The Finishing School (19 page)

I was still paralyzed by embarrassment and indecision when she shot up out of the water, laughing and sputtering.

“I haven’t done that in years!” she cried exultantly. She flung herself backward into the water with a splash and floated, regarding me with a wet grin. She was wearing a bathing suit. “I must have been under a whole minute, at least!” She looked extremely pleased with herself.

“I was imagining you’d drowned,” I said, resentful of her childish mirth.

“That’s the whole point.” She raised her head out of the water and squinted at me, then laughed. “Oh, Justin, if you could see your face. You must be careful with that face.
Everything
shows on it. I’m sorry I teased you, but I couldn’t resist. I heard you coming through the trees and I thought: I wonder if my breath’s as good as it once was. And it
was!
Once, Abel Cristiana and I got so good at this, we staged a double drowning. We had poor Julie in tears when we finally came up. Oh God, we were all so young then. Now look at us: feuding and looking the other way when we meet. I hope you brought your suit today. I brought mine specifically to protect your sense of modesty.”

“No,” I said. “I really can’t stay very long. I only came to thank you for the bottle.” I sounded stiff and ungracious. “I really did like it,” I added.

“I’m glad,” she replied, breaststroking around the pond with her head held up in a formal way. “It was nothing very much, but I wanted you to have it.” She seemed offended. It occurred to me then that she had hoped I would come, had looked forward to a long visit. The idea that I could wound her gave me a little thrill of superiority, and at the same time made me relent.

“I guess I can stay a while,” I said, “as long as I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all. Julie is interviewing two prospective pupils. Two brothers. I preferred to amuse myself down here rather than making chitchat with the mother. But it will be much nicer if you will stay and amuse me.” She smiled at me from the water, and I thought: She knows everything that has been passing through my head; she knows I know she was waiting for me, but she’s still in command. Her humor gives her a command I don’t have. Even if someone did hurt her, she would probably smile that funny smile that always starts with the twitching of her lips, as if she’s trying to keep it back, and then she would say something that would keep her in control.

“Well,” she said, “if you won’t come in, I’m coming out. My fingertips have shriveled.” She did a show-offy backward somersault and came up with her hair streaming behind her like a mermaid. With several brisk strokes she reached the edge and
hauled herself up the muddy bank. She wore an old woolen tank suit, one of those shapeless garments that remind you of school swimming classes, and I could see her stiff nipples sticking up beneath the wool. She had a lean, long-waisted body with broad shoulders and not very much bosom. Her legs were shapely, but I saw with the cruel eye of the young that the tops of her thighs were flabby.

Aware I was giving her the once-over, she immediately turned the tables on me, as she would always do when I was harboring criticisms. “Is it that you can’t swim?” she asked, tossing back her head and wringing her wet hair with both hands. “Because I would be happy to teach you. It would give us a worthwhile project for the summer.”

“I’ve been swimming since I was three years old,” I said (which was an exaggeration; it was nearer to six); “I went to the beach every summer with my grandmother and she taught me to swim.”

“Ah, then it must be that you just don’t like country ponds,” she said, stepping inside the hut. “You imagine all the creepy-crawly things in a pond, whereas”—I could hear her stripping off her wet suit—“an ocean has its own collection of sting-y, prickly things: jellyfish, crabs, sea urchins …” She laughed softly as she reeled them off. “I’d just as soon take my chances with the inhabitants of this pond; I’ve swum with the great-great-grandparents of every frog and turtle and water snake in it.…” She popped her head around the door and winked at me. “Just joking about the snakes, of course. Oh hell, I forgot my towel. Well, I’ll have to make do with this old blanket.” Sounds of energetic rubbing came from behind the door. “I was in a rush to get out of the house before those boys arrived with their mother. She would have expected me to give her a tour of the house. They all want a tour of the house.”

She emerged from the hut with the exuberant superiority of an athlete joining a sedentary friend. “If you can stay a while, we’ll go up to the house and get your other present as soon as Julie’s finished. The first time, he only does little tests, to find out how musical they are—or aren’t. It’s a bit dog-eared and faded,
but we thought it might inspire you, under the circumstances.” She strode over to a tree and slung the wet suit across a low branch.

“I guess I can,” I said. “I just have to be back for this surprise supper or something they’re giving me on my uncle’s houseboat. I’m not supposed to know about it, but my mother told me. She gave me my present earlier because it was just a family thing. I got my grandmother’s pearls.” I thought this sounded impressive.

“Oh my,” said Ursula, sitting down on the cracked stone threshold of the hut. She motioned me to sit down, too. “That must have been quite an occasion. You admired your grandmother, didn’t you?”

“Everyone admired her. My grandfather used to say she was the only woman he knew who would behave exactly the same way when nobody was looking.”

“My God, what a thought!” said Ursula. “Does that mean she was so sure of who she was that she never had to pretend, or was it a way of saying she had no private life?”

“I think he meant she was just
good
,” I said uncertainly. Nobody before had ever questioned my grandfather’s encomium. That Ursula seemed to find something questionable about it put me on the defensive.

With her characteristic quickness she saw that she had come close to profaning a family paragon and made amends by saying she had never known her grandparents on either side. “Father didn’t marry until he was almost fifty. His parents were already dead, and, as he couldn’t stand my mother’s people, we never saw them. Our mother’s family was from Albany. Father met her when he was serving his one term in the state senate. It was his first and last foray into government: he couldn’t wait to come home, where he could run things his own way without having to have a majority. He had known my mother for only a short time when he asked her to come back to Clove with him as his bride. She was barely twenty. I’ve often imagined how it must have been with them: he taken in by her youth and shyness and beauty, and she dazzled by his greater authority and position in
the world. Of course, when they got back to Clove it was a disaster. She didn’t fit in here, she realized she could never be her husband’s equal, and she pined away in loneliness and boredom. Father really shouldn’t have married at all; he was too critical of people. I’m the same way, I’m not marriage material either.”

I had never heard anyone speak so dispassionately of their own parents. “But if your father hadn’t married, you wouldn’t be here.”

She narrowed her eyes, paler than usual from the swim in the cold pond; her freckles stood out. It was fascinating and disconcerting that she could look like different people from minute to minute. With her wet, curly, uncombed hair and the sharp nose and the freckles, she looked like an urchin just now; in the water, her hair streaming back, her face tip-tilted to the sky, she had been a mermaid; at tea, with the dark lipstick and the green dress, she had been a formal older woman.

“I’m not so sure,” she said mysteriously. “I’m not so sure I wouldn’t be here, in some form or other, even if Father had never met our mother. I sometimes fancy that I am the living spirit of this family, reincarnated generation after generation since the ancient days of our ancestors, the Sires DeVeine, whose ruined fortress I visited in France. In those days, the name was spelled v-e-i-n-e.
Veine
means luck in French.
Coup de veine
: stroke of good luck.
Pas de veine
: rotten luck.
C’est bien ma veine
: just my luck. Sometimes in these incarnations I’m a man; sometimes a woman. Sometimes I’m rich, other times poor—like now. Sometimes I die quietly and happily in bed, a large and loving family gathered around me; other times I come to a violent end alone.” She said all this in an amused chant; I couldn’t tell for sure whether she was teasing or not.

“But if your father and mother hadn’t had you, how could you have gotten reincarnated in this life?” I asked.

“There are multitudes of DeVane families into which I could have been born. There are over a thousand in this country, according to my father’s survey. There are letters from many of these people in his files. His hobby was our family history. He wrote to DeVanes all over the world. If he hadn’t married, I
would have found my way back here through one family or another, somewhere in the world. When I went to France to visit our ancestors’ old stronghold, I stayed with a family of DeVanes in the nearby village of Pontarlier. Father had corresponded with them before he died. I came very close to marrying the son of that family. It was the only time in my life I have been that tempted to marry. Marius was his name, Marius DeVane. He was killed at the very beginning of the war, in the French Army. His mother wrote to me in London. She never forgave me for not marrying him.”

“Did you love him?” We were on solider ground with this Frenchman with the same surname, I thought, than with Ursula’s other possible reincarnations.

“He was my first love.” She stretched her arms above her head and gazed up at her outspread fingers. “I felt … we both felt … that we were parts of the same past. He had strong feelings about destiny, too; the way the past reincarnates itself in the present. We even discussed whether I might not have been his sister—or brother—or wife, in a previous existence. I see that polite little mask on your face, Justin, but if you are going to live a full life, you must understand that there must be ways of speaking about things we don’t completely understand. It never gets you further to rule things out just because they can’t be proved. Oh yes, I loved Marius, and the erotic aspect was just … well!” A flush spread over her face and neck. “But I couldn’t do it. You see, I had come to Europe to study acting, and I felt that if I married without ever trying for what I had wanted, I would be cheating myself. So we left it that I would go on to London, as planned, and then if we still felt the same, we might marry later. But there was to be no later; the war saw to that. Yet, somehow I knew, even before I left Pontarlier, that it would never happen. I felt it. When I got Mère DeVane’s letter in London the following spring, I knew what was in it before I opened it. It was fate. Do you know what the DeVane motto is, the motto that was on our crest in the days of the Crusades? It was in Old French, of course, but the free English translation is ‘Luck is our ruler—and our weapon!’ The tricky part of it is that you must bow to your luck when it comes, even if it is bad, and yet never give up trying to
turn it to your own ends. It’s tantamount to having a double destiny.” She scrutinized me with her penetrating eyes. “Can you understand that?”

“Is it like they teach you in religion sometimes? That God gives you free will, but He knows ahead of time how you’re going to use it?”

“Not
quite
,” replied Ursula, frowning. My answer had not come up to the mark. “Only, you see, in the spirit of our motto, you really can turn things around if you keep your courage and your wits.”

“But then …” I hesitated, uncertain whether or not to ask this.

“Yes?” she encouraged.

“Well, I mean … if it was your destiny to be an actress—”

“Ah, but I didn’t say it was my destiny to be an actress,” she interrupted quickly. “I only sensed it was
not
my destiny to marry Marius. I had planned to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and I was determined to go. I had waited for years, postponing it again and again because of my father’s long illness. I was twenty-six when I finally sailed for Europe on the
Normandie
, having buried my father and completely organized Julie’s recital at Carnegie Hall after his graduation from Juilliard. When I got on that ship, I said to myself, ‘Ursula, now it’s your turn.’ First I wanted to see where my ancestors had come from, and then I wanted to study acting: those were my goals. One must never confuse goals with destiny, although one often leads to the other. In my case, I
was
an actress—when I took the entrance exam at the Royal Academy, the principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes himself, told me I had an innate instinct for acting—but, as it turned out, my destiny was not to make my living by acting. And yet I have the comfort of knowing I was good, the one year I was in London. You’ve heard of George Bernard Shaw, I hope?”

I vaguely recalled a witty exchange between the playwright and Winston Churchill that my grandfather liked to quote. “Oh, sure,” I said, although I could not have named a single play Shaw had written.

“Well, he would sometimes sit in on rehearsals, when the
students were performing something of his. He was very old then, but he looked like a lean, cantankerous prophet, and he said the most wonderful things. One day, when I had been rehearsing for
Saint Joan
—the part I had to abandon in order to rush back to America—he came up to me afterward stroking his long white beard, and said, ‘You’ll make a very good Joan, Ursula, if you can remember that in the third scene you do not know you are going to be burned to death in the sixth.’ ”

As she imitated the clipped British voice of an old man, her face took on an excited, rapturous glow. Then she turned to me, looking somewhat arrogant, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Although my destiny has pointed me in another direction than acting, it gives me pleasure to remember that day: Shaw himself telling me I was going to make a good Joan. How many living actresses have a memory to compare to that?”

“Not many, I guess. But why did you have to rush back to America and abandon your play?”