The Finishing School (18 page)

And then I was struck by a blasphemous thought that shocked me even more than my resentment against my father: Why, if my grandfather had been such a superb diagnostician, able to walk into a party and see that a strange woman was going to die … why had he not been able to spot the illness growing in my grandmother, whom he slept beside every night and looked at countless times every day?

It was just after this low moment, in which my own thoughts had set me at odds with cherished illusions in my past, that my mother knocked softly on the door and entered my bedroom.

“You aren’t feeling ill, are you?” She must have seen the remnants of my struggles on my face.

“No, ma’am. I’m just lazy, I guess. What time is it?”

“After ten. The postman’s already been here.” She bent down and gave me a kiss. “Happy birthday. This came for you.” She placed a small, brown-wrapped parcel on top of my covers, and I glimpsed my name in a bold, loopy script. In the upper-left-hand corner was a number on Old Clove Road.

“It’s from your friend, I think,” my mother said, rather shyly, as if she were afraid of trespassing. “Did you tell her it was your birthday?”

“No, she asked me when it was. I guess it’s easy for her to remember because June fourteenth was the day she sailed for France.” I said all this in a slightly bored voice, to keep my mother from seeing how interested I was in the package. But I didn’t want to open it in her presence: I had no idea what it might be.

“Well, come on down when you’re ready, and I’ll make you some breakfast,” said my mother. “It’s just the Stokeses at home today. Mona dropped Becky off at her father’s boat on the way to work.”

“But it’s a weekday. Becky goes to her father on Saturday.” How unfriendly of Becky, not to stay home on my birthday. I would have stayed home for hers out of politeness.

My mother read my look. “Perhaps she has things to do. We’ve all been invited for a cookout on Eric Mott’s houseboat this evening. Something a little special. I know you take after your grandmother in some ways, and Honey always liked to have a hint of warning when people were planning surprises for her.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But please act surprised this evening. Only, I didn’t want you to go around all day thinking we’d forgotten you.” She gave a sidelong glance at my package. “Well, I’ll be downstairs, awaiting my breakfast orders,” she said.

As soon as she had closed the door, I slipped the string off the package, admiring the way my name looked in the bold, slanty script. One dramatic stroke crossed the
t
’s in both names. The capital
J
and
S
were extravagant productions that I made up my mind to imitate in future, when signing my name. I would also copy her Greek
e
, which made
Stokes
look more exotic.

Then I tore off the brown paper, being careful not to damage any of the writing. Inside a cardboard box stuffed with tissue paper was a small, squarish bottle made of thick blue glass. A strange gift, I thought, but then she was an unconventional person. Folded beneath the bottle in its little cradle of tissue paper was a sheet of white stationery with a whole page of writing in the bold, upslanting hand.

She had been out somewhere, but had thought of me. Even he, in search of some old music, had thought of me. They really did like me; they felt I was “one of them.”

And the letter was perfect, especially the way she had phrased that part about the favorite and unfavorite colors. It was a letter that even Aunt Mona could read without suspecting she had been betrayed by me in that diatribe about my room.

I got up at once and placed the little bottle in my window, where it caught the morning light and began to “assert” itself. It drained power from the muddy hues of my walls and flattened the smiles of the milkmaids with its clear, twinkling blue. I kept looking at it as I got dressed. Now it did not seem a strange present to me at all, but a magically appropriate gift. She had sent me a talisman to ward off ordinariness and compromise and despondency. It was just what I needed, this bottle, and I liked it all the better because its significance would be known only to her and to me.

VI.

“U
rsula DeVane sent me a bottle,” I told my mother at breakfast.

“A bottle?” repeated my mother, puzzled. “What kind of bottle?”

“Just a little blue bottle she saw in an antiques shop,” I said, purposely nonchalant. “It reminded her of me because I think I said I liked the color blue. But it was nice of her to remember my birthday. It’s the thought that counts, after all.”

“Of course it is,” agreed my mother. “It’s very kind of her to take an interest in you.” Did I detect a relief in her voice that the gift had not made a great hit with me? “I know you’ll be sure and thank her for it,” she added.

After I had finished a leisurely breakfast of buckwheat cakes and bacon, my mother said, “I’ve got something for you, too. It’s down in my room. I’d rather give it to you here than carry it over to the houseboat.”

“Is it something
huge?
”

“No, not huge,” she said, smiling. “But I’d sure hate to see them drop over the side of the houseboat into the water. Besides, it’s something that belongs just to the family; I don’t want to give it to you in front of all the others.”

“First you said ‘it,’ and then you said ‘them.’ How can it be both?”

“Well,” she said, “come on downstairs to my room and I’ll show you how.”

In the last few weeks, she had made a corner of her room into a little office. Mr. Mott had lent her a fairly new IBM electric, with typing stand and chair, and my mother was now teaching herself to touch-type from a boring manual Aunt Mona had found for her. She was determined that, come September, when Jem started school, she would be proficient enough to get a job as somebody’s secretary. “Though no one will hire me, probably, without shorthand, too,” she had said to Aunt Mona. “Nonsense,” my aunt had retorted, “they’ll take one look at you and see you’ll be an asset to their office. With your looks and your luck, you probably won’t even have to
type.
” “My
luck
, Mona? I hardly see how you can call me
lucky
, after all that has happened.” “Now don’t be offended, Louise. I know you’ve had an awful time. First your parents and then poor Rivers, after he’d got through the war without a scratch on him. No, what I meant was, you have this quality—I have always noticed it in you, even way back when we were kids and I could only gaze at you from the other side of the tracks—” “Oh, Mona, I do wish you wouldn’t speak in that way. You make out as if you and Rivers were some kind of slum children and I was this awful snob.…” “No, let me finish, Louise. I always noticed this quality in you, this attitude. It was the attitude of someone who had been brought up to expect the best. And when you expect the best, you get the best, that’s my theory. People see something in you and respond to it. Some lawyer or businessman in Kingston is going to take one look at you when you walk in his office, and say, ‘That lady has an air about her, and I want it for my office; it will reflect well on
me.
’ ” “Well, for the sake of my children, I hope you are right, Mona,” my mother had said good-humoredly.

Jem was now seated at the typewriter, pecking out lines of gibberish. “You know what?” he said. “If I keep on practicing every day, I’ll be able to type just as good as anybody by the time school starts.”

“Darling, they won’t have typewriters at your school,” said my mother. “But I’ll bet you’ll be able to
read
as well as anybody else in your grade. At least we’ve managed that, these last few months. I’m going to give Justin her present.”

“Aren’t you going to wait for the party?” Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, fearing he’d given the surprise away.

“It’s all right. She knows there’s going to be a little celebration. But I wanted this to be just among us.” My mother opened the top drawer of her bureau and handed me a long, slim box, wrapped in festive paper.

They sat down on the bed beside me while I slipped off the ribbon and undid the Scotch-taped edges without tearing the paper. Inside a brown velvet case I found a pearl necklace that I had known all my life: my grandmother’s. Many thoughts rushed through my head as I sat there simulating the awe I knew I was expected to feel. Since I had been a little girl, I had been told that this necklace would one day be mine. Often, as my grandmother fastened it around her neck, she would tell me how this had been a wedding present from my grandfather, and that, since my mother had received a pearl necklace all her own for her high-school graduation, this one would be mine. “And, just between you and me,” my grandmother would say, “these are far better pearls.” I had always admired the necklace, but was quite willing to wait for it. I had known that it would not be mine until my grandmother died, and she was more important to me than any pearls. But I also connected it with becoming a woman, and I had had ambivalent feelings about this inevitable transformation ever since, as a little girl, I had believed that when you became a woman you grew long fleshy appendages on the bottoms of your feet so you could wear high heels. The high heels looked nice and sounded authoritative as they clacked over wooden floors, but to wear them, I thought, I would have to forfeit my comfortable flat soles on which it was easy to run and play. Though I no longer believed in these sprouting appendages, I still felt unready to inherit these pearls, to look in the mirror and face the young woman fastening them around her neck. I knew I must turn into that young woman within a few years, but something in me held back: there
was a lonely, mysterious side of myself I was just beginning to know, a side neither masculine nor feminine but quivering with intimations of mental and spiritual things. I had to save a place for these things. If I let myself be rushed into womanhood with all its distracting appurtenances, I might miss their quiet revelations and be a less interesting person for the rest of my life.

“Of course, you won’t want to wear them just yet,” my mother said, “but I thought you ought to have them. She always meant for you to have them, you know.”

“I know.”

“Would you like to try them on?” my mother urged.

“I thought you said I shouldn’t wear them yet.”

“I only meant you wouldn’t want to wear them to
school
or anything. But you can try them on now.” She took them from the box and held them out to me.

“Oh, then I’d love to,” I said, with convincing enthusiasm. I bowed my head and let her fasten them around my neck.

“And remember,” Jem told her, “I get my grandfather’s gold watch when I’m older. And his stethoscope.”

I couldn’t wait for them to have their nap that afternoon. I wrote a note (“Gone for a bike ride. I may stop by Ursula DeVane’s and thank her. Love, Justin”) and anchored it to the kitchen table with Aunt Mona’s Scotty dog salt and pepper shakers. I liked the way my handwriting looked with the new Greek
e
’s, and the bold crossing of the
t
in “Justin.” It would have looked even more dramatic if I had been able to slash on through the
t
in “Stokes,” as well, but I could hardly sign a note to my mother “Justin Stokes.”

As soon as I rode away from our house, I felt larger, freer. I was almost certain she would be expecting me today. Why hadn’t I gone back sooner? More than two weeks had passed since the tea. Part of the reason was shyness, but there was a calculated frugality in it: I didn’t want to use up my welcome; I wanted her to miss me a little. But she had been real and present to me every day. I had taken her with me to various places and
thought her thoughts while there. Her personality had already penetrated mine.

I rode down the haywagon road and left my bike at the edge of the forest, just out of sight, so nobody would be tempted to steal it. Then I went softly through the woods toward the hut; I whistled a few tuneless bars of something so she would not feel I had crept up on her again.

She was not in the hut, though her clothes lay in a heap on the blanket. Her thong sandals were there, too, the toe of one stepping on the toe of the other, as though she had slipped them off in haste.

To go for a swim? Then why was there nobody in the pond? “Ursula?” I called timidly. The sound of my voice calling her name sounded presumptuous; it reminded me emphatically of the vast difference in our ages. But where was she? The sunlight pouring down through the shafts of the pines seemed suddenly sinister, the way it sparkled on the slight agitations of that pond with nobody in it. In the space of a second, I imagined her drowned or in the process of drowning somewhere on the bottom of the pond. In my imagination I had already torn off my tennis shoes and plunged straight down, overcoming my horror of all the things below that dark surface; I felt my way through the muddy depths for the crumpled form I must somehow, quickly, every breath counting, pull to the top. I would have to give her artificial respiration the way we had been taught in Girl Scouts. But the people we had practiced on had always been clothed. Hadn’t she said she swam naked? How would she feel when she revived and found me kneeling over her naked body, blowing air into her mouth? But what if she didn’t revive?