The Finishing School (29 page)

Yet I didn’t want my mother to impress Ursula
too
much. What if they should, in Aunt Mona’s awful phrase, “take a shine” to each other? What if they should become friends? It was not impossible. Ursula was older than my mother, but they had, I now realized, important things in common. Both of them had the aura of deposed stars who, because of family fates and adversities, must now devote the remainder of their lives to promoting the interests of their nearest and dearest. Each, in her own style, was cultivating the role of the glamorous martyr. I could just see my mother and Ursula sipping tea on Ursula’s terrace. They would have dressed up for each other, as women do, and Ursula would be confiding her hopes for Julian’s comeback recital, asking my mother whether, in her opinion, it would be too “heavy” to start the program with the Beethoven sonata, or should they
warm up the audience with something lighter, some Mozart, perhaps? And my mother, in turn, consulting Ursula about the right college for me, when the time came. There were some gratifying aspects of my imagined scene—they would both talk lovingly of me, of course—but where would I be in it? Relegated to the sidelines of their more interesting friendship. This position was not a new one for me: I remembered it all too well from my childhood, when my mother was always going off somewhere in a pretty dress to be with friends her own age who, my grandmother said, would take her mind off my father’s being so far away; and then later, when he suddenly entered our lives, going off with him, so they could have the young married times the war had cheated them of.

Before the day came, I had gone through the whole spectrum of possibilities arising out of this brief meeting, when Ursula would come by to pick me up: but, by late afternoon, when I was dressed and waiting in my room, I had narrowed my fears down to fears for Ursula. I hoped she wouldn’t wear those old, discolored brown thong sandals, though they were the only shoes I’d ever seen her in. I hoped her hair wouldn’t be flying about in one of its wilder manifestations. I hoped she wouldn’t be too mocking or outspoken or call into question some cherished belief—as she had done that time when she speculated that my grandmother might not have had a private life and that was why it was easy for her to behave the same way when nobody was looking. I hoped that she would suck in her originality a little, as people suck in their stomachs when trying to make a good impression. It would still be visible, of course, but not threateningly so. I wanted my mother to approve of Ursula as a stimulating friend for her daughter—but not
too
stimulating.

She was extremely prompt. She had said five-thirty; our front doorbell chimed at five thirty-two. I had been sitting on my bed for the last ten minutes. I heard the door open and the exchange of greetings: my mother’s and hers. My mother called up to me that “Miss DeVane” was here.

As I came downstairs, I heard Ursula’s bold, musical voice. “Yes, it’s a favorite play of mine—I even starred in it once in London, though God knows what they’ll do to it tonight. Still, Ibsen is like Shaw, don’t you think? You can’t ever
completely
ruin him: the thoughts are too good. Anyway, it’s going to be so interesting for me to see it afresh through your daughter’s eyes. She has such a wonderful capacity for taking things in, though I’m sure I don’t have to tell
you
that.”

“You’ve been very kind to Justin,” replied my mother. “It’s a lonely time for her, and I know she’s grateful for your interest.” My mother spoke with an unusual quietness and formality, I thought, or was it just the contrast with Ursula’s more assertive voice?

Then I entered the little hallway where they were standing, between the living room and the dining room, and everything went blank for a minute because I was so self-conscious. Here it was, happening, the real meeting, not all the ways I had imagined it, and yet I couldn’t take it in. I
was
able to note that Ursula had on real shoes, high heels, though with the higher vamps and thicker heels that had been fashionable right after the war. And she had done her hair in a nonwild way, parting it in the middle and then sweeping it back from her forehead in two wings: also a style from about ten years before. She wore a dark cotton skirt that flared at the bottom, and a white blouse that just stopped short of being off-the-shoulder, and she had on the dark red lipstick. My first impression was one of relief: she
had
dressed up. But then, as I was able to look at her more steadily, while she and my mother exchanged a few more pleasantries, and Aunt Mona, unable to contain her curiosity, came in from the kitchen and, motioning proudly to her living room, asked Ursula if she couldn’t sit down for a moment, I began to perceive an air of costumery in Ursula’s appearance. This evening she resembled one of those flamenco dancers with haughty heads and arched spines who clatter their high heels brazenly on the floor, knowing their audience expects them to stand out in an aggressive and colorful way.

“Ah, thank you, but I really can’t,” she was saying to Aunt
Mona, “I’m baking a chicken in honor of this child and I wouldn’t want it to get too done.” Then she turned her flashing eyes full force on Mona’s living room, with its prize seafoam-green carpet protected by the plastic runners leading to all the places she might sit. A slight smile tugged dangerously at the corners of her mouth. “But what a nice house you have. Everything so new and clean and
light.
Let’s face it, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old houses are darker. In more ways than one. It must be lovely to move into a brand-new house and furnish it exactly according to the dictates of one’s taste. And no bumping into one’s ancestors every time you turn around at night!”

“Well, how’d I do?” she asked playfully as we drove away in the station wagon.

“You don’t really care.”

“Of course I care. I care about
you
, so why shouldn’t I want to pass muster with your mother and your aunt?”

That seemed logical. Maybe she did care. Maybe that mirthful twitch at the corners of her mouth was to cover up how much she had wanted to make a good impression. Had she? I couldn’t tell. Aunt Mona had been gratified when she had praised the house; my mother had been harder to read: she had seemed to be reserving her opinion.

“You didn’t really like the house,” I said. “You couldn’t have liked that carpet and those plastic runners. You’re not the only one who can read faces.”

“Did I mention the carpet or the plastic runners?”

“No, but you gave the impression you liked the house.”

“Well, I did like it, in its way. People who live in houses like that have a
starting-out
quality about them that I envy. I
meant
that about always stumbling over the clutter of the past. I love our house, I will probably die in it, but that’s part of what I’m saying. Living in it, I sometimes feel I’m a ghost in the making.”

Her words set the mood for the whole evening. The idea of “ghostliness” pervaded me all during dinner in the low-beamed
dining room, with its heavy, dark pieces of furniture that looked as though they had not been moved in many generations. The late-afternoon sun poured down on the road outside the windows, reflecting an oblique orange light onto our faces as the three of us sat at one end of a long table that could have accommodated a dozen people. Julian had also dressed up for the play; he wore a dark blue jacket and a royal-blue ascot knotted inside the neck of his white shirt. Both of them looked like personages of note, from another time and place. The air of the past was all around us as they talked entertainingly of things they had done and people they had known. Julian related some anecdotes, in his gentle stutter, about his time in the Army. How he had come back from South America and joined up (“h-hoping to be sent to the front lines and die a n-noble death for my country”), but as soon as they found out he was a pianist, they sent him to Hawaii, where he spent the remainder of the war playing the organ for the chaplain’s Sunday services, and earning extra money the rest of the week at the Officers’ Club, playing requests. That was when he had worked up his “birthday” number, playing “Happy Birthday” in the styles of many composers: it became such a success that almost every night some officer would claim it was his birthday.

Ursula served ratatouille, made from the products of her own garden, and when I said how tasty it was, she told how her “almost” mother-in-law in France, the mother of the doomed Marius DeVane, had given her cooking lessons during the month she had spent with them in the Burgundy village. “The secret of good ratatouille, Mère DeVane told me, was the secret of most good French cooking: you have to take the time to do it right. With this particular dish, you have to fry the pieces of each vegetable separately and mix them all together afterward in a bowl with freshly chopped basil. Whereas the lazy cook,
le cuisinier fainéant
, fries all the vegetables together and then commits the unforgivable sin of steaming them with the lid on so the odors will mix! Ah, I can still see the way Mère DeVane’s whole face wrinkled in disgust when she pronounced those words: ‘
C’est un péché impardonnable, ma chère.
’ ” And Ursula bunched up her face and did something to her voice as she spoke the French words,
and she became the Frenchwoman jealously protecting her beloved son’s palate from any culinary laziness on the part of her future American daughter-in-law.

I felt as though I were floating with them, there in the reflected orange light that played mysteriously on their faces, floating along on the stream of their histories: being invited to stop to examine a highlight, a quirk of fate, a poignant ruin of something they might have done. The floating sensation was heightened by the wine we drank. I was not used to it, but pretended I had often drunk it “back in Fredericksburg” at my grandparents’ table, and, taking me at my word, Ursula or Julian refilled my glass whenever they filled their own.

And, as they drew me into their world, I did have an eerie sensation of being abducted into a community of ghosts. Was I really a member of that other life outside, a life with a mother and a little brother and an aunt who put down plastic runners so her new green carpet would not be spoiled? Were not
these
two, in some deeper and compelling sense, my true family? Bemused by the wine, I gave myself up to the notion of being possessed by them. It was obviously a thing they wanted, too. Were they not wooing me with these tales of their pasts, showing me how they had been this and this and this, but that perhaps the most glamorous thing of all was to preside attractively over all those old experiences in the seductive orange light of this room? And, because of whatever it was in them that isolated them from present-day reality, I felt I was also in possession of
them.
As long as they preferred to be here, together, in splendid renunciation of the ordinary life that went on outside, I knew where to find them. And the more I learned about them, I told myself, the more I would be able to summon them at will through imagination when I was not with them, when I was going about my business in the other world. They would remain safely as they were, for me, in this house. Of course, there were Ursula’s plans—plans that she said gave her life its meaning now—for Julian’s brilliant comeback. But this evening, somehow, in the nostalgic aura of this room, all that seemed beside the point. Julian’s future was not once mentioned, even indirectly, and if it had been, I
think it would have marred the happiness I experienced in their company that evening. Oh God, what am I saying? Is it true, then, that I wanted them to remain has-beens so that I could be sure of them, so that
I
would be the only bright young ray of future in their lives?

I rode between them in the station wagon to Woodstock. Ursula drove, giving me a schoolmarmish little lecture about what I should “look for” in
Hedda Gabler
, even though I had heard her tell my mother she wanted my fresh impressions. But I loved her; tonight she could do no wrong. I loved him, too, that gentle, melancholy man, fastidiously tucking in the loose ends of his ascot when the breeze from the open windows of the station wagon blew them out. I was drunk with love for both of them, drunk with nostalgia for the moment we were living in: infected by the mood of “ghostliness,” I already saw it as part of a summer dream on which I would someday look back. I let my arm brush against Ursula’s arm as she drove: I needed to touch her. I think I must have been pretty drunk with wine, as well.

I did not lose myself in
Hedda
in the big brown barn on the mountain as I had lost myself in
My Fair Lady.
It was not just that it was hot and mosquitoes nibbled my legs and I kept being distracted by moths fluttering toward the spotlights; or that the audience sat so close to the stage that you could see the sweat running down the actors’ necks, and that the actress who played Hedda was not as young as she should have been; or that the aristocratic Judge Brack’s morning suit was too short in the trousers and cuffs; or that the set looked as if it had come straight off the Salvation Army truck.

One problem was that I found it hard to follow Hedda’s motivation. Ursula had told me in the station wagon that Hedda had made a loveless marriage because she came from a stratum of society where it would never have done for her to marry the man who really attracted her, Lövberg, and also she needed someone to support her. But I found her behavior more erratic than the circumstances called for, and I grew impatient with her.
All she really wanted—unless I was missing something—was to destroy everyone around her, including herself. But then, I missed many significant lines of the play. One reason was the wine I had drunk at dinner; the other, and more important one, was that I was paying more attention to Ursula than to Hedda. I didn’t dare turn and look at her directly, but with a hero-worshiper’s second set of eyes, I knew when she grimaced, grew intent, lost herself, then became annoyed with something. And I knew she was also aware of me, watching me out of
her
second set of eyes, taking note of my impressions even while she watched the action on the stage. When Hedda fired the pistol at Judge Brack, at the beginning of Act Two, I shied violently, and Ursula, looking amused, reached over and took my hand and stroked it a few times. Following that, my mind went ecstatically blank, and when I came to my senses, Hedda and Judge Brack were halfway through their scene and I had missed more valuable information.