Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “Lord Fancourt Babberly. ‘Babbs.’ What a great role that was. I always loved doing characters in disguise. But, Chloe, I thought you told me you were painting the Red Nun on this grotto flat.”

  “I did, Mother, but it didn’t look three-dimensional enough, so I put in trees instead. Then Uncle Henry suggested we try some poly—poly—”

  “We went to the building supply place,” said Henry, “and got a block of polystyrene. The Red Nun is under that tarpaulin. Chloe wanted to surprise you. She’d like it to be our gift to the school for future productions of the play. Chloe, why don’t you unveil it?”

  Chloe, already costumed in jodhpurs and Mother Finney’s riding boots, stepped over and removed the tarpaulin. Henry was moved and slightly embarrassed by the headmistress’s girlish ecstasies when she saw the life-size reproduction of the Red Nun.

  “It was real easy to carve, Mother,” Chloe said, “and you can sand it and make it look just like marble sculpture. But, Uncle Henry, don’t you think it needs a highlight or two?” She whipped out a little spray can and touched the hulking shoulders with creamy white. “Don’t worry, it dries really fast. And it’s really, really light.” She nudged it with a Finney riding boot and it inched forward as though on wheels.

  Tildy suddenly loomed in her director’s choir robe. “Holy J—!” She cut off her oath on a dime when she saw the headmistress. “What is that thing, Chloe?”

  “Well, it’s the Red Nun, Tildy. The painted one looked so flat—I thought you’d be so pleased. I wanted it to be a surprise. Don’t you like it?”

  “Well, isn’t it a bit big? Where do you think we’re going to put her?”

  “Just where the painted one would have gone. In front of the trees. You can move her very easily.”

  “Then where do we put Marta’s bench?” Tildy almost shrieked.

  “Just where it always goes. All this does is give a three-dimensional effect. And we agreed she should be larger, at my house, remember?”

  “That was when I thought you were going to paint her on the flat! This is just—a great big obstruction.”

  “Well, I, for one, am very impressed and very grateful to you girls,” Mother Ravenel diplomatically intervened. “You have put your hearts into it, and I am sure this production is going to be one of the best ever in the annals of the school. And now Mr. Vick and I are going to go down into the audience, where we belong, and just enjoy the show.”

  She took Henry’s elbow and they exited stage right. Henry’s heart had been softening toward Mother Ravenel during the past weeks, when he had dropped by the school a number of times to measure stage spaces and calculate sight lines. He always phoned ahead—–he knew how she disliked anyone “going around” her—and she always accompanied him to the auditorium, letting him in with her keys to the building Malcolm Vick had designed and keeping up a running commentary about the provenance of significant items backstage: the sky cyclorama, gift of the class of ‘36 (“This was a huge step forward because now we could do outdoor scenes …”), and then the great windfall of not just one but three professionally painted canvas drops left at the school in ‘42 by a touring company whose members were enlisting (“I was in charge of the girls’ drama club then, and when the young men asked me if they might store these drops with us until after the war, I said, ‘They will be here waiting for you when you get back, and in the meantime just think what the girls will be able to do with a forest, an ocean, and a drawing room!’ That was the last I heard from those young men—I hope they survived—I still pray for them regularly—but what a godsend their drops have been in dozens of Mount St. Gabriel’s performances!”).

  Henry’s perception of her had undergone a shift. Always before, he had been used to regarding her, whether as his sister’s classmate, his wife’s best friend, or the headmistress of the academy, as a controlling person, jealous of her territory. This school was her life. She was, more and more as the years passed, its custodian, its legend keeper, its repository, its very chronology. (He had completely forgotten about his father’s sideboard being a prop in Charley’s Aunt.) He could hear her, years from now, proudly pointing out the polystyrene Red Nun to someone: “This was created and given to us in ‘52 by one of our girls, a very fine artist, and her uncle, the architect Henry Vick, whose father designed our auditorium …”

  Now he saw—and this was what had softened his heart toward her—that this school was her fortress.

  And, in the sense that all her plans and authority were invested within its borders, it was also her prison.

  Twenty minutes before curtain time, the dressing room beneath the stage was a quivering hive of nerves, excited outbursts followed by shushes, and last-minute adjustments and vanities. Gilda Gomez decided Squire Wallingford needed a mustache and had drawn one on herself with an eyebrow pencil, incurring the wrath of the director, already in a snit over a monstrous prop sprung on her by her best friend without Tildy’s knowledge or consent. Tildy told Gilda that her mustache lowered the play to a grammar school farce and ordered her to wash it off. Beatrix Wynkoop and Hansje Van Kleek, satisfied with their carefully prepared costumes for Father Maturin (cassock borrowed from Father Lohan, the resident priest) and Elizabeth’s Thwarted Suitor (Mr. Van Kleek’s dress suit and a Victorian clergyman’s neckcloth fashioned from a linen napkin), were pinning a bow tie of crepe paper on Ashley Nettle’s father’s baseball umpire shirt to make their protégée look more like a gentleman auctioneer. Josie Galvin, in a St. Scholastica habit, was quietly going over her lines, even though she would be sitting behind a desk and could have the script in front of her when she “told the story of the Red Nun” to two 1920s students, Lora Jean Cramer and Mikell Lunsford, both of whom wore authentic dresses from that decade refurbished by their mothers. Kay Lee Jones, in her sculptor’s smock, retilted her black beret to a cheekier angle; when she saw she was being observed by friends, she kissed her mirror image.

  Dorothy Yount and Jiggsie Judd had stepped out to the garage where the Mount St. Gabriel’s station wagon was kept to warm up their voices.

  In the auditorium’s basement lunch cafeteria for the day students, Madeline Stratton was doing her utmost to calm the director. Round and round the room they paced, Tildy in a full-blown snit.

  “Take deep breaths, baby.”

  “I can’t breathe!”

  “Maybe you should sit down, then.”

  “I have to keep walking! If I sit down my legs will shake. You sit down if you’re so tired.”

  “Of course I’m not tired. I came early with you to keep you company and be of help if I could, but tell me if you’d rather I go. It’ll soon be curtain time anyway.”

  “I don’t care whether you go or stay. No, stay! Oh jumping Jesus Christ, Maddy, you can’t trust anybody!”

  “This play is going to be wonderful, honey. You’ve just got stage nerves, which everyone says means good luck.”

  “How dare she! How dare she drag in that clumsy old piece of garbage! And act like she’s Michelangelo or something, stretching to ‘touch it up’ with her professional little can of paint. Wearing old Finney’s everlasting riding boots that Holy Agnes once wore when she played Fiona Finney. ‘But Tildy, I thought you’d be so pleeeeased.’ And old Ravenel flapping and gloating, as if she’d ordered the thing herself. What the damn hell business did she have backstage anyway? This is the ninth-grade play. You don’t see Mother Malloy backstage, and she’s our teacher. And you don’t bring in props at the last minute that the actors haven’t prepared for. Any moron knows that. We’d planned for it to be painted on the flat. Then she went behind my back at the last minute and purposely deceived me. I hate surprises! It’s not her place to surprise me. Every time you try to share power with someone they stab you in the back!”

  “But Marta is still going to be sitting on the bench as planned, you said. So nothing is changed except”—Madeline selected her words with extreme caution—“except that instead of the painted Red Nun on the grotto
flat, there is now—uh, a sculpted one in front of it. And you alerted the girl who’s playing the Sculptor—”

  “Kay Lee Jones—oh, she was tickled pink. It draws more attention to her as the Sculptor to have something that actually looks like a sculpture.”

  “Well, then, see?”

  “You don’t understand! It throws things off! It throws me off! It’s supposed to be my production, but now—practically at curtain time!—it’s being taken away from me!”

  “Nobody can take it away from you, honey. It’s yours. You have put your stamp all over it, Mama says. Now let me kiss you and go upstairs. Trust me, it’s going to be wonderful.”

  “Hmmmf!” snorted Tildy, going limp and letting herself be kissed. “I just may have a few surprises to spring, myself.”

  MAUD, WRAPPED IN the foundress’s long cloak, whose heft and swing she had become as familiar with as those of her own coat, walked among the marble crosses in the nuns’ cemetery. She felt—she was not sure what she felt. It wasn’t nerves: she knew her lines. She had more lines than anyone else in the play, but she had assimilated them into herself. “The Holy Ghost will be blowing us onward …” and “It would be wrong in a way I can’t find words for …” and “But, Rexy, God isn’t something that can be shared, like a pet.”

  And though you could know your lines perfectly and still blank out due to stage fright, that wasn’t a thing Maud feared, either, because she had become curiously removed from the ninth-grade play. She felt—oh, how Tildy would hate this!—that she was participating because her presence was required, but in her soul she was already somewhere else, even though she wasn’t sure where that somewhere else was.

  She was going into her fifth week as a boarder at Mount St. Gabriel’s, with another full month to go after that. She’d had more confidential sessions with Mother Ravenel, who watched her avidly, as though waiting for some new part to sprout. She had spent much time alone with God, but, if anything, her chapel stints had rendered God less of a presence than ever. She knelt in silence and waited for Him to reveal His plan for her life, but so far He had seemed to feel Himself as remote from her drama as she felt remote from the urgencies of Tildy’s play.

  Well, in less than two hours it would be over. The actors would be mingling with parents and guests in the main parlor. In her weekly phone calls to her mother, Maud had kept mum about the play; she was too afraid they might decide to come, and then Art Foley would have to be introduced as her new father. She had more important things to think about right now. She had risked telling this to Mother Ravenel, who’d agreed, which Maud took as a good sign. It meant that even though the headmistress had yet to see signs of a sprouting vocation, she was already regarding her as separate from her family, which is what Maud would be if she—

  Curiously, her absorption in her two roles, that of the nun who had crossed the sea with her best friend to found schools and that of the girl who chose not to take the veil because her best friend had come between her and God, had reduced Maud’s scruples about latent deceitfulness in herself. They were all playing the game to win, Mother Ravenel, herself, and Tildy, and when the game was over she might or might not have committed herself in return for three more years at Mount St. Gabriel’s. And even if she did announce her “intention,” it wasn’t set in stone: look at Antonia, whose conscience had made her abandon hers.

  Maud paused before the foundress’s cross.

  Elizabeth Mary Wallingford

  O.S.S.

  1863–1930

  Professed February 10, 1893

  “Yes, I have been you, a little,” Maud addressed the grave. “And now it’s almost time to go backstage and in your name turn down Gilda Gomez’s offer to set me up with a school for young ladies on the Wallingford estate. I’ll have to tell the squire that I can’t accept because ‘the world does not need any more schools, Father, to teach girls how to stay home and do needlework and play the piano and manage the servants.’ And then I’ll go to Cowley with my poor spurned clergyman to hear the famous preaching of Father Maturin (Beatrix does a great job of belting out his lines in an English accent).”

  On the road above, Jovan’s grandson Mark, wearing a suit and tie, ran toward the auditorium, an extension cord clutched in his hand. Mark was doing the lighting and was in charge of operating the tape recorder with God’s voice on it.

  “Well, Mother Wallingford, I’m going in now, wearing your cloak. And under the cloak, I have on Granny’s nightgown, which will do for your deathbed scene in act two—just a bit of white collar peeking above the counterpane. And under that I am wearing an actual dress belonging to Antonia Tilden—for the scene between Domenica and Rexanne, when Domenica writes something in an old exam book and hands it over to be read aloud by Suz—Rexanne.

  “Help me to convey your true spirit, Mother, as it really was. And if you have a chance, put in a word for me with God. He doesn’t seem interested in my dilemma. Maybe because—could it be that the whole thing is just playacting on my part?”

  MOTHER RAVENEL STOOD up from her reserved front seat and rang a piercing little handbell.

  “Good evening … good evening, everyone. On behalf of Reverend Mother Barrington and the entire faculty of Mount St. Gabriel’s, I’d like to welcome parents, friends, and townspeople to the academy’s final play of the school year. As many of you know, the freshman play is always the last, that is one of our traditions, and the play the girls will be presenting tonight has become a kind of tradition, too. As you will see in your program, The Red Nun was first presented by the freshman class of 1931. Tonight will mark its fifth revival by a freshman class. Another tradition that has grown up around this particular play is that each class may add its own material. In that way, each revival gives it new life. And now, everyone, please just sit back and enjoy—and the freshman class will do the rest.”

  All right, that’s enough, thought Cornelia. You’ve shown how modest you are—when your name is right there at the top of the program as the person who wrote the play. Sit the hell down.

  The house lights dimmed and out swept Elaine Frew in her wonderful dress. She sat down at the piano below the stage, fiddled importantly with the knobs of her bench, then, as though silently counting to ten, rested her hands loosely on her lap before launching into the overture she had just finished composing this afternoon: a fetching weave of Bach partita, the Mount St. Gabriel’s school song, and the flute overture her mother had composed for the 1931 premiere of The Red Nun.

  A sigh of appreciation rippled through the audience: at least the music was going to be first-rate.

  Music is everything, thought Elaine, serenely spotlit on her island of melody. It shuts people up, it lifts them out of their boring selves—it is superior to all the other arts.

  A small girl with masses of flame-red hair slipped through the curtain parting and stood quietly in the apron while the piano notes dropped to a diminuendo. The spotlight shifted from Elaine to this girl in her black velvet dress with lace collar.

  The music ceased, and Becky Meyer began to speak in her precise and rather impersonal voice: “We are here in the high mountains of North Carolina, but we must travel far back in time to tell you how we have come to be here.”

  She waited in a poised silence that went on a little too long for comfort before a sepulchral bass voice blared from behind the curtain:

  “I … smashed … con-ti-nents … together … to … make … these moun-tains.… Sent hun-dreds of mil-lions of years of my wind and my rain … and pol-ished them with my gla-ciers …”

  Someone backstage had quickly lowered the volume. Mistake! Mistake! thought Cornelia, wincing. John sounds like someone doing a parody of “The Shadow knows.” I should have listened to it myself and stopped it. But Smoky said it was all right and Tildy had worked so hard on the phrasing with John. If I had listened, I would have talked Tildy out of it, but who has time to run a business and listen to one’s child’s every brainstorm? Well, it’s almost over, and th
en we have the spooky little prologue song Francine Barfoot wrote in 1931. Francine certainly looks well put together, though who wouldn’t with all that Frew money—besides which, she doesn’t have a career.

  “If you go out walking in our dark wood

  When the hawk’s face is tucked beneath his wing

  And the mist has risen in the hollows

  And the owl shrieks:

  Do not shrink if on your path

  You meet a solitary ghost.

  Ask it, ‘What did you love most?

  And what have you left undone?’

  Until her husband elbowed her, Mrs. Yount didn’t realize she had been humming along with her daughter up there on the stage. Mavis Yount had so thoroughly ingested that song that she sang it in her sleep.

  “You don’t know what is in you till you try.”

  The stately girl playing Elizabeth Wallingford, accompanied by her thwarted clergyman suitor (Hansje Van Kleek wearing her father’s dark suit), was listening spellbound to Father Maturin, played by Beatrix Wynkoop, preaching in a priest’s borrowed cassock against a forest backdrop.

  “Dis-con-tent may be God’s catapult, His way of prodding you … ‘Go and try yourself now!’

  Beatrix’s reading of the English priest’s lines was masterly.

  MOTHER FINNEY, UPSTAIRS in the balcony with the majority of the nuns, was, as always, dreading the “infirmary deathbed” scene in the second act of the play, but after having consulted her program had found herself pleasantly curious to see how this production was going to do without the “ocean crossing.” And now that they had reached the last scene of the first act, in which “Elizabeth” and “Fiona” were walking in the woods, she understood and admired the cleverness and economy of it. Surely God was to be praised when even this wearisome adolescent play could be changed for the better by later adolescent girls.