The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  I washed down a bite of ham sandwich with the wine and watched a swimmer breaststroking intrepidly across the dark blue lake, too far below for me to tell whether it was a man or a woman. “And it was wonderful?” I repeated her word, not wanting to admit I didn’t understand why.

  “Yes. It put things in perspective. It made me see … well, I have known it all along, but I tend to forget. Death is not the enemy; age is not the enemy. These things are inevitable, they happen to everybody. But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You’re going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You’re not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before. That’s the enemy. There are two kinds of people walking around on this earth. One kind, you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing. With these people, you can never say, ‘X stops here,’ or, ‘Now I know all there is to know about Y.’ And that’s the kind of person I hope I shall be always.” She reclaimed the canteen of wine and took an enthusiastic swig.

  I said, “But … if they’re always changing and moving, couldn’t that mean they are just unstable?”

  “Ah no, far from it. They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive.” Then she cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes at me and said with a mischievous lilt, “You must be constantly on your guard, Justin, against congealing. Don’t be lulled by your youth. Though middle age is the traditional danger point, I suspect that many a fourteen-year-old has congealed during the long history of this world.”

  I took my second sandwich out of waxed paper and bit into it. It was very good. Just rich, ripe tomato from her garden, with something sprinkled on it: a mixture of sugar and salt and something else … little pieces of basil. I remembered the day in the store when I had seen her sauntering toward me with that little box of basil plants balanced on her fingertips. “How will I know if it starts to happen to me?” I asked.

  “Well, if you wake up one morning and think: Another day to get through, that might be a danger signal. Though not necessarily. Everyone has dreary interims. You just have to distinguish between a dreary interim and the onset of jellification. However, if you catch yourself becoming complacent, I’d say that was a bad sign. Or repeatedly choosing the old, familiar routine rather than rousing yourself and striking out for new territory, whether it’s mental or emotional, or actually going somewhere new. Father used to tell how our ancestors, the Sires DeVeine, roused themselves every spring when the snows melted, and left their cozy stronghold and rode down the Jura Pass looking for a new challenge. Sometimes it would be a Crusade, or other times it might be just terrorizing the locals, but the point was they knew they had to keep moving. And that’s why there are still so many of us. When it really came time to move, after Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes, our Huguenot ancestors had moving in their blood and were able to go to Germany, and later to America—to this very spot”—and she waved her hand in a proprietary way over the surrounding mountains and valleys. She took another hefty swig from the canteen and looked extremely pleased with herself, so much so that I fell under her confident spell once more. I guess she saw it in my face—as she said she saw everything—for she magnanimously passed me the canteen as though offering me her own rare potion against ordinariness and congealment. “If you ever feel it coming,” she said, “you must do something quickly. The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.”

  As I drank, she leaned forward and looked at me as if she were burning to confide another secret. But then she stopped herself. I think I know now what she was about to tell me. If I had been older, she might have blurted it out then and there, and we would have sat on, in our summerhouse over the ravine, tenderly mauling her confession in an amicable, winy way until we had extracted its choicest juices and, by doing so, strengthened our bond of womanhood. But, just on the verge of telling, she must have decided that I was, after all, still a child. She must have thought: No, it’s one thing to tell about my mother, but this other thing would be too much. Or maybe she just thought she had told enough for one day.

  What if she had gone on and told me? Would things have turned out better? Or would her confession only have delayed the inevitable tragedy and kept me from being the agent of it?

  We packed up the canteen and our folded picnic papers, “like good citizens,” as Ursula said, and she insisted that I strap the backpack to her for the rest of this outing. “I don’t want to be accused of violating the child-labor laws,” she joked. “As it is, I could probably be cited for corrupting a minor by giving you Beaujolais out of a canteen. But you did say your grandparents served you wine at the table.”

  Then we climbed the remainder of the cliffside path to the tower we had come to see: the focus of this excursion; the intriguing landmark that had looked down upon the site of our friendship all these summer days.

  I was disappointed in the tower. It had looked more mysterious from afar, when it had been a lonely, dark shape against the sky. Up close, its stones were sleek and yellow, and a metal plate attested unromantically that it had been built as recently as 1923. Also, we were not alone. While we had been climbing the cliffside path, a horse-drawn wagon full of hotel guests had been making its way up the winding carriage road, and so we found ourselves climbing to the tower with a dozen or so noisy strangers whose mundane remarks echoed harshly up and down the circular metal stairwell.

  On the observation deck, Ursula had to spin me around, because I had been looking in the wrong direction, confusing (and preferring) the sunny valley of New Paltz with that of Clove. “No,” she said, “we’re over there,” and pointed to a cluster of farms and fields and woods that lay to the northeast in a remoter, bluish haze. “Do you see that metal roof with the sun flashing on it … see, that tiny square of silver? Well, that’s Abel Cristiana’s tin roof. Then you follow the line of those fields to the right until you come to the dark wedge of pines. The pond is in there, and our ‘Finishing School.’ Then if you continue on, you’ll see a clump of trees. Those are the trees that surround our house.” As she said “our house,” she gave my shoulders a light squeeze, as if to say: It’s your house, too. After a moment, she added wistfully, “It’s different from the way I remembered it. I mean the landscape really is different. The last time I was up here, there was more open field, there were so many more farms. But that was a long time ago. Seeing the way this view has changed makes me realize just how long.”

  I caught the underlying sadness in her voice, although I couldn’t see her face; she was still standing behind me, her hands resting lightly on my shoulders. For the second time that day, I felt close to tears for her sake.

  As we started back down the cliffside path, the sadness gathered in me until it became overtaken by some other emotion—more like superstition, or fear. Ursula strode ahead, saying she couldn’t wait to get away from the noisy tourists. As I watched her figure in Julian’s soldier clothes and boots and backpack hurrying down the path, her hair floating in a lively mass around her head, I worked myself up into a superstition that if I allowed her to disappear from my sight I would lose her forever. I knew I didn’t mean I would lose Ursula the woman, who had been in the world a long time before I had been, who had done many things I might not know about or understand; I meant the Ursula I had been bewitched by and had believed in all summer.

  And then I stopped dead still in my tracks and purposely let her disappear from sight around the next curve.

  I began to cry. I considered waiting right where I was until she should miss me and turn around an
d come back for me. Would I revoke the spell if I summoned her back into sight the same way I had cast her out of it? But even as I asked myself that, I was slowly walking down the path again.

  She was waiting for me at the next turn. When she saw I was crying, she wanted to know if I had fallen and hurt myself.

  I wept all the harder at her innocent question, and at her look of increasing concern. “I think … I think I’m just tired,” I sobbed.

  There was another one of those little summerhouses just ahead of us on the path, and she led me to it and made me rest. She sat down beside me and looked anxiously into my face. “I should be killed,” she proclaimed, “for walking you half to death and talking you half to death and getting you drunk in the bargain. Why don’t you just push me over the edge of this summer-house and be rid of me?”

  “I don’t want to be rid of you,” I protested, and burst into fresh tears.

  “Well, of course you don’t,” she said, the humor returning to her voice. “But all the same I’m a brute.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “No you’re not!”

  “Have it your own way, then,” she said, smiling. She put an arm around me and I nestled on her breast like a weary child. With her other hand she began smoothing my hair away from my face in a soft, regular motion until my sobs subsided. I noticed that the mountain ranges, on a level with us at this height, were spinning slightly. Maybe I was drunk. But her steady caress was wonderfully soothing.

  Then an old couple passed our summerhouse on the way to the tower. They carried walking sticks and wore funny baggy walking shorts and matching brown shoes with tassels that flapped. There was something touchingly comical about their alikeness. They nodded pleasantly to us, and Ursula called hello. After they had disappeared around the curve of the path, she said in her low, amused voice, “They thought we were mother and daughter. I could tell from the way they looked at us. They thought you were tired and bored with walking, and I was giving you a little pep talk before we went on. It was a nice feeling, having them think you belonged to me.”

  The sun flashed on the spinning mountains. I closed my eyes in a kind of swoon. “I do belong to you,” I said. Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t completely true, but I wanted it to be true. I wanted things to be as simple as they had been before we had climbed the mountain, before we had driven up here today. If only we could stay up here together now, and not go down to the world again, I might be able to make it all true.

  “Oh child, child,” murmured Ursula, resting her chin on the top of my head. Positioned as we were, I couldn’t possibly have seen her face, but now I am fairly sure that her eyes were not closed, like mine. I see them restlessly scanning the valley below us, squinting through the blue haze to pick out a certain winking rooftop, or a beloved clump of trees. She had given a sustained, disturbing, and captivating performance to her audience of one, and was pleased with the results. But now she was anxious, perhaps impatient, to get back down the mountain and attend to other performances.

  XI.

  After Tuesday’s picnic, I made a resolution to stay away from Ursula for at least one week. I had always spaced my visits far enough apart so she wouldn’t get tired of me. Normally, after two or three days had gone by, I would feel it was okay to go again. I would have stayed away long enough for her to start wondering what I had been doing; and I would have given myself enough time to absorb all the feelings and sort out all the questions that each visit with her invariably stirred up. But after the day on the mountain, I felt almost invaded by Ursula. I felt overwhelmed by the things she had told me. They forced me not only to reassess her but to ask troubling questions about myself. I needed time to reestablish where my personality stopped and hers began. So, after she had taken me back to Lucas Meadows on Tuesday, I told myself: “You are not going over there until next Tuesday.”

  I wasn’t the least bit tempted on Wednesday and Thursday. I enjoyed the luxury of thinking I had begun to tire of her. On one of those days I lay stretched out on a chaise beside Joan Dibble’s pool, too lazy even to swim. I helped Joan speculate as to why she had not yet received an answer to her letter to Rex Harrison. “They usually write right back,” she said. “They don’t always write their own letters, but they make their secretaries do it right away. It’s good public relations.”

  “Maybe he writes his own letters and that’s why it takes longer,” I said. “Or maybe he’s run out of photos of himself and has to wait for a fresh supply so he can include one with his letter.” The backs of my legs still ached from Tuesday’s long hike. We had walked more than five miles, Ursula had said. My eyes were closed against the bright August sun, but I knew Joan, round and relaxed as a friendly Buddha, was surveying me complacently from her chair under the umbrella while I sunned myself on her chaise. Any time now, Mrs. Dibble would bring out a tray of cakes and sandwiches. In this companionable and undemanding atmosphere, I allowed selected playbacks from Tuesday to sift through my mind at the same time I was listening and talking to Joan. “You are like my dream daughter,” Ursula had said. “I truly believe I love you more than my mother ever loved me.… It would be, oh God, so painful if you ever betrayed me.”

  “I think Rex Harrison is such a popular actor,” I told Joan, “that he doesn’t have to worry about public relations. But he struck me as a real nice man and I’m sure you’ll hear. Maybe it’ll even be in his own writing.”

  “That would be worth waiting for,” said Joan.

  Every evening I went up to the empty farmhouse on the hill behind Lucas Meadows. It had become the refuge for my mental life. In Aunt Mona’s house, I was tugged back and forth between the demands and restraints of family life; at Ursula’s, my imagination was in service to whatever she required of it at the moment; and even though I could relax at Joan’s, I was aware that I left the difficult parts of myself behind when I went over to bask in her hospitality.

  I had made a practice of frowning so fiercely whenever I met young children playing around the old farmhouse in the evenings that they now left as soon as they saw me coming up the hill. The place had become mine at sunset, and I would sit on the back steps, facing away from our development, and watch the sky change, and go over my life’s concerns: not in chronological order, but letting one thing lead to another, and that thing in turn suggest something else. I thought of my mother and Ursula and Ursula’s mother; I thought of my grandfather writing down figures in a notebook while I carefully measured the dimensions of the window in a slave cabin and called out the measurements to him; I thought of people’s deaths, and of poor Julian writing that song for Karl and Karl never singing it, and Julian wanting to die. I thought of Kitty, lying without a stitch on in Ursula’s bed, smiling up at her surprised teacher and saying in French, “You see, my darling, I fixed everything.” I put myself in Kitty’s place, in Ursula’s bed, and then wondered if the strange feeling that resulted meant I would never marry, and that one day I might snuggle up against another woman and have people like my grandmother speak carefully to me because I was different but could not help being what I was. Did I love Ursula? Was I “in love” with her? Was there a difference? Was there some wise, detached person I could ask and who would tell me without judging me? If so, where was that person? Then I suddenly had the urge to go to ask Ursula. Just hop on my bicycle and ride over there and say, “I had to see you for a minute. I want you to tell me honestly, just as an impartial observer would, whether you think I care for you in an abnormal way. If you think I do, I won’t bother you anymore, but, you see, I need to know the truth for myself.” What would she say? Would she laugh? Would she be disgusted? Would she make me sit down and put her arm around me and stroke my head and say, “Child, child”? I would want her to do the last, of course, but would she, after I had asked her such a thing? The impulse to go to see what she would do—to put myself out of this misery of suspense—became almost overpowering. Then I remembered it was not even Friday ye
t. And besides, I had never ridden over to her in the evening. I might interrupt their supper. Then she would think I was something even worse than abnormal; she would think I was getting to be a nuisance.

  On Saturday, just before lunchtime, I bicycled down to Terwiliger’s Store and prowled the aisles, pretending that my mother had sent me for something and I had forgotten what it was. I loitered in front of the soup shelf until old Mr. Terwiliger’s beady eyes practically accused me of planning to steal the minute his back was turned. Here by the soup shelf in May she had surprised me, sauntering forward with the basil. But that had been because I wasn’t expecting it; things didn’t happen like that when you lay in wait for them.

  I bought Jem a box of Animal Crackers to appease Mr. Terwiliger, and a Tootsie Pop each for myself and Becky. I chose purple for Becky, her favorite, and was leaving the store feeling let down but virtuous when a truck drove up with two men in it. The ruddy-faced driver, in denim shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, jumped out so lithely that it took me a second to realize it was not a young man but Mr. Cristiana. “Hello there,” he said to me pleasantly, heading into the store. Ed was in the truck. “Hi,” I said, going over to his window. “How’s the fence-building? It’s almost finished, isn’t it?”