The Finishing School (44 page)

“Did Mott tell you about them?” I asked, making my voice hard.

“Yes, he … last night he thought there was a chance of … well, saving some innocent people pain. Eric is a kind man, Justin, you should give him credit for that much. After you had
gone to bed, we did discuss the chances of keeping their secret, at least until Mrs. Cristiana has had her baby … maybe even longer. Eric said he believed you could be counted on to … keep your own counsel. But now I’m afraid things are too complicated for that.… I’m afraid it is all going to come out. Oh darling, I wish I could shield you from this, but I can’t.…”

“Shield me from
what?
” The look on her face was enough to make me sit up in bed.

My mother took me in her arms. “Ursula DeVane phoned Eric this morning. To ask if he would be willing to appear before the coroner—they always try to establish evidence of a motive, even when it’s— Oh, Justin, that poor woman’s brother hanged himself last night.”

Late that afternoon, Mott brought home my bike, lashed to his luggage rack. I watched from a window as he methodically unwound each piece of rope, lifted the bike tenderly to the sidewalk, propped it on its kickstand, then coiled up the ropes and returned them to the kit of useful items that he kept in the trunk of his car. He wheeled the bike up our cement driveway and into the garage. Although I could not see him there, I could imagine his self-satisfaction as he completed the safe return of one more cherished item to its proper home.

Then he came in, and accepted Aunt Mona’s offer of a cup of coffee. He had taken off early from work, he told us, and stopped by the coroner’s, as Ursula had asked him to do. Every member of the household, wanting to hear more, followed him to the kitchen.

“She really wanted you to tell
all?
” asked Aunt Mona, sliding a meaningful look toward Jem, who had been told that Mr. DeVane had died, but not how, and nothing about the “all” Aunt Mona was alluding to. As for my cousin Becky, I judged from her complacently knowing demeanor that she had been told as much as my mother knew; from up in my room, I had heard them buzzing away, after Jem had gone outside to play.

“I questioned that, myself,” said Mott, sipping his coffee
importantly. “I phoned her back, just before I left work this afternoon. I said, ‘You’re sure, now, that you want me to go through with this?’ And she said yes—she sounded very calm—she said she’d already told the whole story just as it happened. She said she knew it wasn’t going to be as easy on her this way, or on certain other people—”

“I should say
not!
” interrupted Aunt Mona caustically.

“—but she said she felt she owed it to her brother’s memory,” Mott went on. “She said it was better for people to know he had done it in anger—she used a French phrase—than to think he had given up on life. Apparently there’d been bad blood between him and the other party for a long time.”

“Did he die of bad blood?” Jem asked Mott.

“Not exactly, son,” said Mott, rumpling Jem’s hair, “but I would say it definitely contributed.”

“There was no question of—” my mother began hesitantly. “I mean, at the coroner’s, nobody said anything about Justin’s having to be involved.”

“No question at all,” said Mott firmly. “I explained the circumstances, and he agreed that there was absolutely no point in upsetting the child further.”

Becky flicked her eyes at me—to see my reaction at being called “the child,” I suppose. But, although I knew that my behavior over the past twenty-four hours had earned me an indulgent demotion in the eyes of protective adults, I was not sorry to have the mask of “child” to hide behind while I dealt with my own disturbing thoughts.

“I’m so relieved,” said my mother to Mott.

“I ought to go and see her,” said Aunt Mona. “I ought to take something over there. A casserole? After all, he was Beck’s piano teacher; and she was so friendly to me when she came to pick up Justin. Or maybe a cake would be more suitable. Louise, help me; you know the etiquette of these things.”

“I don’t know about ‘etiquette,’ ” said my mother, “but I
have
had some recent experience in these matters. Speaking from the receiver’s end, I think a person is more grateful for something solid and simple you can pick at, to keep up your
strength—but without feeling you’re pampering yourself with a whole meal. Cakes are more for the company that comes.”

“I phoned Bill Van Kleek this morning, after I heard,” said Mott. “His daughter took music from DeVane. Mrs. Van Kleek said she was going to take over a tray of cold cuts.”

“I wonder about fried chicken,” said my aunt. “But she might not like it our Southern way.”

A distant smile lit my mother’s face. “When my mother died, this woman in her garden club had her maid fry up the most delicious-looking chicken. And after the funeral guests had all gone home, we were sitting down to eat it—just the family—and I had to take a phone call, and when I came back I burst into tears. Rivers jumped up from the table and put his arms around me and said, ‘You’ve worn yourself out with all this grief and company, Louise,’ and took me away to bed. But the real reason I was crying was that, when I came back from that long telephone call, I saw that Rivers was eating the last drumstick, and no one had saved one for me. Of course I couldn’t tell him that. Now I’m so glad I didn’t, and I’m even gladder Rivers had that drumstick.”

“I think maybe a casserole’s wisest,” said Aunt Mona.

Julian’s funeral was held on Wednesday. As Wednesday was also the first day of school, there was no serious question of my going. If I had wanted to go, I think my mother would have let me; but I didn’t want to. And yet I thought about the funeral all during the school day. I didn’t want to think about it, but I kept seeing images. I saw the church: the same Dutch Reformed Church where the young Karl, fresh from Germany, had played the organ, and where Becky had been humiliated during her recital; I remembered how Ursula had told me Julian had been haunted by that church, distracted by its memories to the point of bad judgment: how he had thought it would
inspire
the children when he called in his old pupil from the street just before Becky was supposed to get up and play “Für Elise.”

And now that gentle, stuttering, melancholy man was dead.
One more person in my life was dead. But he was the first one I had known who had wanted to die.

He had hanged himself from one of those ancient meat hooks upstairs in the oldest part of their house, the part they called “the office.” Using his belt for a rope, he had stood on a chair until he was ready, and then kicked it away. Had his last thought been: This will punish her for betraying me? Or: Now I don’t have to go through with my comeback? I thought it might have been a combination of both: her act’s having given the final push to a decision already brooded upon for years. But nobody had asked for my testimony. “The child” had been upset enough. And what did it matter anyway? It wouldn’t bring him back.
She
was the one who was left to suffer. Let
her
choose his motive and broadcast it to the world, even if, as she had told Mott, “it wasn’t going to be as easy on her this way, or on certain other people.”

Her story—the one she told to Mott and the coroner, and which filtered down to me through my mother and my aunt—was that, after the fiasco, when I was led away in my wet clothes, she and Abel Cristiana had remained for a while at the hut, discussing what they ought to do. Abel thought perhaps he would have a man-to-man word with Mott, and she would talk to “the girl,” and perhaps they could prevent it from spreading all over the village and hurting Abel’s family. Neither of them believed Julian would say anything; he would simply rage inwardly and perhaps “punish” Ursula with silences and looks of disgust; she knew he would never disgrace the family name by telling anyone.

Then Abel had gone home, and she had sat for a while longer on the threshold of the hut, fully dressed now and wrapped in the blanket because it was chilly, but unwilling just yet to go back up to the house and face her brother’s acrimony. And then, like a miracle, she heard what she thought was her reprieve. Coming across the field and through the trees, carried upon the stillness of the night air, were the unmistakable notes of her favorite piece, the Chopin scherzo. She took it to mean he had forgiven her, was signaling:
Let things go on as we planned.
She
was overcome with gratitude and relief as she listened to the music. When it was over, she sat just a little longer, smiling to herself with embarrassment, thinking of what she was going to say: after all, what she had done was not
that
awful; and she
was
proud that she’d had the courage to run out naked like that, when she believed the girl was drowning.

She walked back to the house across the fields, thinking that maybe they would open a bottle of wine and talk the whole thing through—as they had talked through so many things in the past.

He was not in the living room waiting for her, as she had expected. She called to him and there was no answer. She saw the empty half gallon of Chianti on the table and concluded that he had gone upstairs and passed out, after playing the music. She went up to his bedroom, but when she turned on the light, she saw that the bed was empty.

Then she thought he must have gone outside, perhaps down to the terrace, where they often sat together after dark, sipping wine and making plans. But he was not on the terrace. Had he gone back to the pond to look for her? But even in the dark, it was unlikely that she would have missed him. She called out, called his name across the field.

Could he have
driven
off? She hurried up the slope and around to the old barn, which they now used for a garage. No, the station wagon was still there.

Then she looked up and saw that the light was on in “the office.” On the field side, as she was coming home, she would not have been able to see it, because on that side of the wall was only the old “mow” door, sealed now.

What was he doing in “the office”? Her first thought was: Maybe he’s looking through the file folder I’ve been keeping for his recital, going through the flier samples and the estimates from the recital managers—his way of showing me that bygones are really bygones and he’s more interested in getting on with what matters.

But then why didn’t he answer me when I called out? When he heard me come upstairs to his room, why didn’t he call through the door of “the office” and say, “Sissie, I’m in here”?

When she found him, she first tried to hold him up, relieve the pressure. She climbed on the chair he had kicked away and tried with all her strength to support his hanging body with her one-armed embrace, while with her free hand she worked to loosen the belt buckle. Then she abandoned that futile, exhausting method and ran to the sewing room in search of the sharp scissors.

She managed to cut him down, and slapped his cheeks, and put her mouth down on his and breathed and breathed.

She told Mott she thought she had felt something, at one point: a breath? a quiver? She couldn’t be sure. Just a hint, the barest promise of life.

She called the rescue squad, who arrived remarkably fast; but it was simply too late.

Aunt Mona and my mother and Mott went to the funeral. The church was “respectably full,” Aunt Mona said. All the parents of Julian’s pupils were there, and IBM had sent an impressive casket spray. The talented young musician in tennis clothes who had ruined Becky’s recital was there in a dark suit to play the organ. He played beautifully, although he broke down once. The pallbearers were Mr. Terwiliger from the store and five male members of the Huguenot Society, all of whom, Aunt Mona said Mrs. Van Kleek had told her, were direct descendants of the first patentees of New Paltz.

“She asked about you,” my mother said, that evening.

I looked up from my homework, which I was trying to make last as long as possible. I was doing it in Aunt Mona’s living room, a neutral place I had gravitated to since Tuesday. I had been in this room hardly at all since we came here last spring, and so it was antiseptic when it came to memories and associations.
She
had stood in its doorway and flashed her eyes mirthfully on the prize seafoam-green carpet crisscrossed with its plastic runners, but she had not come in, she had not sat down. It was not her kind of room, and that made it easier for me to be in it, rather than upstairs in my room, where the air was still thick
with my former feelings. Or downstairs, for that matter, in my mother’s perfume-scented quarters, where Becky lounged at her convenience. I would be welcomed down there, by my mother, at least, with solicitude (“the child” had had a shock), but I hung back in self-conscious reluctance from the scene I knew I was destined sooner or later to play there: the Prodigal Daughter returning, chastened, to her true mother.

“She wanted to know how you were,” my mother went on. “She asked if you had suffered any ill effects.”

“And what did you say?” Was that cold, guarded little voice mine?

“I said you were young and strong and going to be just fine. I thought it was kind of her to be so concerned, when she must be going through the most unimaginable … I mean, I thought
I
had the copyright on sorrow, but I wouldn’t change places with that woman for anything on earth.”

“Neither would I,” I said with more feeling.

“She also said to tell you she hoped you would come and see her. ‘When she’s ready’ was how she put it.”

I stared down at the colored picture on the first page of my civics textbook: a view of the Washington Monument and cherry trees in blossom.

“I’m not ready yet,” I said.

“That’s completely up to you.”

Giving me the new, solicitous look, my mother wavered in the doorway. Her tact was such that she would not cross into my antiseptic territory and with tearful hugs force acknowledgments … confessions. She would wait; she knew how to wait. That was what her look eloquently said. Then she went back to her own territory, where Becky was no doubt sprawled with her homework and Jem was still giving off hyperactive sparks from his first day of school.