The Finishing School (41 page)

“You don’t understand,” I said to my mother, wanting to hurt her as much as I could, “because you don’t understand
me.
I may be your daughter, but I’ve come to the sad conclusion that you don’t understand the way my mind works or what is important to me. You just aren’t capable of it.”

I watched long enough to see her whiten at the lips. Then I left the kitchen. I went back upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and listened to the destruction of my sanctuary. As the morning grew brighter and hotter, the quality of the noise changed. I knew it was because there was less resistance each time the big machine lurched forward with its destroying blade. I knew that by now the house as I had known it existed only in my memory.

On the other side of my closed curtains, I saw the clear blue outline of the little bottle Ursula had sent me for my birthday. On that morning, I had awakened full of longing for the old life in Fredericksburg; now I would have accepted the earlier part of this summer, when Ursula DeVane still shone from the distance as my unblemished heroine, and the old farmhouse stood securely on the hill—a silent and trusted repository for my daydreams and meditations on life. I considered getting up and parting the curtains, banishing the milkmaids into shadowy
folds, so the bottle could “assert its blueness,” as Ursula had put it in her letter; but the present hopelessness of “Raspberry Ice” suited my mood better. When my mother found me lying in its muddy, mauve gloom, she would realize just how depressed I was and would be sufficiently worried to overlook the harsh things I had said.

She was a long time in coming upstairs, and when she did I could see that she had not forgotten my words. She did not come over to the bed and kiss me and stroke my head. Standing formally in the doorway, she simply said she was about to take Jem shopping for school things in Kingston and asked if I would like to go along.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“It might improve your outlook on life to get out in the sunshine and look at some fall clothes. Becky is coming. We’ll probably stay in Kingston for lunch.”

“Fine, you all go on,” I said, thinking of the good time they would have without me. “If I get hungry, I’ll fix myself a sandwich.”

She continued to stand there, in her formal way, looking at me as if I were a problem to be solved, rather than a flesh-and-blood daughter. “I don’t know …” she began, “I think I’d feel better if you came along. I feel uneasy leaving you here by yourself, in the mood you’re in.”

“If you think I have to go, then of course I have to go,” I said, raising myself up with a sigh, though I was relieved that I would not have to stay here by myself.

“Yes, I do think so,” she said coolly. “Soon you’ll be an adult, and then you can do whatever you please. But, for a few more years, I’m afraid you’re going to have to please me.”

“At this rate, I probably won’t make it to adulthood,” I said tragically.

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“Everything is being taken away.” I began to cry. “By the time I’m grown up, there’ll be nothing worth living for.”

Whether it was my tears, or my words, she came in and sat down on the corner of my bed. She looked at me gravely, but did not touch me.

“I may not be capable of understanding the way your mind works,” she said slowly, “but I will tell you how it looks to me from where I sit. You haven’t had a bad summer. In fact, you’ve had a pretty good summer. You’ve had places to go and things to keep your mind busy. You’ve had Joan, whom you say you like, and Joan’s nice pool to swim in; you’ve had the interest of Miss DeVane, who has interested you, too. You are always animated when you come back from a visit with her; my guess is, you have had at least one person this summer who understands how your mind works—”

“I didn’t really mean—”

“No, let me finish. The other night, you went out with a boy you seem to like, and in another week you’ll start back to school, where there’ll be more new friends and new things to learn, and, who knows, maybe even more people who are capable of understanding how your mind works. And underlying all this—I know it seems trivial to you—is a house to come home to, and food put on the table for you, and people who care what happens to you, and love you, and want you to have the luxury—yes, the luxury—of making sense of the world in small, safe doses until you have built up a character strong enough to last you the rest of your life. You have a home, and you have me in it, whatever my failings. So, forgive me if I don’t see that ‘everything is being taken away’ from you, though it may look that way this morning.”

“I’m sorry for what I said downstairs. It was just that they were tearing down the house, which was my important place, and there you were, spoiling Becky with her buckwheat cakes. I just wanted to hurt you, that was all.”

“Well, you did a pretty good job.” Then she relented and kissed me. “Now get dressed properly and let’s see if we can’t find something nice in Kingston for you to wear back to school.”

“She was the most wonderful woman I had ever met,” Rebecca Mott, counselor and psychologist to precocious criminals, would tell me years afterward, across the table in a vegetarian
restaurant of her choosing. “After you came to live with us, and I saw how wonderful she was, I used to fantasize that she had had an affair with my father while your father was still overseas. I had her meet my father when he was on leave after sinking that Japanese sub, and they conceived me. Your father was off in Europe and never even knew. She went back to you and your grandparents in that snobby house in Virginia, and nobody knew anything. She wore a tight corset to keep them from knowing. Then, just when she started to get big, she went off to another town by herself and had me. And my father wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t, she said it would hurt too many people. So he met my mother and told her, ‘I will marry you on the condition that you agree to raise this baby as our own and never tell a soul.’

“And then when your father was killed in that car accident, and your grandparents were dead, and there was nothing to stay in Fredericksburg anymore for, your mother said to herself, ‘Now there is nothing to stop me from being with my other daughter.’ And she called my father and said, ‘I want to be with Becky. You’ll have to find a way.’ So my father moved to the houseboat and separated from my mother so my real mother could come and live in our house. I carried that fantasy around in my head for years … years after you three had moved out of our house and gone back to the South. I kept that fantasy alive even when I was old enough to realize that the dates would have made it impossible. There was no physical way I could be your mother’s child.

“But you I could never understand. With a beautiful, kind mother like that, you preferred to spend time with that ugly, crazy woman over on Old Clove Road. I’ll never understand that. But I was glad you were out of the way. It was so much better when you weren’t around. I remember that day when she took us all to Kingston to buy clothes for school. I tried on this royal-blue sweater and she said, ‘Oh, Becky, you look so pretty in that sweater, I am going to buy it for you myself.’ And then we went to that cafeteria for lunch and I remember I had chicken à la king—it was one of the best meals I ever ate, even though I don’t
care for meat anymore—and the whole day would have been perfect, except for you moping around. What was the matter with you? All you did was sigh and mutter under your breath about ‘when are we going home?’ I remember wishing you would get run over by a car. I told my analyst about that. She said it was a natural reaction. I didn’t mind Jem. He could be a nuisance, but he was okay. Except I was jealous of him getting to have all those naps with her.”

“I wanted to get back to Lucas Meadows that day,” I tell my cousin, “because I wanted there to be time to ride my bicycle over to Old Clove Road and see that crazy woman. I can’t agree with you that she was ugly. I loved the way she looked, probably just as much as you loved the way my mother looked. I needed to see her because I was upset about that old farmhouse’s being bulldozed. I used to sit up there almost every evening, and it had come to be a sort of extension of myself. And I felt she would understand this in a way my mother couldn’t. But, as it turned out, we got back from Kingston too late for me to go over there before supper. And then after supper I decided to go anyway. Oh God, how I wish I hadn’t.”

“Oh. Was that the famous evening?”

“That was the famous evening.”

My cousin, whose looks haven’t changed much since she was a pert-faced girl, flicks her flat gray gaze at me. “You still feel guilty about it?”

“Of course I do. I always will.”

“You ought to try analysis.”

“Oh, I’ll probably just stick with my guilt. I work a lot of things out in my acting. Maybe that’s why I hold on to my little storehouse of pain. Every so often I come across a real treasure in there that I can use in my acting.”

My cousin shrugs. “Suit yourself.” She looks at her watch. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the real world.”

She never came to see me once, the whole seventeen months I was in that play. She didn’t apologize or make excuses. Once, during the run, when we were having lunch like this, she flicked her eyes at me and said tonelessly, “Everyone’s talking about
that play you’re in; that must make you feel good.” It was the nearest she had come to acknowledging my success, and I felt absurdly grateful for even that tidbit. Yet she’s got a reputation for being a wizard with those murderous kids everyone else has given up on. Something in her connects to them and they respond. My cousin still interests me more than I interest her, and that, I suppose, is why I persist in asking her out to lunch and enduring her slights. I always have to invite her; but she always accepts. One day, I keep telling myself, I am going to crack the code of Becky. Some days I feel closer to success than others.

It gets dark earlier at the end of August, but for those who eat at the family hour, there is a good-size portion of light left between supper and dark. Children can play for another hour outdoors; it is still safe to ride a bicycle; a man or a woman so inclined can go out alone for a walk and return home before the sky has lost its final translucence and people start to wonder where they are.

After supper I made myself go up the hill to survey what was left of my old sanctuary. I went slowly, my head down, in case anybody was watching me from our house. I was acting my sorrow a little, just as someone in mourning feels she has to put on an outward show of sorrow even though her grief really is sincere. After we had come back from Kingston, I had heard Mother and Aunt Mona speaking, in low voices, about my being “upset.” I had stood on the stairs outside the kitchen and eavesdropped as my mother told my aunt how I had rushed down and wanted to call Mott and ask him to stop the destruction. I thought it was loyal of my mother not to tell Aunt Mona the other thing I had said. (Now I realize that she was far too hurt by it to want to repeat it. The fact is, she still hasn’t completely forgiven me, because, every few years or so, when we are talking, she will slip in that old, deadly phrase: “Of course I probably don’t understand the way your mind works, but …”)

“I’ll phone Mott later, and maybe he can explain to her why it had to come down,” I heard Aunt Mona say.

Some children from the development were wandering
around on the hill, gaping at the interesting heap of rubble that, only this morning, had been a house. A toilet stuck up incongruously from the piles of splintered boards. That fallen tower of bricks had been the chimney. The children parted warily, and somewhat respectfully, to make room for me, as though I were the owner of the house and had come back, after an absence, to find it devastated. They watched curiously as I walked, deliberately grave, around the boundaries of the old farmhouse. It had seemed to take up so much more space when it was standing. Tomorrow, Aunt Mona had said, the men would come back and load the lumber into trucks. “It’s good, strong, seasoned wood,” she had said. “Some builder will be tickled to death to buy it.” If it was such good, strong wood, then why did the house have to come down?

Jem joined me, still out of breath from running up the hill. “You’re not going to cry, are you?” he demanded.

“Of course not,” I said, addressing myself to the rest of the junior audience as well as to him. “I just think it’s a shame, that’s all. They could at least have taken away the toilet. It’s like leaving someone’s underpants on top of their casket.”

One of the children snickered.

It was impossible to say a real good-bye to the place with all these children milling around. Jem, who now played with a couple of them, jumped up on a board that had fallen on top of a brick, and walked it, seesaw-fashion. Several others followed suit, one small girl falling off. Dumb Mott, I thought; the house is far more dangerous as a heap of rubble than it was standing there minding its own business. And I had actually wanted to phone him to save the place!

I turned and started back down toward the development. Dreariness filled me like a lethal injection. The sky was still bright. The sun still shone on the tops of the trees, though the ground was already in shadow. Yet there was nothing to look forward to, nothing to forestall my return to ordinary family life, to the inevitable drawing of my bedroom curtains, when the milkmaids would flounce once more around me, flashing their pert, uniform smiles.

“Wait, Justin!” Jem caught up with me. He took my hand.
“What are you going to do now?” The disconsolateness in his voice betrayed that the end-of-day malaise had hit him, too.

Suddenly I knew what I was going to do. And nobody was going to stop me. To make certain of it, I wasn’t going to ask permission.

I didn’t say anything until we were in the garage, where I kept my bike. Then I said, “Jem, I need to be alone for a while. Will you please tell Mother I’ve gone for a ride and not to worry; I’ll be back before dark.”

I swung up on the bike and was off down the driveway before he could answer.

“I wasn’t going to see you until tomorrow. I made this silly rule that I wouldn’t see you for a whole week. The reason was, I had to think about what you told me, I had to decide how I felt, all on my own, without you watching my face. At first, I’ll admit, it seemed strange that anybody could do that to their mother. But things happened today that—well, I won’t say I would betray my mother in the exact same way you did, but I see now that she can’t understand me the way you do. And I did hurt her today. You and I are two of a kind: we both hurt our mothers.