The Finishing School (31 page)

“Oh, I’m sure I alluded to the
romance
of it,” she replied carefully. “After all, that was my stratagem, wasn’t it? To hook their imaginations on romance, which their daydreams were full of, anyway. But of course I didn’t dwell on the erotic aspect. One doesn’t discuss that except with special, close friends.” She was trying to placate me now, but I didn’t believe her. “Anyway,” she concluded with an airy defensiveness, “the point of my story was merely to illustrate that I believe any subject can be made interesting by the right teacher. I am sure that there is some teacher in this world right now who can make the subject of
crops
absolutely fascinating. By rights, he should be teaching in the Clove school system, with all its farm children. But he’s probably
at Princeton, or the University of Bologna … someplace like that.”

I was silent. She was going to have to woo me better than that.

After a minute she asked in a teasing voice, “Do you know what we’ve forgotten, Justin?”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“We were going to go to the mountain.”

“What mountain?” I was not going to make it easy for her.

“The one up there, silly,” she said, pointing across the fields. “Here you are, already memorizing the crops of India, when we have another full month of glorious weather. One day next week we should make our pilgrimage to the old hotel and the tower. We’ll stand on top of that tower and I’ll point out this house to you. I’ll make a picnic lunch—leave it all to me. Would you like that?”

“I’d like it if you would,” I said.

“I’d love it. We’ll leave here about ten, get to New Paltz around ten-thirty. I know a wonderful trail that will take us about an hour to hike. It leads right into the hotel. We can picnic and relax a bit, and then we’ll climb to the tower. I haven’t been up there in ages.” She smiled her special smile, and I decided to forgive her for her earlier behavior.

Up on the road a car door slammed. The car drove away.

“That was Jill Van Kleek,” said Ursula. “The last of the brats departed for another day. Let me see, for supper I am going to have fresh corn, sliced tomatoes and green peppers, and fried eggplant. A vegetarian supper. Too much meat makes one’s spirit heavy. The Buddhists have the right idea.”

No sooner had she won me over than she was abandoning me again. I got up to go because I wanted to stay so much. I wanted to stay and eat the corn and the tomatoes and the eggplant, sitting between them like their child in the ghostly dining room. I wanted to be Julian, adored and cared for and catered to by the sister who was now devoting her life to my triumphant comeback. I wanted to be Ursula, wrapped securely in the duties of the destiny I had accepted, with my own household to command.
I ached at my powerlessness, I chafed at my subordinate role in everyone’s life. It would be years before I could sit back in a chair on my own territory and consult my taste and then declare with perfect authority: “This evening for supper I am going to have …”

From the open windows of the house came a little tune on the piano. At first, because of the precise and spritely way it was played, I thought it was something by Bach. But after the opening bars, I realized it was “Dixie.” After a few more bars, as it gathered chords and then switched tempo and assumed a whole new mood, I realized I was being treated to a medley of great composers’ renditions of my Southern anthem. I was charmed. Ursula was surprised at the beginning, too, but as soon as she understood what her brother was playing, she smiled broadly and assumed a sort of benign guardian-spirit possessiveness over the proceedings, as if she herself had been the instigator of them. “He must have looked out and seen us down here,” she said to me, as thundering, Beethoven-like chords for “Look away, look away” rolled down the slope of the lawn. “Since he was a boy, Julie has cultivated the irresistible trick of ‘summoning’ people by playing their special music. Even Father would drop what he was doing when Julie played the overture from
Tannhäuser
, and I am a pushover for the Chopin ‘Scherzo in B-Flat Minor.’ But I haven’t heard him do this for anyone besides me in years. It would be unthinkable if you didn’t come in for a moment after he has paid you this great compliment. You have time, don’t you?”

I had time. We ate at six-thirty, and I knew exactly how long it took me to ride each way.

Julian was still tinkling “A-way, a-way, a-way down
South
in Dixie” in Debussy’s style when we reached the living room. Smiling shyly at me, he finished his performance by playing more and more softly until his fingers moving over the keyboard made only the ghost of a melody.

I wasn’t sure what to say. At school back in Fredericksburg we had been taught there were some performances after which it was wrong to clap because it spoiled the mood. This might qualify
as one of those times, so I simply smiled back at him in a way that I hoped would show I felt honored.

Ursula put her arm around my shoulders and told him, “We are feeling a bit low today. End of summer, everything changes, nothing lasts.… Oh God, Julie, do you remember being young? It hurt so much, but it was so damned exhilarating! I think I’m jealous of this child for feeling the things I know she’s feeling so intensely!”

Julian, still seated at the piano, looked up at me with his soft, muted brown eyes that never flashed or pierced or probed as his sister’s did. An understanding seemed to pass between us. I felt that he could read my heart not out of perceptive curiosity but out of a gentle, companionable sympathy. He knew how I felt about coming here. He knew why the thought of summer ending made me sad. He knew how I felt about this woman who stood next to me, holding me in her circle of power.

He played a few strange bars on the piano, dissonant yet compelling. “There’s a wonderful poem about … these things,” he said. “I once set it to music so that an old f-friend and teacher could sing it. It’s one of Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus.
I’m not sure I did it justice, but the sounds went with … what the w-words made me feel.”

“It’s a haunting piece,” said Ursula. “You must play it for Justin.”

“I’d love it if you would,” I told him.

Ursula and I sat down on the sofa and Julian played the music he had written. His eyes were almost closed, and he touched the keys with a slight restraint; he looked as though he had sent himself into some other realm and had to be careful not to be swallowed up by it. The music was not melodic; it was more like a series of phrases struck off with a plangent, eerie insistence. Several times Julian hummed aloud, or emitted abrupt, guttural sounds as he played. The whole thing sent shivers through me: the weird, often dissonant notes; the way he looked; the intent, solicitous way Ursula looked at him. The atmosphere in the room was thick with some history they were living in, as he played this music.

“Ah, it needs the words,” said Ursula, as soon as he had lifted his fingers from the keys. She jumped up from the sofa and went to the piano. “Here, let me try, Julie, I want Justin to have the full force of it. Justin, you won’t understand the words, they’re in German, but you’ll feel their expression. I’ll explain what the poem says later. And the other thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that this piece was written for a lieder singer with a very deep baritone voice, a bass baritone, it’s called. So you’ll have to imagine that.”

She stood behind her brother as he played the piece again, and sang in German, in a deep, throbbing voice, much lower pitched than her usual one. With her bold posture, her hand laid lightly on Julian’s shoulder, singing in a man’s voice, in the harsh foreign tongue, she might have been a man. She had slipped into one more transformation, escaped from me into a language I could not understand a word of. I was afraid to take my eyes off her; if I did, she might turn into something else, completely unrecognizable, and I would lose her forever. She was too much for me and she knew it: I saw it in the triumphant way she looked at me while she sang. And Julian, too, seemed mesmerized, as if someone else besides his sister had silently entered the room and laid a hand on his shoulder as he played.

She is right, I thought. I
am
feeling everything so intensely that it hurts. But what am I to
do
with all these feelings?

She was also right about the envy an older person feels when remembering (or confronting in a young person) the taut drama of youth, strung with all its erotic and spiritual demands, demands that are frequently inseparable from one another. Now that I am close to Ursula’s age, I can look back on that afternoon and envy that girl on the sofa, all a-vibrant with the strange music and the sight of the pair before her, afraid she is going to lose this magical woman during one of her transformations, yet
knowing that this fear of loss is part of the magic.
From where I sat, I could look through the open window and see the tower on the mountain, where she had said we would go next week. But what if it rained on the day she wanted to go? Oh, young Justin, what would I say to you if I could penetrate the time barrier and murmur
in your ear? I am so much more certain of myself than you were; I am probably happier, as the world defines happiness. Yet you draw me, you awaken me, as I watch you sitting there, surrounded by your treasures of so many intense desires and fears. Exult in your riches—though of course you won’t—because the day will come when you will look back enviously on your longings. The day will come when you understand what Rilke was saying in that sonnet which Julian set to music: that the act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

Which is what Ursula said to me, in her own words, after they had finished the song, and Julian, looking faraway in thought, had excused himself and gone upstairs. She came back and sat beside me on the sofa. “The reason that song is so haunting,” she said, “is that it’s about a special kind of love. It’s a love that can never be satisfied. It’s more like”—she leaned her head back against the sofa and contemplated the low ceiling with its old beams—“it’s more like a
yearning.
The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It’s the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He
needs
it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.” She reached over casually and put her hand on top of mine. “Do you understand that?”

I could barely nod. I was so full of the things she was describing.

“That is one of the best compositions Julian ever wrote,” she said, removing her hand as easily as she had bestowed it. “That is the power of the artist, you see. If you are an artist, you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That’s the secret all true artists come to know.”

Is that, then, what I am trying to do in reviving you, Ursula? Trying to steal back some of the ardor you aroused in me and put it to use in my art?

“Oh, there you are, Justin,” said my mother, who was setting the kitchen table for supper. The job that was mine. “We were starting to worry.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Mona, “I was just about ready to give Ursula DeVane a ring and ask if you were over there and tell her to send you home.” Since Ursula’s visit to our front hall, on the night of
Hedda Gabler
, my aunt had stopped teasing me about my “grand friend,” and begun speaking of Ursula as if she were her own friend. She always used the whole name, pronouncing it with relish and a certain pride. Aunt Mona had been won over by Ursula completely that night. “Why, she’s not so stuck up as I thought” had been her verdict. She had even gone so far as to say that if Julian DeVane hadn’t been such a fool at the recital, she and Ursula DeVane might have become “good pals” by this time.

“Oh, were you over with Miss DeVane again?” asked my mother with that innocent vagueness she affected when she preferred something not to be so even though she knew it was. She, to my disappointment, had not been won over by Ursula, though I could not exactly figure out why, and couldn’t bring myself to ask. The only comment I had heard her make to Aunt Mona, during one of Aunt Mona’s revisional bursts of approval for Julian DeVane’s sister, was that “she seemed very outgoing.”

“I was riding on Old Clove and she happened to be in the garden,” I said. “Then
he
saw me through the window and played ‘Dixie,’ sort of in my honor, so I had to go in and thank him—”

“That child-hater played ‘
Dixie
’ in your
honor
?” Aunt Mona snorted, waggling her wavy crest.

“He doesn’t hate children,” I felt I must say. As far as I had been able to determine, the only person he hated was Abel Cristiana. But I could see it displeased my aunt to hear this; she was not ready to revise her opinion of
him.
“Besides,” I said, walking the fence and hating myself for my cowardice, “maybe he doesn’t consider me a child.” I lifted the lid on a large steaming pot. “Oh, corn!” At least I would be eating one of the same things they would be eating for supper. “Are there any tomatoes?”