The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  “You know, Justin,” she began slowly, picking diligently at Becky’s seam, “everyone in the world isn’t going to have Honey’s taste in furniture and rugs.” Honey was our name for my late grandmother.

  I sat silently, knowing I was in for a reproach.

  “But we’re going to have to go on living in that world. I’m not saying we’ll never have a home of our own again, with our own things, but right now this is the best I can do for you and Jem.”

  “Is it?” I could not resist replying bitterly.

  “Justin. Do you remember, after we buried your father … and …” She picked out the next few stitches in silence. “… and Mr. Fowler at the bank came to the house to explain to me what my choices were, you remember the talk we had afterward, you and I?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Of course I remembered it: how could I ever forget it? That was when she had told me we had to sell the house. And, just as I had been able to accept that, just as I had gotten us comfortably and bravely settled into a smaller house I was sure we could find somewhere in town where everybody would still know who we were, who would remember what we had been—she had dropped her bomb: we were to go north, to live with Aunt Mona and Becky, the cousin I had never seen.

  “I thought you understood why this was the only sensible choice. Frankly, Justin, I don’t know what we would have done if Mona hadn’t invited us to share her home.”

  “If she hadn’t invited us, we would have found a way. If she and Mr. Mott hadn’t gotten separated, we would still be at home. You know we would.”

  “Yes, perhaps. And it would have been terrible. I don’t think you have imagined just how painful it would have been to have gone on living there with all those reminders. I mean”—and she put her scissors down upon the cloth, and a savage edge came into her voice—“did you imagine us taking walks every Sunday from our dinky little house over to Washington Avenue, so we could see how the new people were enjoying living in our old home? And what, exactly, did you imagine me doing to bring in an income, to bring in money so that your future and Jem’s could lie safely in the bank collecting interest, so you could have your chance when the time comes?”

  “You could have found something. Everyone would have wanted to help you. Granddaddy helped so many people. And I told you I was willing to get a job after school.” I had to keep a tight hold on myself; tears of frustration were threatening to spill. We had been through this before.

  “Justin, honey. You are thirteen years old. You can’t even get a real job till you’re sixteen.”

  “I could have baby-sat my way out of poverty and shabbiness, like Aunt Mona.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Justin. Mona may not do everything in the style you’ve been accustomed to, but she is making an effort to become self-sufficient. I admire that.” My mother picked up the nail scissors and went back to Becky’s seam. “God knows I admire that,” she said with a sigh.

  “Well, you could do it, too. You could get your realtor’s license, like Aunt Mona is doing. She said, once she had it, she could make money hand over fist.”

  “Sooner or later I will have to train for something. I’ll have to get some practical education. But, don’t you see, my hands are tied until Jem’s in school next fall. Until then, I just have to do what I can to help Mona out, and … and take the consequences for the kind of person I have been.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m just beginning to understand, myself,” she said in a wistful, humble tone I had never heard her use before. “You see, all my life, I got to do exactly as I wanted. When I chose to run off and get married rather than go to Sweet Briar, I did it. There was some fuss made, but what could they do? I was their only child and they had raised me to believe I was a law unto myself. And when your father had to go to war three months later, and I was already expecting you, I was welcomed home like the prodigal daughter. After you were born, I got to go off to Mary Washington every day and take what courses I wanted while someone looked after you at home. And I took art, and courses like ‘The History of Furniture,’ things like that. Nothing so boring as shorthand or typing or anything that would help me get a job later. Who needed a job? I had three people to take care of me. And then, when the war was over, and your father wanted to go off to Charlottesville and get his education, I got to go off with him and lead a carefree young college married life, while Honey and Father felt privileged to keep you at home and begin to spoil you as they’d spoiled me. And when we decided it was time to have another child, even though your father hadn’t found the career that suited him yet, my loving parents encouraged us to come right home … there was plenty of room for everybody in that house … and I suppose it could have gone on like that for decades if Honey hadn’t got cancer and then, on top of that, Father his stroke.

  “And, you know, we still thought we could make it, your father and I, if we mortgaged the house to pay the staggering medical bills, and having those round-the-clock nurses for your grandfather. It wouldn’t have been easy, but Rivers was doing real well selling college jewelry for Balfour. I mean, it wasn’t the kind of profession I had hoped he’d have, but it suited his personality. Your daddy had more personality and charm than any man I ever met. He was just a marvelous salesman.

  “But what I had never counted on—after all, he had come home without a scratch from the war—was one little rainy night and his car skidding on a slick road.” She put down the scissors and folded her hands tightly on top of Becky’s dress. “So there you have the story of the little girl who got her own way for thirty-two years. Recently I have been thinking … well … that it would have been better if I hadn’t had my own way quite so much. And I’ve been thinking about you, too. I know there are lots of things you don’t like about our new life, but … pardon me if I sound hard … I think you may grow up to be a better … certainly a more useful person than I am because of the very things you suffer now. You’ll have to develop strengths I never bothered to. Does that make sense?”

  “You make it sound like you brought us here so we could suffer.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were unfair. I had said them as a defense against the bleak life she seemed to be holding up to me. Who wanted to spend the rest of their youth developing strengths from suffering? But my pride kept me from retracting them. And also something else: something about her whole penitential speech had upset me profoundly.

  “Then you have misunderstood everything I have been trying to say,” she replied sadly. “Oh well”—she started ripping Becky’s wrong seam with renewed vigor—“maybe I didn’t say it well enough. I have only just barely thought it out for myself.”

  Now I knew what it was that hurt so, as I watched her rip the seam. Her renouncement of the way she had been was ripping out some vital thread that had run through my whole childhood. In our other life, my mother had always starred as “The Daughter.” I was left with the role of the sturdy little soul, the companion of the grandparents, who colluded with them in allowing Louise to go on being herself. “We must let Louise have the rest of her college,” my grandfather would say. “We must let the young couple have the honeymoon that the war interrupted,” my grandmother would say. Leaving me feeling, almost as far back as I could remember, like a prematurely aged little parent myself, who must exercise self-restraint and empathy—the two chief virtues of my grandmother and grandfather, respectively—so that my mother could prolong her life as a girl.

  And now she was saying she wished we hadn’t allowed it, she wished that self had never been. Where did that leave me? In some kind of limbo, with a lost childhood on either side. There was no reason for me to go on being the kind of person I had been in Fredericksburg; in fact, I couldn’t be, even if I wanted to, because it had been in my role as granddaughter that I had excelled, and my grandparents were dead. And as for the few years of childhood left to me now, hadn’t my mother just implied that those must be devoted to the art of
suffering?

  I sat on miserably, in uncomfortable silence with my mother. Even now, the old responsible adult-child self was asserting itself in me. I knew I should say something “wise,” or at least gracious, in order to take away some of the sting of my previous remark. But what could I say? Then I recalled the words of the woman I had met today, as we had been walking back toward the sunny fields from the hut, when she had her hand on my shoulder.

  “Money does lurk in the plot of everybody’s life, then,” I heard myself saying. “Even more than passion, probably.”

  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.

  Later, 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.