The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  She still did not come. The act of waiting, in such circumstances, contains a built-in paranoia that only intensifies as the frustration is prolonged. Of course she isn’t coming, I thought, pacing around inside the hut, whose walls emanated an ancient smell of dampness and decay; she knows I’m down here, but there’s nothing more she needs from me. She even knows my answer to the question she had been dying to ask me. “What I want to know, Justin,” she had said, “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?”

  And what a pussyfooting answer I had given! “I’m not sure,” I had hedged. “I don’t know what I would have done. But I can understand why you thought you had to do what you did.”

  Even that had been a lie. I didn’t understand. Maybe if I had risked saying, “I don’t understand, but I want to, I want to, more than anything,” she would be down here now. She was a woman of risks, she approved of risk-taking. And maybe she wanted me to judge her sternly. She would have respected me for it, and found me more interesting. But I had not said what I really felt, because I was afraid I would lose her. And now I probably had lost her. She thought of me as a predictable, polite little coward, not worth leaving the house for. No wonder she didn’t feel it worthwhile to walk to the pond to see if I was there. Old same-as-ever, pussyfooting Justin.

  Why hadn’t I said, “No, I have to tell you the truth, Ursula. I would not have done what you did. I might have hoped somebody else would find her out and bring her to her senses, but I would not have betrayed my own mother even if she had murdered somebody. Because she’s my mother, and I couldn’t respect myself if I did a thing like that.”

  I looked down at the Army blanket, folded into its pallet shape, and forced myself to imagine my mother rolling around on it, with her legs around a stranger. Nausea crept into my chest. I remembered the sound of my mother’s passion-cry, coming from behind the closed door of their bedroom in Fredericksburg, the afternoon of my birthday a year ago. The nausea rising into my throat, I snatched my father from his rightful place and put a stranger in the bed beside her and replayed the sound of her cry. If I had looked through the keyhole and seen this other man, who had, say, sneaked in through the window while my father was downstairs reading a book, would I have gone down and told my father?

  “No,” I croaked aloud in the empty hut.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to be here anymore. The hut was changed now that I knew its history, and I didn’t like the things I thought here, or the way they made me feel. Ghosts were not just Halloween things in sheets; ghosts were real; ghosts lingered in the air when people had done things. The ghosts of their deeds lingered with them. How could she, especially, bear to come down here and lie on that blanket and read and think in the very place where she had seen what she had seen, and then done what she had done about it? How could she call such a place her refuge? And how could she make a joke of it, even on my behalf, by calling it a “Finishing School,” when a whole family, and one person’s life, really had been finished by it?

  I couldn’t wait to get out of the hut, out of the woods. I tripped on a root and almost fell, I was hurrying so fast. I was afraid she would come now, and I didn’t want to see her, feeling the way I felt. My initial instinct to wait a whole week had been right, I told myself, running toward my bike. I had not yet assimilated all she had told me. I rode back down the haywagon path to Old Clove Road feeling I’d had a narrow escape. If she had come, she might have read things in my face that would have hurt her and then have made her hate me. Because people had to hate those who hurt them: it was self-preservation.

  The strangest thing was that I still could love her. And, in some ways, I loved her more than ever. I felt, as I pedaled grimly uphill, that I would like to suffer or endure some great sacrifice on her behalf. It would be my payment to her for not being able to believe in her as I had wanted to. If I could suffer for her sake, I might be relieved of some of the pain I felt at losing her as my ideal.

  At the top of the hill, where the land leveled off at the Cristiana farm, I was met by a new sight: Mr. Cristiana, whip in hand, was riding the stallion around the ring. Somehow, I had never imagined Turk with a rider on his back, and it was a letdown to see that proud, dangerous force trotting in a circle on a tight rein, lifting his feet obediently to the rhythm imposed by the man rising and falling in the saddle. Mr. Cristiana saw me pass and waved, and I waved back.

  All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough.

  On Monday morning, I woke out of a deep sleep, knowing that something was wrong. In the first place, I never woke up this early. My mother was indulgent about letting me sleep as late as I wanted in summer, and sometimes I did not make it down to breakfast until ten o’clock. It was usually the light that finally woke me, streaming through the cotton fabric of my milkmaid curtains and shaming me into getting up. But today it was a noise unlike any I had ever heard before: a brutal, repetitive, metallic impact, followed by a creaking, splintering sound.

  I lay there, staring groggily up at Ursula’s poster of the Normandie, which I had taped on the wall facing my bed. From my position, it was as if I were in the ocean and the prow of the great ship were bearing down on me. What could such a terrible noise be? And what was it doing here in our development? We’ll tell Mott and he’ll complain to IBM and IBM will give somebody hell, was my first reaction. Then I heard Jem’s shrill shriek and his feet pounding up the stairs. He burst into my room. “They’re smashing the house in!”

  “What?” For a second, I thought he meant ours. But that couldn’t be. The sound was not close enough for that.

  “The old farmhouse up on the hill! There’s this big old yellow bulldozer smashing it in! The front porch is already gone, I saw them do it!”

  “Oh no! We’ve got to stop them!” I was already out of bed, fumbling in my closet for something to put on. “Run down and tell Mother to phone Mott at IBM and have him send somebody over to stop them!” Purple spots danced in front of my eyes, I had leapt up so violently from bed. “Hurry, Jem! Don’t just stand there.”

  Jem raced downstairs and I heard him cry, “Call Mott!”

  Shaking with outrage, I pulled on my underpants and shorts. There was no time for the stupid bra. Still buttoning my shirt, I ran to Aunt Mona’s bedroom, which had a view of the hill and the farmhouse. Just as I looked out the window, the yellow monster rammed its powerful blade into the front of the house. Jem was right, the porch was already gone—the front steps with it; now, at this latest blow, the whole front of the house shuddered and lurched forward. “Stop it!” I shrieked out of the window. But the man at the controls went on butting the trembling house with his machine.

  I ran downstairs, half-crazy. Even if Mott was starting out right now, it might be too late when he reached Lucas Meadows. But it was worth a try. Maybe the house could be salvaged.

  I stopped, appalled, at the entrance to the kitchen. There sat Becky, being served like a queen by my mother, who was setting a stack of hot buckwheat cakes in front of her. Nobody looked the least bit upset.

  “Where’s Jem?” I demanded loudly.

  My mother raised her eyebrows at my tone. “He’s gone back up the hill to watch them tear down that old house.” She reached across the table and handed Becky the syrup, which she could perfectly well have reached herself.

  “You mean nobody has called Mott?” I said threateningly.

  “What’s this about calling Eric?” said my mother. “He’s at work, he won’t want to be disturbed. Justin, what’s wrong with you? You aren’t even dressed properly—”

  “They’re tearing down the house,” I screamed, “and you don’t even care! And even if you did care, you have no power! You can’t do anything! At least Mott works for a powerful organization. He can make them stop. I’m going to call him—”

  “Justin, you are not going to call Eric Mott. Get control of yourself. That old house
has been condemned. Eric was one of the people who kept after the village to get it condemned. It wasn’t safe for children to play around.”

  She spoke of it already in the past. Outside, the sickening clanking, crushing, splintering noise went on. I knew it was already too late.

  Becky, seeing that I was about to break down, stopped dousing her pancakes with syrup and watched me with interest.

  “You mean you knew Mott was trying to get them to tear down the house,” I said, “and you didn’t even tell me?”

  “Justin, I don’t understand why you are so upset about that old house. I know you go up there by yourself sometimes, but—”

  Becky looked down long enough to cut a neat wedge of buckwheat cakes—her favorite breakfast, which Mother made for her frequently—with her knife and fork. She checked to see that the slabs of butter were securely inside, then poured a bit more syrup on the wedge and guided the dripping morsel to her mouth. Chewing with obvious pleasure, she resumed watching me. Even if I had been about to cry, that impudent little gaze would have dried my tears at their source.

  “You don’t understand,” I said to my mother, wanting to hurt her as much as I could, “because you don’t understand me. I may be your daughter, but I’ve come to the sad conclusion that you don’t understand the way my mind works or what is important to me. You just aren’t capable of it.”

  I watched long enough to see her whiten at the lips. Then I left the kitchen. I went back upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and listened to the destruction of my sanctuary. As the morning grew brighter and hotter, the quality of the noise changed. I knew it was because there was less resistance each time the big machine lurched forward with its destroying blade. I knew that by now the house as I had known it existed only in my memory.

  On the other side of my closed curtains, I saw the clear blue outline of the little bottle Ursula had sent me for my birthday. On that morning, I had awakened full of longing for the old life in Fredericksburg; now I would have accepted the earlier part of this summer, when Ursula DeVane still shone from the distance as my unblemished heroine, and the old farmhouse stood securely on the hill—a silent and trusted repository for my daydreams and meditations on life. I considered getting up and parting the curtains, banishing the milkmaids into shadowy folds, so the bottle could “assert its blueness,” as Ursula had put it in her letter; but the present hopelessness of “Raspberry Ice” suited my mood better. When my mother found me lying in its muddy, mauve gloom, she would realize just how depressed I was and would be sufficiently worried to overlook the harsh things I had said.

  She was a long time in coming upstairs, and when she did I could see that she had not forgotten my words. She did not come over to the bed and kiss me and stroke my head. Standing formally in the doorway, she simply said she was about to take Jem shopping for school things in Kingston and asked if I would like to go along.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “It might improve your outlook on life to get out in the sunshine and look at some fall clothes. Becky is coming. We’ll probably stay in Kingston for lunch.”

  “Fine, you all go on,” I said, thinking of the good time they would have without me. “If I get hungry, I’ll fix myself a sandwich.”

  She continued to stand there, in her formal way, looking at me as if I were a problem to be solved, rather than a flesh-and-blood daughter. “I don’t know …” she began, “I think I’d feel better if you came along. I feel uneasy leaving you here by yourself, in the mood you’re in.”

  “If you think I have to go, then of course I have to go,” I said, raising myself up with a sigh, though I was relieved that I would not have to stay here by myself.

  “Yes, I do think so,” she said coolly. “Soon you’ll be an adult, and then you can do whatever you please. But, for a few more years, I’m afraid you’re going to have to please me.”

  “At this rate, I probably won’t make it to adulthood,” I said tragically.

  “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Everything is being taken away.” I began to cry. “By the time I’m grown up, there’ll be nothing worth living for.”

  Whether it was my tears, or my words, she came in and sat down on the corner of my bed. She looked at me gravely, but did not touch me.

  “I may not be capable of understanding the way your mind works,” she said slowly, “but I will tell you how it looks to me from where I sit. You haven’t had a bad summer. In fact, you’ve had a pretty good summer. You’ve had places to go and things to keep your mind busy. You’ve had Joan, whom you say you like, and Joan’s nice pool to swim in; you’ve had the interest of Miss DeVane, who has interested you, too. You are always animated when you come back from a visit with her; my guess is, you have had at least one person this summer who understands how your mind works—”

  “I didn’t really mean—”

  “No, let me finish. The other night, you went out with a boy you seem to like, and in another week you’ll start back to school, where there’ll be more new friends and new things to learn, and, who knows, maybe even more people who are capable of understanding how your mind works. And underlying all this—I know it seems trivial to you—is a house to come home to, and food put on the table for you, and people who care what happens to you, and love you, and want you to have the luxury—yes, the luxury—of making sense of the world in small, safe doses until you have built up a character strong enough to last you the rest of your life. You have a home, and you have me in it, whatever my failings. So, forgive me if I don’t see that ‘everything is being taken away’ from you, though it may look that way this morning.”

  “I’m sorry for what I said downstairs. It was just that they were tearing down the house, which was my important place, and there you were, spoiling Becky with her buckwheat cakes. I just wanted to hurt you, that was all.”

  “Well, you did a pretty good job.” Then she relented and kissed me. “Now get dressed properly and let’s see if we can’t find something nice in Kingston for you to wear back to school.”

  “She was the most wonderful woman I had ever met,” Rebecca Mott, counselor and psychologist to precocious criminals, would tell me years afterward, across the table in a vegetarian restaurant of her choosing. “After you came to live with us, and I saw how wonderful she was, I used to fantasize that she had had an affair with my father while your father was still overseas. I had her meet my father when he was on leave after sinking that Japanese sub, and they conceived me. Your father was off in Europe and never even knew. She went back to you and your grandparents in that snobby house in Virginia, and nobody knew anything. She wore a tight corset to keep them from knowing. Then, just when she started to get big, she went off to another town by herself and had me. And my father wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t, she said it would hurt too many people. So he met my mother and told her, ‘I will marry you on the condition that you agree to raise this baby as our own and never tell a soul.’

  “And then when your father was killed in that car accident, and your grandparents were dead, and there was nothing to stay in Fredericksburg anymore for, your mother said to herself, ‘Now there is nothing to stop me from being with my other daughter.’ And she called my father and said, ‘I want to be with Becky. You’ll have to find a way.’ So my father moved to the houseboat and separated from my mother so my real mother could come and live in our house. I carried that fantasy around in my head for years … years after you three had moved out of our house and gone back to the South. I kept that fantasy alive even when I was old enough to realize that the dates would have made it impossible. There was no physical way I could be your mother’s child.

  “But you I could never understand. With a beautiful, kind mother like that, you preferred to spend time with that ugly, crazy woman over on Old Clove Road. I’ll never understand that. But I was glad you were out of the way. It was so much better when you weren’t around. I remember that day when she took us all to Ki
ngston to buy clothes for school. I tried on this royal-blue sweater and she said, ‘Oh, Becky, you look so pretty in that sweater, I am going to buy it for you myself.’ And then we went to that cafeteria for lunch and I remember I had chicken à la king—it was one of the best meals I ever ate, even though I don’t care for meat anymore—and the whole day would have been perfect, except for you moping around. What was the matter with you? All you did was sigh and mutter under your breath about ‘when are we going home?’ I remember wishing you would get run over by a car. I told my analyst about that. She said it was a natural reaction. I didn’t mind Jem. He could be a nuisance, but he was okay. Except I was jealous of him getting to have all those naps with her.”

  “I wanted to get back to Lucas Meadows that day,” I tell my cousin, “because I wanted there to be time to ride my bicycle over to Old Clove Road and see that crazy woman. I can’t agree with you that she was ugly. I loved the way she looked, probably just as much as you loved the way my mother looked. I needed to see her because I was upset about that old farmhouse’s being bulldozed. I used to sit up there almost every evening, and it had come to be a sort of extension of myself. And I felt she would understand this in a way my mother couldn’t. But, as it turned out, we got back from Kingston too late for me to go over there before supper. And then after supper I decided to go anyway. Oh God, how I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Oh. Was that the famous evening?”

  “That was the famous evening.”