The Finishing School

by Joanna Goodman

  “And?”

  “We had dinner.”

  Jay gives her a strange look.

  “I went there specifically to talk to him,” she explains. “About the night Cressida fell. It was your idea, remember? You said it would be a good distraction for me. A good idea for a new novel.”

  “And?” he asks calmly. “Was it?”

  “Yes, actually. I found out that he was at Huber House that night. But he wasn’t there to see Cressida. He was there to see Mrs. Fithern.”

  “Why?”

  “She was the housemother on duty that night,” Kersti says, getting excited as she recounts her conversation with Magnus. “He told her that Cressida was having an affair with her husband.”

  “What did she do when she found out?”

  “That’s the thing. Magnus said she didn’t even react. She didn’t seem surprised or angry, which is strange.”

  “She could have been trying to save face.”

  “What if she went up to confront Cressida in her room? She’d just found out her husband was screwing her favorite student—”

  “You think she pushed Cressida?”

  “They could have fought. I’m not saying it was premeditated, but it’s just as plausible as any other theory—”

  “Sounds like the makings of a great mystery.”

  “I’m still not entirely convinced Magnus was telling me the truth.”

  “How did he look?” Jay asks her.

  “Who, Magnus? That’s a weird question.”

  “Is it?”

  “He looked the same,” she says. “Pretty good, I guess.”

  “Where did you have dinner?”

  “A French place in Chelsea.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “I don’t know. Ten?” She kisses his face and rubs his sideburns, omitting Magnus’s invitation to go back to his place. “What’s this about, babe?”

  “This is how affairs happen,” he says. “We’re going through a rough patch, you’re feeling vulnerable and sad. You reach out to an old guy friend on the pretext of finding out what happened to your friend, and next thing you know . . .”

  “First of all, it wasn’t a pretext.”

  “What exactly are you hoping to accomplish hopping from city to city, interrogating all these people?”

  “You’re the one who suggested it,” she repeats, frustrated. “I guess it was convenient for you at the time to get me off your back?”

  “Yes! It was before you took off to New York and had dinner with an old boyfriend at a French restaurant in Chelsea while we were fighting!”

  “Not my old boyfriend—”

  “It doesn’t fucking matter, Kersti.”

  She gets up off his lap and moves away from him. “It so happens I do want to find out what happened to Cressida,” she tells him. “Nothing I’ve found out so far makes sense and frankly I want to dig a little deeper. No one else ever investigated or asked questions and I’m doing it now. Better late than never, don’t you think?”

  “Do what you need to do,” he says.

  “Meaning?”

  “We just can’t seem to get back to where we were.”

  He shakes his head and leaves the room, defeated.

  Alone again, Kersti returns to her swivel chair, faces her computer, and stares at it for a long time. Tears come again, blurring the words on her screen, and she doesn’t move. Eventually, the tears dry up on her cheeks, leaving salty streaks and a faint headache. She reaches for her phone, feeling like a naughty child who’s been told not to do something and wants to do it all the more. She scrolls through her contacts, her finger stopping at the name Brains-Chowne.

  It’s nine o’clock at night in England, a good time to catch someone at home, either putting the kids to sleep, reading in bed, or watching TV with her husband. She impulsively dials the number. While it’s ringing, she pictures the two of them snuggled on the couch watching Downton Abbey with a hand-knit blanket thrown over their legs, a tea tray spread out in front of them, and a fire blazing in the stone fireplace. She imagines Mr. Chowne to be tall and lanky with bad teeth, wearing a serviceable brown robe over his pajamas and slippers on his large feet; and then she realizes she’s unfairly superimposed middle-aged Mr. Fithern onto her picture of Mr. Chowne.

  “Hullo?” A chipper woman’s voice on the line.

  Kersti freezes.

  “Hullo?”

  “Mrs. Fithern?” Kersti blunders, forgetting to call her by her new name, Mrs. Brains-Chowne.

  After a beat of silence, Mrs. Fithern says, “Who is this?”

  “It’s Kersti Kuusk. I was in your English Lit class at the Lycée in Lausanne—”

  More silence.

  “Ninety-four to ninety-eight?”

  Kersti is sure she can hear her sighing on the other end. Neither of them says it out loud, but it’s there, unspoken and intractable: Cressida’s year. Cressida’s best friend.

  “I’m speechless,” she says. “How did you get my home number?” Her voice sounds exactly the same, warm and youthful, familiar. Twenty years collapse like a ribbon of dominos, and she might just as well be talking about Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Kersti says. “I remembered your maiden name and I looked you up in the white pages. I . . . it’s not for myself. It’s for Lille.”

  “L’il Lille Robertson?”

  “Yes,” Kersti says, encouraged. “She died recently. She had breast cancer.”

  “Oh, good God, not ’er, too?”

  “She wrote me a letter before she died,” Kersti continues. “Her mother found it on her computer and sent it to me.”

  “Oh, dear—”

  “Lille wanted me to let you know how much you meant to her,” Kersti lies. “And to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Me? After all these years? Why?”

  “She cared about you. You were her favorite teacher. And . . . well, she really wanted me to get in touch with you and find out how you are. She always wondered after—”

  “She was such a sweet girl. A really good human being. Marked for tragedy though, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this,” Kersti says. “I just felt I owed it to Lille. And the truth is, I’ve thought about you a lot, too. We all cared about you.”

  “That’s very nice to hear,” she says, her voice sounding choked up. “You hope as a teacher to have some impact on your students. I’m touched, really.”

  “I’m relieved I didn’t upset you. I just wanted to tell you about Lille.” And ask you if you went up to Cressida’s room the night she fell and possibly scuffled with her and pushed her off her balcony in a fit of jealous rage?

  “I’m remarried,” she volunteers, quite matter-of-factly. “Simon and I have four girls. He tells people we live in Abberley-Upon-Hormones, in Hormoneshire.” She chuckles at their inside joke and right on cue, Kersti can hear a chorus of girls’ voices in the background, squealing or arguing. It’s hard to tell with girls.

  “I still teach here in Abberley,” she goes on. “I have a good life. Simple and quiet. Lille can rest assured, wherever she is. It’s all turned out rather well.”

  “It sounds nice,” Kersti says, elaborating on her earlier picture of their life and placing them in a charming stone cottage nestled in the Cotswolds. Kersti visited there once, in her second year at the Lycée. It was the Ascension holiday in May and they went to watch the annual cheese rolling in Gloucester. She remembers standing on the side of a hill, surrounded by turreted stone churches and medieval cottages and Union Jacks flapping alongside her under a steady drizzle, and a horde of people chasing a ten-pound cheese wheel down a steep hill with all the fervor and passion of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Afterward, they drove through the rolling, rain-soaked Cotswolds, stopping at a place called the Crown & Crumpet for scones and clotted cream.

  “And how are you doing, Kersti? Are you still in Canada?”

&nbs
p; “Yes, in Toronto,” Kersti responds. “I’m a writer.”

  “A writer? Really.”

  “I write fiction. Historical novels.”

  “Can I take any credit?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I knew you had a talent for it,” she says, probably fibbing. “You just needed to polish your diamond.”

  “You should be able to find my books in the UK,” Kersti tells her, and then rattles off the titles, rationalizing that if you’re going to brag about your literary success to anyone, it should be your English Lit teacher. “I was chosen one of the Hundred Women of the Lycée as part of their centennial anniversary celebration.”

  “Congratulations, Kersti. My time there wasn’t all for nothing then.”

  Kersti doesn’t know what to say. She remains quiet. Both of them do, for what feels to Kersti like an excruciatingly long time. The only thing crackling on the line between them is the tension from what they dare not speak out loud—the very public humiliation that ended Mrs. Fithern’s tenure and her marriage.

  “Is she still alive?” Mrs. Fithern finally asks.

  It takes Kersti a moment to figure out she’s talking about Cressida. “Yes,” she says. “She has permanent brain damage, but she’s alive.”

  “I’ve often wondered. I think about her often.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. She was only a child and I was very fond of her.” Her voice is tender, extraordinarily generous, given what Cressida did to her. And yet Kersti wonders, does some part of her believe that Cressida got what she deserved? If so, she doesn’t say it. What she says is, “Charles was the predator.”

  Kersti can’t imagine what it must be like to find that out about your husband. She thinks of the early days of her own marriage, how life had once brimmed with promise, and how it’s turned out now. Disappointment is a thing you don’t see coming. It’s something you crash into, like the back of a bus.

  “Did you know about the affair before Magnus told you?”

  “I suspected, but I didn’t know for sure,” she admits. “Charles admitted everything to me after Cressida’s accident.”

  “If it was an accident.”

  “You know what I think?” Mrs. Fithern volunteers. “I think Cressida jumped from her balcony. She was an unhappy girl who got in over her head and tried to kill herself. Charles didn’t want that baby any more than she did. Suicide was her way out. That’s what I’ve always believed.”

  “What baby?”

  “She never told you?”

  “No—”

  “He got her pregnant.”

  “Mr. Fithern did?”

  “Indeed,” she says, as though Kersti should have known. Like it was common knowledge. “Charles always thought she jumped to punish him.”

  Chapter 20

  LAUSANNE—May 1997

  Mrs. Fithern has a new haircut. It’s very short on the sides and puffy on top, like a poodle with a Mohawk. She’s also put on some weight in recent months and there’s speculation she might be pregnant. “What’s the book about?” she asks the class.

  They’re studying Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in AP English. Cressida is obsessed with it, has read it three times. Kersti finds it dull and depressing.

  “It’s about rich people doing nothing in the Riviera,” Rafaella answers. “It’s about my parents.”

  The class erupts in laughter. Naturally, they can all relate. Except Kersti.

  “It’s about the dissolution of a marriage,” Cressida says. “About two people who bring out the worst in each other—mental illness and alcoholism.”

  Mrs. Fithern sits down on the front of her desk. “What about themes? I want you thinking thematically.”

  “Youth,” Cressida calls out.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Fithern cries. “And specifically, the sheen of youth. The promise of youth.”

  She slides off the desk and scribbles on the blackboard: “YOUTH.” “Dick was obsessed with his own mortality and lost youth,” she tells them, as though she’s speaking about mutual friends.

  “And Zelda’s,” Cressida adds.

  “You mean Nicole’s,” Mrs. Fithern corrects.

  “Aren’t they one and the same?” Cressida responds. “Isn’t this book Fitzgerald’s attempt to rationalize his own decline and unrealized potential by blaming it on Zelda’s schizophrenia?”

  Kersti and Rafaella look at each other and roll their eyes. Cressida is a brilliant student, but she can be cloyingly pretentious.

  “Be careful in your essay, luv,” Mrs. Fithern cautions. “The protagonists are Dick and Nicole Driver. Not Scott and Zelda. It’s fiction.”

  And then, as though suddenly remembering the other dozen students in her class, she randomly calls on Kersti. “What other character symbolized the promise of youth in the book, or of something new and better?”

  “Um. Their children?” Kersti guesses.

  Mrs. Fithern sighs. “You’re being way too literal,” she says, sounding annoyed. “I mean thematically.”

  Her obvious disappointment gives Kersti the impression she would much rather continue this discussion of Tender Is the Night with Cressida, one-on-one, over coffee.

  Around midnight that night, after they know Hamidou has gone to sleep, Kersti and Cressida creep down the flight of stairs to the third-floor bathroom, cigarettes in hand. The other girls are already there, consoling Noa, who’s crying.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Noa’s ex-boyfriend tried to kill himself,” Raf says.

  “Andries?”

  Noa nods, sniffling. She unravels a strip of toilet paper and daubs at her eyes. “It’s not the first time,” she tells them. “He did the same thing last summer.”

  “And you never told us?”

  “I was embarrassed.”

  Kersti can’t imagine anyone being so in love with her that he’d want to die if she broke up with him. She’s dated a couple of guys since the debacle with Magnus. One was from a finishing school in Villars, a jet-haired Colombian named Miguel. He didn’t speak much English and although he was good looking, they fizzled out pretty quickly. The other one she met at the local hangout, Captain Cook’s. His name was Roger. They went out for a few months in the fall, but didn’t survive the holidays. Neither guy held a candle to Magnus.

  “How did he do it?” Lille asks.

  “Razor blade. The wrong way, of course.”

  “And this time?”

  “Same. I got an emergency call. Madame Hamidou came and got me during study hall. It was Andries from the hospital.”

  “Pathetic,” Cressida mutters. “Anyone who doesn’t die didn’t really mean to.”

  Noa stands up and splashes water on her splotchy face. “I’m going to bed,” she says, and leaves the bathroom.

  Lille starts to braid Kersti’s hair, tickling her scalp with her fingers. “Poor Andries,” she says. “Talk about a cry for attention.”

  “You don’t even know him,” Cressida says.

  “Lille feels everyone’s pain,” Alison says. “That’s why we love her.”

  Kersti closes her eyes, enjoying the moment. Lille’s fingers in her hair, the draft of sharp cold air in her nostrils, the comforting banter of her best friends. She’s content. She feels more at home than home here; she always has. She tries not to think about the end of the year too much.

  She dozes off for a bit and the next thing she knows, Cressida is up on her feet.

  “Where you going?” Kersti asks her, turning her head slightly in Lille’s lap.

  “Out.”

  “You’re sneaking out again?”

  There’s a certain combination of fearlessness and gall required to make a nightly escape from school. Plenty of rebellious students have tried and gotten caught over the years—suffering a suspension or a loss of weekend privileges—and maybe the odd one actually got away with it and didn’t need to prove it could be done again. Cressida isn’t like that. She doesn’t care about provin
g anything to anyone. She’s immune to that teenage albatross—approval. She only serves herself, with no fear of consequence.

  “One of these days you’re going to get caught,” Kersti warns, hurt that Cressida would rather sneak out to meet Magnus than hang out with them.

  “What’ll they do? Expel me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are adorably naïve, Kuusky. Don’t wait up for me.”

  The door closes behind her and Kersti lies there, pissed off.

  “She’s fearless,” Lille says admiringly, tugging on Kersti’s hair.

  “She doesn’t care about anything,” Kersti mutters. “Is that fearlessness?”

  “Rules don’t apply to her.”

  “Why not?” Kersti wants to know. “Why does she get to do whatever she wants? Hamidou must know.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “There’s no point punishing her,” Lille says. “A person has to care in order for a punishment to be effective. Hamidou knows that.”

  “So she just goes through life doing whatever she wants?”

  “Life is much bigger than the Lycée,” Lille says. “The real world will be different.”

  “Will it?”

  “Why does it bother you?” Raf asks her. “It’s her life.”

  Kersti has no answer for that.

  She’s still up when she hears the door creak open and then close. It’s four thirty in the morning. She sits up and turns the light on, startling Cressida.

  “What the fuck!” Cressida cries, stumbling backward. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  “What the hell happened to your face?” Kersti asks her. Her lips are swollen and bloody.

  Cressida peers at herself in the mirror. Kersti gets out of bed and stands behind her. Up close, there are bite marks on her top lip. The skin around her mouth, all the way down to her chin, is bright red, chewed and raw.

  Cressida studies her wounds, inspecting the damage. And then she laughs. “It’s pretty bad this time,” she says.

  “This time?”

  “Look at this,” she says, peeling off her jeans. She stands before Kersti in her panties, exposing violently bruised inner thighs, a kaleidoscope of blue and purple.