The Finishing School (37 page)

“But when I got to Julie’s apartment, I found out he’d been gone for weeks. He’d left for Buenos Aires without waiting for me. I didn’t see him again until after the war. He stayed on in South America, concertizing with Karl, until Karl found another accompanist who happened to be a rich young woman who
wanted to marry him. The impresario told Karl they would make an even more irresistible team than Karl and Julie had made. So Karl more or less told Julie, ‘
Auf Wiedersehen.
It’s been fun, but you’re in the way now.’ Julie was heartbroken; he also happened to be broke. He went to the American Embassy and offered himself as a soldier—we had entered the war the year before—and they paid his way back to basic training in Texas. He hoped he would be sent overseas and killed. He didn’t want to live. But when they found out about his talent and his training, well … you know that story … he spent the rest of the war playing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the Officers’ Club and accompanying the chaplain on Sunday. He stuck it out, but when he was demobilized he fell apart. I quit my job at the girls’ school and brought him home to Clove. I resolved that I would devote all my energy toward saving him. I let him talk about Karl, and in turn I told him the whole story of what had happened in 1922. I nagged and shamed him into wanting him to live. ‘I was going to play Saint Joan, in front of George Bernard Shaw,’ I said, ‘but I threw it all up to come home and save you from ruining your career. And now you say you want to die. If you die, what will I have to live for? My sacrifice will have been pointless. Whereas, if you live and fulfill your potential as an artist … if you make our name famous … I will feel it has all been worth it.’ My strategy worked. He stopped talking of death and began playing again. He took on one student, an extremely promising boy, who has since gone on to Juilliard himself—he was the same boy Julie called into the church during that recital, just before it was Becky’s turn to play her piece; that boy did a lot toward restoring Julie’s faith in music and in himself. And then IBM opened a plant in Kingston, and before we knew it we had enough children—even when we were being picky—to keep the wolf from the door. Now, unless something really unfair happens, I intend to reverse the family fate and see Julie on the concert stage again, where he belongs.”

“That song he played for us that day,” I said. “The one you sang the words to in German? He said he wrote it for an old friend and teacher. That was for Karl, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But, Justin, that is the redemptive power of art. It can make something haunting and beautiful out of something that, in real life, was painful and degrading. Julie wrote that song to win back Karl, when he sensed Karl was abandoning him for the woman. Karl never sang the song, though he kept promising to do it at their next concert. Then there was no ‘next concert.’ Yet, there is the song.
It
exists. It will exist after Karl is gone, and perhaps after all of us are gone. But if Julie’s career finally takes off, the way I am hoping it will, he’ll be able to make his own programs, and one day—maybe you will be there to hear it—some splendid bass baritone will come out on the stage and stand next to the piano and sing that song while Julie plays it. Then we
and
art will have triumphed!”

When at last we emerged from the woods, and the rambling wooden hotel with its towers and gables and porches rose up before us across the dark blue lake surrounded by white cliffs, the scene seemed to me simply a continuation of the world into which Ursula had drawn me. As we followed the path around the lake toward this Old World landscape, it was as though my own life, with its still-to-be articulated themes and concerns, hovered like an unborn shape in this storybook atmosphere fraught with so much history. Ursula had switched moods, in that masterful way she had, and was relating to me in a blithe, ironic manner how this place had started off as a mountaintop tavern whose proprietor had chained drunks to the trees until they sobered up, and how two Quaker brothers, inspired by the romantic cliffs and the grand, sweeping views, had bought the land from him and built this mountain house modeled after a European resort—but with the difference that guests could drink no alcohol in the public rooms, or dance, or play cards. “Father used to entertain his political friends up here a lot before he married. They’d drink whiskey and play cards in their rooms, and then, on Sunday morning, they’d go down to the parlor and join all the other bleary-eyed guests who had been drinking and playing cards in
their
rooms, and everybody would participate in a nice
church service. Father used to say that the reason the hotel was so popular was that it completely embraced the divided American soul.”

But I was not so acrobatic in my mood-shifting. I was still caught up in her terrible family story and all its implications. All I could think of as we walked along together was:
She has to make it all right. She just has to. Nothing must prevent her from saving him. If anything happened to prevent it, her life would be meaningless.
And I wanted to cry for this vision of a defeated, wasted Ursula. I walked beside her with a knot in my throat, while her voice gathered wit and music as she elaborated on her concept of the Divided American Soul, pious on the outside, demonic within.
I love her
, I thought.
No matter what she has done, she is the most interesting person I have ever known.
And at that moment I would rather have been inside with her and her wrongness than separated from her and judging her.

“We’ll take a quick look around inside the hotel before our lunch,” she said, leading the way up to the long porch, where people, many of them old, sat in large oak rocking chairs, gazing out at the lake. We crossed the porch and went inside, and she showed me old-fashioned rooms and then a vast parlor, with a giant fireplace and oak beams and chandeliers, and lots of quaint wicker furniture. Even the sunshine pouring through the French windows seemed old-fashioned. “Oh God,” she said with a sigh. “I haven’t been in this room since I was a young woman. Father brought us up here to dinner to celebrate Julie’s going off to Juilliard. That was in nineteen thirty-
five.
” She did a strange sort of dance turn on the carpet, and I remember feeling embarrassed, hoping that nobody would come into this room and see her, in her rumpled Army fatigues and her brother’s thick boots, dancing around like that. Then she stopped in her tracks and looked at me critically: “You’d better take advantage of the bathroom before we go off into the wilds again,” she said.

“I don’t need to.” I wanted to punish her for treating me like a child.

“Very well, suit yourself.
I
need to. Be right back.” And off she went, leaving me alone in the parlor, whose wicker rocking
chairs seemed to stir faintly with ghostly sitters. I went to one of the windows and looked out at people on a putting green. Their clothes were modern. I could not decide whether I was glad or sorry for this reminder of present-day reality. I felt tired and hungry and vaguely apprehensive, and realized I should have gone with Ursula to the bathroom.

When she came back, she raised her eyebrows at me challengingly and gave me an impish, knowing smile. “Sure you won’t reconsider?” She knew that I needed to. “Go down that hall,” she said, taking me by the shoulders and aiming me in the proper direction. “It’s the third door on the right.”

My reflection in the bathroom mirror came as a shock. I was so real, so visible, so young, It was almost an affront to these surroundings, to the spell of the past Ursula had woven around us, that I should be so solid. Yet there I was, bending over the sink to wash my hands. That was my face, miraculously unlined, dewy with perspiration. Those were my long, brown arms and bony shoulders and my small breasts, about which I still felt ambivalent, sticking out beneath my blouse, which had been pulled askew by the backpack Ursula had strapped to me. I still had my whole life before me.
I
hadn’t yet done anything I would regret for the rest of my life. And it seemed perfectly possible to me, as I stood there, relieved and pleased by my fresh, unmarked image, that with resolution and a little prudent foresight—and from learning from the example of people like Ursula—I could get through life without ever committing any act that would haunt me later.

“You know,” said Ursula, “I had a
memento mori
while you were in the bathroom, but it turned out to be rather wonderful.”

We had climbed the pathway halfway to the tower and stopped to eat our lunch in one of the little summerhouses built along the cliff. From where I sat, I saw the hotel stretched out below us, against a backdrop of distant valleys and mountains. I tried not to look through the cracks in the floor of the summer-house, poised as it was above a steep ravine.

“I’m not sure I know what—”

“It’s a reminder of your mortality. From the Latin: ‘Remember
you must die.’ I was standing in the lobby, waiting for you, when this old man and his nurse came in from the porch. I suppose I must have stared, something I don’t usually do, but he was so very old and white and frail, he was practically transparent with age, and I was impressed by the sheer phenomenon of someone that ancient, standing perfectly erect beside his nurse, who was carrying a folded blanket. Their backs were to me while they waited for the elevator, but then, all of a sudden, he turned around and looked me straight in the eye. His eyes were very smoky, the way old people’s get, but there was a force in them. And I knew he was thinking: One day you will be this old, and one day not long after that you will die, but it’s not as horrifying as you think. It was as if he were trying to tell me: ‘You are much more afraid of death and age than I am.’ And I
smiled
at him. The smile just came out all by itself. He acknowledged it with a slight bow, and then their elevator came.” She passed me the canteen of red wine with one of her knowing, “mysterious” looks. She was obviously expecting me to “get” something from this anecdote.

I washed down a bite of ham sandwich with the wine and watched a swimmer breaststroking intrepidly across the dark blue lake, too far below for me to tell whether it was a man or a woman. “And it was wonderful?” I repeated her word, not wanting to admit I didn’t understand why.

“Yes. It put things in perspective. It made me see … well, I have known it all along, but I tend to forget. Death is not the enemy;
age
is not the enemy. These things are inevitable, they happen to everybody. But what we
ought
to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You’re going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You’re not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.
That’s
the enemy. There are two kinds of people walking around on this earth. One kind, you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very
nice
self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind
keep moving, changing. With these people, you can never say, ‘X stops here,’ or, ‘Now I know all there is to know about Y.’ And that’s the kind of person I hope I shall be always.” She reclaimed the canteen of wine and took an enthusiastic swig.

I said, “But … if they’re always changing and moving, couldn’t that mean they are just unstable?”

“Ah no, far from it. They are
fluid.
They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive.” Then she cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes at me and said with a mischievous lilt, “You must be constantly on your guard, Justin, against congealing. Don’t be lulled by your youth. Though middle age is the traditional danger point, I suspect that many a fourteen-year-old has congealed during the long history of this world.”

I took my second sandwich out of waxed paper and bit into it. It was very good. Just rich, ripe tomato from her garden, with something sprinkled on it: a mixture of sugar and salt and something else … little pieces of basil. I remembered the day in the store when I had seen her sauntering toward me with that little box of basil plants balanced on her fingertips. “How will I know if it starts to happen to me?” I asked.

“Well, if you wake up one morning and think: Another day to get through, that might be a danger signal. Though not necessarily. Everyone has dreary interims. You just have to distinguish between a dreary interim and the onset of jellification. However, if you catch yourself becoming complacent, I’d say that was a bad sign. Or repeatedly choosing the old, familiar routine rather than rousing yourself and striking out for new territory, whether it’s mental or emotional, or actually going somewhere new. Father used to tell how our ancestors, the Sires DeVeine, roused themselves every spring when the snows melted, and left their cozy stronghold and rode down the Jura Pass looking for a new challenge. Sometimes it would be a Crusade, or other times it might be just terrorizing the locals, but the point was they knew they had to keep moving. And that’s why there are still so many of us. When it really came time to move, after Louis the
Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes, our Huguenot ancestors had moving in their blood and were able to go to Germany, and later to America—to this very spot”—and she waved her hand in a proprietary way over the surrounding mountains and valleys. She took another hefty swig from the canteen and looked extremely pleased with herself, so much so that I fell under her confident spell once more. I guess she saw it in my face—as she said she saw everything—for she magnanimously passed me the canteen as though offering me her own rare potion against ordinariness and congealment. “If you ever feel it coming,” she said, “you must do something quickly. The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.”

As I drank, she leaned forward and looked at me as if she were burning to confide another secret. But then she stopped herself. I think I know now what she was about to tell me. If I had been older, she might have blurted it out then and there, and we would have sat on, in our summerhouse over the ravine, tenderly mauling her confession in an amicable, winy way until we had extracted its choicest juices and, by doing so, strengthened our bond of womanhood. But, just on the verge of telling, she must have decided that I was, after all, still a child. She must have thought: No, it’s one thing to tell about my mother, but this other thing would be too much. Or maybe she just thought she had told enough for one day.