The Finishing School (3 page)

The stream fed into a round, dark pond, and beside the pond stood a stone hut—or, rather, the ruin of one. Part of its roof had fallen in, and the windows were blank, open squares in the ancient-looking masonry. It was hardly big enough to hold a piano, even if someone had been foolish enough to put one there. But the structure itself was compelling. There was something primitive and mysterious about the way it just
was there
, so rooted in its setting that it might have grown out of the earth.

The temptation to have a look inside was irresistible. But I went cautiously, anticipating the thing I would least like to see again. Once, my grandfather and I had been foraging around in an old slave cabin in Virginia for one of his articles and I had looked out of the corner of my eye and seen what I had thought was a thick yellow rope suddenly uncoil itself from the sunny seat of a dilapidated chair and plummet through a hole in the floor. “Scared him more than he scared us,” said my grandfather, after I had stopped screaming. That was my grandfather’s trademark: always to see the other fellow’s side.

Forearmed with my prevision of some Northern-hued reptile napping in the corner where the sun would still be streaming through the window, I stepped warily over the crumbling stone threshold. I swiveled my eyes rapidly toward the sunny spot, and was so unprepared to see a human figure lying there that I screamed anyway.

The woman on the Army blanket shot up, flung away her book as though
it
had suddenly become a snake, and with a cry that was more an intake of breath, clasped one hand to her throat.

We confronted each other for a protracted moment, during which her face grew calm again, even though she continued to press the hand dramatically against her throat, as if dutifully finishing off the requirements of a scene. At last she said, in a low voice, thrilling to me for its elegant diction as well as its composure: “Who are you, and why did you scream like that?”

She was my mother’s age, or older, but there was some indefinable
thing in her style as she sat there, barefoot, in an old wraparound skirt and a man’s shirt knotted at her waist, that made me unable to “place” her the way I habitually did adults, either relegating them to their function pertaining to me or judging them with pity or sternness because they had spoiled themselves or been defeated by life in some visible way. This woman seemed—how shall I put it?—not judgeable by my usual standards and categories for older people.

“I was expecting to see a snake,” I told her.

“Oh. Well. Sorry to disappoint you. I don’t think I’ve been a snake in any of my incarnations. I’m not the snake type. Where did you come from?”

“You mean, right now?”

“What else should I mean?”

“Well, originally I’m from Fredericksburg, Virginia, but now we live over in Lucas Meadows, here in Clove.”

“That’s interesting, but”—her wide mouth twitched with amusement—“I meant something more immediate. I mean, did you come from the direction of our house, or from Abel Cristiana’s, or what?”

“There was just this overgrown road that ended in the field,” I said. “What happened was, I was looking for the music.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “You mean you want to
take
music?”

I thought this remark odd. “No, ma’am. I heard some. It seemed to be coming from somewhere in these woods, or maybe on the other side of them. Now it’s stopped. But it was Bach.”

“Ah!” She looked enlightened. “What you heard was coming from our house, which is on the hill on the other side of these trees. It was
trying
to be Bach, but I cannot go so far as to call it music. Which is why I am down here. These woods keep it at a bearable distance, though I’m afraid the sound carries over the field more than I would like. You see, my brother, Julian, is forced for the time being to supplement our income by giving piano lessons. He is a superb musician. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall—and I don’t mean Little Carnegie, either—when he graduated from Juilliard. This particular little girl is my least
favorite of his pupils. Do you want to know why? Because she is just like a robot. She can play whole passages by heart without ever once feeling the music.”

And, slamming her eyes shut, the woman sitting on the blanket hunched down, making herself very tight and small. A prissy, rather imbecilic smile sealed itself across her face. Right there before my eyes, she
became
the unmusical child, addressing an invisible keyboard, her fingers woodenly calling forth in my imagination the very notes I had heard coming through the trees.

“ ‘By heart’ is certainly a misnomer in her case,” she concluded, snapping back into herself again. Her sharp brown eyes drank me in. When she saw that her performance had enthralled me, she smiled. It was a unique smile, breaking away from her large, slightly irregular teeth as if from the force of its own irrepressible mischief, and igniting the fine, thin skin of her mobile face with a blush. A constellation of freckles traveled across the bridge of her imposing hawklike nose. “You must have come down the old haywagon road,” she remarked, with a magnificent reversion to the bland topic of how I had gotten there. “You came around the back of our land into Abel Cristiana’s fields. Which used to be
our
fields, until sacrifices had to be made.
C’est la vie.
Are
you
, perhaps, a musical child?”

“No, ma’am. It was just that the music reminded me of my grandfather.”

“Is he a musician?”

“No, ma’am, a doctor. But he’s dead now.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “So many people are,” she said.

There was a silence then. I stood awkwardly near the door, thinking I should go. It was hard for me to know what to do, because she was like no person I had ever met. With most people you could tell whether you were welcome or not, but her signals were not conventional. She had been quick to respond to having a visitor—even showing off with that remarkable mimicking of the “robot” child—but maybe she was just being polite. On the other hand, she did seem curious about me; she had watched me intently the whole time I had been in the hut. That last remark,
however, had been somewhat strange, and for all I knew it might have been meant as a dismissal.

But then she asked me whether I would like to have a swim in the pond. “It’s still a bit chilly, but very refreshing, once you take the plunge. I had one around noon today.”

I thanked her and said I ought to be getting home. “Besides, I don’t have a suit,” I added, though that dark pond, with who knew what in its invisible depths, invited me not at all.

“I never let that stop me,” she said, laughing, “but I suppose Southern belles are more modest.” Then she sprang up lightly and toed two worn brown leather sandals to her and wiggled her feet into them. “Not that I have anything against modesty,” she continued, in a somewhat ironic tone. “Modesty and politeness are the staples in your repertoire, I know. Which accounts for that unsettling ‘ma’am’ of yours. I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘ma’am’ any more than I have a snake, though I’ve been called one before.”

“A snake?”

“No, silly. A ‘ma’am.’ During the war, I taught at a girls’ school in New York—really more of a finishing school—and I had some budding belles who always called me that. You’re brought up to it, I know, but for the recipient it can be terribly disorienting. There I was, thinking of myself as slightly more than a girl, and then suddenly the drab weight of this ‘ma’am’ is thrown over my shoulders. I’m older now, but I still can’t think of myself as a ‘ma’am.’ I have nothing against Southerners, however, don’t get me wrong. I can appreciate their good points. I can even see the good points in Catholics and I’ve been bred in my blood to hate them ever since 1685, when Louis the Fourteenth ran my ancestors out of France. I find it all very amusing, the way human beings divide themselves up into all these subgenres and then run around hating everybody in the other subgenres. Most people spend their entire lives identifying themselves with their little subgenres. They spend money on them, erect shrines to them, organize clubs around them—I’m in one of the clubs myself: the Huguenot Society, it’s called—and often kill for them. That way, they can manage to get through life
without having to discover who
they
are. Did you walk here, all the way from Lucas Meadows? Surely not.”

“No …” I omitted the “ma’am” this time, though it felt rude. “I left my bike down by the fields.”

“Well, I’ll walk you to your bike. My name is Ursula DeVane. What’s yours?”

“Justin Stokes.” The name that had clung, close and natural as my own skin, for all these years, sounded suddenly flat and unromantic, compared with hers.

“Ah, an androgynous name!” she said, clamping a firm hand to my back as she steered me out of the hut and past the dark pond, in which I was glad I did not have to swim. “I often thought I would have preferred an androgynous name. It gives you more
room
, somehow. Do you find the name Justin gives you more room?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my mother’s maiden name. But I’ve always liked it. I couldn’t imagine being called anything else. Is that what you meant?”

“Not
exactly
,” she replied with a slight smile, “but it will do for now. Tell me, Justin, how long have you lived here? Not very long, because I know most of the young people by sight, as well as who their ancestors were. This is the kind of community where everybody is known as somebody’s daughter or grandson or niece until they’re ninety. After which they’re nothing, but it doesn’t matter by then.”

“We only moved here last month. My father died in February and I guess my mother felt she couldn’t make it alone. So we’ve moved up here to my aunt’s house. She and her husband just recently separated, so she had the extra space.”

“And who is your aunt?”

“Mrs. Eric Mott.”

“
Oh
God.” Ursula DeVane smote her forehead dramatically. “Then your cousin is little Becky Mott. Well, Justin, I’m afraid that jinxes our friendship right from the start.”

“Why?”

“Better ask your aunt. I’m not saying my brother, Julian, didn’t misbehave, but I do think an artist is entitled to an occasional
display of impulsiveness. Especially when forced to waste his talent in a place like this for economic reasons.”

“We moved up here for economic reasons, too,” I said. I intended, of course, to find out when I got home what Ursula DeVane’s brother had done to Becky, just as I intended to look up the word
androgynous.
But right now I was more interested in laying a groundwork of things in common between me and this unusual woman, who had given more of herself and asked more of me than my inscrutable ten-year-old cousin had bothered to do in the whole month I had lived in the same house with her. When Ursula DeVane had said the words
our friendship
, an idea I would not have presumed to have by myself had materialized into an intriguing possibility.

“Money,” said Ursula DeVane, still steering me lightly by the backs of my shoulders, “lurks somewhere in the plot of everybody’s life. Sometimes more than passion, I think.”

We had reached the open field. For a moment I could not see my bike for the tall grass, and I created a scenario in which it had been stolen. Then I would have to go back with Ursula DeVane to her house, which was situated somewhere on the other side of the pine forest, and telephone home. I would meet her brother.… But there lay the conveyance back into my other life, exactly as I had left it.

“Oh, a Raleigh,” said Ursula, springing forward and lifting the bike. “
I
rode a Raleigh when I lived in London. I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But why do you ride a man’s bicycle?”

“It was my father’s.” Now I felt ashamed for having imagined it stolen.

“Ah.” She nodded understandingly. “You must miss him. Julie and I lost our mother when we were young. I was ten and he was just six. It was harder on him because he was closer to her. I was my father’s favorite and, quite frankly, liked him better than my mother. I hope for your sake that you like your mother.”

“Oh yes,” I said, but I could not quite meet her gaze. With her unorthodox question, she had hit on a truth that made me
ashamed: since we had moved up here, I had not felt as friendly and compassionate toward my mother as a daughter should.

Ursula DeVane was now prancing the bike up and down by its handlebars, looking as though she would like to leap on the seat and be off somewhere. In the sunny light of the field, I could see silver tendrils twirling up from the richness of her red-brown hair. Though her unconventional demeanor made her seem much younger, I realized she must be some years older than my mother. She was not a pretty woman, like my mother, but her features, I thought, went with her personality: sharp, generous, and bold.

She saw me studying her and at once straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Well, Justin,” she said with a touch of irony, “your dramatic entry into my day was quite stimulating. I ought to thank you for it. There I was, trying to reread Proust, but he is all wrong for this year. I have reached a time in my life when I need to be refreshed by the unexpected rather than consoled by the stately rhythms of what I know. Of course”—and her face was once again transformed by the unique smile—“your stunning scream certainly helped matters along.”

As I stood there thinking of some way I could say good-bye that would keep the possibility of another meeting open, a dazzling cascade of musical notes burst upon the sunny evening air. Only this time there were no fey stoppings and startings. This time the music, a piece I did not know, continued, triumphantly sure of its power.

“Ah,” said Ursula, lifting her face toward the sound as though showering in it. “My favorite Chopin scherzo. It’s my brother’s all-clear signal. The last of the brats has departed, and the good life can recommence.”

She handed over my bike, her interest already somewhere else. Then she said, as if it were a polite afterthought, “Next time you drop by, bring your suit.”

Without waiting for a reply, she started back toward the woods, taking jubilant, muscular strides in the direction of the music coming from the invisible house somewhere on the other side. I noticed that there were freckles on the backs of her legs.