The Finishing School (14 page)

Ursula burst out laughing. Julian DeVane had a delighted, superior smirk on his face, as though this was exactly the sort of story he liked to hear.

“But the
worst
part about the milkmaids,” I went on, resolving to go all the way in order to win their approval, even if it meant making light of one of my most serious thoughts and abiding fears of late, “is, I’m afraid they’re going to do me in. I mean, everywhere I look, there they are, with their full skirts and their little milk pails and their shallow, beauty-contest smiles. What if I wake up one morning and look into my mirror and discover I am like them? I don’t mean I’d have a milk pail or anything, but that … well … I’d suddenly be just like everybody else. I’d no longer remember what it felt like to be me … before I lived in that room.”

Although I had meant to keep it light, my voice faltered and I could not hide the anxiety I felt about the subject.

“I don’t s-see that happening to you, somehow,” said Julian DeVane. He said it quite gently, with no ironic or superior overtones. I saw I had made him like me, made him take me seriously, and I couldn’t help liking him in return.

Looking thoughtful, Ursula poured everyone more tea. “The influence of a place is no light matter,” she said. “Some places threaten your very essence. While others reinforce your sense of who you are. There’s a threat there, too, of course. I sometimes wonder if this place doesn’t encourage me to be
too much
myself.”

“Wh-what do you mean by that, Sissie?” asked her brother, turning to her with respectful attention. In the eager look he gave her, I felt I could read many moments of their childhood together: “Baby Brother” pricking up his ears when Big Sister started to lecture about some aspect of life that she had discovered first.

“Oh, you know, Julie. Everybody around here has formed their opinions of us. They formed them years ago. Because they’ve always known us—or think they have—they take it for granted we will behave in a certain way. And so we do. It becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s why I envy Justin here in no small way. Despite her unfortunate room, and all those milkmaids threatening to swallow her with their smiles”—and Ursula gave me her warm and singular smile—“she can start her life over and be anything she chooses to be. Nobody knows what she was like back in Fredericksburg. She has lost all the props that defined her. Nobody knows all the peculiarities and character traits of her forebears so they can pretend to recognize those traits in her. She’s a clean slate. When she meets new people, or new challenges, she is free to respond to the unique demands of the moment. Whereas
I
often feel I have been playing the same part in a show that’s been running too long. I have a starring role, of course: I’m the sophisticated woman who’s gone away to far places and come back again; who can be counted on to provide a bit of mystery and speculation for the provincials to chew on, as cows chew their cud.”

This last comparison struck me as funny and I laughed.

“What part have I, then?” asked Julian DeVane.

“Ah, you know quite well what your part is,” his sister scolded him playfully. “You are the natural genius to whom I have devoted my considerable energies. If we want to be symbolic about it, you are pure, inspired art and I am the practicality and the ambition and the driving force that art needs if it is to impose itself on the world.”

“The dear old world,” said her brother sarcastically, shaking his head so that the silvery-sandy hair rippled in the light. “That’s where my sister and I differ,” he explained to me. “I could be perfectly happy p-playing my music to the birds and the trees—and my memories. She believes it will be all wasted unless I perform before crowds of coughing idiots.”

“Oh, Julie, how can you say that! You know you are capable of electrifying an audience. If you’ve forgotten, I have all those reviews from South America to remind you. It’s wrong to want to hide your light under a bushel. You used to tell me you wouldn’t be satisfied until you had performed on the concert stage of every major city in the world.”

“That was in the old days, when I was still looking for something,”
he replied, giving her a meaningful look. “Now I’m not looking for it anymore, so why c-can’t I stay home and play for the birds—and my sister?”

There was something teasing in his manner, yet something serious at the same time. I had the feeling they had had this conversation many times before, that it had become almost a game with them—a game they could even play in front of a third person—but that, underneath, there was a subtler battle going on. I was reinforced in this belief when Ursula went suddenly deflated in her chair. But then she rallied and said casually, “You can play for me anytime you like. I’m your captive audience and you know it. So, for that matter, are the birds. I’ve heard them sing with you.”

“I hope you’ll play for me sometime, too,” I said. “I mean, when you know me better, of course.”

He regarded me with his somber brown eyes. “She has a nice voice, hasn’t she, Sissie? Most young girls are so shrill and edgy.”

“ ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman,’ ” intoned Ursula, in a deep, caressing voice. “We did
King Lear
when I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. Only I wasn’t Cordelia, I was Goneril. I was always being cast in those tough roles for women. I’ve been Hedda, and Medea, and if I hadn’t had to rush back to America I was going to be Saint Joan. Now you, Justin, would make a perfect Cordelia. Wouldn’t she, Julie?”

“P-possibly,” said Julian DeVane. “If it’s in her nature to want to perform before coughing crowds.”

“You are incorrigible, Julie, but I love you anyway.”

“That’s lucky for me, isn’t it?” replied the brother, sending her a rueful little smile. Then he crumbled a bit of bread between his long, delicate fingers and, crouching low in his chair, sprinkled it carefully in the pathway of an ant.

“Tell me, Justin,” said Ursula, “how do you find living here? I mean, how does Clove compare with your hometown?”

“Well, the two places are very different.”

“Yes, I know that,” she said impatiently, “but
how?
” I
couldn’t help feeling this was some sort of test of my mental acuity.

I cast about for some out-of-the-ordinary thing to say. All I could come up with was that the people up here seemed more deep down in themselves that the people back home. She liked this remark; it interested her. She fixed the flashing brown eyes on me and told me to pursue the subject further:
How
, “deep down”? Be more specific. Could I think of examples? Comparisons?

But then my mind blanked, the way it still does when someone asks me who were the major influences on my life, or what good plays I’ve seen during the past year. I knew I had an answer somewhere in myself, but I couldn’t perform the necessary function of translating it into speech on demand. I stumbled around the question, taking shameless detours into the deaths in our family—the one subject I had come prepared to talk about—and sounding more and more stupid and scatterbrained and inconclusive. And yet I could see, from the motions of her expressive face, that her agile, grasping mind was darting here and there, seizing on my incoherent morsels and forming them into impressions of what kind of person I was and how my mind worked. I could somehow tell that she, in her imperious way, had already decided that I was going to be “worthwhile.” I think I already knew she was the kind of woman who, once she had made up her mind to like somebody, even if it had been an impulsive decision, would invest that person with all sorts of interesting and romantic aspects rather than admit she had been wrong.

“How do you get on with your cousin Becky?” she asked, with an impish twitch at the corner of her mouth.

I glanced over at Julian, who seemed engrossed in the gathering conclave of ants he had enticed forth with his bread crumbs. “Well, we’re not very close,” I said. “I mean, I tried to be friends at first, but she keeps to herself most of the time. If you try to make conversation, she can be very abrupt. She gives me odd looks I can never figure out. They might mean anything.”

“From her point of view, you must seem a terrible threat,” said Ursula.

“A threat?” This was something I had never considered.
“How?”

“You’ve got a sweetness she doesn’t have. I don’t mean a cloying, goody-goody sweetness, God preserve us from that, but a certain subtle sympathy that makes people trust you, seek you out. If I had been her age and you had moved into my house, I would have felt … perhaps not
threatened
, because I could always stand up for myself, but I would have felt competitive. I would have taken a good look at your ways, and then I would have examined my ways, and … well!” She gave a sharp, harsh laugh. “If it had been I, I might have found some way to depose you or drive you away. However, if I weren’t so sure of myself, I would probably pout … or go underground until I had assessed the situation more carefully. And then, don’t forget, you’re older. At that age, two or three years can seem a hopeless gulf for the younger person. Exactly how old
are
you, anyway?”

“I’ll be fourteen in two weeks,” I said.

“Two weeks! What day is your birthday?”

“June fourteenth,” I said shyly, wondering if she would feel she had to send me a card.

“June fourteenth, June fourteenth, why does that date ring a bell, I wonder?”

Julian DeVane looked up from his ants. “Don’t you remember, Sissie?”

“No! What happened on June fourteenth?”

“That’s the day you sailed for France on the
Normandie.
”

“Oh God, so it was. June fourteenth, 1939. Getting away at last! Oh, it will be good to have you around, Julie, when I become senile. I can simply say”—and she affected the querulous voice of an old lady—“ ‘Now let me see, what happened on June fourteenth?’ And you’ll snap right back with ‘
Normandie
, dear Sissie, pier—’ Do you remember the pier number? I don’t.”

“No, but I remember the sailing time. Three p.m. I felt dreadful. I was sure I was never going to s-see you again.”

“Well, I can recall worrying I was never going to see
you
again a couple of times, with a
lot
more reason,” she retorted, her tone thick with innuendo, “so we can call it even.”

A look so full of private associations passed between sister and brother that I felt left out, almost jealous of their closeness. Then, with a weary smile, Julian returned his attention to the ants. After a moment, he said musingly, “You know, I’ve watched them carry their dead away. They’re a highly organized society—they have a great love of home, I read somewhere—and they’re always helping one another out. I like w-watching them.”

“We know you do,” said Ursula wryly. “You made poor Jill Van Kleek postpone her lesson for almost half an hour so you wouldn’t miss the baby cardinals.” To me she explained, “We had a nest of cardinals in the shrubbery outside our living room, and Julie made that little girl I told you about—the one who plays like a robot—stand at the window and watch with him until all three fledglings took off one morning.”

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle,” he replied, leaning down to watch the ants carrying away the crumbs in a militaristic little procession. “Jill’s playing will remain pretty much the same after all the b-birds have flown.”

Ursula and I continued talking. She was still being the demanding inquisitor, trying to make me formulate my thoughts. “That was hard,” she said, “to have all those people you loved die within such a short time. Three family members dead within less than two years, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was a real tragedy,” I replied, somewhat self-importantly.

“No, dear, it was not a tragedy,” she surprised me by saying. “It was unfortunate, it must have been extremely sad and painful, but you mustn’t call it tragedy.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Tragedy is something different from misfortune or catastrophe,” said Ursula. “When something terrible happens and it can be traced back directly to the inevitable process of someone’s living out his destiny,
that
is called tragedy. There is a foredoomed quality about tragedy. There is nothing random or accidental about it, when you look closely and examine the causes that led up to it. Tragedy is when you can look back and say: ‘Given who that person was, and how he, or she, habitually confronted life,
this was bound to happen.
’ Tragedy has the shape of a
beautiful, inescapable pattern. Look at Lear. Or at Oedipus. Or Hamlet. Every time we watch their stories being reenacted, we suffer them afresh, no matter how many times we’ve seen them before. Oh
no!
we think, each time we watch, here they go
again!
But the paradox is that their suffering purges us as we suffer with them vicariously. It sometimes allows us to take warning and escape our own destruction.”

Interlacing her fingers on her lap, she lifted her head and gazed raptly at the skies, looking quite satisfied with her eloquent discourse.

There was a silence. Then, abruptly, Julian DeVane rose. “I’m going up to the house,” he said.

Ursula snapped out of her raptness at once. “But why?” she asked, looking almost afraid of him. “I thought we were all getting on so well.”

“We were. But now there is a b-blot on the view.”

Ursula looked out at the fields, where the afternoon shadows were deepening. I looked, too, and saw a man riding slowly and deliberately along. He reined in his horse, appeared to be studying the ground, then rode slowly on again.

“Oh God,” murmured Ursula.

Julian DeVane stood above me. “It was nice to meet you,” he said, offering me his hand. His face had twisted petulantly, but his eyes absolved me from the cause of his annoyance. “Happy b-birthday, if I don’t see you b-before.”

He climbed the hill rapidly to the house, and we heard the screen door slam.

“Oh God,” repeated Ursula in a dull voice. “That’s our neighbor, Abel Cristiana, out inspecting his new boundaries. He’s the farmer I sold our meadows to. I expect they’ll start fencing soon. Julie detests even the sight of him from a distance. It’s an old family feud, too complicated for me to explain. Damn it, Abel,” she addressed the distant figure on horseback, “why couldn’t you have waited until our tea hour was over?” I noticed, however, that a touch of humor had crept into her tone. “I’m sorry it’s ruined the mood,” she said then, returning her attention to me. “Julie liked you. I could tell.”