Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  The end of October brought Black Friday, followed by the Monday morning telephone call from the Ravenel brother in Charleston. Their father killed in a hunting accident. The girl not to come home for the funeral. Her nonrefundable board and tuition prepaid to mid-December. After that, more modest arrangements must be found for her back in Charleston. No money for her to continue at Mount St. Gabriel’s. However, not possible for her to live at home with the mother.

  “The girl who lost her father is here with us in the infirmary,” Mother Finney told Mother Wallingford, who had occupied a room there since she went on the intravenous painkiller.

  “Which girl, Mother Finney? Do you expect me to keep up with every girl in my present state?”

  “The nice little girl from Charleston we’ve talked about. Suzanne Ravenel. She’s taking it hard that she has to leave us when the term finishes.”

  “Then why must she leave?”

  “There’s no more money. And she can’t live with her mother. There seems to be a problem about the mother.”

  “There always is. The mother is an opium eater; that’s the problem.” The foundress erupted into the unnerving high-pitched cackle of her illness.

  “No, that was—I think you’re confusing her with someone else, Lizzie.”

  “I’ll thank you not to ‘Lizzie’ me. What is the point of a rule if we ignore it and address one another by first names? And I’m not as impaired as you’d like to think. I know whose mother you are talking about. And a very effective method of abdication, too. Send the girl to me. Who better than myself to enlighten her about a mother’s abdication?”

  “When Reverend Mother told the girl about her father and asked if she wanted anyone to accompany her to chapel, do you know what she said?”

  “For God’s sake, Fiona, be specific. ‘She’ who? Reverend Mother or the girl? Doesn’t the girl have a name?”

  “Suzanne Ravenel, Mother. The boarder whose father had the shooting accident in Charleston. Reverend Mother was very touched. When she asked the girl if there was anyone she would like to have with her, Suzanne Ravenel said there was only One whom she needed and He was always with her anyway. Reverend Mother suspects she may have an early vocation.”

  Again the eerie high-pitched cackle. The tumor seemed to have robbed the foundress of her rich, mellow tones. “Reverend Mother suspects everyone of having an early vocation. Send the girl to me. I’ll put her straight about mothers.”

  “I was wondering, Mother—”

  “I’m not your mother, Fiona. Your mother died a good Catholic death from having too many babies. Now who’s becoming forgetful?” Another cackle, this time triumphant and mean.

  “I was wondering,” ventured Mother Finney, now barred from using both first names and religious ones, “if we might look to the trust for keeping Suzanne Ravenel here with us. We could do it on a year-by-year basis, if you see fit.”

  “I’ll be in the ground before the end of this year, Fiona. Certainly, let’s sign up your little protégée and shield her under Father’s munificent umbrella. You can do it yourself. You have power of attorney now.”

  “I’d rather we signed together. You still can, you know.”

  To Mother Finney’s chagrin, Mother Wallingford dissolved into a squall of grief. Forlorn yowling noises poured out of the foundress’s mouth, interspersed, which made it all the sadder, with completely lucid sentences. “Oh, Fiona, why do you allow me to be so cruel to you? It’s the pressure, the pressure … some iron giant is pressing my head between his iron hands and soon I will squash like an overripe fruit. Oh, Fi! Fi! Fi! What has it all been for?”

  The morphine drip was increased that night, and during the following week Mother Finney arranged for a sum to be set aside for a full room-and-board scholarship for Suzanne Ravenel, to be renewed annually through high school and junior college for as long as the girl proved herself worthy of it.

  The foundress was given credit for the idea by Mother Finney herself. That was the kind of thing that furthered the school legend. Just as the Red Nun was allowed to become part of that legend in order to protect the school. Suzanne was brought to Mother Wallingford’s infirmary room for a short “audience” with the dying foundress during what Mother Finney judged to be one of the foundress’s more lucid moments, of which there were fewer and fewer. Though the audience lasted less than five minutes, it twice veered toward disaster. The first time was when Mother Wallingford went into a screed over bad mothers, shouting out some lines from De Quincey about his cold and unforgiving mother, who had driven him to opium. (“The whole artillery of her displeasure unmasked!” Mother Wallingford had screeched in the unnerving, high-pitched voice.) This was diverted by Mother Finney’s quick reminder that we also had a Divine Mother who can contain all our sorrows because she herself is the Mother of Sorrows, a quote that was later to find its way into Suzanne Ravenel’s report of her one and only meeting with the dying foundress, attributing these lines to the foundress.

  The second close call was when Mother Wallingford, incoherently muttering something in Latin, had tried to embrace the girl, who then became entangled in the intravenous drip. Mother Wallingford screamed at Mother Finney’s efforts to disengage them, accusing Mother Finney of trying to steal her rightful child. Then the infirmarian came running and Mother Finney led away the frightened Suzanne. Mother Finney sat beside the girl’s bed and prayed the rosary with her until Suzanne Ravenel fell asleep.

  None of this became part of Suzanne Ravenel’s later remembrances. True to the spirit of romantic hindsight by which one builds a personal myth, the whole thing was represented by Suzanne as having taken place in dignity and affection between the dying foundress and the chosen beneficiary. Mother Finney had no place in this myth.

  CHAPTER 29

  A Letter

  Mrs. Creighton Rivers

  984 Cherbrooke Lane

  Marietta, GA 30064

  Sunday, October 21, 2007

  Dear Tildy,

  Rebecca Meyer (now Birnbaum) from our ninth-grade class helped me trace you through Ashley Nettle. Ashley said you go by Mary now, but I hope you won’t mind if I call you by the old name, at least for the purpose of this letter.

  I hardly know where to begin. Let me start by saying I was sorry to hear of your husband’s death. I have such pleasant memories of Creighton Rivers. He raised me from a dog paddler to a crawler and was always so sweet with us at the pool. He used to call you “Tantalizing Tildy.” You predicted he would marry your sister, Madeline.

  I, too, am widowed. My husband, Max, a veterinary surgeon, died two and a half years ago. I have just sold our house, along with Max’s office building and surgery. We had no children, and last February I lost our beloved golden retriever, Daisy. The prospect of my independence verges on the terrifying, but I am in good health, knock on wood, and will try to meet the demands of this new freedom.

  I wonder if you knew that Mother Ravenel wrote a school memoir, Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered, which was published in 2006 by a Mountain City printing press. Becky told me about it and then kindly sent me a copy, at my request, advising me to read it as a fascinating document of a lost “girl world.” Becky is a psychiatrist in New York working with adolescents. She “rediscovered” me through a guest column I wrote for the Palm Beach Post about a dyslexic boy reading to an old golden retriever.

  It was a mixed experience, reading through Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered. Some pages made me nostalgic for the “holy daring” and the excellence of the whole endeavor (I mean the founding of the school), and on other pages I felt she was making up her own version as she went along, putting in what she liked and leaving out what didn’t suit her. But then I thought, Maybe that’s the way all our memories work. If you haven’t seen it—and if you want to see it—I’ll be glad to send you my copy.

  I feel I could go on and on. The problem would be organizing all I want to tell you and ask you! Remember our five-page papers for Mother Malloy? Be concise a
nd modest, she would say; don’t bite off more than you can chew. So I am going to stop here and go out and mail this before I start finding fault with it. My street address is on the back of the envelope, and I also include my cell phone number and my email address. I would dearly love to hear from you, Tildy. It was the reading of Mother Ravenel’s memoir—in which neither of us is mentioned—that made me realize how much I have missed you all these years.

  Maud Norton Martinez

  CHAPTER 30

  Dire Alternatives

  Evening of April 9, 1952

  Wednesday in Holy Week

  Mount St. Gabriel’s chapel

  MAUD HAD SPECIAL permission from Mother Ravenel to stay in chapel until the nuns’ Compline and seek God’s will. She had been a boarder at Mount St. Gabriel’s for a week. The Pine Cone Lodge was no more. Her mother and Art Foley were living in a hotel in Atlanta while they house hunted. Lily had told Mother Ravenel that she and Mr. Foley had been married back in February by a justice of the peace and asked Maud to back her up in this little story.

  “You mean tell my friends you are married?”

  “Of course, what else? It would reflect awkwardly on you, as well, Maud. Mr. Foley and I want to wait and do it right, come June, when we are all three together as a family. Maybe have the ceremony in our new house.”

  It was bad enough telling a lie; it was even worse to have to tell a lie that made Art Foley part of her family one minute sooner than he had to be. So far Maud had not told anyone. To Tildy, who insisted on boring into your secrets, she said, “They say they are married but it disgusts me to think so, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Of course it’s all right with me, Maud. Your whole life is being turned upside down. But you’ve got your scholarship and you’ve got me. All we have to do is get you through the rest of high school; then you can go to any college you want.”

  “But you know as well as I do that the scholarship is just for a day girl, and Lily won’t pay for me to board at Mount St. Gabriel’s after May. She expects me to live with them in Atlanta.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” said Tildy. “You can always live with us.”

  “Your mother and father may have something to say about that.”

  “All Daddy wants is for his girls to be happy, and Mama and I have been especially close since I’ve been directing the play.”

  “But Tildy, I can’t—if I could pay something to live at your house, it would be one thing—”

  “Well, look, is it totally over with Anabel and you? I know she and your dad are separating, but couldn’t you write and say you know it wouldn’t be wise for you to go back to Palm Beach just now, but you have this opportunity to live with your old friend’s family while you finish Mount St. Gabriel’s on your day scholarship and if you just had a little saving-face money to pay for your room and board—? Wasn’t she always hinting that she planned to pay for your college?”

  “That was before”—Maud had to keep herself from shrieking—“that was before I went off with this man at the dance and ruined Anabel’s social aspirations. I would rather die than ask her. It’s bad enough that she’s going to put my father on some sort of retainer, so he can stay at a decent place and not have to go to some state institution.”

  “Well, all right,” Tildy said, backing down. “Let’s just get through the play and then we still have almost the whole month of May to think of something. If worse comes to worst, I’ll cash all my war bonds and we can sell off the gold pieces that Granddaddy gave me. They are mine to do what I like with. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Maud was remembering Anabel’s lifted eyebrows last summer on Worth Avenue when she was shown Tildy’s picture. (“Why, she looks like Orphan Annie without a neck. She’s still a little girl, darling, whereas you …”)

  “I’m just touched by your generosity, Tiddly, that’s all.”

  SINCE GRANNY’S DEATH and the dismantling of the Pine Cone Lodge, it had been very hard for Maud to keep track of who she still was inside and what she was up against and who she was going to have to fool. That was why Mother Ravenel had given permission for her to stay behind in chapel.

  She was supposed to be praying, only to discover she wasn’t sure what real prayer consisted of. For years she had rattled off her nightly orations, but surely there was something else she was meant to be doing here on her knees if she expected God to tell her what He wanted from her.

  Had Maud really indicated to Mother Ravenel that she might—? She buried her face in her hands. Could this be a possibility or was she the biggest liar in the school? Not even Tildy would be allowed to pull this out of her. It was too important—or too dangerous; she hadn’t decided which. In its way it was worse than if she had gone the whole way with Troy Veech. Probably there were people who thought she had: Mimi Weatherby, probably even Anabel thought so, though Maud had tried to explain to her stepmother what had and hadn’t happened during the fateful intermission at the Palm City Club that had gotten herself and Anabel uninvited to Mimi’s party. But this—this new possibility that so far she’d shared with Mother Ravenel alone—if it was true, and if it became known—that she might, that she just might have a vocation—it would be a far worse kind of going all the way. Worse in the sense that it would alter other people’s perception of her. And it might change her into something different even if she did not go through with it.

  If she couldn’t find her way into the proper way of praying, she could at least go back over it again and try to discern her motives. (Or, as Mother Malloy had instructed her about the martyred St. Thomas Becket, “See how far you can follow the tugs of his dilemma within those boundaries.”)

  All this had begun back in March during Maud’s conference with Mother Malloy about her medieval history paper. You were supposed to imagine yourself at some important point in the life of your historical figure and Maud had chosen Thomas Becket, favored friend and chancellor of King Henry II and then later, by the king’s wish, archbishop of Canterbury.

  “It’s the conscience part of it that grips me, Mother. I mean, here is his king, the person he owes everything to, they are best friends, and then, through this king and friend, he is given a job where he’s supposed to answer to God first, and he finds he can’t be true to both of them. So what is his deepest duty? That’s what I want to go for.”

  “You certainly do go for the deep, don’t you, Maud?” Mother Malloy had a chest cold, her eyes were bleary, and her voice was spectral. But she had a smile for Maud. “It is an ambitious topic, and I’m not going to warn you away from it, because I know your abilities. But try to limit yourself to one or two specific instances and see how far you can follow the tugs of his dilemma within those boundaries. And remember, don’t bite off more than you can chew!”

  And then she had honored Maud by wondering aloud, in her congested voice, where Maud’s “many gifts” would be likely to lead her.

  “I’d like to do some kind of scholarship,” said Maud, “history or maybe English. And”—wanting to please Mother Malloy—“maybe be a teacher, too. Also I’d like to write—if that’s not asking too much.”

  “Why? It all goes together. And you would be giving so much.”

  The nun looked at her with something so close to admiration that Maud felt bold enough to ask, though they weren’t supposed to ask personal questions of nuns, “What did you think you wanted to do with your life, Mother, when you were my age?”

  “Like you, I wanted to study and to teach. Since I was raised in the church, it was a straight path for me. I knew I wanted to go into a teaching order and keep learning as I taught. It’s a mutual commitment. You make your vows to the order, and the order underwrites your education. If I had been born a man, I would have tried for the Society of Jesus.” Seeing Maud’s puzzlement, she added, “The Jesuits.”

  “Oh,” sighed Maud, “if only we had something like that. A commitment—where you could set yourself on a path and not have to wo
rry about—”

  “‘We’ meaning …?”

  “Oh, the Methodists; it’s our family’s church. Not that I’m much of one. I’ve been at Mount St. Gabriel’s so long I can flip my missal ribbons through the Mass as expertly as any Catholic girl.”

  “But I interrupted you. You were saying ‘and not have to worry about—’?”

  “Your education. Becoming what you want.”

  “Are you worried about those things, Maud?”

  It was both the surprise and the concern in the nun’s voice that swept away Maud’s composure. “I’m so afraid, Mother,” she heard herself say, starting to break down.

  “Afraid of what, dear?”

  “That my mother and Mr. Foley won’t let me come back to Mount St. Gabriel’s next fall and I’ll have to—I’ll have to—to downgrade my dreams.”

  Quoting from her own A-plus Dickens paper to underwrite her distress—how much lower could you get?

  Was this what life was going to be like from now on, after you “came into,” as Mother Ravenel liked to put it in her “Moral Guidance” talks, “your full cognitive powers”? When nothing was a straightforward emotional exchange anymore, and there was always a hidden motive or a sly bid for advantage.

  But Mother Malloy simply said, “I am sorry to hear this, Maud, but perhaps it’s good that you told me. I don’t know what can be done, but I am going to speak to Mother Ravenel. With your permission, that is.”

  THAT HAD BEEN back in March, and this morning at breakfast she had found a folded note tucked beneath her napkin ring. “Maud, please come to my office at the beginning of afternoon study hall. Mother Ravenel.” Her first thought was, What have I done wrong? She didn’t connect it with her talk with Mother Malloy. It occurred to her that Mother Ravenel had somehow found out that Maud’s second part in the play, that of Domenica, who, with her school friend Rexanne, had decided to become a nun, was really based on Tildy’s aunt Antonia, and that the character of Rexanne, played by Tildy, was based on Suzanne Ravenel. This scene, wedged into the crucial final ten minutes of the play, was being rehearsed separately by its two principals, Tildy and Maud. Only during the performance would the other players see the scene for the first time.