The Finishing School (8 page)

Then Ursula made him play it a second time, and she went over and stood beside him at the piano and laid her hand lightly
on his shoulder as she sang the words. I could see that she was pleased with herself for singing the German so well: she knew she was impressing me; she knew I was completely in her power. She sang in a deeper voice than her own because she said that this man, a lieder singer, had been a bass baritone and Julian had written the music to accommodate his low range. I remember watching her and thinking she had the ability to transform herself into anything she pleased. Right now she had
become
the man, the lieder singer. Her performance dazzled me, but I was also distraught: she was too much for me and she knew it. I was afraid I would lose her completely, during one of these transformations, and yet her power over me made me miserable at times. What am I to
do
with all these feelings? I remember thinking.

She must have read my mind, because afterward, when Julian had left us, she sat down beside me on the sofa and explained to me that the song she had just sung had been about a special kind of love. “It’s a love that can never be satisfied,” she said. “That is its property. It’s more like”—and 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 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.”

Now, enough time has passed for me to repossess—and be repossessed by—that late-summer evening, twenty-six years
ago. I can revisit that room, which then seemed a kind of tabernacle devoted to the life I wanted: music, art, travel, sensibility, drama; conversations that moved easily into the realms of the imagination. And the amazing thing is, I am possessed now by the same emotions as I was then, through the act of intensely remembering. I remember how I looked through the window, as Julian played and Ursula sang, and saw the mountain and the old hotel’s lookout tower, to which Ursula had, just that afternoon, promised to take me the following week, the tower to which Ursula and I would climb after she had told me the strangest of all her stories about her life. I remember sitting on that sofa, surrounded by so many feelings that I didn’t know whether I was miserable or ecstatic. I remember being afraid that it would rain the day we planned to go to the tower. Now, after all this time, I can almost reach out and touch that girl I was, as well as the woman who sat beside me, in that room still filled with echoes of Julian’s music, written as a gift of love to his own fateful mentor. At last, I can feel what my mentor felt, think the thoughts she must have thought, as she spoke to me of unrequited yearnings and shaped my demands on the future. And, having gone through the stages of adoring her, despising her, and forgiving her, maybe I am finally ready to forgive myself. That’s why I am now able to appreciate her even more than I did when dazzled by her. She was a unique woman. And a tragic one.

But the rebirth of all these long-suppressed feelings has made me anticipate my story. We are not in the middle of the summer yet. We are still at the beginning, and I have met Ursula DeVane only that one time, in the broken-down hut by the pond in the woods. And dreamed that curious dream about her on the night of that day.

Which two events had given me an interest in riding the school bus. I no longer dreaded being trapped twice every school day in its fume-filled interior with several dozen kids whose voices, as they rose in pitch as the bus grew more crowded in the morning, and fell into murmurs between friends as it emptied in
the afternoon, seemed almost foreign in their rough consonants and different cadences. Because this bus now took me, twice a day, five days a week, past a house that grew more and more interesting to me.

In the mornings I would take a window seat on the left side of the bus and wait for those few seconds when, after Ed Cristiana and his sister climbed aboard and the bus gathered speed for the childless stretch of Old Clove Road, the DeVane house came into sight.

I would stare intensely, trying to memorize details. Then, in the afternoons, I would take a window seat on the right side of the bus and concentrate all my attention toward those few seconds when the bus rumbled past the house.

I should mention that, the day after I had met Ursula in the hut, I shortened my afternoon bike rides on Old Clove Road. Now I went only as far as the hill
before
the Cristianas’ horse farm came into view. This was because I did not care to face the horsebreeder with his knowing eyes again, after he had seen me watching the horses. But even if that event had not occurred, I would have stopped short of the DeVane house, which was half a mile farther along the winding road. And I certainly would not have returned to the hut where I had burst in on Ursula reading, even though she had said, at the last, “Next time you drop by, bring your suit.” Anyone who suffers from shyness will understand me. I had decided that our next meeting would have to occur by chance, and then if she had really meant it she would let me know. The dream I had had about her had given her an added, a mystical dimension, and I felt we were fated to know each other because I had dreamed about her in such a way. Even then, I took my dreams seriously, and I knew the difference between ordinary dreams, which mixed together all sorts of leavings from the day before, and important dreams, which, in some wonderfully economical way, seemed to be able to solve a problem, or at least illuminate that problem, by combining a simple, often strange and symbolic scenario with powerful feelings. The powerful feelings that remained with me after one of these dreams were the proof that it had been an important dream.

And after I had dreamed of the house with grassy floors and Ursula’s hand on my shoulder and her voice telling me this was good, not bad, I knew that she belonged to me. I never doubted that a subsequent meeting would soon come, and I almost enjoyed delaying it because of the added significance it would now take on.

Of course, if Mr. Cristiana hadn’t seen me watching the horses, I would have turned around at my usual spot that day and gone home, leaving Ursula bored by Proust and wishing vainly for something unexpected. But, as I interpreted it—and my lonely, undemanding life allowed me pleanty of time to fantasize and interpret—fate had intervened once and would surely do so again. Meanwhile, I could study the house.

When I first saw it, I was disappointed. Something Aunt Mona had said had put different pictures in my head. Yet all she had said was that it was one of the original stone houses built by the Huguenots, and that it was right on the road. But the “old houses” I had been taken to see—the grand, ruined plantations I had visited with my grandfather when he went out on his field trips to research the family life of slaves, the famous Revolutionary house across the street from ours that my grandmother’s club had helped restore—did not prepare me to be impressed by the plain, lonely-looking house with yellowed mortar holding together the crude, uneven gray stones. There was an austere dignity about its old, plain facade, but it was in no way beautiful or grand. It had two stories, though the upper one, with its narrow dormers, looked like an afterthought. The east side of the house, which looked even older, was sunk lower on its foundations and gave the whole structure an asymmetrical effect. The shutters on the downstairs windows were painted the same glossy black as the front door, and the shrubbery and lawn were cared for, though not with the meticulous care given by the IBM fathers to the lawns in Lucas Meadows: from the window of the bus, I could see unchecked spurts of onion grass and several bare patches that should have been reseeded. A towering lilac bush that was just now blooming at the old, left corner of the house did a lot to soften the harsh and solitary aspect of the place.

At first I had thought, Surely Aunt Mona meant some other
house, but it was the only stone house that came anywhere after the Cristianas’ house, and it was the first house following the pine forest and a field between. Finally my desire to know for sure overcame my shyness, and I tapped Ed Cristiana’s sister Ann on the shoulder one morning when she sat just in front of me. “Whose interesting old stone house was that, that we just passed?” I asked. She looked surprised that I had spoken to her, but then she said, “Oh, that’s the DeVane place,” and smiled at me and stayed turned around for a minute, as if she hoped I might ask her something else.

Then, a couple of mornings later, I saw Ursula in the yard. She wore the same clothes as she had in the hut, only her hair was tied back with a bright kerchief. She was cutting lilacs. As the school bus hurtled past with its noisy load, she looked up, straight at my window, where I was already ducking my head in embarrassment. I rode the rest of the way to school feeling foolish for being so curious about a woman I hardly knew. But I also went on imagining her: how she had looked different in the kerchief than with her hair curling loose around her head that day in the hut (the kerchief made her look more like a housewife, one of the mothers in Lucas Meadows); and how, after she had cut some more blossoms, she would have gone into the house and found a vase, or maybe an old silver bowl, and arranged the lilacs in it to enhance some room. She had looked so sure of herself in the yard, as if the best thing you could do on a morning like this was tie a housewifely kerchief around your curls and go cut blossoms for “the good life,” as she had described the life she led with her brother. “I mean, let’s face it, they’ve got to be peculiar, a middle-aged brother and sister living together,” Aunt Mona had said. But, somehow, that made it more interesting to me than if Ursula DeVane had been living with a husband. There was more mystery, this way; there was some hidden story to be brought to light. And also—I understand this now, too—it isolated Ursula more from the ordinary world and made her more accessible to me.

Ann Cristiana stopped me in the hall and asked me if I rode. I said “a little,” which stretched the boundaries of truth, though it allowed me to keep my pride. Her gentle smile widened. “I thought so,” she said. “My dad’s seen you admiring our horses. Well, I mean, they’re not
all
ours, but we take care of them as though they were.”

I looked closely at her face, to see if she was making fun of me about my “admiring” the horses, but she seemed completely in earnest. She asked me to ride with her and her brother the next afternoon. “Bring your riding things to school and get off with us at our stop, and somebody will drive you home afterward.”

I said yes; I couldn’t think how to say no. I was flattered because she was a year older and had her own crowd. I guessed that, in my sadness and preoccupation with my lost world, I had seemed aloof to my schoolmates, and that my speaking first to her on the bus had released her sense of hospitality. And then it occurred to me that going riding at the Cristianas’ might give fate the very opportunity it had been waiting for: wasn’t their land right next to the DeVane land? I saw myself, looking splendid on horseback, somehow running into
her.

My mother got animated when I told her about the invitation. She dragged out her trunk and unpacked the riding clothes her parents had bought for Sweet Briar, unaware that she was planning to elope with my father instead. “I’ve hardly even worn these,” she said, “but now they might fit you.” She seemed so pleased about Ann Cristiana’s asking me that I felt selfish for not having come home with an invitation sooner.

The jodhpur boots were a little roomy, but they stayed on when we strapped them tight. The jacket was way too big in the chest, even though it was the right length. But the brown twill jodhpurs fit perfectly, as if they had been made for me. “Thank goodness it’s so warm,” my mother said. “You can wear your yellow oxford cloth shirt without a jacket.” Then she suddenly frowned.

“Oh Lord, Justin, haven’t we forgotten something?”

“What?”

“You can’t ride very well, honey. Remember those few times when I took you out to Mr. Eames’s stable? And how your horse was always stopping on the trail and Mr. Eames finally said to you, ‘Let him know who’s boss, Justin,’ and
you
said, ‘Oh, he already knows, sir.’ ”

I didn’t remember saying that, I barely remembered those trail rides, but it was wonderful to see my mother laugh.

“I expect I ought to have taken you there every weekend while you were still so young,” she mused, frowning again. “But that’s when Rivers and I were commuting back and forth from Charlottesville so he could go to school, and our weekends with you and Honey and Daddy were just so short.”