The Finishing School Page 9

  “So tell me,” she asked in that low voice, managing to sound both confidential and amused. “I’m curious. Why did you never come back? Did your aunt warn you off?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that.”

  “Well, what was it?” We were the same height, but she seemed to be looking down on me indulgently.

  “Well, a lot of times people say to come and see them, but they’re just being polite, they don’t really mean it.”

  “I never ask people if I don’t mean it. However, I’m glad it was your Southern scruples that kept you away. I was afraid your aunt might have warned you off. Didn’t you tell her we met?”

  “Yes, ma’—I mean, yes. I did.”

  She smiled at my truncated “ma’am.” “And did she tell you all about my brother?”

  “She told me about … the recital.”

  “Ah, yes, that ill-fated recital. I told Julie he was making a mistake to give in to the parents and have it there. That Dutch Reformed Church has vivid personal associations for my brother. But nobody knew that, you see. All the parents were clamoring for the church because there was more room, but what they didn’t know was the powerful influence of my brother’s memories. This year we had the recital at our house again, and everything went beautifully: no passionate music or untoward interruptions. The parents got their money’s worth, and no one was inconvenienced by the threat of real Art. Poor Julie didn’t even realize what he’d done to Becky. I had to explain it to him afterward. He had simply been caught up in all those old associations—artists are more sensitive to the atmospheres around them—and then his favorite former student happened to pass by, and he thought he would be doing something charming and spontaneous by inviting him to come in and play. Julie thought it would be an inspiration to the children and the parents: ‘See what can happen if you practice?’—that sort of thing. He had no idea he was doing any harm, or that Becky would take it personally. My brother is so tenderhearted, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. I mean that literally. The other night, during dinner, a gnat fell into his wine, and he went to great trouble to rescue it and let it dry on his fingernail until it could fly off again. That’s how tenderhearted he is.”

  “Well,” I said, “Becky has her ballet now, and she’s doing well with that, so I guess no real harm was done.”

  “Ah, yes, Imogene Roosa,” said Ursula wryly. “A much safer mentor for little girls who want to express themselves and be rewarded for it. I went to school with Imogene. In those days we all went to a one-room schoolhouse, there were that few of us. There were Imogene and Abel Cristiana, and myself and Julie, and a few others. Well, look. If your aunt didn’t go so far as to tell you to eschew the DeVanes, why don’t you ride over and have tea with us tomorrow? We always have it at four on Sundays. Just continue on Old Clove past that haywagon road you turned into before, and you’ll come to our house. It’s the ancient stone job, with black shutters. If it’s as nice as it is now, we’ll have it down on the terrace. Is that specific enough to convince you I’m not just being polite?”

  “I’d like to very much.” I had to stop myself from adding, “If you’re sure you really want me.” The invitation, coming so suddenly, had startled me. I had hoped to see her again, hoped she might ask me to come back to the hut, but somehow I had not expected an invitation to tea.

  “Good! I want you to meet my brother. We’ll have a nice high tea and amuse one another.” She patted me on the shoulder and strode off to an old green station wagon with wooden sides. The wagon door groaned on its hinges when she opened it, and she laughed and called back, “Neither of us is as young as we used to be! À tout à l’heure, then.”

  When I got back to Lucas Meadows, they wanted to know what had taken me so long, but I said nothing about meeting anyone. I simply said I hadn’t meant to take so long. I was not a secretive person, and I would have told my mother about the invitation later, when we were alone. The reason I didn’t tell at once—or so I reasoned—was that I didn’t want to bring up the DeVanes in front of Becky. And maybe also I wanted to keep the meeting with Ursula—which had happened, as such things inevitably do, just when I had stopped anticipating it—to myself for a few hours. Perhaps I felt I needed to go over it in my mind, relishing its details, before sharing it with someone else. At any rate, I said nothing, and my silence was to cause difficulties later in the day.

  At lunch, Becky was still immersed in the Craven Ravenel story (as I was immersed in my recent meeting with Ursula DeVane), and, for once, she was the most talkative person at the table. She wanted to know what Craven Ravenel had said to my mother during the last dance; had he been angry or pleased to have been “signed up” like that? And had she ever seen him again?

  “I don’t remember a single thing he said,” my mother replied, laughing. “You’ve got to realize, I was beside myself. I felt I had made magic happen. No, he wasn’t angry, I think he admired my little maneuver. It was an enterprising thing to have done. Next to the way I arranged for my elopement with your uncle Rivers, it was probably the most enterprising thing I have ever done. I was just determined to have that boy dance with me, and I made it happen. But you know, my mother and I went back home to Virginia a few days later and I didn’t think about him anymore. That may sound strange, after all the fuss I made, but it was as if … well, as if his magic never crossed the state line of South Carolina. He was the best-looking boy at the dance, and I wanted to crown the evening with him. I suppose I thought it was my due, or something. I’m afraid, Becky, that I was a very spoiled girl, in many ways. I mean, I always had excellent manners, that was a point of pride with me, but I did expect the sun and the moon on a silver platter—and usually got it in those days! As a matter of fact, I did see Craven Ravenel again. It was during the war, and I was already married and a mother. Honey and I and Justin, who was only a baby, had gone down to Pawleys Island to spend the first two weeks of June, as we always did. Those were the only two weeks of the year that my mother and father agreed to separate. He went up to The Greenbrier, in West Virginia, and played golf. My father liked his golf, and he liked the company of other men, and my mother respected this. And she liked to be with her relatives and the friends she had grown up with in South Carolina, and my father, who was a taciturn man, found their ‘effusions,’ as he called them, a little wearing on his nerves. So they went their own ways, those two weeks every year, and I believe that’s why they had such a good marriage the other fifty weeks of the year.

  “Anyway, it so happened that Craven Ravenel was stationed at Myrtle Beach at that time, and he drove over to Pawleys to see some friends—and we met again. He shook my hand and smiled and said, ‘I have never forgotten that last dance.’ You see, there were other people around, and, as he was a gentleman, he didn’t want to embarrass me by saying any more. And then we talked a little and he learned I was married and had a baby. He looked just a shade disappointed, but not long afterward I heard that he had married a rich girl from his hometown.”

  “Were you sorry you were married when you saw him again?” asked Becky, who had listened respectfully, with (for Becky) something like awe, to my mother’s story.

  “Sorry? Gracious no, honey. I had what I wanted. I wish you could have known your uncle Rivers, Becky. He was the most charming man in the world. Everyone who met him said so.”

  Becky looked dubious. “How was he charming? In what way?”

  “Well … in just every way.” My mother, not used to being contradicted on this subject, cast about for an example. “I can’t think of anything specific, but … well, his face, for one thing, the expression on his face. It was the expression of someone with a happy, slightly mischievous secret, and you felt it included you. And even in the midst of a setback, Rivers had this wonderful way of making you feel that the very next day was going to be great.”

  Then she paused and looked around and seemed surprised to find herself in Aunt Mona’s kitchen, sitting around with a bunch of children over the remains of a tunafish cass
erole. A moment of pain and amazement passed over her face. “Oh no,” she said in a softer voice, “I didn’t regret being married when I saw Craven Ravenel again. I mean, he was still very handsome, and there was a certain sad, romantic quality to our meeting again, but what I had felt for him had less to do with love than with … satisfying my pride. There’s a whole world of difference between the two feelings, Becky.”

  For the first time since we had come to live at Aunt Mona’s, Becky took her own plate and glass and fork to the dishwasher. She did it with much ceremony, looking at my mother once or twice to make sure she was watching. I attributed this change in my cousin’s behavior to my mother’s remark about having always had pride in her own manners, even though she (too) had been a spoiled child.

  I spent the early afternoon on the back porch of the empty farmhouse on the hill. I had my newfound box of paints, a watercolor block, some rags, and a jar of water. Facing away from the hivelike drone of the fathers’ lawnmowers in our development below, I lost myself in the production of an imaginary scene that appealed to my mood: a woman in a long dress stood at a shoreline, looking out to sea. As I evoked the whitecaps by painting the darker waters around their tips, I went over my dialogue with Ursula DeVane: first from my side, to recall how each of her remarks had affected me, and then from her side, to imagine how my remarks had impressed her. Then I worried about tomorrow: “We’ll have a nice high tea and amuse one another,” she had said. I was not very confident of my powers to amuse on demand. During our two meetings so far, I had not been very interesting or eloquent. I tried to think of things I could say tomorrow that might or might not be amusing but that would reveal my life to have some interesting aspects.

  Then, as I brushed in the shadows in the folds of my figure’s long skirt—it was supposed to be blowing a little in the wind—I fell to wondering why someone as interesting as Ursula DeVane would invite someone like me to tea. Had she done it to prove a point, to prove that she had meant it when she had invited me to come back to the pond? Or had it been a spontaneous, queenly gesture on her part, because she could see it would mean a lot to me? Or had she wanted me to meet her brother, this peculiar man about whom I had heard no good words, except from her? Maybe she wanted me to come so that I could judge Julian DeVane for myself. (I imagined possible ways a young girl might irritate his sensitive artistic nature, and resolved to commit none of them tomorrow. I was not at all sure that I would like him, but I wanted him to like me, for her sake.)

  Then my attention was drawn back to the figure I had created on the watercolor block. Her back was to me, and, judging from the long dress, she was from another time. But who was she, and what was she waiting for? Was she someone to whose story I was attracted because of its uncertainty and pathos, or was she someone I wanted to be? I painted in some storm clouds, not because I wished her trouble, but because they made the scene more charged with potential drama. Then I decided to “enter into a trance” and let her speak aloud. What would she say if she were to speak aloud at just this moment in the picture?

  “Oh, when, if ever, is he coming back to me?” I intoned in a solemn voice. The words had come easily to me, as things were supposed to do in a trance, but I didn’t like the hopeless, self-pitying sound of them. I wondered if it would be okay to start over. Surely, if the words made me feel so dissatisfied, they couldn’t have been the right ones. I studied the woman’s figure, and the horizon which she faced, and the clouds. They might be storm clouds, or they might just be dark, heavy clouds that would make her life more interesting but weren’t necessarily deadly. “What is out there?” I decided she might say. As soon as I had decided that, I “heard” the next words; they came exactly as they were supposed to, as if dictated by an inevitable force.

  “What is out there?” I asked, in a low, level voice. And then I answered my question with the new words, in a voice that thrilled me with its timbre and control. “Soon I shall know.” The effect was so great that I felt almost as if I had turned into someone else. I was filled with a strange elation.

  “What is out there? Soon I shall know,” I repeated, wiping off my brushes and emptying the jar of cloudy water on the ground beneath the farmhouse stairs.

  As I descended the hill toward the lookalike houses of Lucas Meadows, I saw Mr. Mott, his lawn mowing completed, and all of the members of our household gathered in our driveway. I was still so much under the spell I had cast on myself through art and daydreaming that I was afraid my transformation would be visible to them. I made an effort to redisguise myself as the adolescent they believed me to be. As Jem came running toward me, I turned the picture on the watercolor block inward, hoping that no one would ask to see what I’d been doing.

  “Guess what!” Jem cried, racing up to me and seizing me by one of the pockets in my jeans. “Mott has invited you and me to the houseboat tomorrow! We’re going to charcoal hamburgers on deck.”

  “Tomorrow? What time tomorrow?” As my little brother tugged me possessively toward our family group, I realized they were waiting for me to show some excitement about Mr. Mott’s benevolent offer.

  “If it’s all right, I’ll come and pick you kids up around four,” said steady Mr. Mott, running his palm across his short, prickly crew cut. His voice was full of complacency. Here he had mowed the lawn of a house in which he didn’t even live anymore, and now, on top of that, he was inviting his daughter’s fatherless cousins to charcoal hamburgers on his deck. Becky, standing ready with her little overnight suitcase, looked complacent, too: wasn’t her father wonderful to do this for us?

  “But I can’t go tomorrow at four,” I said, wishing IBM had transferred Mr. Mott to some distant site, so he could not be such a dutiful uncle. I also wished now that I had said something to my mother about the other invitation: she could have stopped all this.

  “You can’t?” screamed Jem incredulously. “Why can’t you?”

  “Because …” I sought my mother’s eyes. “I’ve already promised to go somewhere else. I’ve been invited to tea tomorrow at four.”

  “Tea?” chimed in Aunt Mona, whose freshly sprayed coiffure made a feeble attempt to quiver. “Who in this place has tea? Oh, oh, wait a minute, I’ll bet I know.” And she gave me a hideous, knowing wink. “Your grand friend over on Old Clove Road.”

  “Ann Cristiana?” my mother asked uncertainly.

  “No, ma’am.” The serious Mott and his impatient daughter stood waiting for me to explain myself. I couldn’t utter the incriminating name of Becky’s former music teacher before them. “It’s just that woman I met, you know, a few weeks ago, when I was riding my bike on Old Clove Road. I saw her at Terwiliger’s when I went for our mushroom soup, and she asked me for tomorrow at four, and … I’ve already said I would.” To my dismay, tears started to well up in my eyes. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Mott,” I managed to say before anyone saw them, “I’d like to come another time, if that’s okay.” And then I wheeled around and started for the house as fast as I could.

  “Does that mean I can’t go either?” I heard Jem wail. Followed by the solemn assurance of the good Mr. Mott that he would come and pick Jem up just as planned.

  “Oh damn, oh hell,” I cursed tearfully, slamming the door of my room. How had one simple, independent act of accepting an invitation to tea compromised me so? After all, I wasn’t a baby anymore. I wasn’t even a child. I was a person struggling to stay free of all the fetters trying to bind me to a boring, ordinary, mediocre life in which I was obliged to exist for a few more years until I could have my own life, my own place, free from petty restraints and clinging baby brothers and hurt looks from mothers and hideous winks from know-it-all aunts.

  I paced the confines of “Raspberry Ice,” growing more agitated and aggrieved. If only I could be eighteen—no, better twenty-one, for safety! Then I could come and go as I liked, I could have a job and earn my own money and paint and furnish my room as I pleased. I could see the people who attracted me and stimulated me and brought me
closer to the life that I was determined to have for myself. I could not, as yet, imagine this life I wanted, but I could recognize very well the one I didn’t want: it was all around me! It was threatening to suck me in.

  To console myself, I took a look at the watercolor I had done, hoping it would bring back to me the rapturous feeling I’d had on the hill: that self-transformation did lie in my powers. But here in the confines of “Raspberry Ice” the painting had suffered a sea change. The figure was no longer mysterious or potent or even lifelike. What was worse, I saw now that her outline bore a very close resemblance to the figures of the milkmaids who adorned my curtains, flounces, and dust ruffle. She had the same wasp waist, and her skirt fell in similar folds. I felt that if she should suddenly turn around, she would smile at me with their same shallow smile. I remembered a radio drama my grandmother and I had listened to once, in her bed. We had snuggled up close, one winter evening, and let ourselves be scared silly by a program. It was the story of a little girl whose mother loses her in a huge department store. The little girl is left in the store all night, and the mannequins come to life and take her back to live with them, make her one of them. The next day, the mother comes back to the store to continue her search with the police for her little girl. They do not find her, of course, because the little girl has been turned into a mannequin. At the end of the program, the mother passes the mannequin that is her own frozen child. The mother remarks tearfully that the mannequin looks just like her lost daughter. The policemen tell her that she is exhausted to the point of imagining things, and they lead her away.

  Oh God, I thought, what if “Raspberry Ice” and Lucas Meadows get me, after all? Even now, they were closing in on my soul.

  What if my mother wouldn’t let me go tomorrow? I would fight for the right to go, if it came to that.

  As it turned out, no battle was necessary. After Mr. Mott and Becky had driven off, my mother came up to my room and told me not to worry any more about tomorrow, but that she hoped in future I would tell her my plans ahead of time and prevent this sort of confusion. Then, seating herself on the edge of my bed, she inquired gently about Ursula DeVane. How, exactly, had we met? What had we talked about? Wasn’t she much older? What did I know about her history?