The Finishing School (27 page)

“She ate seven cupcakes, I counted them,” said Jem, as we were going home in the car.

“I’ve never seen anyone so fat,” said Becky, narrowing her eyes with malicious glee. “It’s
disgusting.
She’s very stupid, too.”

“I don’t think she’s really stupid,” I said. “She’s just very quiet.”

“Well, I think she’s
very
stupid,” said Becky. “Maybe even retarded.”

“Oh no, dear,” my mother corrected Becky. “She had very intelligent eyes. I felt terribly sorry for her. It must be a thyroid condition or something. Surely no mother would allow a child to get like that if it could be avoided. On the other hand—she
did
eat an awful lot of cupcakes. Oh well, it was kind of them to ask us and it’s unkind of us to criticize.” She reached over and patted Becky, who sat next to her in the car. “Just be thankful you are so
pretty and slim,” she said. Becky preened herself and looked smug. She adored getting compliments and caresses from my mother.

Then Jem began singing a song our father had taught us: “
I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me
 …” and all of us started laughing. My mother looked as though she might cry, as well. She was probably remembering the last time we all sang that song, accompanied by my father’s banjo, on the porch in Fredericksburg.

We had to detour by the travel agency to pick up Aunt Mona, who had ridden to work with a neighbor that morning so that we could have her car for the Dibble outing.

“What was the house like?” was the first thing Aunt Mona wanted to know.

“It was very … affluent,” said my mother. “But the pool was lovely.”

“What kind of carpeting did she have? Wall-to-wall or just rugs?”

“Wall-to-wall,” replied my mother. “It was a … let me think … a kind of beigey color, rather shaggy, and the same carpeting went all through the house, except for where the tile floors were.”

“Hmm,” said Aunt Mona neutrally. I could not tell whether she was expressing jealousy or disapproval. “And what were
they
like?”

“Oh, she’s very hospitable,” said my mother. “She wore a bikini the whole time. The daughter is sweet, but quiet and extremely fat.”

“Disgustingly fat,” Becky put in. “You wouldn’t get me to go back there for anything. Pool or no pool.”

“Well, however fat she may be, Beck old girl, you’ve got to remember that Mr. Dibble is your father’s boss,” said Aunt Mona.

“I don’t care. She’s fat and stupid and I’m not going to be friends with her,” countered Becky firmly.

“You know,” said my mother, “today was the first time I’ve been swimming since Rivers’s death. The water felt so wonderful, but it made me sad. Rivers loved a nice pool.”

“Oh yes, Rivers loved the water. He won the diving contest every summer at the municipal pool,” recalled Aunt Mona proudly. “Of course, you went to the country club pool, so you wouldn’t have been there.”

“He was good at any sport he tried,” my mother agreed with a small sigh, overlooking, or choosing to ignore, Aunt Mona’s pet theme of their social differences back in the days of their youth.

A few mornings later, the phone rang and I answered.

“Is that Justin?” It sounded like a grown-up trying to imitate a child’s voice. For a moment, I thought it might be Ursula, playing a joke.

“Yes,” I said, my heart starting to beat fast, “who is this?”

“Joan Dibble.”

“Oh. Hello.” I tried not to show my disappointment.

“I was wondering if you and Becky would like to come over and swim in the pool.”

I grabbed for an excuse and found one. “Gosh, Joan, that’s nice of you, but we can’t. Aunt Mona has the car.”

“My mother could come and pick you up.”

“Oh! Oh, well … wait just a minute. I’ll run upstairs and ask Becky.”

Becky was in her room, pasting cutouts from magazines all over her lampshade. “Are you crazy? Waste another day with that fatty?”

“It’s hot. We could swim. I could do the socializing.”

I was not eager to go myself, but I thought it would be better to go and get it over with and not hurt Joan’s feelings. “We don’t have anything better to do,” I reasoned with Becky. I had been to Ursula’s once already that week, and it was too soon to go again.

“
I
have lots to do,” said Becky with disdain. “And even if I didn’t, even if it was
boiling
, I wouldn’t go over there again.
You
go, if you’re so desperate for something to do.” She turned a page of a magazine and plunged her scissors into a picture she wanted for her lampshade.

I went back downstairs to the phone. “If you’re going to do a
thing, do it graciously” had been one of my grandmother’s maxims. I told Joan Dibble that Becky was otherwise engaged, but that I would “love to come.” I had a brief relapse from graciousness when Mrs. Dibble’s horn blew a half hour later, and I walked toward the car, Joan’s placid moonface watching me possessively from the back seat, where she had spread herself out in comfort, like an indolent pasha.
What have I done?
I thought. But then Mrs. Dibble, a beach robe tied loosely around her bikini, called cheerfully in her gum-smacking voice that I would “ride up front with the chauffeur,” and I climbed in beside her, a bit depressed but proudly determined to make the best of what I had gotten myself into.

This had taken place in late June. Everyone was surprised when, after that, Mrs. Dibble’s horn sounded regularly outside our house on two or three mornings a week. Becky’s reaction was incredulity mixed with contempt. Aunt Mona’s way of explaining it was that I was a sensible child and knew the value of a good pool on the hot summer days. My mother, who frequently accompanied me out to the car to say a friendly hello to “Babs,” would give me tender, puzzled looks as she watched our strange trio drive off. Finally she asked me if I really enjoyed going over there; I wasn’t doing it, she asked, out of any mistaken idea that somebody at our house had to oblige Joan Dibble because she was the daughter of Mott’s boss?

“No, really, I
like
Joan.”

“Well,” she said, kissing the top of my head, “that’s all right, then. You go and have fun.” Perhaps she was relieved that I spent more days of the week with Joan than I did riding over to see Miss DeVane on Old Clove Road.

I did like Joan, and I did like going over to her house. The first day, when I had gone there by myself intent on “doing good,” I had found it wasn’t difficult at all to be in Joan’s company. Far from being the poor fat girl I had to cheer up, she was the serene and benevolent hostess who put me so at ease I forgot all about my “duty.”

“You just swim all you want,” she said in her mild, uninflected voice, “and I’ll sit up here under the umbrella and watch
you.” For half an hour I swam obediently back and forth in the sparkling pool, enjoying the streamlined sensation of my limbs coordinating in an efficient crawl, pleased and slightly vain about having an audience watching me with such approval. “You’re a good swimmer,” murmured Joan in her jumbo-size suit beneath the umbrella. There was no wistfulness or envy in her tone. If anything, there was the gratified note of the indulged pasha, who had sent out for an elegant young swimmer to watch and was complimenting the performance.

Joan was not stupid. And she had a self-possession whose source I couldn’t fathom. Where did it come from? Was it something she had developed in order to compensate for her appearance, or did she actually draw some kind of mythical charge from her size? I never found out. We never discussed her fatness. We discussed many other topics—gradually I confided to her some of my admiration for Ursula DeVane, after she had shown me her scrapbook of cards and letters and signed photos of famous people to whom she constantly wrote—but never, never her weight. She never once alluded to it or even appeared to notice it, except that, when getting out of a chair or settling into one, she often emitted a half-humorous and resigned groan. Of course I never said anything. Some other girl, even a well-meaning friend, might have broached the subject after three or four visits. (“Hey, listen, Joan. Does it ever … I mean … bother you about your weight? Have you ever … you know … thought about dieting?”) What would Joan have answered? But I had been brought up
not
to ask: had been brought up, moreover, to feel superior because I knew better than to ask.

She had, in her red-leather scrapbook, letters from Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Dale Carnegie, A. J. Cronin, and Danny Kaye, as well as a postcard from Mary Hemingway (answering for Ernest) and signed photographs from Piper Laurie and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Before she wrote to celebrities, she told me, she looked up everything she could find on them, and read their interviews in magazines. If they had special pets, she was sure to mention them in her letters, just as she always made sure to refer to a star’s latest picture or an author’s latest book. She
made an extra handwritten copy of every letter she sent, and when the reply came, she would paste it on the page facing her letter. She wrote in a small, round, extremely legible hand, always mentioned that she was twelve years old, and did not stint in her extravagant praise of her intended correspondent’s achievements. Once she repeated herself, but how, for instance, was A. J. Cronin to know she had also written to Dale Carnegie and Pearl Buck that “you have influenced many people’s lives for the better”? I am not sure whether she had read their books or even seen their movies. But her letters must have made them think she had, because she had some warm replies in her collection. If I were to receive such a fan letter today from a twelve-year-old girl who told me my last performance was stunning and that I had influenced many people’s lives for the better, I would sit right down and pen a friendly, glowing reply. There would be no doubt in my mind that she knew my work. From the small, shapely handwriting, I would probably deduce a small and shapely young person invested with all the mental and physical attributes deserved by such a perspicacious acknowledger of talent.

As I mentioned, I told Joan about my friendship with Ursula after I had been admitted to the red-leather sanctuary of her collection of heroes. I began by saying I didn’t really have any friends my own age here yet, but there
was
this older woman I had met who had taken an interest in me and whom I admired a lot. I had to explain to Joan who George Bernard Shaw was, and then I told her how Ursula had acted for him in one of his plays and he had said she was going to make a good Joan of Arc, but then the war had broken out. I shared with Joan various selections from my afternoons with Ursula, always tailoring my narratives to make Ursula appear as unusual as possible. Joan’s small, bright eyes gazed on me possessively as I told these stories. She often wore an inscrutable little smile that made it seem she knew what I was going to say next. Then, some other times, I wondered whether she was really listening to what I was saying about Ursula, or whether she was watching me in the same way she liked to watch me swim: as though I were a
friendly young storyteller she had sent for, to while away her afternoon, and it didn’t matter much what the storyteller told as long as she went on talking in an engaging and animated way. However, Joan’s silent attention encouraged me to talk. Her huge, quiet, self-contained presence seemed a safe repository for those things I had told no one else. Joan was so different that it was as if she didn’t count as a confidante. She was more like a large, semi-smiling Buddha some lonely traveler pours his thoughts out to in some faraway temple just to keep track of himself.

And so, going to Joan’s was far from being a chore to me. Being there had many advantages: I could talk about the person who interested me most, and Joan would listen for hours; I could plunge, whenever I liked, into that inviting blue pool (such a contrast to Ursula’s country pond, where I never swam, with its invisible generations of swimming and crawling inhabitants she loved to tease me about); I could take an unselfish pleasure in knowing it pleased Joan that I always wanted to come when she called; I could take a perverse pleasure in baffling Becky and making them all wonder at home why I liked coming here so much; I could enjoy Mrs. Dibble’s tasty poolside snacks, which she urged on Joan and me but never touched herself—she disappeared into the house or out on one of her numerous shopping expeditions as soon as she had watched Joan and me heap our plates.

Oh, sometimes when they were driving me home, Joan sprawling serenely in the back, I making polite conversation with the “chauffeur” in the front seat, I felt weary in that way you do when you have been on your good behavior too long. But then I would look down at the deepening tan on my arms and legs and imagine Ursula saying, the next time she saw me, “Just look at you, Justin! You’re so dark I hardly recognized you. You must
live
outdoors.” A tan was the nearest thing to a transformation I could effect in myself in order to show her I, too, changed from visit to visit. Maybe that’s one reason people value a tan: it makes others look at them afresh and say, “Oh, you’ve been
away
somewhere. You’ve
changed.
” Often, as the Dibbles were
driving me home, I would realize, with sudden elation, that I had made one more day pass and it was that much nearer the time when I could allow myself to ride over to Ursula’s again.

And so, when Mr. Dibble at IBM, due to some foreign executive’s canceled trip, found himself in possession of four tickets to the most popular show in New York, it was only natural that he would think of the girl who had befriended his daughter; and of this girl’s deserving mother, the sad, pretty widow. And that’s how Joan Dibble and I (Joan this time making space for me in the back seat) and “Babs” and my mother set off early one Saturday morning at the end of July for the matinee on Broadway—stopping for a sumptuous lunch, prepared by Mrs. Dibble, at a roadside picnic table along the way.

The show was
My Fair Lady
, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and I was impressed without reservation. It was the first time in my life I had seen a professional stage production with fine actors at the top of their form and all those masterful accoutrements of stagecraft that can create an unbroken illusion for the audience. As a child of the movies, I had been impatient with and critical of the few instances of local “little theater” I had been exposed to. Invariably there would come some intrusion of reality in the form of a wobbly cardboard set, or an actor’s bungled lines, or a wrong lighting cue, or a shabby costume you had already seen in a little theater production the year before. I had concluded that it was impossible to lose yourself at the theater as you could at the movies. But with
My Fair Lady
came a new experience. I did lose myself, but in a less self-enclosed way. There was a rapport between me and the human beings on the stage: they were really up there
now
, in the same room with me and all the other people in this particular audience. The performance as it happened today would never happen quite the same way again. On this occasion we were all participating together in a human drama, an uplifting one, suitable for songs, about how people could learn from one another and be transformed. And that these actors, flesh-and-blood people like ourselves, not distant celluloid images whose bad scenes could be reshot and edited out, were able to command our emotions with such superb
skill was both mysterious and moving. I loved Rex Harrison especially. It would be nice to have a man like that waiting for you when you grew up. But then I thought of the age difference between Ursula’s mother and father and how that marriage had turned out, and I wasn’t so sure.