The Finishing School (33 page)

“You mean, he asked you to
marry
him?”

“Don’t sound so incredulous, Justin. I’m not exactly a hopeless spinster.… I was even less of one then. I had barely turned thirty.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t, I was only teasing.
Any
way …” And she waved my apology aside, eager to pursue this odd story that had risen up out of nowhere and come between us at the outset of this beautiful day, which was to have been for the two of us alone. I was caught up in the story and wanted to know what had happened, but I hated sharing the station wagon with the invisible spirit of the clever, cosmopolitan Kitty, whose “unconventional style” was so amusing, whose family disaster was so much more dramatic than mine. “Kitty had told her father she loved me and wanted me for a stepmother,” Ursula went on. “And he put the whole thing to me frankly: nothing but his daughter’s happiness would ever induce him to marry again. He said I was an attractive, cultured woman, and that was enough for him: it would be an honor for him to claim me as his wife before the world. As far as our private life went, he said, I could have my choice: I could simply accept and become his daughter’s stepmother, and Kitty and I could live wherever we wanted; or, if I decided I wanted the full conjugal rights of marriage, he would be only too happy to oblige. Over crèmes de menthe I thanked him for the compliment, but explained I was not ready to marry, that my French fiancé had been killed in the war and it would be a long time indeed before I could think of marriage. And if I did marry, I said, it would be because I loved someone and didn’t want to live without him and because he felt the same way. ‘Oh,’ he said then, ‘if it’s love you want, we can manage that, too.’ He was obviously not accustomed to having his deals turned down. He said, now that he thought of it, he was beginning to fall in love with me already, and that if we went out to dinner a few more times, perhaps I would start to fall in love with him. ‘It’s certainly not what I had in mind when I came out this evening,’ he said, giving me an unsavory wink, ‘but I’m willing to broaden my offer. I’m not sure how happy it will make
Kitty
if we fall in love, but I’m willing to experiment.’ It was at this point I realized
there was something fishy about the entire evening, but I was naïve in some ways, even though I was thirty years old, but it was not till I got back to my place that I understood the full extent of my naiveté. I told Kitty’s father that I was exhausted and that I didn’t think his plan could work under any circumstances, and he took me back to the brownstone next door to the school where I and several of the other teachers had little studio apartments. He kissed my hand and told me to call him if I changed my mind. ‘Kitty won’t let you off as easily as I did’ were his last words.

“He was right. Kitty was waiting for me in my apartment. She had climbed up the fire escape and broken a windowpane to get in. When I turned on the light, there she was in my bed, without a stitch on. She smiled up at me mischievously and said, in French, ‘You see, my darling, I fixed everything. Now we can be together forever and travel where we like and it will all be perfectly
comme il faut.
’ She was
very
annoyed when I didn’t follow the script she had been preparing for weeks in her head. I sat down and tried to reason with her. I realized that the schoolgirl crush had been something more. But I now learned that she had been this way for years, that her father knew it and found nothing wrong with it, as long as it made her happy, and that her father had assumed
I
was of the same persuasion and was entirely willing to marry his daughter’s lover in order to give us
carte blanche.
She told me that I had given her every indication that I felt the same. I was flabbergasted! I protested, but to no avail. She presented me with evidence—or what
she
considered evidence. There was the day when I had looked at her a certain way, or touched her hand in such-and-such a way when we were performing our little French skit in class in which she played the part of Jean-Louis De Rossignol. I had blushed at her compliments, she said; I had accepted her gifts; and once I had answered a note of hers, which she said was a love note but I had thought was a joke: I had thought she was simply prolonging the ‘Jean-Louis De Rossignol’ courtship skit, and I had playfully responded. But—here she was, in my
bed.
And the more I tried to protest, or to reason with her, the more emotional she became.
She accused me of leading her on, of making her fall in love with me, and she threatened to scream and wake all the teachers and tell them I had lured her to my room and tried to seduce her if I didn’t get into bed with her and hold her. The old Phaedra revenge on Hippolytus, you know.”

I did not know what “the old Phaedra revenge on Hippolytus” was, but, just now, there were other things I wanted to know more. “
Did
you get into bed with her?”

“I compromised. I lay on top of the covers and spent most of the night holding her and stroking her head—as a mother would—and explaining to her why this thing could not be. Finally, around four a.m., I convinced her to climb quietly back down the fire escape and go to her room. But that wasn’t the end of it, by any means. She pursued me the rest of that semester, alternating between dolefulness and aggressiveness. Thank God she transferred at the end of the year to another school. But one of the teachers later told me that Kitty had ‘confided’ to a number of people that she had ‘spent a night’ in my room, and however much I protested that nothing had happened, my reputation was never the same. Not that it was a matter of life and death: our headmistress was ‘of the persuasion’ herself, though she was positively puritanical when it came to safeguarding the innocence of our students. In her opinion, I imagine, I had made a foolish tactical error but had been wise enough not to repeat it. Now, if it had been another
teacher
, she would no doubt have blessed our union and welcomed us into the fold.”

We were ascending a steep road now, the old station wagon laboring in low gear. At each new curve, more and more of the valley spread out below us. But the lovely view had been dimmed for me by the story of Kitty. It had raised all sorts of murky questions and speculations.

After we had driven in silence for a few minutes, Ursula said, “Justin, you look unhappy. You don’t mean you’ve never heard of lesbians?”

Back in Fredericksburg there had been two dancing teachers, Miss Drake and Miss Culpepper, who lived together over their dance studio, and attended the Episcopal church every
Sunday, snuggling together to take communion at the rail. I had known, in that subliminal way that children know things, that these two women were “different”: I sensed it in the way my grandmother always greeted them after church. She spoke to them almost tenderly, as though they were wounded or handicapped and she didn’t want to show that she had noticed.

“I think I knew what they were, but nobody ever used the word,” I said.

“Well, most people call them lesbians,” said Ursula, adding, after a moment, in her schoolmistress tone, “after the Greek island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived and wrote her poems.”

“We’ll walk from here,” she announced, parking the station wagon on the left side of the road. Below was a sweeping view of the valley, with the lumpish primordial shapes of the Catskills beyond. On the other side of the road was a steep, forested bank.

“But where’s the hotel?” I asked.

“Oh, up the hill a bit. I thought we’d walk the old bridle path. That’s the way we always got in when we were young. If you drive in at the hotel gate, you have to pay for a day pass. This way is free.”

“Oh.” Did she mean we were going to sneak in?

“Since you are young and strong, I’ll let you carry the backpack with our lunch. It’s Julie’s Army backpack. All his old Army issue comes in very handy. See, today I’m not only wearing his fatigues, but I’ve also got on his marching boots.” She stuck out a foot clownishly. “We’re both size nine, isn’t that fortunate?”

She spun me around and strapped the pack to my shoulders. Then we crossed the road and started climbing the bank. She went first, quite agile in the heavy boots, and kept offering me a hand when I lost my foothold in my sneakers.

The instances of physical contact between us had always been like special treats to me: I could count the times that she had put an arm around my shoulders, or laid a hand on top of mine, or corrected my posture by thwacking the side of her hand
against my back. I had loved such moments, and, up until now, had found nothing wrong in hoarding them in my memory or hoping for more. But when she had strapped the pack to my back, giving me a brisk, affectionate pat on the rear when she was finished, and each time she now grabbed my hand to haul me up the slope, I realized my pleasure was no longer innocent. I still felt the specialness of her touch, and wanted it, but now I was afraid there was something wrong with me because I wanted it. Was I one of those women who loved other women? What would Ursula do if she discovered she had harbored
another
one all summer? I tried to imagine her describing me to some future friend: “… there was this young girl who moved here from Virginia, she was very sweet at first, and such a good little companion, such a good
listener.
My brother and I became quite fond of her. But it got unpleasant at the end. What she wanted was … not what I was able to give. I’m not built that way myself, though I suppose I lay myself open to suspicion.…”

I clambered up the last stretch of bank unaided, even though I stumbled twice and Ursula kept offering her hand. “All right, Miss Independent”—she laughed—“have it your own way.”

We reached the bridle path, which wound alongside a sheer rock-faced bluff. As we began to walk, Ursula explained the history of these rocks, which were millions of years old, and the history of this mountain range. The outline of it, which we could see so well from her terrace, had been chiseled and polished, she said, into its present form by glaciers during the Ice Age. But my mind kept escaping back obsessively into what she would think of me if she were to decide I was not normal, and I was aware of losing the very details I should be storing up to relate to my mother and Aunt Mona as proof of an edifying day.

“What is your mother going to do with the rest of her life?” Ursula suddenly asked. “I mean, she can’t go on being a widow forever and living with Mona Mott. She’s still young. And quite attractive, too.”

“She’s teaching herself typing from a book. After Jem starts school in the fall, she’s hoping she can get some kind of job in
Kingston. Maybe as somebody’s secretary. Or at least as a receptionist.”

“Hmm. That’s very enterprising of her, but not her
style
, somehow.”

“What do you think her style is?” I was curious to hear Ursula’s “pronouncement” on my mother, even though it felt disloyal to want to.

“Oh, a sort of … 
princesse éloignée.
She has this faraway, above-it-all aura about her. One gets the feeling she would never easily let herself be known to anybody. Of course, many people find this sort of remoteness fascinating. Men especially: ‘the eternally mysterious female.’ ” Ursula’s voice took on its melodic lilt of irony, but beneath that lilt I detected a fascination for this woman who did not quite like her. I could tell, from the energy with which she was pursuing her description of my mother, that Ursula found the subject interesting and perhaps envied my mother a little.

“My own mother had something of the
princesse éloignée
about her,” Ursula went on, “but, in her case, it was affected. She pretended to be remote in order to cover up her deficiencies and insecurities. But your mother doesn’t strike me as the affected type. On the contrary, she strikes me as someone who knows exactly who she is.”

Here a difficult choice presented itself. We could pursue the topic of my mother and I could unburden myself of my conflicting thoughts on the matter while at the same time satisfying Ursula’s obvious interest in what made her tick. Or I could take advantage of this opportunity to find out more about Ursula’s mother: after all, she had brought up the subject twice already today. There might never be such a good opportunity again.

“What happened to your mother?” I asked Ursula. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” replied Ursula a little too breezily, as if she had been waiting for my question. “I assumed you knew
something
by the very fact you never asked.”

“Well … I …”

“The Cristiana children told you, probably. Any number of
people might have told your aunt. Everyone around Clove old enough to remember knows that my mother had to be institutionalized. It was no secret at the time. Our father informed the community when it was necessary to send her away. It was a comfortable private institution, of course, even though it was a strain on Father’s finances. Several years later, she died in the same institution and Father informed the community of her death. He was a lawyer, he was privy to other families’ secrets and sorrows, and he felt he owed others some accounting of our sorrow. He did not tell them all the
details
, of course. Nobody tells all the details, do they? Almost everyone lies a little. Some people lie a lot; they even lie to themselves. My father used to say it was a rare person who came to the office to seek his advice who could actually tell an accurate story of how his grievance came about. That’s because most people run from what they can’t understand—or don’t want to understand. Lying is a way of running. My mother’s madness was a lie: I believe that. I believe madness is often the show we put on when we haven’t got what we wanted. Only, by the time you put yourself in the hands of the doctors, you’ve locked yourself into a part you have to keep on playing. At least until someone proposes another part for you. That’s what happened to our mother. She lost her appetite one day and a doctor asked her if she was trying to starve herself. That gave her the inspiration: she stopped eating altogether, and, despite the doctors’ efforts to feed her intravenously, she succeeded in starving herself to death. People around here never knew that part. Father withheld the details even from Julie, who was still only a little boy. Julie only found out from me much later, after he came back from the Army.”