The Finishing School (10 page)

“Like what?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure,” said Ed. “How do you like Gentleman Johnny?”

“He’s
very
smooth.”

“He’s a Tennessee walker. We bought him for my little sister Jenny, but you shouldn’t feel insulted or anything. My dad rides Johnny sometimes, when he’s inspecting the land. You know, these horses were bred for Southern planters, so they could ride them all day long without getting tired. That’s because of their gait. It’s this soft rocking motion where you don’t have to post. Want to trot him now? Just give him the slightest pressure with your legs and he’ll do the rest.”

The next thing I knew, I was gliding along on the affable Johnny, who was certainly doing everything he could to let me pretend I was boss. I didn’t even have to post. Ed posted on Mercury, showing off a bit, but I had to admit he looked much more commanding on a horse than down on the ground, bobbing up and down with his bouncy walk. I would have liked to ask more questions about the DeVanes, but I couldn’t trot and talk at the same time. Ann had dropped some distance behind us, and I was certain that my being there was at her brother’s instigation. Well, I would do the same thing for Jem, when the time came, so I really couldn’t blame her.

“You’re doing great!” Ed called to me, riding a little ahead. There might as well have been a lead tied between his horse and mine, so dutifully did Gentleman Johnny follow in Mercury’s steps.

We descended into a lower field and I looked to the right and realized that this was the spot at which I had entered, the day I found Ursula. There was the haywagon road that stopped abruptly at the beginning of the field. And there was the pine forest. She might even be reading in the hut right now. I strained to listen for music coming from the house somewhere on the other side, but all I heard was my own creaking saddle and Gentleman Johnny’s rhythmic footfalls in the grass.

We rode a little farther; then Ed abruptly turned Mercury around, as if stopped at a border. “That’s as far as we’ll go now,” he said.

“But where is the DeVane house?” I asked. “I don’t see it.” Gentleman Johnny was obediently turning around, to follow Mercury.

“Well, it’s just around the corner from those pines,” said Ed. “It sits up on a hill. I’d be glad to point it out to you, but our father told us to stay out of sight of it whenever we could. You see, it makes DeVane mad to see us, and then he takes it out on his sister. Of course, we’re going to have to be in sight when we start putting up the fences, but for now Dad said play it cool.”

“He sounds like an ogre. Why does he hate you all so much?”

“I don’t think he hates
us
, except that we’re my father’s children. He and Dad had this fight about something a long time ago, when they were both a lot younger. It wasn’t a real
fight
, because Dad says DeVane never could fight with his hands on account of his talent, but they had a terrible argument about something and he’s hated Dad ever since.”

“Does your father hate
him?
”

“Not really. He just thinks he’s kind of strange. And he thinks he’s a drag on his sister.”

“What was the fight about?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was something about their mother. She was in an insane asylum. I think Dad said he had mentioned it once, and then DeVane got mad and said some pretty unkind things about our family. The DeVanes are terrible snobs, my mom says. Anyway, Dad doesn’t talk about it much, except to tell us to avoid him as much as we can.”

“I guess that’s best,” I said. An insane asylum! I thought she said her mother had
died.

We rode together in silence for a few minutes. I was so deeply engrossed in all this new information I had learned about the DeVanes that I was borne along on my horse in complete unselfconsciousness. Gone were all fears of making myself ridiculous.

Then Ed looked over at me and swallowed hard and blushed again. “Justin, you’re doing just great,” he said.

“I’m having a wonderful time,” I told him.

“Well, you’ll have to come back and we’ll … do it again. I mean, if I have any free time between putting up those fences. Of course … of course, you and
Ann
can always ride …” He stopped, looking thoroughly confused at all he was trying to say and trying not to say.

“Of course,” I said graciously. All I felt was a sort of wonderment that I could have power over someone without having tried for it, without even wanting it.

We trotted our horses back to where Ann, that cupid, was actually allowing her horse to graze, so as to let us keep to ourselves. I was sorry not to have been spotted in my equestrian glory by Ursula DeVane, but, because of this ride, I knew more about her than I had before. A mother in the insane asylum! And Mr. Cristiana thought she was sacrificing herself for her brother, when she could have done great things herself. It had all the makings of a drama, and with quite a bit of mystery attached, as well.

As the three of us made our way back to the stableyard across the bright fields, I felt happy and at the same time pensive. The happiness was because I had comported myself well on my horse, however much that horse had contributed to the effect. I had not disgraced myself with these new friends, and Ed Cristiana admired me. It was not that I wanted a boyfriend—or that I wanted Ed Cristiana as a boyfriend—but I knew that the time was coming when it would be desirable for me to have boyfriends, and I was relieved to know that my charms were sufficient to attract one without even trying. My pensiveness came from what I felt to be a new and profound truth I had discovered
during this outing: that the same things can be important to people for entirely different reasons. Ed Cristiana had been satisfied with this afternoon because I had been in it; whereas my greatest interest in the afternoon had come out of the additional things I had been able to learn about his fascinating neighbors. Poor Ed would never in a million years suspect this divergence, and if someone told him, I knew he would not be happy to know it.

Mrs. Cristiana was busy preparing supper for her large family, and, as neither Ed nor Ann was old enough to drive, it fell to Mr. Cristiana to take me home. To my embarrassment, I overheard Ed and his father speaking outside in the stableyard while I was upstairs in the bathroom.

“Isn’t she riding her bike?” the father asked gruffly.

“No, Dad. She came on the bus with us.”

“Where does she live?”

“Over in Lucas Meadows. You know, those new houses?”

A silence. “Who’s going to hose down Turk’s tendon? It’s got to be done now.”

“I guess I will.”

“You guessed right. Well, tell her to come on. I haven’t got all day.”

The horsebreeder removed some tools from the passenger side of the truck, and I climbed in.

“Lucas Meadows, right?” He started the engine with a roar.

“Yes sir.” Sitting beside him in my jodhpurs, a department store shopping bag containing my school clothes on my lap, I felt how superfluous I must seem to his concerns.

We started down Old Clove Road. He kept his eyes straight ahead and might as well have forgotten me. He smelled strongly of sweat and horse and some pungent liniment, probably something he had been rubbing on the stallion’s sore tendon. It would be at least eight minutes, I calculated, before we would be in Lucas Meadows, and I wished I could just blank out until that time: it would certainly make no difference to him. But I had
been brought up to make polite conversation with my elders so as not to seem “sullen.” “Speak to them about what they know, and what it is appropriate for
you
to know,” my grandmother had instructed me once, when our rector and his wife arrived too early for a visit and I had to go down and entertain them while my grandmother finished dressing. “And steer clear of topics that are too familiar, or original,” she had added, as I left her bedroom.

I told Mr. Cristiana that I was very sorry to hear about Turk’s tendon. Would it be all right, did he think?

Then I had to repeat myself because I had apparently startled him out of some deep thought. I spoke louder, this time, to be heard over the noise of the truck.

“Oh, he’ll be okay,” said the horsebreeder.

“Did he
stumble?
” I asked.

“Nope. A mare kicked him. It’s what you might call an occupational injury.” He gave a short, dry laugh.

“Oh,
I
see,” I said enthusiastically, not seeing at all.

He turned then and looked at me. “That’s right. You were there, weren’t you? You did see. She kicked hell out of him. Thank God she was booted. Did your people keep horses down south?”

“No sir.” So he had actually mentioned it: how he had caught me watching the horses. But it had not been as awkward as it could have been.

We rode for a minute without saying anything. Then he declared, “But I still hold out for corral breeding.”

“Oh, do you? Why?”

“Well,
because
 …” He narrowed his eyes at the road in front, and his face and neck grew ruddier. It must have occurred to him that it might not be quite the thing to discuss breeding methods with a strange young girl he was driving home. But his passion got the better of him. “My father did it that way, and his father before him. They didn’t tie a mare up with all these hobbles and twitches. They would have laughed at me for putting on the
boots.
And the most unnatural thing of all is this new ‘colt-by-mail-order’ business. Who’s to say what kind of material you’re going to get through the damn mail.”

“The
mail?
” I squeaked. What was he talking about?

“Artificial insemination,” he replied brusquely.

I thought my grandmother would have given me about a “C-minus” for that conversation.

We rode on for what seemed another
eighty
minutes, and we still hadn’t left Old Clove Road. I knew I should leave well enough (or not so well enough) alone, but I was more than ever determined to have a successful conversation with him.

“My uncle, Mr. Mott, said—”

“Oh, Eric Mott’s your uncle? How is he?”

“He’s just fine. He lives on a houseboat now. He and my aunt separated.”

“I think I heard something about it. He still with IBM?”

“Oh yes. It’s a very friendly separation,” I went on. “He comes over every Saturday and mows the lawn and sees to things around the house.”

“That’s nice of him,” said the horsebreeder dryly.

“He said you had a very good war.”

This took Mr. Cristiana aback for a minute. Then he said, “I made the most of what I got. If you want to call that good.” But I caught a pride in his tone that made me think it was safe to go on.

“What did you … get?”

“Well, first I got shot down. But I flew eleven missions first. After they shot me down, they put me in a German prison camp. That was no fun. But horses got me out.” He looked at me in that provocative way people do when they want you to ask them to go on. I had found the right subject, I decided.

“Horses?”

“The Germans found out I was good with horses. This was in the winter of ’forty-four, when the Russians were on their way into Germany. Roosevelt had made this deal with the Russians, see, that they could go in and take the east part of Germany and we’d wait and take the west part—but don’t get me started on Roosevelt. Anyway, the Germans wanted to get their Trakehner horses out. The Trakehners were the best German breed of horse there was … beautiful, powerful horses … a unique breed of
horses … and the big Trakehner stud farm lay right in the path of the Russians, in a part of Germany that later became Poland. Well, they asked me to help out, and I did. A German officer who’d lost an arm in the war and myself got a hundred mares and stallions to what’s now West Germany. Altogether, about nine hundred horses were saved. I might go back there one day and visit the descendants of those horses. I might even look up that German officer. We had a lot in common. We both grew up on farms where horses were raised. If he’s still alive, I’d like to thank him. You know what he did?”

“No sir, what?”

“After we got the horses to the farms where they were going, he looked the other way and let me escape to the Allied front.”

I thought it was a very exciting story. I especially liked the part about the one-armed German officer looking the other way. It expressed a kind of camaraderie I wanted to believe existed in the larger world. But one point bothered me, a point having to do with patriotism. My grandmother would no doubt have advised me to leave well enough alone (for we had now
had
a successful conversation), but I wanted to clear up something. Why was it considered all right, by such people as Mr. Mott, that Abel Cristiana had helped the enemy save their horses, when Julian DeVane was criticized simply for staying too long in a country that sympathized with the enemy? Mr. Mott had said Mr. Cristiana had had a good war, whereas, according to Aunt Mona, he considered Julian DeVane practically a traitor. I decided it must have something to do with bravery. Mr. Cristiana had proved his bravery by getting shot down, whereas Julian DeVane hadn’t joined up until the war was almost over. But to Julian DeVane, music came before fighting; hadn’t Ed said that, even when he was young, Julian DeVane would not fight with his hands because of his talent? Julian DeVane had been pursuing his talent in Argentina, and Mr. Cristiana had been true to his love for horses in enemy territory. But Mr. Cristiana had been brave, and Julian DeVane hadn’t. I wondered how Ursula DeVane would defend her brother on this question.

“Did you ever feel you were being disloyal,” I asked Mr. Cristiana, “when you were helping the Germans?”

“I wasn’t helping the Germans, I was helping the horses.
They
didn’t cause the war. The
horses
didn’t vote for Adolf Hitler. If we’d left them there for the Russians, the breed would probably be extinct by now. Those Bolsheviks would have made horsemeat out of them.”

“Oh,” I said.

“On a scale between Russian and German,” pursued the horsebreeder more heatedly, “give me German any day. We’ve got more in common with the Germans. And while we’re on the subject of loyalty, I’ll tell you something else: I had a lot more respect for that German officer riding all that distance when he’d just had an arm amputated, in order to save those lovely Trakehners, than I have for some of my close neighbors.”