by Gail Godwin
Tildy had continued to spend Saturday nights with Chloe because the play needed to be blocked out in scenes, and Tildy found that her creative faculties worked best when she lay on her sofa bed with her eyes closed and Chloe read slowly through the play until Tildy envisioned a kind of square around a certain body of material; then she would cry “Stop!” and have Chloe make a big colored block around that scene. They had done this so often that Tildy knew the play pretty well by heart. She could see it, stacked up in its red, blue, yellow, green, brown, purple, and black scenes, on the insides of her eyelids when she lay in bed at night. And Chloe was patient and steadfast: she would read a scene over and over until Tildy had seen whatever it was she needed to see. Very unlike Maud, who used to sigh heavily at some point and say, “All right, Tildy, open your eyes and let’s move on, okay?”
Maud posed a dual problem these days. On the one hand, she seemed grateful, almost humbly so, for their revived friendship; she sought Tildy’s counsel about the smallest things. But there was at the same time in Maud a disturbing new standoffishness. Tildy could not remember this holding back in their previous friendship. Maud seemed to be keeping certain parts of herself in reserve. Tildy was at the moment in the midst of puzzling this out. She felt sure that if she could get to the reasons, it would be more like the old Tildy-and-Maud equation, though of course now Chloe had to fit somewhere into that equation.
Maud’s life over at the Pine Cone Lodge was disintegrating by the day. It wasn’t even the Pine Cone Lodge anymore: the sign had been taken down and an up-and-coming real estate firm had put a binder on the house. If the city planning board gave the go-ahead next week, the sale would go through and the company would start turning it into apartments for older people who wanted to be within walking distance to town. And that meant Maud and Lily Norton and Mr. Foley would have to move out immediately and leave the house “broom clean” within thirty days of the closing. That was part of the negotiated sale price, which Maud was being coy about, though Daddy had said he had heard Lily had done very well because this same real estate bunch was buying up more old houses on the same street and planned a sort of enclave for well-heeled oldies who’d had their driver’s licenses revoked.
Recently Maud had overheard her mother and Mr. Foley discussing whether it would be more economical to rent temporary lodgings in Mountain City so that Maud could finish out her school year “at home” or for them to go ahead and invest in a house in Atlanta, where Mr. Foley’s home office was, and fork over a boarding fee to Mount St. Gabriel’s for the remaining month or so.
“Oh, Christ, Maud, don’t be silly—you can stay here with us!” Tildy had expostulated, though she knew she would have to win over Mama, who seemed to have taken against Maud.
But it had become easier to bring Mama around to her wishes since Mother Ravenel had made Tildy the director of the play. Tildy exulted in her new power over Mama: Cornelia was on jealous alert for the first sign that her baby was being stolen away by the enemy.
But Maud had rebuffed Tildy’s offer. “Thank you, that’s really sweet of you, Tildy, but, you know, I am going to pressure them to let me board. That’s what will work out best for me, I’ve decided.”
Why being cooped up as a boarder would work out best for Maud was beyond Tildy’s comprehension. There was something being kept from her, but she could not figure out what. It had to be more than Maud’s antipathy for Art Foley, because there was certainly nothing new about that.
Meanwhile, Maud was devotedly immersed in The Red Nun. She had learned all of her lines for both of her parts—although Tildy was still writing more lines for the second part.
Before Tildy had cast the play, Maud had respectfully asked if she might “try out” for the part of Mother Wallingford, the foundress. “We’re not going to have tryouts,” Tildy told her. “They take too long and people tend to imagine themselves capable of roles that are completely unsuited to them. You waste valuable time paying lip service to the democratic process. Mother Ravenel feels the same. She cast all the parts for the play’s first performance in 1931.”
Then Tildy had let a suspenseful pause go by before she put Maud out of her misery—and granted her double what she’d asked for. “It so happens, Maud, that I have already cast you as Mother Elizabeth Wallingford. You have the gravity and bearing of an aristocratic English foundress. Nobody in our class could wear Mother Wallingford’s own cape as well as you.”
Tildy watched Maud’s countenance change from disappointment to relief. Only there was a shadow of the new aloofness, too. As if she were having a small side thought about how juvenile all this fuss about a mere school play was.
“But in my production, the person who plays the foundress has to play another role, as well,” Tildy went on.
“What role is that?”
“It’s a character I haven’t finished creating yet. Each class is allowed to add their own material, as long as it honors the spirit of the original production. Mother Ravenel has given me permission to add new characters who come later in the history of the school. Your second character will be a girl named Domenica. She’s the best friend of a girl named Rexanne. The two of them plan to emulate Elizabeth and her friend Fiona by becoming nuns together.”
And then take John and Flavia, those monoliths of dignity in Tildy’s home life. They had behaved totally out of character after Tildy invited them into the dining room to listen to Daddy’s and her finished tape of John speaking God’s lines. She had ceremoniously brought the machine to the table, laid it on a mat, and pressed the button. After a series of hisses and pops, the hollow magisterial voice caused both John and Flavia to step back in alarm from the reel. But as it rolled on (“I smashed continents together …”), with its pregnant word spacings indicated by the director, the couple regained their usual composure. However, by the time God got to the part about deciding to create a school “in my own good time,” where God’s voice swung up a notch, both John and Flavia turned away from her, and Tildy saw their shoulders were shaking. Her first thought had been “They are so moved they’re crying,” but then Flavia gasped that something was “boiling over on the stove” and ran to the kitchen, even though it was midafternoon and nothing was cooking. John held out a few moments longer before blurting a strangled “Thank you, Miss Tildy” and bolting through the kitchen’s swinging door after his wife. From the other side of the door came a horrid release of stifled laughter as the couple made a hurried escape to their quarters over the garage.
And then, just yesterday, Friday, there had been the completely out-of-character behavior of Mother Malloy during their tutoring session. They had been working up Tildy’s medieval history paper the way they had worked up her David Copperfield paper. Tildy was first encouraged to extemporize aloud, and then together they’d narrow her enthusiasms down to manageable proportions. Tildy had chosen Eleanor of Aquitaine as her topic and, having anticipated being congratulated by Mother Malloy at finding a perfect fit for herself, was dashed when the teacher said many others in the class were writing on Eleanor, too. “Well,” said Tildy, rising above her setback, “but it’s what you do with the topic, isn’t it, Mother?” “There’s certainly enough of her to go around,” the nun agreed, smiling. “What do you plan to do with her, Tildy?”
And Tildy had launched confidently into her extemporization: “I would like to use a lot of French, Mother, maybe compose it in French, the way we did with my Uriah Heep paper. This time it seems really appropriate because she was a French queen before she was an English one.”
Last time, when they had been working up her Uriah Heep paper, Tildy had simply tossed out highlights of things that had caught her fancy about this grotesque figure, relying on her gift for pulling excitement (or repulsion) out of the air, and liberally sprinkling it with what people called her “precocious” vocabulary, meanwhile watching Mother Malloy closely to measure the quality of her nods. Steering by the more vigorous nods, Tildy had been able to narrow down to the topi
c that had earned her a B plus: what made Uriah so disgusting and what parts of his disgustingness were truly evil?
But this time the nod method wasn’t working so well. None of the nun’s nods could be called vigorous.
Tildy had chosen Eleanor of Aquitaine because that was the person in the period they were studying who seemed most worthy of her imagination. Given the right parentage and all those lands, Tildy felt sure that she, too, would have made a superb queen at fifteen, which she would be on her next birthday.
Given more encouragement, she was about to voice this certainty aloud, but Mother Malloy was sitting very still, hands folded on her lap, head bowed, and so Tildy searched for something less egotistical and hit on the idea of fifteen alone. Mother Malloy loved concision and modesty—she was always counseling them about “not biting off more than you can chew” in their presentations.
“I was thinking, Mother, maybe I could just take Eleanor at fifteen, basing it on all the history that was going on around her, all the fascinating people, and why she and Louis had to consolidate their holdings, and … no, wait, Mother, I’ve got a better idea. I could just do the marriage—or even Eleanor, on horseback, a fifteen-year-old duchess, riding toward the young king she has never met, with all her vassals and trappings, and show why—”
Mother Malloy did not raise her head. She seemed scarcely to be breathing.
Then she stirred herself and apologized, explaining that she had been having trouble sleeping lately, and asked Tildy if she would mind going over her proposal again.
Three of the most dependable people in Tildy’s life: the teacher who had spent hours encouraging her to express herself in new ways and the two house servants whose adoration she had taken for granted ever since they had taken turns pushing her wherever she wanted to go in her stroller; within a single week, two of them had run out of the room laughing at her, and she had put the other one to sleep sitting bolt upright.
It made you think twice before taking anybody’s fealty for granted. Thank goodness there were some new people in her life to make a fresh impression on today. At the moment, Tildy sat next to Jiggsie Judd, the new boarder who had recently been demoted to ninth grade by Mother Ravenel, on the scratchy backseat of Jiggsie’s Spartanburg grandmother’s ancient Oldsmobile, being driven by “Bob,” a cigar-smoking man in Levi’s and a plaid wool jacket. They were on their way to the Sunset Park Inn to have afternoon tea with Mrs. Judd in her suite. Bob seemed to be an uncertain mixture of friend and retainer to Jiggsie’s grandmother. Jiggsie said he “went everywhere with her” and “stayed in the room smoking when she had company at home,” but Granny wrote him a check for fifty dollars every week; Jiggsie had seen her doing it. Since Tildy had been in the car, Bob had related several bits of information about Mrs. Judd, whom he referred to as “Nita,” in his sarcastic smoker’s voice: “Nita” still had her license, but she liked him to drive so she didn’t have to pay attention to where they were going; “Nita” refused to part with the 1937 Oldsmobile, whose yearly upkeep cost them more than a new car, because her late husband had bought it for her the year before he died; “Nita” tended to dwell in the past, but she was right good company. His tone teetered between affection and condescension. Tildy was encouraged by the “dwelling in the past” part, however, because this afternoon she planned to ransack the memory of Mrs. Nita Netherby Judd, class of 1913, for the purposes of the play. Think of it: 1913 was only three years after Mount St. Gabriel’s opened. Mrs. Judd would have known the foundress in her prime!
Jiggsie’s being put back a grade—a secret dread of Tildy’s for years—hadn’t appeared to faze the girl. If anything, she seemed to regard it as a reward. As a ninth grader she got to spend her entire school day in the same classroom with her adored patron Elaine Frew, who had taken the girl under her wing.
And for Tildy, Jiggsie’s demotion to the ninth grade had been pure gold. Jiggsie looked like a delicate, if slightly unstable, angel and sang like one in a keen, otherworldly soprano. Tildy at once conceived a new part for her in the play. Since she could hardly revoke Dorothy Yount’s singing part of the doomed Caroline DuPree, Tildy made Jiggsie the ongoing “Spirit of the School.” Like an angel, this spirit didn’t age, and it had perfect hindsight and foresight. It could shed light on things that had happened a long time before and predict things that were going to happen in the future. It could see behind the scenes and right old wrongs. The character inspired by Jiggsie provided the new dimension Mama had said the play needed to make a “breakout” from Mother Ravenel’s “old party line.”
Tildy, feeling magnanimous, had invited Elaine Frew to compose the piano music for Jiggsie’s songs. “I’d have to see some lyrics first,” hedged haughty Elaine. “I’ll have a sample of them for you by Monday,” Tildy promised, swallowing her ire and spending her weekend dictating and revising “The Spirit’s Theme Song” as she lay on her sofa bed over at Chloe’s:
My pitiless light routs out dark schemes;
My brilliant flame revives old dreams;
Yesterday and tomorrow are for me the same.
Call me Spirit of Now if you need a name.
“Who wrote this?” Elaine asked, frowning.
“I did,” said Tildy. “What’s the matter with it?”
“It sings well—or will, when it has the right music. It will suit Jigg sie’s queer little countertenor.”
Though Mrs. Nita Judd was definitely old, she did not look or act like a grandmother. She paced compulsively about the suite, plying them with her opinions. She obviously felt it was her role this afternoon to instruct and entertain two young people and was doing her best by her lights, not expecting them to contribute much. Which was understandable, thought Tildy, if your idea of a young person was someone like Jiggsie. People on Mrs. Judd’s good side were labeled “poor,” and the rest had to do without her favorite adjective. Her wide-bottomed gray silk trousers swished as she paced the carpet in her Mexican huaraches, her bracelets clanked and tinkled, and when she bent forward to pour the tea in her loose V-necked sweater, you could see the whole front of her black lacy brassiere and the crispy folds of her midriff below. Her skin was the color and texture of a gingersnap, and her hair, swept back in a cruelly tight Spanish knot that made her eyebrows look permanently in shock, was what Mama would have called “suspiciously black.”
Her topics tumbled out in no particular order, usually trailed by insurrectionary backlashes. First she had reminded the girls that today was the Ides of March, “the day poor Julius Caesar was murdered by his so-called friends. ‘Et tu, Brutus?’ You see, I did learn a few things at old Mount St. Gabriel’s, even though I was the sort of girl who couldn’t wait to see the last of school.” Next came the history of Jiggsie’s slapdash schooling (“deplorable, really, poor child, but what could you expect, with those parents?”); and on into Jiggsie’s home life, due to Jiggsie’s poor father having spent his inheritance and become a golf pro and Jiggsie’s mother being “well, let’s just say capricious in her affections, to put it kindly;” then detouring somehow into Mrs. Judd’s firm adherence to her Catholic faith (“When everything’s in turmoil around you, you have to have something constant to steer by—though the Lord knows His poor church is not without stain”); and then on to the perfections of the late Mr. Judd (“Poor Harold was perfect, the perfect husband. And I’ll tell you something, girls, and you can remember this when you are widows: he was even more perfect after he died”).
And then back to Jiggsie: “When Mother Ravenel phoned to say she’d had to put Jiggsie back a grade, I made poor Bob drop everything so I could rush up here and console my only grandchild. And what do I find? Jiggsie like a pig in clover, surrounded by friends like you, Tildy, and this nice Elaine Frew—I’m so sorry Elaine wasn’t able to come today—”
“Oh, Elaine is brutal about sticking to her Saturday practice schedule,” Jiggsie proudly announced without looking at anyone. Her fingers hovered over the sandwich tray. Finally she picked up a
triangle with the crusts cut off, peeled back the bread and sniffed at the filling inside, then popped the whole thing into her mouth with a shrug.
It was the first Tildy had heard that Elaine had been invited.
“So I guess this old granny will check out of here tomorrow morning,” Mrs. Judd cheerfully resumed, swishing and clanking. She had yet to sit down. “I’ll go to Mass at the basilica and stop off and have my conference with Mother Ravenel and see if I can find Mother Finney, who was always my favorite, and then poor Bob can get back home to his tools. You know that archaic old buggy you rode here in? I don’t dare sell it because poor Bob would have nothing to tinker with at my house.”
Tildy decided the time had come to divert this going-nowhere monologue about all these poor people onto a more purposeful track. “I was hoping, Mrs. Judd, that you would tell us about your time at Mount St. Gabriel’s. You know, we’re doing this play about the history of the school—”
“Yes, Jiggsie was saying. You wrote in a new part just for her. That was very sweet of you, Tildy.”
“Elaine is writing some songs especially for me,” said Jiggsie, tearing a petal from the single rose in the silver vase on the room service tray and setting it afloat, like a little boat, in her teacup.
“Actually,” Tildy informed Mrs. Judd, “I am the one writing the songs. Elaine is supplying the music.”
“However,” said Jiggsie with a shrug.
“You girls are so clever!” said Mrs. Judd. “What do you call your play, Tildy?”
“The Red Nun,” said Jiggsie rather scornfully, still not looking at anyone. She tore off a second petal and set it afloat in her teacup.
“It’s not really my play,” said Tildy. “I mean, as director I’m allowed to add material, but Mother Ravenel wrote it when she was a freshman back in 1931, and it’s a tradition for the freshman class to revive it every few years.”