The Finishing School Read online

  Mrs. Cristiana was busy preparing supper for her large family, and, as neither Ed nor Ann was old enough to drive, it fell to Mr. Cristiana to take me home. To my embarrassment, I overheard Ed and his father speaking outside in the stableyard while I was upstairs in the bathroom.

  “Isn’t she riding her bike?” the father asked gruffly.

  “No, Dad. She came on the bus with us.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Over in Lucas Meadows. You know, those new houses?”

  A silence. “Who’s going to hose down Turk’s tendon? It’s got to be done now.”

  “I guess I will.”

  “You guessed right. Well, tell her to come on. I haven’t got all day.”

  The horsebreeder removed some tools from the passenger side of the truck, and I climbed in.

  “Lucas Meadows, right?” He started the engine with a roar.

  “Yes sir.” Sitting beside him in my jodhpurs, a department store shopping bag containing my school clothes on my lap, I felt how superfluous I must seem to his concerns.

  We started down Old Clove Road. He kept his eyes straight ahead and might as well have forgotten me. He smelled strongly of sweat and horse and some pungent liniment, probably something he had been rubbing on the stallion’s sore tendon. It would be at least eight minutes, I calculated, before we would be in Lucas Meadows, and I wished I could just blank out until that time: it would certainly make no difference to him. But I had been brought up to make polite conversation with my elders so as not to seem “sullen.” “Speak to them about what they know, and what it is appropriate for you to know,” my grandmother had instructed me once, when our rector and his wife arrived too early for a visit and I had to go down and entertain them while my grandmother finished dressing. “And steer clear of topics that are too familiar, or original,” she had added, as I left her bedroom.

  I told Mr. Cristiana that I was very sorry to hear about Turk’s tendon. Would it be all right, did he think?

  Then I had to repeat myself because I had apparently startled him out of some deep thought. I spoke louder, this time, to be heard over the noise of the truck.

  “Oh, he’ll be okay,” said the horsebreeder.

  “Did he stumble?” I asked.

  “Nope. A mare kicked him. It’s what you might call an occupational injury.” He gave a short, dry laugh.

  “Oh, I see,” I said enthusiastically, not seeing at all.

  He turned then and looked at me. “That’s right. You were there, weren’t you? You did see. She kicked hell out of him. Thank God she was booted. Did your people keep horses down south?”

  “No sir.” So he had actually mentioned it: how he had caught me watching the horses. But it had not been as awkward as it could have been.

  We rode for a minute without saying anything. Then he declared, “But I still hold out for corral breeding.”

  “Oh, do you? Why?”

  “Well, because …” He narrowed his eyes at the road in front, and his face and neck grew ruddier. It must have occurred to him that it might not be quite the thing to discuss breeding methods with a strange young girl he was driving home. But his passion got the better of him. “My father did it that way, and his father before him. They didn’t tie a mare up with all these hobbles and twitches. They would have laughed at me for putting on the boots. And the most unnatural thing of all is this new ‘colt-by-mail-order’ business. Who’s to say what kind of material you’re going to get through the damn mail.”

  “The mail?” I squeaked. What was he talking about?

  “Artificial insemination,” he replied brusquely.

  I thought my grandmother would have given me about a “C-minus” for that conversation.

  We rode on for what seemed another eighty minutes, and we still hadn’t left Old Clove Road. I knew I should leave well enough (or not so well enough) alone, but I was more than ever determined to have a successful conversation with him.

  “My uncle, Mr. Mott, said—”

  “Oh, Eric Mott’s your uncle? How is he?”

  “He’s just fine. He lives on a houseboat now. He and my aunt separated.”

  “I think I heard something about it. He still with IBM?”

  “Oh yes. It’s a very friendly separation,” I went on. “He comes over every Saturday and mows the lawn and sees to things around the house.”

  “That’s nice of him,” said the horsebreeder dryly.

  “He said you had a very good war.”

  This took Mr. Cristiana aback for a minute. Then he said, “I made the most of what I got. If you want to call that good.” But I caught a pride in his tone that made me think it was safe to go on.

  “What did you … get?”

  “Well, first I got shot down. But I flew eleven missions first. After they shot me down, they put me in a German prison camp. That was no fun. But horses got me out.” He looked at me in that provocative way people do when they want you to ask them to go on. I had found the right subject, I decided.

  “Horses?”

  “The Germans found out I was good with horses. This was in the winter of ’forty-four, when the Russians were on their way into Germany. Roosevelt had made this deal with the Russians, see, that they could go in and take the east part of Germany and we’d wait and take the west part—but don’t get me started on Roosevelt. Anyway, the Germans wanted to get their Trakehner horses out. The Trakehners were the best German breed of horse there was … beautiful, powerful horses … a unique breed of horses … and the big Trakehner stud farm lay right in the path of the Russians, in a part of Germany that later became Poland. Well, they asked me to help out, and I did. A German officer who’d lost an arm in the war and myself got a hundred mares and stallions to what’s now West Germany. Altogether, about nine hundred horses were saved. I might go back there one day and visit the descendants of those horses. I might even look up that German officer. We had a lot in common. We both grew up on farms where horses were raised. If he’s still alive, I’d like to thank him. You know what he did?”

  “No sir, what?”

  “After we got the horses to the farms where they were going, he looked the other way and let me escape to the Allied front.”

  I thought it was a very exciting story. I especially liked the part about the one-armed German officer looking the other way. It expressed a kind of camaraderie I wanted to believe existed in the larger world. But one point bothered me, a point having to do with patriotism. My grandmother would no doubt have advised me to leave well enough alone (for we had now had a successful conversation), but I wanted to clear up something. Why was it considered all right, by such people as Mr. Mott, that Abel Cristiana had helped the enemy save their horses, when Julian DeVane was criticized simply for staying too long in a country that sympathized with the enemy? Mr. Mott had said Mr. Cristiana had had a good war, whereas, according to Aunt Mona, he considered Julian DeVane practically a traitor. I decided it must have something to do with bravery. Mr. Cristiana had proved his bravery by getting shot down, whereas Julian DeVane hadn’t joined up until the war was almost over. But to Julian DeVane, music came before fighting; hadn’t Ed said that, even when he was young, Julian DeVane would not fight with his hands because of his talent? Julian DeVane had been pursuing his talent in Argentina, and Mr. Cristiana had been true to his love for horses in enemy territory. But Mr. Cristiana had been brave, and Julian DeVane hadn’t. I wondered how Ursula DeVane would defend her brother on this question.

  “Did you ever feel you were being disloyal,” I asked Mr. Cristiana, “when you were helping the Germans?”

  “I wasn’t helping the Germans, I was helping the horses. They didn’t cause the war. The horses didn’t vote for Adolf Hitler. If we’d left them there for the Russians, the breed would probably be extinct by now. Those Bolsheviks would have made horsemeat out of them.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “On a scale between Russian and German,” pursued the horsebreeder more heatedl
y, “give me German any day. We’ve got more in common with the Germans. And while we’re on the subject of loyalty, I’ll tell you something else: I had a lot more respect for that German officer riding all that distance when he’d just had an arm amputated, in order to save those lovely Trakehners, than I have for some of my close neighbors.”

  And he scowled so angrily at the houses, as we turned into Lucas Meadows, that I thought he would have gladly sold us all—especially one talkative young girl—down the river for the sake of that German officer. But after I had thanked him for the ride, and he had looked at me as though I hadn’t turned out to be quite as silly as he had expected, and had said, “You come back and ride again,” and I was starting up the front walk of our yellow house with its lamp in the window, I knew he had probably been thinking of one particular neighbor over on Old Clove Road.

  IV.

  On Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend it rained, so Mr. Mott could not cut the grass. He telephoned to say it was supposed to clear up by early afternoon; meanwhile, if it was all right with us, he would spend the morning making some repairs on the houseboat and collect Becky in the afternoon.

  This change of plans, along with the rain, upset the household. Becky pouted because her father always took her out to lunch on Saturday. Jem was grumpy because he could not play outside. Aunt Mona worked half-days on Saturdays at the travel agency in Kingston, and after that she always had her hair done, so my mother was pretty much stuck with the job of amusing us. She suggested we all help her go through some boxes from Fredericksburg she hadn’t yet unpacked, and see what we could find.

  As the things came out of the boxes, I could remember my mother hastily packing them in, almost vengeful in her grief. Supposedly I had been helping, but even at that zero hour, with our reservations already booked on the train to Aunt Mona’s, I had been trying to talk her out of going. Now, as each thing was withdrawn from the boxes, I could remember arguments I had been making as it had been put in. There was my old paint set, my father’s shoeshine kit, the Ink Spots album they had loved to dance to, and the little enamel-topped card box in which my grandmother had kept her solitaire deck: that had been when we were packing up things we had used on the sun porch. I had been standing by the open windows (for it was already quite warm) and gazing out on my grandmother’s garden, where, from the middle of March to the middle of October, there was a succession of flowers. I had been advancing my arguments for that small house, somewhere in town, where we could live in cheerful frugality and still have all our old friends and landmarks. Finally, having heard all she could stand, my mother told me I was “too young” to have thought out all the complications of staying in a place when your supports were gone. Rather than being reminded constantly of how much better things used to be, she said, it was far better to start over again where nobody knew you. And just as I was going to protest that there was no reason to go to such extremes, she silenced me with the adult’s ultimate ploy: she had made the decision, she said, and, since I was still a child, I would have to abide by it.

  So, when my mother, beginning on another box, to divert Jem and Becky on this rainy Saturday, pulled out a yellow taffeta evening dress that she had worn as a girl, and said she had saved it for me, and asked me to try it on, I was still smarting from our argument on the sun porch back in Fredericksburg. I said I didn’t “feel like it, right now,” even though I had been the one who had begged her to save that dress when she was about to put it in the Salvation Army box with my father’s and grandparents’ clothes.

  “I’ll try it. Let me try it on,” said Becky, who had been eyeing the dress with a grudging respect ever since my mother had unfolded it and shaken out its creases. She disappeared into the utility room (now Jem’s bedroom), and we heard the rustling of the taffeta and fast breathing from her exertions. Then she called out to my mother, “Can you come and help me zip this up?” Becky never used anyone’s name when she was addressing them, but she had perfected her omission to such an art that everybody always knew whom she meant. My mother, with her new humble manner, went at once to zip up Becky.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I wore that dress,” my mother told Becky, as my cousin stalked back and forth in front of the mirror, holding the dress to her nonexistent bosoms to keep it from falling down. “I was sixteen and my mother had taken me down to South Carolina to visit some of her people. A cousin gave a dance in my honor, and there was this perfectly gorgeous boy at that dance, his name was Craven Ravenel. In those days, we had cards at dances and the boys would come up to you and write their names beside the dances they wanted. I was almost all filled up—I was the guest of honor, after all—and still Craven Ravenel had not asked me for one of the dances. We hadn’t even been introduced yet, and I was getting worried. So you know what I did? When nobody was looking, I wrote his name in for the last dance.”

  “But what if he’d asked some other girl for the last dance?” asked Becky, swishing back and forth in front of the mirror with one of her ballerina poses. I knew this story well, but this was Becky’s first time hearing it.

  “I’m coming to that,” said my mother, smiling at Becky. “What happened was, when other boys came to ask me for the last dance, I would look down at my card and say, ‘Oh, I believe I’ve already given that dance to someone called Craven Ravenel.’ And the news got back to him, because, when the last dance came, suddenly there he was. ‘Miss Louise Justin,’ he said formally, ‘I hear you have given me the honor of the last dance.’ And so I danced the last dance with Craven Ravenel.”

  “But what would you have done if he had already asked some other girl for the last dance?” persisted Becky, who had listened intently to the story.

  “Oh, I had prepared for that, too,” said my mother. “If he hadn’t shown up before the band started playing, I was going to tell my cousin I had a headache and had to go upstairs and lie down. The dance was being held at her house. And then everybody would have assumed that poor Craven Ravenel had had to find another dance partner at the last minute.”

  As Mr. Mott had predicted, the rain stopped. Shortly before lunchtime, the sun came out, and my mother said, “Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, what is your pleasure for lunch?” Telling the old story had restored some of her former jauntiness. Jem said he’d like a tuna casserole, and after my mother, with just a touch of humor in her solicitation, had ascertained that Becky had nothing against tuna, cream of mushroom soup, potato chips, or a combination of those ingredients, I volunteered to ride down to Terwiliger’s to pick up the needed can of soup. After my refusal to try on the dress, I thought it would become me to make this small peace offering.

  Terwiliger’s was a country store, run by an old farmer. It smelled of animal feeds and fertilizers and catered to people who grew things; but it suffered consumers like ourselves when we ran out of eggs or forgot some staple from the big Kingston supermarket.

  I had just located the only can of cream of mushroom soup on the depleted shelf and was blowing the dust off it, when Ursula DeVane came sauntering toward me. She was wearing Army fatigue clothes (my father had brought home some like that) and her hair was quite damp and curled all around her face. She balanced a little box of green-leafed plants on the tips of her forefingers, as if she were a waiter about to serve them.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about you.” she began, as if we were simply continuing our conversation from several weeks before. “I’ve been thinking about why you never came back for that swim.” She brandished the little box close to my nose. The leaves emanated a smell like licorice. “Isn’t it a wonderful smell, basil? I planted our vegetable garden this morning. Just put on my slicker and planted everything in the rain. It’s the ideal way, in a soft rain. You don’t have to water afterward. Then I went in and was running my hot bath and was just about to pour the bubbles in, when I remembered I’d forgotten the basil! Do you know what I concluded when you didn’t come back?”

  “What?”

  “I
concluded”—and the smile that was hers alone made its irrepressible way over her features—“that you were afraid of snakes.”

  I must have answered something. I had forgotten how compelling her voice could be, with its low, rich timbre that was both intimate and ironic. Then we were walking together to the cash register, where the dour old farmer, Mr. Terwiliger, waited.

  “Would you believe it, Twiggy,” said Ursula, going first. “I forgot to plant basil flats.” She took a wallet from her pants pocket and fished out a wrinkled dollar bill.

  The old farmer pushed it away. “No charge for the basil,” he said.

  “Now, Twiggy.” She pushed the bill forward again. “I insist. Otherwise I’ll have to start shopping all the way over in Kingston, where they’ll be glad to take my money.”

  He folded his arms across the bib of his overalls. “An old man can’t give a gift?”

  Ursula gave him a look of affectionate exasperation and put the dollar back in the wallet. “Every time Julian and I sprinkle basil on our tomatoes, we will think of you, Twiggy,” she said.

  “Did you put your cutworm collars around your tomatoes yet?” he asked gruffly, meanwhile showing no hesitation at accepting my money.

  “No, but I’ll go and do it,” said Ursula obediently.

  “Better not wait,” cautioned the old man.

  We went out into the parking lot. The wet green trees sparkled in the sunshine and the birds were singing loudly.