The Finishing School (22 page)

Aunt Mona wiped the corners of her mouth with her paper napkin. “I suppose it’s natural that you should be drawn to the one with all the history,” she said, with obvious disappointment. “Why, when you think of it, that old meat room, or whatever it was, is older than all your celebrated
Southern
historical homes by over a century. I wonder what it is like to know who your ancestors were as far back as she does. Not that it seems to have made her or her brother any great shakes, but it undoubtedly gives you a certain arrogance. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had grown up with that arrogance.”

Later in the evening, when we were roasting marshmallows on sticks, Mott hovering protectively by in case some child got too close to the flame, another guest showed up: a Mr. Elmendorf, with a booming voice and a cigar, whom Mott introduced as “Wilbur.” He was an older engineer at IBM and recently widowed. He was also the owner of the houseboat Mott had rented. When Mrs. Elmendorf was alive, they had spent their
weekends on the houseboat and sometimes taken it on trips as far as West Point. Wilbur Elmendorf spoke of the houseboat, which looked like a floating box, as though it were a trim clipper ship on the high seas. He used lots of nautical terms and always referred to his late wife as “The Skipper.” He said he couldn’t be more pleased that a former Navy man like Mott was looking after things aboard. I remember he and Mott talked about Mott’s adventures on the submarine that torpedoed all the Japs, and Mr. Elmendorf explained to us that he would have given anything to be in the Navy, but that he was practically blind in one eye as a result of a childhood injury. Jem wanted to know why the bad eye didn’t look blind, and Mr. Elmendorf told him jovially that in bright daylight you could see a slight difference between the eyes. Then he asked Mott if he’d heard the story about the time Mr. Watson, Sr., had dropped into the men’s room at IBM’s Poughkeepsie site and discovered an employee disregarding the sign over the sink.

“Mr. Watson said, ‘Excuse me, young man, can you read?’ The man said, yes sir, of course he could read. ‘Well, will you read that sign to me?’ the founder of IBM asked. ‘Yes sir. It says “Please Wash Hands Before Returning to Work.” ’ ‘Well, why don’t you obey it, then?’ asked Mr. Watson. ‘Oh sir,’ said the employee, relieved, ‘I’m not going back to work, I’m going to lunch!’ ”

Mr. Mott laughed so hard that he looked as if he were in pain. He laughed the way people laugh when a story is told about someone who means a lot to them: they go out of control sometimes. I remembered Mott’s laughter a few days later, when Mr. Watson, Sr., died and IBM closed all its sites and Aunt Mona took a day off from the travel agency so she could be with Mott. He was completely broken up by the death of the old man, she said. “That man was like a father to Mott.” She said Mott had wept and talked about the orphanage again. She said that even when people couldn’t live as man and wife anymore, they could share each other’s pain. A few days later, Mr. Mott was back in Lucas Meadows, mowing our lawn, his stolid figure guiding the machine with concentration, as if it were the most important
thing in the world to cut even swaths that merged with one another. It was hard to imagine him lying face down on his bunk bed in the houseboat, sobbing into his pillow, but not as hard as it had been before I had seen him laugh like that. After the death of Mr. Watson, Mott became more solicitous of our family than ever, as if by doing double duty as a father he could console himself for being so hopelessly fatherless.

I still have two of the presents from that birthday. One of them is, of course, my grandmother’s pearl necklace. When fastening the clasp around my neck, I almost always think of her. And sometimes I ask myself the unwelcome question that Ursula planted in my mind on my fourteenth birthday: Was she so sure of who she was that she never had to pretend, or did she have no private life? And I find myself defending my grandmother to Ursula. “Don’t you understand,” I tell her, “that his saying she would behave exactly the same way when nobody was looking was his way of saying
he trusted her?
Why can’t we leave it at that? Why can’t we leave her private life alone?” But, nevertheless, Ursula has left her mark there, as she has on so many other places.

The other present I had completely forgotten about until, several years ago, on a visit, my mother brought it to me, wrapped in tissue paper, in a corner of her suitcase. “I found this little book of yours,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet, the way you faithfully put down everything.” It had a pink cover, a pink very similar to the color of those old “Raspberry Ice” walls in Lucas Meadows. “My Personal Life” was embossed in fancy letters on the front. Inside the cover I found birthday greetings from Aunt Mona and Becky in my aunt’s handwriting. It was a pert sort of teen record, with illustrations and printed headings for the teenager to write under. There were pages reserved for “This Year’s Movie Record,” for “My Wardrobe,” “That’s My Family,” “Friends, Classmates, Chums,” and “Heart Thermometer” (“Rate your love life for the year! Which boyfriend rings the bell?”).

I didn’t remember being given this book on the houseboat, though it surely must have been among the gifts I unwrapped along with Floreen McEvoy’s pincushion stolen from Woolworth’s. I must have thanked my aunt and cousin for it, even if I secretly scorned those insidious, regimental headings that took away your freedom for organizing your own thoughts and feelings. (“ ‘Peeves and Problems’: Every year brings its own special little [and big] problems. Write here in this space, in private and in detail, just what those problems are.”)

How Aunt Mona must have loved discovering that book in some store. I can see her now, turning to the first page, where there is a decorated, heart-shaped “frame,” all ready for a photograph of the “teen” in question to paste in of herself over the caption “Me, Myself, and I.” I can see Aunt Mona, her earrings quivering slightly, scanning the “Message to
You
” on the facing page (“… Before you can be a woman, you must grow up in
four
ways:
physically
[your body];
emotionally
[your feelings];
intellectually
[your mind];
socially
[your dealings with others]. These are the
Big Four.
They are a large order, and that is why so much has been written about you. You are now in the greatest growing period of your life …”).

I can hear Aunt Mona thinking to herself, maybe even muttering under her breath, “Now, if
I
had had a cute book like this to help me organize my feelings when I was growing up, what mightn’t I have made of myself by now?”

But whatever I secretly thought of “My Personal Life” on the night Aunt Mona gave it to me, I was to write on most of its pages. For a period of five years, starting sometime during my fourteenth summer, I was to document my wardrobe, accomplishments and goals, height and weight, peeves and problems, friends and movies. I was earnestly to answer the questionnaires (“Rate Your Personality Quotient,” “How Much Do I Cost?”) scattered strategically through the little pink book. As I turn its pages as a grown-up, I am amazed at how many of the specific, everyday details of those years I have forgotten: yet, even as the book recalls them to me, they seem to have happened to another young person, a quite ordinary girl who uses expressions like
“Nuts!” and “Heck,” and whose entries too often take on a shallow, insincere tone that makes me wince. From the evidence of this record, I must have been claimed by the world of “Raspberry Ice” and the milkmaids before we left the village of Clove. How did this happen? When did they actually get me? Surely not until the end of that summer, after I had buried the crumpled poster of the
Normandie
, along with the little blue bottle, deep in the garbage can one afternoon, turning my mind away, in the act of doing so, from all that was too volatile and hurtful and strange in “the greatest growing period of my life.”

Now, in the light of all I am trying to recover, I take out “My Personal Life” from its tissue paper and search thoroughly, under all the headings of the year concerned, for clues to Ursula. There is only a single mention of her, located, fittingly enough, in the “Notes” section, the one place in the book where the teenager’s thoughts are allowed to roam free from any preorganized compartments. The sentence, written in my acquired Ursuline handwriting of that summer, says: “I have made a new friend this summer who I admire a lot because she is sweet, interesting, and funny.”

I stare at that commonplace sentence written by yesterday’s teenager. I will it to render up all the passions and fears I know lie waiting for me in the silt of the reclaimed past.

VII.

W
hat do I want from Ursula now? Why does she again, after twenty-six years, dominate my thoughts?

I could say: It’s because I’m between plays. Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit. During a play, you are somebody else as well as yourself. Often this character becomes more definite and real to you than the quotidian self you face every morning in the mirror. You are possessed by your role. It is a form of possession you encourage to happen, because it heightens ordinary life; it makes you feel larger than just yourself. And it does wonders for your stage performance. However, when the play is over, you are in limbo. With no one for you to inhabit, with no one to inhabit
you
, you may get depressed, or go looking for action, any kind of action to keep you from feeling ordinary again. Actors between plays are notorious trouble-seekers. Acting addicts you to dramatic intensity, to a need for everyday life to have a
shape.
When you don’t have a play to stimulate you and satisfy these requirements, you go out and stir up reality, trick your life into patterns of drama. Once—and not so long ago, either—I married someone after playing Ann Whitefield to his Jack Tanner in a Shaw summer festival. When the marriage ended six months later, we both admitted
that we had chosen to confuse each other with our stage roles, because it had been a time in both our lives when we could not bear to go back to being just ourselves again.

Of course, dwelling on Ursula … becoming infatuated with her memory … is a lot less destructive than marrying an illusive Superman. But why
now?
It interests me to puzzle it out while I mark time between roles. Why, ever since I had that powerful dream about her, have I become obsessed with recalling her, summoning back the way she was then, and the girl I was, the girl with all those feelings she didn’t know what to do with? Why have those old scenes I avoided thinking about for years become my most alluring task?

Is it because I am reaching that dangerous age, the “traditional danger point” that Ursula spoke of so warily, when people must either take some new risk or congeal?

If so, what is the risk involved here? What is “Ursula” trying to teach me or make me do?

And why should I feel so close to her, so strongly in touch with her, after all the years of recalling her with reluctance, discomfort, shame? God knows I don’t want to be her, and yet in some way I do. She had an arrogance, a precipitance, a flair for improvisation I wish I had. It seems strange to me that I, not she, became the actress. Of course she
was
an actress, to the very marrow of her bones, but she made her own life into her role.

A dangerous proposition.

It’s as if I were preparing myself for two roles in the same play, two roles I couldn’t possibly fill at one time: the role of the enchanted young girl with all those seething erotic and spiritual energies not yet channeled, and of the older woman who, thwarted by a too-narrow existence, was nevertheless able to enchant.

No, it’s something more. It’s as if, in allowing myself full recall of the power she had over the girl Justin, I am trying to
take on
that power, to beam it back onto myself as an adult and as an actress, until it infuses me and I become bright with it.

Yesterday I rented a car and drove upstate to the village of Clove. There is a thruway now, and the trip took a little more than two hours. It seemed wrong to get there so quickly. I felt I had cheated by returning to the past on a modern route. I got off at the Kingston exit and drove the old road for the eight-mile stretch into Clove. Things began to look less modern and I felt better. There were still extensive tracts of farmland, many already plowed and awaiting their crops. There were the same old stone houses along the road, some now bearing prominent New York Historical Landmark signs, but at least they hadn’t been torn down—or painted white. Then I had to remind myself that Ursula’s house would no longer look as it had when I had last seen it: for Aunt Mona, several years after we had moved away from Clove, had written that a department store executive had bought the DeVane house and whitewashed the stones and put a cathedral ceiling with skylights above the old, dark kitchen. Which meant, of course, tearing out that ancient upper room where the family of Chrétien DeVane had stored their grain and hung their meat and where Ursula had hung the rope to make her little brother a swing. The department store executive must have heard some part of the DeVanes’ story: “… you can’t keep people from gossiping in a small, rural place like this,” Aunt Mona had written, “but we real-estate people sure kept mum about the whereabouts of that last awful episode. So it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other whether he heard it from someone else and wanted to do away with that room, or that his wife took one look at that crummy kitchen and said she wouldn’t so much as fry a piece of bacon till she had her cathedral ceiling. I know, it’s a shame to destroy the lines of an old historical home like that, but when you pay the price
he
paid (my commission alone was over $5,000), I guess you feel you’ve got the right to put your own convenience and comfort above some snobbish family’s past that came to nothing but ruin and sorrow.”