The Finishing School (36 page)

“Then one day in November, when Julie and I got home from school, there was a distant cousin of ours, Mrs. Hasbrouck, who sometimes sat with us when our parents went out. Mrs. Hasbrouck told us that she would be staying with us for a few days while our father settled our mother in a place where she was going to have a rest. Our mother never came home again. Father took us to visit her several times, but she was getting progressively worse, sinking into her madness, and something unpleasant always happened. Once she started screaming, ‘Get her away from me, that devil,’ when she saw me, and, the last time we ever went, she told Julie he was only pretending to be her son, that her true son had gone away. ‘He went back to Germany to study,’ she told Julie. Poor Julie tried to reason with her. He pointed to the clothes he was wearing. ‘When you made them for me, they were too big, but look, now I can fit into them.’ She went into a violent rage and tried to tear the clothes off him. That was the last time we ever saw her. Julie stopped speaking about her, after that. But he would often talk about Karl. ‘I wonder what Karl is doing now?’ he would ask. When he learned a new piece from his music teacher in Kingston, he would say, ‘I wish Karl could hear me play this.’ And when we went to the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, he would ask us, ‘Do you remember when Karl was up there, playing that organ?’

“But what I want to know, Justin, is what you would have done if you had been in my place. Would you have done what I did, or do you think I was a monster? You must be honest. If you’re not, you know, I can read it on your face.”

She had caught me unprepared. I was still deep in the land of her troubling story. I had almost forgotten I existed. “I’m not sure,” I said, after a moment. “I mean, I just don’t know what I would have done.” After another moment, I added, “But I can understand why you thought you had to do what you did.”

She pounced. “Ah, you said ‘thought you had to’! That means
you
don’t think I had to!”

The goading note in her voice worried me: it was as though she
wanted
me to accuse her. I was disturbed by all the things I had heard, and also I felt trapped. This day which was supposed to be our outing had turned into an ordeal. I felt as though I dangled
precariously on the cusp of my childhood and that the least wrong move, the least wrong thought, would send me tumbling prematurely into the uncertain abyss of adulthood, where morals, backed up by experience, could never be simple again. Ursula’s story of Kitty had already made me wonder whether I would grow up to be a normal woman. Her tale about her unfortunate mother raised troubling questions—more, perhaps, than she was aware of. Did she, for instance, approve today of the way her father had handled things? Did she believe he had been a good man? Had she and her mother
always
been at war? Surely there had been some good moments, some times of affection between mother and daughter. And all that talk about “the DeVanes,” their specialness, their superiority: did she still subscribe to that, as she still believed that the “spirit” of the DeVane place provided her with an “elixir” to be found nowhere else in the world? And if she did believe this so strongly, could it not be the reason why she had never been able to break away and become the actress she had wanted to be? Or was it that after
failing
to become that acress, she had justified her retreat by convincing herself that she had to get back to the elixir that was her birthright?

Her story had made me question her adult perspective more than ever before, and yet, somehow, by telling it to me she had implicated me in it: it bound me to her even as it raised serious doubts about her character. I felt, in a strange way,
motherly
toward her, as if it were my duty to shield her from the consequences of her skewed vision. And this meant shielding her from my own doubts about her. She had made me older on this walk, and I fought down a surge of resentment. Wasn’t I supposed to be the petted child on this picnic day, and she the responsible adult? Would this bridle path that we were taking so as not to have to pay at the gate never end? The perspiration trickled down my back, beneath Julian’s Army pack that contained our lunch. Would we ever eat it? The woods were thick and close around us: we had met not one soul in the time we had been walking, and there wasn’t the least sign of a hotel. Yet I knew I was not being fair. I had wanted for a long time to hear about the mysterious, mad mother; only, while I had waited, I had constructed
a different story, something vaguely sad, or even tragic, but not so morally ambivalent and with so many disturbing loose ends.

“Poor child,” said Ursula then, with her uncanny insight into my feelings (or, as she claimed, my face), “I have overloaded you.”

“No you haven’t. I was just … thinking. I was trying to think out how I would have acted. It’s just that it’s so difficult. I mean, I didn’t know your mother, and so I keep picturing mine. And I don’t think mine would have … I mean, I’m not saying she’s better than yours, but … well, her circumstances were different.”

“Of course they were,” she replied coldly. “Everyone’s circumstances are different from everyone else’s. I’m not asking you what your mother would have done. I’m asking about betrayal. Would you have betrayed your own mother, whatever the ‘circumstances’?” She was being unreasonable, I thought, because she was disappointed in me. Yet she had managed to regain control over me by showing her disappointment.

“I
might
have,” I ventured miserably, as if saying such a thing was equal to doing it. “If I had felt as threatened as you did. But I would have felt guilty about it, probably for the rest of my life.”

“I do!” cried Ursula passionately. “I do feel guilty! The older I grow, the more that woman haunts me. This summer her ghost has been breathing down my neck. There are certain parallels, you see, which I can’t go into, but it is as if she were determined to make me feel what she felt, and to suffer what she suffered. You are part of it, too.…”

“I am? How?”

“Well, you are like my daughter, a dream daughter I might have had. And I look at you and talk to you and read your face, and it would be, oh God, so painful if you ever betrayed me. So now I can see it from the other side. Except that I truly believe I love you more than my mother ever loved me. I respect and admire you. I wouldn’t want to change you, as she wanted to change me.”

“Thank you.” Overcome by the suddenness and extravagance
of her declaration, I tried to hide my feelings by shifting the subject slightly. “Whatever happened to that Karl?” I asked. “Did you ever hear from him anymore?”

“Did we ever hear from him anymore?” she repeated with arch mysteriousness. “Ah, Justin, do you remember how I told you our family history was as convoluted as a Greek drama? Well, Sophocles himself couldn’t have plotted this one any better: Karl
came back
for Julie.”

“Came back?”

“Yes, he came back. Just like a bad penny. And Julie went off with him and spoiled his own career. Karl showed up at Julie’s Carnegie Hall recital. Yes, that’s right, my brother’s brilliant night, crowning all those years and years of studying and practicing and all our scrimping and saving so Julie could have his chance. And he was brilliant that night, he played like a god. And there were eleven hundred people in the audience. I credit myself for that: I organized that recital within an inch of its life. I spent more than two thousand dollars, hired the best recital manager in town, had beautiful fliers printed, with Julie’s picture, and I made Julie compile a list of every person he had met while at Juilliard, every old dowager at whose brownstone or Sutton Place apartment he had played chamber music, and I sent these fliers to them all, some with personal notes. I went around the city of New York myself, posting the fliers in every allowable space I could find—and some not allowable! I put them in hotel lobbies, apartment buildings, everywhere! And we got eleven hundred people. That’s no mean achievement. I’m talking about Carnegie
Hall
, not Little Carnegie, where most Juilliard graduates give their recitals. I was determined Julie was going to make a splash and he did. He had never looked so beautiful or played so well. Only, as fate would have it—our peculiar convoluted fate—Karl Klauss was winding up a tour of lieder singing in this country and was stopping off in New York, looking for some way to keep from going back to Germany—they were just about to start the war, you know—and he comes down to breakfast with his accompanist one morning at their hotel, and what do you think he sees? A flier announcing the recital of Julian DeVane.
A flier I myself had put up, because it was a hotel popular with musicians.

“So Karl came to Julie’s recital and went backstage afterward. Julie was overwhelmed. When he finally understood who this big German was—Karl had filled out quite a bit, to put it kindly—he kept repeating, ‘You came. You actually came. You
said
you would, all those many years ago, and you actually came!’ He hung on to Karl’s sleeve and made him stand there beside him while people came up to congratulate him on his performance. And to each one of them he said, ‘This is my first teacher, Karl Klauss, and without him I wouldn’t be here tonight!’ And Karl, I must say, caught on to his role at once and played it to the hilt. He told everyone who would listen how he had discovered Julie’s perfect pitch, and how, when he himself had won a ‘scholarship’ to the Hochschule and had to return to Germany, he had left instructions behind for Julie in a notebook. Instructions I happen to know that Julie’s teacher in Kingston never used; she told Father they were full of affectations meant to cover up a lack of solid technique.

“After the recital, I had a small reception back at Julie’s apartment. Karl came and drank champagne and ate at least fifty hors d’oeuvres, and I heard him telling anyone who would listen how, when he was a child, he and his family had shared a single potato among the six of them. But Julie was simply mesmerized. He stayed at the side of his old teacher, hanging on to every word Karl uttered in his booming voice. And when Karl made a toast to ‘your dear parents, who took me in when I had nothing, and whose generosity set me on my life’s course,’ my brother actually wept. It was just too much for him, this dramatic reappearance of the man who had been his last connection to the time when he had both his parents. Now, even Father was gone; he died the year before Julie’s recital.

“I thought that Karl had blossomed into a bombastic old phony. If he had felt that grateful to my parents, why had he never—except for one thank-you letter, shortly after he left our house—gotten in touch with us again? Yet I understood the pull Karl exerted on Julie. He was a poignant link with Julie’s childhood;
he was vitally connected with Julie’s music. And—I have to confess it—I was glad of his timely appearance, even though I didn’t think he had changed for the better. I was sailing for France on the
Normandie
in a month’s time, and I had been worrying that Julie would miss me and there would be no one to encourage him in his music. And when Karl came to see us a day or so later and announced that he had sent his accompanist back to Germany without him and that he was going to apply for a permit to stay in America and work, I thought it sounded like a good idea when Julie asked him to share the apartment in New York. I thought Karl would be paying half the rent. I later learned that Karl paid for very little during his years with my brother.

“And when Julie wrote to me in France, when I was staying with the DeVanes and was all involved with Marius, that he had been on tour with Karl, accompanying him in some singing engagements, I still didn’t see any real cause for concern. And then, just as I was about to leave for England, Julie wrote a rather sad letter, saying that Karl had been denied his permit because the immigration office didn’t think that he would be able to support himself singing lieder with the increasing anti-German feeling in America, and so Karl had signed on with an impresario who was taking him on tour to South America for the winter. Julie mentioned that he was helping Karl with his passage money, as he was low on funds, and I thought: Well, Karl Klauss has set sail twice out of the family’s pocketbook, but we have seen the last of him now. And I went on to London to enroll at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I had waited so long to begin my own life, and I felt I had every right to start now. I had nursed Father for almost six years, when other girls my age were going to college and getting married; I had done everything in my power to launch my brother’s career. And I probably didn’t read Julie’s letters as closely as I should have, during the next year. I should have read between the lines, but I didn’t. He wrote about the engagements he was getting, which weren’t the kind I had expected him to take. He was playing mostly with chamber groups, in private homes, or in small halls. I wrote him that he should get after his manager and tell him he wanted bookings with orchestras—
that was the way he was going to make his name. But Julie wrote back that he liked chamber music, he liked being part of a group, that it was less lonely. Julie is not very aggressive, you see. He can provide the art, but he needs someone behind him to advertise him and push him out into the world.

“Then the Germans started bombing London, and, at about the same time, Julie wrote to tell me that Karl wanted him to come to South America. Karl said there was plenty of work for the two of them because concert life down there was booming, especially in Argentina, and Karl’s impresario had put together an irresistible program: Julie would accompany Karl in his lieder singing, but would have at least two solos of his own for each appearance. ‘If you were still here, I might try to stay and make a go of it in New York,’ Julie wrote me, ‘but you have to pursue your own career now, and, to be honest, I miss Karl.’ I cabled Julie back at once: ‘Returning soonest. Wait for me.’ Well, it took me more than a month to get out of England. It would have taken a lot longer if I hadn’t had the idea of offering myself to something called The American Committee as an escort for children who were being evacuated to the Americas. The woman organizing things liked me, and I found myself in charge of fifteen children, sailing across the Atlantic in the middle of a convoy. I hadn’t heard again from Julie, but I felt that he would wait for me; he had always done what I had asked him before. I felt full of power and purpose. I was going to get Julie back on the track, and then I would perhaps enroll in another acting school in New York. Everything still seemed possible. I kept my fifteen children beautifully occupied the whole way: we played charades and had spelling bees, and I made the children act out scenes from their lives as a way of getting acquainted. It worked wonderfully. That was when I realized I was a good teacher, that I might be able to support myself teaching while I went on with my acting lessons.