by Gail Godwin
“My own mother had something of the princesse éloignée about her,” Ursula went on, “but, in her case, it was affected. She pretended to be remote in order to cover up her deficiencies and insecurities. But your mother doesn’t strike me as the affected type. On the contrary, she strikes me as someone who knows exactly who she is.”
Here a difficult choice presented itself. We could pursue the topic of my mother and I could unburden myself of my conflicting thoughts on the matter while at the same time satisfying Ursula’s obvious interest in what made her tick. Or I could take advantage of this opportunity to find out more about Ursula’s mother: after all, she had brought up the subject twice already today. There might never be such a good opportunity again.
“What happened to your mother?” I asked Ursula. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” replied Ursula a little too breezily, as if she had been waiting for my question. “I assumed you knew something by the very fact you never asked.”
“Well … I …”
“The Cristiana children told you, probably. Any number of people might have told your aunt. Everyone around Clove old enough to remember knows that my mother had to be institutionalized. It was no secret at the time. Our father informed the community when it was necessary to send her away. It was a comfortable private institution, of course, even though it was a strain on Father’s finances. Several years later, she died in the same institution and Father informed the community of her death. He was a lawyer, he was privy to other families’ secrets and sorrows, and he felt he owed others some accounting of our sorrow. He did not tell them all the details, of course. Nobody tells all the details, do they? Almost everyone lies a little. Some people lie a lot; they even lie to themselves. My father used to say it was a rare person who came to the office to seek his advice who could actually tell an accurate story of how his grievance came about. That’s because most people run from what they can’t understand—or don’t want to understand. Lying is a way of running. My mother’s madness was a lie: I believe that. I believe madness is often the show we put on when we haven’t got what we wanted. Only, by the time you put yourself in the hands of the doctors, you’ve locked yourself into a part you have to keep on playing. At least until someone proposes another part for you. That’s what happened to our mother. She lost her appetite one day and a doctor asked her if she was trying to starve herself. That gave her the inspiration: she stopped eating altogether, and, despite the doctors’ efforts to feed her intravenously, she succeeded in starving herself to death. People around here never knew that part. Father withheld the details even from Julie, who was still only a little boy. Julie only found out from me much later, after he came back from the Army.”
I thought of the languid woman in the old photograph in Julian’s room. She hadn’t looked happy in the picture. But to just stop eating, to starve yourself … “She must have been very unhappy,” I said.
“In all my childhood, I don’t remember her ever throwing back her head and really laughing. She was so afraid of life … so timid. She was socially insecure and terrified of doing something gauche. So, most of the time, she didn’t do anything at all. She sat around looking distant and beautiful and hoped she would pass for what people around here expected from a DeVane. But she kept getting it wrong. There was the matter of her clothes, for instance: she made all her own clothes, sent off for the most exquisite fabrics from a store in New York, and then she would make herself the kinds of clothes that no one wore in the country. And she would go shopping for groceries in them. She would get all dolled up, even with a hat and a veil, to go to Twiggy’s! People laughed at her. I remember them laughing, because I was with her. They would nudge each other and exchange glances, and then the most hypocritical of them would come up and say, ‘Oh, Mrs. DeVane, you always turn yourself out so nicely.’ It drove me wild! I was so ashamed, but I was furious at them, too!”
I looked over at Ursula, stomping along the path in her brother’s sturdy boots. Her face, pink from exercise, was at the moment wearing an expression of baffled youth and rage, such as the young Ursula in the grocery store must have worn. I had the eerie sensation of being able to glimpse Ursula as she had looked all those years ago, angry and humiliated beside her mother.
“Why didn’t somebody tell her about the clothes?” I asked. “Why didn’t your father?”
“My father was like most men. He liked his wife to look nice, and the clothes made her happy. She did look nice, just terribly overdressed, and the clothes did make her … well, not happy, but contented. She loved sewing them and draping them on her body and turning this way and that way in the mirror. She wanted to dress me, too, but I wouldn’t stand still for the fittings. I gave her a pretty awful time, poor woman. I can see it more objectively, now that I’m older. I’m older than she ever became. When she died she was ten years younger than I am right now. And I was to give her a worse time, still. I was the one who precipitated her madness. I drove her over the edge, you see.” She stopped on the path and fixed me with the bright brown eyes. “Do you want to know how?” she demanded. She was looking at me as though she wasn’t sure I could pass the test.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”
“I do want to tell you. I’ve thought about it for some time. I want you to be my judge. Because you aren’t much older than I was when I precipitated our family tragedy. I want you to imagine yourself in my place and then tell me if you would have done the same thing … or if I am a monster.”
“I’ll … try,” I said nervously.
“Good!” she replied. She stooped and vehemently broke off a long, leafy branch from a sapling. “I don’t know where all these gnats have suddenly come from. A trail of them has started following us, have you noticed? Well, since you are the lunch-bearer, I shall be the gnat-fanner.” We began to walk once more, she flamboyantly waving the branch before us, clearing a path through the gnats.
X.
“Only one other person alive knows this story in its entirety, and that’s Julie. I told him everything after he came back from the Army and was very demoralized and didn’t want to live. Father and I had kept a lot of it from him because he was just a little boy when it happened, but now I thought it might make things better if he knew all of it. So even though it meant risking his love, I told him what I had learned about our mother and what I had done about it. There was the chance that he would blame me for her death, but I was lucky: he didn’t blame me. He said he had known a lot more than we thought, and that, even though he was just a small boy, at the time he had sensed our mother was an unhappy woman, even before Karl came, and that Karl had only precipitated things; if it hadn’t been Karl, it would have been something … or somebody … else before long. And having it all out in the open brought us closer than ever. He stopped speaking of wanting to die, and he let me lecture him about not wasting his talent: he started practicing again. He could even joke about it. ‘We can’t let Karl get away with killing two DeVanes,’ he said. The only thing I ask of you is that you don’t tell this to your mother or your aunt or anybody; and I wouldn’t want Julie to know that you know. I don’t want him upset in any way before his recital next year. I can’t risk having the whole thing start over.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Dear Justin, you say that so earnestly. I love your earnestness. Don’t ever lose it, though I suppose you’ll have to lose some of it out of self-defense. Earnest people are so often teased. Oh God, where to begin this tale of woe? With the hut, I suppose. The hut by the pond that we have christened your ‘Finishing School.’ The last person to live in that hut—it had a roof then and was quite habitable in the warm months; after all, it had housed a miller and his wife, year-round, in my great-grandfather’s time, when there was a mill there—the last person to live in that hut was a tutor of ours, a young German named Karl Klauss. He wasn’t really a tutor, he was one of Father’s benevolent causes. The po
or boy had come over from Schleswig-Holstein to work for a great-uncle, but by the time he arrived the uncle had died and the bank had repossessed his mortgaged farm. Father acted as the bank’s lawyer and felt sorry for Karl, who spoke little English and didn’t have money for the passage back to Germany. Karl’s hope had been to work for his great-uncle and earn enough to go back home and put himself through the Berlin Hochschule für Musik—he had a beautiful bass-baritone voice. When Father found out Karl was musical, he offered him the hut and his meals in return for giving us piano lessons. I was hopeless, right from the start—I’d rather have been outside playing than practicing—but it was Karl who discovered Julie had perfect pitch, and it was Karl who, I’m convinced, made Julie want to be a pianist. A child can have talent, you see, but if that child doesn’t have the desire, he will never be a truly inspired musician. Father also got Karl a paying job playing the organ on Sunday at the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston—you know, where we had that wretched recital and Julie got so caught up in memories that he acted unwisely and upset your cousin Becky. Father loved matching people up with jobs and benefactors. He was one of those old-time country lawyers who hardly ever collect a fee. He preferred the old influence-and-barter system: ‘I’ll draw up your will for you, and you send me a ham the next time you slaughter some pigs.…’ ‘I’ll defend your son for writing that bad check, Doctor, because I know you’ll take care of me if I ever get sick.’ Father liked that way of doing business because it kept him in the center of things, it gave him a kind of patriarchal power in the community. That’s why Julie and I are in our present predicament. Father lived off his capital, and whenever he got strapped he’d just sell off some timber or another piece of land. In my great-grandfather’s time, all the land on the other side of the road belonged to the DeVanes, and all the fields between here and the Cristianas’. In those days, the Cristianas were barely hanging on, they had only about ten acres to farm. Now we have only ten acres and Abel has a hundred and fifty. How the mighty are fallen! And Julie and I can’t very well pay our electricity bills with hams that were eaten thirty-five years ago. Though, I must say, the doctor in question never once sent a bill for caring for Father all during his last illness. And you saw how Twiggy wouldn’t let me pay for the basil plants that day in the store. Twiggy is still paying off his debt to Father; Father saved Twiggy’s farm once. However, much as I wish we could, we cannot exist on basil any more than we can on memories of our family’s once-exalted position in Clove.
“So Karl came to live in the hut by the pond. It was in the spring of 1922. I was ten and Julie was six. Karl was twenty-two, the same age as the century. He was a sad, comical thing at first sight. Thin and angular as a scarecrow, with pale skin and red, red cheeks—cheeks like a painted doll’s. And the way he ate! Ravenously, voraciously, keeping an eye on everything on his plate, as if he were scared some part of it would run away! He told us in his broken English that his family had almost starved during the fourteen-eighteen war, and that sometimes six people had to share one potato among them. And his poor English: it came out in clumsy, unmodulated blasts … like a bull in pain. And he would blush if you looked sideways at him: his long, pale face would turn red as his cheeks, all the way out to the tip of his long, beaklike nose. He seemed to me like a large, funny pet that Father had brought home to entertain us. But, from the first, Julie adored him. He thought of Karl as his personal possession because the two of them spent so much time together. Karl became a kind of baby-sitter. The two of them would go for long walks in the fields and Julie would teach Karl the names of things in English. Julie was the perfect little teacher—you know how children delight in repetition—and Karl felt less self-conscious trying out his new language in the presence of a child. And, in turn, Karl discovered Julie’s talent and got him interested in playing the piano.
“In the evenings Karl would play and sing for the family. As soon as he began to perform, he shed his forlorn, comical aspect. He became a person in control, a force. He had a rich, doleful, slightly sinister bass-baritone voice that lent itself well to the songs he liked best, the romantic and melancholy songs of Schubert and Schumann and Brahms. There was one song, Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger,’ that he sang so well it made us shudder. It’s a song about a man who is watching another man staring forlornly at the house where his beloved used to live, and then the watcher realizes that the other man is himself. When Karl got to this part of the song, Julie would cringe and moan in a little ecstasy of terror, and burrow up against our mother, who would smile and burrow back against Julie and pretend to be afraid also. And Father would arch his eyebrows to show he was pleased with the whole setup: this useful, talented young foreigner under his protection, entertaining our household. And as I watched Karl and listened to him sing, I became aware for the first time of the formidable power of art. I understood how art has the power to seduce us all—it can even turn the artist from a ridiculous, frightened person into a seducer.
“Our mother, after an initial revulsion at Karl’s foreignness, became devoted to him. She was grateful to him for being so good to Julie, but, more than that, he gave her a purpose. Here at last was someone who felt more out of place than she did. She learned to cook his favorite German dishes and made shirts for him out of her soft, beautiful fabrics. Within no time, Karl began to fill out and look sleeker; he looked more like a man. And, blushing and bowing, he became her grateful knight. To him she was the exalted lady of the manor, the figure she had tried for so long to impersonate.
“It was no secret to anyone that my mother and I were at war. Our natures clashed. From as far back as I could remember, she had wanted me to be the kind of child I wasn’t: a sweet, passive little girl, a dressmaker’s mannequin. And even when I was very young, I had a sort of contempt for her. My father was amused by it; I think he had long since gotten over his infatuation for the young bride he had brought back from Albany, but he was too proud a man ever to admit making a mistake. He enjoyed telling people that I was such a thorough DeVane that he sometimes believed he had given birth to me out of his head, the way Zeus had produced Pallas Athene. My father and I were allies, and he defended me when my mother complained that I was a roughneck. My great-aunt Clothilde, who had married a Hasbrouck, had been a roughneck as a girl, he said. When he was a boy and she was an old woman, she told him stories about how she went off for days, fishing and camping out with her brothers, and once, in a fit of rage against some family discipline, she had run away on her horse, riding bareback in the pouring rain all the way to Alligerville, where an old uncle lived. I would calm down when I married, my father told my mother, adding somewhat proudly that it was in the nature of DeVane women to be headstrong and cheeky when they were young. Naturally, I overheard all this and became more headstrong and cheeky than ever: I felt it was my birthright to defy my mother now.
“Then, just after Karl came to us, some nuns opened a private school for girls in Kingston, and were accepting applications for the fall. My mother begged my father to send me. ‘Think of the advantages,’ she said. ‘DeVanes don’t go to Catholic schools, whatever the advantages,’ he told her. ‘We are descended from Huguenots, remember?’ But now that she had this idea of a private school in her head, she couldn’t let it go. As the summer wore on, she kept nagging him. I was a smart girl, she said, changing her tack, and it was a shame for a smart DeVane to be wasting her brains in that one-room school. She nagged until I heard Father say he would consider it. It was too late for this year, he said, but he would ask around about good boarding schools. I probably should have more mental stimulation, even though he would miss my wit and energy around the house.
“After that, she had her weapon. Whenever I disobeyed, or tore my clothes, or refused to stand still and let her braid my hair ‘for neatness,’ she would shake her head and say, ‘I’ll be so glad when it’s time for you to go off to school, where they’ll turn you into a lady.’ She made it sound like some evil spell: I saw myself hobbled and im
prisoned in airless clothes, forced to sit simpering in some institution’s ‘parlor,’ sipping tea out of a fragile china cup with my little finger curled. I would lose all my wit and energy. I would have to leave this place, the place of my heritage. Even at the age of ten, I understood how certain places keep the spirit alive. I needed this place that was my home. It nourished me with some elixir, gave me confidence and strength. I still feel that. During those times when I was away, in France and England and New York, I knew I lacked a certain something this place could give me. Oh, I knew I could live without it—I would have had to, had I become a famous actress, traveling all over—but, at ten, I was terrified. My soul was forming. If I were sent away, I might lose something this place was carefully building into me. And I was terrified and in a rage, all at the same time. ‘My mother is trying to separate me from my birthright,’ I told Abel Cristiana, who was my friend and playmate. ‘She is trying to kill the DeVane in me! She’s jealous because she is not a real DeVane.’ Abel didn’t have much love for my mother, either, because she thought he was a raggedy little ‘yokel’ and always looked offended when I brought him into the house. ‘She is destroying me,’ I said to Abel. ‘She is trying to turn me into a weak thing like herself!’ ‘Maybe she will die,’ Abel said, to comfort me. He had been my best friend since I was in second grade and he was in first and he had tried to bully me by aiming his slingshot at me; but I had outbullied him with sarcasm, and after that we joined forces and encouraged and protected each other’s interests. ‘Oh no, not die,’ I told him—that was going too far— ‘but I wish maybe she could contract tuberculosis, like Mrs. Johannsen did, and be sent away to a nice sanatorium. We could go and visit her and take her presents, and she could have her sewing machine there, but she wouldn’t be able to ruin my life anymore!’