The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  “I hope you’ll play for me sometime, too,” I said. “I mean, when you know me better, of course.”

  He regarded me with his somber brown eyes. “She has a nice voice, hasn’t she, Sissie? Most young girls are so shrill and edgy.”

  “ ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman,’ ” intoned Ursula, in a deep, caressing voice. “We did King Lear when I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. Only I wasn’t Cordelia, I was Goneril. I was always being cast in those tough roles for women. I’ve been Hedda, and Medea, and if I hadn’t had to rush back to America I was going to be Saint Joan. Now you, Justin, would make a perfect Cordelia. Wouldn’t she, Julie?”

  “P-possibly,” said Julian DeVane. “If it’s in her nature to want to perform before coughing crowds.”

  “You are incorrigible, Julie, but I love you anyway.”

  “That’s lucky for me, isn’t it?” replied the brother, sending her a rueful little smile. Then he crumbled a bit of bread between his long, delicate fingers and, crouching low in his chair, sprinkled it carefully in the pathway of an ant.

  “Tell me, Justin,” said Ursula, “how do you find living here? I mean, how does Clove compare with your hometown?”

  “Well, the two places are very different.”

  “Yes, I know that,” she said impatiently, “but how?” I couldn’t help feeling this was some sort of test of my mental acuity.

  I cast about for some out-of-the-ordinary thing to say. All I could come up with was that the people up here seemed more deep down in themselves that the people back home. She liked this remark; it interested her. She fixed the flashing brown eyes on me and told me to pursue the subject further: How, “deep down”? Be more specific. Could I think of examples? Comparisons?

  But then my mind blanked, the way it still does when someone asks me who were the major influences on my life, or what good plays I’ve seen during the past year. I knew I had an answer somewhere in myself, but I couldn’t perform the necessary function of translating it into speech on demand. I stumbled around the question, taking shameless detours into the deaths in our family—the one subject I had come prepared to talk about—and sounding more and more stupid and scatterbrained and inconclusive. And yet I could see, from the motions of her expressive face, that her agile, grasping mind was darting here and there, seizing on my incoherent morsels and forming them into impressions of what kind of person I was and how my mind worked. I could somehow tell that she, in her imperious way, had already decided that I was going to be “worthwhile.” I think I already knew she was the kind of woman who, once she had made up her mind to like somebody, even if it had been an impulsive decision, would invest that person with all sorts of interesting and romantic aspects rather than admit she had been wrong.

  “How do you get on with your cousin Becky?” she asked, with an impish twitch at the corner of her mouth.

  I glanced over at Julian, who seemed engrossed in the gathering conclave of ants he had enticed forth with his bread crumbs. “Well, we’re not very close,” I said. “I mean, I tried to be friends at first, but she keeps to herself most of the time. If you try to make conversation, she can be very abrupt. She gives me odd looks I can never figure out. They might mean anything.”

  “From her point of view, you must seem a terrible threat,” said Ursula.

  “A threat?” This was something I had never considered. “How?”

  “You’ve got a sweetness she doesn’t have. I don’t mean a cloying, goody-goody sweetness, God preserve us from that, but a certain subtle sympathy that makes people trust you, seek you out. If I had been her age and you had moved into my house, I would have felt … perhaps not threatened, because I could always stand up for myself, but I would have felt competitive. I would have taken a good look at your ways, and then I would have examined my ways, and … well!” She gave a sharp, harsh laugh. “If it had been I, I might have found some way to depose you or drive you away. However, if I weren’t so sure of myself, I would probably pout … or go underground until I had assessed the situation more carefully. And then, don’t forget, you’re older. At that age, two or three years can seem a hopeless gulf for the younger person. Exactly how old are you, anyway?”

  “I’ll be fourteen in two weeks,” I said.

  “Two weeks! What day is your birthday?”

  “June fourteenth,” I said shyly, wondering if she would feel she had to send me a card.

  “June fourteenth, June fourteenth, why does that date ring a bell, I wonder?”

  Julian DeVane looked up from his ants. “Don’t you remember, Sissie?”

  “No! What happened on June fourteenth?”

  “That’s the day you sailed for France on the Normandie.”

  “Oh God, so it was. June fourteenth, 1939. Getting away at last! Oh, it will be good to have you around, Julie, when I become senile. I can simply say”—and she affected the querulous voice of an old lady—“ ‘Now let me see, what happened on June fourteenth?’ And you’ll snap right back with ‘Normandie, dear Sissie, pier—’ Do you remember the pier number? I don’t.”

  “No, but I remember the sailing time. Three p.m. I felt dreadful. I was sure I was never going to s-see you again.”

  “Well, I can recall worrying I was never going to see you again a couple of times, with a lot more reason,” she retorted, her tone thick with innuendo, “so we can call it even.”

  A look so full of private associations passed between sister and brother that I felt left out, almost jealous of their closeness. Then, with a weary smile, Julian returned his attention to the ants. After a moment, he said musingly, “You know, I’ve watched them carry their dead away. They’re a highly organized society—they have a great love of home, I read somewhere—and they’re always helping one another out. I like w-watching them.”

  “We know you do,” said Ursula wryly. “You made poor Jill Van Kleek postpone her lesson for almost half an hour so you wouldn’t miss the baby cardinals.” To me she explained, “We had a nest of cardinals in the shrubbery outside our living room, and Julie made that little girl I told you about—the one who plays like a robot—stand at the window and watch with him until all three fledglings took off one morning.”

  “It was a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle,” he replied, leaning down to watch the ants carrying away the crumbs in a militaristic little procession. “Jill’s playing will remain pretty much the same after all the b-birds have flown.”

  Ursula and I continued talking. She was still being the demanding inquisitor, trying to make me formulate my thoughts. “That was hard,” she said, “to have all those people you loved die within such a short time. Three family members dead within less than two years, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was a real tragedy,” I replied, somewhat self-importantly.

  “No, dear, it was not a tragedy,” she surprised me by saying. “It was unfortunate, it must have been extremely sad and painful, but you mustn’t call it tragedy.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Tragedy is something different from misfortune or catastrophe,” said Ursula. “When something terrible happens and it can be traced back directly to the inevitable process of someone’s living out his destiny, that is called tragedy. There is a foredoomed quality about tragedy. There is nothing random or accidental about it, when you look closely and examine the causes that led up to it. Tragedy is when you can look back and say: ‘Given who that person was, and how he, or she, habitually confronted life, this was bound to happen.’ Tragedy has the shape of a beautiful, inescapable pattern. Look at Lear. Or at Oedipus. Or Hamlet. Every time we watch their stories being reenacted, we suffer them afresh, no matter how many times we’ve seen them before. Oh no! we think, each time we watch, here they go again! But the paradox is that their suffering purges us as we suffer with them vicariously. It sometimes allows us to take warning and escape our own destruction.”

  Interlacing her fingers on her lap, she
lifted her head and gazed raptly at the skies, looking quite satisfied with her eloquent discourse.

  There was a silence. Then, abruptly, Julian DeVane rose. “I’m going up to the house,” he said.

  Ursula snapped out of her raptness at once. “But why?” she asked, looking almost afraid of him. “I thought we were all getting on so well.”

  “We were. But now there is a b-blot on the view.”

  Ursula looked out at the fields, where the afternoon shadows were deepening. I looked, too, and saw a man riding slowly and deliberately along. He reined in his horse, appeared to be studying the ground, then rode slowly on again.

  “Oh God,” murmured Ursula.

  Julian DeVane stood above me. “It was nice to meet you,” he said, offering me his hand. His face had twisted petulantly, but his eyes absolved me from the cause of his annoyance. “Happy b-birthday, if I don’t see you b-before.”

  He climbed the hill rapidly to the house, and we heard the screen door slam.

  “Oh God,” repeated Ursula in a dull voice. “That’s our neighbor, Abel Cristiana, out inspecting his new boundaries. He’s the farmer I sold our meadows to. I expect they’ll start fencing soon. Julie detests even the sight of him from a distance. It’s an old family feud, too complicated for me to explain. Damn it, Abel,” she addressed the distant figure on horseback, “why couldn’t you have waited until our tea hour was over?” I noticed, however, that a touch of humor had crept into her tone. “I’m sorry it’s ruined the mood,” she said then, returning her attention to me. “Julie liked you. I could tell.”

  “It’s okay. I ought to be going soon anyway,” I said. She didn’t reply to this. “I think that’s Gentleman Johnny, their Tennessee walker, that he’s riding,” I added after a minute.

  “How do you know that?” she demanded, looking at me sharply.

  “Because of the way he picks up his legs, and stops and starts so nicely. I rode him myself last week,” I added casually, trying to keep the pride out of my voice. “Ann Cristiana invited me over there to ride after school. But what I really think is, her brother Ed got her to invite me over.”

  I expected her to tease me for “making a conquest,” the way most older women would, but she studied me for a moment and then said thoughtfully, “Funny, you gave me the impression that you were just a lonely waif, all by yourself in an alien land. But of course you must make friends your own age. I don’t know the Cristiana children well. This feud we’ve been having for decades precludes any social intercourse between our families.”

  I was embarrassed when she used the word intercourse. I also felt I had betrayed her in some way by having gone out riding with people my own age, like an ordinary young person. As if I cared about Ed and his sister! Whom had I been hoping to meet for almost the entire ride? I sat there miserably, wondering how to reinstate myself with her. She was staring fixedly at the man down in the fields that had once belonged to her family. I thought there was a masochistic intensity about the way she watched him ride slowly along, as if every deliberate tread of his horse’s hooves on her lost land were felt upon herself and she were determined to have it so.

  A deep rumbling of chords, like thunder, came from the house. They thickened into a series of sinister runs up and down the keyboard, and then burst into explosions of fiendish energy. I had never heard such violent music coming through the open windows of a country house; I had never heard such music, period.

  “He’s playing the ‘Mephisto,’ ” said Ursula. “That means he’s really in a temper.”

  But she sounded proud, and, even to me, who knew little about music, except for nostalgic memories of my grandfather’s Bach, the sounds coming from the house were impressive. The music dominated everything with its passages of almost threatening intensity. Even I knew that not just anybody who “played the piano well” could make so many notes come out sounding at once so hard and separate and clear and yet all blended together in this stunningly ominous manner.

  “I’ve never heard anybody play the piano like that,” I said.

  “Of course you haven’t,” she replied triumphantly. “Not unless you had heard Paderewski … or Liszt. Even Rubinstein doesn’t have that clean sharpness. My brother has been blessed by the gods with a rare combination of clarity and passion when he sits down to that instrument—even if he can be a stubborn fool at other times. That’s why that piano was worth every one of those damn acres, and all this … strife. That’s why it’s all worthwhile. One day, not too far away, I hope, I won’t be the only one to think so.”

  “Will he play before crowds again?” I asked. I had started to say “coughing crowds,” as he had done, but decided not to risk humor at the moment.

  “If I have my way, he will be doing it in two years. Otherwise, what has this all been for?”

  There came an eerie hiatus in the music, a sort of metaphysical calm during which the notes seemed to be asking sad questions they already knew the answers to. Down in the field, the man on the horse continued the pacing of his recently purchased boundaries, but the effect of the music was so dominating that it relegated him to a small, picturesque element in a summer landscape over which some eternal power loomed.

  “What is that tower up there on those mountains?” I asked, when the metaphysical passage had given way to another furious burst of stormy notes.

  “It’s a lookout tower,” said Ursula. “It belongs to the hotel up there. If we had binoculars, we could see it, nestled beneath that ledge. It’s a magnificent old hotel, on a lake. The whole thing might have been transported from Europe. One night last winter when I couldn’t sleep, I was prowling around the house in the dark, and I happened to look out of the living-room window, and there were all these sparkling lights hanging there in the clear black night. At first I thought I might be having a vision—or that a whole cluster of stars had suddenly moved closer to earth. Then I realized it was simply the lights from the hotel rooms. The atmosphere that night was so cold and clear that everything looked closer.”

  “I wish I had seen it,” I said. I wished I could have been there, like a ghost hovering behind her, and seen her prowling around her dark rooms, then looking out and seeing the lights. I wondered what had kept her from being able to sleep.

  “It’s not that far away, you know. Only in New Paltz. I’ll take you up there one day. There are miles of mountain trails where one can walk. I’ll make a picnic lunch and we’ll eat it by the lake. I think you would like it up there.” She gave me a fond, possessive look. “But promise me you won’t go with any of your other friends, because I want to show it to you first.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” I vowed so solemnly that she burst out laughing.

  Then, becoming serious again, she said, “You know, Justin, I am thirty years older than you, but I have a feeling we are fated to be good friends.”

  “I feel it, too,” I said.

  “Of course you do. When people are sensitive, they can tell when they meet someone who is going to influence their lives.”

  V.

  “What did you think of the house? Did you see the upstairs?”

  “No, ma’am. We had tea down on the terrace.”

  “You mean you didn’t go inside at all?”

  “No, ma’am. I offered to help her carry the tea things in before I left, but she said she wanted to sit a while longer before going up to the house. He was inside, playing the piano, and I guess she didn’t want to disturb him.”

  “You mean he didn’t even have tea with you? How antisocial!”

  “No, he had tea. Then later he went up to the house.”

  “Well, I’m disappointed. Here I was, waiting for a report on those upstairs rooms. If it had been me, I would have asked to use the bathroom. That’s perfectly acceptable, you know. Then you could have had a quick look around at the rooms.”

  I had been trying to sneak upstairs to our bathroom when Aunt Mona had waylaid me. “Come back and tell me all about it,” she had called from the li
ving-room sofa, where she was watching some late Sunday afternoon show on TV. I had wanted to escape the house without speaking a word. My mother was taking a nap and Jem was over on the houseboat, grilling hamburgers with Becky and her father. I had hoped to make myself a peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwich and go up to the abandoned farmhouse on the hill and absorb my visit with the DeVanes. So much had occurred that I needed to go over it while it was still fresh, before all the special looks and words had become diluted by the commonplace affairs of our household. But Aunt Mona wanted a “report” on the tea, and I had reluctantly crossed the plastic bridge over her prize carpet and sat down beside her. She had even turned off the sound of her program, she was so interested in what I might say.

  “What did you talk about?” she wanted to know, curling her toes.

  “Oh, about flowers,” I said, “and the influences of different places, and ants.…” I was trying to pick off the superficial elements to satisfy her curiosity, while guarding the big topics from being drained of their charge until I could sort them out and file them away safely in privacy, up on the hill.

  “Aunts? You mean like me?”

  “No, the insects,” I said, to her disappointment. I gazed at the two black-and-white figures on the television screen: a woman in a low-cut dress was turning away in anger from a man in a tuxedo who was imploring her about something. “Aren’t you missing your program?” I said. “I could come back later.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t very good. Sometimes I think I prefer the old radio plays. You could see so much more in your mind. What did you think of him?” From the sour face she made and the way her feathery crest quivered, I knew whom she meant.