The Finishing School Read online

  “Well, Mott and I followed her, of course, and then Julian DeVane rushes up to us and says, ‘That’s not like Becky. She always sees things through to the end.’ It was if he didn’t even realize it was his fault! Can you imagine?”

  “Poor Becky,” I said, really meaning it. My cousin had not exactly won my heart during the five weeks we had shared the same house, but what a humiliating thing. The man did seem crazy. Or very insensitive. Ursula DeVane had called it ‘an occasional display of impulsiveness’ to which an artist was entitled. But, as much as I had liked her, I couldn’t excuse him. It seemed to me that artists, if anything, had more of a duty to behave well, because people looked at them more. I was disappointed: I would have wished for Ursula DeVane’s brother to be better.

  “We missed the reception, naturally,” Aunt Mona went on, still intensely reliving the outrage of that day, “which, I must admit, I had been looking forward to. She always serves May wine with strawberries floating in it, and these Englishy sandwiches to remind everyone she lived over there—it’s an elegant affair for this community. Also I wanted to poke around that house of theirs. At a reception you can do that. It’s one of those original old stone Huguenot houses—never been out of the family since it was built. Well, you saw it, if you met her on Old Clove, because it’s right on the road. The one time we were inside, I couldn’t look around. He insists on a personal interview with the parents to make sure they’ll enforce his strict practicing regime. Now it makes me sick to my stomach when I think how Mott and I sat in that bare living room—they don’t even have any carpeting on the floor—and twisted our hands on our laps praying he would accept Becky. Mott had doubts about him then, because, when we were making polite conversation, Mott asked him about his war record, and it turns out he didn’t join up until almost the end of the war. He was living in Argentina during most of the war. Mott didn’t like that one bit, because Argentina was strongly pro-Nazi. He said he was ‘concertizing’ down there, but, as Mott pointed out later, when your country’s at war, you don’t hang around in some other country that likes your enemy better. I also wanted to see their bedrooms. You can tell a lot from people’s bedrooms. I mean, let’s face it, they’ve got to be peculiar, a middle-aged brother and sister living together. Never been married, either of them. Anyway, now Becky’s got her ballet and she adores her teacher. Thank God, Mrs. Roosa is a normal married woman with children. But don’t bring up Julian DeVane to Beck in any of your conversations, Justin. No use opening up old wounds. Okay?”

  “Okay.” So far, Becky and I had not had any conversations.

  “Though I must say it’s gratifying,” said Aunt Mona, “that she admitted her brother had misbehaved.”

  “Whose brother misbehaved?” asked Jem, coming into the kitchen. A bright-eyed, nervous boy, he was curious about everything. His eyelids were still puffy from his nap.

  “Not you, Jimbo,” said Aunt Mona. “Somebody else’s brother.”

  My six-year-old brother sighed. “How many times do I have to tell you, my name’s not Jimbo. I’m not some circus animal.”

  “Jem, darling. That’s no way to speak to Aunt Mona.” My mother followed him into the kitchen, looking not quite awake. She gave me a languid hug and kiss. Her breath was not sweet, and this upset me. In the old days, she would never have come into a room without being perfectly groomed. In the Fredericksburg days, her entrances had been those of the doted-upon star whose affectionate supporting cast has left center stage for her. But since we had lived here, she seemed to be uncertain of her role, and this uncertainty had robbed her of the breezy self-assurance I had admired in her—even though it had sometimes made me jealous. “I think you owe Aunt Mona an apology,” she told my brother gently. There was a sad, resigned quality about this act of discipline; I could almost hear her thinking: Well, I’m no longer anybody’s cherished wife or beloved daughter, but I must try hard to be a good mother—it’s all I’ve got left.

  “I’m sorry,” Jem told Aunt Mona. “But my name is Jem.” He glanced toward me for support. “Whose brother was it that misbehaved? I want to know.”

  “Nobody you know, just a man,” said Aunt Mona, not particularly wounded by his rudeness. She was used to much worse from Becky. “Just one of our village eccentrics.”

  “What’s an eccentric?” pursued the inveterately curious Jem.

  “Someone in a place who can misbehave and still be accepted by society,” said Aunt Mona, seizing a bright green sponge and annihilating a drop of water perched on the rim of her stainless-steel sink, “because he’s got family or money.”

  We all sat around the Formica-topped kitchen table with the gold-painted pine-cone centerpiece Aunt Mona had copied from a magazine, and her Scotty dog salt and pepper shakers, the white dog for salt, the black one for pepper.

  “Beck,” said my aunt, “you’ll have to take more food than that if you want to keep up your strength for the dance recital.”

  Becky sat with her spine arched conspicuously away from her chair back, as if she denied all possible contact with the family scene. She looked calmly at her mother from under her bangs. “I don’t like squash.”

  “Well, take some of Aunt Louise’s meat loaf. It’s very tasty. She was nice enough to make it while I was at work today; all I had to do was pop it in the oven when I got home. Here, try it, it’s delicious.” Aunt Mona pushed the platter at her daughter.

  Becky rolled her eyes and compressed her lips, as if to say: You are forcing me to be rude. She said slowly and evenly to her mother, “You know I don’t like onions mixed in with my meat.”

  There was an embarrassed silence. Then my mother smiled apologetically and said, “Oh dear, I’m so sorry, Becky. I would have left them out if I had known.”

  Becky slid her eyes briefly toward my mother but made no reply. I was furious, not only at her blatant rudeness but at my mother’s humility. She was acting as if she were some kind of servant, or something. This would never have happened, I told myself, if we had stayed in Fredericksburg. Even if we had moved to a smaller house, there would have still been the familiar air of Fredericksburg all around us, to remind my mother who she was.

  “When my brother, Rivers, and I were growing up in Fredericksburg,” said Aunt Mona, “we ate whatever our aunt could put on the table for us, and were glad to get it. If we didn’t eat it, we knew, we would go to bed hungry. Orphans can’t be finicky.”

  “Well, I’m not an orphan,” replied Becky in her toneless, rather high voice. “And even if I was”—and she gave her mother a peculiar look, as if she were testing in her mind the idea of orphanhood—“I still wouldn’t eat onions mixed in with my meat.”

  My mother lowered her eyes and ate a hearty forkful of her own meat loaf. I knew she thought Becky had gone too far, but she would never say so. That was Aunt Mona’s job. But when, presently, Jem got excited over something he was saying and flung a bite of meat from his fork, Aunt Mona bolted from her chair and lunged for the paper towels as if acid had dropped and were eating away the foundations of the house. As she fell to her knees and scoured the shiny kitchen tiles, I tried to catch my mother’s eye, to exchange a glance of Our Way of Life against Theirs, but she purposely evaded me, I thought. Becky intercepted my glance. She raised her flat gray eyes at me and smirked. A month ago, I would have put a lot of effort into interpreting any communication from Becky—was the smirk meant to show contempt for me, or conspiracy against her mother, whom she took pains, it seemed, to annoy?—but my ten-year-old cousin had repulsed my overtures so many times that my pride finally asserted itself over charity (and loneliness) and I had resolved that any concrete move toward friendship would have to come—unequivocally—from her. It seemed a bitter irony that one of the reasons my mother had given for our moving here was that Becky and I could grow up together. “Like sisters,” she had said.

  My mother and Aunt Mona then found some topic that took them back to when they had been girls in Fredericksburg. The way my mother tal
ked, you would have thought they had been best friends, or something. But I knew that was not the way it had been, and I had to admire Aunt Mona’s tenacious insistence on the truth. “Now, Louise, I’m flattered, but you hardly knew me before you and my brother eloped. Why should you? You were the daughter of Dr. Justin and lived on Washington Avenue, and I was just the baby-sitting orphan girl whose aunt took in sewing. I’ll never forget when Auntie got the telegram from Rivers, saying you two had eloped. ‘But Louise Justin could have had anybody,’ she kept repeating. ‘Auntie,’ I told her, ‘Rivers has an ease that makes him anybody’s equal. He has a sunny temperament and a gorgeous body. Any girl would be a fool to refuse Rivers, and that includes Louise Justin.’ I’m sorry, Louise, but I did say that.”

  “You were right to say it,” replied my mother softly. “And you were right about Rivers’s wonderful ease.”

  I sat eating my meat loaf and thinking about how my mother had eloped with my father instead of going to Sweet Briar. But she had been clever: she had saved her father the first semester’s unrefundable tuition by offering to mail the check herself a few days before she was to leave for college. “Oh, I’ll mail it at the corner box, I’m going out for a walk anyway,” she had said, and as soon as she was out of their sight she tore up the envelope with the check in it and dropped the pieces down the sewer grating. This story became one of my grandmother’s favorites because it illustrated both what a devoted daughter and a passionate, headstrong young woman my mother had been.

  Toward the end of the meal, when everyone had finished and was waiting for Becky to nibble a few more forkfuls of the ground meat she had painstakingly separated from the onions, Aunt Mona said, “I’ve got to rush off to the real-estate class. Do you mind holding the fort, Louise?”

  She always asked this, even though we all knew very well that one of the agreements of this new joint household was just that: my mother would “hold the fort” whenever Aunt Mona had to go to work or to her real-estate classes.

  “Of course I don’t mind. What else have I got to do?” The gracious martyr.

  “I’m sure Beck won’t be any trouble, will you, Beck? She’s got to work on her sundress for 4-H.”

  “I wish I’d never started the stupid thing,” said Becky vehemently. “I made a mistake and now I have to rip out the whole top part. Stupid dress.”

  “Be thankful you’re learning to sew, Beck. We didn’t have 4-H in our high school, did we, Louise? If I had been able to sew, I wouldn’t have had to wear those dowdy numbers my poor aunt whipped up for proms. I would have made myself something really stylish, from a Vogue pattern. Who knows, I might have captivated some eligible planter’s son with my haute couture, and my whole life would have been different.”

  Although my aunt winked as she said the part about the planter’s son, to show that she was getting wise to her own habit of running down her past, Becky scraped back her chair violently and rolled her eyes back in her head. As she was making her disdainful exit from the kitchen, my mother amazed me by saying, “Bring the dress down and let me have a look at it, Becky. I’m not a seamstress, but I’ve got lots of time and a pair of sharp nail scissors.”

  My cousin, without deigning to turn and face my mother, stopped long enough to raise her eyebrows. “Okay,” she said with a majestic shrug, and left.

  “Beck misses her father,” said Aunt Mona, clearing her daughter’s dishes. “She wasn’t always so abrupt.”

  It was too much. I took my plate and glass and eating utensils to the dishwasher, said, “Excuse me, please,” very distinctly, to impress upon them the difference between Becky and myself—I had a lot more reason to miss my father, whom I would never see again—and, with an aggrieved spirit, mounted the few carpeted stairs that led to the level of “my room.”

  Aunt Mona had decorated this room to greet me on my arrival, her brother’s fatherless child. But I was still trying to figure out what image of me she had in her mind when she chose the paint and the fabric, which assaulted my peace of mind whichever way I looked. The color of my walls was an unsettling purplish-pink. “Raspberry Ice” was its official name. Had my aunt, studying the samples in the paint store, picked the color for its name, thinking her niece would like raspberry ice cream? Nobody, I thought, could pick the color for its looks. And what about the figures of the milkmaids, row after row of them, with their wide skirts and pert, beauty-contest smiles, who adorned my curtains, the flounce around my dressing table, and the dust ruffle of my bed? Had Aunt Mona pictured me as being like that: a false-smiling, full-skirted girl? But how could she have? She had seen me at my father’s funeral. I wasn’t at all like that. Why had she picked the milkmaid fabric, then? Was there some obscure association in her mind between their accommodating facades and the old-fashioned graciousness of the South she couldn’t wait to leave but still retained nostalgia for?

  I found this hour of the day a particular trial. The evenings here contrasted so sadly with the “old” evenings in the house in Fredericksburg, before anyone had gotten sick or died. Evenings there had a comforting flow of communal awareness about them: you could feel the flow like a current moving through the rooms of the house, keeping us in touch with one another as we went about our separate pursuits. My grandfather might be closed in his study, with his slavery articles and “J. Sanity Bach”; my grandmother up in her bedroom, already in her nightgown and bed jacket, reading a novel from the library; my mother loafing unashamedly on the sun porch, leafing through a magazine or talking to my father if he was home; Jem already in bed in the room next to mine, where I could hear him going over his day aloud, in strange little phrases, while I did my homework. I luxuriated in being alone, I even loved my homework, because I felt, somehow, that I was everybody else in that house as well as myself, so I was not missing anything.

  But now there were new people in that house, strangers who had moved their own furniture in and would never know that we had always kept a vase of flowers by a certain window or pushed our chairs together in a certain way on the sun porch. Some other girl might at this very moment be lying in bed, under the eaves in my room, looking out at the thick foliage of the backyard and listening to the birds I had listened to last spring.

  This thought made me so sad I could not stay in the room. There was at least another hour until dark. There was no homework for me to do, because this was a rural school and teachers did not give homework during planting season. We had what were called “study-hour assignments,” which could all be done during the afternoon period assigned for them.

  I decided that, rather than getting depressed at dusk in “Raspberry Ice,” I would walk up to the old farmhouse that overlooked Lucas Meadows and think my thoughts there. I crouched in front of my dressing-table mirror and combed my hair. Was I pretty or not? I couldn’t tell.

  The piece of furniture that was now my dressing table had been Mr. Mott’s desk. This had been his room. He snored, Aunt Mona had explained, and also he tinkered. He had to have a place where he could take his transistor radio apart if he wanted to. Mott had a way of tinkering with things, Aunt Mona said, until she thought she would go out of her mind.

  Whenever I wanted to open the center drawer of my dressing table, I had to part the milkmaid fabric that Aunt Mona had tacked around it, and I always felt disconcerted when I saw the sturdy legs of Mr. Mott’s former desk beneath. It was like having him, hidden behind a skirt, spying on me in my room.

  As I went downstairs, I passed Becky coming up. She gave me a quirky raise of her eyebrows, which could have meant “Hi,” or “How dare you be on my stairs,” or “Isn’t life exasperating.”

  My mother was sitting on the living-room sofa. She already had Becky’s sundress and was picking out the seam. My cousin certainly hadn’t wasted any time.

  My mother was wearing her new, martyr’s look as she bent over Becky’s sewing. But she was a very pretty martyr, and something about the way she held her head made me think she saw herself now in the role of a
person who is determined to make suffering noble and beautiful.

  “I’m going up to that old empty farmhouse for a while,” I said from the doorway.

  She raised her light blue eyes from her work and smiled at me. I thought I glimpsed the ghost of the look she had rewarded me with occasionally in the old days, a flirtatious look that said: Something about you pleases me right now, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

  Maybe it was not too late yet: maybe I could still say or do something to persuade her to pack up our things and take the train south again. I had made no new friends at school yet. There was nothing in this new place that I would be sad to leave behind. Emboldened by this flicker of her old self that I had spotted, I made a wry face at Aunt Mona’s clear plastic runners, which led, in three directions, from the doorway to the main places one was expected to sit in the living room. This way, her seafoam-green wall-to-wall carpeting would be protected forever from a dirty footstep.

  “What’s she waiting for?” I said. “It’s like those women you see downtown with their hair in rollers. You wonder what the special event would have to be for them to take them out.”

  In the old days, my mother would have giggled and said, “Justin, don’t be naughty,” but in a way that signified that the nonmotherly part of her, the part that was not required to instill respect in me, approved of the truth in my “naughty” observation. But now she only said gravely, “Come and sit by me a minute.” She patted a place beside her. “I won’t keep you long.”

  I crossed Aunt Mona’s plastic bridge to the sofa and sat down beside my mother. She resumed picking out Becky’s errant seam with her nail scissors. The early-evening light was still strong, and, as she bent over her work, I noticed a new little line along the edge of her chin. It was nothing very awful, but it had a strange effect on me: it made me angry with her. I felt, unreasonably perhaps, that, in her present way of life, she was encouraging such lines, that she was purposely trying to transform her whole being as a way of avenging herself on her unhappy fate of losing all her supporters and protectors. But wasn’t I still here? Wasn’t Jem? And we needed her as she had been. This new image of her made it seem as if our glamorous, carefree mother had died along with everybody else.