Julian should play, and in what order, to show his versatility and keep the audience so attentive that not a single person would dare to cough. And then, suddenly, in the midst of our dialogue, she would administer a corrective thwack with the side of her hand between my shoulder blades and say in a reproving tone, “Don’t slump, Justin. Your posture tells others your opinion of yourself.” And I would be reduced from an equal to a child.