The Finishing School (24 page)

I also loved it when she talked about me. She created me as she talked. She examined the substance of me and then prophesied, in grand, sweeping strokes, the uses to which I could be put. “For some people, a life in art is the only way they can survive,” she had said. “I know what I’m talking about. I
knew
, I knew that Sunday tea when you described your room to Julie and me that you could not bear the ordinary life. Your soul craves that constant
heightening of reality only art can give. So does mine. So does Julie’s. Oh, you’re one of us, all right. We need our definite, dramatic shapes. I’m not sure what your art will
be
yet. Are you? Well, never mind. You’ve got lots of time. Even the
times
are on your side. There’s no depression, as there was when Julie and I were growing up and Father didn’t even have the money to send him to Juilliard. I don’t know what would have become of Julie’s talent if he hadn’t won that scholarship. As for me, I was my own college. I knew Father needed me, and after that, I was going to be an actress. Actresses don’t need college. But your mother has put away money for your college, and you must go and soak up every opportunity, keep that absorbing mind of yours busy until your chosen art makes itself clear. Meanwhile, during your sojourn in the provinces with us”—and she laughed in her arch, throaty way—“it will be my pleasure, mademoiselle, to teach you what I can at our little Finishing School here among the pines.”

I looked across the pond and saw a dirty little boy watching me from behind a tree. He was about four, or maybe five, or even six. It’s hard for me to tell the ages of young children, never having had any of my own. I recognized him as one of the trailer children and said hello. He didn’t answer, but continued to watch me with his flat brown disks of eyes. The lids were curiously shaped, almost Oriental. I must have been an odd vision to him: a woman in “city clothes” sitting all by herself among a heap of stones in the woods, her purse beside her.

“Do you ever swim in this pond?” I asked, projecting what I hoped would come across as a cheerful, matey image: for some reason, it was important to me that he think me normal. “I knew a woman who used to swim here.”

He narrowed his eyes at me across the pond. I could see from his expression that I was becoming more inauthentic to him by the second. Then he filled his lungs—I could see his ribs rise beneath his soiled T-shirt like a pair of small bellows—and shouted, “No she didn’t! They’s snapping turtles in there. They’d kill her to pieces.” And he ran away as fast as he could through the pines, back to the safety of his trailer home.

When I returned to the car, there was nobody outside the trailer. Had the mother herded them all inside to watch the crazy woman from behind a curtain? Perhaps the mother was telephoning the Cristianas right now. “Sir, I don’t like to bother you, but there’s this strange woman down by your pond.…”

It was not yet two in the afternoon when I left Old Clove Road. I could be on the thruway in fifteen minutes, back in the city by four-thirty, beating the rush hour. Then a hot bath, soaking and meditating on this journey, and supper and a glass of wine. The rest of the evening I would work some more on Lady Macbeth. “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here …” On that soliloquy hangs so much: I become Macbeth’s Evil Genius, but I remain also a woman determined to help her husband. If that dual nature of the role is not preserved, something brilliant is lost.

But when I was almost to the thruway in Kingston, hunger overcame me and I stopped for a hamburger at Howard Johnson’s. What I did next is hard to explain. I think I did it partly because of that inveterate desire to stir life up when it has not, of its own initiative, met my needs for drama; but also because I had not found the one I wanted to find, and her absence in spirit from her old homestead provoked me into seeking out a long-avoided source.

I called Mott. I went to the pay phone in Howard Johnson’s and looked up “IBM Corp Neighbrhd Rd” and dialed the number and asked for Eric Mott. I knew from Becky that he was still there. Steady old Mott. In a corporation whose employees have made its name an acronym for “I’ve Been Moved,” steady Mott has managed to stay put at one location for twenty-eight years.

He was on the phone before I was ready for him. What have I done? I thought, panicking. But I had given my name to the secretary and it was too late. He was so pleased. He had not heard from me in years: he had thought I had forgotten him, he said. He had meant, he had
really
meant, to get down to New York to see me in that last play—Becky had told him about it—but, what
with one thing and another, he hadn’t been down to New York City in almost five years. Where was I calling from? Kingston! Howard Johnson’s?

“Why, you’re only minutes away,” he said, and proceeded to give painstaking directions, directions even a child could follow, to Neighborhood Road. After he had finished, he made me repeat them back to him.

And so I got back in the rented car and drove, of my own instigation, to meet a person who had bored me as a child; a person whose face I could never remember, even when I saw it several times a week; a person I had never really liked because I sensed—rightly—that he might one day try to “help out” more than you wanted him to. I drove to meet the man whose dutiful protectiveness of me had combined so lethally that long-ago August evening with my obstinate pursuit of Ursula DeVane’s attentions.

Neighborhood Road looked like a movie set, though whether for a euphemistic documentary about a friendly corporation or a surrealist’s sinister satire on corporate life it was hard to say. I tended to the latter impression as I drove slowly down the neat, straight road (lanes carefully marked for left turns) with smooth grounds and modern office buildings on both sides. I made a left turn into the parking lot beside the big white building with the American flag in front (Mott’s headquarters), and a mechanical arm swung up to admit my car after I had pressed a button. A sign directly above the button informed me that the only way I could get out of the parking lot was by depositing a special “gold coin” (available only from the receptionist at the main desk) into the slot at the exit gate. Employees with earnest, abstracted faces walked briskly from one building to another, tiny replicas of these faces flapping with the identification tags on their lapels. After I had identified myself to the stylish middle-aged receptionist at the main desk, and had explained my purpose, and she had confirmed this by a phone call to Mott’s secretary, I was given a visitor’s badge, with a picture of
the building I was now in, but with azaleas blooming all around it. The receptionist, who looked as if she had just come from the hairdresser, wrote out my name in an even, legible hand, and watched me while I pinned it on my sweater. I could tell she was having trouble “placing” me, and I tried to soothe her cautious imagination by chatting briefly about the weather. I was glad I had worn a skirt for this outing. By the time she had issued me my “gold coin” for getting out of the parking lot later, the atmosphere of the place had begun to make me feel like an outlaw disguised as a kind niece, come by to pay dutiful respects to an old uncle at his place of work. I sat down next to a window behind which two uniformed guards kept surveillance over a bank of closed-circuit monitors. On the monitors, you could watch the movements of employees a they went from room to room in the inner recesses of this building. While waiting for Mott, I followed the progress of a stoop-shouldered man with dark hair and a small mustache. Down one hall he went, coattails flopping behind him on the black-and-white monitor. Then through a door and down another hall. He reminded me a little of Charlie Chaplin. Then the door to the reception room opened and there stood the same man in living color. He stared at me, trying to decide something.

“Justin, honey?”

“Good God, Mott, it’s you!” I blurted. When had he grown that ludicrous mustache? Surely he had never had such
black
hair. He must dye it. He looked completely changed in externals from the old Mott, with his colorless crew cut and forgettable face. And yet the face
was
his, I now saw. It was just that the mustache and the black hair and the dry creases down the cheeks and around the mouth gave him a definite outline he hadn’t had before. “I was watching this man on the monitor,” I said, “but I didn’t realize I was watching
you
until you came through the door.”

“Well,” he said, self-consciously lifting a hand to the silky black hair that I had decided must certainly be dyed, “it’s been a long time for both of us, hasn’t it?”

He proudly escorted me back through the labyrinth of doors
and halls to his office. I was aware that the guards were now following my image on their screens. Such a surprise, Mott was saying, my suddenly phoning like that. What was I doing in the area, anyway? I told him I was between plays and had decided to take a sentimental journey and look at the old places. “Lucas Meadows has changed,” I said.

“Oh, it’s gone down, there’s no doubt about it,” said Mott. “No IBMer has lived there in years. The zoning laws have changed over there. A new element has moved in.”

“Yes, I noticed a lot of trailers on Old Clove Road.” I couldn’t look at him while I pronounced the name of the road. “There weren’t trailers before, were there?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mott absently, not appearing to pick up any significance in my mention of the road he had driven me, stunned and shivering, away from, on that night twenty-six years ago. “Here’s my office. This is Karen, my secretary. Karen, I’d like you to meet my niece—my ex-wife’s niece, actually, but I’m proud to claim her. She’s an actress, Justin Stokes—you may have seen her in something. I’m ashamed to say she was in a Broadway hit for over a year, and I never made it down to see her.”

“I haven’t seen a play since I was in high school,” said Karen, a young, neat, sexless person with straight white teeth. “Have you been in any movies?”

“I’ve done some work in television. Some O’Neill plays. It was a few years back.”

“No,” said Karen, shaking her head seriously, “I don’t think I … but I’m
very
glad to meet you.” She smiled, showing her white teeth, and then recrossed her legs chastely behind her word processor. I was sure she was the kind of girl who wore white cotton panties under her pantyhose.

We went into Mott’s inner sanctum. He motioned me to a comfortable chair and sat down at his own desk and peered at me in a shy-friendly way over his black mustache: did he dye that, too?

“How is your mother?” he asked.

“Oh, prospering.”

“And Jem?”

“He’s prospering, too,” I said. The word seemed to be stuck in my mind today.

“I always liked that little fellow. Made me real sad when he moved away. And now he’s married. He sent me an invitation, which I appreciated. I got a nice note from the bride, thanking me for my present.” He blinked at me and looked hesitant. “You got married, too, didn’t you? But it was a while back.”

“I’m afraid it didn’t last.” Mott was referring to my first marriage, to which, I now realized, I had neglected to send him an invitation. I saw no reason to enlighten him about the second failed marriage, to “Jack Tanner”; it would just confuse him.

“That’s too bad,” said Mott gravely. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Oh, neither of us was damaged irreparably,” I said airily. It all seemed such a long time ago, a sort of sociable mistake made by two young people trying to honor the conventions.

Mott cast his eyes down to his clean desk. I had worried him with my flip remark. On the shelf behind his desk and stacked on the low round table beside my chair were multiple copies of two books:
The Lengthening Shadow: The Life of Thomas J. Watson
, and
A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM
, by Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

“You know, Mott,” I said, trying to project an “upbeat, normal” image, “I just realized, I don’t know what your job is. I don’t think I ever knew. Or was I just too wrapped up in my adolescent traumas ever to ask?”

“If you
had
asked, I couldn’t have told you,” he said, with a little sparkle in his eye. “I couldn’t even tell Mona what I did. We were working on a top-secret project. As a matter of fact, I just got through giving a slide show to some of our new employees. That’s part of my job now. I’m the resident historian of this site. If you have a few minutes, I can show you what I did. I can even show you a picture of myself at work, back in those days.”

The next thing I knew, I was in a conference room with an elated Mott, who projected his slide show on a screen while I drank a cup of Karen’s coffee out of a paper mug and ate a piece of lemon sponge cake left over from the reception for new employees
that had taken place that morning. It was very good cake. I sat in the dark and looked at black-and-white pictures of the two-hundred-acre farm this place had been before IBM bought it and turned it into a site. I watched the buildings being built. I saw an early “IBM Family Day” on the site, which Mott told me we had all attended, though I had no memory of going. Mott’s steady, measured tone accelerated as he began to show slides of the top-secret project in which he had been involved. What Mott had been doing, that summer when he mowed our lawn every Saturday, and checked Aunt Mona’s car under the hood, and played dutiful uncle to his fatherless niece and nephew, was maintaining the vacuum tubes of an enormous secret computer being readied for the military. “It was a top-secret job … top secret,” he repeated, pausing at the black-and-white slide of himself, the old “colorless” Mott with a crew cut so extreme it looked as if his head had been shaved. His face looked so
young
to me now, in the slide. He wore overalls over his clothes and was kneeling raptly—that is the only word for it—beside a console of vacuum tubes. “See, we had two identical systems trading off every twenty-four hours. Every day it was my job to go over those tubes. If one gave out, I had to find it and replace it. We had to replace about five hundred tubes every month. When we shipped the first system down to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, I was sent down with it to show the Air Force how to do the maintenance process. I don’t suppose you remember that week when I was away. It was the last week in June. I’ll never forget it, because it was the week after old Mr. Watson died.”