The Finishing School (46 page)

The milkmaids approved of Dixie. And Dixie did not see why Justin had felt so threatened by the milkmaids. They were only an old-fashioned pattern printed on a fabric.

I did repaint the walls of my room, but it took two coats. Dour, muddy, threatening old “Raspberry Ice” wasn’t going to be glossed over with a lighter color as easily as Justin had let Dixie cover up for her at school.

Late one afternoon, when Becky was practicing her ballet again in her room, and Aunt Mona was still at work, and my mother was soaking her feet downstairs after a modeling session with the Hadassah ladies, I removed the blue bottle and the crumpled poster of the
Normandie
from my closet and carried them down to the garage and put them under some other garbage in the can.

“What did you just throw away?” demanded Jem, coming up on me suddenly.

“Nothing worth keeping,” I said, “just some old decorations from before I painted my room.”

“Oh,” he said, losing interest.

In the mornings, I sat on the right side of the school bus. In the afternoons, coming home, on the left side.

Just the opposite from last spring, when the view I could hardly wait for was the one of their house.

The trees changed color. From the window of the bus, I watched the flamboyant death scene of summer. The sumac glowed scarlet; the willows turned chartreuse, then straw-colored; the clusters of purple asters that grew by the side of
the road hung on, stalwart and colorful as ever, even after the first frost.

Sometimes I forgot, and sat on the wrong side of the bus, the side closer to their house, and one October day I realized I had done this only when I happened to look out the window and saw her raking leaves. Her hair was tied back with the kerchief she had worn when I had seen her cutting lilacs last spring. She was thinner, I thought, but she raked with a conscious vigor and pride. The way you would rake if you expected to be observed and commented upon by people passing on the road.

The knowledge of her went straight through me. I might as well have been inside her body, holding myself in that valiant way, playing my part, knowing the village would observe me and say, “I saw her out raking leaves today. She looked thin, and still sad, of course, but, all the same, she had that pride.”

For a moment, I
was
her. And the realization that this could still happen, that I could still understand her and feel her from the inside like this, was unwelcome to me.

One day in early November, Becky and I were making a cake after school. Or rather, I was making the cake, from a Pillsbury’s Devil’s Food Cake Mix, and Becky was standing by to scrape the bowl when the time came.

The front doorbell rang.

“Get that, would you, Becky? Mother’s resting.”

Becky groaned and rolled her eyes, but she went. She came back, carrying an empty casserole dish, and looking as if she knew something compromising about me.

“Who was it?”

“
Shh.
She’s still here. She wants to see you.”

Becky never used people’s names. But I knew, from the way she arched her eyebrows, whom she meant.

“Why did you have to tell her I was here?” I whispered. “Now I’ll never get this cake made.” Yet I felt a strange excitement. Now I would have to face her. What would it be like?
What would I feel? “Don’t you dare sneak any of this while I’m gone,” I told Becky.

She was standing in Aunt Mona’s living room, with her back to me, looking out of the picture window at the street, where several children, including Jem, were riding their bicycles. She wore a dark blue suit I had never seen before, with a skirt that was too long for the fashion now, and dark stockings, and those shoes with the thick heels and high vamps, also from another decade, that she had worn the night she came to pick me up for
Hedda Gabler.
Her hands were clasped behind her, and her head was held high: just as the leading actress might pose, with her back to the audience, looking out of a window, as the curtain goes up.

“Hi,” I said from the doorway, in my cheerful, shallow “Dixie” voice.

She spun around, an expectant smile already prepared for me, and, as she did so, the heel of her shoe caught briefly on one of Aunt Mona’s plastic runners. She looked down to see what the impediment had been, and when she raised her face again, the old mirth was tugging at her mouth. Her dark, mischievous eyes sought mine, inviting me to share the joke.

I smiled, but only politely. Letting her understand that my allegiances were now to the people of this house, however bourgeois their practices might appear to outsiders.

She caught my meaning at once. The irrepressible smile was repressed. Then she took me in with a sweeping glance that half convinced me she was reading the complete text of my thoughts about her since that night at the pond.

“Justin, how are you?” she asked at last, in her low, compelling voice.

“I’m fine, thank you.” I walked across a plastic runner and sat down on the sofa. “Won’t you sit down for a minute?”

“Why,
thank
you.” There was a touch of irony now, the tone of an adult humoring a child who is trying to play grown-up. She sat down beside me on the sofa. Underneath the suit she wore a black pullover sweater and a white blouse underneath. Her hair had grown longer, and she had clipped it back with pins, just
below her ears. She looked very schoolmarmish, very much in control. The new hairstyle was neater, but made her look more severe. Then I remembered that day in her room, when she had been brushing her hair in the mirror and had told me that she and Julie cut each other’s hair. Now she no longer had him to cut her hair. That was also the day that she told me: “To know you is to love the way you look.” How I had treasured those words!

Something in me softened. “Look,” I said, “I’m really sorry about … well, everything.”

She reached over and took my hand. “I know,” she said quietly. “I know you are. I am, too. It’s been awful, but I’ve survived. I’ve survived it. Today I just”—she bit her lip, looked as though she were going to cry—“well, I thought I would come and see how you were. I used the excuse of returning your aunt’s casserole dish, but it was you I was hoping to see.…” She raised her head proudly, struggling with emotions. “When you didn’t come to see me, I thought perhaps you had been hurt by all this. Or that maybe
I
had damaged you. I wanted to see for myself that you were all right.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Nobody has damaged me.”

“Are you sure?” She was beseeching me with her eyes. I knew she was asking more than if I had been damaged. She was asking whether I was still her friend; whether we were going to resume what we had. (“I have a s-selfish reason for hoping you’ll st-stay in our lives,” he had told me on the night of his death. “S-so that after I disappoint her, she will have s-someone else to transfer her ambitions to. Sissie n-needs that.”) I began to have the most terrible fear that out of pity I might pledge myself to something, might promise to go back to her and let her mold my life.

“Honestly, I’m all right,” I said, removing my hand from her grasp, pretending I needed it to smooth back my hair. “I’m
fine.
I really am. It’s just that I’ve been busy with school. I just haven’t had the time to come over.”

Even I could hear the falseness.

“I see,” she said, curling her lips in a dry little smile.

We both sat without speaking.

Then she took a deep breath and said, “There is something I would like to explain to you. About Abel …”

“I don’t want to—” I put my hands to my ears.

“Please. I know you don’t feel the same about me anymore, Justin, but I’m not as bad as you think. It was no … it was not just a cheap affair. Or even a sudden, thoughtless thing. It has a history. It goes back a long time. Abel once wanted to marry me. We were much younger then, and we were … we were already lovers. He was very much in love with me, but I knew Father would never hear of it, and I … well, I loved him, too, but I had larger ambitions for myself than just becoming Mrs. Cristiana. But, all the same, I couldn’t break with him; there was something irresistible about him. Then Julie found out about it. He was home from Juilliard one weekend, and Abel came over, and they had the most terrible argument. You remember, I told you that they had fought? Well, it was over me. Julie told Abel that it would be a comedown for his sister to marry someone like Abel, and Abel’s pride was hurt. So he did something much worse to Julie than beating him up: he told Julie about our mother and Karl. They never spoke again. Abel and I stopped seeing each other, and soon after that he married Adelaide. I thought it would end there. But it didn’t. Don’t judge too harshly … it might happen to you someday. You might find yourself magnetized by someone … and not necessarily the most suitable someone. When Julie and I came back here to live after the war, I saw Abel again and knew there was still something between us, but I fought it. My life was devoted to my brother now, and I wanted to keep it that way. I thought I could just … smolder in my unrequited passion and nobody, including Abel, need ever know. And I managed, I managed superbly for nine years! Then we had to sell off some land last year, and I had to do the negotiating, because Julie doesn’t … didn’t … speak to Abel. One afternoon we met at the hut—Abel wanted to buy the hut and the pond, too. We started talking about it, and I told him I didn’t think I could let it go, it was too much a part of me, and then we just … well, it was as if someone had thrown a very tiny little match on a pile of dry kindling that had been
longing
to burst into
flames.” Her hands spread and lifted, describing the inevitable flames. Her cheeks were flushed with her story. Her eyes triumphantly sought mine, expecting me to reward her confession with my understanding.

But I didn’t want to understand. I had not known “Abel” when he was young, and there was nothing in the man I knew to convince me he was “irresistible.”

And, more than that, this new story of hers contradicted an old story I had liked better.

“I thought you said Marius DeVane was your first love.”

For a second she looked as if she couldn’t quite remember who “Marius DeVane” was. Then she answered with that breezy nonchalance people adopt when they decide to brazen their way out of a tight spot. “Marius
was
my first love, of course, in the sense that it was all magic and foreign and romantic.… God, it was so romantic, up there among our ancestors’ ruins … and also he was acceptable. Even Julie would have approved of that marriage. That was what I meant when I said he was my first love. But I’m sure I never said he was my first lover.”

No, but you said, “The erotic aspect was just … well!” and your face flushed exactly the way it did when you were talking about going up in flames with Abel. Were you, by any chance, thinking of Abel when you were entertaining a gullible girl with your story of Marius, last summer?

I said, “Well, that was the impression I got.”

Now I just wished she would go.

In that uncanny way of hers, she read my thought. “Ah, Justin, I’m sorry we should end like this. I
have
hurt you, I see that, now. And you aren’t going to let me get close enough for it to happen again. Nevertheless, before I go, I do wish you would tell me one thing.”

I waited.

“Did you really want to drown when you threw yourself into the pond that night? Was it that bad, discovering Abel and me?”

“To
drown?
What made you think I wanted to drown?”

Her eyes were probing mine. “For the same reason Julie
wanted to die. To punish me. For disappointing him. You did utter that harrowing cry before you hit the water, and I thought … I mean, you
never
went in the pond. I assumed you couldn’t swim. I thought you were trying to drown yourself … because of me.”

Oh God
, I wanted to scream,
you think you’re the center of the universe!

I said, as calmly as I could, “Of course I can swim. I told you. I’ve been swimming practically all my life. Don’t you remember me telling you that?”

“Yes, but I thought you might have been lying. To save face.”

“Not everyone is a liar,” I said.

I saw her flinch. But she covered up admirably. She didn’t want me to see how much I had hurt her.

“Well, then, my rescue mission was rather wasted, wasn’t it?” she said with a little lilt of sarcasm. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, and this gesture recalled the old Ursula to me, the Ursula who had always been able to put me on the defensive after I had dared to criticize her. I remembered how it had been to love her.

“I don’t know why I jumped in,” I said, fighting the impulse to grab at her sleeve, to plead with her to forgive me for that heartless reply. “I still don’t understand it. I just sort of … went crazy and had to do something. But I didn’t want to
drown
myself.”

As she stood up to go, she smiled down at me. It was a new kind of smile, not one that emphasized all the ways in which we were alike, but one that acknowledged all the ways in which we were different—and not necessarily to my advantage, either.

“Well, that’s one thing off my conscience, anyway,” she said.

I walked her to the door. Once, she gave an infinitesimal tilt toward me, and I stopped, thinking she might be going to kiss me; I was going to let her. But I was mistaken. Her eyes were formal, almost hard, when we said good-bye.