by Gail Godwin
“I believe it was something like ‘Ever studious and thoughtful.’ What was yours, Mother?”
She lightens her grip on my arm, straightens herself, and drops thirty years on the spot. “Energy incarnate,” she crows, with a triumphant cackle.
And I have to fight down the bile of resentment. We are here in the present under these constellations, the Virgin and Swan and Archer and Winged Horse of this autumnal tilt, in the year 2001, Common Era, crisscrossed by the winking reds and greens of the Logan jets. Two old nuns, without a convent or a resident priest, without a school or pupils, shuffling along in the starlight on their retirement compound in a suburb of Boston. This old girl on my arm is no longer the ruddy-faced novice mistress in her prime who rebuffed the new postulant (“There are so many Charlestons, aren’t there, Sister?”) when, to ingratiate myself with her, I had referred to the city in which we had both been raised as “our mutual hometown.” Further along in my postulancy, she had dangled before me the specter of a worse exclusion: “Whatever length your stay with us in the Order, Sister Galyon, we must both keep in mind that God will be using it, whether it is a mere six months or your whole life, for His good.”
And then, after I had taken final vows, had done my graduate work summa cum laude at the university, served as principal of the grammar school for one year, and filled in for her as headmistress of the academy during her leave of absence in 1952–53, she returns to administer the coup de grâce.
Reverend Mother calls me in and says I am being sent to be headmistress of the Order’s academy in Boston. Though a nun isn’t supposed to ask why, I couldn’t hide my dismay. “But I had thought,” I protested, “that I would go back to being principal of the grammar school here.” Vague, unflappable Reverend Mother Barrington. Her glasses shone at you, while the soft gray eyes behind swam with a preoccupied rapture. Some said she prayed ceaselessly and that was the secret of her equanimity. But if you insisted on her attention, the eyes sharpened and fastened on the petitioner, who then felt like a fledgling being swept away from ground-level dangers by a great mothering bird. When you landed again, after advice and higher wisdom had been dispensed, you shook out your ruffled feathers and flapped off to obey orders. The wisdom and advice on this occasion being that when I had been serving as headmistress in Mother Ravenel’s stead while she cared for her dying mother in Charleston, Reverend Mother and others had seen that my gifts would be put to fuller use with older girls. And so, when Mother Ravenel returned to resume her duties, Reverend Mother had made a proposal. The academy’s enrollment was on the increase. And, considering the loss of Mother Malloy and the marriage of Miss Mendoza to the new headmaster of the boys’ division, might Mother Ravenel not welcome having Mother Galyon as her assistant headmistress?
“Unfortunately,” said Reverend Mother, her eyes already going remote behind the glint of her glasses, “Mother Ravenel was not too keen on the idea, and that, my dear, is all I shall say. You are an exceptional teacher and a fine example to the older girls. Mother Ravenel is a dynamic headmistress and very popular in the Mountain City community. She has been devoted to the school since she came to us as a girl in 1929. Our own foundress, in her final days, made provisions for her to stay on at Mount St. Gabriel’s. It was perhaps a little selfish of me to want to keep two stars under the same roof.”
DADDY LEFT HIS sorrows at the altar rail each morning and went forth to tend to his ailing engines. Given my coordinates—time, place, age, life history—what else do I have to do on this September evening but play master mechanic to a sister in religion spinning her wheels in the roundhouse?
Steam pipe to hot-water pipe on Engine Ravenel leaking pride. Flue clogged with remorse. Take guilty twist out of brakes.
Full steam ahead into the fifties.
A Confessional Cassette
Late Saturday night
September 1, 2001
Mother Ravenel’s room
St. Scholastica Retirement House
My dear Beatrix,
Please consider this tape as a personal letter from me to you. The whole tape is from me to you.
I have just returned from a very restorative evening walk with Mother Frances Galyon, whom you will remember from the school year of 1952-53, when she filled in as your headmistress while I was on leave of absence. And then in the fall of 1953, our Order transferred Mother Galyon to our academy in Boston, where she served for many years as headmistress and later as teacher of Latin and higher mathematics. Like me, she was an old Mount St. Gabriel’s girl, entering the Order her senior year—as I did—and now that we are old women she is being a good sport about leading me around in the dark, keeping me “on the track,” as she puts it. I didn’t realize until tonight how much she had loved Mount St. Gabriel’s and how unhappy she was about leaving the South. She said it would have broken her heart if she had not already given it over to God. Until recently I have always thought of her as rather unapproachable and not very socially inclined, but isn’t it wonderful how God keeps loosening our biases and showing us more sides of one another? Tonight I learned that Mother Galyon is possessed of a discerning heart along with her intellectual gifts.
Tonight I admitted to her that I was holding back from my chapter on the 1950s because I dreaded reliving that “toxic year” that you and I spoke of last June at the picnic on your mountaintop.
And she said the most perceptive thing, Beatrix. She said, “But haven’t you been reliving it ever since? Could it be that it has grown to occupy so much space in your mind that it crowds out the material that truly belongs in your account of that decade in a school history?”
“But how do I account for it?” I persisted.
That’s when Mother Galyon reminded me that I had said that our focus is on the seniors as we go through the yearbooks. “And they never became seniors at Mount St. Gabriel’s,” she went on. “When the class of 1955 gets the spotlight in their 1955 yearbook, those girls who haunt you aren’t there anymore. Yet it’s obvious that you still feel the need for some accounting. Have you gone into this with your spiritual directors over the years?”
“I have tried,” I said, “but aside from Father Krafft, who could be very rigorous, they’ve all been in a rush to absolve me and tell me not to be so hard on myself. One of them suggested I take up yoga and learn to play the guitar. In my last conference with him, Father Krafft told me I was rendering God’s grace nugatory by continuing to ‘scrape the cauldron’ of that year for more ‘evil snacks,’ and that I had already done my penance during my year of exile. My last director, who wore a Red Sox cap and flip-flops, said my refusal to forgive myself was pure pride. He told me to read some fantasy by C. S. Lewis about people on a bus and what keeps them from getting off the bus and entering the great freedom and spaciousness of heaven.”
“Well, did you read it?” Mother Galyon asked, and when I said no she laughed, and then, I’m afraid, we exchanged anecdotes about some less-than-helpful spiritual directors. She said it had been years since she’d heard anyone in religious life use the word “nugatory,” which had a ring of authority that “trifling” or “worthless” couldn’t match. But she went on to say she did like the idea of heaven as a place of great freedom and limitless space in which we could accept the shock of being our fullest selves in God’s image, whatever our circumstances.
I was very taken with this idea, too. “Yes,” I said, “but how do we get there? Do you see any buses lined up outside the retirement house?”
At this point we had reached the gates at the far end of the estate, and it was time to turn around and walk back to the house. There were lights on in various rooms, and I was pleased that I could see those. As we came closer I could even make out the brightly colored wraiths in constant motion on the TV screen in the nuns’ parlor.
I could feel Mother Galyon thinking very strenuously on our return walk. Finally she said, “The buses were C. S. Lewis’s choice of transport, but we can get there just as well by our own means.” S
he said trains came naturally to her because her father had been a railroad man, and she liked to think in terms of trains and their problems and how to fix them and get them back on their assigned tracks.
“All you need, Mother Ravenel,” she said, “is a way to get from one place in yourself to a better place.” Then she said, “Maybe your mode of transport could be your tape recorder. You’re comfortable with that mode of travel, aren’t you?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “C. S. Lewis gets buses, you get trains, but I am supposed to travel to heaven sitting alone in my room in front of a tape recorder?”
“Why not?” she said. “Tell your story to someone alive, someone you care about and trust. Just tell the parts that you are tired of reliving, the parts that haunt you. Get it out of the darkness and invite a fellow creature to look at it with you under some shared light. Then ask God’s blessing at the end of the tape, and send it off to that person and be done with it.”
I thought of you immediately, dear Beatrix.
Now that I am beginning to see, thanks to Mother Galyon’s perspicacity, which things do not serve any purpose in a school memoir though they may have shaped my behavior as headmistress in the “toxic year,” what I am going to try to do is to relate those parts to you, Beatrix, in order to achieve a better perspective.
This story had its beginnings back in the early 1930s, when my classmate and best friend, Antonia Tilden, and I decided that we wanted to enter the Order together. Antonia had known as early as age ten that she wanted to be a nun, and this was just fine with Antonia’s parents, but Antonia had a twin sister, Cornelia, who never liked me. She kept her eye on me from the very beginning and made no secret of her misgivings about our alliance. The sisters were identical twins, but Antonia had a higher nature; she was easy, and tolerant of people’s foibles, whereas Cornelia was critical of everybody and had a corrosive tongue.
CHAPTER 19
Unmerited Degradation
Sunday evening, January 6, 1952
Pine Cone Lodge
Mountain City, North Carolina
All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby’s in the same common way, and with the same common companions, and with the same sense of unmerited degradation as at first. But I never, happily for me no doubt, made a single acquaintance, or spoke to any of the many boys whom I saw daily in going to the warehouse, in coming from it, and in prowling about the streets at mealtimes. I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner.
MAUD NORTON’S David Copperfield paper was due on Tuesday, the first day of the new semester. The draft of ten handwritten pages would have to be cut back to the five Mother Malloy had specified. Getting in everything you planned to say in five pages required a whole different approach from having ten pages to roam around in. Plus, what you had planned to say kept turning into something else, and often something much less grand. “The Pungent Ache of the Soul in David Copperfield,” a.k.a. “The Universal Aches of David,” a.k.a. “Transfers,” had been, in Maud’s retrospective opinion, a brilliant concept. The concept being how you can experience more of yourself as you follow a character through his story if the story is told well enough to help you make the transfer. Maud had planned to demonstrate some of these transfers as they occurred throughout the novel, and Mother Malloy had pronounced it a very ambitious plan. Though she had advised Maud to take a less dramatic title.
During the two months she had been working on this paper, Maud had learned many things about writing and almost too much about life. The life lessons inflicted on her during the Christmas vacation in Palm Beach curled her lip and nauseated her.
She intended, however, like David, to bear the unmerited degradation in self-reliant apartness until some turn in her fortunes could rescue her or until she grew strong enough to rescue herself. There was no one she could talk to about these things. Lily, who now crept into Mr. Art Foley’s room when he was in residence, was a contributor to the overall atmosphere of dishonor. Granny, downstairs, who turned her radio programs louder these nights so she would not “overhear” anything dishonorable in the Pine Cone Lodge, had not been well. Walking across a room or even speaking a long sentence made her breathless, her ankles had swollen to the size of elephant ankles, and there was a not-quite-fresh smell in her usually immaculate kitchen. The boardinghouse trade had fallen off since the recent opening of two new motels on the tunnel road behind Tildy’s house. There were more traveling salesmen than ever in Mountain City, but they wanted their own bathrooms and to choose their meals from a menu. They wanted the freedom and privacy of impersonal rooms without ailing grandmothers spying on them.
Tildy would have been possible to talk to. Oh, very possible! But Tildy was no longer hers. How was Tildy managing with her David Copperfield paper? When they were best friends, they had discussed their papers and Maud would suggest topics for Tildy to choose from. She would make an outline and sometimes let Tildy wheedle her into sketching out a rough draft for Tildy to “take off from.”
The nearest guide Maud had for her lonely self-reliance was David Copperfield; though Maud couldn’t help feeling that there were certain degradations he and his creator had never experienced because they had been born boys.
Since last summer, the Palm Beach Nortons had been cast as the potential rescuers of Maud’s life story: Anabel and Cyril Norton, who had made overtures to Cyril’s fourteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage to Lily. There was money from this second wife to do something splendid for Mr. Norton’s daughter, if she should prove worthy. On Maud’s triumphal return from her summer stay in Palm Beach, Granny and Lily had begun to elaborate upon expected Norton largesse. There was to be college, of course, with no stinting or choosing between second choices or need for servile scholarships. And the right clothes and the right travels and meeting the right people. “Mark my word, they will probably insist upon her making her debut down there in Palm Beach,” Granny Roberts had predicted. “A debut is an important thing for a girl; it sets her up for life.”
“Oh, really, Mother? Too bad I didn’t have one, then. And too bad you didn’t, either” was Lily Norton’s acid reply.
“What’s done is done … for us,” declared Granny stoically, “but the child must have her chance. Mark my word, they will be wanting her to spend Christmas with them.”
“If we haven’t heard something by Thanksgiving, it’s not a good sign,” Granny had said when November had arrived with no word from the Nortons. And Lily had blown up and declared herself sick of waiting on the whims of the rich. Of course the invitation came almost immediately after, followed by long-distance phone calls about dates and planes. “You must always call us collect,” Anabel Norton would instruct Lily, who smoldered each time she reversed the charges, then hurried off to mimic Anabel’s self-satisfied lisp to Mr. Foley. Now, each time Art Foley departed for the Atlanta office to refurbish his stash of gourmet items, he would slip his arm around Lily’s waist and croon in his oily baritone, “Remember, dear Lily, you musth al-wathes call us collect.” To which Lily’s arch retort was “I don’t call men, Mr. Foley. You know where I am if you want to call me.”
Then at the last minute, Anabel, all aflutter, had phoned Lily to ask if Maud could take an earlier plane. “The Dudley Weatherbys are hosting a Christmas cotillion dance on Friday for young Duddy, who’s home from Groton, and when my friend Mimi Weatherby heard Maud was coming, she said Duddy would be so thrilled if Maud, whom he so admired from last summer, would be his partner for the cotillion.”
So off Maud flew, on Thursday rather than Saturday, to satisfy the social ambitions of Lily and Granny and Anabel Norton. Anabel aspired to the patronage of Mimi Weatherby, Maud remembered from her stepmother’s name-dropping of this personage last summer. There seemed to be staircase after staircase for social climbers in Palm Beach. Probably Mimi, whose husband was a past president of the Old Guard Society, and who herself was on the board of directors of the Society of the
Four Arts and the Palm Beach Round Table (two clubs Anabel longed to be asked to join)—probably Mimi Weatherby herself had her eye trained on some further roped-off staircase spiraling into the loftiest realms of the social stratosphere.
Maud recalled “young Duddy” merely as a boy with insolent piggy eyes in a sunburned face, always embedded in a pack of other boys who gawked rudely at girls. Having spent most of her life in the company of women, Maud hadn’t appreciated until last summer how much more subtle her sex was, compared to boys of the same age.
Duddy’s “so admiring her” must mean her looks, she thought; she had never had a conversation with him. It seemed strange, though, that at this late date he didn’t have a partner for his own dance. Maud guessed that she and Duddy might be pawns in some social exchange between Anabel Norton and Mimi Weatherby.
This turned out to be the case, though Maud had no joy in the acuity of her foresight.
ANABEL MET MAUD at the Palm Beach airport on Wednesday afternoon, and they headed straight for Worth Avenue to outfit Maud for the Weatherbys’ cotillion dance.
“Is it going to be at their house?” Maud asked.