Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “Heavens no, darling, at the Palm City Club. There will be a party at their home on Saturday, and you and I will attend that together. Your father hasn’t been going out much lately.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “I believe the medical profession is coming around to regarding it as a sickness. But the good news is, he’s on the road to recovery if he can stick it out. Cyril is the sweetest man in the world, but it’s all or nothing with him. One little slip off the wagon and he’s … well, he’s something else entirely. He’s better staying away from the parties this season. I’m sorry to greet you with this news, Maud. Last summer he wanted to win the respect of his daughter and went without a drop for your entire stay. But as soon as you left, he rewarded himself with one little martini, and it went downhill from there.”

  Stunned, Maud stared out the window of the Cadillac at the palm trees that lined the road. The tropical foliage seemed a mockery of the Christmases she had always known. This past summer she had been unaware that her father was on any wagon. She had assumed his most self-destructive habit was snacking in the kitchen while the cook prepared the next meal. But now Anabel was all but saying that the strain of Maud’s last visit with them had pushed him over the edge the minute it was over. Had Lily known about the existence of this wagon, or was it a more recent thing?

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “Nonsense! Cyril is so proud of you. We’ve both looked forward to your visit.” Maud wished that Lily and Mr. Foley had not made a game out of Anabel’s affected speech, because her stepmother’s reassurances now came to her ridiculously distorted. Nonsensth! Thyril isth tho proud of you. All summer, Maud had been as unconscious of her stepmother’s lisp as she had been of Cyril’s wagon.

  “Why, you’re the best thing we’ve got going for us—you give us something to live for,” Anabel hurried on, and Maud did her best to hear the words without the debasing sibilances. “I only wanted to warn you to expect a change, because you’ll see it yourself. He’s lost a lot of weight, and he’s being medicated.”

  “Is he … still … off the wagon?”

  “Oh, goodness no. As I said, he’s on the road to recovery—as long as he can keep it up. Since November he’s been a day patient at a very exclusive—and expensive, I might add—treatment center. That’s why he didn’t come to meet you at the airport. He’s getting his daily fix over at the center. They medicate them, you see, so they don’t crave a drink, but it makes him nauseated. Then he sees his psychiatrist. Also, he gets pills for depression.”

  “Depression,” Maud repeated. She couldn’t think of what else to say.

  “It’s part of the syndrome. You get depressed when you withdraw. Of course, the doctors are now saying that alcohol itself is a depressant. But the alcoholic doesn’t feel depressed as long as he’s drinking, because that’s his chosen form of escape. As long as he keeps drinking, he thinks he feels wonderful. Only he has to keep pouring the shots or he’ll start feeling depressed.”

  Escape from what? Maud wished she could ask. Once again she wondered whether the wagon had existed back in the days when her mother had been married to Mr. Norton.

  “Now let’s switch to a happier subject,” said Anabel, turning onto Worth Avenue. “Your dress for the Weatherbys’ cotillion. And you’ll need a little beaded purse and the right shoes. It’s such a delight to shop for you because you’re tall and so young and pretty. And look, here is a parking spot right in front of Tat Saunders. We’ll go to Tat first and then see what the other places have.”

  “What is Duddy Weatherby like?” Maud asked.

  “Oh, he’s at Groton. That is one of the top prep schools in the country. And my friend Mimi naturally hopes he will go to Princeton, like his father, and follow Dudley into the stock exchange. Let’s see, what else? Well, I know what else!” Anabel playfully jingled her keys before dropping them into her purse. “He is smitten with you, my dear.”

  “But we’ve never had a single conversation.”

  “Someone with your assets, Maud, can afford the luxury of silence” was Anabel’s triumphant comeback. Maud tried hard to screen out the thomeone and the athets part.

  If Anabel hadn’t tipped her off about the wagon ordeal, Maud might have attributed the changes in her father to a successful diet regime and simply feeling more relaxed with his daughter on her second visit. Cyril Norton had lost his potbelly and fleshy cheeks and looked, well, more as a girl would wish her father to look. His movements were slow and dignified, his speech deliberate, though on the languid side. He was far less apprehensive of her this time. He asked her questions about her school, specific questions about what she was studying and what the nuns were like, and questions about her mother, even about Granny. He ticked off, course by course, the delicious dinner Granny had cooked for him that one time he had stayed with them at the Pine Cone Lodge. His night with them, he recalled, had coincided with Granny’s favorite radio program, and so they had all four adjourned to the living room and listened to Doctor Christian together. “I remember your grandmother turned the lights off. She said she could hear it better in the dark. Does she still do that?”

  He seemed to take pride in his powers of recall. “It’s one of the good side effects of these pills. I can sit and think about things for hours. The most amazing things come back. The other day I remembered how your mother would flourish those tasseled menus and set off across the dining room, her chin sky-high, when she was hostess at the resort where we met. One of the not-so-good side effects of the pills is”—here he cut an apologetic glance at Anabel—“I don’t want to do much of anything else.”

  Maud’s hours with her father and Anabel before the Weatherby dance on Friday were to be the brightest ones of her Christmas stay with them. Everything leading up to that event was full of hope, and Maud felt that somehow she was its emblem. They dressed up and went out to restaurants, a prosperous, handsome little family. Cyril Norton drank Sanka with his meals and sometimes looked sleepy. Maud tried on her new finery for them, and Cyril Norton fished his medically broadened memory for stories of his marriage to Lily, when he was on the road selling college jewelry for the Balfour Company. “I was their top salesman on the eastern seaboard when you were a little girl. It is dumbfounding to me now how effortlessly I got people to order those rings. I’ll never rake in such gobs of money again.” He uttered a weak, astonished laugh. “Luckily, Anabel has enough for us both, and”—another quick glance at his wife—“she seems to like having me around.”

  “As long as you are behaving yourself,” said Anabel, “you are the sweetest man in the world.”

  DUDDY WEATHERBY, IN dinner jacket and black tie, entered the Nortons’ living room holding a transparent florist’s box at arm’s distance, as though it might possibly explode. Inside was a white orchid with a pink center. In his own lapel he wore a white carnation. His summer tan had been replaced by a pale forehead spotted with pink pimples. He succeeded in handing the box to Maud without meeting her eyes. Everything slowed down. It was as though all of them had helped themselves to Cyril Norton’s pills. Even Anabel’s exclamation of how perfectly the orchid would go with Maud’s dress sounded like a record played at a too slow speed. When Cyril Norton asked Duddy if he wouldn’t like to take a seat while Anabel was fastening the orchid to Maud’s dress, Duddy rolled his piggy eyes. “I guess not,” he said to the ceiling. “We’re running late because my dad, as usual, mismatched his studs and cuff links.” He imparted this information with a titter of satisfaction, meaning what? That not everyone’s father could rise regularly to such cavalier disregard for his effects?

  At first Maud thought it was the chauffeur standing under the streetlight. But it was Mr. Weatherby in his dinner jacket. “He always wears his Rolls-Royce cap when he drives his 1929 Phantom,” explained Duddy. “And I wear it when I drive it, but I have to go on the back roads with it till I get my license. Mother went on ahead to the club to greet the guests who get there too early.�
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  Duddy’s father doffed his chauffeur’s cap to Maud and introduced himself. He smelled like Tildy’s father after five o’clock in the afternoon, and sometimes before, and Maud was reminded why her father was better off staying away from the Christmas parties.

  She and Duddy were tucked away ceremoniously in the backseat of the Rolls and Mr. Weatherby instructed Maud not to lean against her door, because it had been known to fly open. Duddy gave a sinister little snicker. Maud wondered why, if that was the case, she had not been seated on the other side. Or did that door fly open, too? There were many things Maud was thinking, but she was not about to say any of them aloud. (Thomeone with your athets, Maud, can afford the luxury of silence.) Maud was even feeling nostalgic for her stepmother before they were three blocks from the Norton house. Luckily, Mr. Weatherby had launched into a monologue about vintage Rolls-Royces, which lasted them most of the way to the club, but then suddenly he was asking about the Nortons. “I run into Anabel almost every day, but I haven’t seen Cyril around town recently. What’s your dad been up to?”

  “He’s been staying at home mostly,” Maud answered. But then, to dispel any notion of sickness, she added, “He’s been doing a lot of thinking about things.”

  This was met with a silence lengthy enough for Maud to imagine ways in which this information might be misconstrued.

  “Well, good for him,” Mr. Weatherby finally responded. “Hell,” he cheerfully continued, “I wish I could find some time to do some thinking about things. Though Lord knows what I might catch myself thinking.”

  Beside her, Duddy gave another sinister snicker.

  Maud’s country club experience had been limited to the one in Mountain City. She swam in its pool as Tildy’s guest and ate dinner with the Strattons on its outdoor terraces or in the smoky grill room. Hiding in the bushes outside its ballroom windows, she and Tildy had given themselves flirting tutorials by watching Madeline enchant partner after partner at a Christmas dance. The Mountain City Country Club was a low-lying building of golden-gray stone whose rooms you could count and most of which opened straightforwardly into one another. It was surrounded on three sides by its golf course and was approached from the fourth side so that you or the automobile in which you were riding would not be smacked by an errant golf ball.

  On first approach, the Palm City Club, which Anabel spoke of with such reverence, presented itself to Maud’s eye as a picturesque imitation of a Spanish mission with a lit-up bell tower. But as Mr. Weatherby’s Phantom purred along between high hedges and giant palms, the mission image sprawled into a bewildering maze of extensions and facades.

  Even after her ill-fated “tour of the grounds” of the Palm City Club, which would occur later in the evening, Maud would be unable to recall whether the ocean or the lake was to the left or right of the club, or where the sequestered tennis courts were in relation to the golf course, or up which spiral stairs she had fled to repair her own compromised facade. The labyrinthine club, with its overweening prolixity of styles, would serve in the future as Maud’s mental image whenever she felt like reflecting upon the treacherous route of the social climber. Its standoffish byways were so much truer to the nature of the journey than her previous notion of simple stairways leading the climber up and up into the next roped-off sphere of belonging.

  Mrs. Weatherby, flanked by stone urns bristling with spiky flowers, stood in a tiled-and-mirrored alcove, welcoming guests to her son’s dance. Maud, who was nearsighted, glimpsed a handsome, beautifully dressed girl. Moving closer, she was sorry that the girl’s nervous smile ruined the whole effect, and even sorrier when she saw that she was facing her own reflection. Mimi Weatherby, whom she scarcely knew, grabbed her by the shoulders and lavished praise on her. “I know where you’ve been, young lady! Isn’t Tat Saunders just the best?”

  She forced Maud and Duddy into the alcove with her to welcome the guests. They were mostly Duddy’s contemporaries but there was a sprinkling of adults, who bantered back and forth, alluding to events that had taken place as recently as this afternoon, some at this very same club. They all seemed to have been to the same parties this week. Most of them had Smoky Stratton’s after-five odor on their breaths. Mr. Weatherby, who had insisted on parking “his own baby,” sauntered past his wife’s reception line with a jovial wave and headed for the bar.

  Mimi Weatherby presented Maud to the guests. To some, she was “Maud Norton, who is with us from North Carolina.” To others, she was “Maud Norton, you know, Cyril and Anabel Norton’s daughter—she’s spending Christmas with them.” And then certain others Mimi would kiss or nuzzle, after which she would say, “Oh! And this is Duddy’s friend Maud Norton, visiting from her school in North Carolina,” making it sound like Maud was boarding at this school. Occasionally Mimi would murmur, “Isn’t she precious?”

  Maud shook hands and dropped the occasional curtsy when some older person seemed to expect it. Having deplored the handsome girl’s nervous smile in the mirror, she kept her face still. A lady asked which school in North Carolina and said she knew someone whose cousin had gone to Mount St. Gabriel’s. Duddy, after swapping mumbles with friends and putting in his share of “Yes sir”s and “No ma’am”s to adults, turned to Maud and said, “Oh, wait.” He fumbled in his pockets and extracted a palm-sized dance card, equipped with a tiny pencil. “You know what this is for, don’t you?”

  “I hope I’m not that sheltered,” Maud snapped back crossly. A nearby man gave an appreciative chortle. Duddy reddened, but saved his dignity with his trademark snicker. “And here’s Timmie Veech,” exclaimed Mimi, embracing a plump red-haired boy who wore his dinner jacket more like a straitjacket. “And Troy Veech. I thought you were off breaking wild horses in Montana or something. What brings you back to placid old Palm Beach?”

  “Someone had to drive my little brother to the Christmas parties. Our folks are in Bermuda. You’re looking very attractive this evening, Mrs. Weatherby.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Veech. I try.”

  “But unlike most, you never look as though you had to try. After the holidays, I’m off to join the Army.”

  “The Army! Why?”

  “Why not?” Troy Veech countered languidly. He looked some ten or fifteen years older than his little brother. His hair, a silky faded red, flopped insouciantly over his brow, and he emanated a contemptuous elegance. He wore his evening clothes as if he had tugged them off their hanger at the last minute and trusted them to fall into place, and they had. Maud recognized him as the man who had laughed when she’d snapped at Duddy.

  “And this is Maud Norton, Duddy’s date,” said Mimi. “She’s visiting from her boarding school in North Carolina.”

  “How do you do, Maud Norton.” Troy Veech raised Maud’s hand to within an inch or so from his lips, then puckered his lips at the air in between. “Timmie, let’s see if Miss Norton has any dances to spare for the likes of us,” he said. Maud handed her card and pencil to Timmie, and the brothers stepped to one side of the receiving line. “Take this one and that one,” Maud heard Troy say. “But I can’t do that one—it’s a tango,” protested Timmie. “Just shut up, will you,” said Troy Veech, “and put your name down for those two.”

  When Troy was returning the card to Maud, Mimi Weatherby whirled away from the lady she was speaking to in midsentence and snatched at his sleeve. “Please don’t tell me, Troy, that you’re going to enlist.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea, Mrs. Weatherby?”

  “Well, you said you were off to join the Army.”

  “Off to Officer Candidates School, then, if that makes you feel easier on my behalf. But off to join the Army sounds more irrevocable.”

  “Since when did you go in for the irrevocable, Troy Veech?”

  “It attracts me more and more, Mrs. Weatherby, the older I get.”

  Maud was puzzled by the facetious animosity between Duddy’s mother and Timmie’s older brother.

  The dancing, she was relieved to find, was
going to be the least of her worries. Duddy had done his time in ballroom classes: he was light on his feet and knew how to lead a girl without clutching at her dress or colliding with her feet. Maud relaxed during their second dance, a fox-trot. Too bad Duddy hadn’t simply materialized as her dance partner on this terrace surrounded by palm trees, without any of the stiff, snickering preliminaries they had been put through.

  Now she felt safe enough to look around herself and enjoy her situation. She was the official date of the host, booked by him for three more dances, which included the last, and he seemed as proud as she that they could display themselves so professionally before his parents and friends. He didn’t try to make small talk, and he came off much better as the silent type. In this torch-lit evening setting his blemishes were not noticeable, and she could visualize him as the man he would become when he was as old as Troy Veech. And she looked as well as she had ever looked in her life: the dress from Miss Tat cinched her waist snugly and floated about her calves, its taffeta petticoat rustling against her sheer stockings. Her feet moved airily in the high-heeled sandals. Her envelope-sized evening bag (“I was set upon a beaded one,” said Anabel, “but the sequins will glitter on this one when you’re out on the dance floor”) came with its own comb and mirror, and there was just room besides for a lipstick and for the dance card—with all its spaces filled in.

  The two partners after Duddy must have skipped some dance classes. The waltz boy stayed a beat ahead of her, and the shag boy seemed to forget that he had a partner. Next came Timmie Veech, who led her in wide circles around the terrace, vigorously pumping their joined, sweating hands, while his nonchalant brother leaned against a palm tree, smoking and watching them. Timmie’s thatch of red hair barely crested her shoulder, recalling to Maud her dance practices over at the Stratton house, Tildy’s Orphan Annie curls butting against Maud’s shoulder. “Oh, Norton, what a divine dancer you are!” Tildy had crooned, and Maud found herself sweetly missing her old friend, with none of the rancor that had come after their breakup.