The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

  “But if your father and mother hadn’t had you, how could you have gotten reincarnated in this life?” I asked.

  “There are multitudes of DeVane families into which I could have been born. There are over a thousand in this country, according to my father’s survey. There are letters from many of these people in his files. His hobby was our family history. He wrote to DeVanes all over the world. If he hadn’t married, I would have found my way back here through one family or another, somewhere in the world. When I went to France to visit our ancestors’ old stronghold, I stayed with a family of DeVanes in the nearby village of Pontarlier. Father had corresponded with them before he died. I came very close to marrying the son of that family. It was the only time in my life I have been that tempted to marry. Marius was his name, Marius DeVane. He was killed at the very beginning of the war, in the French Army. His mother wrote to me in London. She never forgave me for not marrying him.”

  “Did you love him?” We were on solider ground with this Frenchman with the same surname, I thought, than with Ursula’s other possible reincarnations.

  “He was my first love.” She stretched her arms above her head and gazed up at her outspread fingers. “I felt … we both felt … that we were parts of the same past. He had strong feelings about destiny, too; the way the past reincarnates itself in the present. We even discussed whether I might not have been his sister—or brother—or wife, in a previous existence. I see that polite little mask on your face, Justin, but if you are going to live a full life, you must understand that there must be ways of speaking about things we don’t completely understand. It never gets you further to rule things out just because they can’t be proved. Oh yes, I loved Marius, and the erotic aspect was just … well!” A flush spread over her face and neck. “But I couldn’t do it. You see, I had come to Europe to study acting, and I felt that if I married without ever trying for what I had wanted, I would be cheating myself. So we left it that I would go on to London, as planned, and then if we still felt the same, we might marry later. But there was to be no later; the war saw to that. Yet, somehow I knew, even before I left Pontarlier, that it would never happen. I felt it. When I got Mère DeVane’s letter in London the following spring, I knew what was in it before I opened it. It was fate. Do you know what the DeVane motto is, the motto that was on our crest in the days of the Crusades? It was in Old French, of course, but the free English translation is ‘Luck is our ruler—and our weapon!’ The tricky part of it is that you must bow to your luck when it comes, even if it is bad, and yet never give up trying to turn it to your own ends. It’s tantamount to having a double destiny.” She scrutinized me with her penetrating eyes. “Can you understand that?”

  “Is it like they teach you in religion sometimes? That God gives you free will, but He knows ahead of time how you’re going to use it?”

  “Not quite,” replied Ursula, frowning. My answer had not come up to the mark. “Only, you see, in the spirit of our motto, you really can turn things around if you keep your courage and your wits.”

  “But then …” I hesitated, uncertain whether or not to ask this.

  “Yes?” she encouraged.

  “Well, I mean … if it was your destiny to be an actress—”

  “Ah, but I didn’t say it was my destiny to be an actress,” she interrupted quickly. “I only sensed it was not my destiny to marry Marius. I had planned to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and I was determined to go. I had waited for years, postponing it again and again because of my father’s long illness. I was twenty-six when I finally sailed for Europe on the Normandie, having buried my father and completely organized Julie’s recital at Carnegie Hall after his graduation from Juilliard. When I got on that ship, I said to myself, ‘Ursula, now it’s your turn.’ First I wanted to see where my ancestors had come from, and then I wanted to study acting: those were my goals. One must never confuse goals with destiny, although one often leads to the other. In my case, I was an actress—when I took the entrance exam at the Royal Academy, the principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes himself, told me I had an innate instinct for acting—but, as it turned out, my destiny was not to make my living by acting. And yet I have the comfort of knowing I was good, the one year I was in London. You’ve heard of George Bernard Shaw, I hope?”

  I vaguely recalled a witty exchange between the playwright and Winston Churchill that my grandfather liked to quote. “Oh, sure,” I said, although I could not have named a single play Shaw had written.

  “Well, he would sometimes sit in on rehearsals, when the students were performing something of his. He was very old then, but he looked like a lean, cantankerous prophet, and he said the most wonderful things. One day, when I had been rehearsing for Saint Joan—the part I had to abandon in order to rush back to America—he came up to me afterward stroking his long white beard, and said, ‘You’ll make a very good Joan, Ursula, if you can remember that in the third scene you do not know you are going to be burned to death in the sixth.’ ”

  As she imitated the clipped British voice of an old man, her face took on an excited, rapturous glow. Then she turned to me, looking somewhat arrogant, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Although my destiny has pointed me in another direction than acting, it gives me pleasure to remember that day: Shaw himself telling me I was going to make a good Joan. How many living actresses have a memory to compare to that?”

  “Not many, I guess. But why did you have to rush back to America and abandon your play?”

  “The war, my dear, the war,” she said imperiously. “The Germans began to bomb London—you’ve heard of the Blitz, haven’t you?—and no one knew how long it would last. I had to get out while there were still ships to get out on. You see, Julie was in a turmoil over his career at the time. I was afraid he was going to make a terrible mistake and I wanted to stop him.”

  “Did you?”

  “Ah, no,” she said wryly. “He had already left the country by the time I docked in New York. I didn’t see him again until after the war. When he got out of the Army, he was very ill for a while, and I had to take care of him. That’s when we came back here. Our family history is as convoluted as a Greek drama, Justin. Certain things happened that shouldn’t have happened, which led to other mistakes being made, which in turn doubled back and bred fresh mistakes. But, you see, I believe there is still a chance to set things right. And I believe I’m the only one who can do it. Just as in our motto, I may be able to take all the fate that’s happened and use it to make possible what still must happen. Come on.” She rose lightly to her feet by balancing her hand on my knee. “Let’s go up to the house and get your other present. I haven’t heard a sound, have you? Julie must have finished with them early.”

  As we crossed the field to the house on a path of beaten-down grasses, she added, as if it were an afterthought: “A bomb fell on our theater a few months after I had left the Royal Academy. Nobody was killed, but I’ve often thought that, had I stayed, I might have been rehearsing there, perhaps even alone, and that would have been the end of me. It would have meant the end of Julie, too, I’m fairly sure of that.”

  We entered through the back door in the old part of the house, where we found Julian DeVane sitting at a scuffed round table in the dim kitchen, peeling an apple.

  “Why, h-hello,” he said, looking pleased to see me.

  “We didn’t hear a sound, so we assumed they were gone,” said his sister.

  “Oh, they’re g-gone, all right.” His mouth twisted in a disdainful sneer.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Ursula.

  “One was hopeless. The other was little b-beast.” He did not look at his sister, but kept his attention on the loop of unbroken apple peel he was making fall in a graceful length onto a small plate.

  Uttering a heavy sigh, Ursula sank into a chair on the other side of the table. “Are you telling me that you didn’t take them?” She seemed to have forgotten I was there.

  “D-do you know what
he did? While I was giving his brother the c-coin test, he t-tore the wings off a moth he f-found in the corner of the window.”

  “So you didn’t take them?” repeated Ursula.

  Julian looked up at me. I was lingering uncertainly beside the sink. The linoleum was cracked all around the edges. Everything in the kitchen looked old and worn; Aunt Mona would have been shocked by the ancient appliances and the jumble of things that had collected on the deep sills of two narrow windows set in the thick wall. “D-did you ever take the c-coin test?” he asked me.

  “I never took piano,” I told him.

  “Well, you p-put your hands like this on the keys,” he said, laying down his knife and apple and spreading his fingers on the table, “and then the t-teacher puts a c-coin on the back of each hand, and you try to p-play without the coins falling off. It t-tests the independence of the fingers.”

  Ursula propped an elbow on the table and rested her head on her hand. She looked at neither of us as he explained the coin test. I knew he was using me to forestall her displeasure. When he had finished, she asked in a deadly even voice, “What exactly did you tell the mother?”

  “I told her I was c-cutting down on beginning students,” he said, picking up the knife again. He sliced the apple into neat, even wedges. “I suggested she try Mrs. K-kirk, in Kingston. I t-told her I had to st-start practicing for my New York recital.”

  Ursula raised her eyes skeptically at him. “You really told her that?”

  “I really did,” he replied, smiling. He offered her the plate of apple wedges. She shook her head impatiently, still watching him. He held out the plate to me, but I thought I should refuse, too. I felt I shouldn’t be there at all, but what was I to do?

  Julian took a piece of apple, popped it in his mouth, and chewed it thoughtfully. All during this time, a strange little exchange had been going on between them. It was almost as if he were flirting with her, to win her over, and she was melting despite her annoyance with him. “Don’t worry, Sissie,” he said at last, “we’ll manage without them. It was c-cruel, the way he destroyed that moth. And the other one had weak fingers and a tin ear.”

  A brief battle went on at the corners of Ursula’s mouth. The irrepressible smile won. “If they would have been a drain on you, you were right not to accept them,” she said affectionately. “Especially”—and she fixed him sternly with her sharp brown eyes—“since you have finally come around to agreeing it’s time to start preparing for the recital. Of course, we’re losing Jill Van Kleek to boarding school in the fall, but we’ll just have to tighten our belts, as the English loved saying during the war.”

  Looking reprieved, Julian got up from the table and offered the apple around again. Ursula, standing up, too, took a slice, and so did I.

  “Isn’t today your b-birthday?” asked Julian.

  “I brought her up here to give her her other present,” said Ursula.

  They regarded me fondly, like parents who have finished quarreling and have time for their child again.

  “Why don’t I give her a sm-small birthday concert first,” said Julian.

  “Now that is an honor,” exclaimed Ursula, with a proud look at her brother.

  We went through the dining room, which was rather gloomy, with its low, beamed ceiling and heavy brown furniture, then into a larger, brighter room, also with a beamed ceiling. This room had windows on three sides, and a stone fireplace tall enough for a child to stand in. The floorboards were at least a foot wide, and looked very old. The dominating focus of the room was a nine-foot Steinway grand. Julian DeVane propped up the lid with an air of ceremony.

  Ursula motioned me to sit beside her on a sofa of faded flowered chintz. In front of the sofa was a low table containing books from the Clove Library and a bowl with an unusual arrangement of peonies and rhododendron leaves. She folded her arms across her breasts and leaned against the sofa back with a rapt air of expectation.

  At first, I thought it was some kind of joke when Julian DeVane began playing “Happy Birthday” with one hand. But then his other hand joined in, the tune became more complex, and the next thing I knew, he had turned it into a fugue that sounded just like Bach. From there he went on to imitations of Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Debussy, all improvised around “Happy Birthday,” Ursula of course making certain I knew which composer was being imitated as he went along.

  It was an impressive performance, both for its novelty and for the showmanlike manner in which he carried it off. He was engaging to watch, with his desiccated boyish handsomeness, and the way he caressed the keys when doing the romantic passages and looked intense and haunted during the wild ones. I began to doubt my aunt’s dire pronouncement that it was too late for him to have a successful career, because he looked and sounded to me like the embodiment of what people would want in a concert artist: that delicate profile with its shadings of a secret, melancholy history, combined with his skillful and feeling touch. Of course I was a novice in judgment. I had never seen a professional musician play before. I wonder what my judgment would be if I could hear him play now. Would I find him affected? Would I be able to detect, behind the trained precision and the emotion, a fatal absence of the spark of genius? I will never know.

  After my “concert,” they took me upstairs to a room with old-fashioned wallpaper and a sewing machine in it, and presented me with something rolled up like a large scroll that had been lying on top of some boxes. They stood by, like pleased conspirators, as I unfurled it. It was a poster, crumbly and yellow at the edges, of the Normandie, the ship Ursula had sailed to France on, the day of my birthday. Only I hadn’t been born then. At the bottom of the poster were the words

  NEW YORK SOUTHAMPTON LE HAVRE

  “We thought you could use it to cover up some of that ‘R-raspberry Ice,’ ” Julian said.

  “A little window of freedom for you,” said Ursula, smiling, “to remind you that one day you, too, shall sail off, all on your own. I had this on the wall of my room when I was teaching at that girls’ school in New York. French was my subject, and the day after the Normandie burned in New York harbor, I took my class down to see where it had sunk. There was a crowd at the pier; some of the people were weeping. ‘An era of history went down with that ship,’ I told the girls, ‘and, for that matter, an era of my own life, as well.’ ”

  “It’s great,” I said, gazing down at the shabby poster with what I hoped looked like respect. But I was touched that they had thought about what I had said concerning my room, and that Ursula wanted me to have something on my wall that had once been on hers, something that represented an era of her life. I would put it up as soon as I got home.

  “We thought you’d appreciate it,” said Ursula, pleased. “I’ll find you a bit of string and we’ll tie it so you can carry it on your bike. But first, would you like to see the rest of the house? I don’t often offer people tours, any more than my brother offers people concerts.”

  “I’ll leave you two, now,” Julian said. “I think I’ll p-play a while. F-for the birds.” He gave his sister a teasing look and, wishing me happy birthday again, went downstairs.

  “This is a pretty room,” I said, when Ursula and I were alone. As soon as I had said it—mostly to be saying something—I realized it wasn’t true. There were large, discolored spots on the wallpaper, and boxes and extra furniture were piled everywhere. It was more that the room should have been pretty, with the summer afternoon light pouring through the west window, which looked out to the terrace below, and over the fields to the mountains in the distance and the tower.

  “It was nicer once,” said Ursula. “It was our mother’s. It’s got the best view of all the upstairs rooms. Now we only use it for storage, which is a pity.”

  Was it because the mother had gone to an insane asylum that no one wanted to live in her room now?

  Downstairs, Julian began to play the brilliant music that had summoned Ursula home the day I met her. Now she smiled knowingly and li
fted her head. “He’s playing my scherzo to make amends,” she said. “For throwing away thirty dollars a week in lessons. But today will have been worth it if he means it about not procrastinating about his recital any longer. Over here is his room.”

  She led me across the hall to a much dimmer room, with a narrow dormer that faced the road. It was a room filled with memorials to the past. Many old pictures in frames covered the dresser and most of the wall. Ursula hovered behind me while I inspected some of the photographs. There were quite a few on the wall of Julian with a portly, arrogant-looking man. In several, they were both wearing the sort of odd, ruffly shirt Julian had worn on the day of the tea. In one picture, the man was singing and Julian was accompanying him at the piano.

  “That is the lieder singer Julie concertized with in South America,” said Ursula, “and this, of course, is myself and Julie when we were children. And here we are with our mother.”

  I recognized Ursula at once, standing beside her mother’s chair, staring defiantly into the camera with bold, dark eyes. Her face hadn’t changed much, which made it all the more touching to see it connected to the body of a little girl in a white dress, her sturdy, in-turned knees buckled with baby fat. Cuddled close against the mother was a sleepy baby wearing a lacy christening gown. The mother, in an elaborate, stiff-sleeved dress, held herself haughtily, her long neck arched tensely back, as though she was aware of her beauty but didn’t want to entrust it to the camera. Her mouth was serious, she made no attempt to smile, and in the large, light irises of the almond-shaped eyes there was a slightly startled look. I thought there was something altogether uncertain about her, something lacking in confidence. Or was it just that Ursula had told me she had been unhappy and unsure of herself?

  “She’s very beautiful,” I thought I should say. When Ursula’s mother married Mr. DeVane, I realized with a shock, she had been only six years older than I was now; and he was almost twenty years older than my father had been at his death. No wonder Ursula’s mother had felt she could never be his equal. He must have seemed like her own father and a rather old one, at that.