Home Truths (2 page)

In point of fact, the school had never been an abbey. Each of its clammy stones had been quarried in North America, and the architectural ragout was deliberate; it was intended to provide the pupils with character and background otherwise lacking in a new continent. As for the fruit importer, the size of his portrait had to do only with the size of his endowment. The endowment had been enormous; the school was so superlatively uncomfortable that it cost a fortune to run. The fruit importer’s family had been – still were – exceedingly annoyed. They wished he would take up golf and quit meddling in church affairs. He could not help meddling. Presbyterianism had left its scar. Still, he felt uneasy, he was bound to admit, if there were nuns about, or too much incense. Hence his only injunction, most difficult to follow: The school should be neither too High nor too Low. Every regime had interpreted this differently. The retiring principal, to avoid the vulgarity of being Low, had brought in candles and Evensong. The new headmistress, for her part, found things disturbingly High, almost Romish. The white veils the girls wore to chapel distressed her. They were so long that they made the girls look like Carmelite nuns, at least from the waist up. From the waist down, they looked like circus riders, with their black-stockinged legs exposed to garter level. The pleated serge tunics were worn so short, in fact, that the older
girls, plump with adolescence, could not sit down without baring a pink inch between tunic and stocking top. The modernism she had threatened took form. She issued an order: lengthen the tunics, shorten the veils. Modernism met with a mulish and unaccountable resistance. Who would have believed that young girls, children of a New World, would so obstinately defend tradition? Modernism, broadmindedness foundered. The headmistress gave up the fight, though not her claim to the qualities in which she took greatest pride.

It was broadmindedness now that compelled her to welcome Mrs. Holland briskly and cordially, ignoring Mrs. Holland’s slightly clouded glance and the cigarette stain on the hand she extended. Ruth’s father had rung up about tea, so it was quite in order to let Ruth go; still, Mrs. Holland was a family friend, not a parent – a distinction that carried its own procedure. It meant that she need not be received in the private sitting room and given cake but must wait in the office. It meant that Ruth was not to go alone but must be accompanied by a classmate. Waved into the office, Mrs. Holland sat down once more. She propped her umbrella against her chair, offered the headmistress a cigarette. The umbrella slid and fell with a clatter. The cigarette was refused. Reaching for her umbrella, Mrs. Holland tipped her case upside down, and cigarettes rolled everywhere. The headmistress, smiling, helped collect them, marvelling at the variety of experience inherent in teaching, at the personal tolerance that permitted her contact with a woman of Mrs. Holland’s sort.

“My hair’s all undone, too,” said Mrs. Holland, wretchedly, clutching her properties. And, really, watching her, one felt she had too much for any one woman to handle – purse, umbrella, and gloves.

The headmistress retrieved the last cigarette and furtively dropped it in the wastebasket. “With all this rain, one can hardly cope with one’s hair,” she said, almost as cordially as if Mrs. Holland were a parent. Resolved to be lenient, she remembered that Ruth’s father’s money did, after all, lend the situation a certain amount of social decency. The headmistress had heard, soon after her arrival, this wayward story of divorce and confusion – Ruth’s parents divorced; Ruth’s mother, who had behaved badly, gone abroad; the sudden emergence of Mrs. Holland – and she had decided that Ruth ought to be watched. There might be tendencies – what someone less broadminded might have called bad blood. But Ruth was a placid girl, to all appearances – plump, lazy, rather Latin in looks, with glossy blue-black hair, which she brushed into drooping ringlets. In spite of the laziness, one could detect a nascent sense of leadership; she was quite bossy, in fact. The headmistress was satisfied; like the school, the imitation abbey, Ruth was almost the real thing.

Summoned, Ruth came in her own good time. Conversation between the two women had frozen, and they turned to the door with relief. Ruth was trailing not one friend but two, May Watson and Helen McDonnell. The three girls stood, berets on their heads, carrying raincoats. Their long black legs looked more absurd than ever. They shook hands with Mrs. Holland, mumbling courteously. For some reason, they gave the appearance of glowering, rather like the portraits in the hall.

“What time do we have to be back, please?” said Ruth.

“I expect Mrs. Holland will want to bring you back soon after tea,” said the headmistress. She made a nervous movement toward Mrs. Holland, who, however, was collecting her
belongings without difficulty. The girls were being taken to the tearoom of a department store, Mrs. Holland said. “I
am
pleased,” said the headmistress, too enthusiastically. The girls glanced at her with suspicion. But her pleasure was authentic; she had feared that they might be going to Ruth’s house, where Mrs. Holland, the family friend, might seem too much at home. Mrs. Holland pressed on the headmistress a warm, frantic farewell and followed the girls out. It had begun to rain again, the slow warm rain of June. Mrs. Holland, distracted, stopped to admire the Tudor-Gothic façade of the school, feeling that this was expected, and was recalled by the fidgeting of her charges. There was more fumbling, this time for car keys, and, at last, they were settled – Ruth in front, as a matter of course (the car was her father’s), and Helen and May in back.

“Out of jail,” said Ruth, pulling off her beret and shaking out her hair.

“Is it jail, dear? Do you hate it?” said Mrs. Holland. She drove carefully away from the curb, mindful of her responsibilities. “Would you rather –”

“Oh, Ruth,” Helen protested, from the back. “You don’t mean it.”

“Jail,” said Ruth, but without much interest. She groped in the side pocket on the door and said, “I left a chocolate bar here last time I was out. Who ate it?”

“Perhaps your father,” said Mrs. Holland, wishing Helen had not interrupted that most promising lead about hating school.

“He hates chocolate. You know that. He’d be the last person to eat it. But honestly,” she said, placid again, “just listen to me. As if it even mattered.”

Situations like this were Mrs. Holland’s undoing. The absence of the chocolate bar, Ruth’s young, averted profile, made her feel anxious and guilty. The young, to her, were exigent, full of mystery, to be wooed and placated. “Shall we stop somewhere and get another chocolate bar?” she said. “Would you like that?”

It was terrible to see a grown woman so on the defensive, made uneasy by someone like Ruth. Helen McDonnell, taller than the others, blond, ill at ease, repeated her eternal prayer that she might never grow up and be made unhappy. As far as she knew, there were no happy adults, other than teachers. She looked at May, to see if she had noticed and if she minded, but May had turned away and was staring at her pale, freckled reflection in the window, thrown back from the dark of the rainy streets. She knew that May was grieving for an identical face, that of her twin, who this year had been sent to another school, across the continent. Driving through thicket suburbs and into town now, they passed May’s house, a white house set back on a lawn.

“There’s your house, May,” Ruth said, twisting around on the front seat. “How come you’re a boarder when you are right near?”

“How about you?” said May, angrily.

Ruth twisted a curl and said, “Haven’t got a mother at home, that’s why.”

“Would you like to live at home?” said Mrs. Holland eagerly, and Ruth stiffened. Oh, if only she could teach herself not to be so spontaneous! Instead of drawing the child toward her, she drove her away.

“It’s much better to board,” said Helen, before Ruth could reply. “I mean, you learn more, and they make you a lady.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” said Ruth, and May said, “Who cares about that?”

Helen, reminded that these two would grow up ladies in any case, colored. But then, she thought, seeing the three of us together, no one could tell. They wore the same uniform, and who was to guess that Ruth’s father was rich and May’s clever? As long as she had the uniform, everything was all right. Pious, Helen repeated another prayer – that God might miraculously give her different parents.

Furious with Helen for having again interrupted, Mrs. Holland clamped and relaxed her gloved hands on the wheel. Traffic lights came at her through a blur of rain. If only she and Ruth were alone. If only Ruth, with the candor Ruth’s father was so proud of, would turn to her and say, “Are you and Daddy getting married?” Then Mrs. Holland might say, “That depends on you, dear. You see, your father feels, and I quite agree …” Or if Ruth were hostile, openly hating her, if it were a question of winning her confidence, of replacing the mother, of being a sister, a companion, a friend … But the girl was closed, indifferent. She seemed unable to grasp the importance of Mrs. Holland in her father’s life. There was an innocence, a lack of prudence, in her references to the situation; she said things that made shame and caution fill Mrs. Holland’s heart. She was able to remark, casually, to Helen and May, “My father and Mrs. Holland drove all the way to California in this car,” reducing the trip (undertaken with many doubts, with fear, with a feeling that hotel clerks were looking through and through her) to a simple, unimportant outing involving two elderly people, long past love.

They crawled into the center of town, in the wake of streetcars. Mrs. Holland, afraid for her charges, drove so slowly that
she was a traffic hazard. An irritated policeman waved them by.

“Is the store all right?” Mrs. Holland said to Ruth. “Would you rather go somewhere else?” She had circled the block twice, looking for a parking space.

Ruth, annoyed by all this caution, said, “Don’t ask me. It’s up to the girls. They’re the guests.”

But neither of the girls could choose. Helen was shy, May absorbed. Mrs. Holland found a parking place at last, and they filed into the store.

“I used to come here all the time with my sister,” May said, suddenly coming to as they stood, jammed, in the elevator. “We came for birthdays and for treats. We had our birthdays two days in a row, because we’re twins and otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. We wore the same clothes and hardly anybody could tell us apart. But now,” she said, echoing a parental phrase, “we have different clothes and we go to different schools, because we have to develop separate personalities.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Holland, unable to take this in. “Have you a sister?” she said to Helen.

There was a silence; then Helen blurted out, “We’re seven at home.”

“How nice,” said Mrs. Holland. But Helen knew that people said this just to be polite, and that being seven at home was just about the most shameful thing imaginable.

“Are your sisters at school with you?” Mrs. Holland asked.

Everyone in the elevator was listening. Helen hung her head. She had been sent to school by an uncle who was also her godfather and who had taken his duties seriously. Having promised to renounce Satan and all his works in Helen’s name, he uprooted her, aged six, from her warm, rowdy, half-literate family and packed her off to school. In school, Helen had been
told, she would learn to renounce Satan for herself and, more important, learn to be a lady. Some of the teachers still remembered her arriving, mute and frightened, quite as frightened as if the advantages of superior schooling had never been pointed out. There were only three boarders Helen’s age. They were put in the care of an elderly housekeeper, who filled a middle role, neither staff nor servant. After lessons they were sent to sit with her, in her red-papered, motto-spangled room. She taught them hymns; the caterwauling got on her nerves, but at least they sat still while singing. She supervised their rushed baths and murderously washed their hair. Sometimes some of the staff wondered if more should not be done for the little creatures, for although they were clean and good and no trouble, the hand that dressed them was thorough but unaffectionate, and they never lost the wild-eyed hopelessly untidy look of unloved children. Helen now remembered very little of this, nor could she imagine life away from school. Her uncle-godfather conscientiously sent her home each summer, to what seemed to her a common, clamorous, poverty-stricken family. “They’re so loud,” she would confide to the now quite elderly person who had once taught her hymns. “Their voices are so loud. And they drink, and everything.” She had grown up to be a tall, quiet girl, much taller than most girls her own age. In spite of her height she wore her short, ridiculous tunic unselfconsciously. Her dearest wish was to wear this uniform as long as she could, to stay on at the school forever, to melt, with no intervening gap, from the students’ dining hall to the staff sitting room. Change disturbed her; she was hostile to new girls, could scarcely bear it when old girls came back to be married from the school chapel. Hanging over the stairs with the rest of the
girls, watching the exit of the wedding party from chapel to street, she would wonder how the bride could bear to go off this way, with a man no one knew, having seen school again, having glimpsed the girls on the stairs. When the headmistress said, in chapel, confusing two esteemed poets, “The old order changeth, girls. The Captains and Kings depart. Our King has gone, and now our beloved Kipling has left us,” Helen burst into tears. She did not wish the picture of George V to leave the walls; she did not want Kipling to be “the late.” For a few days afterward, the girls amused themselves by saying, “Helen, listen. The Captains and Kings depart,” so that they could be rewarded, and slightly horrified, by her astonishing grief. But then they stopped, for her shame and silence after such outbursts were disconcerting. It never became a joke, and so had to be abandoned.

M
rs. Holland and her guests settled into an oval tearoom newly done up with chrome and onyx, stuffed with shoppers, smelling of tea, wet coats, and steam heating. Helen looked covertly at Mrs. Holland, fearing another question. None came. The waitress had handed them each a giant, tasselled menu. “I’ll have whatever the rest of them have,” Helen said, not looking at hers.