The Finishing School (28 page)

The final curtain came down and the lights went on. Joan rolled herself out of her aisle seat with a little groan, and the four of us streamed slowly up the aisle. People were humming snatches of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” and “The Rain in Spain” and smiling at one another.

We had reached the foyer when a man in a cotton cord suit pushed his way hurriedly through the crowd and caught my mother’s arm. “Louise, it
is
you,” he declared excitedly when my mother turned, startled at the touch. She gave the stranger a searching look, then let out a little cry. “Craven Ravenel, I don’t believe it! But what are you doing
up here?
”

“Same thing you are, I expect. We flew up especially just to see this show.” He motioned to a tall woman in a red dress who was flowing toward us with the crowd but making no effort to get ahead of anybody. She stuck up five fingers and gave us a languid wave.

“Is that … your wife?” my mother asked.

“Yes, that’s Charlotte. She was Charlotte Emory before we married. I’m sure you met the Emorys when you came to Columbia with your mother.” The way he pronounced it—“mothah”—made me realize with a homesick jolt that I had grown up with people who talked like this. He seemed a nice, gentlemanly man, but he was not at all as I had pictured the Craven Ravenel in my mother’s story. That Craven had been young and dashing, with flaring nostrils and ripply hair and a tall, willowy figure and a Greek profile. This was a stocky man who was losing his hair on top; the best thing about his face was the expression of delight and wonder on it as he kept looking at my mother.

My mother introduced the Dibbles and me. As she presented me to Craven Ravenel, she took me by the shoulders and drew me slightly in front of her, like a shield.

“I believe I met you once when you were a little bitty thing,” he told me. “It was at Pawleys Island during the war. I was stationed over at Myrtle Beach for a while.” Then he turned back to my mother. “Is your husband with you, Louise?”

“My husband is dead, Craven.” She said it apologetically, as though she wished she could spare him from having asked. “We live up here now, with his sister. I also have a little boy of six.”

Craven Ravenel looked stricken. “I don’t know what to say. All this time, I’ve been thinking of you living happily in Fredericksburg. And your mother? Is she—?”

“They’re both gone, too,” she told him softly. I felt her fingertips press into my shoulders. “All I’ve got in the world are Justin and Jem, but they are a great comfort to me.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure they must be.” He took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his brow, anxiously scanning the crowd. “I can’t understand what happened to Charlotte,” he said helplessly. “One minute she was there and now I don’t see her. But that’s like Charlotte.”

“I expect she may have stepped into the powder room,” suggested my mother.

“That’s not a bad idea.” Mrs. Dibble spoke up brightly. “Come on, Joanie. Remember, it’s a long drive home. We don’t want to be stopping a lot. How about you, Justin?”

“No, thank you.” I felt my mother needed me right where I was.

Craven Ravenel gave the retreating Dibbles a perplexed frown, looked as if he might say something, but didn’t. After a moment, he asked my mother if my father had been ill a long time, and she said no, Rivers had never been sick a day in his life, it had been a car accident.

“Well, I’m just as sorry as I can be. Look, can you and your … friends … come back to the Waldorf and have drinks and supper with us … if Charlotte ever does reappear?”

My mother thanked him, but explained we had a hundred miles to drive and that she had left her little boy in the care of a nice man on his houseboat. “He likes Jem, but I don’t want to take advantage,” she said.

“No, of course not,” said Craven Ravenel, who looked
somewhat crestfallen at the mention of this nice man. Then he took out his wallet and showed us a snapshot of two preadolescent girls. “That’s our daughter Annabel … she’s almost twelve … and that’s Amy … she just turned eight.” He reached in another flap of the wallet and pulled out a card, which he handed to my mother. “If you all are ever in Columbia, please get in touch with me,” he said. “Or if there’s ever anything I can do for you or your family, Louise, I hope you’ll write. Maybe you’ll write anyway and fill me in on what happened to you all these years. I’ve thought about you many times.…”

Then the tall woman in red was suddenly upon us. “Here I go hide in the ladies’ room so he can have a reunion with his childhood sweetheart,” she bantered in a merry contralto drawl, “and when I come out, I find him showing pictures of our children. I don’t call that very romantic!”

“Charlotte, this is Louise Justin,” Craven Ravenel began formally, but then he stopped, looked at my mother in consternation, and said, “This is unforgivable, but I can’t seem to recall—”

“Stokes,” replied my mother, offering her hand to the woman in red. “And this is my daughter, Justin.”

“Oh, I feel I know you,” said the other woman to my mother. “The beautiful girl from out of town who wrote Craven’s name on her dance card because she knew he was too bashful to ask. He tells that story every time he can find a new audience. I think”—and she linked her arm through my mother’s as though they were two conspirators against the man—“it may be the most exciting thing that ever happened to him. Why, after he saw you at intermission, he could hardly watch the show. He kept saying, ‘I’m sure that’s Louise Justin.… I’m just sure that’s Louise Justin.’ Finally I said, because I wanted to shut him up so I could concentrate on Rex Harrison, ‘Well, why
shouldn’t
it be Louise Justin? She has the right to fly up and see this play, too. Only you
aren’t
Louise Justin anymore. You’re married now. Where is your—?”

“Charlotte”—Craven Ravenel sent his wife a warning look—“Louise has just told me some sad news. She has lost her husband in an automobile crash.”

“Oh Lord,” moaned Charlotte Ravenel, immediately shedding
her jovial, bullying tone. “Oh honey”—she put her arm around my mother—“I’m as sorry as I can be. Craven, why don’t you stop me from jabbering so much?”

“Well, darling, you know it’s hard sometimes.” As he said this, he smiled helplessly at my mother and me, but there was also in the air a visible relief between husband and wife: It’s okay now, we have covered Charlotte’s awkward question by our “long-suffering old married couple” exchange.

“I was just telling Craven,” said my mother, who was now casting anxious looks toward the ladies’ room, hoping for the Dibbles’ return, “that we live up here in Yankeeland now. After my husband’s death, in February, we moved up here to live with his sister. Justin and my son, Jem, and I share a house with Mona and her little girl.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Charlotte. “Then that’s who the woman and the … um … plump little girl were … that you all were sitting with. They were going into the ladies’ just as I came out.”

“No, those are just friends,” my mother corrected her. “Kind friends who had extra tickets to the show. Justin and Joan—that’s the girl—have been spending some time together this summer.”

“Oh, I see,” said Charlotte transferring her attention finally to me. “Well,
she
is certainly an attractive child. Going to be tall. When I was your age,” she told me, “I was already taller than all the boys. You must favor your father, though. You don’t have your mother’s features, at all. Except maybe around the eyes.”

“I think she favors my mother a lot,” my mother said.

The Dibbles returned, and all the introductions had to be gone through once more. My mother looked strained. Craven Ravenel repeated his offer for all of us to join them for drinks, at least, at the Waldorf, and Mrs. Dibble seemed intrigued by the idea until my mother firmly declined, reminding “Babs” that Eric Mott had been so good about keeping Jem and she didn’t want to take advantage. At the mention of the other man’s name, Craven Ravenel backed off at once, saying, “Then we mustn’t keep you, maybe another time.” He gave my mother a wistful look and
added, “It’s been wonderful seeing you again, Louise.” To his wife he said, “I’ve given Louise my card and told her if there’s ever anything she needs, she must get in touch.”

“Of course you must!” declared Charlotte to my mother in her jovial contralto, linking her arm through her husband’s. “Craven would like nothing better.” She gave us all a broad wink and led him away.

We left the cool, dark theater and went out into the bright, hot, late-afternoon sun of Broadway, passing more species of humanity than I had ever thought possible on the way to our parking garage.

“Was he an old boyfriend of yours?” Mrs. Dibble asked my mother.

“Goodness, no. I only danced with him one time. It’s just a silly story about how I wrote his name on my card because I wanted him to ask.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Dibble. “From the way everybody greeted everybody, I thought it must have been a lot more.”

“It wasn’t,” said my mother. “It was practically nothing.” Then she looked at the card crumpled in her hand. “Craven Ravenel, A.I.A. Oh, he’s become an architect. I had always imagined him becoming a lawyer.”

“Southerners are more …” Mrs. Dibble searched for the right word but couldn’t find it. “Bart and I lived in Kentucky for a time when we were first married, and I never could tell when people were inviting me somewhere and when they were just being polite.”

“It’s hard to tell sometimes.” And my mother laughed dryly, putting the little white card in her purse.

She slept for most of the drive home, pillowing her head on her folded white jacket. She explained to “Babs” that the whole day had been so exciting, and confessed that she was in the habit of taking an afternoon nap. Joan and I sat in the back, thinking our own thoughts companionably; except that Joan did tell me she planned to write a letter to Rex Harrison the next day.

In “My Personal Life,”
My Fair Lady
is the only play listed for that year on the page entitled “Legitimate Drama and Concerts I Attended.” Why didn’t I record the production of
Hedda Gabler
that Ursula and Julian took me to in early August? The only explanation I can think of now is that I wasn’t sure it qualified as “legitimate drama,” being held as it was in that hot, barnlike structure on top of a mountain in a nearby village called Woodstock.

One afternoon not long after our trip to New York, I had been telling Ursula about Rex Harrison and
My Fair Lady
, which she rather archly informed me had been based on a play called
Pygmalion
, by George Bernard Shaw, and she asked me if I would like to go with them the following week to a marvelous play by Norway’s greatest playwright. “Every actress wants to play Hedda,” she told me. “I played her once myself, while I was at RADA. Though I was complimented highly on my performance, I wasn’t completely satisfied. There were certain subtle aspects of her personality I didn’t truly understand, which I understand all too well today. That’s why I’m very interested in seeing the play again. Mind you, Woodstock isn’t Broadway, but it’s an interesting place. A Colony of the Arts was founded there early in the century by some English people. There’s a whole mountainside full of little brown cottages where artists live and work and paint and act and dance and so forth. Though something in me recoils at the idea of artists in colonies. The artist is by nature a separate beast. But you ought to see the place. And you certainly should see the play. You’ll come and have dinner with us and then we’ll drive up there.
Now
what? Why have you got such a worried look on your face?”

“I was wondering about my bike,” I said. “Mother doesn’t like me to ride it after dark.”

“Silly child! Of course I plan to pick you up and take you home afterward.”

“Oh,” I said.

But her picking me up presented another problem, which worried me all the way home that afternoon. If she picked me up, she would have to meet my mother. Maybe I could just wait
for her on the front steps of our house. No, that might make her think I was ashamed for her to meet my mother. Also, I knew my mother would never sanction such rudeness. Even when “Babs” honked her horn, Mother would stop whatever she was doing and go outside and say hello. No, Ursula would have to come to our door and ask for me, and my mother would be there to greet her. I knew my mother would not pass up the opportunity to meet this Miss DeVane she had heard so much about and was—I thought—a little jealous of. I was thrilled at the prospect of having dinner with them, spending an entire evening with the DeVanes, but as the day approached, I became increasingly nervous about the meeting between Ursula and my mother. I had strange and conflicting sensations when I pictured the two women meeting each other. I was afraid each might see in the other the faults I sometimes found: that Ursula would dismiss my mother as being merely one more pretty, passive woman (reminiscent of her mother?); that my mother might find Ursula a bit too colorful or eccentric. I felt particularly protective of my mother, and found myself wishing Ursula could have known her in the old days, before everybody started dying and before she became a widow, when she had that air of entering a room so you knew she was the star. That person would have been sure to attract someone like Ursula DeVane.