NINA LOOKED LIKE a washed-out version of her daughter. Everything about Maude was more: More color, more height, more curve, more electricity. Nina’s straight bangs and ponytail were pale with early gray, and her twittery, fragile-looking form was outfitted in the flattering bohemian uniform of thin black sweater, dirndl, and ballet slippers.
Dropping Maude off at school one morning, as sometimes happened, she got out of the car and stood inside the wing of its open door, looking around. The school grounds too were more: More and bigger trees, sweeping lawns, the mansion that formed the school’s main building; the mansarded barn that was like a mansion, which housed the dance and art studios; and, at the moment, more color, as the maples sprouted the first fingerbursts of autumn vermilion amid the still summery lush green. Students trod winding paths in workboots, jeans, flannel shirts, and turtlenecks, all with long floppy hair, or springy hair that suggested egrets, angora cats, passion flowers. In a few years the look would be legion, but at the time it was hardly to be seen outside rock groups, and even they wore repressive little matched jackets.
“I’m glad you’re going here.”
Maude was collecting her books, piling them against her recently budded chest. “Daddy isn’t.”
Mrs. Pugh dodged this. “Well, I am. I think you’re lucky. I wish I could have gone here myself.”
Maude squinted, not wanting to start up the fight again by reminding her mother of how hard she’d made it for her to accept the scholarship she’d won after secretly applying and getting in. They weren’t a private school sort of family, she had been loftily informed. Now, it seemed, they were. Half of them. (Her brother’s vote wasn’t in because, actually, they didn’t know where to reach him to ask his opinion.)
The bearded, proudly potbellied art teacher came sauntering over, hands in pockets, as if recognizing a landsman by Nina’s art uniform. (On top of this, the car was that emblem of nonconformity, a Volkswagen.) “Mrs. Pugh!” he said heartily, extrapolating from Maude’s presence. “You’ve got a talented daughter.” Irritation prickled like scalding bites along Maude’s back. She could draw, it was perfectly true, and she liked people to notice. But she hated this kind of oozy worship, and she wouldn’t tolerate flattery or praise as a comeon. It seemed to patronize the very seriousness of her intention to be an artist.
“I’m gonna be late for lit, Mom. Thanks for the lift.” She wanted to blow her mother a kiss but didn’t want Mr. Patrick to be its incidental recipient.
The mother watched her daughter blend into the stream of students. It seemed a miracle that this girl, her daughter, knew what to do, like an animal that has an instinct about where to fly in winter, how to perform a mating dance. Everything she did, no one had taught her. It was eerie, almost scary, her apartness and self-possession. Even her drawing abilities. Milt had steadfastly refused to teach her, even when she asked: “Daddy, will you show me how to draw a tree?” “Go out and look at one,” he had answered. She hadn’t done as he’d said, though; she just figured it out somehow. And in that same mysterious way she knew how to be part of this crowd, these children of millionaires and famous people, a Senator’s niece, a movie star’s son. She acted as if it were nothing, in her cheap deep-blue jeans from Penny’s in the Roosevelt Field shopping center—which, however, she had embroidered with paisley shapes on one thigh and a peace sign on the back pocket. But how had she learned to embroider? Nina Resnikov Pugh, daughter of a garment worker, hadn’t in her whole life mastered so much as how to hem a dress.
Nina felt the pang that always meant Seth, Maude’s brother—sick, helpless guilt, as if she had wronged him by producing Maude. Nina couldn’t help hating Maude, a little—as if Maude had wronged Seth by being born. Shown her older brother up. Everyone had always oohed and ahhed over little Maude, precious Maude. With each word of praise for Maude, you could see Seth flinch. She and Milt had been so careful, as a result, not to praise Maude.
She wondered at her daughter’s boldness and ingenuity in applying to the school, and at its having occurred to her in the first place. She herself had wanted it for Seth, if anything. They had always known about the school, of course, in that vague way that you knew about things in your area; the way they knew that pioneer aviators had used Roosevelt Field before it got paved over as vast parking lots, though there were still cracked landing strips in the last grass of the flat field; the way they knew that the antiaircraft plants had come because of the flyers, and the farms started to go because of the highways coming out, serving the plants; and they knew the names of the families, which seemed like families out of Greek drama and British heraldry, by the beautiful lands behind brick fences where the few hills of Long Island rose—the Phipps estate, the Whitney estate, Coe, Woolworth, Pratt, Morgan—and saw the starry denizens in gauzy dresses and sequins on the society pages. They seemed hardly human and utterly inaccessible, a different order altogether, for all that Nina passed their gates when she drove to certain shops and always when she drove Maude to her school. And this new friend of hers—Weesie—Louise, who seemed like a polite, lively girl, apparently she lived on one of the estates. Not in the main house but some house on the grounds, so that it sounded not so intimidating, as if they might be gatekeepers or caretakers. Which they certainly weren’t. Though, in any case, to be a caretaker to such grand people was in itself pretty intimidating.
Nina would never have admitted she thought they were better than she was, would not have admitted it to herself. Justice demanded that they be, if anything, worse.
But it was impossible not to be drawn to the green silent enclaves, to want to follow the narrow lanes that snaked from wrought-iron gates posted PRIVATE and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, marked with reflectors so that a forgetful inhabitant coming home drunk at four a.m. wouldn’t crash his own barriers, controlled by electric eyes and other devices triggered out of sight, beyond the fieldstone pillars to which the gates were hinged. It was impossible for Nina not to feel connected to places to which her senses were so attracted, or rubbed that much more raw by the rudeness of the inescapable larger culture to which she was consigned.
And that was why, two summers before, they had pulled onto the winding road that led to Bay Farm: anyone might look at a school, anyone might be a prospective student or student’s parent, however fraudulent or out of place they felt. They had walked the lovely rolling grounds, the gardens no longer elegantly kept but planted with botany projects and provender for cooking classes and preserves sold at the school fair. That was one way they knew about the school: the fair was open to the public and advertised by fliers in store windows or piled on the counter at the cleaners and the stationery store. They always meant to go and always forgot.
They walked into the barn and saw student carvings in wood and stone left half finished on stands, and oil paintings piled against walls, and etchings and woodcuts pinned to the ubiquitous pocked beaverboard. Peering into windows in the main buildings, they saw classrooms. Instead of the usual thirty unconversational desks in grim rows, there were two long tables pressed together, surrounded by chairs—fewer than thirty chairs, for sure. You could see from how things were set up that the students were treated as something precious, not just noisy bothers to be processed and gotten rid of.
No wonder the upper classes had such a sense of their own consequence.
“Maybe Seth—” Nina had begun. Milt silenced her with a look.
But Maude caught it. They thought this place could salvage Seth. The crude way he laughed with his friends; the way he wrenched her arm behind her back until sweat beaded her face; the way he snapped the back of her bra and said “Littlest Angel,” as if she would wear a training bra. There was his music—but, even so, she couldn’t imagine him here.
From the hill on the far side of the old mansion they saw that they were only steps from the glittering bay.
A blunt-bodied fellow in tennis shorts, swinging his racket pendulum-style, had appeared from greenery that must have concealed courts and came up to the interlopers. “How can I help you?” he had unsuspiciously asked. When they said they were just looking around, he had assumed the then-twelve-year-old Maude was the prospective student and took her hand in his big, sweaty paw. Nina hadn’t taught Maude to shake hands and hoped the girl wouldn’t shame her. Maude, in a dark headband, prebangs, had shown her front teeth and returned a firm grip. The man had said he hoped he’d be seeing her there in a year or two. He was a history teacher, but Maude had evidently taken his words as prophecy.
“Isn’t that funny?” Nina had said. “He thought you were applying.”
Only she did. Without telling anyone, except to ask selected teachers at her two-thousand-student junior high for recommendations to the two-hundred-student high school. Not high school: the private-school people called it secondary school, suggesting that there was something gauche or intrinsically low about high schools. The fact that they were free. The fact that anyone could go to them. No one could be turned away.
The Pughs didn’t know anyone who sent their kids to private school except the unfortunate couple down their street, who had finally put their ten-year-old, a boy like a screaming pre– Annie Sullivan Helen Keller, into a school for the deaf.
It came to Nina that Mr. Patrick—“Call me Rod”—was flirting with her. Feeling vulnerable, Nina reminded herself that a high school art teacher was unlikely to be as successful an artist as Milt. She made a point of mentioning her husband. “Have him come over,” Mr. Patrick, Rod, said. “Maybe he’d like to address Friday Meeting.”
Many students had dinner at the school and stayed for evening programs in crafts or for discussion groups, but on Fridays, staying late was mandatory. The whole school would sing a short work in four-part harmony from Bach or Orlando di Lasso and then listen to some uplifting lecture or presentation. The Sena-tor was scheduled, as was someone’s uncle who was head of the World Bank. Nina always found it painful when Milt spoke to a public audience and felt a familiar dread.
“Maybe.”