by Gail Godwin
Madeline closed the door of her own room and hastily unwrapped the “gift” and put away the ribbon and paper for another time. How she wished she were a fly on the wall over at Henry Vick’s. After they had stowed away the boxes of Agnes’s things, Henry, reticent as he was to “cross-examine” his niece, would surely have asked, and surely been entitled to, some account of Chloe’s time in Barlow. All Chloe had said, when Henry asked her how the day had gone, was that it was “all finished” but she was very tired.
Feeling curiously unrelated to everybody, Madeline wandered down the hall and knocked tentatively on Tildy’s door. She found herself absurdly grateful to be welcomed into her old room by her baby sister, who was full of her own day. At the last minute, Maud had canceled out on Tildy because she had to help Lily get some stuff ready for a household sale at the Pine Cone Lodge. “So I decided it would be a good day to inventory Aunt Antonia’s old belongings from under the window seat. I thought we might use some of the clothes for props in the play. But you will never guess in a million years what I found in the back of this old trigonometry blue book! I can’t wait for Mama to get home.”
Tildy didn’t ask a single question about Madeline’s day.
CHAPTER 24
Trigonometry Midterm
(front cover)
Honor Examination Book
Name: Antonia Tilden
Date: October 11, 1933
Subject: Trigonometry
I certify on my honor that I have neither given nor received assistance on this examination
ANTONIA MARIA TILDEN
(inside back cover)
Since that evening at the Swag, Suzy, I have been wondering whether we should go on with our plans. Something tells me it would be wrong in a way I can’t find words for. Only that there is a good reason for things, but when you know there ought to be a better reason, then the good can turn bad. Has that happened to us?
Confessional Cassette, Continued—and Interrupted
Dawn, Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001
Feast of Saints Protus and Hyacinth, brothers and martyrs, burned at the stake; Rome, 260
Mother Ravenel’s room
St. Scholastica Retirement House
Sentences have been forming in my head all night, Beatrix. Finally I gave up on sleep and dressed in the dark and here I am at dawn, having just pressed the Record button. We have Mass at seven-thirty on weekdays now because Father has to do three nuns’ retirement homes, and then we eat a cold breakfast because that’s too early for our cook. I’d like to complete this cassette today and send it off.
From what I am able to discern with my limited sight, augmented by my other senses, it is going to be a fine September day here in Boston. The sky is golden, not milky gray. The air is crisp, not humid. The bird chorus is in full voice, soon to be drowned out by the roar of jets departing from Logan. Sister Bridget’s brother-in-law who is an air traffic controller at Logan says our retirement house, formerly the old Sanderson estate, lies directly beneath the first minutes of all southbound flights.
I am now on the second side of the tape. But you of course know this because you would have turned it over! I was starting to tell you about writing The Red Nun for my class to perform and how working on it with Antonia intensified our plan to join the Order together at the end of our senior year. We were now freshmen in the academy. I had been elected class president and Antonia vice president. In the previous year, 1929-30, much had happened. I had lost a home and a father, but I had found a new home at Mount St. Gabriel’s and the chance to re-create myself. Nothing was stopping me from becoming the person I wanted to be. And I knew I was treasured by the friend closest to my heart.
Our foundress had died at the beginning of 1930 and there was the big funeral at the basilica, then a Requiem Mass at the school, and lots of write-ups in the local and state papers and Catholic periodicals about the growth of Mount St. Gabriel’s and how it had become so much a part of the community in its first twenty years. Mother Finney was kept busy giving interviews, and along with all her other chores she was writing her chapbook, Adventures with Our Foundress, while, as she said, so much was still fresh in her mind, though overlaid with sorrow. The reason it was fresh, Beatrix, was that during Mother Wallingford’s final months in the infirmary, when nothing more could be done for her, Mother Finney would sit by her bed whenever she could steal a free moment and they would try to recollect the stages of their remarkable journey together, “charged by the Holy Ghost,” just like the Apostles in Acts. Of course, with the brain tumor, Mother Wallingford was not always cogent and sometimes Mother Finney would get very sad and frustrated. I had a spell in the infirmary myself for several days following the death of my father and I overheard snatches of their conversation. It was so odd: sometimes they sounded like old crones and other times like young girls congratulating themselves. Once I heard Mother Finney ask breathlessly, “Did we really do all this for God?” And Mother Wallingford answered with a chilling laugh, “No, I think God used us.” Once I heard Mother Finney begging, “Please, Lizzie, please speak to me,” and Mother Wallingford screeched at her: “Fie! Fie! Fie!” I thought she was cursing Mother Finney, but later I realized she could have been screeching, “Fi! Fi! Fi!,” which may have been her nickname for Fiona.
(I will break here, Beatrix. Sister Bridget has just rung the gong for seven-thirty Mass.)
Back from morning Mass and cornflakes.
I had started to tell you about the play I wrote for our freshman class. Each academy class presented a play during the year and the freshmen went last, usually at the end of April, so they would learn from seeing the older girls’ plays. Most of the plays chosen were by well-known playwrights. The seniors that year were in rehearsal for W. B. Yeats’s great morality play in verse The Hour Glass, about the smart man who has taught everyone in his village that there is no soul and then an angel arrives to tell him he is going to die and go to hell unless he can find one person who still believes in the existence of the soul. He will still have to die, of course, but if he finds that one person he will only have to go to purgatory.
And I had been sitting in study hall wondering, “How will we ever top that one?” Even back then, Beatrix, I was very competitive. Some good has come out of my ambitious nature, I believe, but I have also been told that it has chipped away parts of my soul. I was class president and I wanted us to do something that would make our class be remembered for years to come.
I also wanted to impress Antonia and get her involved in a project that would bind us closer.
The academy study hall had been the ballroom, back when this building was the old Sky Top Inn. Couples danced to an orchestra in this vast room where we now studied; and then around the sides were smaller parlors and smoking rooms, which were now our classrooms.
Well, suddenly all kinds of voices started swirling around in my head, voices coming from different times in the building’s history. I heard a couple exchange platitudes while they waltzed around this room, and I heard the auctioneer ask for opening bids for the hotel’s furnishings (the auction had also been held in this room) after old Sky Top went out of business, and Mother Wallingford made her offer for “every piece of furniture throughout the hotel and in all the eighty bedrooms.” Her bid was snatched up; the liquidators were overjoyed. Here came this English nun with her hoity-toity accent and her banker’s draft, freeing them from having to pay a single penny to drag it downstairs and truck it all away.
Later that day, Mother Wallingford bought the hotel.
And I heard the pure soaring voice of the girl, Caroline DuPree, who was carried off by malaria in the summer of 1912, so early in the school’s history, before she was able to make her first vows. And then I heard God ruminating on how He had gone about creating this place.
It didn’t come out, when I was writing it, in chronological order. It was more like God’s kind of time; God Himself isn’t chronological. I can’t remember who said that. Father Krafft
, perhaps.
Then I did the deck scene of Mother Wallingford and Mother Finney crossing the Atlantic on their ship back in 1898, feeling like they are in a tale they are making up as they go along.
I loved imagining these two, and so did Antonia: these two close friends, bound up in God, writing their own rule. The more we fleshed out their story, the more it seemed we were filling in our own future. We already knew that Antonia was going to play the part of the foundress.
There were certain lines I wrote for the play that could have doubled as our lines, Antonia’s and mine.
WALLINGFORD: I couldn’t have done this without someone to go with me.
FINNEY: Yet it all seems so easy.
WALLINGFORD: It seems easy because the Holy Ghost is blowing us onward.
At first we thought I’d play Finney, but in the end I cast Agnes Vick. Agnes was close to Mother Finney, who helped her get all the details right. And Finney had been more of a follower, whereas I was so much a leader. “It’s too bad you and I can’t both play the foundress,” Antonia once joked. And I joked back that I’d try to console myself with just being God’s voice and the narrator and the playwright. Oh, Antonia looked so beautiful in Mother Wallingford’s own cloak. Everyone said so.
Which brings me to the regrettable subject of envy, my envy of Antonia.
In an unfallen world if you love and admire someone, you rejoice when they are loved and admired by others. But ever since our first parents’ envy of God’s knowledge caused them to eat of the tree, we have been living out variations on the envy theme and reaping the consequences. Cain’s face fell when Abel’s firstborn lamb found more favor with God than his own offering of fruits. Jacob covered himself with skins so he could steal his hairy brother’s blessing from their blind old father.
Regarding my envy of Antonia, I hardly know where to jump in. I’m like those little girls on the playground who never could dart right into a moving rope.
I want to jump in with this more than I do not want to jump in, yet I am also tempted to divert from the plunge by inquiring into the jealousies of others. Who smote your heart with envy, Beatrix? Best friend? Archenemy? Colleague? A passing stranger who had some quality you wished for? A family member?
God’s angel Lucifer was not content to be the brightest in heaven. He wanted to run his own show.
But I am “divaricating,” as you girls tell me I used to point out when someone was beating around the bush.
Antonia Tilden, beautiful, secure, and good, had known as early as fifth grade that she wanted to give her all to God. And she was backed up by her family. They started a fund for her dowry. Antonia had so much and she knew it and she wanted to put it all to the service of God. It was as simple as that.
Were my desires so simple?
In our sophomore year, we founded this little society, the Oblates of the Red Nun. It was my inspiration, but Antonia liked the idea. Each member pledged to dedicate herself to fulfil God’s plan for her. We wanted to put a wall around our intentions, to protect them from all harm, to keep out any second-best desires. That was all it was about. We chose the Red Nun as our mascot because she stood for the unfulfilled desire of an earlier pupil at Mount St. Gabriel’s. And yet God was able to use her unfinished monument, and her legend, to be a fortress for others.
There were only five of us oblates. Cornelia insisted on joining anything Antonia did. And there was my roommate, Soledad Ostos, from Mexico. And we asked Francine Barfoot, a boarder who played the flute. She was a helpful, modest girl who didn’t insist on being the icing on every cake. Her daughter, Elaine Frew, was in your class.
That’s all we were, a small harmless society of girls who wanted to become the best they could be and not let God down by settling for anything less. Yes, we also pledged to forsake any person or influence who tempted us to shortchange God’s major plan for us. After that debacle of Tildy Stratton’s production of The Red Nun in the spring of 1952, her mother, Cornelia Stratton, said some unwarrantable things to me at the reception. She accused me of being the indirect cause of Antonia’s death in Rome. She said I had been a pernicious influence on her sister, had “fed on Antonia’s vocation like a tapeworm” and poisoned it with my own desires. She said that the “silly old pledge” I had dreamed up, the pledge to forsake all second-best influences, had stuck in Antonia’s conscience and troubled her heart on her wedding trip, causing her to step in front of that van.
I do not believe that Finney was ever jealous of Wallingford. She knew Wallingford was the superior one and was content to share a grand adventure with her.
Those two, no doubt, provided a model in my young mind for Antonia and myself. But I didn’t identify us as much as Antonia thought. “Suzy, we’re not them,” she said to me one day, early in our senior year, when she had started to question her vocation.
It was around that time when I realized I might have to go it alone. I was already having conferences about it with Reverend Mother.
But there was something else, too, Beatrix. And here I must come back to envy and its first cousin, competitiveness.
I knew, even back in September of our senior year, that the school would vote Antonia the Queen of the School for the May First festivities. She was the inevitable choice: beautiful and good; she was that year’s embodiment of the Mount St. Gabriel’s ideal. Oh, I had been class president four years in a row, I was the best leader in my class, but I was not its best embodiment of the ideal, and I knew it. Though it gave me pain and I was envious.
And so, when Antonia began to have doubts, I decided to subdue my envy by entering early. Because, you see, as a postulant I would be ineligible to be voted queen.
(Beatrix, someone downstairs is frantically ringing our gong. It makes no sense. The next gong is scheduled for the Angelus at noon. I must go see what is the matter.)
CHAPTER 25
Silent Skies
Late Tuesday night, September 11, 2001
St. Scholastica Retirement House
Two nuns setting off for a walk
“THE STARS—DO they seem closer tonight, Mother Galyon?”
“They do, Mother.”
“That’s what I thought. Even though I can only see them out of the corners of my eyes. The Carolina Cherokees believed the sky was a great overturned bowl that we live under. They called it the sky vault. Did you ever hear that when you were in Mountain City?”
“No, Mother. But you were in Mountain City a great deal longer than I was.”
The former headmistress, who had been instrumental in curtailing Mother Galyon’s teaching career in Mountain City, did not respond to this. They continued along the gravel drive, the crunch of their steps amplified by the uncanny new silence of the skies. All aircraft, except for military fighter jets and medical helicopters, had been grounded, all airports closed indefinitely. The nation was on high alert. Were these coordinated attacks only the beginning of more of the same—or worse? Would we go to war, as we did after Pearl Harbor? But against whom, and how?
Knowing that the chatterbox fastened to her arm could not endure silence for very long brought a paradoxical measure of relief to Mother Galyon. When the next unimaginable thing could strike from the sky vault at any moment, you welcomed the familiar intrusions.
“Well, you and I logged in forty-one Boston Catholic deaths tonight. I was surprised there were that many, weren’t you?”
“Why, Mother?”
“I guess it would have seemed more natural if they had waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“Oh, to hear the president’s speech—to see what was going to happen next. To—I don’t know—hold out for some singularity in their deaths. Thousands, the president said. All those bodies in flames falling through the air. Innocent people starting work at their desks—or thinking they were safely aboard flights to California. Forgive me, I know I’m rambling, but those two planes from Logan were supposed to be headed west; by the time they went over us the real pilots
may already have had their throats cut. Probably the exact moment the hijackers were flying over our house, some passenger who knew the route was thinking, Why have we suddenly turned south? What were you doing, Mother, when Sister Bridget started banging away at that gong?”
“I was reading a detective novel.”
“You know what I was doing? I was dictating that little confessional tape that you suggested. I had almost reached the end of the second side. But after the events of today, how could I possibly send such a cassette to Beatrix down in Mountain City? It would seem all out of proportion, and she would lose respect for me.”
“Why don’t you put it on hold for now, Mother. For all we know we all may be dust and ashes within a few days.”
They reached the gates at the end of the estate and retraced their steps: the cautious homecoming of four old safely shod feet. Tonight the TV screen in the nuns’ parlor, usually visible through the window, was blocked by heads gathered round it, watching the endless replay of falling bodies, crumpling towers, dust-covered people running, running …
CHAPTER 26
Henry
Thursday midmorning, February 14, 1952
Henry Vick’s office
Downtown Mountain City
“MR. COXE FOR you, Mr. Vick.”