The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  “Then one day, in midsummer, Abel came to me very excited. He said he had been waiting around in the woods by the pond earlier that afternoon while Julie was having his nap and I was reading in my room—Mother always made me rest after lunch, to ‘digest.’ Abel had been waiting for Karl to go off on the hike it was his custom to take in the afternoons; then Abel could splash around in the pond as noisily as he pleased. But Karl didn’t come out of the hut, and Abel was about to give up and go home when he saw my mother enter the woods carrying a shirt. She knocked at the door of the hut, looked nervously around her, then went inside. Abel crept closer and looked through the window. He saw Karl, very red in the face, take off the shirt he was wearing. Then my mother put the other shirt on him. As she buttoned the shirt, she suddenly laid her head on his chest. Then they began kissing. ‘She would be in lots of trouble if your father knew that,’ Abel said.

  “Now I had a weapon. But I was sick and disgusted. Our mother, with her air of being the grand lady, and Karl, who was living on my father’s bounty, that comical foreigner, hardly more than a boy! Of course, our mother wasn’t ancient, she was barely a decade older than Karl, but at the time it seemed ancient to me. Oh God, how strange it all is, the vagaries of fate. Now I’m this age and—” Ursula stopped walking and looked around her. Her expression was wide-eyed and disoriented. She looked down at the sapling branch she had been carrying for some time without waving: the gnats had gone away. She tossed the branch into the ferns that grew beside the bridle path. Then she gave me a challenging look, her eyes fierce, as if to ask: Are you still with me?

  “Did you tell your father?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral. For the sake of the story, I wanted her to have told him: it would make it more dramatic. But I quailed for the foolish, unsuspecting mother, that nervous, unsmiling young woman in the old photograph. How defenseless and isolated she must have been amidst all that DeVane pride.

  “I hadn’t truly made up my mind,” said Ursula, resuming our hiking pace, “but I thought I’d better see the evidence with my own eyes before I did anything.” We were in deep woods now, the sun striking us intermittently through layers of leaves; all around was the smell of mossy earth and the horse-droppings we frequently encountered on the bridle path. “My father might not accept the story at second hand; and my mother—if I did decide simply to blackmail her by threatening to tell my father if she insisted on pursuing the boarding-school idea—might deny everything, saying that Abel was a dirty-minded little yokel. So I made up my mind to spy on her, to follow her the next time she went to the hut. Silly woman, she went the very next afternoon. I watched from my room as she left the house and cut across the fields. She must have thought she was safe: Father at work, her little boy asleep, her troublesome daughter reading in her room—I had pretended at lunch that I couldn’t wait to get back to my book.

  “I streaked out of the house and went the long way round, down Old Clove Road, cutting back via the old haywagon road and approaching the hut from the rear. This took more time, of course, than following her through the fields, but there was less chance she would see me. Nevertheless, I was afraid that by the time I arrived she would have finished kissing him and there would be nothing left for me to see.

  “I needn’t have worried. There was more to see than I had bargained for. When I looked through the window, they were on the floor, her skirts pushed up and crushed … those clothes she was so careful about! And there were his bony knees and elbows, sticking out from more angles than I had thought possible. Oh, it was horrible. I don’t mean that I was innocent about sex … when you grow up in the country, you learn about those things early. But it was the shock of those two, and their clumsy, furtive coupling. They had put down the covers from his bed onto the floor and there was our mother writhing about with the penniless young foreigner my father was housing and feeding.

  “I ran home the way I had come, sobbing. But, as I ran, I split into two parts. One part was a frightened, sobbing ten-year-old child who had lost her mother just as finally as if she had seen her killed. The other part was a cool, intelligent girl who plotted exactly what words she would use when she told her father what she had seen. But the strangest thing was that I loved my mother-who-had-been more than ever at the moment. I realized how safe and admirable, by comparison, that other mother had been. All her silly airs, her vanity and fastidiousness, her constant harping on my behavior, had been at least respectable. And, in a sense, she had helped make me as tough and independent as I was by giving me something constant to rebel against. But she was no longer constant. She was something else, some new thing entirely. The ‘old’ mother was gone and I felt it was my duty to warn our father before she brought shame and ridicule upon us, before she contaminated or hurt Julie, who was still a trusting, innocent child.

  “That was how I reasoned. Does it sound extraordinary to you? Was it abnormal? Or couldn’t it have been just the most normal reaction in the world? You see, she had stopped being the person I knew. She had become another woman. And I couldn’t predict what this new woman might do. For all I knew, she might run away with Karl. They might even take Julie with them. I recalled that the question of my going to boarding school hadn’t arisen until after Karl had come. Maybe she had been plotting to get me out of the house so it would be easier to carry on her liaison with Karl. Now that I’m older, I can see her side. She was lonely, without inner resources; my father was far too old for her. Karl became her playmate, her pet, her project. And then, one day, a spark … perhaps when he was singing … and the sexual possibilities flashed into being. Oh I know what that can be like! But I didn’t know then. I was just ten years old, and what I had seen through the window of the hut seemed a threat to my whole existence. Children are the most conservative creatures, and I was fighting to preserve what I had.

  “That night, I told my father. I went to him in that old part of the house we call ‘the office,’ where he often went after supper to work on his DeVane archives: to write letters to new DeVanes he had discovered, or to answer letters from other DeVane correspondents. I told him what I had seen, and I told him simply that it had ‘frightened me.’ I was careful not to pass judgment or condemn anybody: that was for him to do. He heard me out, his face perfectly composed except for a momentary quiver around the eyes. Then he said, ‘You know, Sissie, DeVanes have lived in this valley for more than two hundred years and not once has anything dishonorable been brought against our name. I hope nothing ever will.’ Then he told me he was going to put my love for him and my loyalty to the family to the test. The test was that I would not mention to anyone else what I had seen. I promised him. I was afraid to tell him that Abel had seen them kiss. But at least Abel hadn’t seen what I had seen. How glad I was that I hadn’t asked Abel to meet me at the pond for more spying; and how glad I was that Abel hadn’t shown up on his own!

  “My father told me that I must keep completely silent about the matter and act as though nothing had changed. ‘You must treat your mother with respect,’ he said. ‘Only, don’t be too good, or she will suspect something. Just be your usual rambunctious self, but show respect. I will take care of the rest.’

  “Things went on as usual for several weeks. Mother continued to sneak off to the hut. I would watch her from my window, feeling as though I were watching an animal walking into a trap. I warned Abel away from the woods. I told him (copying Father’s tactic with me) that the test of our friendship was going to be that he would never tell about the kiss. ‘There are circumstances that I can’t relate to anyone outside the family,’ I said, ‘but everything is going to be taken care of, if you don’t go and spoil it by talking.’ Abel swore he would never tell. He kept his promise for many years, until he was a grown man. Then he and Julie had a terrible argument one time, when Julie came home from Juilliard. Julie, who can be quite snobbish, insulted Abel’s pride, and Abel got back by insulting our mother. I could have killed Abel, but Julie had gone too far. He had hurt Abel, and Abel
had lashed out with his secret. Julie had hated Abel ever since Abel trapped his pet raccoon, but after that fight they never spoke again.

  “Then one evening Father came home and listened to Julie play a new piece Karl had taught him, and then he told Karl he wanted a word with him alone. This is the showdown, I thought. But when Karl appeared at the supper table, he looked elated. His appetite was more voracious than ever, and he kept smiling to himself between bites. Then Father announced that he and some friends, who had been impressed with Karl’s playing at the Dutch Reformed Church, had gotten together a ‘little scholarship fund’ that would allow Karl to go back to Germany and begin his studies in music at the Hochschule in Berlin. ‘It would be selfish of us to keep you here longer for our own purposes,’ Father told Karl. ‘If you are going to be trained properly and have a career, now is the time to start. It’s because we’ve become so fond of you that we must let you go.’ Then he looked at our mother and said, ‘Isn’t that so, Ida?’ And her expression was that of an animal caught in a trap.

  “Things went quickly after that. Karl’s passage was booked. He spent most of his time with Julie, who was heartbroken that his beloved teacher was going away. He told Julie that if he practiced hard, he would grow up to be a great pianist and that he, Karl, would be in the audience one night and come up afterward and shake hands. Karl wrote a whole notebook full of instructions, telling Julie how to play pieces he wouldn’t be ready to learn for years.

  “Only once after Father’s announcement did I see our mother go to the hut. But she came back immediately and went to her room and cried and didn’t come down for supper that night. I understood what had happened: Karl had sent her back. Unaware of the true cause of his ‘scholarship,’ he was not going to risk alienating Father now. He had thrown her over. After that, she spent her days in the sewing room, making clothes for Karl to take back with him to Berlin. Sometimes she would send a tragic glance across the room to him, but he seemed unaware; he was so wrapped up in his good fortune. To this day I don’t know whether ‘friends’ helped pay for Karl’s ‘scholarship,’ or whether it all came out of Father’s pocket to save our family pride. The latter, I imagine.

  “On his last evening with us, Karl played and sang. Of course, he concluded with ‘Der Doppelgänger,’ and I’ve always believed it was partly that song, and the look he briefly sent our mother as he sang it, that gave her the inspiration for her madness. The words are from a poem by Heine, the great German poet, and, roughly translated, they go something like this:

  “Still is the night, the streets are all resting,

  In that house yonder lived my beloved;

  She has long ago left the town,

  But the house is still standing in the same place.

  I see there a man who stares at her window

  And wrings his hands with the power of pain.

  Horror besets me when I see his face,

  Because the moon shows me … my own!

  “I think that, in the weeks after Karl left, my mother came to identify herself with the woman in that song. She heard Karl’s voice in her memory, and dwelt on that single look he had risked sending her on his last evening, and she came to believe that she was the woman who had gone away and that Karl would always love that woman, as the haunted man in the song did. The suggestive power of art is so strong that it can convince us of all kinds of things.

  “Cold weather came and she retreated further and further into herself. She stayed in the sewing room most of every day, making clothes for Julie. We later found that she had made the clothes in sizes he would not need for years. She stopped going out, even to the store. Father brought the groceries home each evening. She continued to cook for us, but the meals weren’t good and she often burned things. She grew careless about her dress, and Father had to remind her she had worn the same clothes for several days at a time. Once I went into the sewing room to ask her something. I must have come up behind her without her hearing. She turned and gave a shriek and brandished her scissors at me as if she were going to stab me. I ran for my room and bolted the door. Then she followed me and said she was sorry, that she had been miles away in her thoughts and that when I had come up on her like that she had mistaken me for someone who had broken into the house and she had been frightened.

  “Then one day in November, when Julie and I got home from school, there was a distant cousin of ours, Mrs. Hasbrouck, who sometimes sat with us when our parents went out. Mrs. Hasbrouck told us that she would be staying with us for a few days while our father settled our mother in a place where she was going to have a rest. Our mother never came home again. Father took us to visit her several times, but she was getting progressively worse, sinking into her madness, and something unpleasant always happened. Once she started screaming, ‘Get her away from me, that devil,’ when she saw me, and, the last time we ever went, she told Julie he was only pretending to be her son, that her true son had gone away. ‘He went back to Germany to study,’ she told Julie. Poor Julie tried to reason with her. He pointed to the clothes he was wearing. ‘When you made them for me, they were too big, but look, now I can fit into them.’ She went into a violent rage and tried to tear the clothes off him. That was the last time we ever saw her. Julie stopped speaking about her, after that. But he would often talk about Karl. ‘I wonder what Karl is doing now?’ he would ask. When he learned a new piece from his music teacher in Kingston, he would say, ‘I wish Karl could hear me play this.’ And when we went to the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, he would ask us, ‘Do you remember when Karl was up there, playing that organ?’

  “But what I want to know, Justin, is what you would have done if you had been in my place. Would you have done what I did, or do you think I was a monster? You must be honest. If you’re not, you know, I can read it on your face.”

  She had caught me unprepared. I was still deep in the land of her troubling story. I had almost forgotten I existed. “I’m not sure,” I said, after a moment. “I mean, I just don’t know what I would have done.” After another moment, I added, “But I can understand why you thought you had to do what you did.”

  She pounced. “Ah, you said ‘thought you had to’! That means you don’t think I had to!”

  The goading note in her voice worried me: it was as though she wanted me to accuse her. I was disturbed by all the things I had heard, and also I felt trapped. This day which was supposed to be our outing had turned into an ordeal. I felt as though I dangled precariously on the cusp of my childhood and that the least wrong move, the least wrong thought, would send me tumbling prematurely into the uncertain abyss of adulthood, where morals, backed up by experience, could never be simple again. Ursula’s story of Kitty had already made me wonder whether I would grow up to be a normal woman. Her tale about her unfortunate mother raised troubling questions—more, perhaps, than she was aware of. Did she, for instance, approve today of the way her father had handled things? Did she believe he had been a good man? Had she and her mother always been at war? Surely there had been some good moments, some times of affection between mother and daughter. And all that talk about “the DeVanes,” their specialness, their superiority: did she still subscribe to that, as she still believed that the “spirit” of the DeVane place provided her with an “elixir” to be found nowhere else in the world? And if she did believe this so strongly, could it not be the reason why she had never been able to break away and become the actress she had wanted to be? Or was it that after failing to become that acress, she had justified her retreat by convincing herself that she had to get back to the elixir that was her birthright?

  Her story had made me question her adult perspective more than ever before, and yet, somehow, by telling it to me she had implicated me in it: it bound me to her even as it raised serious doubts about her character. I felt, in a strange way, motherly toward her, as if it were my duty to shield her from the consequences of her skewed vision. And this meant shielding her from my own doubts about her. She had made me ol
der on this walk, and I fought down a surge of resentment. Wasn’t I supposed to be the petted child on this picnic day, and she the responsible adult? Would this bridle path that we were taking so as not to have to pay at the gate never end? The perspiration trickled down my back, beneath Julian’s Army pack that contained our lunch. Would we ever eat it? The woods were thick and close around us: we had met not one soul in the time we had been walking, and there wasn’t the least sign of a hotel. Yet I knew I was not being fair. I had wanted for a long time to hear about the mysterious, mad mother; only, while I had waited, I had constructed a different story, something vaguely sad, or even tragic, but not so morally ambivalent and with so many disturbing loose ends.

  “Poor child,” said Ursula then, with her uncanny insight into my feelings (or, as she claimed, my face), “I have overloaded you.”

  “No you haven’t. I was just … thinking. I was trying to think out how I would have acted. It’s just that it’s so difficult. I mean, I didn’t know your mother, and so I keep picturing mine. And I don’t think mine would have … I mean, I’m not saying she’s better than yours, but … well, her circumstances were different.”

  “Of course they were,” she replied coldly. “Everyone’s circumstances are different from everyone else’s. I’m not asking you what your mother would have done. I’m asking about betrayal. Would you have betrayed your own mother, whatever the ‘circumstances’?” She was being unreasonable, I thought, because she was disappointed in me. Yet she had managed to regain control over me by showing her disappointment.

  “I might have,” I ventured miserably, as if saying such a thing was equal to doing it. “If I had felt as threatened as you did. But I would have felt guilty about it, probably for the rest of my life.”