The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  One afternoon when I was helping her weed her vegetable garden, I started telling her about the flowers my grandmother had grown, and Ursula got very inspired at my description of the delphiniums and launched into grandiose plans for the kind of garden she was going to put in around the terrace after she had gotten Julian launched and some money was coming in. “Of course, I’ll have to be away a good deal—Julie’ll need someone to pack for him and organize him on his tours—but when I’m home I’m going to make this into such a showplace that all the family buried for miles around will float up out of their graves at night and come over here and gape at what I have made of their old homestead.” Infected by her excitement, pleased to have been the agent of it, I elaborated further on my grandmother’s gardening prowess. Feeling I had something to teach her, for a change, I grew bolder than usual in the repeated use of her name as I dispensed the horticultural advice I remembered my grandmother sharing with fellow gardeners—such as the lifelong investment to your garden of double-digging, even though you’d have a backache for a week after. As I rattled along happily, Ursula-ing her lavishly, I saw amusement spread wider and wider across her face until at last she burst out laughing. “Dear child,” she said, “you pronounce my name as if it were some kind of sweet wine. It’s not ‘Er-salla,’ it’s ‘Ur-seula.’ Eu … eu.…” She puckered her lips. “Can you say eu?”

  I was so distressed by her unexpected rebuke that I could not even look at her: for all these weeks, I had been pronouncing her name wrong and she had simply listened to me compounding my mistake, the silent laughter building in her. What was I to her, then: some pet buffoon whose mistakes could be counted on to provide amusement during the dull summer hours when she could not be with her brother? I vowed to myself not to use her name again until she noticed its absence in our conversations and repented of her ridicule. But she read my mind at once and turned the tables on me. “Now, don’t pout,” she said in a gently teasing voice. She reached over from where she knelt in the dirt to pluck a ladybug from my shirt and blow it into the air. “It’s just that I want you to be perfect in all things. If I loved you less, I wouldn’t always be harping at you like a schoolmistress.” She had actually used the word love. Frowning in order to hide my pleasure, I uprooted a large hunk of grass from between the leaves of a squash plant. “Okay?” she said. She was waiting for me to look up and meet her gaze. “Yes,” I said, giving in. “Yes, what?” she coaxed. “Yes … Urseula,” I said. Satisfied, she went on with her own weeding. We were silent for a few minutes. From the house came sporadic phrases of a third-year student’s attempt at the “Moonlight Sonata.”

  Then she surprised me by saying, “You know, one reason for our great affinity, I think, is that we are both at crucial turning points in our lives. In a strange way, the adolescent and the middle-aged person are neither one thing nor the other: they are both in the process of molting, of turning into something else. That is why we can have this friendship, despite the huge age difference. It’s as though we were meeting as spirits, and with spirits, age doesn’t matter.”

  I wanted to know what the something else was that we were turning into.

  “Oh,” she said lightly, “you are turning into a woman, and I … I am turning into an old woman.”

  “You’re not!” I protested.

  “Oh, but I am. When you are twenty, I’ll be fifty. You’ve got to agree that fifty qualifies as old age.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “You won’t be old at fifty.”

  “Ah, Justin, it’s such an experience just to watch your face. You should see the look on it right now. It’s a mixture of … let’s see … oh, so many things. All for my benefit, too. But you mustn’t fret or be outraged; it’s the law of the world: as one generation comes up, the other goes down. Children bury their parents”—balancing herself with a hand on my shoulder, she got slowly to her feet—“and protégées grow wings and take off blithely from the nests of their aging mentors.” She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at me rather triumphantly. I looked up and saw that, from this angle, she did look old. It was as though she had transformed herself deliberately into the way she was going to look as an old woman just to prove her point.

  I remember how I rode home full of a delicious combination of sadness and power. All around me the ripe countryside swelled, at the peak of its growing season. I gloried in being young. The future awaited me, whereas she was already becoming old. She had told me and then she had shown me it was so. I felt a magnanimous pity for her. I fantasized how, one day, when I had become a grown woman, happy and accomplished, successful (at something that had yet to be defined), I would come and visit a gray-haired woman in the country with sparks in her brown eyes and a humor and enthusiasm that age had failed to dampen. I think I actually worked up some tears at this tender, clichéd image of the two of us sitting down on the stone terrace, maybe surrounded by the fine garden that would have come into being by then, and my telling her of my exploits in the world. She would nod encouragingly from time to time and remark proudly, “I knew you would do it! I knew from the first that you weren’t ordinary.”

  As the summer progressed and my afternoon visits to her gathered cumulative impact, I was actually relieved to return to the average, less demanding environment of Lucas Meadows, where children shouted and rode their bicycles, and fathers mowed their lawns and washed their cars on Saturdays, and my mother, looking lovely and lost, bowed her head over her typing exercises, and Aunt Mona invariably asked, “Well, and what have you done with the afternoon?” I don’t think I ever, even at the height of my devotion, visited Ursula more than twice a week (I gave much thought to the spacing of my visits and the “reasons” for each, so she would not grow tired of my company), but, even so, I found that my brain, my emotions, my imagination needed a rest after being with her. She played me: until I met her, I never knew I had so many tones and vibrations. It was nice to know I had them, but until I grew more accustomed to having them, it was necessary for me to come back to the ordinary world and play back to myself, in a more restful atmosphere, the responses she had evoked for me.

  I often spent the hour or so after supper up at the empty farmhouse on the hill. I would take my appointed place on the top back step, facing away from our development, and go over my latest visit with Ursula. Or I would cull favorite scenes from the succession of visits and make a gratifying montage of proofs that she liked me. I would also fashion and refashion her story, taking the information she had given me during different visits, and stage in my imagination various incidents and turning points in her life. Frequently I became so involved in my productions that the lines of my own individuality became blurred: it seemed as though I were remembering my own past. Sometimes these mental fabrications would carry over into sleep, and I would dream strange concoctions of her life and mine.

  Even the mysterious blanks in her stories provided me with many absorbing hours as I sat on the steps of the abandoned farmhouse in Lucas Meadows or lay in bed at night. I would embroider around the blanks, imagining what I had not been told. She had said so little about her mother, and nothing about that mother’s going to the insane asylum, as the Cristianas said she had. I made up “mad scenes” between the mother and Ursula. Wild-eyed and furious, she berated Ursula for being a disappointing daughter, for not being beautiful. Ursula, the young Ursula, would bravely stand her ground, a glimmer of contempt in her bold brown eyes. Sometimes she would say such things as “There are more interesting things in this world than beauty, Mother.” Once she muttered under her breath, “Fate will rescue me from this if I can only hold out.” I remember this mother-daughter scene in particular, because it gave me pleasure to act it out in my head. Though I did not know it then, I was doing what actors do: calling up unacknowledged and potentially dangerous feelings hidden in the depths of my psyche and projecting them onto other characters safely removed from my personal circumstances. Every time “Ursula” muttered with stoic streng
th, “Fate will rescue me from this if I can only hold out,” I was able to avenge myself for certain helpless moments in my own history: the time, for instance, when I had been standing on our sun porch back in Fredericksburg, watching my mother pack up our life there, and I had made one last, desperate effort to make her change her mind, only to have her quash me with the adult’s ultimate ploy: that I was still a child and would have to abide by her decision.

  The last week in July of that summer, fate really did make a propitious little bow into our lives, and as I am attempting, in these recollections, to acknowledge my fair share of blame for the unhappiness I caused, I think it is only sane for me to accept my share of credit for bringing about something that would eventually lead to some happiness.

  It happened in a roundabout way, and in several stages, but it would not have happened if I had not behaved as I had. As Ursula had said, that day she had been explaining fate in terms of her family’s motto, you take all the fate that has happened to you and use it to make possible what still may happen. Not that I was trying to cause anything momentous when I befriended Joan Dibble. The friendship came about simply because I was trying to behave compassionately on a day when there was nothing more exciting to do.

  It began like this: Mott had a new boss, a manager named Mr. Dibble, who recently had been transferred from another IBM location. As soon as Mr. Dibble learned that Mott had a daughter and a niece, both close to his own daughter’s age (Joan was twelve), he had Mrs. Dibble telephone Aunt Mona and invite us all (Jem included) to come over one afternoon and swim in their pool. As it was a weekday afternoon and Aunt Mona was working at the travel agency, my mother took us.

  The Dibbles lived on a higher scale of income than the Motts, and they had bought a spacious ranch-style brick house on the outskirts of Kingston. It had elaborate landscaping and central air-conditioning, and, of course, the pool, glowing like a large blue jewel, in the midst of a walled-in patio where Mrs. Dibble, tanned already to the color of burnt sugar, took her sunbaths. Mrs. Dibble was an open, friendly, brassy-voiced woman who was wearing the first real bikini I had ever seen; she chewed a spearmint-scented gum energetically as she talked. She fell, I decided, into that category my grandmother had called “nice, but not quite a lady.” She lay baking herself by the side of the pool and chatted, in her ringing voice, with my mother, who, to our delight, swam for a while with us. “I like to swim nude,” said Mrs. Dibble. “I do it all the time when it’s just Joanie and me here at home. I’ve tried to get Joanie to do it, but she’s too modest.”

  Even Jem, splashing around happily in his yellow life preserver, had the decency not to laugh. Becky tried to meet my eyes and exchange a cousinly smirk of contempt, but I wouldn’t look at her. “Joanie” herself sat placidly on the steps at the pool’s shallow end, her lower half mercifully submerged in water, a serene half-smile on her round face. She wore a jumbo-size woman’s bathing suit with bright, flashy flowers printed all over its considerable expanse and ruffly skirt. She must have weighed more than two hundred pounds. Yet she showed no shame about her appearance. When she greeted each of her young guests, shaking hands with my little brother, her demeanor had been that of a kindly, regal deity—a sort of pubescent female Buddha—trying to put three embarrassed children at their ease. Now she sat, supremely motionless, watching us benevolently as we splashed and swam in her pool. She had not batted an eyelid at her mother’s mention of her modesty, nor did she seem aware of the ludicrous images of the less modest Joanie that her mother’s words had sent going inevitably in our imaginations: all those mounds of pale flesh, let loose on their own in the water, without the restricting garment. How could Mrs. Dibble be so cruel? I wondered. But before the afternoon was over, I saw that Mrs. Dibble was blithely unaware—or behaved as if she were—of her daughter’s size. When refreshments were served at the round, glass-topped table by the pool, Mrs. Dibble kept passing the cupcakes around to Joan, who always murmured, “Oh, thanks, Mom,” with a little air of surprise—as though her thoughts had been on higher matters—before delicately choosing a cake from the plate and transferring it dreamily to her mouth. Yet whenever my mother passed the sandwiches or cakes to “Babs” (they were already on a first-name basis), Mrs. Dibble looked down at the plate as if it contained a mass of writhing little snakes, and clutched at her skinny, dark-brown midriff, and declared, “Oh no, Louise, I never eat anything between meals. I have to watch my figure.” Did Mrs. Dibble, then, have one set of standards for her body and another set for her daughter’s? Could she really be as unaware of Joan’s appearance as she seemed to be?

  “She ate seven cupcakes, I counted them,” said Jem, as we were going home in the car.

  “I’ve never seen anyone so fat,” said Becky, narrowing her eyes with malicious glee. “It’s disgusting. She’s very stupid, too.”

  “I don’t think she’s really stupid,” I said. “She’s just very quiet.”

  “Well, I think she’s very stupid,” said Becky. “Maybe even retarded.”

  “Oh no, dear,” my mother corrected Becky. “She had very intelligent eyes. I felt terribly sorry for her. It must be a thyroid condition or something. Surely no mother would allow a child to get like that if it could be avoided. On the other hand—she did eat an awful lot of cupcakes. Oh well, it was kind of them to ask us and it’s unkind of us to criticize.” She reached over and patted Becky, who sat next to her in the car. “Just be thankful you are so pretty and slim,” she said. Becky preened herself and looked smug. She adored getting compliments and caresses from my mother.

  Then Jem began singing a song our father had taught us: “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me …” and all of us started laughing. My mother looked as though she might cry, as well. She was probably remembering the last time we all sang that song, accompanied by my father’s banjo, on the porch in Fredericksburg.

  We had to detour by the travel agency to pick up Aunt Mona, who had ridden to work with a neighbor that morning so that we could have her car for the Dibble outing.

  “What was the house like?” was the first thing Aunt Mona wanted to know.

  “It was very … affluent,” said my mother. “But the pool was lovely.”

  “What kind of carpeting did she have? Wall-to-wall or just rugs?”

  “Wall-to-wall,” replied my mother. “It was a … let me think … a kind of beigey color, rather shaggy, and the same carpeting went all through the house, except for where the tile floors were.”

  “Hmm,” said Aunt Mona neutrally. I could not tell whether she was expressing jealousy or disapproval. “And what were they like?”

  “Oh, she’s very hospitable,” said my mother. “She wore a bikini the whole time. The daughter is sweet, but quiet and extremely fat.”

  “Disgustingly fat,” Becky put in. “You wouldn’t get me to go back there for anything. Pool or no pool.”

  “Well, however fat she may be, Beck old girl, you’ve got to remember that Mr. Dibble is your father’s boss,” said Aunt Mona.

  “I don’t care. She’s fat and stupid and I’m not going to be friends with her,” countered Becky firmly.

  “You know,” said my mother, “today was the first time I’ve been swimming since Rivers’s death. The water felt so wonderful, but it made me sad. Rivers loved a nice pool.”

  “Oh yes, Rivers loved the water. He won the diving contest every summer at the municipal pool,” recalled Aunt Mona proudly. “Of course, you went to the country club pool, so you wouldn’t have been there.”

  “He was good at any sport he tried,” my mother agreed with a small sigh, overlooking, or choosing to ignore, Aunt Mona’s pet theme of their social differences back in the days of their youth.

  A few mornings later, the phone rang and I answered.

  “Is that Justin?” It sounded like a grown-up trying to imitate a child’s voice. For a moment, I thought it might be Ursula, playing a joke.

  “Yes,” I said, my heart starting
to beat fast, “who is this?”

  “Joan Dibble.”

  “Oh. Hello.” I tried not to show my disappointment.

  “I was wondering if you and Becky would like to come over and swim in the pool.”

  I grabbed for an excuse and found one. “Gosh, Joan, that’s nice of you, but we can’t. Aunt Mona has the car.”

  “My mother could come and pick you up.”

  “Oh! Oh, well … wait just a minute. I’ll run upstairs and ask Becky.”

  Becky was in her room, pasting cutouts from magazines all over her lampshade. “Are you crazy? Waste another day with that fatty?”

  “It’s hot. We could swim. I could do the socializing.”

  I was not eager to go myself, but I thought it would be better to go and get it over with and not hurt Joan’s feelings. “We don’t have anything better to do,” I reasoned with Becky. I had been to Ursula’s once already that week, and it was too soon to go again.

  “I have lots to do,” said Becky with disdain. “And even if I didn’t, even if it was boiling, I wouldn’t go over there again. You go, if you’re so desperate for something to do.” She turned a page of a magazine and plunged her scissors into a picture she wanted for her lampshade.

  I went back downstairs to the phone. “If you’re going to do a thing, do it graciously” had been one of my grandmother’s maxims. I told Joan Dibble that Becky was otherwise engaged, but that I would “love to come.” I had a brief relapse from graciousness when Mrs. Dibble’s horn blew a half hour later, and I walked toward the car, Joan’s placid moonface watching me possessively from the back seat, where she had spread herself out in comfort, like an indolent pasha. What have I done? I thought. But then Mrs. Dibble, a beach robe tied loosely around her bikini, called cheerfully in her gum-smacking voice that I would “ride up front with the chauffeur,” and I climbed in beside her, a bit depressed but proudly determined to make the best of what I had gotten myself into.