by Gail Godwin
We had a lay teacher, Mrs. Prince, who taught arithmetic in the grammar school. She was popular with the girls because she brought us fudge and read us Uncle Remus stories, doing all the voices, until some of us were in hysterics. And then one day Cornelia said, “The trouble with Mrs. Prince is, she wants to be liked too much. And that can be the undoing of anyone.” And though we went on enjoying Mrs. Prince and eating her fudge and laughing at her Uncle Remus renditions, we now saw her as “someone who wanted to be liked too much” and were on the lookout for signs of this pitiful weakness in ourselves. Well, twenty years passed, and Mrs. Prince was still popular with the grammar school girls. Until Cornelia’s daughter Tildy Stratton and her best friend in sixth grade, Maud Norton, organized the other girls and drove the poor woman out. I had just become headmistress of the academy when this occured. Mrs. Prince told Reverend Mother she could no longer go on teaching at Mount St. Gabriel’s. And Reverend Mother called me in and I heard the story. I begged Mrs. Prince to at least continue her home economics classes with the academy girls, which also were very popular, but she said she now felt nauseated every time she drove through the school gates. Tildy’s putsch had completely undermined her. And it was so diabolically organized! I remember wondering, after this sad interview with Mrs. Prince, whether Tildy’s cruel act had been “inspired” by her mother. If a parent shows contempt for a teacher, the child is more than likely to follow suit. Perhaps Tildy did it to win favor with her mother. For it should come as no big surprise that Cornelia as a mother treated her daughters very much as she had treated her school friends. She kept them in thrall to her with her contemptuous tongue.
The last thing I could have imagined, when I offered Tildy the chance to direct her class in a new production of my old school play, was that I would be setting myself up for a treachery that would have more fallout for the school than the ousting of poor Mrs. Prince.
Looking back now, I see it is all too likely that Tildy’s adulteration of the play was one more attempt to win favor with her mother. I also believe that Cornelia not only egged Tildy on but went out of her way to contribute suggestions: such as the clothes worn in the treacherous scene and other background material Tildy could not have known about.
I have asked myself many times why I offered Tildy the opportunity that was to bring down so much censure on my head. Tildy Stratton was a difficult, headstrong girl, not as lovable or as lovely as her older sister, Madeline, but she had leadership potential that was going to waste or—as we have seen in the case of Mrs. Prince—being put to the wrong uses. Mother Malloy, who had been tutoring Tildy in the afternoons, agreed with me about this. She said Tildy hadn’t found large enough outlets for her leadership qualities. I was the same way myself. I liked to think up things for others to do and direct them in the doing of it. I liked to see my effects go forth in the world around me. But I was fortunate to seek healthy outlets. When I was Tildy’s age, I wrote a play for my freshman class to perform. I called it after the unfinished sculpture in the grotto. I wanted it to honor that girl who had died before she could realize her vocation.
Maybe, I remember thinking in those minutes before Compline, it was time for a new production of The Red Nun. The last one had been in 1947 and, though those students worked very hard and were very loyal to what they believed were my intentions and the “traditions” of the play, I felt the whole thing could use some new blood. And I thought, maybe that is the answer for Tildy: give her something to sink her teeth into. I will sound her out. But she must realize that I am offering her a gift and a privilege as well as a chance to prove herself.
You could say I offered my play as tinder and threw in the first lit match myself.
But I have jumped ahead. I was telling about how Antonia and I became friends and something of the quality of that friendship. Actually, it was my play and the working on it together that solidified our decision to join the Order of St. Scholastica together.
Lord, help me keep all these stories going and fit them into their proper places.
CHAPTER 22
An Errand for Agnes
Saturday forenoon, February 2, 1952
Downtown Mountain City
MADELINE, HAVING PURCHASED the required supplies for her mother’s studio, stopped at the front of Commercial Stationers to examine the rack of Valentine’s Day cards. Tucked among a preponderance of sweet and safe offerings (“I really think you’re mighty nice …” “To the One I Love …”) were a few spicier alternatives: “It’s leap year and you’ve caught my eye, / You great big handsome wonderful guy,” with a girl frog ogling a bullfrog. And “Where’s the fire? Now don’t be smart. You know you set it in my heart,” with a dog driving a fire truck. Boldness in love, it seemed, required animal stand-ins. Madeline burst into giggles at the tuxedoed skunk holding a glass of champagne (“For a Man of True Di-STINK-shun”), but there was no male in her life with the kind of humor that could tolerate receiving such a valentine. Her father, perhaps, but from a daughter it might seem disrespectful. If Mama sent it to Daddy, he would guffaw and be tickled she’d thought of him; but Mama, being Mama, was not a card-sending person. (“I don’t need a Hallmark hack to express my feelings.”)
“Oh, Madeline, hello.”
It was Henry Vick, also carrying parcels. He looked gray-faced and hollowed out. “I thought I recognized your laugh,” he said.
“It was this card.” She plucked it out of the rack and handed it over, watching him study the picture with a bemused smile, then break into laughter when he read the message inside.
“Were you thinking of sending it to me?”
“Oh, Uncle Henry, I would never—!” Madeline felt her face flame. But then she was doubly embarrassed when she realized he had been making a joke.
“What have you been buying?” she asked him.
“Tracing paper, India ink, more pen nibs. Have you had lunch?”
“Oh, I was just going to grab a Coke and a grilled cheese at the Woolworth counter.”
“We can do better than that,” said Henry Vick.
They walked to the Park Cafeteria on the green; it had Beaux Arts trim and colored skylights and had been designed by Henry’s father, Malcolm Vick, in the 1920s. The cafeteria had been Madeline’s eatery of choice since she was a little girl, and today she loaded her tray with all her childhood favorites: slices of moist white turkey meat wrapped around a generous scoop of dressing, mashed potatoes puddled with gravy, lima beans swimming in milk and butter, red Jell-O with whipped cream, and sweetened iced tea. Henry had Salisbury steak with the mashed potatoes and gravy, a pineapple salad, and black coffee. It was too early for the Saturday lunch crowd, but several people greeted Henry warmly as they moved through the line. Madeline felt sophisticated to be “dining out” with a prominent man in town. She also had the pleasure of noting her own positive effects on poor Uncle Henry, who already seemed a different person from the gray-faced old bachelor who had crept up behind her in the stationery store. He was being almost debonair. He asked where she preferred to sit, upstairs or downstairs. “Wherever you want,” she said, feeling suddenly shy and deferential.
“Let’s take that booth, where we can have some privacy. I want to ask your advice, Madeline.”
“My advice?”
He unloaded both their trays, hers first, arranging her dishes and silverware in front of her. Then he carried the trays to a nearby stand, to be collected by a busboy. From behind, Henry could still pass for a much younger man. As he bent deeply from the knees to stack the trays on the bottom shelf—saving the top shelf for the people who could not bend so easily?—she saw him as a desirable man through her late aunt’s eyes. What had sex been like between them on that short honeymoon?
Flustered, Madeline ducked her head and gazed intently at her mashed potatoes.
“You should have started without me,” said Henry, folding himself into the booth across from her. “You don’t want that wonderful gravy to get cold.”
“I love their gravy.�
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“Evaporated milk, bouillon cubes, flour, and a touch of molasses.”
“How do you know that?”
“The cook is Rosa’s cousin. Rosa thinks it’s a pretty poor excuse for brown gravy, but health departments don’t like to see jars of pan drippings and grease sitting around on restaurant stoves. Rosa adds a splash of sherry to ours.”
“Isn’t food great? The last thing I’d want is to take one of those capsules they’re talking about that fulfill all your nutritional needs.”
Henry sipped his black coffee and smiled at her indulgently. Was he already regretting asking a sixteen-year-old girl to lunch?
“How is Chloe?” she asked. Since Mrs. Roberts’s funeral, Tildy seemed to be getting thick with Maud again. Tildy and her intense, exclusive friendships!
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You’re a discerning person, Madeline. You know about the stepfather business, don’t you?”
“Rex Wright wants Chloe to go back to—what is the town?”
“Barlow. He’s her legal father, you know. He’s going to marry again and wants to start them right off as a family.”
Madeline thought: Both Tildy’s best friends have stepmothers—or stepmothers-to-be—who want to add them like charms to their lives. Though she’d gathered from Tildy that there was some disenchantment going on vis-à-vis the Palm Beach stepmother. Maud had acted “fast” at a dance, or something, and thrown a wrench into the second Mrs. Norton’s social aspirations.
“How does Chloe feel about it?” she asked Henry.
“At first she wanted no part of it. When I told her about the letters going back and forth between Ollie Coxe and Rex Wright’s lawyer in Barlow, she gave me a wide-eyed stare, like Agnes used to when someone brought up something she disapproved of. She asked me couldn’t I just have Mr. Coxe write back to the other lawyer and say she was happy with me. But now she’s suddenly come up with this idea of taking the bus to Barlow by herself and spending the weekend with them.”
“What would the point be?”
“To get to know Brenda, the fiancée. She’s a widow with grown sons. Both sons work for Rex; one sprays crops and the other teaches flying lessons.”
“But why should Chloe want to get to know Brenda if she’s happy with you?”
“Well, now, this is the thing—” Henry, looking uncomfortable, passed his hand slowly over his receding hair. “Chloe thinks that her mother—that Agnes—wants it.”
Madeline recalled Tildy’s recent outburst. (“All this drawing, drawing, drawing of Agnes, Agnes, Agnes! And then she consults her like she’s the Blessed Virgin or something. It’s downright creepy. I don’t have the patience for that now, with the play to direct and all.”)
At the time Madeline had assumed Tildy was presenting excuses to the family for taking up with Maud again.
“But why would Agnes want it? What is Chloe’s reasoning?”
“I’m not sure reasoning comes into it. I don’t like to say this, but my niece seems haunted. She spends hours drawing pictures of her mother. And I can’t help overhearing her talking in her room at night. It was my sister’s room as a girl, you know.”
“Yes, Tildy said.”
“Chloe and Tildy aren’t as close as they were, and I’m sorry about that. Tildy is such an unhaunted little person. But I can see why Chloe, the way she is at present, would strain a friendship. There just isn’t a lot of her to relate to. I include myself. Lately I’ve been wondering whether I wouldn’t have done better for her to let her board with the nuns, as planned. But Chloe wanted to live at the house, so I forfeited her boarding fee. I’ve even considered consulting Mother Ravenel, but she tends to take over in these matters. And Agnes always had reservations about Suzanne.”
“Will you let her go to Barlow for the weekend?”
“Ollie Coxe says I’m crazy if I do. He says it’s playing into their hands. What’s to stop them from keeping her? Possession is nine tenths of the law, especially since Wright is her legal father anyway.”
“But they couldn’t just hold her hostage. If she had her round-trip bus ticket—”
“Yes, I considered that. The trouble is, what if she didn’t want to come back?”
“But why would she want to stay? She told Tildy he used to hit them.”
“Ah, she never told me that. I haven’t wanted to cross-examine her, you see.”
“Couldn’t you send her down on the bus and then pick her up yourself?”
“I offered that. But,” he laughed dolefully, “it seems Agnes has decreed that I’m not to be a part of this. Chloe is to go to Barlow of her own free will. It’s something she must accomplish for her mother. You see how troublesome this is getting. I am not in Chloe’s mind, so I don’t know how much of this is the wishful fantasy of a girl who desperately misses her mother and wants to pretend they’re in communication, or whether she really hears Agnes, or something she believes is Agnes, dictating to her from within. At any rate, what I have decided I have to do is speak to Monsignor after he hears my confession this afternoon.”
“What does the church say about—hauntings?”
“Well, there is the doctrine of the soul’s immortality. And Aquinas held that we can prove the fact of the soul’s conscious life even after it is separated from the body. But I’m hoping Monsignor can shed some light of a more practical kind. A priest is bound to have had more experience of haunted young people than an old bachelor architect. I can’t even claim the experience of a single haunted house.”
“Listen, Uncle Henry, why don’t I drive Chloe down to Barlow? We could make it a day trip. Leave early on a Saturday morning, and I’d drop her off and then pick her up a few hours later. Do you think that would pass muster with Agnes?”
Henry winced slightly, and Madeline regretted her flippancy. Why, oh, why was it so hard to strike a balance between wit and kindness? Not that she’d had the greatest teacher in her mother.
But the next thing she knew they were working out the logistics.
“What would you be doing during those hours?” asked Henry.
“Oh, I could be visiting an old school friend in Barlow. No, they might want to know my friend’s name. What is the nearest good-sized town to Barlow? I’m not smart like my granddaddy Tilden; he carried the state map in his head—he could close his eyes and rattle off the counties for you, west to east, and who they were named for.”
“My father used to say that Archie Tilden was one of the rare state legislators who could see things whole. But you’re plenty smart, Madeline; I won’t have you running yourself down. Barlow’s about twelve miles below Statesville.”
“In that case, my friend is going to live in Statesville.”
“You have to go through Statesville to get to Barlow, so it would mean doubling back for that visit with your friend.”
“What’s twenty-four miles round-trip for a friend?” said Madeline merrily. “But, wait, why would I suddenly be going to see her? Maybe a bridal shower. No, my friends are still too young for those. I know: her big sister’s bridal shower. I always admired her big sister. And I happened to mention it to you, Henry, and you said, ‘Chloe’s thinking of taking the bus down there—when would you be going, Madeline?’”
“And when would you be thinking of going?”
“How about next Saturday? That would give Chloe time to phone them, and it would save her the bus fare and all. Of course, we still don’t know if—”
Shut up, she thought, stopping herself.
“If it will pass muster with Agnes,” Henry finished for her, smiling sadly.
“Listen, Uncle Henry, you don’t have any scruples about—well, my imaginary friend and her big sister, do you? I mean, if you told Chloe, ‘Madeline has offered to drive you down and wait for you and drive you back,’ it might seem as though we’re in cahoots, like I was your stand-in, your spy, sort of.”
“I’d much rather she be in your care than sending her off on the bus. I may have ov
erdone my scruples regarding her. But what about you, Madeline? If you’re going to be gone all day, your family will want to know where you are.”
“I will tell Mama the truth. She enjoys covert operations. But I won’t tell Tildy, because you never know with Tildy. She might or might not spill the beans to Chloe.”
“That’s wise, I think. I’ll propose your offer to Chloe this evening and she’ll probably want to—sleep on it. Will you be at Mass tomorrow? I may be able to let you know something then. Of course, it will depend on the weather, too.”
Early Saturday morning, February 9, 1952
Mountain City to Barlow
The weather was just what Madeline had wished for: crisp, bright, not cold. If it had been cold, Mama had offered, they could switch cars so Madeline could drive the better-insulated Packard. Cornelia had entered with gusto into the intrigue, which she had drolly christened “the errand for Agnes.”
“But don’t you think a bridal shower is a little incautious, Maddy? What if Rex Wright and his intended bride hunt through the newspapers for your friend’s sister’s upcoming wedding?”
“Well, we’ll have left Barlow by then.”
“But you might need to go back. You don’t want to destroy your credibility. Have your friend’s sister expecting a baby—the dates are vaguer. Make it a baby shower. And, of course, you’ll need a present.”
“Isn’t buying a present taking it a bit far, Mama?”
“Who said anything about buying? How about your silver baby mug? You can wrap it prettily and sit it in full view on the backseat, where everyone can poke their heads in and admire it. Then you can stow it in the trunk before you go back to pick up Chloe.”
“But what if Tildy sees it when I’m leaving the house?”
“Do you really think Tildy is likely to be anywhere but fast asleep in her nice big bed—the bed you so generously bequeathed her—at six on a Saturday morning? But your point is taken. Wrap it in secret and carry it to your car inside an old shopping bag. Before you get to the Vick house, pull over and display it on the backseat. But after you come back, you should tell Tildy you drove Chloe to Barlow. In case Chloe says something to Tildy. Goodness! It makes one pause, doesn’t it? Think of all the things you’d have to plan for before setting out to commit a real crime.”