The Finishing School (12 page)

At lunch, Becky was still immersed in the Craven Ravenel story (as I was immersed in my recent meeting with Ursula DeVane), and, for once, she was the most talkative person at the table. She wanted to know what Craven Ravenel had said to my mother during the last dance; had he been angry or pleased to have been “signed up” like that? And had she ever seen him again?

“I don’t remember a single thing he said,” my mother replied,
laughing. “You’ve got to realize, I was beside myself. I felt I had made magic happen. No, he wasn’t angry, I think he admired my little maneuver. It was an enterprising thing to have done. Next to the way I arranged for my elopement with your uncle Rivers, it was probably the most enterprising thing I have ever done. I was just determined to have that boy dance with me, and I made it happen. But you know, my mother and I went back home to Virginia a few days later and I didn’t think about him anymore. That may sound strange, after all the fuss I made, but it was as if … well, as if his magic never crossed the state line of South Carolina. He was the best-looking boy at the dance, and I wanted to crown the evening with him. I suppose I thought it was my
due
, or something. I’m afraid, Becky, that I was a very spoiled girl, in many ways. I mean, I always had excellent manners, that was a point of pride with me, but I did expect the sun and the moon on a silver platter—and usually got it in those days! As a matter of fact, I did see Craven Ravenel again. It was during the war, and I was already married and a mother. Honey and I and Justin, who was only a baby, had gone down to Pawleys Island to spend the first two weeks of June, as we always did. Those were the only two weeks of the year that my mother and father agreed to separate. He went up to The Greenbrier, in West Virginia, and played golf. My father liked his golf, and he liked the company of other men, and my mother respected this. And she liked to be with her relatives and the friends she had grown up with in South Carolina, and my father, who was a taciturn man, found their ‘effusions,’ as he called them, a little wearing on his nerves. So they went their own ways, those two weeks every year, and I believe that’s why they had such a good marriage the other fifty weeks of the year.

“Anyway, it so happened that Craven Ravenel was stationed at Myrtle Beach at that time, and he drove over to Pawleys to see some friends—and we met again. He shook my hand and smiled and said, ‘I have never forgotten that last dance.’ You see, there were other people around, and, as he was a gentleman, he didn’t want to embarrass me by saying any more. And then we talked a little and he learned I was married and had a baby. He looked
just a
shade
disappointed, but not long afterward I heard that he had married a rich girl from his hometown.”

“Were you sorry you were married when you saw him again?” asked Becky, who had listened respectfully, with (for Becky) something like awe, to my mother’s story.

“Sorry? Gracious no, honey. I had what
I
wanted. I wish you could have known your uncle Rivers, Becky. He was the most charming man in the world. Everyone who met him said so.”

Becky looked dubious. “How was he charming? In what way?”

“Well … in just every way.” My mother, not used to being contradicted on this subject, cast about for an example. “I can’t think of anything specific, but … well, his face, for one thing, the expression on his face. It was the expression of someone with a happy, slightly mischievous secret, and you felt it included you. And even in the midst of a setback, Rivers had this wonderful way of making you feel that the very next day was going to be great.”

Then she paused and looked around and seemed surprised to find herself in Aunt Mona’s kitchen, sitting around with a bunch of children over the remains of a tunafish casserole. A moment of pain and amazement passed over her face. “Oh no,” she said in a softer voice, “I didn’t regret being married when I saw Craven Ravenel again. I mean, he was still very handsome, and there was a certain sad, romantic quality to our meeting again, but what I had felt for him had less to do with love than with … satisfying my pride. There’s a whole world of difference between the two feelings, Becky.”

For the first time since we had come to live at Aunt Mona’s, Becky took her own plate and glass and fork to the dishwasher. She did it with much ceremony, looking at my mother once or twice to make sure she was watching. I attributed this change in my cousin’s behavior to my mother’s remark about having always had pride in her own manners, even though she (too) had been a spoiled child.

I spent the early afternoon on the back porch of the empty farmhouse on the hill. I had my newfound box of paints, a watercolor block, some rags, and a jar of water. Facing away from the hivelike drone of the fathers’ lawnmowers in our development below, I lost myself in the production of an imaginary scene that appealed to my mood: a woman in a long dress stood at a shoreline, looking out to sea. As I evoked the whitecaps by painting the darker waters around their tips, I went over my dialogue with Ursula DeVane: first from my side, to recall how each of her remarks had affected me, and then from her side, to imagine how my remarks had impressed her. Then I worried about tomorrow: “We’ll have a nice high tea and amuse one another,” she had said. I was not very confident of my powers to amuse on demand. During our two meetings so far, I had not been very interesting or eloquent. I tried to think of things I could say tomorrow that might or might not be amusing but that would reveal my life to have some interesting aspects.

Then, as I brushed in the shadows in the folds of my figure’s long skirt—it was supposed to be blowing a little in the wind—I fell to wondering why someone as interesting as Ursula DeVane would invite someone like me to tea. Had she done it to prove a point, to prove that she had meant it when she had invited me to come back to the pond? Or had it been a spontaneous, queenly gesture on her part, because she could see it would mean a lot to me? Or had she wanted me to meet her brother, this peculiar man about whom I had heard no good words, except from her? Maybe she wanted me to come so that I could judge Julian DeVane for myself. (I imagined possible ways a young girl might irritate his sensitive artistic nature, and resolved to commit none of them tomorrow. I was not at all sure that I would like him, but I wanted him to like me, for her sake.)

Then my attention was drawn back to the figure I had created on the watercolor block. Her back was to me, and, judging from the long dress, she was from another time. But who was she, and what was she waiting for? Was she someone to whose story I was attracted because of its uncertainty and pathos, or was she someone I wanted to be? I painted in some storm clouds,
not because I wished her trouble, but because they made the scene more charged with potential drama. Then I decided to “enter into a trance” and let her speak aloud. What would she say if she were to speak aloud at just this moment in the picture?

“Oh, when, if ever, is he coming back to me?” I intoned in a solemn voice. The words had come easily to me, as things were supposed to do in a trance, but I didn’t like the hopeless, self-pitying sound of them. I wondered if it would be okay to start over. Surely, if the words made me feel so dissatisfied, they couldn’t have been the right ones. I studied the woman’s figure, and the horizon which she faced, and the clouds. They might be storm clouds, or they might just be dark, heavy clouds that would make her life more interesting but weren’t necessarily deadly. “What is out there?” I decided she might say. As soon as I had decided that, I “heard” the next words; they came exactly as they were supposed to, as if dictated by an inevitable force.

“What is out there?” I asked, in a low, level voice. And then I answered my question with the new words, in a voice that thrilled me with its timbre and control. “Soon I shall know.” The effect was so great that I felt almost as if I had turned into someone else. I was filled with a strange elation.

“What is out there? Soon I shall know,” I repeated, wiping off my brushes and emptying the jar of cloudy water on the ground beneath the farmhouse stairs.

As I descended the hill toward the lookalike houses of Lucas Meadows, I saw Mr. Mott, his lawn mowing completed, and all of the members of our household gathered in our driveway. I was still so much under the spell I had cast on myself through art and daydreaming that I was afraid my transformation would be visible to them. I made an effort to redisguise myself as the adolescent they believed me to be. As Jem came running toward me, I turned the picture on the watercolor block inward, hoping that no one would ask to see what I’d been doing.

“Guess what!” Jem cried, racing up to me and seizing me by one of the pockets in my jeans. “Mott has invited you and me to the houseboat tomorrow! We’re going to charcoal hamburgers on deck.”

“Tomorrow? What time tomorrow?” As my little brother tugged me possessively toward our family group, I realized they were waiting for me to show some excitement about Mr. Mott’s benevolent offer.

“If it’s all right, I’ll come and pick you kids up around four,” said steady Mr. Mott, running his palm across his short, prickly crew cut. His voice was full of complacency. Here he had mowed the lawn of a house in which he didn’t even live anymore, and now, on top of that, he was inviting his daughter’s fatherless cousins to charcoal hamburgers on his deck. Becky, standing ready with her little overnight suitcase, looked complacent, too: wasn’t her father wonderful to do this for us?

“But I can’t go tomorrow at four,” I said, wishing IBM had transferred Mr. Mott to some distant site, so he could not be such a dutiful uncle. I also wished now that I had said something to my mother about the other invitation: she could have stopped all this.

“You
can’t?
” screamed Jem incredulously. “Why can’t you?”

“Because …” I sought my mother’s eyes. “I’ve already promised to go somewhere else. I’ve been invited to tea tomorrow at four.”

“Tea?”
chimed in Aunt Mona, whose freshly sprayed coiffure made a feeble attempt to quiver. “Who in this place has
tea?
Oh, oh, wait a minute, I’ll bet I know.” And she gave me a hideous, knowing wink. “Your grand friend over on Old Clove Road.”

“Ann Cristiana?” my mother asked uncertainly.

“No, ma’am.” The serious Mott and his impatient daughter stood waiting for me to explain myself. I couldn’t utter the incriminating name of Becky’s former music teacher before
them.
“It’s just that woman I met, you know, a few weeks ago, when I was riding my bike on Old Clove Road. I saw her at Terwiliger’s when I went for our mushroom soup, and she asked me for tomorrow at four, and … I’ve already
said
I would.” To my dismay, tears started to well up in my eyes. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Mott,” I managed to say before anyone saw them, “I’d like to come another time, if that’s okay.” And then I wheeled around and started for the house as fast as I could.

“Does that mean I can’t go either?” I heard Jem wail. Followed by the solemn assurance of the good Mr. Mott that he would come and pick Jem up just as planned.

“Oh damn, oh hell,” I cursed tearfully, slamming the door of my room. How had one simple, independent act of accepting an invitation to tea compromised me so? After all, I wasn’t a baby anymore. I wasn’t even a child. I was a person struggling to stay free of all the fetters trying to bind me to a boring, ordinary, mediocre life in which I was obliged to exist for a few more years until I could have my own life, my own place, free from petty restraints and clinging baby brothers and hurt looks from mothers and hideous winks from know-it-all aunts.

I paced the confines of “Raspberry Ice,” growing more agitated and aggrieved. If only I could be eighteen—no, better twenty-one, for safety! Then I could come and go as I liked, I could have a job and earn my own money and paint and furnish my room as I pleased. I could see the people who attracted me and stimulated me and brought me closer to the life that I was determined to have for myself. I could not, as yet, imagine this life I wanted, but I could recognize very well the one I didn’t want: it was all around me! It was threatening to suck me in.

To console myself, I took a look at the watercolor I had done, hoping it would bring back to me the rapturous feeling I’d had on the hill: that self-transformation did lie in my powers. But here in the confines of “Raspberry Ice” the painting had suffered a sea change. The figure was no longer mysterious or potent or even lifelike. What was worse, I saw now that her outline bore a very close resemblance to the figures of the milkmaids who adorned my curtains, flounces, and dust ruffle. She had the same wasp waist, and her skirt fell in similar folds. I felt that if she should suddenly turn around, she would smile at me with their same shallow smile. I remembered a radio drama my grandmother and I had listened to once, in her bed. We had snuggled up close, one winter evening, and let ourselves be scared silly by a program. It was the story of a little girl whose mother loses her in a huge department store. The little girl is left in the store all night, and the mannequins come to life and take
her back to live with them, make her one of them. The next day, the mother comes back to the store to continue her search with the police for her little girl. They do not find her, of course, because the little girl has been turned into a mannequin. At the end of the program, the mother passes the mannequin that is her own frozen child. The mother remarks tearfully that the mannequin looks just like her lost daughter. The policemen tell her that she is exhausted to the point of imagining things, and they lead her away.