Free The Finishing School by Gail Godwin Page A

afterthought. The east side of the house, which looked even older, was sunk lower on its foundations and gave the whole structure an asymmetrical effect. The shutters on the downstairs windows were painted the same glossy black as the front door, and the shrubbery and lawn were cared for, though not with the meticulous care given by the IBM fathers to the lawns in Lucas Meadows: from the window of the bus, I could see unchecked spurts of onion grass and several bare patches that should have been reseeded. A towering lilac bush that was just now blooming at the old, left corner of the house did a lot to soften the harsh and solitary aspect of the place.
    At first I had thought, Surely Aunt Mona meant some otherhouse, but it was the only stone house that came anywhere after the Cristianas’ house, and it was the first house following the pine forest and a field between. Finally my desire to know for sure overcame my shyness, and I tapped Ed Cristiana’s sister Ann on the shoulder one morning when she sat just in front of me. “Whose interesting old stone house was that, that we just passed?” I asked. She looked surprised that I had spoken to her, but then she said, “Oh, that’s the DeVane place,” and smiled at me and stayed turned around for a minute, as if she hoped I might ask her something else.
    Then, a couple of mornings later, I saw Ursula in the yard. She wore the same clothes as she had in the hut, only her hair was tied back with a bright kerchief. She was cutting lilacs. As the school bus hurtled past with its noisy load, she looked up, straight at my window, where I was already ducking my head in embarrassment. I rode the rest of the way to school feeling foolish for being so curious about a woman I hardly knew. But I also went on imagining her: how she had looked different in the kerchief than with her hair curling loose around her head that day in the hut (the kerchief made her look more like a housewife, one of the mothers in Lucas Meadows); and how, after she had cut some more blossoms, she would have gone into the house and found a vase, or maybe an old silver bowl, and arranged the lilacs in it to enhance some room. She had looked so sure of herself in the yard, as if the best thing you could do on a morning like this was tie a housewifely kerchief around your curls and go cut blossoms for “the good life,” as she had described the life she led with her brother. “I mean, let’s face it, they’ve got to be peculiar, a middle-aged brother and sister living together,” Aunt Mona had said. But, somehow, that made it more interesting to me than if Ursula DeVane had been living with a husband. There was more mystery, this way; there was some hidden story to be brought to light. And also—I understand this now, too—it isolated Ursula more from the ordinary world and made her more accessible to me.

    Ann Cristiana stopped me in the hall and asked me if I rode. I said “a little,” which stretched the boundaries of truth, though it allowed me to keep my pride. Her gentle smile widened. “I thought so,” she said. “My dad’s seen you admiring our horses. Well, I mean, they’re not
all
ours, but we take care of them as though they were.”
    I looked closely at her face, to see if she was making fun of me about my “admiring” the horses, but she seemed completely in earnest. She asked me to ride with her and her brother the next afternoon. “Bring your riding things to school and get off with us at our stop, and somebody will drive you home afterward.”
    I said yes; I couldn’t think how to say no. I was flattered because she was a year older and had her own crowd. I guessed that, in my sadness and preoccupation with my lost world, I had seemed aloof to my schoolmates, and that my speaking first to her on the bus had released her sense of hospitality. And then it occurred to me that going riding at the Cristianas’ might give fate the very opportunity it had been waiting for: wasn’t