Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “No, you are not,” declared Tildy. Maud could feel her old friend shudder with the thrill of this outpouring of new melodrama. “You must tell me every single thing that has happened, and then we will decide on a plan.”

  Confessional Cassette, Continued

  Dawn, Monday morning

  September 10, 2001

  Feast of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, confessor (1245-1305)

  Mother Ravenel’s room

  St. Scholastica Retirement House

  I guess you’ve been wondering what happened to me, Beatrix. But no, you didn’t know I’d begun this personal tape to you ten days ago. That was after Mother Frances Galyon had suggested during our evening walk that I turn over the “toxic year” to someone I trusted and cared about, and that certainly describes you, dear Beatrix.

  There is nothing like a week’s vacation in the hospital to make a person put her priorities in order and show her where she has been fudging. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly fine now. It was something I have trouble pronouncing in which the intestine knots itself up in little kinks and you have to watch your diet carefully from then on, but it took a while for them to diagnose it and make sure it wasn’t something worse. I spent several days on a painkiller drip, drifting in and out of fugues. At one point I was sure I had already died, and at another, time flattened itself out like an intricate carpet and I saw the episodes of my life woven into their divinely appointed places, and not all of it belongs in a school history. What I came to call the “toxic year,” after I had lived through it, was fallout from things set in motion long before. I must accept responsibility for the role I played throughout, but I must also accept that mine was only one of many roles and, furthermore, that it is insulting God’s mercy to go on flagellating myself as prime blamee, if I may coin such a word.

  At the start of this personal tape to you, I said my story had its beginnings in the early 1930s, when my best friend, Antonia Tilden, and I decided we wanted to enter the Order together. I think it is best to go back to that time, maybe even further back, to our first becoming friends.

  Antonia and Cornelia Tilden. They were identical twins but easy to tell apart. Antonia’s superiority of soul shone through her beauty like a light from within, while Cornelia’s identical features seemed harder, as though chiseled from without. Cornelia was dreaded for her critical eye and scornful tongue. In contrast, Antonia was comforting and unthreatening to be with. In her there was none of the meanness and silliness of most girls her age. She had a way of treating everyone as equally worthy of her regard. Now, this is a rare and admirable quality—I think Our Lord Himself must have had it—but it can certainly exasperate someone who hopes to claim a major share of that person’s attention or be chosen as that person’s “most beloved.” You have only to page through the Gospels to come upon Peter making a pest of himself again and again: “Whom do you love most, Lord? Who will sit next to you in Heaven?” Impulsive Peter, stepping out of the boat, into the waves, to get to Our Lord first, and having to be saved from drowning.

  Antonia befriended me; I would never have approached her first.

  I was a new boarder from Charleston. My mother had told my father that she would divorce him if he didn’t send me away to school. She said our eighteen-room house on the East Battery was no longer large enough to contain us both. She had always called me her “pelican child,” saying I’d come out of her body determined to tear her slowly to pieces, whereas my older brothers had slid out like “little greased otters.” She loved telling people in my presence, “I first thought Suzanne was the beginning of early menopause.” She called me her “sneaky surprise package.” By the time I reached adolescence, she had compiled a whole list of “Suzanne” epithets. I was “sneaky, sanctimonious, self-advancing;” so many of her adjectives began with s that I came to believe she had chosen my name because it would alliterate well with those qualifiers. She also liked to call me things prefaced by “old”: “Old Frump,” “Old Stumpy,” and “Old Stubby,” the last of which seemed particularly unfair, since I was better built, with a longer torso and legs, than either of my brothers. I had my father’s wandlike body and his finer features.

  But this is not going to be the story of my mother’s dislike of me. It has taken a good portion of my lifetime for me to comprehend that there is, and has been all through recorded history, many a mother who cannot stand her child. I was merely one of those children. That was part of my pattern, one of the episodes in the “carpet” I saw spread out before me during my painkiller fugues in the hospital. But I wanted to provide you with a little background of how I came to Mount St. Gabriel’s as a boarder. “One of us must go,” my mother had said, and my father, who had probably seen this coming for some time, did not want to lose his comfortable home. Furthermore, since he was from an old Catholic family, divorce was anathema to him.

  I loved Mount St. Gabriel’s from the moment I set eyes on it. Unlike the other new boarders, I was not the least bit homesick. From the very first, I felt that Mount St. Gabriel’s was my home. I loved the thin, clean air of the mountains, so energizing and bracing after Charleston’s sultry closeness. I loved the nuns, old and young, sweet and crabby, every one of whom behaved more like a mother to me than the woman I had left behind. I was enchanted with my adorable little roommate, Soledad, who’d had her own hand-carved prie-dieu shipped to her from Mexico City. I liked going to Mass in the chapel and following in the daily missal my father had given me, with my initials in gold on the cover. I loved knowing and following the church seasons and the feasts of all the saints and martyrs. Even Mount St. Gabriel’s cuisine satisfied me, though it was fashionable among the boarders to complain. The school was founded by an Englishwoman, so its normal fare was roast meats or savory pies, boiled vegetables and stewed fruits, with bread-and-butter puddings or sponge cake for dessert—and trifle on special occasions.

  I had been given a chance to start over and win love for myself, and this I set about doing on the very first day of school.

  The Tilden twins were in the row next to mine, Antonia at the front of the row and Cornelia just behind her. I was at the end of one row and they were at the head of the next, so I could observe them simply by looking forward. At first I studied them as a unit: What would it be like to have a twin? What if there had been another of me? Would my mother have devised epithets for us both? They dressed alike, which made their individual “touches” stand out more. Cornelia wore colored shoelaces in her oxfords, pink or yellow or light green; Antonia’s were always brown. Antonia pulled her honey-gold hair back rather severely from her forehead with tortoiseshell barrettes; Cornelia let hers loop forward, and she would regard you slyly from behind its heavy side wave.

  I listened more than I talked, those first weeks at Mount St. Gabriel’s. I listened to what the old girls said about the other old girls and about the nuns. I heard that the English foundress, Mother Elizabeth Wallingford, then in her late sixties, had a deadly tumor growing in her brain and all anyone could do for her now was “make her comfortable” up in the infirmary. Mother Fiona Finney was pointed out to me, the Irishwoman who broke horses in her youth and had come over with Mother Wallingford. She was very busy, performing a great many jobs at once, from sacristan to baker to riding instructress, but you would see her rushing through the halls or picking up her skirts and flying up the stairs. “There she goes,” someone would say. “She runs up to that infirmary every chance she gets. Poor Finney is going to be devastated when Wallingford goes!”

  I learned that the Tilden twins’ father was in the state legislature in Raleigh and that their mother was an accomplished homemaker who sewed all the girls’ clothes. But Cornelia went into a “humor” or fainted if she had to stand still to fit dresses, so Antonia had volunteered to do it for them both. Cornelia, they said, had the cruel tongue. A new girl, wanting to make an overture of friendship, had asked “which kind of twins they were,” and Antonia was gently explaining that they were the identical, not
the fraternal, kind when Cornelia spoke up and completely dashed the poor girl. “Actually,” Cornelia announced in a baleful voice, “we are triplets, but one of us died.”

  I was good at sports, as most girls are who have older brothers. I could run fast and played a good game of tennis and I liked organizing team sports. At the end of the school year I was voted one of the four field day captains for the grammar school, and our team, the Green Team, won the trophy. I had chosen Antonia Tilden as my cocaptain. Cornelia Tilden, captain of the Red Team, was very put out that I, rather than she, had gotten her sister for cocaptain because I’d drawn the straw for first pick. But I think Cornelia had begun to resent me long before this.

  However, I am jumping ahead.

  Back at the beginning of the school year, it was Antonia who befriended me—forgive me if I am repeating myself; I may have already said this—because I would never have approached either of the twins and risked the fate of that poor girl who had made an overture of friendship by asking what kind of twins they were. I let people approach me as they felt inclined to. I was surprised how well this worked. I just did my work, ran the races, played the games, was courteous and pleasant to everyone, and had an easy, approachable demeanor, but I never went out of my way to attract the notice of any particular person. As I think I have indicated, God had favored me with presentable looks. I was not a beauty, nor did I radiate a superior aura like the Tildens, but I was slim and well made and had curly brown hair with interesting lights in it and straight white teeth. I moved lightly and quickly but always with purpose, and I once overheard Mother Finney saying,”The Ravenel girl holds herself straight as a switch.” My classmates knew little about me other than that I was from Charleston, that my family lived on the East Battery, and that my father was an attorney specializing in trusts and my mother a semi-invalid. I am afraid I was the one who set this last story going. It seemed the least my mother could do for me. I put her in a nice big bedroom with everything she could need, the curtains drawn against the heat of the day: a nice quiet back bedroom, away from the hustle and bustle of the promenade traffic. My brothers were grown, the older already a partner of my father’s, the other still in law school. I had been a late child—which was true—and she just didn’t have the strength to keep track of an energetic young girl on the cusp of womanhood, much less take charge of that girl’s social life and properly chaperone her.

  The funny thing was that after a while, I almost came to believe this version myself.

  But Antonia and I, how it began.

  It was after lunch on one of those dazzling September days when the mountain air was so pure it could make a person light-headed. Especially someone like myself who had grown up in the sultry lowlands. My roommate, Soledad, and I were headed to the playground for recess. She was chattering in her excited nonstop Spanish-English. I wasn’t paying close attention to what she was saying; she didn’t seem to require it. She always stuck to me at recess because I was the known quantity she slept beside every night, and she would twitter away, like some charming exotic pet bird who had fastened itself on your arm. I found myself laughing from sheer physical well-being—I flourished in this high altitude—and from joy at having this devoted little creature hanging on me so that I appeared desired and chosen in the eyes of the others.

  Antonia Tilden was strolling slowly ahead of us on the path, head bent, appearing deep in thought. For once, her twin was nowhere in sight. Soledad blithely tugged me along, completely wrapped up in her polyglot chatter and my laughter, and that’s when Antonia suddenly stepped aside to let us pass. She gave us both this respectful, rather wistful smile, the kind of smile an older person might bestow on young girls enjoying high spirits.

  As soon as we got to the playground, Soledad made a beeline for the Ocean Wave, which was the preferred ride of the boldest girls. It was a circular bench attached by steel cables to a high pole in the center. Riders would climb on, spacing themselves around the circle in kneeling or crouching positions, and grab hold of the bar in front of them. The last girl on—this time it was Soledad—would give it a great push to set it rocking before she jumped aboard. It was a hazardous ride to have on a school playground; today it would not be tolerated, even if the riders were wearing helmets and had brought letters from home absolving the school of all liability. Yet I don’t recall any injuries. The Ocean Wave served decades of bold girls into the sixties, when the playground was leveled to make way for the new school and convent.

  I watched Soledad fling herself with a little shriek onto the rocking contraption. The girls aboard shrieked back and began working their knees and writhing their bodies to keep the thing in motion and see how many times they could make it clang against the pole. Soledad and I were both thirteen, but the Ocean Wave separated us into child and adult. Now it was my turn to smile benignly at the high-spirited girls. The smile was for the benefit of Antonia Tilden, who had come to stand beside me. I knew she was going to speak first and tried to guess what she might say. She could have begun in many ways—with something wryly conversational: “You’re not a devotee of the Ocean Wave?” Or a direct personal question: “How are you finding Mount St. Gabriel’s?”

  I was floored when she looked up at the sky and murmured, as much to herself as to me, “What a beautiful day.”

  Oh Lord, I prayed, please don’t let Antonia Tilden be just some vapid Pollyanna.

  “When I was little,” Antonia went on, “I thought that God lived in the wind. But now I think He lives in the clouds, too.”

  “He’s always more than you can get your mind around,” I said as we watched a cumulus cloud collapse from an old man’s stern profile into a slouching beast.

  “Yes!” said Antonia.

  “Have you ever been in a hurricane?” I asked her.

  “No, have you?”

  “Oh, we get them every year in Charleston. I can watch them from my bedroom window. Trees snap in two and roofs go flying through the air. I think God dwells in destruction, too. I mean, for His own purposes, of course.”

  “For His own purposes, of course,” echoed Antonia, recognizing me with a smile that went straight to my heart.

  This was the exchange that launched our friendship on that September day back in 1929. Since then, I have watched generations of girls begin friendships. Wryly, cautiously, coyly, pushily; setting up rules and dividing up powers; vying for advantage or trying to fascinate. We were just two girls speculating on how God went about revealing Himself through His world.

  After we became known as best friends, I’m sure others assumed that Antonia and I told each other everything about ourselves. But we always kept a respectful reserve between us. I know I held back because I didn’t want to risk alienating this superior person. In fact, it took a while for me to acknowledge what everybody else took for granted: that Antonia sought out my company and seemed most content when she was with me. But why did she not pry more into my life? When Reverend Mother called me out of class on that Monday after Black Friday to tell me Father had died in a hunting accident, she said I could go to the chapel or to my room for the rest of the day. “Is there anyone you would like to have with you?” she asked. I thought of Antonia but was afraid she might feel obligated. So I told Reverend Mother something that led her to suspect I might be blessed with an early vocation. “The only one I want to have with me is always with me anyway,” I said. “I would like permission to go to my room and get my rosary and then to pray for my father in the chapel.”

  Of course, the news spread through the school like wildfire. Coming so soon after Black Friday, which had wiped out the savings of many girls’ families, my father’s death was bound to cause speculation: had it been an accident? My father handled many large trusts. What had been revealed about the state of those trusts when everyone was demanding reassurance about their solvency? Why did my mother not want me to go home for the funeral? Was it because the body could not be buried in hallowed ground? (Just for the record, Beatrix, it was,
following a full Catholic Mass; and no one ever brought a suit against my father for mismanaging funds. Indeed, my brothers, both now deceased, honored every one of his obligations.)

  While I was saying my rosary, I was aware that the chapel was filling up with people. Our teacher, Mother O’Hara, had sent our class to pray with me until lunchtime. Little Soledad plunged into my pew and wept ardently beside me while I went, decade by decade, through my beads. The day being Monday, the meditation was on the joyful mysteries and their corresponding virtues: the Annunciation and humility; the Visitation and charity; the Nativity and poverty; the Presentation (obedience); and the Finding in the Temple (piety). When the Angelus bell rang at noon, the nuns came in for Sext and my classmates left for the cafeteria, all except Antonia, who had been somewhere behind me. Now she moved into my pew and knelt beside me. She had her rosary out. “Which mystery are you on?” she asked. I said I had reached the Finding in the Temple. “Then I’ll begin there with you,” she said, “and go back and do the others later.”

  That was Antonia.

  As I said, I wondered back then, at the beginning of our friendship, why she did not pry more into my life. But later I realized she didn’t have to. Her twin would have supplied her with the kinds of information and hearsay Antonia would have thought too intrusive to inquire about. With me Antonia went to places Cornelia didn’t or couldn’t go, and I think Cornelia resented that. On the other hand, Cornelia sought out the places Antonia kept aloof from. Cornelia loved gossip; she loved assessing people, winkling out their faults and scandals. She specialized in the shocking put-down (“Actually, we are triplets, but one of us died”) and in summing up someone with a shrewd but unkind pronouncement that lingered in your mind. I heard her say once that a certain boy smelled like he had “dried with a sour towel,” and I could never see that boy again without thinking of a sour towel.