The Finishing School (2 page)

“The girl’s situation interested me, however. I have always been drawn to stories in which people have to start over. I saw immediately that, for all her sadness and disorientation, this girl was determined to escape the ordinary and had the intelligence to see that I was her best bet in the village. So you might say I was initially flattered by her recognition—one is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are—and then I grew fonder of her as the summer progressed. There was a sweet, old-fashioned gravity about her; unlike most young people, she listened well. I loved to watch her face as she listened, and also when she struggled to articulate her thoughts. She was not as eloquent as she wanted to be, but she was better than she knew. I did what I could for her: fed her mind and stoked her desire for the larger life. If she hadn’t burst in on me that summer, who else could have done it for her? Yes, I take my share of the credit for what she has become. Not that she ever thanked me for it. And she was very cruel at the last.

“I’m sorry, all the same, that she is in danger of congealing. She doesn’t know where I am, but I’ve kept up with my old protégée, and I’m sad to say she shows signs of falling into complacency, that alarming early warning signal of congealment. She’s done well, of course, but to reach the range and intensity I
have seen others capable of, she must tap new sources of feeling. Or old sources which she turned away from at the end of that summer, when she was afraid and confused. Ah, Justin, if you were to come riding over to me again, I would stir up your blood. ‘Don’t you recall,’ I would say, ‘how I warned you to be alert for the first signs of jellification? How you must
fight
, the moment you feel its clammy grip. You must hurl yourself into action, take some new risk. Remember my ancestors, the Sires DeVeine; how, every spring, when the snows melted, they roused themselves from the snug stronghold of all their old trophies and triumphs and rode boldly down the Jura Pass looking for trouble?

“ ‘When did you last leave
your
stronghold, Justin? When was the last time you went out alone, forsaking all the props that have come to define you?’ ”

Fourteen. Be fourteen again. Is that possible? Can I ride back into the country of youth, even on the conveyance of memory, propelled by imagination?

It was a long time ago. I was such a different person. What connection is there between the woman I am now and that lost, diffident girl pedaling up the steepest part of Old Clove Road, silently bargaining with herself, If I can reach the top of the hill without getting off my bike, something will happen, something will change …? Well, right there is a connection. I still make superstitious bargains with myself. Only now I usually bargain for something specific. I have come to know, perhaps too well, what I want. On that May afternoon, I wished only for something interesting enough to rescue me from my present life.

Actually, I was not yet fourteen. My birthday was a month away. We had been living in this rural community—the township of Clove—in upstate New York for one month, my newly widowed mother, my little brother, and I. I still thought of it as enemy territory. Wasn’t it part of “the North” that I had been brought up to hate because its interference and brutalities had destroyed our gracious past? By sheer geography, these Clove families with their harsh and peculiar names of Terwiliger and
Hasbrouck and DePuy and Osterhoudt were implicated with the rude general who, my grandfather said, had not had the decency to remove his foul-smelling cigar from his mouth while our noble Lee was in the act of signing away our way of life.

Not only that, but the people here were different. They were deep in themselves and slow to respond, not given to graces or flourishes. They were like their weather. As we had come north, last month, on the train from Virginia, I had watched in dismay as the green on the trees folded back into red buds and then disappeared altogether as we came close to our destination. Why had my mother done this to us? I still could not understand. She had said we could no longer afford to live in the big house on Washington Avenue, the only house I had known in my life. Well, I had accepted that. My grandparents’ illnesses had eaten up the family savings and my father’s accidental death had robbed us of our only breadwinner. But why could we not have stayed on in the place where people had always known us? We could have moved into a smaller house and cheerfully pinched our pennies the way fatherless families did in books. Everybody would have said, “Look how hard Dr. Frank Justin’s poor daughter is trying,” and would have helped us, would have encouraged us in our bravery. But my mother had decided instead to throw away everything familiar and move us north, into Aunt Mona’s house. Aunt Mona was my father’s sister. She and her husband had just separated, and she had the room for us. My mother said she was doing this for our future, for my brother Jem’s and my college education. But I couldn’t stop believing she had done it out of some perverse love of extremes: if she could no longer go on being the protected wife and daughter, then she would be the martyr. It was as if she were so grieved by all she had lost that she didn’t want to leave herself a single thing to be thankful for. Of course, as she kept saying, she still had
us.
But by bringing us away from all we had known, hadn’t she hurt us, too?

And as I pumped and puffed up the strenuous hill of Old Clove Road that warm May afternoon, I held myself back from any love of the place, even though the sun made the backs of my legs feel warm and alive, even though the landscape, with its old
farmsteads and freshly sown fields, its rural scents and roadside blossoms, was now as lovely and as fragrant as any country road in Virginia.

Every afternoon I rode my bike compulsively on this picturesque and meandering route I had learned from the school bus that took me to and from my new school. I rode to flee my Aunt Mona’s house, to emphasize my solitary state, to give myself the illusion of going somewhere.

My turning-around point on Old Clove Road was at the top of the hill, where the land leveled off at the Cristianas’ horse farm. On the left side of the road was their gaunt frame house with its peeling gray paint, and, to the side of the house, a well-raked stableyard bracketed by smart, streamlined stalls. The roofs of the stalls were in better shape than the Cristianas’ roof, and the stalls had new white paint, with dark green trim around the doors, where the horses stuck their heads out. From the looks of things, horses lived better than people here. A professionally hand-lettered sign hanging from the crossbar of the main gate read:

On the right side of the road was a training ring and a paddock. In this paddock, for the past few weeks, had been a magnificent stallion, all by himself. After seeing him, there was not much point in going on: I knew I was not likely to see anything more splendid and dramatic than that stallion. But I always did continue on about a hundred yards or so, because Ed Cristiana was in my class at school, and though I’d seen him glance at me more than once with shy appreciation, it just wouldn’t have done to turn around right outside his house. He might think I had come looking for him. Besides that, he embarrassed me, with his old blue jeans and bouncy country walk.

Some afternoons the stallion would be measuring the boundaries of his paddock in a continuous self-conscious trot, the tense, arrogant arch of his neck, the backward pricking of his ears showing that he was aware of his solitary importance. On other afternoons, I would reach the crest of the hill only to find
him planted stubbornly at the farthest corner of the paddock, pretending to graze like any ordinary farm animal, too far away for me to see the fire in his eye that I knew was there.

But this afternoon, I was met by an unexpected sight. There was a second horse in the paddock, with a bandaged tail. As the two of them cavorted erratically around their confines, I saw that the new horse, a mare, wore some sort of boots tied to her rear hooves. The two horses zigzagged skittishly about, the stallion in pursuit, until, suddenly, just short of overtaking the mare, he reared up and plunged down sideways on her. As he clamped himself to her hindquarters, she responded with a violent kick with her booted hoof. But then, with a quivering of her long legs, she bowed her haunches to his frantic thrusts.

I don’t know why this scene should have distressed me. I had known the facts of life since I was nine. My grandmother had explained, in a careful, euphemistic way, what has to happen between a male and a female before offspring can be born; we had been walking on the beach one morning, down at Pawleys Island, when we had seen two golden retrievers scuffling bizarrely in the sand, and I had been afraid the dog on the bottom was going to get hurt.

Perhaps I was upset because I had become possessive of the stallion, identifying him with my own proud aloneness in this place. Maybe it was because I hated to see him lose his dignity like that and join the herd. Or maybe it was the way the mare had capitulated; how she hadn’t had much chance anyway, with her tail bandaged to one side and those boots on her hooves. But what made the incident mortifying was that I realized someone had been watching me watch.

Ed Cristiana’s father, his thumbs hooked under his belt, was slouched back against the fence in front of their house. A coarse, stocky farmer, he nodded brusquely at me. He was the kind of man I had not known in my life, but I had eyes to see that I was as of little value to his world as he was to mine. In his narrowed blue eyes I saw a country man’s contemptuous amusement at a squeamish girl—who nevertheless had gotten down from her bicycle to gawk.

I barely managed a hello, and then, mounting my bike with
what little dignity I could muster, I rode off with a little wobble. I felt his shrewd, amused eyes on my back. It would be impossible for me to turn around at my usual point, a hundred yards down the road, and cycle back past his scornful gaze.

So—for the first time—I went on down the next hill, continuing farther than I’d ever gone. The school bus always went faster here, as there were no children to be picked up.

I rode on, absorbed in my humiliation. The road curved and curled back on itself. Fields planted with some crop I didn’t recognize followed on both sides. My bike clattered as it bounced over a wooden bridge, and I wondered how far I would have to ride before I could be certain that the horsebreeder had gone away.

Then came a pine forest on the left side of the road. Tempted by its shade, I parked my bike and sat down under an old tree. I leaned my head against its rough bark and surprised myself by starting to cry. Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the happy existence I had known in the house on Washington Avenue were gone forever. Things would never be the same again. I summoned up pictures of the ways they would never be the same again and sobbed.

Then, oddly revived by this accomplishment of tears, I walked with my bike down a narrow, overgrown road that led alongside the pine forest. For it had seemed to me during my crying that I had heard snatches of music coming from somewhere within the pine forest or on the other side of it. It had been my grandfather’s favorite music at the end of an exhausting day at the hospital or when he worked in the evenings on the historical articles on slavery it had been his hobby to write. “J. Sanity Bach,” my grandfather liked to call his favorite composer. Bach, he said, was one of the few places in the world where you could still find order. It was as if, the mystical side of me fancied, the ghost of my grandfather had sent me these snatches of music, traveling faintly through the spring air, to console me. And yet the pragmatic side of me was curious to find out just who in this rural village was playing J. Sanity Bach.

By this time I had come to the end of the pine forest, but the music—after several enticing overtures—had abruptly ceased. Ahead of me were acres of open field. The sun was beginning its late-afternoon descent toward a purplish mass of low, undulating mountains in the distance that culminated abruptly at their northern end in a sharp ledge. Atop this ledge was a tower of some kind. There had been mention of a tower and of a famous old hotel on top of a mountain during Aunt Mona’s exhaustive briefing on this area that was to be our home; but I hadn’t listened very carefully, partly from not wanting to hear anything about landmarks that served to remind me I was no longer in Virginia, and partly from not wanting to be drawn into Aunt Mona’s manner of looking at life. She had a way of infecting everything with a deadly practicality. In her telling, the romantic tower up there with its tiny window winking in the sun would turn out to have some utilitarian purpose; the hotel, no matter how old or mysterious, to cater to convention groups at special rates, which Aunt Mona, a travel agent, would know to the penny.

But because I had discovered it, led on by the music, the vista exerted a charm and a release. My chagrin over the stallion and Mr. Cristiana seemed silly. But beyond that, as I faced these acres of fields, moving softly with wind, stretching toward the rise of the mountains with the intriguing tower, my pain for the world I had lost expanded into a wider kind of sorrow, a sorrow that could coexist with future prospects. For the first time since coming here, I felt curiosity about the place. What, since I had to live here, would happen to me in it?

Then, like a tease, the Bach again. Did it come from within the pine forest? Or from somewhere on the other side of it, invisible from where I was? The phrases of the music burst forth, with every promise of going on, then suddenly stopped as they had before.

I laid down my bike at the edge of the field and entered the forest at the point of a stream. All at once, it was quieter. I could hardly hear my own footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. The air was pungent with pine smell, and the sunlight seemed filtered through a light brown glass. A sudden stir of wind through the
high branches made the pines hiss softly, and I felt the flutter of fear that comes from trespassing.