The Finishing School Read online

  We had reached the open field. For a moment I could not see my bike for the tall grass, and I created a scenario in which it had been stolen. Then I would have to go back with Ursula DeVane to her house, which was situated somewhere on the other side of the pine forest, and telephone home. I would meet her brother.… But there lay the conveyance back into my other life, exactly as I had left it.

  “Oh, a Raleigh,” said Ursula, springing forward and lifting the bike. “I rode a Raleigh when I lived in London. I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But why do you ride a man’s bicycle?”

  “It was my father’s.” Now I felt ashamed for having imagined it stolen.

  “Ah.” She nodded understandingly. “You must miss him. Julie and I lost our mother when we were young. I was ten and he was just six. It was harder on him because he was closer to her. I was my father’s favorite and, quite frankly, liked him better than my mother. I hope for your sake that you like your mother.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, but I could not quite meet her gaze. With her unorthodox question, she had hit on a truth that made me ashamed: since we had moved up here, I had not felt as friendly and compassionate toward my mother as a daughter should.

  Ursula DeVane was now prancing the bike up and down by its handlebars, looking as though she would like to leap on the seat and be off somewhere. In the sunny light of the field, I could see silver tendrils twirling up from the richness of her red-brown hair. Though her unconventional demeanor made her seem much younger, I realized she must be some years older than my mother. She was not a pretty woman, like my mother, but her features, I thought, went with her personality: sharp, generous, and bold.

  She saw me studying her and at once straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Well, Justin,” she said with a touch of irony, “your dramatic entry into my day was quite stimulating. I ought to thank you for it. There I was, trying to reread Proust, but he is all wrong for this year. I have reached a time in my life when I need to be refreshed by the unexpected rather than consoled by the stately rhythms of what I know. Of course”—and her face was once again transformed by the unique smile—“your stunning scream certainly helped matters along.”

  As I stood there thinking of some way I could say good-bye that would keep the possibility of another meeting open, a dazzling cascade of musical notes burst upon the sunny evening air. Only this time there were no fey stoppings and startings. This time the music, a piece I did not know, continued, triumphantly sure of its power.

  “Ah,” said Ursula, lifting her face toward the sound as though showering in it. “My favorite Chopin scherzo. It’s my brother’s all-clear signal. The last of the brats has departed, and the good life can recommence.”

  She handed over my bike, her interest already somewhere else. Then she said, as if it were a polite afterthought, “Next time you drop by, bring your suit.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she started back toward the woods, taking jubilant, muscular strides in the direction of the music coming from the invisible house somewhere on the other side. I noticed that there were freckles on the backs of her legs.

  She must have known she had left a captive audience, however, because when she reached the trees, she turned, smiling, toward the exact spot where she had left me.

  She lifted her hand to her mouth, indicating she had something further to impart.

  I strained forward to hear.

  “Now that, my dear,” she called, “is music.”

  II.

  Returning to Lucas Meadows constricted my heart. This was my home now, but there was no connective tissue to bind us together. There was nothing of my past here, and, I certainly hoped, nothing of my future. It was just the place my mother, in her panic and grief at losing everyone in life she had depended on, had decided we had to be now; and when you are thirteen years old you have no choice in such decisions, though you may have plenty of feelings about them.

  Although I could not feel at home in Lucas Meadows, I did feel sorry for the place. I compared its downfall to mine. As recently as two years ago, we had both existed without a thought that our vistas would ever be altered. There I had been, happily ensconced in that big, rambling house in Virginia whose every object and corner contained my history; and, hundreds of miles away to the north, poor Lucas Meadows had still been meadows, presided over by a dignified old farmhouse. The farmhouse still stood, though it was bereft now of all its furniture, and children could peer to their heart’s delight through its curtainless windows. But the beautiful meadows had been plowed up, its hundred-year-old trees cut down to make way for several dozen “split-level” houses, all alike in the treeless sunlight except for their colors. Every third house was light yellow, like ours. The two in between, light blue and light tan. Each “level” was about half the height of a normal story. On the top level were the family bedrooms and a bath; on the middle level were the living room, dining room, and kitchen; on the bottom level were the den, utility room, and half bath. Aunt Mona had explained to us that these houses had been designed to hold what was, statistically, the average modern American family, which numbered, according to my aunt, two adults and two and a half children. When my six-year-old brother, Jem, had boldly asked what a half-child would be like, Aunt Mona had laughed and winked at me and replied to Jem that it was simply the statisticians’ way of saying the family would have to move to a larger house when that half-child turned into a whole child.

  What bothered me most about these houses, what bothered me even more than their lack of history, was that they seemed designed to make everybody as alike as possible. And the people who lived in them seemed to conspire. In Lucas Meadows, all mothers seemed to be cooking dinner at the same hour, and all the lights in the children’s bedrooms went out at night before the lights in the master bedrooms. Even worse, every single living room had a lamp, its shade still covered with cellophane, on a table squarely in the middle of the picture window. That the mother in every one of these houses had gone out, on her own volition, and bought a lamp to fill her window exactly as her neighbors had done, seemed ominous to me. It was as though Lucas Meadows emanated a germ, and if you caught it, you would become just like everyone else. Not only that, but most of the fathers in Lucas Meadows worked for IBM in the town of Kingston, eight miles away. And they all washed their cars and mowed their lawns on Saturday mornings. Even Mr. Mott, who now lived on a rented houseboat in Rondout Creek since he and my aunt had separated, came over faithfully on Saturday mornings to mow our lawn and wash Aunt Mona’s car. While there, he talked seriously with the other men—for he, too, worked for IBM—who were mowing the lawns and washing the cars on either side of us. Then he repaired anything in the house that needed repairing, saw whether Aunt Mona’s car needed gas, and changed the oil himself before driving my cousin Becky away with him for the weekend in his own car. It was a very friendly separation, Aunt Mona said. It was just that she and Mott had decided they wanted different things out of life. Also, she admitted, Mott got on her nerves and she supposed she got on his when they were together too long. It happened to lots of married couples, she said, only she and Mott (as she always called him) had decided to be sensible about things before “one of us killed the other.” Mr. Mott did not look like the killer type to me, even though I knew he had killed Japanese from his submarine during the war. He was a solemn, conscientious man, and what he seemed to like best was doing other people’s chores and being nice to children. He would spend hours with Jem, explaining how airplanes get off the ground, showing him how a transistor radio works. He had built Becky a real ballerina’s barre along one wall of her room, so she could practice her ballet lessons in earnest. He had fixed the chain on my bike. I wished I could like him more, but his presence deadened my spirit. When I was around him, I always wanted to yawn. Also, I could never remember his face.

  Mr. Mott and my aunt had both been orphans. It was one of the things that had brought them together, Aunt Mona said. But whereas my father and Aunt M
ona had been raised by an aunt in Fredericksburg, Mr. Mott had endured the horrors of an orphanage. If a child wet his bed at Mr. Mott’s orphanage, Aunt Mona told us, he was made to come down to breakfast wearing his wet sheet. One reason they were not getting an outright divorce just yet, Aunt Mona said, was that Mott couldn’t bear having to tell old Mr. Watson, the founder of IBM, who came frequently to the Kingston site and always asked after Becky and Mona by name. To Mott, my aunt said, IBM was like the family he had never had as a child. Mott had actually cried the first Christmas he was with IBM, Aunt Mona said, when all the employees filed into a big room and sang Christmas carols, because Mott felt he belonged somewhere at last.

  I could not imagine my mother ever calling my father “Stokes,” as if they had been two buddies or something.

  Also, Aunt Mona had admitted, in her practical voice, from which all traces of a Southern accent had been expunged, that if she and Mott got an outright divorce, she would lose the excellent health insurance IBM provided for wives.

  I parked my bike in the garage and went inside. On the ground “level,” where the den and utility room had been turned into living quarters for my mother and Jem, things were quiet. That meant they were taking a nap. Since we had moved here, my mother took a lot of naps. She would read Jem to sleep in her bed in the afternoon and then doze off beside him.

  From two levels up, came the sounds of “Les Sylphides.” Becky was practicing her solo number for the upcoming ballet recital.

  I found Aunt Mona in her spotless kitchen, which always looked as if she were expecting a photographer from House Beautiful any minute. She was indulging in her obsessive pastime, wiping the kitchen counter with a paper towel. “Well,” she greeted me, as she did every day, “and what have you done with your afternoon?”

  “Rode my bike on Old Clove Road,” I replied, as I did every day. “Only, I went a little farther today. Something smells delicious in the oven.”

  “Well, it’s your own mother’s meat loaf,” said my aunt. “Louise has been so good about helping out, after all she’s been through. ‘Mona, you’re the working woman of this household,’ she told me. ‘The least I can do, after you’ve offered your home, is to prepare supper.’ ”

  “Would you like me to set the table?”

  “You’re a doll, Justin. If Becky ever offered to set the table, I think I’d have a heart attack. But, as I was telling Louise the other day, your grandmother brought you up in her image. Honora Justin was just the perfect lady.” As she pronounced this eulogy to my late grandmother, her short, feathery haircut trembled on top. With her quick, nervous gestures and her sharp eyes and her preference for colorful clothes, my aunt reminded me of a high-strung bird of paradise. Even in her relatively still moments, you could detect a slight quiver about her head and neck.

  “Be glad for your early training,” she told me, as I laid out the plastic mats at the round Formica table and placed a folded paper napkin beneath each pair of forks. “It sets you up for life. I never had it, you know.”

  As I aligned the tines of Aunt Mona’s stainless-steel salad and dinner forks with the same care as if they had been my grandmother’s heavy Georgian silver ones, now packed away in a shoebox in the room where my mother slept, I tried to pretend that the ghost of my grandmother hovered approvingly behind me. But, though I wanted to feel her near, I could not imagine how she would be able to find her way here, even by spiritual means. How much did the spirits of the dead know about what happened since they had died? It might be cruel to summon my grandmother, even if my love could give me the power. “But what has happened?” she might wonder. “Why is Justin setting the table with those forks? Whose table is that? Where are our forks? Where is my husband? Where is Louise’s husband? What strange house are they living in, and why are they no longer in our house?” Trapped in her ghost world, she would be unable to comprehend all that had happened to us since she had gone. No, I would just have to go on living with the good example of her memory. But it was hard. I was not as good as my grandmother, no matter how much Aunt Mona might think I had been raised “in her image.” My grandfather had told me once that my grandmother was the only woman he had ever known who would behave exactly the same way if nobody were looking. I knew I could not say that of myself.

  “Well,” said Aunt Mona, gazing restlessly about her for the sight of some bit of disorder, some small thing out of place in her spotless kitchen, “I went to Chicago twice today, to the Grand Canyon once, and tomorrow I may be off to Yugoslavia.” In this whimsical manner she liked to describe her job of sitting behind a desk in a Kingston travel agency, phoning airlines and booking reservations. Her critical eye lit in triumph on a brown-tipped frond of the spider plant hanging in the window above the sink. She reached up and excised the brown tip between painted fingernails.

  I said Yugoslavia sounded interesting. Then I asked, “Do you know some people named DeVane?”

  Her chin shot up so fast that it set in motion the crest of her feathery haircut. “Where did you hear about them?”

  “I met her. I met Ursula DeVane.” Saying her name made me self-conscious, as if I were pronouncing the name of an esoteric book whose contents were far beyond my years.

  “When? Where?” My aunt looked at me sharply.

  “Today, when I was riding on Old Clove Road.” Instinct told me to keep the meeting in the hut to myself. “She was outside. She seemed very nice.”

  “Oh, she can be nice enough when it suits her. But why was she nice to you?”

  Aunt Mona was often blunt to the point of tactlessness. But I understood what she meant. “I don’t know. She liked me, I guess.”

  “Did you tell her who you are? Did you mention that you are my niece?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  My aunt’s wavy crest quivered. “And what did she say to that?”

  “She said that her brother had misbehaved in some way with Becky.”

  “Oh, she said that, did she? That he had misbehaved? Well, well. Tell me, Justin, did she start being nice to you after you told her you were my niece, or before?”

  I sensed what she wanted me to say, but I couldn’t say it. “Before, I think.”

  “You think, but you’re not sure?”

  “No, I’m sure.”

  “Well …” A fresh square of paper towel was tugged from the roll and the spotless kitchen counter wiped again. “Well, I don’t know,” my aunt said. “I have nothing against her, really, except that she puts on airs, but her crazy brother killed music for Becky. Two solid years of piano lessons wasted. At fifteen dollars a lesson—which is an outrage, but he can get away with it—that comes to one thousand five hundred and sixty dollars: Mott figured it up. That’s not cheap. And the whole investment goes down the drain because of that crazy man!”

  “How was he crazy?”

  “Not was. Is. Always has been, probably. Only, people protect them, you see, because they are the DeVanes. I sure as heck wish I was from one of those creepy old families dating back to God. It sets you up without you ever having to lift a finger. That, plus a little money, and I’d be set. I’d be able to put on a few airs myself.”

  “But how is he crazy?” I wanted to keep her off her favorite theme: how her life would be so different is she had had “family” and money. It was hard to believe that she was the sister of my father, who had been brought up with the same disadvantages but who had possessed so much charm.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. But if Beck comes down, I’ll have to stop. He just did the craziest thing imaginable in the middle of Becky’s recital. They were having it over at the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston because he has so many students now—thanks to IBM opening its new site here—and just before time for Beck to get up from the pew and play her ‘Für Elise’ that she had slaved over to get perfect—and it was perfect—do you know what this idiot does? He’s standing in the doorway to the church to get a breath of air—this was the end of last May and it was stifling in that old chu
rch—when suddenly he calls out to some person on the street: ‘C-come in! C-come in!’ He has this stutter, you know. ‘I order you to c-come in!’

  “And we all turn around to look, and in comes this young man wearing tennis clothes and carrying a racket. He looked very embarrassed, but Julian DeVane just pushed him up the aisle by the elbow. ‘No, I insist. I insist,’ he says to the young man.

  “Well! The next thing everybody knows, this young man in tennis shorts sits down at the Steinway, and Julian DeVane is stammering excitedly that this was his most talented pupil from a few years back and now he will play something for us ‘as an inspiration to us all.’ I have to give the boy credit, he looked thoroughly ashamed for his teacher, but he adjusts the bench—where poor Becky was scheduled to be sitting—and plays the ‘Hungarian Rhapsody.’ I mean, can you imagine? This boy is at Juilliard now—DeVane announces it—and that lunatic drags him in, in the midst of a children’s recital, to ‘play something.’ To play the ‘Hungarian Rhapsody.’ And after that was over, he tried to get him to play an encore!

  “But he wouldn’t. He got up and shook his teacher’s hand, and bowed to all of us, and then took his tennis racket and left. And all the parents look at one another, as if to say, ‘What the heck …?’ and then DeVane says, ‘And now, Miss Becky Mott will play “Für Elise.” ’ And Beck gets up, she’s pale, but she walks up there like a trouper and sits down and adjusts her bench back to where it should have been. Then she takes a deep breath and puts her fingers on the keys. She did fine all the way through the first passage, but then she made a mistake. I saw her hesitate whether to go on or start over. But she just stopped. She put her hands down to the side and just sat there for a minute; then she stood up, smoothed her crinolines down, and walked right out of the church, right past Julian DeVane as if he didn’t exist.