The Finishing School (42 page)

“I think I have more in common with you than anybody else. You said I was like your dream daughter. Well, I’ve decided I want to be your friend for life and your mystical daughter.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into another Kitty. I’m just not built that way. In fact, just this past Saturday night, I had a date with Ed Cristiana. But that doesn’t change the way I feel about you. You’re something different in my life; you’re unique. Nothing can ever change the way I feel about you. I’ve put it to the test this week. You’re not perfect, but who is? This week I’ve learned that when you really love someone—and I don’t mean in the Kitty way—you come to accept everything about them, all the moments in their history that have made them into just what they are. And I can accept everything in your past, because it has made you
you.
…”

All I wanted to do was to ride to her house, see her alone, and tell her that. Then ride off again, leaving her surprised and moved and flattered. Fifteen minutes there, five minutes for the declaration (its brevity would impress her and make the event more ceremonious), then fifteen minutes back. There was a whole hour before dark. I wanted her to know, and it seemed urgent that she know tonight. Then I could carry the security of her knowing back to Lucas Meadows with me. It would be like a pledge between us, a profound moment in which we sealed our bond of alikeness and swore to be true to it. She would enter into the spirit of my declaration. She loved things like that; she loved drama and courting Fate. She would rise to the occasion, I was positive, even though her mouth would twitch with the beginnings of the irrepressible smile: the smile that told me I was young and she knew more than I did but nevertheless she found me charming.

And then, carrying our solidarity inside me, I could ride home, say an affectionate goodnight to my mother, thank her for the skirt and the fleece-lined jacket she had bought me in Kingston that day, and go up to my room and face “Raspberry Ice” and the milkmaids with impunity. Henceforth I would render unto biological motherhood its filial dues and affections, but my secret pact with Ursula would have vaccinated me against losing touch with my best, my imaginative self.

As I whizzed past the Cristiana farm, I caught sight of Ed’s little brother carrying a pail of something across the stableyard to the barn. He didn’t see me, and I was glad. I didn’t want to break the intensity of my purpose by having to call hello.

I flew down the hill and over the wooden bridge and past the haywagon road. She wouldn’t be at the hut now, not this late. The only thing I was really worried about was that I would catch them in the middle of eating. I shrank at the image of one of them coming to the front door, wiping his or her lips on a napkin. “Oh! Justin? What a surprise. We’re still having supper, but do come in.” How embarrassing that would be … but I decided I had to risk it. My declaration must be made tonight; I had become
superstitiously urgent about it now: it must be made before nightfall, it must be made before Tuesday, the “allowable” day on which I could see her again. I had to see her now, to prove to myself that I accepted her with all her strangenesses and faults.

The DeVane house, with its austere black shutters and ancient gray stones half buried in limestone mortar, looked lonely and forbidding. In contrast, the road in front was just now a generous, curving swath of orange-gold, reflecting the late-afternoon sun. I laid down my bike and, feeling nervous but fated, walked up to their porch and knocked firmly on the door.

Julian DeVane opened it. “Why, hello.” He was obviously surprised to see me. He was carrying a long-stemmed glass of red wine.

“Oh God,” I said. “I interrupted your supper.”

“N-no, we ate early. We had s-sardines on toast. It was our f-favorite meal when we were little.” He smiled wryly, inviting me to approve of their childish indulgence. “Won’t you come in?”

“Is Ursula busy?”

“She’s gone for a walk. I was just s-sitting here drinking wine.”

“Oh.” I tried not to let my disappointment show. “Well, I wanted to tell her something, but I guess it can wait.”

“C-come in, anyway. She’ll be back. This time of day is so m-melancholy, don’t you think?” He gave me a wistful look, his head cocked to one side. There was a disheveled air about him I hadn’t seen before. I realized that he was probably a little drunk.

“Well, okay,” I said, “but I really can’t stay long.” I went in and he closed the door softly behind us. “They’ll worry if I’m not home before dark. How long do you think Ursula will be?”

“It varies. S-sometimes she g-goes in one direction, s-sometimes in another. You know Sissie. She’s p-predictably unpredictable. Will you join me in a glass of w-wine?”

“No, thanks. I’d better not drink and drive.”

It took him a minute to respond to my joke, but then he uttered a soft, appreciative laugh. Swaying slightly, he led the way
to the chintz sofa, where, from the looks of things, he had staked himself out for a sunset hour of lugubrious drinking. A stack of library books and a vase of pink and white phlox had been pushed to one side of the table to make room for a rotund half gallon of Chianti. I sat down on the edge of the sofa, in the corner next to the books; he sank down with a sigh and topped off his glass with more wine. “Wh-where have you been all week?” he asked. “We m-missed you.”

“Oh, I had all these social obligations. And then buying clothes for school—all that stuff.” Outside the window, the sky grew fiery-brilliant behind the darkening mountains and the tower as the sun began its descent. I was thinking I would have to make a few minutes of polite conversation before I could leave. Then maybe I could still find Ursula, meet her as she was returning from her walk.

“Will you be gl-glad when school starts?”

“In some ways I will. In others I won’t.” I waited for him to pick up on the last part, which meant I would miss his sister.

“Ah,” he said ambiguously, nodding.

We both stared shyly out the window at the sun slipping down toward the ridge of the mountains.

To break the silence, I said, “I guess you’ve been practicing a lot?”

“Practicing?”

“For your recital next year. Your comeback,” I reminded him.

“Oh,” he said. He tilted his glass and swirled the red wine around. “There’s still p-plenty of time for that,” he said, meditating on the little whirlpool. Then he took a sip of wine and swallowed it very slowly. “You know, anyone with the m-money can hire a hall and give a recital,” he said. “A ‘c-comeback’ is another matter. Especially if you haven’t been anywhere to c-come back to.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked down at my tanned knees, aligned like two upside-down shields. How it would hurt Ursula to hear him talk like that!

“Ursula has great faith in you,” I said. “And … well, I’m not
any musical expert, but when you play, something happens inside me. I think that’s important, the way your playing makes other people feel.”

It sounded incredibly naive, even though I was sincere.

He put down his wineglass and contemplated me with his oblique, in-turned brown eyes, so much softer and less demanding than his sister’s sharp, pouncy, penetrating ones. “You are a lovely girl,” he said. “My sister cares for you a great deal. You’ve been g-good for her.”

“I don’t know about good, but I care for her a lot, too.”

“That’s obvious,” he replied with a gentle smile. He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. “I haven’t c-cared for many people, but I’ve grown quite f-fond of you, too.”

“Well, thank you.”

We both looked away, and there was another shy pause.

Then he said, “I have a s-selfish reason for hoping you’ll st-stay in our lives.”

I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say next. Influenced by the tenuous, dreamlike quality of my being here like this at this hour, and his being in this wine-loosed, melancholy mood, I was seized by the fantastic notion that Julian DeVane might be going to propose marriage to me—when I “came of age,” or something. It might be that he really loved me, or it might be more in the spirit that Kitty’s father had proposed marriage to Ursula: because he wanted to please his daughter. But Ursula was not Kitty, I reminded myself. Nevertheless, in the space of those few silent seconds, I imagined myself into a bizarre but strangely contented future, in which, by making myself Julian’s child-bride, I would have gained Ursula as a sister forever.

“You have?” I asked him, with indrawn breath.

“Yes. S-so that after I disappoint her, she will have s-someone else to transfer her ambitions to.” He picked up his glass and drank deeply, as if the wine were medicine. “Sissie n-needs that.”

I have had several decades in which to consider the other ways I might have responded to him. And I have the rest of my
life to play with alternate endings to that scene. A playwright with a penchant for the less sensational denouement might simply have had the girl, who was sympathetic and perceptive for her age, tell the depressed musician, “You know what
I
really need right now, at this sad, sunset hour? A little of that solace my grandfather used to call ‘J. Sanity Bach.’ ” And to oblige his young guest, the musician would pull himself out of the seductive suction of his down-spiraling reverie and go to the piano, and prop up the lid, and take out the music for
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, or maybe the
Goldberg Variations
, and, as the light dimmed slowly on the set, he would play himself and the girl back into the rational, balanced universe of that artist whose life and work seem so blessedly immune from the petty snares and torments of this world. And, soon after that, the humorless, overprotective uncle, summoned by the aunt to console the girl, and sent by the mother to find the girl (who had not returned from her bicycle ride before dusk), would knock at the door and provide comic relief, unctuously refusing a glass of wine from his sanguine host, and judiciously shepherding the girl off the set.

Soon after their exit, the sister would return from her walk. Teasing her brother for sitting morbidly in the dark, she would turn on the lamps. (In a way that indicated symbolically that she was the light of his life?)

“Justin came by,” he would say.

“Justin! At this time of evening?” (The sister looks startled, not very pleased.)

“She wanted you. But she ch-cheered me up.”

“I’m glad. But what on earth made her want to wander around here at
this
hour?” (The look of alarm and displeasure remains on the sister’s face, but the brother doesn’t see it.)

“S-something she had to t-tell you. Then her uncle showed up, l-looking highly suspicious of me, and made her go home. You d-didn’t see them when you were coming back from your walk, I take it?”

“No. Tonight I decided to cut across the fields.”

“Dear old Sissie. You have to have your v-variations.”

(The sister goes to the window and gazes out intently at the
blooming night. Her back is to her brother, her profile to the audience. One hand goes to her throat and remains there, long enough to indicate her awareness of a crisis narrowly averted by sheer good luck.)

“Ah, me,” she would say, recovering her light and amused tone. “The urgencies of the young.”

And her secret, as well as her brother’s bout with despair, would be kept under wraps a while longer. Long enough, perhaps, to turn the action into another mode of drama in the next act: a more contemporary mode in which all the characters are permitted to survive the last act because their creator has endowed them with enough blissful ignorance, or cynicism, to avoid any fatal confrontations with the really unspeakable betrayal, the unthinkable compromise, the ultimate shattered ideal that would destroy an old-fashioned “hero,” obsessed with notions of destiny and honor.

But I am not a playwright, neither in the ironic nor in the tragic mode.

I was not even an actress then. I was a fourteen-year-old girl who liked to think of herself as sympathetic and perceptive for her age, but who was beginning to be repulsed and a little scared by the overwhelming reality that pervaded the twilit room where Julian DeVane and I sat. That reality was acknowledged failure—tantamount to damnation in the eyes of the young. I felt sorry for Julian DeVane, of course, and even sorrier for Ursula, who I knew had invested too deeply in him to be able to “transfer her ambitions” to someone else. But the atmosphere of the room was becoming so oppressive I could not bear it. Now I could smell the sour wine on his breath. I thought I sniffed faintly the toast from their supper, and it made me depressed, no longer envious, to think of all their years of suppers together, abetting each other’s childhood fantasies about the destinies they were entitled to.

I wanted to get out of there, into what little light was left, before I was infected by Julian DeVane’s pervasive despair.

“I’d better be running along,” I said. “If I’m not back before dark, my mother will worry. I’m not supposed to ride at night, because I don’t have a light on my bike.”

Julian put down his glass and walked me to the door. “I’m afraid I haven’t been very good c-company, but you were sweet to listen,” he said.