Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  Cornelia stopped dead in her tracks. “No, I didn’t know, Maddy. When I get home from the studio, nobody bothers to fill me in on anything.”

  “Well, it just happened yesterday, Mama. Tildy told me when we were having our little reading session last night. She wasn’t even supposed to tell me. You know how the Ravenel likes to say, ‘Now this is just between ourselves. … ‘”

  “I wonder what that woman has up her sleeve to inflict on our family now,” Cornelia burst out savagely.

  But then she switched back into her soignée social persona as the potentate, a burly, red-faced man in a red fez and a Santa-red cardigan, came tripping toward them with the light gait of an upright bear. When introduced to Madeline, he complimented her lavishly on her fetching hat.

  THEIR LAST AFTERNOON shoot was the Women’s Preservation Society’s Christmas sale at the newly restored Miles-Rutherford House, the oldest brick building in the county.

  “Which means I’ll have to be civil to Eloise Niles, the president,” Cornelia said to Madeline as they climbed the freshly painted steps leading to the double-tiered porch. A uniformed maid took their wraps at the entrance; then they pushed slowly forward into the crowded neoclassical rotunda, through a dense cloud of cigarette smoke and conflicting perfumes and the eerie acoustics of dozens of high-pitched voices reverberating off the domed ceiling. Well-turned-out preservationists broke apart from their huddles to make a passage for the equally well-turned-out Mrs. Stratton followed by the camera-laden beauty wearing the Davy Crockett cap with seductive veil. Some called to Cornelia by name. “Oh, what a darling hat your assistant has on,” cried someone else. “No, that’s the daughter,” said another. “And she has a twin, doesn’t she?” “No, that was the—” (inaudible).

  Finally they reached the Greek Revival semicircular sunroom sparkling with reflections from the river and a ceiling-high Christmas tree loaded with handmade ornaments for sale. Arranged on trestle tables covered in green felt were crocheted lap robes, sequined evening purses, knitted socks and mittens and scarves (a great many, alas, contaminated by the Santa-red color), embroidered napkins, needlepoint eyeglass cases, painted wood serving trays, silver jewelry, hand-carved soapstone angels, “and just about every other last thing on earth nobody needs,” Cornelia muttered to Madeline over her shoulder as she stooped behind her flash camera to get eye-level close-ups of the laid-out goodies. “It’s a wonder, though, that there’s so much of it left at the end of the day.”

  “Oh, most of them have already been sold,” confided a voice behind her that was not Madeline’s. “But I explained that they had to remain on the tables until you got here, Cornelia.”

  “Ah,” said Cornelia, straightening up to confront the eavesdropper. “Well, that makes sense.” She saw that Madeline had been detained by some women stroking her hat.

  “I’m Sally Goodall, vice president of the preservationists. Eloise Niles has a bad case of the flu, but she asked me to send you her warmest regards, Cornelia, and thank you for fitting us into your day.”

  “How very kind of her. Tell her from me to get well quickly. Listen, er—Sally, could I trouble you to stand over there by the tree, with the river view as your background?”

  “Don’t you want me to get some of the others, Cornelia?”

  “The others can wait. Right now the light is perfect. And you look so—well, representative of this whole gathering.” Cornelia reserved a special corner in hell for people who repeated your name over and over, as this vice president person was intent on doing.

  “Well, thank you, Cornelia. That is,” the woman tittered nervously, “if you meant it as a compliment.”

  “What else? Now turn your body a little to the left—that is really a handsome suit—and lift your chin—nice earrings, too. No, don’t look at me. You’re the person in command at this lovely affair, everyone is having a good time, and most of the goods have already been sold. Just look sideways at the river and think of your—um—bounty.”

  “My bounty,” echoed the vice president obediently.

  “That’s right. Don’t move, just keep looking slightly sideways at—that’s it, that’s great.” Cornelia snapped away, aiming the lens so the flash wouldn’t reflect in the window and ruin the shot.

  “Well, thank you, er, Sally. I think we got something really nice—the table with all the goodies, the river, and, of course, yourself.” She expected the vice president to take this as her cue to plunge back into the surroundings, but the woman continued to stand there, beaming at her meaningfully.

  “You don’t remember me, do you, Cornelia? It’s Sarah, Sarah Kogan, from your class at Mount St. Gabriel’s, only I transferred to public high after seventh grade. And when we moved away, I decided to call myself Sally.”

  “Well, goodness—Sarah Kogan—now I remember you perfectly.” The old name had instantly plugged Cornelia into the image of an overeager girl who crept around the edges of people’s private conversations. “And how is it you find yourself back in Mountain City, Sarah—er, Sally?”

  “My husband was transferred here from Macon, Georgia, last year. He runs the Mountain City State Farm office.”

  “And here you are, practically running the preservationists. Well, great to see you, Sarah. I’ve got to be earning my shekels. I’m a working woman, now, you know.”

  But to Cornelia’s amazement, Sarah-Sally was clutching at her arm. Her eyes had gone all teary and she was saying the most appalling things.

  “You and she were just—everything. I used to watch to see you come into the classroom together, to see what you wore. You dressed alike, but there was always some difference. You had colored shoelaces; she wore her barrettes farther back. You were like twin goddesses; everyone looked up to you. Just before we moved away, I heard Antonia was going to become a nun, and I wondered what that would be like for you. I mean, it would be like losing a part of yourself. And then, oh, I am so very sorry—I hadn’t heard until Jim and I came back to Mountain City that she had passed away. If I had known, Cornelia, I would have written you a letter. Not that my letter would mean much after all these years, but I felt so bad about not knowing—!”

  Sarah-Sally Goodall née Kogan was on the verge of losing control, though she’d at least had the presence of mind to whip out a hankie and, in the process, thank God, had abandoned her clutch on Cornelia’s person. Partly remembering, partly calculating where the downstairs restroom in the restored Miles-Rutherford House was likely to be, Cornelia shoved the vice president of the Women’s Preservation Society in that direction.

  “Please—Sally—go to the ladies’ and pull yourself together. Thank you for your kind words and welcome back to Mountain City, but now I really must get on with my work.”

  MADELINE, HAVING EXTRICATED herself from her hat flatterers (was that all you had to do to be thought superior and daring in this environment: drape an old silk scarf over your curlers and crown yourself with your father’s old raccoon cap?), hurried to her mother, who would be wanting more film. But she was arrested by a strange scene taking place between Mama and a woman clawing at her arm. Talking urgently into Mama’s affronted stare, the woman suddenly whipped out a handkerchief and began to cry, and Cornelia, her face gone remote, was steering her through the room and then shoving her in a specific direction. “… I really must get on with my work,” Madeline heard her mother say.

  Cornelia turned and saw her daughter. “Well, better late than never,” she drily commented. “Give me the Argus and take the Kodak. And go get our coats out of hock and wait for me outside, on the porch.”

  “THANK YOU, MADDY.” Madeline was driving them away from the Miles-Rutherford House. “That appalling woman. I couldn’t risk still being there when she came back from the john. I couldn’t have endured a second onslaught. I just wanted to shoot every face and outfit as fast as possible and get out of there with my sanity intact.”

  “Who was she, Mama? Why was she crying?”

  “The blubbering eff
rontery! She was a nobody in our class at Mount St. Gabriel’s. She transferred to public school after seventh grade, and then her family left town. And here she was, going on in this presumptuous way about Antonia and me.”

  “What? What did she say?”

  “Oh, how we were twin goddesses and everybody thought we were ‘everything’ and how she used to lie in wait to see what wonderful outfits we wore to school each day, and how I wore colored laces and Tony pulled her hair back with barrettes. I tried to keep tuning it out—it was so inappropriate! And now she’s moved back to town with her insurance-salesman hubby and she hears for the first time that no, Antonia did not become a nun and that Antonia had—oh my God—‘passed away.’ and, oh, wait, before that about how she had worried about me after Antonia had taken vows, would I feel I was losing a part of myself—oh, the familiarity! The emotions! I’d rather she had thrown lye in my face.”

  “Listen, Mama, would you like to stop at the Dairy and get a cup of tea and some ice cream?”

  “I can’t think of anything more comforting, darling, than sitting across the table from my beautiful daughter in her crowd-pleasing hat and sipping a hot cup of tea and then chasing it down with a hot fudge sundae, and then going home to my adoring husband and hearing about all the free trees and eggnog he dispensed this afternoon, and then taking a fresh perspective on my strange unique baby girl and warning her to beware of the ravenous Ravenel, who has been known to gobble up young girls, but I am a working woman and so what I am going to do is ask you to take me home so you can start primping for your lovely dance with your dashing older man. Flavia will prepare me a thermos of soup and another of hot tea, and then I’ll go down to the studio and develop the afternoon’s haul. I want to get it done. All the Christmas do-gooders and their tacky decorations for Our Lord’s poor birthday in a stable. Also, I think I may be coming down with something.” She laughed almost happily. “I think Eloise Niles has managed to infect me with her flu all the way from her sickbed.”

  How does she do it, wondered Madeline, turning the Packard homeward. How does she manage to shoot us down with such faultless aim—“better late than never,” when I’ve been her faithful driver and camera bearer the whole of this Saturday afternoon, and my “crowd-pleasing hat” and “primping for your lovely dance with your dashing older man”—and make us keep loving her and longing for more of her company and her eloquent abuse? Tonight I will be leaning into the shoulder of Creighton’s rented tux, knowing we are the handsomest couple on the floor, but part of my heart will be with Mama in her darkroom, venting her outrage against the presumptuous blubberer and the tackiness of the Christmas season.

  CHAPTER 17

  Shadows on an Outing

  First Saturday of Christmas break 1951

  Ice Capades matinee

  Mountain City Civic Auditorium

  HENRY VICK HAD taken front-row dress-circle seats so that Chloe and Tildy could crane their young necks over the parapet to their hearts’ content and devour every move in close-up of the professional troupe of skaters waltzing to the thump and blare of Tales of the Vienna Woods, which bounced off the acoustic ceiling Malcolm Vick had designed the year before his death, and whose installation Henry had faithfully overseen, along with the important ductwork and the hydraulic-plant room below, with its water and pressure tanks that made it possible to transform a dance floor and basketball court into an ice rink overnight. The girls were close enough to spot the plume of breath curling from the parted mouth of a skater, to thrill to the shear and scrape of blades executing a sudden turn, to overhear the human grunt of the leading man as, smiling, he lifted his partner to twirl her around on the ice. “Look,” hissed Tildy, “you can see her vaccination scar. Right there, on her thigh. I would have made them do it on my arm.” “But her arms are bare, too,” reasoned Chloe. “True, but if it was me with my legs up in the air in front of crowds, I would have insisted on the arm.”

  There they are in their young dramas, thought Henry, bitter with his dark news, which he had determined to keep from Chloe until after Christmas. Mine are over. That is, if I can be said to have had any dramas. Somehow “his bride killed on their honeymoon” doesn’t really belong to me. It’s more like something imposed on my curriculum vitae by others who weren’t there. There was—perhaps—a drama in our marriage, but it was just beginning and could have developed to fruition; though who knows what kind of fruit it would have produced?

  A woman he’d gone out with for a while, longer than he should have, told him before she broke off with him that he reminded her of a character named Marcher in a tale by Henry James. In his fifth year as a widower, friends had fixed him up with Letitia Winch, a Mountain City “girl” of good family, who’d lost a fiancé in the Battle of the Coral Sea and taught literature at the local junior college. Henry checked out the book and tried to read the story, curious to find out what Letitia Winch thought he was like. It was a lengthy, obscure narrative with paragraphs few and far between. The long sentences doubled back on themselves, frustrating your search for the main entrance. It was like trying to force your way into a perpetually revolving door. Nevertheless, he shoved his foot through the verbiage enough times to wrest the message: Marcher was a vain cold fish to whom nothing at all was destined to happen. After the death of May Bartram, who had known it all along and loved him anyway, he flings himself, an old man, on her tombstone, realizing he has missed, through her, his one chance to be human.

  How can I let Chloe go back, Henry thought. Back to what? She won’t want to go back. Why is he doing this? He had received Rex Wright’s lawyer’s letter with the copy of the startling document the day before, Friday. Forgetting his overcoat and gloves, he’d set off on foot for his own lawyer’s office, the unbelievable papers clutched in his bare fist.

  “Ollie, tell me I don’t have to worry about this,” he’d said.

  “Henry, I wish I could, but she’s his legally adopted daughter. There’s his name on her birth certificate. You didn’t know?”

  “No, I didn’t know. Agnes never told me. Chloe never said anything, either. And how can Merry’s name—her real father’s name—not be mentioned anywhere on that document?”

  “Because that’s the way it’s done, Henry. A new beginning, legitimized by the state. For all civil intents and purposes, she is his daughter, with the rights, privileges, and duties of his child and heir.”

  “But her name is still Starnes.”

  “That’s up to the individuals. Let’s see, Chloe would have been ten when these papers were signed and it was midyear and they were already living in Barlow. It’s hard for a kid to leave school one day and come back the next with a different surname. Perhaps that’s what Agnes was taking into account.”

  “Well, regrettably,” said Henry, “we can’t ask Agnes. But why would he want to do this?”

  “Maybe because, as his attorney says, he feels her loss and, now that he is going to remarry, he wants to offer her a stable home.”

  “But she’s fine as she is. We’re fine. She likes her school; she likes living in the house her mother lived in. Look, Ollie, tell me the worst. Are we going to have to go to court?”

  “It’s too early to say about court, Henry. And, I hate to say it, but there could be worse than court.”

  “You mean I could lose her?”

  “Henry, first let’s try to ascertain just how serious this is, or if he may be wanting something else.”

  “What else could he want?”

  “Oh, maybe to give you a good shake-up. Or to impress his intended. We know nothing about her, but let me see what I can find out.”

  “But why would he want to give me a shake-up?”

  “Maybe just because he knows he can. You weren’t exactly a fan of his, I take it?”

  “That’s putting it mildly. In the last conversation I had with my sister, she told me the marriage had been a mortal mistake but she was going to try to salvage something because, well, her exact words were t
hat she was still ‘ferociously attached to her honor.’ Wait, there’s something else you should probably know, Ollie. Agnes was six weeks pregnant when she died. They discovered it in the autopsy. Rex didn’t know and was pretty upset about it. He told me he wouldn’t put it past Agnes to have told Chloe and not him. He was crying at the time—he said they were always keeping secrets from him.”

  “I’m taking notes, Henry. This could be very helpful. Did you ever ask Chloe about this?”

  “No, I’ve been very scrupulous about not quizzing her.”

  “Well, Henry, you may have to ascertain a few things. She’s what—fourteen? She’s old enough to testify in court.”

  “But this is despicable. She’s had enough sorrow without being dragged in front of a judge. She won’t want to go back. We haven’t discussed Rex Wright at all. As I said, she never even told me she’d been legally adopted by him.”

  “Let’s take this a step at a time, Henry. It may all blow over. Let me first indulge in some lawyer ping-pong and see how far that takes us.”

  Same Saturday evening

  Vick house

  Mountain City

  For thirty-two and a half hours, Tildy had been marking time until she could be alone with Chloe and tell about the play. She’d planned out her announcement, followed by a “first reading” of the script, but, God Almighty, the intolerable string of activities she’d had to endure before reaching this hour! First she’d had to get through all of last evening, though at least she’d been able to tell Madeline about the play—and then she’d had to wake up Saturday and eat breakfast and get through the whole morning with Madeline pressing her dress and fussing with her hair for the dance and Mama in one of her swivets about too many bookings and nobody appreciating a working woman’s schedule, and then waving Smoky the Conquering Hero off with John and Flavia and their carful of goodies to the Swag for Daddy to play Lord Bountiful Bear to the simple folk who liked to cut their own trees and fill up on eggnog and snacks afterward, and then—dragging it out some more!—lunch with Chloe and Uncle Henry at the downtown cafeteria (designed by old Grandfather Vick in the twenties) and waving to people they knew who were also going to the Ice Capades, followed by the Ice Capades itself, and then being driven across town in Uncle Henry’s Jag at his favorite speed of fifteen miles an hour, his foot on and off the pedal to punctuate his sentences, enough to make you carsick, and on to the Vick house, where Uncle Henry had to sip his leisurely drink and the girls their accompanying Cokes (Uncle Henry could make one little jigger of scotch and a splash of soda in a tiny glass outlast two of Daddy’s iced-tea glasses of bourbon and ice and water) and then they had to rehash the Ice Capades and all about the auditorium’s underground ice-making system that old Mr. Vick had designed the year before his death, and then make more civilized conversation in the echoing Vick dining room with gloomy family portraits over their supper of cold chicken, tomato aspic, potato salad, and chocolate cake, prepared the day before by Rosa. And then Uncle Henry, suddenly looking sad, shuffles over to the piano and begins tinkling his interminable Bach, and then his interminable Debussy, and Chloe, on cue, throws herself ecstatically into an armchair and dashes off one sketch after another (she must have a whole portfolio of them by now) of Uncle Henry tinkling at the piano.