The Finishing School (40 page)

“You don’t need to be, Louise. Beck and Jimbo will ride the same bus home from elementary school. We’ve already gone over that. You just worry about finding the right job for yourself.”

“ ‘Middle-aged woman, to keep house for lady living alone. Hours flexible.’ I wonder if I qualify for ‘middle-aged’?”

“Are you just trying to make me mad, Louise? You? Cleaning somebody’s house?”

“Well, if it’s an honest living and it pays well … If I were alone in the world, I wouldn’t mind being somebody’s live-in housekeeper. I’d take care of their house and they’d take care of me.”

“That’s just ridiculous, Louise. That’s just irresponsible. I can’t understand your attitude. I can’t understand a person not wanting to be in charge of her own life.”

My mother smiled ruefully.

“Shall I turn on the dishwasher,” I asked, “or will it be too noisy?”

“Oh, turn it on, Justin,” Aunt Mona said. “We’re getting noplace fast over here.”

“I think I’ll go for a bike ride,” I said.

“I was wondering when you were going to remember your friend Ursula DeVane,” said my know-it-all aunt. “Or maybe you want to see someone else on Old Clove Road today. A certain gentleman on crutches who just might be sitting on the porch.”

“I do not,” I said, angrily turning on the dishwasher.

“Come and kiss me,” said my mother as I started off in a huff. Her hand lingered on my hair after we had kissed. I saw from the way she glanced at me that she believed Ed Cristiana had displaced Ursula in my affections and that was why I had snapped at Aunt Mona: for guessing the truth. Although I was glad she was relieved of one of her worries, her mistake made me feel lonelier than ever.

There was no one sitting on the Cristiana porch. There was no one at the pond, either.

But it was still early. It was not even two. After my disappointment at not finding her there, I reasoned that this was the earliest I had ever come. I sat down on the crumbling doorstep of The Finishing School to wait. From my position I would be able to see where she would emerge from the pines. “Hi,” I’d say. “Boy, are you still sore from Tuesday’s hike?” “Well, hello there, Miss Independent,” she’d say, quickening her stride, “I was beginning to think you were angry at me.” “Why should I be angry at you?” “Ah, why indeed! For walking you like a soldier. For getting you drunk and making you cry. For telling you all those terrible stories about my family.” “No,” I’d say, “it’s just that I’ve been kind of busy. I had to go spend some time with my friend Joan, and then last night I went to the movies with Ed Cristiana.”

Time passed. It was so quiet I could hear the whish of the wind in the tops of the pines and the tiny drones of insects around the pond. Periodically, a katydid would dominate everything with its insistent announcement that winter was coming. School began next week. Where was she?

I got up to stretch my legs and walked around the pond. I imagined that I had brought my bathing suit and that I changed
into it and went for a swim and she found me in the pond. Or maybe I would even dive under and hold my breath and scare her, as she had done to me that time. But I knew I was too cowardly to go into that pond.

I went inside the hut and walked around, picturing how it must have looked when the roof was whole and there was furniture in it. Karl’s bed. Yet they had done it on the floor, she said, “her skirts pushed up and crushed … those clothes she was so careful about! And there were his bony knees and elbows, sticking out from more angles than I had thought possible.… They had put down the covers from his bed onto the floor.”

To have more room, I supposed. His bed was probably too narrow. A “tutor’s” bed. When the father had that bed moved in, he naturally assumed only the tutor would want to lie in it.

Ursula’s blanket—or, rather, Julian’s old Army blanket—was folded, palletlike, in the corner of the hut, just as it had been when I first surprised her lying on it, trying to read her book. That corner of the hut had been in sunshine when I first crossed its threshold, but now it was in shadow. “There I was, trying to reread Proust,” she had said when she was thanking me, ironically, for my dramatic entry into her day, “but he is all wrong for this year. I have reached a time in my life when I need to be refreshed by the unexpected.”

Had I, then, fulfilled my role for the summer as her “unexpected”? Maybe by now there was nothing unexpected left about me. Maybe I was a known quantity to her, and she was no longer “refreshed” by me. She knew when I was likely to come to the hut, and what I would say when I came; she also knew when I was likely to stay away. Probably she had driven away from Lucas Meadows on Tuesday afternoon, after our hike, smiling to herself and thinking: Poor Justin. I really overdid things today. I’ll bet anything she is resolving right this minute to stay away from me for a whole week. She’ll almost make it, too. She won’t break down until … let’s see … next Sunday afternoon.

She still did not come. The act of waiting, in such circumstances, contains a built-in paranoia that only intensifies as the frustration is prolonged. Of course she isn’t coming, I thought,
pacing around inside the hut, whose walls emanated an ancient smell of dampness and decay; she knows I’m down here, but there’s nothing more she needs from me. She even knows my answer to the question she had been dying to ask me. “What I want to know, Justin,” she had said, “is what you would have done if you had been in my place. Would you have done what I did, or do you think I was a monster?”

And what a pussyfooting answer I had given! “I’m not sure,” I had hedged. “I don’t know what I would have done. But I can understand why you thought you had to do what you did.”

Even that had been a lie. I didn’t understand. Maybe if I had risked saying, “I don’t understand, but I want to, I want to, more than anything,” she would be down here now. She was a woman of risks, she approved of risk-taking. And maybe she
wanted
me to judge her sternly. She would have respected me for it, and found me more interesting. But I had not said what I really felt, because I was afraid I would lose her. And now I probably
had
lost her. She thought of me as a predictable, polite little coward, not worth leaving the house for. No wonder she didn’t feel it worthwhile to walk to the pond to see if I was there. Old same-as-ever, pussyfooting Justin.

Why hadn’t I said, “No, I have to tell you the truth, Ursula. I would not have done what you did. I might have hoped somebody
else
would find her out and bring her to her senses, but I would not have betrayed my own mother even if she had murdered somebody. Because she’s my mother, and I couldn’t respect myself if I did a thing like that.”

I looked down at the Army blanket, folded into its pallet shape, and forced myself to imagine my mother rolling around on it, with her legs around a stranger. Nausea crept into my chest. I remembered the sound of my mother’s passion-cry, coming from behind the closed door of their bedroom in Fredericksburg, the afternoon of my birthday a year ago. The nausea rising into my throat, I snatched my father from his rightful place and put a stranger in the bed beside her and replayed the sound of her cry. If I had looked through the keyhole and seen this other man, who had, say, sneaked in through the window while
my father was downstairs reading a book, would I have gone down and told my father?

“No,” I croaked aloud in the empty hut.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be here anymore. The hut was changed now that I knew its history, and I didn’t like the things I thought here, or the way they made me feel. Ghosts were not just Halloween things in sheets; ghosts were real; ghosts lingered in the air when people had done things. The ghosts of their deeds lingered with them. How could
she
, especially, bear to come down here and lie on that blanket and read and think in the very place where she had seen what she had seen, and then done what she had done about it? How could she call such a place her refuge? And how could she make a joke of it, even on my behalf, by calling it a “Finishing School,” when a whole family, and one person’s
life
, really had been finished by it?

I couldn’t wait to get out of the hut, out of the woods. I tripped on a root and almost fell, I was hurrying so fast. I was afraid she
would
come now, and I didn’t want to see her, feeling the way I felt. My initial instinct to wait a whole week had been right, I told myself, running toward my bike. I had not yet assimilated all she had told me. I rode back down the haywagon path to Old Clove Road feeling I’d had a narrow escape. If she had come, she might have read things in my face that would have hurt her and then have made her hate me. Because people had to hate those who hurt them: it was self-preservation.

The strangest thing was that I still could love her. And, in some ways, I loved her more than ever. I felt, as I pedaled grimly uphill, that I would like to suffer or endure some great sacrifice on her behalf. It would be my payment to her for not being able to believe in her as I had wanted to. If I could suffer for her sake, I might be relieved of some of the pain I felt at losing her as my ideal.

At the top of the hill, where the land leveled off at the Cristiana farm, I was met by a new sight: Mr. Cristiana, whip in hand, was riding the stallion around the ring. Somehow, I had never imagined Turk with a rider on his back, and it was a letdown to see that proud, dangerous force trotting in a circle on a
tight rein, lifting his feet obediently to the rhythm imposed by the man rising and falling in the saddle. Mr. Cristiana saw me pass and waved, and I waved back.

All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough.

On Monday morning, I woke out of a deep sleep, knowing that something was wrong. In the first place, I never woke up this early. My mother was indulgent about letting me sleep as late as I wanted in summer, and sometimes I did not make it down to breakfast until ten o’clock. It was usually the light that finally woke me, streaming through the cotton fabric of my milkmaid curtains and shaming me into getting up. But today it was a noise unlike any I had ever heard before: a brutal, repetitive, metallic impact, followed by a creaking, splintering sound.

I lay there, staring groggily up at Ursula’s poster of the
Normandie
, which I had taped on the wall facing my bed. From my position, it was as if I were in the ocean and the prow of the great ship were bearing down on me. What could such a terrible noise be? And what was it doing here in our development? We’ll tell Mott and he’ll complain to IBM and IBM will give somebody hell, was my first reaction. Then I heard Jem’s shrill shriek and his feet pounding up the stairs. He burst into my room. “They’re smashing the house in!”

“What?” For a second, I thought he meant ours. But that couldn’t be. The sound was not close enough for that.

“The old farmhouse up on the hill! There’s this big old yellow bulldozer smashing it in! The front porch is already gone, I saw them do it!”

“Oh
no!
We’ve got to stop them!” I was already out of bed, fumbling in my closet for something to put on. “Run down and tell Mother to phone Mott at IBM and have him send somebody over to stop them!” Purple spots danced in front of my eyes, I had leapt up so violently from bed. “
Hurry
, Jem! Don’t just stand there.”

Jem raced downstairs and I heard him cry, “Call Mott!”

Shaking with outrage, I pulled on my underpants and shorts. There was no time for the stupid bra. Still buttoning my shirt, I ran to Aunt Mona’s bedroom, which had a view of the hill and the farmhouse. Just as I looked out the window, the yellow monster rammed its powerful blade into the front of the house. Jem was right, the porch was already gone—the front steps with it; now, at this latest blow, the whole front of the house shuddered and lurched forward. “Stop it!” I shrieked out of the window. But the man at the controls went on butting the trembling house with his machine.

I ran downstairs, half-crazy. Even if Mott was starting out right now, it might be too late when he reached Lucas Meadows. But it was worth a try. Maybe the house could be salvaged.

I stopped, appalled, at the entrance to the kitchen. There sat Becky, being served like a queen by my mother, who was setting a stack of hot buckwheat cakes in front of her. Nobody looked the least bit upset.

“Where’s Jem?” I demanded loudly.

My mother raised her eyebrows at my tone. “He’s gone back up the hill to watch them tear down that old house.” She reached across the table and handed Becky the syrup, which she could perfectly well have reached herself.

“You mean nobody has called Mott?” I said threateningly.

“What’s this about calling Eric?” said my mother. “He’s at work, he won’t want to be disturbed. Justin, what’s wrong with you? You aren’t even dressed properly—”

“They’re tearing down the house,” I screamed, “and you don’t even care! And even if you did care, you have no power! You can’t do anything! At least Mott works for a powerful organization. He can make them stop. I’m going to call him—”

“Justin, you are
not
going to call Eric Mott. Get control of yourself. That old house has been condemned. Eric was one of the people who kept after the village to get it condemned. It wasn’t safe for children to play around.”

She spoke of it already in the past. Outside, the sickening clanking, crushing, splintering noise went on. I knew it was already too late.

Becky, seeing that I was about to break down, stopped dousing her pancakes with syrup and watched me with interest.

“You mean you
knew
Mott was trying to get them to tear down the house,” I said, “and you didn’t even
tell
me?”

“Justin, I don’t understand why you are so upset about that old house. I know you go up there by yourself sometimes, but—”

Becky looked down long enough to cut a neat wedge of buckwheat cakes—her favorite breakfast, which Mother made for her frequently—with her knife and fork. She checked to see that the slabs of butter were securely inside, then poured a bit more syrup on the wedge and guided the dripping morsel to her mouth. Chewing with obvious pleasure, she resumed watching me. Even if I had been about to cry, that impudent little gaze would have dried my tears at their source.