The Finishing School (6 page)

I found this hour of the day a particular trial. The evenings here contrasted so sadly with the “old” evenings in the house in Fredericksburg, before anyone had gotten sick or died. Evenings there had a comforting flow of communal awareness about them: you could feel the flow like a current moving through the rooms of the house, keeping us in touch with one another as we went
about our separate pursuits. My grandfather might be closed in his study, with his slavery articles and “J. Sanity Bach”; my grandmother up in her bedroom, already in her nightgown and bed jacket, reading a novel from the library; my mother loafing unashamedly on the sun porch, leafing through a magazine or talking to my father if he was home; Jem already in bed in the room next to mine, where I could hear him going over his day aloud, in strange little phrases, while I did my homework. I luxuriated in being alone, I even loved my homework, because I felt, somehow, that I was everybody else in that house as well as myself, so I was not missing anything.

But now there were new people in that house, strangers who had moved their own furniture in and would never know that we had always kept a vase of flowers by a certain window or pushed our chairs together in a certain way on the sun porch. Some other girl might at this very moment be lying in bed, under the eaves in my room, looking out at the thick foliage of the backyard and listening to the birds I had listened to last spring.

This thought made me so sad I could not stay in the room. There was at least another hour until dark. There was no homework for me to do, because this was a rural school and teachers did not give homework during planting season. We had what were called “study-hour assignments,” which could all be done during the afternoon period assigned for them.

I decided that, rather than getting depressed at dusk in “Raspberry Ice,” I would walk up to the old farmhouse that overlooked Lucas Meadows and think my thoughts there. I crouched in front of my dressing-table mirror and combed my hair. Was I pretty or not? I couldn’t tell.

The piece of furniture that was now my dressing table had been Mr. Mott’s desk. This had been his room. He snored, Aunt Mona had explained, and also he
tinkered.
He had to have a place where he could take his transistor radio apart if he wanted to. Mott had a way of tinkering with things, Aunt Mona said, until she thought she would go out of her mind.

Whenever I wanted to open the center drawer of my dressing table, I had to part the milkmaid fabric that Aunt Mona had
tacked around it, and I always felt disconcerted when I saw the sturdy legs of Mr. Mott’s former desk beneath. It was like having him, hidden behind a skirt, spying on me in my room.

As I went downstairs, I passed Becky coming up. She gave me a quirky raise of her eyebrows, which could have meant “Hi,” or “How dare you be on my stairs,” or “Isn’t life exasperating.”

My mother was sitting on the living-room sofa. She already had Becky’s sundress and was picking out the seam. My cousin certainly hadn’t wasted any time.

My mother was wearing her new, martyr’s look as she bent over Becky’s sewing. But she was a very pretty martyr, and something about the way she held her head made me think she saw herself now in the role of a person who is determined to make suffering noble and beautiful.

“I’m going up to that old empty farmhouse for a while,” I said from the doorway.

She raised her light blue eyes from her work and smiled at me. I thought I glimpsed the ghost of the look she had rewarded me with occasionally in the old days, a flirtatious look that said: Something about you pleases me right now, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

Maybe it was not too late yet: maybe I could still say or do something to persuade her to pack up our things and take the train south again. I had made no new friends at school yet. There was nothing in this new place that I would be sad to leave behind. Emboldened by this flicker of her old self that I had spotted, I made a wry face at Aunt Mona’s clear plastic runners, which led, in three directions, from the doorway to the main places one was expected to sit in the living room. This way, her seafoam-green wall-to-wall carpeting would be protected forever from a dirty footstep.

“What’s she waiting for?” I said. “It’s like those women you see downtown with their hair in rollers. You wonder what the special event would have to be for them to take them out.”

In the old days, my mother would have giggled and said, “Justin, don’t be naughty,” but in a way that signified that the nonmotherly part of her, the part that was not required to instill respect in me, approved of the truth in my “naughty” observation. But now she only said gravely, “Come and sit by me a minute.” She patted a place beside her. “I won’t keep you long.”

I crossed Aunt Mona’s plastic bridge to the sofa and sat down beside my mother. She resumed picking out Becky’s errant seam with her nail scissors. The early-evening light was still strong, and, as she bent over her work, I noticed a new little line along the edge of her chin. It was nothing very awful, but it had a strange effect on me: it made me angry with her. I felt, unreasonably perhaps, that, in her present way of life, she was encouraging such lines, that she was purposely trying to transform her whole being as a way of avenging herself on her unhappy fate of losing all her supporters and protectors. But wasn’t I still here? Wasn’t Jem? And we needed her as she had been. This new image of her made it seem as if our glamorous, carefree mother had died along with everybody else.

“You know, Justin,” she began slowly, picking diligently at Becky’s seam, “everyone in the world isn’t going to have Honey’s taste in furniture and rugs.” Honey was our name for my late grandmother.

I sat silently, knowing I was in for a reproach.

“But we’re going to have to go on living in that world. I’m not saying we’ll never have a home of our own again, with our own things, but right now this is the best I can do for you and Jem.”

“Is it?” I could not resist replying bitterly.

“Justin. Do you remember, after we buried your father … and …” She picked out the next few stitches in silence. “… and Mr. Fowler at the bank came to the house to explain to me what my choices were, you remember the talk we had afterward, you and I?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Of course I remembered it: how could I ever forget it? That was when she had told me we had to sell the house. And, just as I had been able to accept that, just as I had
gotten us comfortably and bravely settled into a smaller house I was sure we could find somewhere in town where everybody would still know who we were, who would remember what we had been—she had dropped her bomb: we were to go north, to live with Aunt Mona and Becky, the cousin I had never seen.

“I thought you understood why this was the only sensible choice. Frankly, Justin, I don’t know what we would have done if Mona hadn’t invited us to share her home.”

“If she hadn’t invited us, we would have found a way. If she and Mr. Mott hadn’t gotten separated, we would still be at home. You know we would.”

“Yes, perhaps. And it would have been terrible. I don’t think you have imagined just how painful it would have been to have gone on living there with all those reminders. I mean”—and she put her scissors down upon the cloth, and a savage edge came into her voice—“did you imagine us taking
walks
every Sunday from our dinky little house over to Washington Avenue, so we could see how the new people were enjoying living in our old home? And what, exactly, did you imagine me doing to bring in an income, to bring in money so that your future and Jem’s could lie safely in the bank collecting interest, so you could have your chance when the time comes?”

“You could have found something. Everyone would have wanted to help you. Granddaddy helped so many people. And I told you I was willing to get a job after school.” I had to keep a tight hold on myself; tears of frustration were threatening to spill. We had been through this before.

“Justin, honey. You are
thirteen years old.
You can’t even get a real job till you’re sixteen.”

“I could have baby-sat my way out of poverty and shabbiness, like Aunt Mona.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Justin. Mona may not do everything in the style you’ve been accustomed to, but she is making an effort to become self-sufficient. I admire that.” My mother picked up the nail scissors and went back to Becky’s seam. “God knows I admire that,” she said with a sigh.

“Well, you could do it, too. You could get your realtor’s
license, like Aunt Mona is doing. She said, once she had it, she could make money hand over fist.”

“Sooner or later I will have to train for something. I’ll have to get some practical education. But, don’t you see, my hands are tied until Jem’s in school next fall. Until then, I just have to do what I can to help Mona out, and … and take the consequences for the kind of person I have been.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m just beginning to understand, myself,” she said in a wistful,
humble
tone I had never heard her use before. “You see, all my life, I got to do exactly as I wanted. When I chose to run off and get married rather than go to Sweet Briar, I did it. There was some fuss made, but what could they do? I was their only child and they had raised me to believe I was a law unto myself. And when your father had to go to war three months later, and I was already expecting you, I was welcomed home like the prodigal daughter. After you were born, I got to go off to Mary Washington every day and take what courses I wanted while someone looked after you at home. And I took art, and courses like ‘The History of Furniture,’ things like that. Nothing so boring as shorthand or typing or anything that would help me get a job later. Who needed a
job?
I had three people to take care of me. And then, when the war was over, and your father wanted to go off to Charlottesville and get his education, I got to go off with him and lead a carefree young college married life, while Honey and Father felt privileged to keep you at home and begin to spoil you as they’d spoiled me. And when we decided it was time to have another child, even though your father hadn’t found the career that suited him yet, my loving parents encouraged us to come right home … there was plenty of room for everybody in that house … and I suppose it could have gone on like that for decades if Honey hadn’t got cancer and then, on top of that, Father his stroke.

“And, you know, we still thought we could make it, your father and I, if we mortgaged the house to pay the staggering medical bills, and having those round-the-clock nurses for your grandfather. It wouldn’t have been easy, but Rivers was doing
real well selling college jewelry for Balfour. I mean, it wasn’t the kind of profession I had hoped he’d have, but it suited his personality. Your daddy had more personality and charm than any man I ever met. He was just a marvelous salesman.

“But what I had never counted on—after all, he had come home without a scratch from the
war
—was one little rainy night and his car skidding on a slick road.” She put down the scissors and folded her hands tightly on top of Becky’s dress. “So there you have the story of the little girl who got her own way for thirty-two years. Recently I have been thinking … well … that it would have been better if I hadn’t had my own way quite so much. And I’ve been thinking about you, too. I know there are lots of things you don’t like about our new life, but … pardon me if I sound hard … I think you may grow up to be a better … certainly a more useful person than I am because of the very things you suffer now. You’ll have to develop strengths I never bothered to. Does that make sense?”

“You make it sound like you brought us here so we could suffer.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were unfair. I had said them as a defense against the bleak life she seemed to be holding up to me. Who wanted to spend the rest of their youth developing strengths from suffering? But my pride kept me from retracting them. And also something else: something about her whole penitential speech had upset me profoundly.

“Then you have misunderstood everything I have been trying to say,” she replied sadly. “Oh well”—she started ripping Becky’s wrong seam with renewed vigor—“maybe I didn’t say it well enough. I have only just barely thought it out for myself.”

Now I knew what it was that hurt so, as I watched her rip the seam. Her renouncement of the way she had been was ripping out some vital thread that had run through my whole childhood. In our other life, my mother had always starred as “The Daughter.” I was left with the role of the sturdy little soul, the companion of the grandparents, who colluded with them in allowing Louise to go on being herself. “We must let Louise have the rest of her college,” my grandfather would say. “We must let the
young couple have the honeymoon that the war interrupted,” my grandmother would say. Leaving me feeling, almost as far back as I could remember, like a prematurely aged little parent myself, who must exercise self-restraint and empathy—the two chief virtues of my grandmother and grandfather, respectively—so that my mother could prolong her life as a girl.

And now she was saying she wished we hadn’t allowed it, she wished that self had never been. Where did that leave me? In some kind of limbo, with a lost childhood on either side. There was no reason for me to go on being the kind of person I had been in Fredericksburg; in fact, I couldn’t be, even if I wanted to, because it had been in my role as granddaughter that I had excelled, and my grandparents were dead. And as for the few years of childhood left to me now, hadn’t my mother just implied that those must be devoted to the art of suffering?

I sat on miserably, in uncomfortable silence with my mother. Even now, the old responsible adult-child self was asserting itself in me. I knew I should say something “wise,” or at least gracious, in order to take away some of the sting of my previous remark. But what could I say? Then I recalled the words of the woman I had met today, as we had been walking back toward the sunny fields from the hut, when she had her hand on my shoulder.

“Money does lurk in the plot of everybody’s life, then,” I heard myself saying. “Even more than passion, probably.”