The Finishing School (26 page)

VIII.

W
hat was the source of her witchery? Did all of it emanate from her? Or did I invest her with part of it?

“I have made a new friend this summer who I admire a lot because she is sweet, interesting, and funny.” That was the best I could describe it with my adolescent vocabulary. As I wrote that sentence in the “Notes” section of “My Personal Life,” what was I trying to capture with those everyday words? I know acuter ways of describing people now. My perceptions of human beings are more complex, I like to think. But can I now, through mere words, get any closer to the essence of her charm?

It had something to do with her elusiveness, her mercurial, protean qualities. I was never sure of her, but I was never bored by her, either. She was never, from one visit to the next, quite the same. I could not pin her down even visually. Sometimes she would look extraordinarily young; sometimes old. She could appear as a sprite or a tomboy or an aging spinster. In a single afternoon she could be amused and benevolent, severe, abstracted, imperious, childish or snobbish, funny, sarcastic or downright spiteful. She could also be poignant and vulnerable. One minute I was her confidante: she would be relating to me her latest schemes for Julian’s comeback, which she and a manager in New
York were going to arrange for the winter season one year away. She could be discussing with me, as though my ideas and opinions really counted, what ways “we” might employ to fill up the hall, and which pieces Julian should play, and in what order, to show his versatility and keep the audience so attentive that not a single person would dare to cough. And then, suddenly, in the midst of our dialogue, she would administer a corrective
thwack
with the side of her hand between my shoulder blades and say in a reproving tone, “Don’t slump, Justin. Your posture tells others your opinion of yourself.” And I would be reduced from an equal to a child.

One afternoon when I was helping her weed her vegetable garden, I started telling her about the flowers my grandmother had grown, and Ursula got very inspired at my description of the delphiniums and launched into grandiose plans for the kind of garden she was going to put in around the terrace after she had gotten Julian launched and some money was coming in. “Of course, I’ll have to be away a good deal—Julie’ll need someone to pack for him and organize him on his tours—but when I’m home I’m going to make this into such a showplace that all the family buried for miles around will float up out of their graves at night and come over here and gape at what I have made of their old homestead.” Infected by her excitement, pleased to have been the agent of it, I elaborated further on my grandmother’s gardening prowess. Feeling I had something to teach
her
, for a change, I grew bolder than usual in the repeated use of her name as I dispensed the horticultural advice I remembered my grandmother sharing with fellow gardeners—such as the lifelong investment to your garden of double-digging, even though you’d have a backache for a week after. As I rattled along happily, Ursula-ing her lavishly, I saw amusement spread wider and wider across her face until at last she burst out laughing. “Dear child,” she said, “you pronounce my name as if it were some kind of sweet wine. It’s not ‘Er-
salla
,’ it’s ‘Ur-
seula.
’
Eu
 … 
eu.
…” She puckered her lips. “Can you say
eu?
”

I was so distressed by her unexpected rebuke that I could not even look at her: for all these weeks, I had been pronouncing
her name wrong and she had simply listened to me compounding my mistake, the silent laughter building in her. What was I to her, then: some pet buffoon whose mistakes could be counted on to provide amusement during the dull summer hours when she could not be with her brother? I vowed to myself not to use her name again until she noticed its absence in our conversations and repented of her ridicule. But she read my mind at once and turned the tables on me. “Now, don’t pout,” she said in a gently teasing voice. She reached over from where she knelt in the dirt to pluck a ladybug from my shirt and blow it into the air. “It’s just that I want you to be perfect in all things. If I loved you less, I wouldn’t always be harping at you like a schoolmistress.” She had actually used the word
love.
Frowning in order to hide my pleasure, I uprooted a large hunk of grass from between the leaves of a squash plant. “Okay?” she said. She was waiting for me to look up and meet her gaze. “Yes,” I said, giving in. “Yes, what?” she coaxed. “Yes … Ur
seu
la,” I said. Satisfied, she went on with her own weeding. We were silent for a few minutes. From the house came sporadic phrases of a third-year student’s attempt at the “Moonlight Sonata.”

Then she surprised me by saying, “You know, one reason for our great affinity, I think, is that we are both at crucial turning points in our lives. In a strange way, the adolescent and the middle-aged person are neither one thing nor the other: they are both in the process of molting, of turning into something else. That is why we can have this friendship, despite the huge age difference. It’s as though we were meeting as spirits, and with spirits, age doesn’t matter.”

I wanted to know what the something else was that we were turning into.

“Oh,” she said lightly, “you are turning into a woman, and I … I am turning into an old woman.”

“You’re not!” I protested.

“Oh, but I am. When you are twenty, I’ll be fifty. You’ve got to agree that fifty qualifies as old age.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “
You
won’t be old at fifty.”

“Ah, Justin, it’s such an experience just to watch your face. You should see the look on it right now. It’s a mixture of … let’s see … oh, so many things. All for my benefit, too. But you mustn’t fret or be outraged; it’s the law of the world: as one generation comes up, the other goes down. Children bury their parents”—balancing herself with a hand on my shoulder, she got slowly to her feet—“and protégées grow wings and take off blithely from the nests of their aging mentors.” She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at me rather triumphantly. I looked up and saw that, from this angle, she
did
look old. It was as though she had transformed herself deliberately into the way she was going to look as an old woman just to prove her point.

I remember how I rode home full of a delicious combination of sadness and power. All around me the ripe countryside swelled, at the peak of its growing season. I gloried in being young. The future awaited me, whereas she was already becoming old. She had told me and then she had shown me it was so. I felt a magnanimous pity for her. I fantasized how, one day, when I had become a grown woman, happy and accomplished, successful (at something that had yet to be defined), I would come and visit a gray-haired woman in the country with sparks in her brown eyes and a humor and enthusiasm that age had failed to dampen. I think I actually worked up some tears at this tender, clichéd image of the two of us sitting down on the stone terrace, maybe surrounded by the fine garden that would have come into being by then, and my telling her of my exploits in the world. She would nod encouragingly from time to time and remark proudly, “I knew you would do it! I knew from the first that you weren’t ordinary.”

As the summer progressed and my afternoon visits to her gathered cumulative impact, I was actually relieved to return to the average, less demanding environment of Lucas Meadows, where children shouted and rode their bicycles, and fathers mowed their lawns and washed their cars on Saturdays, and my mother, looking lovely and lost, bowed her head over her typing
exercises, and Aunt Mona invariably asked, “Well, and what have
you
done with the afternoon?” I don’t think I ever, even at the height of my devotion, visited Ursula more than twice a week (I gave much thought to the spacing of my visits and the “reasons” for each, so she would not grow tired of my company), but, even so, I found that my brain, my emotions, my imagination needed a rest after being with her. She
played
me: until I met her, I never knew I had so many tones and vibrations. It was nice to know I had them, but until I grew more accustomed to having them, it was necessary for me to come back to the ordinary world and play back to myself, in a more restful atmosphere, the responses she had evoked for me.

I often spent the hour or so after supper up at the empty farmhouse on the hill. I would take my appointed place on the top back step, facing away from our development, and go over my latest visit with Ursula. Or I would cull favorite scenes from the succession of visits and make a gratifying montage of proofs that she liked me. I would also fashion and refashion
her
story, taking the information she had given me during different visits, and stage in my imagination various incidents and turning points in her life. Frequently I became so involved in my productions that the lines of my own individuality became blurred: it seemed as though I were remembering my own past. Sometimes these mental fabrications would carry over into sleep, and I would dream strange concoctions of her life and mine.

Even the mysterious blanks in her stories provided me with many absorbing hours as I sat on the steps of the abandoned farmhouse in Lucas Meadows or lay in bed at night. I would embroider around the blanks, imagining what I had not been told. She had said so little about her mother, and nothing about that mother’s going to the insane asylum, as the Cristianas said she had. I made up “mad scenes” between the mother and Ursula. Wild-eyed and furious, she berated Ursula for being a disappointing daughter, for not being beautiful. Ursula, the young Ursula, would bravely stand her ground, a glimmer of contempt in her bold brown eyes. Sometimes she would say such things as “There are more interesting things in this world than beauty,
Mother.” Once she muttered under her breath, “Fate will rescue me from this if I can only hold out.” I remember this mother-daughter scene in particular, because it gave me pleasure to act it out in my head. Though I did not know it then, I was doing what actors do: calling up unacknowledged and potentially dangerous feelings hidden in the depths of my psyche and projecting them onto other characters safely removed from my personal circumstances. Every time “Ursula” muttered with stoic strength, “Fate will rescue me from this if I can only hold out,” I was able to avenge myself for certain helpless moments in my own history: the time, for instance, when I had been standing on our sun porch back in Fredericksburg, watching my mother pack up our life there, and I had made one last, desperate effort to make her change her mind, only to have her quash me with the adult’s ultimate ploy: that I was still a child and would have to abide by her decision.

The last week in July of that summer, fate really did make a propitious little bow into our lives, and as I am attempting, in these recollections, to acknowledge my fair share of blame for the unhappiness I caused, I think it is only sane for me to accept my share of credit for bringing about something that would eventually lead to some happiness.

It happened in a roundabout way, and in several stages, but it would not have happened if I had not behaved as I had. As Ursula had said, that day she had been explaining fate in terms of her family’s motto, you take all the fate that has happened to you and use it to make possible what still may happen. Not that I was trying to cause anything momentous when I befriended Joan Dibble. The friendship came about simply because I was trying to behave compassionately on a day when there was nothing more exciting to do.

It began like this: Mott had a new boss, a manager named Mr. Dibble, who recently had been transferred from another IBM location. As soon as Mr. Dibble learned that Mott had a daughter and a niece, both close to his own daughter’s age (Joan
was twelve), he had Mrs. Dibble telephone Aunt Mona and invite us all (Jem included) to come over one afternoon and swim in their pool. As it was a weekday afternoon and Aunt Mona was working at the travel agency, my mother took us.

The Dibbles lived on a higher scale of income than the Motts, and they had bought a spacious ranch-style brick house on the outskirts of Kingston. It had elaborate landscaping and central air-conditioning, and, of course, the pool, glowing like a large blue jewel, in the midst of a walled-in patio where Mrs. Dibble, tanned already to the color of burnt sugar, took her sunbaths. Mrs. Dibble was an open, friendly, brassy-voiced woman who was wearing the first real bikini I had ever seen; she chewed a spearmint-scented gum energetically as she talked. She fell, I decided, into that category my grandmother had called “nice, but not quite a lady.” She lay baking herself by the side of the pool and chatted, in her ringing voice, with my mother, who, to our delight, swam for a while with us. “I like to swim nude,” said Mrs. Dibble. “I do it all the time when it’s just Joanie and me here at home. I’ve tried to get Joanie to do it, but she’s too modest.”

Even Jem, splashing around happily in his yellow life preserver, had the decency not to laugh. Becky tried to meet my eyes and exchange a cousinly smirk of contempt, but I wouldn’t look at her. “Joanie” herself sat placidly on the steps at the pool’s shallow end, her lower half mercifully submerged in water, a serene half-smile on her round face. She wore a jumbo-size woman’s bathing suit with bright, flashy flowers printed all over its considerable expanse and ruffly skirt. She must have weighed more than two hundred pounds. Yet she showed no shame about her appearance. When she greeted each of her young guests, shaking hands with my little brother, her demeanor had been that of a kindly, regal deity—a sort of pubescent female Buddha—trying to put three embarrassed children at their ease. Now she sat, supremely motionless, watching us benevolently as we splashed and swam in her pool. She had not batted an eyelid at her mother’s mention of her modesty, nor did she seem aware of the ludicrous images of the less modest Joanie that her mother’s
words had sent going inevitably in our imaginations: all those mounds of pale flesh, let loose on their own in the water, without the restricting garment. How could Mrs. Dibble be so cruel? I wondered. But before the afternoon was over, I saw that Mrs. Dibble was blithely unaware—or behaved as if she were—of her daughter’s size. When refreshments were served at the round, glass-topped table by the pool, Mrs. Dibble kept passing the cupcakes around to Joan, who always murmured, “Oh, thanks, Mom,” with a little air of surprise—as though her thoughts had been on higher matters—before delicately choosing a cake from the plate and transferring it dreamily to her mouth. Yet whenever my mother passed the sandwiches or cakes to “Babs” (they were already on a first-name basis), Mrs. Dibble looked down at the plate as if it contained a mass of writhing little snakes, and clutched at her skinny, dark-brown midriff, and declared, “Oh no, Louise, I never eat
anything
between meals. I have to watch my figure.” Did Mrs. Dibble, then, have one set of standards for her body and another set for her daughter’s? Could she really be as unaware of Joan’s appearance as she seemed to be?