The Finishing School (7 page)

My mother stopped what she was doing and gave me a strange look. “What a deep thing to say. When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been capable of such a thought.” She laughed bitterly. “Up until a
year
or so ago, if someone had said what you just said, I would have tossed my head and retorted, ‘Don’t be an old fogey, passion is what makes the world go around!’ ” In the act of saying this, she tossed her head and became the old Louise for a moment: the girl-mother I worshiped and admired and was jealous of, all at the same time, and was so proud to show off to my friends.

It was this mother I allowed to hug me, and whom I hugged back. “You see,” she said, as she let me go, “that’s what I’m talking
about. Already you are becoming a much stronger and smarter woman than I’ll ever be.”

But I went outside feeling her triumphant words had been more a threat than a compliment.

Jem was riding his small bike with training wheels up and down the sidewalk in front of our house. He was bright for his age, but small, which put him at a double disadvantage with the other “development” children: if he had been larger, he would have fitted in with the older boys because of his intelligence; the children of his size looked upon him cautiously, as a kind of phenomenon, and he quickly tired of their games. He suffered the additional handicap of having been born in October—just after the cutoff date the public schools cruelly enforced—so he could not enter first grade until next fall, when he would be almost seven. He looked up with such hope, when I came out, that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wanted to go up to the empty house alone and meditate.

We climbed the grassy hill together, Jem taking manly strides to keep up. He was breathing fast with exhilaration at my having actually asked him first. “Want to hear the joke Mott told me?”

“Sure.” I could not imagine what kind of joke steady, serious Mr. Mott would tell.

“Why did the robber take a bath?”

“I give up. Why?”

“Because he wanted to make a clean getaway!” Jem cackled hilariously, and I laughed, too, though I thought it was a strange joke for a grown person to tell: so simplistic and childlike. But it would be just like Mr. Mott and his sense of responsibility to go around collecting jokes especially to tell to children.

Neither of us spoke as we climbed the front steps of the old farmhouse. There was something awesome as well as mysterious about an old and empty house where people have lived for many
generations. We peered into each of its bare front rooms, which were already full of shadows at this time of evening. Jem, breathing audibly, took my hand. Still holding hands, we walked around the porch and looked in the windows of a long room with a big fireplace. “This was probably the dining room,” I said, “because the kitchen’s right through there.” Jem said he was sure a big family had lived there. “Then the grandmother got sick and died and the grandfather was so sad he got sick and died, and then the father died, and the people left had to sell the house and all this land so they could go somewhere else to live and have enough for later.” He looked up at me, in the orange light of the setting sun, for confirmation. “Remember the magician?”

“I sure do,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “I still think of that magician almost every day.”

The last year we had lived in Fredericksburg, during the time that my grandfather had been so ill, a magician and his family had moved into a house on our block. During the week, he went on the road, just like my father, but on the weekends he practiced tricks in his garage and let the neighborhood children watch. After we had buried my father and sold the house, and Mother was packing our boxes and labeling which furniture was to go to storage and which to be sold, Jem had walked back and forth through the empty rooms, saying in a surprised voice: “You know who I’m really going to miss? I’m going to miss that magician.”

After we had finished looking through all the windows, I sat on the back steps of the house while Jem climbed a tree. This side of the house faced away from our development, which had spoiled its meadows. From here you saw a thick line of trees and the western sky, which was an orange-pink, with the cirrus clouds that my grandfather had called “mare’s tails” scudding across its surface.

If I had been alone, I might have given myself up to the twilight mood and pretended to be some other person, from another time, sitting on this porch. Sometimes I would meditate aloud up here, pretending I was thinking another person’s thoughts. Strange phrases would come, fully formed, with a sort of predestined ease, from my mouth, as if I were simply repeating what had actually been thought or said at some other time. And then I’d feel refreshed, a little bit magic, and could take a deep breath and go down the hill feeling impervious to the ordinary life that had begun blinking below, from the lamps in the picture windows. This feeling of imperviousness would sometimes last me all the way to the “Raspberry Ice” walls of my room.

That night I dreamed I was riding my bike home from somewhere. Home was, of course, the house in Fredericksburg. It was night and there were no lights in our house. The only light on the street came from the magician’s garage. He was in there practicing his magic, and I could see his figure, with arms outstretched, fingers moving, as he performed some sleight of hand. When I reached our house, the front door was swinging open. I went inside, knowing something was wrong. It was all dark, and I couldn’t find a light switch, but I could see from the magician’s light down the block that our rooms were completely empty and that there was grass growing abundantly all over the floors.

I sobbed out in panic and distress, and then, suddenly, a firm hand pressed my shoulder, and a low, amused voice told me not to grieve, that this was a good sign, that all our ancestors had lived in houses with grassy floors. I was calmed by the authority of the voice, and, in the dream, I didn’t even need to turn around to know whose it was. It was the voice of Ursula DeVane.

III.

L
ater, in college, I played Nina in
The Sea Gull.
I was having trouble with the scene in which Trigorin is about to leave the Sorin estate and Nina rushes in to tell him she has decided to run away to Moscow and become an actress and she will meet him there. The director told me I acted more thrilled by the prospect of going on stage than I was by Trigorin. “Be enchanted!” he ordered. “Don’t you know what it’s like to be enchanted?” I knew he was right. Part of the problem was that the actor playing Trigorin was too young. I could not imagine him as the seasoned literary man, the ironic, pleasure-seeking Trigorin; I could not imagine myself being enchanted by him. But I knew that if I were going to do the part well, I would have to find a way to feel enchanted by
Trigorin
, by the essence of enchantment a character named Trigorin personifies. I remember walking slowly back to my dormitory room, determined to evoke in myself the necessary state of enchantment. I waited until dusk, until my roommate had gone to the library; then I opened the windows to the raw spring air. “This is summer air on a country estate in Russia,” I told myself, “and I am an ambitious, impressionable young girl whose dreams and feelings are getting too large for her quiet environment. She craves change, she craves romance, she craves danger—the kind of danger that leads to transformation.
Then, enter suddenly this magnificent older man who has not only seen and done the things she longs to do, but who seems bored and sarcastic and even sad about it. She is enchanted by him not only for the great world he represents, a world she wants to be a part of, but because, when he looks at her and talks to her, he appears to know something about her that she longs to know about herself. She feels somehow that if she can know and possess him … if she allows him to know and possess her … that the longed-for, mysterious world will be revealed and she will finally possess herself.”

Having reasoned this out, speaking it aloud in my room, I felt closer to Nina. Now, to imagine the scene.

But here my imagination balked. Perversely, it flashed images of the face of the too-young actor playing Trigorin in our production; not the face of the enchanter.

“Be
enchanted
,” I ordered myself. “Imagine a convincing enchanter and the rest will follow.”

I tried turning my back on the enchanter. I closed my eyes and inhaled the chilly spring air. Let the enchanter approach me from behind. I would not try to picture his features, any features at all. I would simply permit the essence of enchantment—what it would mean to me, how it would make me feel—to enter this room.

After I had stood there for a while, breathing deeply and getting very cold, I did feel in the presence of something. I kept my eyes tightly closed. What was approaching? I was slightly afraid. What if I had invoked something?

It seemed I had.

Purposely breaking the spell I had invoked, I spun around and faced an empty room.

But I knew, with a coward’s knowledge, that by turning around when I had, I had limited the Nina a braver me could have portrayed. Yet, I couldn’t do it. I was afraid to confront whatever had been in the room with me.

Now I know who it probably was. I think I knew then, but couldn’t acknowledge it. Of
course
I knew what it was like to be
enchanted. I had been enchanted the summer I was fourteen and living in that quiet rural village that, after we had left it, seemed a passing dream. I had felt enchantment that summer: the constant, straining alertness toward one person and one person only. All I needed to do in my college room was to remember those feelings and put them into my Nina. I would have been a stunning example of the enchanted girl.

But I didn’t want to acknowledge, didn’t want to remember. Only six years had passed. Six years had not put enough time and healing distance between the fourteen-year-old who had felt shocked and sick and guilty over what had happened, and the twenty-year-old apprentice actress who might have been able to use those memories for an inspired performance.

Perhaps I was wise. If I had remembered her, I might still have felt revulsion for all that happened, and, consequently, all she had made me feel. And I might have decided that I was trying to be an actress because of her influence, because she had wanted to be one.

At twenty, I might have given it up to spite her. To spite her memory.

Now, ironically, I can allow myself to feel again exactly what it was like. With no trouble at all (I don’t have to close my eyes or turn my back or stand in a chilly room), I can summon back my obsession to know everything about her life, everything she thought and felt … even her memories. And the sense that whatever she was doing at a given time was bound to be more compelling than anything anybody else was doing: at least, anybody in my world. And the continual charged consciousness I had of her, as I went about my day, of the marvelous fact that we shared the same village and that I might see her at any time: that, if I chose to come riding over to her, she always seemed glad to see me. And how, on the days when I didn’t want to push my luck by making her tired of me, I could absorb myself completely by going off by myself and imagining her routine—she would be in the garden now; she would be preparing their lunch; she would
be down by the pond, reading or swimming (and maybe having a thought or two about me); she would be leaning her head back against the sofa, in that abandoned way she had, while he played her favorite scherzo.

And wanting, somehow, to
be
her; to wake up one morning and find myself waked inside her body, with her memories, and her duties, and even her disappointments. To find out how it felt to be her. To find out what she knew that I didn’t know.

And the curious tenderness I felt toward her, as the summer matured, when I realized I would
not
want to be her; when I realized it was far better to be me imagining what it was like to be her. Because my life was still unfolding, and, in many ways, hers—by her own proud admittance—had been foreclosed.

I say it’s ironic that I can let myself feel these old feelings again, because of course it’s too late for me to play enchanted young girls. And yet I became what she wanted to be. I did that. In that sense, I am her creature. But I couldn’t have admitted it, back there in the chilly dormitory room when I was struggling with the part of Nina. I couldn’t have admitted it without being engulfed by too much confusion and pain. And in turning away from the pain, I might have turned away from the thing I wanted to become, the thing I most wanted to be.

However, if someone were to write a play with a character like Ursula DeVane, I think I could do justice to that part now.

After Julian DeVane had accepted me as one of them that summer, he sometimes played for me. Once, just before time for me to rush home to supper on my bike, he played one of Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus
, which, he told me, stuttering shyly, he had set to music for an old teacher and friend who was a singer. I thought the music was very strange—discordant, even—but compelling, especially the way he played it, with his eyes almost closed, his fingers touching the keys with restraint, as if he feared he might evoke more than he could bear.