by Gail Godwin
I had time. We ate at six-thirty, and I knew exactly how long it took me to ride each way.
Julian was still tinkling “A-way, a-way, a-way down South in Dixie” in Debussy’s style when we reached the living room. Smiling shyly at me, he finished his performance by playing more and more softly until his fingers moving over the keyboard made only the ghost of a melody.
I wasn’t sure what to say. At school back in Fredericksburg we had been taught there were some performances after which it was wrong to clap because it spoiled the mood. This might qualify as one of those times, so I simply smiled back at him in a way that I hoped would show I felt honored.
Ursula put her arm around my shoulders and told him, “We are feeling a bit low today. End of summer, everything changes, nothing lasts.… Oh God, Julie, do you remember being young? It hurt so much, but it was so damned exhilarating! I think I’m jealous of this child for feeling the things I know she’s feeling so intensely!”
Julian, still seated at the piano, looked up at me with his soft, muted brown eyes that never flashed or pierced or probed as his sister’s did. An understanding seemed to pass between us. I felt that he could read my heart not out of perceptive curiosity but out of a gentle, companionable sympathy. He knew how I felt about coming here. He knew why the thought of summer ending made me sad. He knew how I felt about this woman who stood next to me, holding me in her circle of power.
He played a few strange bars on the piano, dissonant yet compelling. “There’s a wonderful poem about … these things,” he said. “I once set it to music so that an old f-friend and teacher could sing it. It’s one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. I’m not sure I did it justice, but the sounds went with … what the w-words made me feel.”
“It’s a haunting piece,” said Ursula. “You must play it for Justin.”
“I’d love it if you would,” I told him.
Ursula and I sat down on the sofa and Julian played the music he had written. His eyes were almost closed, and he touched the keys with a slight restraint; he looked as though he had sent himself into some other realm and had to be careful not to be swallowed up by it. The music was not melodic; it was more like a series of phrases struck off with a plangent, eerie insistence. Several times Julian hummed aloud, or emitted abrupt, guttural sounds as he played. The whole thing sent shivers through me: the weird, often dissonant notes; the way he looked; the intent, solicitous way Ursula looked at him. The atmosphere in the room was thick with some history they were living in, as he played this music.
“Ah, it needs the words,” said Ursula, as soon as he had lifted his fingers from the keys. She jumped up from the sofa and went to the piano. “Here, let me try, Julie, I want Justin to have the full force of it. Justin, you won’t understand the words, they’re in German, but you’ll feel their expression. I’ll explain what the poem says later. And the other thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that this piece was written for a lieder singer with a very deep baritone voice, a bass baritone, it’s called. So you’ll have to imagine that.”
She stood behind her brother as he played the piece again, and sang in German, in a deep, throbbing voice, much lower pitched than her usual one. With her bold posture, her hand laid lightly on Julian’s shoulder, singing in a man’s voice, in the harsh foreign tongue, she might have been a man. She had slipped into one more transformation, escaped from me into a language I could not understand a word of. I was afraid to take my eyes off her; if I did, she might turn into something else, completely unrecognizable, and I would lose her forever. She was too much for me and she knew it: I saw it in the triumphant way she looked at me while she sang. And Julian, too, seemed mesmerized, as if someone else besides his sister had silently entered the room and laid a hand on his shoulder as he played.
She is right, I thought. I am feeling everything so intensely that it hurts. But what am I to do with all these feelings?
She was also right about the envy an older person feels when remembering (or confronting in a young person) the taut drama of youth, strung with all its erotic and spiritual demands, demands that are frequently inseparable from one another. Now that I am close to Ursula’s age, I can look back on that afternoon and envy that girl on the sofa, all a-vibrant with the strange music and the sight of the pair before her, afraid she is going to lose this magical woman during one of her transformations, yet knowing that this fear of loss is part of the magic. From where I sat, I could look through the open window and see the tower on the mountain, where she had said we would go next week. But what if it rained on the day she wanted to go? Oh, young Justin, what would I say to you if I could penetrate the time barrier and murmur in your ear? I am so much more certain of myself than you were; I am probably happier, as the world defines happiness. Yet you draw me, you awaken me, as I watch you sitting there, surrounded by your treasures of so many intense desires and fears. Exult in your riches—though of course you won’t—because the day will come when you will look back enviously on your longings. The day will come when you understand what Rilke was saying in that sonnet which Julian set to music: that the act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.
Which is what Ursula said to me, in her own words, after they had finished the song, and Julian, looking faraway in thought, had excused himself and gone upstairs. She came back and sat beside me on the sofa. “The reason that song is so haunting,” she said, “is that it’s about a special kind of love. It’s a love that can never be satisfied. It’s more like”—she leaned her head back against the sofa and contemplated the low ceiling with its old beams—“it’s more like a yearning. The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It’s the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.” She reached over casually and put her hand on top of mine. “Do you understand that?”
I could barely nod. I was so full of the things she was describing.
“That is one of the best compositions Julian ever wrote,” she said, removing her hand as easily as she had bestowed it. “That is the power of the artist, you see. If you are an artist, you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That’s the secret all true artists come to know.”
Is that, then, what I am trying to do in reviving you, Ursula? Trying to steal back some of the ardor you aroused in me and put it to use in my art?
“Oh, there you are, Justin,” said my mother, who was setting the kitchen table for supper. The job that was mine. “We were starting to worry.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Mona, “I was just about ready to give Ursula DeVane a ring and ask if you were over there and tell her to send you home.” Since Ursula’s visit to our front hall, on the night of Hedda Gabler, my aunt had stopped teasing me about my “grand friend,” and begun speaking of Ursula as if she were her own friend. She always used the whole name, pronouncing it with relish and a certain pride. Aunt Mona had been won over by Ursula completely that night. “Why, she’s not so stuck up as I thought” had been her verdict. She had even gone so far as to say that if Julian DeVane hadn’t been such a fool at the recital, she and Ursula DeVane might have become “good pals” by this time.
“Oh, were you over with Miss DeVane again?” asked my mother with that innocent vagueness she affected when she preferred something not to be so even though she knew it was. She, to my disappointment, had not been won over by Ursula, though I could not exactly figure out why, and couldn’t bring myself to ask. The only comment I had heard her make to Aunt Mona, during one of Aunt Mona’s revisional bursts of approval for Julian DeVane’s sister, was that “she seemed very outgoing.”
“I was riding on Old Clove and she happened to be in the garden,” I said. “Then he saw me through the window and played ‘Dixie,’ sort of in my honor, so I had to go in and thank him—”
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“That child-hater played ‘Dixie’ in your honor?” Aunt Mona snorted, waggling her wavy crest.
“He doesn’t hate children,” I felt I must say. As far as I had been able to determine, the only person he hated was Abel Cristiana. But I could see it displeased my aunt to hear this; she was not ready to revise her opinion of him. “Besides,” I said, walking the fence and hating myself for my cowardice, “maybe he doesn’t consider me a child.” I lifted the lid on a large steaming pot. “Oh, corn!” At least I would be eating one of the same things they would be eating for supper. “Are there any tomatoes?”
“There are a couple in the refrigerator, if you want to slice them,” said my aunt. “And when you thanked him, what did he say?”
I took a knife from the counter and began slicing the tomatoes carefully onto a plate. I had hoped she would not pursue the topic further. “Well, he played another piece. It was this poem he had set to music.” I had forgotten the poet’s name, and anyway I didn’t want to mention that it was in German. I remembered what Mott had thought about Julian DeVane’s staying in Argentina too long during the war, when everybody knew Argentina sympathized with the Germans. “And then she and I discussed the poem. What it meant and all that.”
“Sounds very educational,” said Aunt Mona. “I would have enjoyed that kind of afternoon myself. You know, if he hadn’t behaved so abominably to Beck, she and I might have found a lot to talk about. I don’t pretend to be as well traveled or as cultured as she is, but I would be a ready listener. And I might have been able to give her a few tips, as well. On decorating, for instance. I really think she liked my house, and I could have suggested—in a tactful way, of course—some ideas to perk up that old house of theirs.”
Now would be the opportune time to tell them about our proposed picnic on the mountain, I was thinking all during my aunt’s fanciful picture of her might-have-been friendship with Ursula. Ursula had said we could go next Tuesday if the weather was nice, and it would follow naturally out of the topic right now if I could announce casually that “Ursula DeVane” had asked me to go up to the mountain where there was this historic old hotel and we would have a very educational expedition. I could get the whole thing over, in the presence of my mother, who I was sure would allow me to go even though she was not as enthusiastic about my friend as my aunt was. But I hesitated, and then my mother changed the subject, and then Jem appeared for supper, and then Becky, and the opportunity was lost.
“Pass the butter for the corn.”
“ ‘Please pass the butter for the corn,’ Beck.”
“Oh, you want the butter for the corn?”
“Beck, that’s not funny. I want you to be a lady. I may not have had much when I was growing up, but my aunt did teach me manners.”
“Please—pass—the—butter—for—the—corn,” intoned Becky, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. Her mother pushed the plastic butter container across the table. “Thank—you,” intoned Becky like a robot. As she proceeded to slather butter on her corn, she shot me a smirk.
“What do you think’s happened to that little boy who lost both his parents on the Andrea Doria?” Jem asked.
“His aunt and uncle have taken him, darling,” said our mother. “Don’t you remember? We read it in the newspaper. He and his three younger brothers will be raised by the aunt and uncle.”
“Does that still make him an orphan? Or are orphans just children who have to go live in an orphanage, like Mott did, when their parents die?”
He’s still an orphan,” said my mother. “Anybody who’s lost both parents is an orphan.”
“Then you’re an orphan,” Becky said to my mother. “Both your parents are dead.”
“Well, technically, yes, I suppose I am. But the term is usually reserved for children.”
“I was a real orphan,” said Aunt Mona, warming to the subject, “and so was your father, Jem. My brother, Rivers, and I lost our parents when we were very young, much younger than the boy on the Andrea Doria. My mother and father were out one evening delivering life-insurance policies from door to door, or sticking them in people’s mailboxes, because it saved on postage, you see. My father had just started himself this little insurance business. And as they were pulling back onto the road after putting a policy in a mailbox, a farmer in a truck came along in the dusk and hit them head on.”
“Did they die instantly, like the parents on the Andrea Doria?” Jem wanted to know.
“Well …” I saw Aunt Mona and my mother exchange a look. “Pretty much instantly. Our mother lived a few days, but she didn’t know anything. And then our aunt came down to Georgia and got us, and took us back to Virginia to live with her.”
“Will the boy be much poorer now?” asked Jem.
“Oh no, all those people are very rich,” said Aunt Mona. “After all, the boy’s parents had the deluxe suite on the ship. That was the part that was hit. If they had been traveling third class, they might still be alive today.”
Becky took a ferocious bite of corn and narrowed her eyes at her mother.
After supper, I dawdled about, putting off the moment when I must tell my mother about going to the mountain with Ursula, a task I knew would grow harder the longer I put it off. If I told her tonight, however much she reserved her approval of Ursula, at least she couldn’t say I hadn’t informed her of my plans ahead of time. I helped Aunt Mona load the dishwasher. I wandered out into the warm evening and climbed part of the way up the hill to the old, abandoned farmhouse, where, to my disgust, I saw children playing. I turned away and started down again, stopping to watch the sky. The clouds still had bright sun on them, as did the tops of the trees; but the grass was already wet with dew and there were lights on in the houses. It got dark much earlier now than it had a month ago. Soon it would be dark by suppertime. Then the darkness would steal away more and more of the afternoon. When I got home from school, there would hardly be time to hop on my bike and ride up Old Clove Road and back before dark. And even if I did, it would be too cold for anybody to be waiting in the hut by the pond. The Finishing School would be closed.
When I finally got around to going to my mother’s room, I was not happy to find Becky there, making herself at home on the bed, while my mother sat in front of the typewriter, halfheartedly pecking at a typing lesson. She looked amused and slightly embarrassed over something, and Becky looked very proprietary and pleased with herself, her long legs stretched out the length of the bed, her arms folded Indian-style across her flat bosom. They looked very intimate, the two of them. What could they have been talking about?
“Where’s Jem?” I asked, standing haughtily in the doorway.
“He’s watching television with Aunt Mona,” said my mother. “Come in and sit down, darling. I was getting so bored with my typing.”
Becky grudgingly removed her legs from the lower half of the bed so I could sit there. I crossed the room and sat down in a chair. I wanted my mother alone but was too proud to say so. So far, during my friendship with Ursula, I had honored Aunt Mona’s injunction not to “open old wounds” by discussing the DeVanes in Becky’s presence, although Becky surely knew I went there often. But what could I do if she planted herself in my mother’s room?
“I only came to ask if it was all right if I went on a picnic next Tuesday,” I said, suddenly afraid I might not be allowed to go.
“Next Tuesday?” asked my mother. “I don’t see why not. Is it with—?” She hesitated, also aware of Aunt Mona’s concern over Becky’s “wound.”
“Ursula DeVane,” I said clearly, watching my cousin, who did not even blink. “She’s going to take me to that old hotel on the mountain, the one Aunt Mona told us about when we first came up here; you know, it’s real old. We’re going to go up there and look around and hike and take a picnic.”
“Well, let me know what you want to take, and I’ll buy it when we go to the supermarket on Saturday.”
“Oh no, she’s making the lunch. You don’t have to do any
thing.”
“Oh,” said my mother. She sighed. “Well, I hope the weather is nice on Tuesday.”
“So do I.”
Nobody said anything else. My mother frowned over the typing exercise book and tapped a few keys. Becky eyed me covertly from under the fringe of her bangs. I wanted to get up and go, but I wanted to drive Becky out first. More and more, lately, she hung around my mother, had a little crush on her; was always asking her familiar questions, yet never using her name; was always trying to wheedle praise and compliments from her.
Then Becky stuck out her legs full-length again and wiggled her toes. “I still think you ought to write to him,” she announced to my mother, in a feisty voice.
“Write to who?” I asked.
My mother blushed.
“Craven Ravenel,” said Becky.
I knew my mother had told Becky all about meeting the Ravenels at the theater in New York. I had considered it unnecessary, myself, but understood that it was my mother’s kind way of including Becky—who, after all, had been treated to the famous dance-card story—in our outing. But this detestable familiarity on Becky’s part was too much. I wondered how my mother could permit it. Obviously they had been discussing Craven Ravenel when I came in, and Becky wanted me to know it.
“There is no reason to write,” my mother told Becky firmly. To me, almost apologetically, she explained, “Becky has been letting her imagination run a little wild.”
“But he wanted you to write,” persisted the obdurate Becky. “He gave you his card, didn’t he?”
