The Finishing School (23 page)

The main street of Clove had changed much less than it might have in twenty-six years. There was the library, itself an old stone house, where I had spent several rainy afternoons
reading about Huguenots in order to be closer to Ursula DeVane. There was the old movie theater—now remodeled into offices shared by a lawyer and a veterinarian—where Ed Cristiana and I had gone to the movies that one time, at the end of the summer. Terwiliger’s market was gone—a branch bank stood in its place. The post office, formerly a prefabricated structure with a tin roof, now made its respectable headquarters in a solid brick building. But, just as in the old days, “town” was only a couple of blocks in a road leading to and from bigger places; and before and after those blocks, farmland still stretched on both sides.

I drove on to Lucas Meadows. Nature and individuality have reasserted themselves there, and it is no longer the prairie of uniformity I remember. Trees have grown up around the houses. Different homeowners have declared their personal tastes by adding wrought-iron trellises, toolsheds, and birdbaths, or little plaster gnomes that sit cross-legged on the grass. The houses themselves no longer adhere to the old consecutive color scheme, and I had some trouble locating our old house: it is now a shiny coral-pink. When I lived in Lucas Meadows, I dreaded being engulfed by sameness. Now, having escaped to return as an onlooker in a rented car, I missed its neatness; I missed, perversely, a certain purity expressed in all those bandbox-trim houses and lawns seeking to blend themselves into an anonymous little enclave of upscale democracy. I counted only two lamps in all of the picture windows I passed, but would I, at fourteen, have felt less threatened by this new, cheerful heterogeneity of houses every color of the rainbow, and trellises and gnomes?

Then on to Old Clove Road. Farmlands still, but a new element in the landscape that wasn’t there before: mobile homes. It had seemed longer, the twisting, hilly road, when I traveled it on my bike. Some important trees are gone; others have grown up in different spots, and the light falls differently. Even the contours of the land are altered in places.

I am up on the Cristianas’ place before it seems possible. Well, they have certainly endured. Evidences of prosperity everywhere. Two new horse barns down in the field below the house. An elaborate system of fences cordoning off different
groups of horses. New paint and a new roof on the main house. Another ranch-type frame house across the road, where Turk’s paddock used to be. A sign as large as a movie screen in the front yard of this house reads:

I can see a small group of men gathered around a van from which a horse is being unloaded, down by one of the new barns in the field. They are too far away for me to tell whether there is anyone I knew among them. And, if there were, what would I say? If I were to park my car and walk down to them and introduce myself as Justin Stokes, the adult version of the girl who frequented this road quite a lot during one summer in the fifties, how could they possibly be glad to see me? How could they be anything but resentful and embarrassed, considering the reminders I would bring with me?

I go on. Down the hill. Around the curves. Across the little wooden bridge. I am beginning to think: This stretch is uncannily as it was, except it is too early for leaves on the trees …, but then I come to the haywagon road, which has a chain across it and a No Trespassing sign hanging from the chain, and I see that the road-front part of the pine forest that led to Ursula’s pond has been cut away to make room for a long, tan mobile home with brown trim. A family is very much in evidence: several small children playing in the dirt yard beneath a clothesline, and a young, overweight woman watching them sullenly as she sits slumped on the steps of the trailer.

And so, on, around that final curve, and, oh God, there it is. I pull into the driveway and sit in the car with the ignition still on and gaze on the inglorious sight: the old rough stones mere lumps beneath the whitewash that has been painted over the entire house. And the incongruous cathedral ceiling with its skylights rising out of the old part of the house, that first simple farm cottage built in the late sixteen hundreds. And—the final badge of betrayal—the For Sale by Century 21 sign jammed into the derelict lawn.

I switch off the engine and get out of the car, determined to
honor to the dregs this rendezvous with the past for which I have driven a hundred miles. Should I lock the car, or take my purse? I am annoyed with myself for having such petty thoughts. A heroine in a film, having been moved by the changes in an old, beloved landscape, would eschew thoughts of personal property and stride off into the past without breaking the mood.

But today the past is more elusive than I had expected. The sun is under clouds and a helicopter flies low overhead. Its metallic, chopping sound agitates the birds. Some of the old trees around the house look as if they might come down with the next storm. I remember this place best all in green. The lilacs were out when, in the beginnings of my obsession with Ursula, I researched the house twice each weekday from the bus. Oh, that’s another change: the lilacs are gone. Now, who in his right mind would cut down
lilacs?
Or did the department store executive’s wife take a dislike to them because they had grown too tall and shaded her cathedral ceiling? What has become of the department store executive and his wife? Did the house reproach them in some way for violating its integrity? Or did they become disenchanted with it, or with each other, or both?

I walk slowly down the slope, my purse slung over my shoulder by its strap. It is an expensive purse. Julian DeVane would have had to teach twenty piano lessons for the price of this purse. If Ursula were watching me now from an upstairs window, she would laugh. “Dear Justin, you are certainly more
encumbered
than you were the first time you came down that slope. Do you remember yourself, all in white, the way you poked out your elbows and turned in your toes? You’ve got more assurance now, of course, but do tell me: who do you think is going to steal your purse in the middle of the country?” But Ursula is not here, not even in spirit. In fact, I can feel her absence from this place as strongly as though she were making a statement.

The terrace is all coming to pieces. Bluestones upended or missing; Father DeVane’s painstaking symmetry destroyed. There’s no trace left of any garden, only brambles, weeds, and last year’s leaves. Someone has left a large tree stump on the terrace.
At first I think maybe a tree has grown up through the stones, but no, I can move it with my foot. Now, why would anyone want to leave a loose tree stump in the middle of a crumbling terrace? Vandals? Someone out to do a little wood sculpture, then abandoning the effort before he’d even cut into the wood? There are too many changes here, too many incongruences that have nothing to do with what I came to find. What I came to find is not here. Did I have to drive one hundred miles, and another hundred back, to discover that memory does not reside in places? Places have their own continuing lives. Memory lives in the brain of the rememberer. What had I expected, anyway? To drive up in my rented car and see, as through a mist, the house as it had been when I rode by on the school bus all those years ago? Ursula DeVane and her brother sitting down here like royalty in their two lawn chairs, then slowly turning toward me the faces of twenty-six years ago? In an Ingmar Bergman film it might have happened; but not here, not today.

Yet there, beyond the Cristianas’ prosperous fields and fences, are the mountains. The same as they were. Give them another few hundred years, perhaps, and they’ll be altered, too. But, for now, they are just the same as they were the afternoon Ursula and I looked at them from this terrace and she promised she would take me up to the old hotel and to the tower. And then that day, in late August, we went. It was our last good day together but we didn’t know it. We walked along the woodland trail, and she told me about Julian’s broken career. And about how, when she was only ten, she had betrayed her mother. And then we arrived at the old hotel. We went in, and for some silly reason I said I didn’t need to go to the bathroom, although I did. When she came back, she teased me into relenting, and while I was gone she saw some old man and called him a
memento mori
, and, as we ate our lunch in a little thatched hut overlooking the lake, she gave her famous speech about congealment.

Then we climbed the steep path to the tower and looked down on the surrounding valleys. She pointed out the Cristianas’ shiny roof, and the dark wedge of pines (“The pond is in there, and our ‘Finishing School’ ”), and the clump of trees that hid
what she called “our house,” as if it were my house, too, and I lived in it with them.

And then, going down, I played that strange little game with myself, decreeing that if I let her out of sight on the path, I would lose her forever. She was walking ahead of me. I stood still and
let
her disappear.

And afterward, when I cried, and she comforted me, and then that old couple passed us, wearing their funny, baggy walking shorts and matching brown shoes with tassels that flapped. And Ursula said, “They thought we were mother and daughter.… It was a nice feeling, having them think you belonged to me.”

The sun flashed on the spinning mountains. We had drunk red wine with lunch, and I went into a kind of swoon. “I do belong to you,” I said, nestling close to her. “Oh, child, child,” she murmured, resting her chin on the top of my head.

The outline of the tower is particularly sharp today in the harsh spring light. I know for a fact that the old hotel is still flourishing. Recently I saw pictures and a big write-up about it in a magazine while I was waiting in my ophthalmologist’s office. It has become a favorite retreat, the article said, for nostalgic weekenders harassed by the cruel tempo of modern life. Its Victorian-Gothic atmosphere is soothing, suggestive. The Mystery Writers of America, the article said, now hold their annual conventions there.

I turned my back on the mountains and the tower and left the ruined terrace. I climbed the discolored, grassy hill and got back in my rented car and drove back to the haywagon road, where, resolved to follow through in full the requirements of this scene, I pulled off on the shoulder of Old Clove Road, locked the car
and
took my purse, and—under the accusing glance of the fat woman on the trailer steps and the curious stares of her brood of children—boldly lifted my skirt and stepped over the chain with its No Trespassing sign. Slinging my purse jauntily over my shoulder, I walked down the haywagon road with the assurance
of an absentee landlady come to inspect her property. The Cristianas’ name was on the No Trespassing sign, and if any or all of them should suddenly materialize and block my path, I would simply say, “Remember me? Justin Stokes? Well, you see, I’ve been haunted quite a bit over the years, as I’m sure you must have been, and so I decided to come back and see if I could lay some ghosts … if you’ll excuse the unfortunate pun.” I was angry as I walked down the haywagon road, angry at the Cristianas for prospering, angry at myself for prospering, angry at all the changes I saw around me, from the fat woman and her trailer to the blight that had struck many of the remaining pines, causing them to turn brown. As I entered the pine forest, or what was left of it, I became even angrier when I realized that, once again, I was hearing music. But this time it was not Bach; it was nasal country and western, following me from the direction of the trailer.

The pond was still there, but smaller and full of woodland debris. I could not imagine Ursula, even at her boldest, swimming in it now.

The hut was a heap of stones. But there lay the oblong slab that had once been the doorstoop, the threshold—as if it had preserved itself as the one necessary piece of scenery for this act—and I picked my way through the rubble and sat down on it, first casting a wary glance all around, though I knew it was still too cold for snakes. Who owned the pond now? If it was still “DeVane” land, then it had been sold to the department store executive and was now in the hands of Century 21. I remembered how, that sunny spring day when I had gone horseback riding with Ed and his sister Ann, he had told me that his father had wanted to buy the hut and the pond and stock the pond with fish. But Ursula had needed the pond as a retreat, and Mr. Cristiana had told his children that she was a brave woman and was entitled to the few pleasures she had left.

I could see why, even if the Cristianas now owned the pond, they would be glad to see it fill up with silt and natural debris. Let one more generation grow up, perhaps; let the older generation of gossips die; and then rebuild. A playhouse, a guest cottage.
Dredge the pond and let fresh water fill up again. Or fill it in and level the whole dying forest and make a profitable little “estate” of half-acre lots—maybe even a trailer park. Plenty of useful things can be built on the ruins of other people’s lives. Look how I have profited from Ursula’s influence; look how I have been profiting lately, in spirit and energy, from the memories and dreams she inhabits.

“For you, Justin, I’m convinced nothing but a life of art will do,” she told me down here one afternoon, as we sat hip-to-hip on this crumbly slab of stone. Often she would have been in for a swim, sporting around in the pond while I watched her, teasing me for my cowardice, telling me how refreshing the water felt. Afterward, she would dress in the hut and then come out and sit beside me, toweling her curly hair, or rubbing it briskly with her fingertips when she forgot the towel. I loved the way she told stories about her life. As I watched her face, it was as if I saw the stories happening. I would think about them between visits. I would imagine them from her side, pretending I was she. I had bought a bottle of the lotion I had seen on her dresser and I would rub it on my body before I went to bed at night. I would turn off the light in my room at Lucas Meadows and “become” Ursula DeVane, lying in her independent white room in the house on Old Clove Road. I would pretend I was Ursula remembering her past. Remembering her young lover in France, how they had climbed up the precipitous ledge to the ancestors’ stronghold and lain down in the moonlit ruins of the Chäteau DeVeine and whispered that they had been united already in past incarnations. And sometimes I would imagine everything so well that I would feel strange stirrings and almost cease to be myself.