The Finishing School by Gail Godwin

Author:Gail Godwin [Godwin, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-47226-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

VIII.

What was the source of her witchery? Did all of it emanate from her? Or did I invest her with part of it?

“I have made a new friend this summer who I admire a lot because she is sweet, interesting, and funny.” That was the best I could describe it with my adolescent vocabulary. As I wrote that sentence in the “Notes” section of “My Personal Life,” what was I trying to capture with those everyday words? I know acuter ways of describing people now. My perceptions of human beings are more complex, I like to think. But can I now, through mere words, get any closer to the essence of her charm?

It had something to do with her elusiveness, her mercurial, protean qualities. I was never sure of her, but I was never bored by her, either. She was never, from one visit to the next, quite the same. I could not pin her down even visually. Sometimes she would look extraordinarily young; sometimes old. She could appear as a sprite or a tomboy or an aging spinster. In a single afternoon she could be amused and benevolent, severe, abstracted, imperious, childish or snobbish, funny, sarcastic or downright spiteful. She could also be poignant and vulnerable. One minute I was her confidante: she would be relating to me her latest schemes for Julian’s comeback, which she and a manager in New York were going to arrange for the winter season one year away. She could be discussing with me, as though my ideas and opinions really counted, what ways “we” might employ to fill up the hall, and which pieces Julian should play, and in what order, to show his versatility and keep the audience so attentive that not a single person would dare to cough. And then, suddenly, in the midst of our dialogue, she would administer a corrective thwack with the side of her hand between my shoulder blades and say in a reproving tone, “Don’t slump, Justin. Your posture tells others your opinion of yourself.” And I would be reduced from an equal to a child.

One afternoon when I was helping her weed her vegetable garden, I started telling her about the flowers my grandmother had grown, and Ursula got very inspired at my description of the delphiniums and launched into grandiose plans for the kind of garden she was going to put in around the terrace after she had gotten Julian launched and some money was coming in. “Of course, I’ll have to be away a good deal—Julie’ll need someone to pack for him and organize him on his tours—but when I’m home I’m going to make this into such a showplace that all the family buried for miles around will float up out of their graves at night and come over here and gape at what I have made of their old homestead.” Infected by her excitement, pleased to have been the agent of it, I elaborated further on my grandmother’s gardening prowess. Feeling

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