The Finishing School (45 page)

Be cold. Be guarded. Be polite. Think of it this way: last spring you came here—were dragged here—against your will. There was nothing here. Nothing except school and a roof over your head. The past gone. The
future, years ahead; too far ahead to think about. And then you met this person, and this person interested you and made the summer fly by. And now you’re back where you started. School. A roof over your head. The future, someday. Look at it that way.

Outwardly I was cold, guarded, polite, dutiful—above all, dutiful. Duty is a wonderful time-filler; it makes you feel useful, it makes you like yourself; it keeps unpleasant thoughts at bay. I remembered my grandmother, when she came home from the hospital after her operation: how she got out her yarns and started embroidering pillows and Christmas tree ornaments, even though Christmas was almost a year away. “In case I’m not feeling all that good, later,” she had said. And she had been right to do her Christmas embroidery early.

I studied. I went for bike rides around the development with Jem. I helped Jem with his reading and his lettering. I set the table. Loaded the dishwasher. Ran Aunt Mona’s vacuum cleaner over the seafoam-green rug, first carefully lifting all the plastic strips. I heard them muttering about me and my “shock.” Aunt Mona, entering into the spirit of my dutifulness, suggested we do a “fall cleaning.” One Saturday afternoon, we took down curtains, ran them in loads through the washer, dried them on “Fluff,” then ironed them in relays and hung them again. “You know,” I said, “I’ve been thinking. I really would like to paint my room. I mean, I like the color you painted it for me last spring, but now I’d kind of like a change.” Aunt Mona was beside herself with enthusiasm; her earrings quivered ecstatically as we discussed possible colors.

How easy it was to deceive people.

But at moments when my guard was down, just before falling asleep, for instance, I would see pictures. Sometimes I felt she was sending these pictures to me. I saw her eating supper alone in that gloomy kitchen; saw her dusting his room, stopping to look at certain photographs; saw her deciding not to dust “the office” yet; saw her sitting on the old chintz sofa, her feet up, looking out the window at the mountains and the tower. Staring at the piano, with its keys covered; remembering certain music. I would feel a surge of pity, and be glad I could feel it. Wouldn’t I be a monster if I couldn’t?

But the great fascination with her was gone. Evaporated. And with it, the “love” I had believed would last forever. I could
remember
feeling it, but that was in the past. It was as though she had died, too. (“You see, she had
stopped being
the person I knew. She had become another woman.”) She had said that about her mother, the way she had felt about her mother after spying on her in the hut. I was aware, even then, at fourteen, of the ironies and parallels between Ursula’s trauma and mine. I had repeated her history; I had visited upon the adult Ursula her own childish betrayal. Yet I also felt betrayed. I felt … somehow … 
used
by Ursula, made to perform by her as the catalyst-figure in her tragedy. She had led me on with her charms; she had sown her seeds of suggestion; she had done everything but give me cues! She had been a witch, I decided, able to make me perform in her story, robbing me of the chance to be the heroine of my own story. But I was no longer bewitched. I felt sorrow and guilt about Julian, but, I convinced myself, it would have happened sooner or later, probably. I remembered how he had been talking, the night of his death. And hadn’t she told me how he had wanted to die after Karl had gone out of his life? I did, truly, feel pity for her, for the wasted existence she was now doomed to, in that house filled with its terrible history. (With the romantic blindness of the young, it never occurred to me that she could leave the house, go somewhere else and start over. Something in me didn’t even want it.) But the pity I felt for her left me free. I was glad not to be obsessed by her anymore. Glad not to be always wondering what she was doing, wondering if I felt “too much” for her: I felt like someone who had come in close contact with a fatal illness and survived—though others had not been so lucky. I hoped to get on with my own life, even if there were not many exciting prospects in this village. I frankly hoped to avoid meeting her.

Aunt Mona and I became buddies. She would join me in the living room, put her feet up, and watch her programs, the sound turned low, while I did my homework.

“You don’t have to keep it that low,” I said one evening.

“I don’t want to disturb your concentration.”

“You won’t. I don’t mind the sound.”

“Well, if you’re sure, maybe I will turn it up just a little.”

We drifted into a pattern. I would do some homework, watch the programs at the same time, and then we would talk during the commercials. My homework wasn’t very demanding. I envied Joan Dibble her small private school in Kingston They were studying the Etruscans, a mysterious, artistic race of people in Italy who never got anywhere; but Joan said her teacher was going to prove they were better than the Romans. That kind of learning seemed more interesting than Checks and Balances, which I had already learned about last year in Fredericksburg.

“I know Louise is pleased with herself for being a working girl,” said my aunt during a commercial, “but I think she’s being exploited.”

My mother had answered an ad in the paper, and now worked from ten to three on weekdays in a boutique that a lady named Barbara Feldman ran out of her own home. Mott had found her a secondhand car she could afford, so she no longer had to depend on Aunt Mona for transportation. Dr. Feldman was a dentist, and Barbara Feldman had told my mother that even if they didn’t make a profit it was all right, because her husband could claim “Barbara’s Boutique” as a tax write-off.

“She seems happy,” I told Aunt Mona. “I mean, she soaks her feet when she comes home, but I don’t think she feels exploited.”

“I didn’t say she feels exploited, I said
I
think she’s being exploited. I know the ways of the world better than Louise, because I’ve been out fighting in it longer. Where else could that woman have found someone who would take that insulting pittance of a wage,
and
unpack all the stock,
and
dress the window,
and
stand on her feet all day,
and
model the clothes? I think it’s an insult to someone of Louise’s background.”

“But she said she enjoys the modeling. And she likes talking to the women. And the thing she likes most of all is that she can get home about the same time Jem does.”

“I suppose so,” Aunt Mona conceded. “But if it were me, I
wouldn’t put up with it. I just thank my stars I passed my real-estate boards. Now, look out, world, this gal is going to make some money.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Oh, travel a little. See the world. Go claim my share of adventure and romance. I could hardly ask Mott to pay for
that
, now, could I? Though the dear soul probably would if I asked him.”

“What about Becky?”

“Oh, I’ll wait until Beck goes to college. That gives me eight years to make my fortune. I’ve got it all planned. In eight years I’ll only be thirty-nine. I know that seems ancient to you, but there’ll still be plenty of kick left in this old gal. I have a lot to make up for!”

In eight years,
she
would be fifty-two. (“You are turning into a woman,” she had said, “and I … I am turning into an old woman.” “
You
won’t be old at fifty,” I had protested. “Ah, Justin, it’s such an experience just to watch your face.… 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, and protégées grow wings and take off blithely from the nests of their aging mentors.”)

One evening during a commercial, Aunt Mona said, “Well, guess what I heard through the grapevine today.”

“What?”

“That Adelaide Cristiana has forgiven her husband. No reproaches, no recriminations, complete amnesty. The subject never to be mentioned between them again. On the condition that he never see her again.”

“That seems fair, I guess.”

“Yes, it’s probably the best all around. She’s got the new baby now. That makes five kids. You can hardly walk away from a wife and five kids, not to mention all that livestock. Not even for Cleopatra. The town wouldn’t be big enough to hold the two of you if you did.”

“What was the new baby?”

“You mean you don’t know? You mean Ed didn’t tell you?”

“Are you kidding? He hardly speaks to me. When he and Ann get on the bus every morning, they can hardly bring themselves to look at me.”

“Oh, you poor child! Why didn’t I think—!” She shook her plumage violently at her own stupidity; her earrings went into frenzies. “They know you were there—they connect you … but you mustn’t think they hate you, or anything like that. Put yourself in their place. Wouldn’t you feel hardly able to look at someone who had been there when—?”

“I’ve already done that. I don’t blame them. I’d behave the same way myself.”

“You’re a doll, Justin. I told Louise there was no need to worry about you. I’m a close observer of people, and I knew from the beginning you were a smart, sensible girl. You’re feeling lonely and shaken, but, my goodness, that’s normal. You were with them so
much
this summer!”

(“… 
I said, ‘Louise, I’ve known Justin going on two months now, I’m a close observer of people, and in my opinion she’s a smart, sensible girl. She’s been brought up to tell right from wrong. Now, for some reason, she’s taken a shine to Ursula DeVane, and Ursula DeVane seems to have taken a shine to
her.
I think we can trust Justin to get what she can out of knowing this woman, who
is
a cultured person, whatever airs she puts on—and leave the rest alone.
’ ”)

“Well, it was a boy, the new baby,” Aunt Mona went on, even though the program had started up again, and it was
I Love Lucy
, one of her favorites. “I guess they’re glad; you can always use another boy around a farm. But, you know, your mother and I were discussing it again the other night, and we both agreed the whole thing could have been hushed up a lot more. If only she hadn’t told the coroner everything, and played on Mott’s sense of honesty to tell the coroner. There was no need for the whole thing to be all over town. What good did it do? I mean, it couldn’t help the poor brother, he was already out of his misery. Why did she have to dramatize everything to the hilt? I told Louise it was almost as though she
wanted
to paint herself as the scarlet woman.”

I had had similar thoughts myself.

I made new friends at school. Although I cherished the image of myself as a deep and solitary creature by nature (“You gave me the impression you were just a lonely waif, all by yourself in an alien land,”
she
had said), I was a sociable person by upbringing. My grandfather had taught me to be curious about the lives of others; my grandmother had instructed me in the art of conversing with people in their own language, and had reminded me frequently that listening is also an art. And I had long recognized in myself—I am still not comfortable with the knowledge—that I had an enormous need to be liked. This caused me to invest considerable energy and imagination into “putting myself over” as a likable person—as I would later learn to project images of different characters to an audience.

The ninth-grade math teacher, who was also the football coach, nicknamed me “Dixie” on the first day of school because of my accent, and the name caught on. I was surprised to find, as the weeks went by, that I didn’t resent it. On the contrary, it made everything easier. It gave me a new persona—a quick-smiling, fluent one, to whom shyness and brooding were anathema—and provided many more people with access to me. “Hi, Dixie,” the captain of the football team called out as we passed each other. “Oh, hi there,” I called back, not at all shy or worried about what he was thinking of me: it was “Dixie” I was playing, Dixie with her quick (if shallower) smile, and a whole set of mannerisms that made the day flash by with a minimum of self-consciousness and doubt. And she became “popular,” more than the low-key Fredericksburg Justin had been among her old cronies. There I had been one of a group. Here I was something singular, exotic. The magnolia surrounded by cornfields. But such a “friendly” magnolia! A magnolia who “really cared about people” and “had an interested word for everybody.” Being Dixie made it far less embarrassing when I passed Ed or Ann in the halls or saw them on the school bus twice a day.
“Hi!”
Dixie would say, with not a bit of memory resonating in her chipper tone. “Hi, there,” more pertly, as the crystal of her “popularity” hardened around her like a multifaceted shield. She was not hurt by their coldness as much as I would have been. And before I left
the village, I am sure
they
saw me more as “Dixie” than as the girl who, last May, had pretended she could ride, the obsessed and lonely girl who had pedaled past their house one too many times for the good of the family, the girl whose hand Ed had held as if it were a creature that might escape. Or the girl who remembered what she had seen at the pond.