The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  One problem was that I found it hard to follow Hedda’s motivation. Ursula had told me in the station wagon that Hedda had made a loveless marriage because she came from a stratum of society where it would never have done for her to marry the man who really attracted her, Lövberg, and also she needed someone to support her. But I found her behavior more erratic than the circumstances called for, and I grew impatient with her. All she really wanted—unless I was missing something—was to destroy everyone around her, including herself. But then, I missed many significant lines of the play. One reason was the wine I had drunk at dinner; the other, and more important one, was that I was paying more attention to Ursula than to Hedda. I didn’t dare turn and look at her directly, but with a hero-worshiper’s second set of eyes, I knew when she grimaced, grew intent, lost herself, then became annoyed with something. And I knew she was also aware of me, watching me out of her second set of eyes, taking note of my impressions even while she watched the action on the stage. When Hedda fired the pistol at Judge Brack, at the beginning of Act Two, I shied violently, and Ursula, looking amused, reached over and took my hand and stroked it a few times. Following that, my mind went ecstatically blank, and when I came to my senses, Hedda and Judge Brack were halfway through their scene and I had missed more valuable information.

  On the way home, Ursula launched into a stunningly vituperative monologue. She tore apart, in a gloating rage, each of the performers in turn, sparing only the lady who had played the small part of the old aunt, whose hat Hedda makes fun of in the first act. She reserved her greatest scorn for the actress who had played Hedda. “First of all, she is at least fifty if she’s a day, and even I, at my present time of life, would know better than to accept such a role, even if some backwoods theater company came to my door and begged me. Second of all, her performance reeked of everything that is detestable about this vile new Method Acting. Method Acting, Justin, is a so-called technique developed by an old Russian that the Americans have gone gaga over; Americans will go gaga over anything foreign, because they love to be intimidated. You don’t find the English falling for such drivel. ‘Get in touch with your emotions.’ ‘Open up your own personality and spill your guts all over the role you are playing.’ Of course, this dried-up ‘thespian’ tonight had no guts to spill. My God, she played most of the performance in a monotone, did you note that, Julie? With your ear, of course you would have. Poor bitch, she probably commuted down to the city for three or four Method classes and is tickled pink with all she’s learned about ‘getting into herself.’ But as for getting into Hedda, the real Hedda Gabler was as far away as Norway is from Woodstock, Justin, and I want you to promise me you won’t judge this play from what you saw tonight. It’s a shattering play when it’s done right. Hedda, if she’s played well, is one of the most haunting women in the world.”

  “You would still be splendid in it, Sissie,” said Julian loyally as we drove through the night. Ursula was driving fast, in her heated state, and the tires squealed every time we took another curve.

  “Well, I would have been better than that colorless hag with her snippets of Method Acting. Sir Kenneth used to tell us at RADA that the actor is the link between the individual and the universal. The point is to play Hedda not so she reflects the actress’s emotions and shortcomings, but so that every member of the audience becomes aware of the universal potential of the Hedda in herself. Or himself. There’s a Hedda in all of us: that’s why she’s one of the great dramatic characters. Just as there’s an Oedipus in all of us … a Hamlet … a Lady Macbeth. My God, Hedda is trapped! Hedda is desperate! Who hasn’t felt trapped and desperate in surroundings too small for them? She is a dashing personality in a social straitjacket! She is gathered together, when we meet her in that first scene, like a force … ready to strike. The very air of the theater should eddy with the waves of her tension as she coils tighter and tighter … until she explodes! And the explosions have waves. They mount and mount and then recoil on her to strike her down. But, at the same time, you see—and this is what makes the part such a demanding one—we have to feel … we have to feel that when she points that pistol at herself and fires offstage, she is not only vindicating herself by flinging an unanswerable challenge at all the people in the world who have failed to live up to her ideals, she is also freeing herself.”

  Julian and I exchanged a look. Isn’t she magnificent? we said, without words, to each other. We were also saying: It’s a good thing she has us to understand and love her.

  Later, when I played Hedda, I was to remember Ursula’s passionate diatribe on the way she should be portrayed. I also recalled how Ursula had looked, at the steering wheel, flinging out those phrases as though she had an inexhaustible spring of eloquence to draw on, her face shining with haughty exuberance at her own performance as she sped her captive audience along that dark road.

  I have often wondered if Julian recalled her words about Hedda’s final vindication on the night he sat down at the piano and played his sister’s favorite Chopin scherzo for the last time.

  IX.

  “Justin, your face is a mile long,” said Ursula as we sat on the stone terrace overlooking the fields one Thursday afternoon in the middle of August. “What is going on in that head of yours?”

  I had wanted her to ask that. I had purposely made my face a little longer than necessary so that she would be sure to notice and ask. Yet now that she had asked, I wasn’t sure what to say, or even certain that I could express it. “It” was nothing definite, but rather a swarm of uncertainties, an oblique sense of sadness and impending loss. When I had not found her in the pond or in the hut—“The Finishing School,” as we now called it—I had swallowed my pride and ridden to their house. Luckily I had found her outside, in her garden, picking vegetables. Just as I approached, she had hurled a monstrous-size squash down into the meadow. Her back was to me, but I had the feeling she knew I was there and had executed her flamboyant gesture entirely for my benefit. Then I had wondered if her not being at the pond was for my benefit as well: to test me, sort of; to see if I wanted to see her badly enough to come to the house, even though I knew (and she knew I knew) Thursday was Julian’s busiest teaching day and I would not dare to ring the doorbell. Maybe her not being at The Finishing School—like the squash-throwing gesture, like the time she hid from me in the pond and I imagined her drowned—was to teach me never to expect the predictable where she was concerned.

  “Nothing stays the same,” I replied bitterly, staring out at the masses of spiky purple loosestrife that had sprung up all over the meadow surrounding the terrace: they were beautiful wild-flowers, but their appearance meant that summer was almost over. The rich clusters of scarlet bee balm, which had been like flames licking the edges of the terrace in July, now drooped in their exploded glory, revealing blasted brown centers. High in the branches of a tree, a katydid chirred. When my grandfather heard the first katydid, he always said: “Well, Justin, six weeks till the first frost.” I had never liked winter as much as summer, but I liked to hear him say that because he said it every year. It was comforting to know you could count on some things staying the same from year to year. Only, they didn’t.

  “What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” Ursula coaxed.

  “I mean everything. Everything changes.” As I uttered the words, their proofs assailed my senses on every side: up at their house, Julian’s four o’clock student had finally mastered the difficult passage of the “Moonlight Sonata” I had heard her butchering in previous lessons; down in the field that now belonged to the Cristianas was a brand-new fence separating their land from DeVane land (I had watched it come into being, seen them unloading the posts from the truck, heard the pounding of the sledgehammer through the summer days: I had concluded that the reason why Ed Cristiana had never followed up on his movie invitation was that he fell exhausted into bed every evening and dreamed of hammering rails into posts); and yet it seemed that only yesterday Ursula and I had sat on this very terrace and
watched Mr. Cristiana pace the unfenced boundaries of his new land on Gentleman Johnny, while Julian had gone inside to express his fury through the “Mephisto Waltz.” Even the light on the mountains had changed. I remembered the afternoon I had first seen those mountains, when I had followed the haywagon road into the fields in search of the music, and there they had been suddenly, different from any mountains I had seen before: low-lying, austere, old-looking, their subtle, purplish-blue ascent culminating dramatically in the sharp ledge marked by the mysterious tower. They had seemed a hopeful vista to me as I stood there in the soft spring light, fresh green grasses waving all around me, only minutes before I met Ursula for the first time. Now the axis of earth had shifted toward winter and the light on the mountains was sharper, less dreamy and diffuse.

  “Of course everything changes,” said Ursula. “If it didn’t, we’d have stasis. You wouldn’t want everything to just stop, would you? We’d be sitting here like those poor people in Pompeii that were found hundreds of years later, frozen in lava in the act of doing whatever they were doing at the time the volcano hit. But what particular thing has changed that gives you that woebegone look?”

  “Well, for one thing, the summer’s almost over. Soon I’ll be back in school.”

  “You don’t impress me as someone who hates school. With your curious mind, you should be looking forward to what you’ll learn next.”

  “It’s not like that!” I said impatiently. “Can’t you remember school? Most of it is just boring: what crops grow in what countries—that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t remember much about lessons in our school. But, as I told you, it was a one-room school. The dynamics are different in a one-room school. One is more aware of what’s going on around one.” She laughed. “The thing I remember best, just at this moment, is how Abel Cristiana and I used to beat up the Democrats. This was a rigid little enclave of die-hard Republicans—still is, to some extent—and we had been raised to believe that Democrats were a pitiable sect of sloppy, misguided heretics. There were two little boys, I remember, that we terrorized. We would make them buy their way out of a beating by giving us the cookies out of their lunch, and—once”—she closed her eyes and snorted with laughter—“Abel made each of them eat a bite of a grasshopper sandwich. We had found a dead grasshopper on the way to school and I forfeited part of my cheese sandwich so we could substitute the grasshopper. Ugh! I can still see how it looked covered with mayonnaise. Children are beasts. Probably more so when they grow up in the country.” She laced her hands on her lap and looked very smug at the thought of the beast she had been. All her sympathies for my melancholy state had vanished during the telling of this story. I thought it was a nasty story. Every time she and “Abel” got together, in these stories, they were always torturing or teasing others: like the time they had both pretended to be drowned at the bottom of the pond and had scared little Julian. No wonder he hated Abel Cristiana. Killing his pet raccoon, and all this cruel teasing. I hated Abel Cristiana a little myself; not so much the red-faced, paunchy farmer who had driven me home and told me how he had saved the German horses, but this gleefully destructive childhood chum of Ursula’s, whom she remembered with smug smiles and snorts of laughter. What if I had been a child in that one-room school? I was a Democrat, or my family was. Probably Ursula and “Abel” would have ganged up on me, made me eat some foul thing in my sandwich: a grasshopper, a worm, a snake! Ursula, if she had met me when she was fourteen, would probably have scorned me as a sissy.

  She must have read the disapproval on my face. She switched back into her adult personality and said in a superior tone, “Of course, anything can be made interesting if it’s taught well. The whole secret of teaching is to capture the student’s imagination. When I taught French at that girls’ school in New York during the war, I saw immediately we were going to get nowhere with the textbook: ‘Which is the way to the train station?’ ‘Has the postman been already?’ I remembered all too well how I had taught myself French, painstakingly, with records and textbooks, during those years when I was nursing Father, only to get to France and realize I had no words for many of the situations I found myself in, or for things I most wanted to say. I told my class this. ‘Most of you will go to France after this war is over,’ I told them, throwing the textbook into the wastebasket beside my desk, ‘and I am going to prepare you for the kinds of experiences I was fortunate enough to have, but was not prepared for, in terms of expressing myself.’ Then I drew up a little scenario for them, resembling my own, in which they would find themselves staying with distant relatives, with illustrious ancestors in common—this won over a girl from New Orleans, named Lisa Thibodeaux, at once, because she had such relatives—and perhaps there would be a young man, an attractive young man with whom it would be easy to fall in love, and quite tempting to marry, even if one had higher ambitions in mind; and then we set about creating the kinds of dialogues that might arise out of these circumstances. What fun we had! Nobody missed my class! One day, another teacher, who had seen my class’s slavish attention through the glass-paneled door, asked me, ‘What are you teaching them in there?’ I said, ‘I am teaching them to conduct their affairs in French.’ I’m sure she thought I meant the business type of affair, she was that dull, unsuspecting sort.”

  “Did you tell your class about you and Marius in the moonlit ruins?” I asked, unable to keep the surliness out of my voice. Ursula was at her worst today, her most cruel. Here I was feeling blue because the summer would soon be over, and she knew very well why that made me sad: it would be harder to see her; I would have to make formal calls on her, because when it got cold she would no longer be down at the hut. Yet here she was, surely knowing it if she could read my face as she said she could, telling me about all these other girls who meant nothing, to whom she had told the same stories she told me.

  “Oh, I’m sure I alluded to the romance of it,” she replied carefully. “After all, that was my stratagem, wasn’t it? To hook their imaginations on romance, which their daydreams were full of, anyway. But of course I didn’t dwell on the erotic aspect. One doesn’t discuss that except with special, close friends.” She was trying to placate me now, but I didn’t believe her. “Anyway,” she concluded with an airy defensiveness, “the point of my story was merely to illustrate that I believe any subject can be made interesting by the right teacher. I am sure that there is some teacher in this world right now who can make the subject of crops absolutely fascinating. By rights, he should be teaching in the Clove school system, with all its farm children. But he’s probably at Princeton, or the University of Bologna … someplace like that.”

  I was silent. She was going to have to woo me better than that.

  After a minute she asked in a teasing voice, “Do you know what we’ve forgotten, Justin?”

  “No,” I said. “What?”

  “We were going to go to the mountain.”

  “What mountain?” I was not going to make it easy for her.

  “The one up there, silly,” she said, pointing across the fields. “Here you are, already memorizing the crops of India, when we have another full month of glorious weather. One day next week we should make our pilgrimage to the old hotel and the tower. We’ll stand on top of that tower and I’ll point out this house to you. I’ll make a picnic lunch—leave it all to me. Would you like that?”

  “I’d like it if you would,” I said.

  “I’d love it. We’ll leave here about ten, get to New Paltz around ten-thirty. I know a wonderful trail that will take us about an hour to hike. It leads right into the hotel. We can picnic and relax a bit, and then we’ll climb to the tower. I haven’t been up there in ages.” She smiled her special smile, and I decided to forgive her for her earlier behavior.

  Up on the road a car door slammed. The car drove away.

  “That was Jill Van Kleek,” said Ursula. “The last of the brats departed for another day. Let me see, for supper I am going to have fresh corn, sliced tomatoes an
d green peppers, and fried eggplant. A vegetarian supper. Too much meat makes one’s spirit heavy. The Buddhists have the right idea.”

  No sooner had she won me over than she was abandoning me again. I got up to go because I wanted to stay so much. I wanted to stay and eat the corn and the tomatoes and the eggplant, sitting between them like their child in the ghostly dining room. I wanted to be Julian, adored and cared for and catered to by the sister who was now devoting her life to my triumphant comeback. I wanted to be Ursula, wrapped securely in the duties of the destiny I had accepted, with my own household to command. I ached at my powerlessness, I chafed at my subordinate role in everyone’s life. It would be years before I could sit back in a chair on my own territory and consult my taste and then declare with perfect authority: “This evening for supper I am going to have …”

  From the open windows of the house came a little tune on the piano. At first, because of the precise and spritely way it was played, I thought it was something by Bach. But after the opening bars, I realized it was “Dixie.” After a few more bars, as it gathered chords and then switched tempo and assumed a whole new mood, I realized I was being treated to a medley of great composers’ renditions of my Southern anthem. I was charmed. Ursula was surprised at the beginning, too, but as soon as she understood what her brother was playing, she smiled broadly and assumed a sort of benign guardian-spirit possessiveness over the proceedings, as if she herself had been the instigator of them. “He must have looked out and seen us down here,” she said to me, as thundering, Beethoven-like chords for “Look away, look away” rolled down the slope of the lawn. “Since he was a boy, Julie has cultivated the irresistible trick of ‘summoning’ people by playing their special music. Even Father would drop what he was doing when Julie played the overture from Tannhäuser, and I am a pushover for the Chopin ‘Scherzo in B-Flat Minor.’ But I haven’t heard him do this for anyone besides me in years. It would be unthinkable if you didn’t come in for a moment after he has paid you this great compliment. You have time, don’t you?”