The Finishing School (15 page)

“It’s okay. I ought to be going soon anyway,” I said. She
didn’t reply to this. “I think that’s Gentleman Johnny, their Tennessee walker, that he’s riding,” I added after a minute.

“How do you know that?” she demanded, looking at me sharply.

“Because of the way he picks up his legs, and stops and starts so nicely. I rode him myself last week,” I added casually, trying to keep the pride out of my voice. “Ann Cristiana invited me over there to ride after school. But what I really think is, her brother Ed got her to invite me over.”

I expected her to tease me for “making a conquest,” the way most older women would, but she studied me for a moment and then said thoughtfully, “Funny, you gave me the impression that you were just a lonely waif, all by yourself in an alien land. But of course you must make friends your own age. I don’t know the Cristiana children well. This feud we’ve been having for decades precludes any social intercourse between our families.”

I was embarrassed when she used the word
intercourse.
I also felt I had betrayed her in some way by having gone out riding with people my own age, like an ordinary young person. As if I cared about Ed and his sister! Whom had I been hoping to meet for almost the entire ride? I sat there miserably, wondering how to reinstate myself with her. She was staring fixedly at the man down in the fields that had once belonged to her family. I thought there was a masochistic intensity about the way she watched him ride slowly along, as if every deliberate tread of his horse’s hooves on her lost land were felt upon herself and she were determined to have it so.

A deep rumbling of chords, like thunder, came from the house. They thickened into a series of sinister runs up and down the keyboard, and then burst into explosions of fiendish energy. I had never heard such violent music coming through the open windows of a country house; I had never heard such music, period.

“He’s playing the ‘Mephisto,’ ” said Ursula. “That means he’s really in a temper.”

But she sounded proud, and, even to me, who knew little about music, except for nostalgic memories of my grandfather’s
Bach, the sounds coming from the house were impressive. The music dominated everything with its passages of almost threatening intensity. Even I knew that not just anybody who “played the piano well” could make so many notes come out sounding at once so hard and separate and clear and yet all blended together in this stunningly ominous manner.

“I’ve never heard anybody play the piano like that,” I said.

“Of course you haven’t,” she replied triumphantly. “Not unless you had heard Paderewski … or Liszt. Even Rubinstein doesn’t have that clean sharpness. My brother has been blessed by the gods with a rare combination of clarity and passion when he sits down to that instrument—even if he can be a stubborn fool at other times. That’s why that piano was worth every one of those damn acres, and all this … strife. That’s why it’s all worthwhile. One day, not too far away, I hope, I won’t be the only one to think so.”

“Will he play before crowds again?” I asked. I had started to say “coughing crowds,” as he had done, but decided not to risk humor at the moment.

“If I have my way, he will be doing it in two years. Otherwise, what has this all been for?”

There came an eerie hiatus in the music, a sort of metaphysical calm during which the notes seemed to be asking sad questions they already knew the answers to. Down in the field, the man on the horse continued the pacing of his recently purchased boundaries, but the effect of the music was so dominating that it relegated him to a small, picturesque element in a summer landscape over which some eternal power loomed.

“What is that tower up there on those mountains?” I asked, when the metaphysical passage had given way to another furious burst of stormy notes.

“It’s a lookout tower,” said Ursula. “It belongs to the hotel up there. If we had binoculars, we could see it, nestled beneath that ledge. It’s a magnificent old hotel, on a lake. The whole thing might have been transported from Europe. One night last winter when I couldn’t sleep, I was prowling around the house in the dark, and I happened to look out of the living-room window, and
there were all these sparkling lights
hanging
there in the clear black night. At first I thought I might be having a vision—or that a whole cluster of stars had suddenly moved closer to earth. Then I realized it was simply the lights from the hotel rooms. The atmosphere that night was so cold and clear that everything looked closer.”

“I wish I had seen it,” I said. I wished I could have been there, like a ghost hovering behind her, and seen her prowling around her dark rooms, then looking out and seeing the lights. I wondered what had kept her from being able to sleep.

“It’s not that far away, you know. Only in New Paltz. I’ll take you up there one day. There are miles of mountain trails where one can walk. I’ll make a picnic lunch and we’ll eat it by the lake. I think you would like it up there.” She gave me a fond, possessive look. “But promise me you won’t go with any of your other friends, because I want to show it to you first.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I vowed so solemnly that she burst out laughing.

Then, becoming serious again, she said, “You know, Justin, I am thirty years older than you, but I have a feeling we are fated to be good friends.”

“I feel it, too,” I said.

“Of course you do. When people are sensitive, they can tell when they meet someone who is going to influence their lives.”

V.

“W
hat did you think of the house? Did you see the upstairs?”

“No, ma’am. We had tea down on the terrace.”

“You mean you didn’t go inside at
all?
”

“No, ma’am. I offered to help her carry the tea things in before I left, but she said she wanted to sit a while longer before going up to the house. He was inside, playing the piano, and I guess she didn’t want to disturb him.”

“You mean he didn’t even have tea with you? How antisocial!”

“No, he had tea. Then later he went up to the house.”

“Well, I’m disappointed. Here I was, waiting for a report on those upstairs rooms. If it had been me, I would have asked to use the bathroom. That’s perfectly acceptable, you know. Then you could have had a quick look around at the rooms.”

I had been trying to sneak upstairs to our bathroom when Aunt Mona had waylaid me. “Come back and tell me all about it,” she had called from the living-room sofa, where she was watching some late Sunday afternoon show on TV. I had wanted to escape the house without speaking a word. My mother was taking a nap and Jem was over on the houseboat, grilling hamburgers
with Becky and her father. I had hoped to make myself a peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwich and go up to the abandoned farmhouse on the hill and absorb my visit with the DeVanes. So much had occurred that I needed to go over it while it was still fresh, before all the special looks and words had become diluted by the commonplace affairs of our household. But Aunt Mona wanted a “report” on the tea, and I had reluctantly crossed the plastic bridge over her prize carpet and sat down beside her. She had even turned off the sound of her program, she was so interested in what I might say.

“What did you talk about?” she wanted to know, curling her toes.

“Oh, about flowers,” I said, “and the influences of different places, and ants.…” I was trying to pick off the superficial elements to satisfy her curiosity, while guarding the big topics from being drained of their charge until I could sort them out and file them away safely in privacy, up on the hill.

“
Aunts?
You mean like me?”

“No, the insects,” I said, to her disappointment. I gazed at the two black-and-white figures on the television screen: a woman in a low-cut dress was turning away in anger from a man in a tuxedo who was imploring her about something. “Aren’t you missing your program?” I said. “I could come back later.”

“No, no, it wasn’t very good. Sometimes I think I prefer the old radio plays. You could see so much more in your mind. What did you think of
him?
” From the sour face she made and the way her feathery crest quivered, I knew whom she meant.

“Well, he was okay. I mean he was nice to me.” I hesitated, torn between loyalty to him for Ursula’s sake and reluctance to offend my aunt. “He seemed kind of moody, but he’s probably a very talented musician. Maybe he’s even great. She thinks he may be a great artist.” The more I said, the more I could feel the magic drain out of the afternoon.

“Talented musician, maybe, but great he’s not,” pronounced my aunt, folding her arms combatively over her bony chest. “If he were great, he’d be flying around the world giving concerts and playing with big orchestras.”

“Well, that’s her plan. She hopes he’ll be playing in public again in two years. She has big ambitions for him; he got wonderful reviews in Argentina, but now he’s withdrawn from the world for some reason. He seems kind of … haunted.”

“Haunted-schmaunted,” said my aunt, with a vigorous shake of her plumage. “Acting like some sort of superior hermit is just a good way to hide failure. Besides, there was no competition to speak of in Argentina during the war. Only Nazis and Nazi sympathizers would go there and perform. And even if he
was
the best thing in Argentina, that was almost fifteen years ago. Great artists aren’t suddenly ‘discovered’ when they’re already middle-aged.”

My heart felt heavy for Ursula. Surely she had considered this: this
practical
side of things that my aunt was always reminding you of.

“And whatever kind of ‘artist’ he is,” Aunt Mona went on, “doesn’t excuse him for being rude and thoughtless. Or for showing contempt for pupils he’s being paid good money to teach.” She pinned me with her quick, nervous eyes, and her gold hoop earrings swung faintly with her indignation. “
You
don’t think it excuses him, do you?”

“No, ma’am,” I said honestly, “I don’t.”

My aunt relaxed. “That’s good. I told your mother you were a sensible girl. We had a talk about your going over there today. She said you were so set on going that she didn’t like to say no, but she asked me if I thought these people were okay for you to know; I hadn’t spoken too kindly of them. I said, ‘Louise, I’ve known Justin going on two months now, I’m a close observer of people, and in my opinion she’s a smart, sensible girl. She’s been brought up to tell right from wrong. Now, for some reason, she’s taken a shine to Ursula DeVane, and Ursula DeVane seems to have taken a shine to
her.
I think we can trust Justin to get what she can out of knowing this woman, who
is
a cultured person, whatever airs she puts on—and leave the rest alone. I don’t have any use for the
brother
,’ I said to your mother, ‘but since Justin isn’t going to be taking piano from him, he can’t do her much harm, he can’t ruin music for her the way he did for Beck. You’ve
got to remember,’ I told your mother, ‘that
you
grew up surrounded by cultured, educated, well-bred people who knew how to behave and had been places. Who knows what I might have made of myself by this time if I had had a few of those people take an interest in me and want to polish me up? Now, there’s not a whole lot of
polish
in Clove, so I say let’s give Justin her chance to pick up what she can.’ And Louise agreed. ‘That’s why I’m here, Mona,’ your mother told me, ‘so that Justin and Jem can have their chance.’ ”

I left the house feeling compromised. I went up to the empty farmhouse with my peanut butter sandwich and sat glumly on the back steps, trying to figure out what had been saved and what had been lost during the exchange with my aunt. So much of my life in those days seemed to be occupied with trying to keep track of my soul’s progress (or lack of it) upon a confusing map where adults had already charted their conflicting ideas of reality. Gone forever were the earlier times when I had been conveyed securely along by the cherished traditions of authorities I loved and never thought to question. Those authorities were mostly dead now, and though I could still rely on their advice to guide me through small social crises (such as how to begin a conversation with a brusque farmer who was driving me home in his truck), I found them less useful when it came to choosing how I would (how had Ursula put it?) “respond to the unique demands of the moment.”

My talk with Aunt Mona had muddied things. I had a horror of getting muddied, because I was afraid I would lose sight of myself. And, once that happened, I might turn into just anybody. It was all part of the same fear that made me uncomfortable about living in Lucas Meadows with the lookalike lamps in the picture windows and the milkmaids surrounding me with their insinuating smiles that seemed to say: “Come on, now, stop resisting and just be one of us!”

So before I could allow myself the luxury of going over the hour I had spent with the DeVanes and committing to memory
all the gratifying moments as well as the tense and mysterious ones, I had to sit on the old farmhouse steps and determine how clear I was to myself after my encounter with my aunt.