The Finishing School (30 page)

On the way home, Ursula launched into a stunningly vituperative monologue. She tore apart, in a gloating rage, each of the performers in turn, sparing only the lady who had played the small part of the old aunt, whose hat Hedda makes fun of in the first act. She reserved her greatest scorn for the actress who had played Hedda. “First of all, she is at least fifty if she’s a day, and even
I
, at my present time of life, would know better than to accept such a role, even if some backwoods theater company came to my door and begged me. Second of all, her performance reeked of everything that is detestable about this vile new Method Acting. Method Acting, Justin, is a so-called technique developed by an old Russian that the Americans have gone gaga over; Americans will go gaga over anything foreign, because they love to be intimidated. You don’t find the
English
falling for such drivel. ‘Get in touch with your emotions.’ ‘Open up your own personality and spill your guts all over the role you are playing.’ Of course, this dried-up ‘thespian’ tonight had no guts to spill. My God, she played most of the performance in a monotone, did
you note that, Julie? With your ear, of course you would have. Poor bitch, she probably commuted down to the city for three or four Method classes and is tickled pink with all she’s learned about ‘getting into herself.’ But as for getting into Hedda, the real Hedda Gabler was as far away as Norway is from Woodstock, Justin, and I want you to promise me you won’t judge this play from what you saw tonight. It’s a shattering play when it’s done right. Hedda, if she’s played well, is one of the most haunting women in the world.”

“You would still be splendid in it, Sissie,” said Julian loyally as we drove through the night. Ursula was driving fast, in her heated state, and the tires squealed every time we took another curve.

“Well, I would have been better than
that
colorless hag with her snippets of Method Acting. Sir Kenneth used to tell us at RADA that the actor is the link between the individual and the universal. The point is to play Hedda not so she reflects the
actress’s
emotions and shortcomings, but so that every member of the audience becomes aware of the universal potential of the Hedda in herself. Or
himself.
There’s a Hedda in all of us: that’s why she’s one of the great dramatic characters. Just as there’s an Oedipus in all of us … a Hamlet … a Lady Macbeth. My God, Hedda is
trapped!
Hedda is
desperate!
Who hasn’t felt trapped and desperate in surroundings too small for them? She is a dashing personality in a social straitjacket! She is gathered together, when we meet her in that first scene, like a force … ready to strike. The very air of the theater should eddy with the waves of her tension as she coils tighter and tighter … until she explodes! And the explosions have
waves.
They mount and mount and then recoil on her to strike
her
down. But, at the same time, you see—and this is what makes the part such a demanding one—we have to feel … we have to feel that when she points that pistol at herself and fires offstage, she is not only vindicating herself by flinging an unanswerable challenge at all the people in the world who have failed to live up to her ideals, she is also
freeing
herself.”

Julian and I exchanged a look. Isn’t she magnificent? we said,
without words, to each other. We were also saying: It’s a good thing she has us to understand and love her.

Later, when I played Hedda, I was to remember Ursula’s passionate diatribe on the way she should be portrayed. I also recalled how Ursula had looked, at the steering wheel, flinging out those phrases as though she had an inexhaustible spring of eloquence to draw on, her face shining with haughty exuberance at her own performance as she sped her captive audience along that dark road.

I have often wondered if Julian recalled her words about Hedda’s final vindication on the night he sat down at the piano and played his sister’s favorite Chopin scherzo for the last time.

IX.

“J
ustin, your face is a mile long,” said Ursula as we sat on the stone terrace overlooking the fields one Thursday afternoon in the middle of August. “What is going on in that head of yours?”

I had wanted her to ask that. I had purposely made my face a little longer than necessary so that she would be sure to notice and ask. Yet now that she
had
asked, I wasn’t sure what to say, or even certain that I could express it. “It” was nothing definite, but rather a swarm of uncertainties, an oblique sense of sadness and impending loss. When I had not found her in the pond or in the hut—“The Finishing School,” as we now called it—I had swallowed my pride and ridden to their house. Luckily I had found her outside, in her garden, picking vegetables. Just as I approached, she had hurled a monstrous-size squash down into the meadow. Her back was to me, but I had the feeling she knew I was there and had executed her flamboyant gesture entirely for my benefit. Then I had wondered if her not being at the pond was for my benefit as well: to test me, sort of; to see if I wanted to see her badly enough to come to the house, even though I knew (and she knew I knew) Thursday was Julian’s busiest teaching day and I would not dare to ring the doorbell. Maybe her not
being at The Finishing School—like the squash-throwing gesture, like the time she hid from me in the pond and I imagined her drowned—was to teach me never to expect the predictable where she was concerned.

“Nothing stays the same,” I replied bitterly, staring out at the masses of spiky purple loosestrife that had sprung up all over the meadow surrounding the terrace: they were beautiful wild-flowers, but their appearance meant that summer was almost over. The rich clusters of scarlet bee balm, which had been like flames licking the edges of the terrace in July, now drooped in their exploded glory, revealing blasted brown centers. High in the branches of a tree, a katydid chirred. When my grandfather heard the first katydid, he always said: “Well, Justin, six weeks till the first frost.” I had never liked winter as much as summer, but I liked to hear him say that because he said it every year. It was comforting to know you could count on some things staying the same from year to year. Only, they didn’t.

“What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” Ursula coaxed.

“I mean everything. Everything
changes.
” As I uttered the words, their proofs assailed my senses on every side: up at their house, Julian’s four o’clock student had finally mastered the difficult passage of the “Moonlight Sonata” I had heard her butchering in previous lessons; down in the field that now belonged to the Cristianas was a brand-new fence separating their land from DeVane land (I had watched it come into being, seen them unloading the posts from the truck, heard the pounding of the sledgehammer through the summer days: I had concluded that the reason why Ed Cristiana had never followed up on his movie invitation was that he fell exhausted into bed every evening and dreamed of hammering rails into posts); and yet it seemed that only yesterday Ursula and I had sat on this very terrace and watched Mr. Cristiana pace the unfenced boundaries of his new land on Gentleman Johnny, while Julian had gone inside to express his fury through the “Mephisto Waltz.” Even the light on the mountains had changed. I remembered the afternoon I had first seen those mountains, when I had followed the haywagon road into the fields in search of the music, and there they
had been suddenly, different from any mountains I had seen before: low-lying, austere, old-looking, their subtle, purplish-blue ascent culminating dramatically in the sharp ledge marked by the mysterious tower. They had seemed a hopeful vista to me as I stood there in the soft spring light, fresh green grasses waving all around me, only minutes before I met Ursula for the first time. Now the axis of earth had shifted toward winter and the light on the mountains was sharper, less dreamy and diffuse.

“Of
course
everything changes,” said Ursula. “If it didn’t, we’d have stasis. You wouldn’t want everything to just stop, would you? We’d be sitting here like those poor people in Pompeii that were found hundreds of years later, frozen in lava in the act of doing whatever they were doing at the time the volcano hit. But what
particular
thing has changed that gives you that woebegone look?”

“Well, for one thing, the summer’s almost over. Soon I’ll be back in school.”

“You don’t impress me as someone who hates school. With your curious mind, you should be looking forward to what you’ll learn next.”

“It’s not
like
that!” I said impatiently. “Can’t you remember school? Most of it is just boring: what crops grow in what countries—that sort of thing.”

“I don’t remember much about lessons in our school. But, as I told you, it was a one-room school. The dynamics are different in a one-room school. One is more aware of what’s going on around one.” She laughed. “The thing I remember best, just at this moment, is how Abel Cristiana and I used to beat up the Democrats. This was a rigid little enclave of die-hard Republicans—still is, to some extent—and we had been raised to believe that Democrats were a pitiable sect of sloppy, misguided heretics. There were two little boys, I remember, that we terrorized. We would make them
buy
their way out of a beating by giving us the cookies out of their lunch, and—once”—she closed her eyes and snorted with laughter—“Abel made each of them eat a bite of a grasshopper sandwich. We had found a dead grasshopper on the way to school and I forfeited part of my cheese sandwich so
we could substitute the grasshopper. Ugh! I can still see how it looked covered with mayonnaise. Children are beasts. Probably more so when they grow up in the country.” She laced her hands on her lap and looked very smug at the thought of the beast she had been. All her sympathies for my melancholy state had vanished during the telling of this story. I thought it was a nasty story. Every time she and “Abel” got together, in these stories, they were always torturing or teasing others: like the time they had both pretended to be drowned at the bottom of the pond and had scared little Julian. No wonder he hated Abel Cristiana. Killing his pet raccoon, and all this cruel teasing. I hated Abel Cristiana a little myself; not so much the red-faced, paunchy farmer who had driven me home and told me how he had saved the German horses, but this gleefully destructive childhood chum of Ursula’s, whom she remembered with smug smiles and snorts of laughter. What if I had been a child in that one-room school?
I
was a Democrat, or my family was. Probably Ursula and “Abel” would have ganged up on me, made me eat some foul thing in my sandwich: a grasshopper, a worm,
a snake!
Ursula, if she had met me when she was fourteen, would probably have scorned me as a sissy.

She must have read the disapproval on my face. She switched back into her adult personality and said in a superior tone, “Of course,
anything
can be made interesting if it’s taught well. The whole secret of teaching is to capture the student’s imagination. When I taught French at that girls’ school in New York during the war, I saw immediately we were going to get nowhere with the textbook:
‘Which is the way to the train station?’ ‘Has the postman been already?’
I remembered all too well how I had taught myself French, painstakingly, with records and textbooks, during those years when I was nursing Father, only to get to France and realize I had no words for many of the situations I found myself in, or for things I most wanted to say. I told my class this. ‘Most of you will go to France after this war is over,’ I told them, throwing the textbook into the wastebasket beside my desk, ‘and I am going to prepare you for the kinds of experiences
I
was fortunate enough to have, but was
not
prepared for, in
terms of expressing myself.’ Then I drew up a little scenario for them, resembling my own, in which they would find themselves staying with distant relatives, with illustrious ancestors in common—this won over a girl from New Orleans, named Lisa Thibodeaux, at once, because she
had
such relatives—and perhaps there would be a young man, an attractive young man with whom it would be easy to fall in love, and quite tempting to marry, even if one had higher ambitions in mind; and then we set about creating the kinds of dialogues that might arise out of these circumstances. What fun we had!
Nobody
missed my class! One day, another teacher, who had seen my class’s slavish attention through the glass-paneled door, asked me, ‘What are you
teaching
them in there?’ I said, ‘I am teaching them to conduct their affairs in French.’ I’m sure she thought I meant the business type of affair, she was that dull, unsuspecting sort.”

“Did you tell your class about you and Marius in the moonlit ruins?” I asked, unable to keep the surliness out of my voice. Ursula was at her worst today, her most cruel. Here I was feeling blue because the summer would soon be over, and she knew very well why that made me sad: it would be harder to see her; I would have to make formal calls on her, because when it got cold she would no longer be down at the hut. Yet here she was, surely knowing it if she could read my face as she said she could, telling me about all these other girls who meant nothing, to whom she had told the same stories she told me.