The Finishing School Read online

  Abel Cristiana, Prop. Horses Boarded and Bred

  On the right side of the road was a training ring and a paddock. In this paddock, for the past few weeks, had been a magnificent stallion, all by himself. After seeing him, there was not much point in going on: I knew I was not likely to see anything more splendid and dramatic than that stallion. But I always did continue on about a hundred yards or so, because Ed Cristiana was in my class at school, and though I’d seen him glance at me more than once with shy appreciation, it just wouldn’t have done to turn around right outside his house. He might think I had come looking for him. Besides that, he embarrassed me, with his old blue jeans and bouncy country walk.

  Some afternoons the stallion would be measuring the boundaries of his paddock in a continuous self-conscious trot, the tense, arrogant arch of his neck, the backward pricking of his ears showing that he was aware of his solitary importance. On other afternoons, I would reach the crest of the hill only to find him planted stubbornly at the farthest corner of the paddock, pretending to graze like any ordinary farm animal, too far away for me to see the fire in his eye that I knew was there.

  But this afternoon, I was met by an unexpected sight. There was a second horse in the paddock, with a bandaged tail. As the two of them cavorted erratically around their confines, I saw that the new horse, a mare, wore some sort of boots tied to her rear hooves. The two horses zigzagged skittishly about, the stallion in pursuit, until, suddenly, just short of overtaking the mare, he reared up and plunged down sideways on her. As he clamped himself to her hindquarters, she responded with a violent kick with her booted hoof. But then, with a quivering of her long legs, she bowed her haunches to his frantic thrusts.

  I don’t know why this scene should have distressed me. I had known the facts of life since I was nine. My grandmother had explained, in a careful, euphemistic way, what has to happen between a male and a female before offspring can be born; we had been walking on the beach one morning, down at Pawleys Island, when we had seen two golden retrievers scuffling bizarrely in the sand, and I had been afraid the dog on the bottom was going to get hurt.

  Perhaps I was upset because I had become possessive of the stallion, identifying him with my own proud aloneness in this place. Maybe it was because I hated to see him lose his dignity like that and join the herd. Or maybe it was the way the mare had capitulated; how she hadn’t had much chance anyway, with her tail bandaged to one side and those boots on her hooves. But what made the incident mortifying was that I realized someone had been watching me watch.

  Ed Cristiana’s father, his thumbs hooked under his belt, was slouched back against the fence in front of their house. A coarse, stocky farmer, he nodded brusquely at me. He was the kind of man I had not known in my life, but I had eyes to see that I was as of little value to his world as he was to mine. In his narrowed blue eyes I saw a country man’s contemptuous amusement at a squeamish girl—who nevertheless had gotten down from her bicycle to gawk.

  I barely managed a hello, and then, mounting my bike with what little dignity I could muster, I rode off with a little wobble. I felt his shrewd, amused eyes on my back. It would be impossible for me to turn around at my usual point, a hundred yards down the road, and cycle back past his scornful gaze.

  So—for the first time—I went on down the next hill, continuing farther than I’d ever gone. The school bus always went faster here, as there were no children to be picked up.

  I rode on, absorbed in my humiliation. The road curved and curled back on itself. Fields planted with some crop I didn’t recognize followed on both sides. My bike clattered as it bounced over a wooden bridge, and I wondered how far I would have to ride before I could be certain that the horsebreeder had gone away.

  Then came a pine forest on the left side of the road. Tempted by its shade, I parked my bike and sat down under an old tree. I leaned my head against its rough bark and surprised myself by starting to cry. Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the happy existence I had known in the house on Washington Avenue were gone forever. Things would never be the same again. I summoned up pictures of the ways they would never be the same again and sobbed.

  Then, oddly revived by this accomplishment of tears, I walked with my bike down a narrow, overgrown road that led alongside the pine forest. For it had seemed to me during my crying that I had heard snatches of music coming from somewhere within the pine forest or on the other side of it. It had been my grandfather’s favorite music at the end of an exhausting day at the hospital or when he worked in the evenings on the historical articles on slavery it had been his hobby to write. “J. Sanity Bach,” my grandfather liked to call his favorite composer. Bach, he said, was one of the few places in the world where you could still find order. It was as if, the mystical side of me fancied, the ghost of my grandfather had sent me these snatches of music, traveling faintly through the spring air, to console me. And yet the pragmatic side of me was curious to find out just who in this rural village was playing J. Sanity Bach.

  By this time I had come to the end of the pine forest, but the music—after several enticing overtures—had abruptly ceased. Ahead of me were acres of open field. The sun was beginning its late-afternoon descent toward a purplish mass of low, undulating mountains in the distance that culminated abruptly at their northern end in a sharp ledge. Atop this ledge was a tower of some kind. There had been mention of a tower and of a famous old hotel on top of a mountain during Aunt Mona’s exhaustive briefing on this area that was to be our home; but I hadn’t listened very carefully, partly from not wanting to hear anything about landmarks that served to remind me I was no longer in Virginia, and partly from not wanting to be drawn into Aunt Mona’s manner of looking at life. She had a way of infecting everything with a deadly practicality. In her telling, the romantic tower up there with its tiny window winking in the sun would turn out to have some utilitarian purpose; the hotel, no matter how old or mysterious, to cater to convention groups at special rates, which Aunt Mona, a travel agent, would know to the penny.

  But because I had discovered it, led on by the music, the vista exerted a charm and a release. My chagrin over the stallion and Mr. Cristiana seemed silly. But beyond that, as I faced these acres of fields, moving softly with wind, stretching toward the rise of the mountains with the intriguing tower, my pain for the world I had lost expanded into a wider kind of sorrow, a sorrow that could coexist with future prospects. For the first time since coming here, I felt curiosity about the place. What, since I had to live here, would happen to me in it?

  Then, like a tease, the Bach again. Did it come from within the pine forest? Or from somewhere on the other side of it, invisible from where I was? The phrases of the music burst forth, with every promise of going on, then suddenly stopped as they had before.

  I laid down my bike at the edge of the field and entered the forest at the point of a stream. All at once, it was quieter. I could hardly hear my own footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. The air was pungent with pine smell, and the sunlight seemed filtered through a light brown glass. A sudden stir of wind through the high branches made the pines hiss softly, and I felt the flutter of fear that comes from trespassing.

  The stream fed into a round, dark pond, and beside the pond stood a stone hut—or, rather, the ruin of one. Part of its roof had fallen in, and the windows were blank, open squares in the ancient-looking masonry. It was hardly big enough to hold a piano, even if someone had been foolish enough to put one there. But the structure itself was compelling. There was something primitive and mysterious about the way it just was there, so rooted in its setting that it might have grown out of the earth.

  The temptation to have a look inside was irresistible. But I went cautiously, anticipating the thing I would least like to see again. Once, my grandfather and I had been foraging around in an old slave cabin in Virginia for one of his articles and I had looked out of the corner of my eye and seen what I had thought was a thick yellow rope suddenly uncoil itself from the sunny seat of a
dilapidated chair and plummet through a hole in the floor. “Scared him more than he scared us,” said my grandfather, after I had stopped screaming. That was my grandfather’s trademark: always to see the other fellow’s side.

  Forearmed with my prevision of some Northern-hued reptile napping in the corner where the sun would still be streaming through the window, I stepped warily over the crumbling stone threshold. I swiveled my eyes rapidly toward the sunny spot, and was so unprepared to see a human figure lying there that I screamed anyway.

  The woman on the Army blanket shot up, flung away her book as though it had suddenly become a snake, and with a cry that was more an intake of breath, clasped one hand to her throat.

  We confronted each other for a protracted moment, during which her face grew calm again, even though she continued to press the hand dramatically against her throat, as if dutifully finishing off the requirements of a scene. At last she said, in a low voice, thrilling to me for its elegant diction as well as its composure: “Who are you, and why did you scream like that?”

  She was my mother’s age, or older, but there was some indefinable thing in her style as she sat there, barefoot, in an old wraparound skirt and a man’s shirt knotted at her waist, that made me unable to “place” her the way I habitually did adults, either relegating them to their function pertaining to me or judging them with pity or sternness because they had spoiled themselves or been defeated by life in some visible way. This woman seemed—how shall I put it?—not judgeable by my usual standards and categories for older people.

  “I was expecting to see a snake,” I told her.

  “Oh. Well. Sorry to disappoint you. I don’t think I’ve been a snake in any of my incarnations. I’m not the snake type. Where did you come from?”

  “You mean, right now?”

  “What else should I mean?”

  “Well, originally I’m from Fredericksburg, Virginia, but now we live over in Lucas Meadows, here in Clove.”

  “That’s interesting, but”—her wide mouth twitched with amusement—“I meant something more immediate. I mean, did you come from the direction of our house, or from Abel Cristiana’s, or what?”

  “There was just this overgrown road that ended in the field,” I said. “What happened was, I was looking for the music.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “You mean you want to take music?”

  I thought this remark odd. “No, ma’am. I heard some. It seemed to be coming from somewhere in these woods, or maybe on the other side of them. Now it’s stopped. But it was Bach.”

  “Ah!” She looked enlightened. “What you heard was coming from our house, which is on the hill on the other side of these trees. It was trying to be Bach, but I cannot go so far as to call it music. Which is why I am down here. These woods keep it at a bearable distance, though I’m afraid the sound carries over the field more than I would like. You see, my brother, Julian, is forced for the time being to supplement our income by giving piano lessons. He is a superb musician. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall—and I don’t mean Little Carnegie, either—when he graduated from Juilliard. This particular little girl is my least favorite of his pupils. Do you want to know why? Because she is just like a robot. She can play whole passages by heart without ever once feeling the music.”

  And, slamming her eyes shut, the woman sitting on the blanket hunched down, making herself very tight and small. A prissy, rather imbecilic smile sealed itself across her face. Right there before my eyes, she became the unmusical child, addressing an invisible keyboard, her fingers woodenly calling forth in my imagination the very notes I had heard coming through the trees.

  “ ‘By heart’ is certainly a misnomer in her case,” she concluded, snapping back into herself again. Her sharp brown eyes drank me in. When she saw that her performance had enthralled me, she smiled. It was a unique smile, breaking away from her large, slightly irregular teeth as if from the force of its own irrepressible mischief, and igniting the fine, thin skin of her mobile face with a blush. A constellation of freckles traveled across the bridge of her imposing hawklike nose. “You must have come down the old haywagon road,” she remarked, with a magnificent reversion to the bland topic of how I had gotten there. “You came around the back of our land into Abel Cristiana’s fields. Which used to be our fields, until sacrifices had to be made. C’est la vie. Are you, perhaps, a musical child?”

  “No, ma’am. It was just that the music reminded me of my grandfather.”

  “Is he a musician?”

  “No, ma’am, a doctor. But he’s dead now.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “So many people are,” she said.

  There was a silence then. I stood awkwardly near the door, thinking I should go. It was hard for me to know what to do, because she was like no person I had ever met. With most people you could tell whether you were welcome or not, but her signals were not conventional. She had been quick to respond to having a visitor—even showing off with that remarkable mimicking of the “robot” child—but maybe she was just being polite. On the other hand, she did seem curious about me; she had watched me intently the whole time I had been in the hut. That last remark, however, had been somewhat strange, and for all I knew it might have been meant as a dismissal.

  But then she asked me whether I would like to have a swim in the pond. “It’s still a bit chilly, but very refreshing, once you take the plunge. I had one around noon today.”

  I thanked her and said I ought to be getting home. “Besides, I don’t have a suit,” I added, though that dark pond, with who knew what in its invisible depths, invited me not at all.

  “I never let that stop me,” she said, laughing, “but I suppose Southern belles are more modest.” Then she sprang up lightly and toed two worn brown leather sandals to her and wiggled her feet into them. “Not that I have anything against modesty,” she continued, in a somewhat ironic tone. “Modesty and politeness are the staples in your repertoire, I know. Which accounts for that unsettling ‘ma’am’ of yours. I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘ma’am’ any more than I have a snake, though I’ve been called one before.”

  “A snake?”

  “No, silly. A ‘ma’am.’ During the war, I taught at a girls’ school in New York—really more of a finishing school—and I had some budding belles who always called me that. You’re brought up to it, I know, but for the recipient it can be terribly disorienting. There I was, thinking of myself as slightly more than a girl, and then suddenly the drab weight of this ‘ma’am’ is thrown over my shoulders. I’m older now, but I still can’t think of myself as a ‘ma’am.’ I have nothing against Southerners, however, don’t get me wrong. I can appreciate their good points. I can even see the good points in Catholics and I’ve been bred in my blood to hate them ever since 1685, when Louis the Fourteenth ran my ancestors out of France. I find it all very amusing, the way human beings divide themselves up into all these subgenres and then run around hating everybody in the other subgenres. Most people spend their entire lives identifying themselves with their little subgenres. They spend money on them, erect shrines to them, organize clubs around them—I’m in one of the clubs myself: the Huguenot Society, it’s called—and often kill for them. That way, they can manage to get through life without having to discover who they are. Did you walk here, all the way from Lucas Meadows? Surely not.”

  “No …” I omitted the “ma’am” this time, though it felt rude. “I left my bike down by the fields.”

  “Well, I’ll walk you to your bike. My name is Ursula DeVane. What’s yours?”

  “Justin Stokes.” The name that had clung, close and natural as my own skin, for all these years, sounded suddenly flat and unromantic, compared with hers.

  “Ah, an androgynous name!” she said, clamping a firm hand to my back as she steered me out of the hut and past the dark pond, in which I was glad I did not have to swim. “I often thought I would have preferred an androgynous name. It gives you more room, somehow. Do you find the name Justin give
s you more room?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my mother’s maiden name. But I’ve always liked it. I couldn’t imagine being called anything else. Is that what you meant?”

  “Not exactly,” she replied with a slight smile, “but it will do for now. Tell me, Justin, how long have you lived here? Not very long, because I know most of the young people by sight, as well as who their ancestors were. This is the kind of community where everybody is known as somebody’s daughter or grandson or niece until they’re ninety. After which they’re nothing, but it doesn’t matter by then.”

  “We only moved here last month. My father died in February and I guess my mother felt she couldn’t make it alone. So we’ve moved up here to my aunt’s house. She and her husband just recently separated, so she had the extra space.”

  “And who is your aunt?”

  “Mrs. Eric Mott.”

  “Oh God.” Ursula DeVane smote her forehead dramatically. “Then your cousin is little Becky Mott. Well, Justin, I’m afraid that jinxes our friendship right from the start.”

  “Why?”

  “Better ask your aunt. I’m not saying my brother, Julian, didn’t misbehave, but I do think an artist is entitled to an occasional display of impulsiveness. Especially when forced to waste his talent in a place like this for economic reasons.”

  “We moved up here for economic reasons, too,” I said. I intended, of course, to find out when I got home what Ursula DeVane’s brother had done to Becky, just as I intended to look up the word androgynous. But right now I was more interested in laying a groundwork of things in common between me and this unusual woman, who had given more of herself and asked more of me than my inscrutable ten-year-old cousin had bothered to do in the whole month I had lived in the same house with her. When Ursula DeVane had said the words our friendship, an idea I would not have presumed to have by myself had materialized into an intriguing possibility.

  “Money,” said Ursula DeVane, still steering me lightly by the backs of my shoulders, “lurks somewhere in the plot of everybody’s life. Sometimes more than passion, I think.”