Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  Rebecca Meyer stepped forward and began to read from a paper in her meticulous, rather detached voice:

  “Tonight we have traveled far back in time to tell you how we came to be. We have overheard God planning our school even before its mountains were in place. We have seen the mist rising in its dark woods and heard the owl shriek while the hawk sleeps. On its paths we have met ghosts who sang to us because we knew the right questions to ask: what did you love most and what have you left undone?”

  Scanning the reception crowd, Henry Vick failed to locate his niece. He thought it probable that Chloe was off somewhere with Tildy, helping her lick her wounds. That’s what friends were for. The two of them had worked so passionately on this wretched play. Hours and hours at his house. He had spent hours on it himself. Suddenly he saw its ridiculous and depressing side: a school play, written by his sister’s ambitious classmate back in the thirties. His late wife, Antonia, had played the foundress, wearing her cloak, the same old English cloak Maud Norton wore tonight. His late sister had played Mother Finney, wearing the same old Irish riding boots Chloe had worn tonight. Why were they all still in harness on this moribund merry-go-round?

  Preferring the darkness, he went outside again and leaned against a spindle corner post on the west porch. In night-lit Mountain City below, he could pick out many of his father’s buildings. Earlier this month had been the groundbreaking for his own library—the hated columns to be tacked on so people could keep living in their fantasies of what the past was like.

  Chloe might be better off over at Mountain City High with the Stratton girls. He could tell that Bernard’s “I’ve about had it,” meant business. Once, earlier in the school year, Chloe had said that if Tildy ever got kicked out of Mount St. Gabriel’s for bad grades, she would feel like a ghost wandering its halls.

  Had the living Vicks as well as the living Strattons “about had it” with its halls and Victorian spindle posts and Gothic Revival windows and the company of its ghosts?

  Mother Ravenel’s insistent little handbell pierced his meditations. Not wanting to leave the darkness of the porch, he moved closer to a window and watched through the glass. She was in her element, she who had played the comic Lord Babberly in Charley’s Aunt; now she was playing the Headmistress in Cheerful Control. She was interpreting their evening for them, tying up any loose ends so everyone could go home assured that the fortress safeguarding their daughters was as intact as ever.

  She then turned the proceedings over to unflappable little Becky Meyer, who read from a script that was apparently a review of the play’s scenes. Then each girl stepped forward and took her bow, and of course there was Chloe, as she had been all along. He hadn’t been able to find her because he had forgotten she was still dressed up as Mother Finney.

  He went in to claim her. Running to him, she stumbled over the skirts of the habit.”Where have you been, Uncle Henry? Tildy and Maud did something awful, but nobody will say what. And she wouldn’t even speak to me at intermission.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Tildy. She hated my Red Nun. I thought she’d be so pleased.”

  Now was not the time to tell Chloe about her vandalized prop.

  “Do you know where Tildy is now?”

  “She’s probably up with Maud in the dormitory. They’ll go back to being best friends. It’s so unfair. I read that play over to her at least a hundred times while she lay on her sofa bed with her eyes closed. I took dictation whenever she had an idea and typed it up. And she kept that scene with Maud a secret from me! And now she hates me because of the prop. But Mother Finney hugged me and told me I had made her happy and that Agnes would be so pleased.”

  Henry found himself echoing Bernard Stratton in the parking lot. “In that case, what do we want to do now?”

  “I want to put on my own clothes and go home.”

  “Then let’s go,” said Henry.

  AFTER THE POSTLUDE and curtain calls in the main parlor, Mrs. Nita Judd presented Elaine Frew with a little token of her appreciation (a silver grand piano to go on her charm bracelet) for being so good to Jiggsie, but now she was uncertain what to do about her present for Tildy (a gift card announcing a year’s subscription to Seventeen magazine), who was not at the reception. Jiggsie told her grandmother that both Tildy and Maud were in big trouble having something to do with the last scene in the play, which nobody knew about. “That’s Tildy’s mother over there with Mother Ravenel,” Jiggsie said. “Maybe you could just leave the envelope with her. These stupid boots I borrowed are pinching my feet. I’m going up to the dorm to change into my Capezios.”

  “Well, come right back, sweetie, so we can say our good-byes. Poor Bob’s waiting out in the car to drive us back to Spartanburg.”

  But when Nita Judd approached the woman Jiggsie had pointed out as Tildy’s mother, she saw that she was locked in some kind of grim exchange with the headmistress. She went instead to pay her respects to Jiggsie’s ninth-grade teacher, poor Mother Malloy, who was speaking with a very pretty girl. Malloy looked completely done in. Nuns punched no time clocks, drew no salaries, and belonged to no unions, but were expected to work till they dropped.

  Mother Malloy had hardly finished introducing Mrs. Judd to Tildy’s big sister, Madeline, when Jiggsie was back again, still in the borrowed boots that pinched. In her usual fey manner, she announced to no one in particular, “I just saw Tildy on her way to the tower. She’s planning to throw herself off—like that Caroline person tried to do.”

  MADELINE WAS ALREADY running down corridors and up stairs. It was as though she and Mother Malloy had been suddenly able to read each other’s minds. Malloy would keep the others off and do whatever else was necessary while Madeline got a head start. Thank God she knew her way around this old pile! At the third-floor landing, the wood stopped and the linoleum started. At this level, there were only nuns; nobody needed the extra touches. Her running feet slapped along linoleum corridors, and up another flight, and then pinged up the circular iron staircase to the tower room. She was panting as she flung open the heavy door. She cursed like a sailor as she felt along the walls for a switch. She had never been up here at night.

  A familiar titter came out of the darkness. “Naughty, naughty. You sound as bad as me.”

  She found the switch. “Tildy! What are you doing?”

  “I was trying to write in the dark because I couldn’t find the goddamned light. But your eyes get accustomed pretty fast.”

  Three of the blue velvet window-seat cushions had been sprayed in jerky white letters. SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL. Tildy, still in costume as “Rexanne,” was aiming the can at a fourth cushion.

  “That’s enough!” said Madeline, snatching the can.

  “Take it—it was sputtering out anyway. How did you know where I was?”

  “Jiggsie said you were going to throw yourself off the tower.”

  “That little imbecile. She asked where I was going and I said I had some business in the tower and she got all excited and asked me if I was going to throw myself off like Caroline tried to do and I said I just might. She is so stupid.”

  “Tildy, Daddy and Henry are outside combing the grounds for you with flashlights. Mama and I have been looking in all the classrooms and bathrooms. We have all been worried.”

  “Well, I deserve some worry!” shrieked Tildy. “My night was ruined! My play was stolen from me! I damn this whole place to hell and everybody connected with it, including Chloe and Maud.”

  Slow footsteps were heard on the metal stairs. A haggard Mother Malloy appeared. Leaning against the door frame to catch her breath, she asked Tildy, “Do you include me, too?”

  Madeline was to isolate that scene and play it back to herself throughout her life. She would try to watch it as she had witnessed it that night, before she had known what was coming next. But in all her replayings, she could never completely block out the impurities of hindsight. Because after the experience itself, you always did
know what was coming next.

  Tildy made a mewing sound and stumbled forward. Mother Malloy met Tildy halfway and gathered the girl into her arms. “Come,” she said, “let’s sit down. Oh, dear, somebody’s been at work on these cushions. Let’s find one Satan hasn’t claimed yet.”

  Then there was this—forgiving calm. The tower room seemed swathed in it, as though the three of them were wrapped in clouds. Madeline stood—but it almost seemed she floated somewhere above, just watching and hearing. Mother Malloy was teaching Tildy a poem. “It’s a poem I remembered while watching your play, Tildy. I love that poem. How could I have forgotten it? I’ll say a line, then you say it. You’ll learn it by ear, which you do so well. And then, perhaps, you’ll help me teach it to the class on Monday.”

  The two sat side by side, Mother Malloy bowed slightly forward, hands clasped on her lap, and Tildy, now drained of her violence, leaning against the nun’s shoulder.

  “‘I have desired to go—

  “‘I have desired to go—

  “‘Where springs not fail—

  “‘Where springs not fail—

  “‘To fields—where flies—no sharp and sided hail—’

  “‘To fields—where flies—no sharp and—’” Tildy balked at the startling syntax.

  “‘No sharp and sided hail—’” Mother Malloy led her through it.

  “‘No sharp and sided hail—

  “‘And a few lilies blow.

  “‘And a few lilies blow.

  “Go and find Mother Arbuckle,” Mother Malloy told Madeline. “Bring her here as quickly as possible. She’ll know what to do. Go quickly, dear.”

  She wants the infirmarian to give Tildy something to calm her, thought Madeline, hurtling down the flights of stairs.

  Mother Arbuckle was just leaving the reception with Dr. Galvin.

  “Oh, Mother, come quickly! Mother Malloy needs you. She’s up in the tower with Tildy. She said—she said you’ll know what to do.”

  Then the return: the brisk rustle of Mother Arbuckle’s skirts mounting the stairs, the doctor’s footsteps right behind; and her own gasping babble as she raced ahead, trying to fill them in about the play going wrong, Tildy running off in a rage, everybody searching—then a girl saying Tildy was going to throw herself off the tower, herself racing up flights of stairs, then Mother Malloy herself arriving in the tower room and miraculously calming Tildy—“but now I think Mother may want you to give her a sedative or something—the poor child’s had a bad night.”

  And now the climbers—big sister, school infirmarian, nuns’ doctor, all three short of breath—have reached the tower room, and what do they find?

  A nun and a young girl sitting close together on the curved window seat. Behind them the arched windows full of night. The nun is hunched forward, hands clasped. She could be deep in prayer, as Madeline had first assumed of her that afternoon in October when she had come upon Mother Malloy asleep in the grotto on the Red Nun’s lap.

  “She’s been doing this a lot lately,” a shaky Tildy informs them. “She can fall asleep sitting up.” She adds, with a halfhearted laugh, “Especially when I’m around.”

  “How long has she been asleep?” Mother Arbuckle asks, stepping forward.

  Something in the infirmarian’s voice puts Tildy on the defensive. “I’m not sure. I haven’t—she just—I was afraid to move in case I woke her. We were going through the poem again so I can help her teach it on Monday, but then she just dropped off and wouldn’t answer me. The way she does.”

  Now Dr. Galvin is in motion and Mother Arbuckle is removing Tildy from the window seat. Madeline sees her noticing the defaced cushions: SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL.

  “Take her down with you,” the nun says to Madeline. “And ask someone to find Reverend Mother and tell her she is needed here at once.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Sister Bridgets Heart

  Thursday, October 18, 2001

  Feast of St. Luke, evangelist

  St. Scholastica Retirement House

  MOTHER RAVENEL WAS dreaming of her mother. In the dream it was the present time and place and her mother was just a voice in the dark room, but behind its familiar rhythms of scorn it pulsed with a new acceptance of her daughter. Together they had been puzzling things out, her mother speaking for both of them.

  “Yes, there are a great many who dance in ecstasy at obliterating great numbers of us, but what is one to do? Put on the surgical mask and rubber gloves and open the mail if you dare, shut down the Senate and the House until the men in yellow can vacuum up the anthrax spores. If you ask me, it may all boil down to whether we outnumber the ones who want us dead. And whether we like it or not, the most evolved don’t necessarily win.”

  In the dream she felt so proud. She looked forward to the cornflake breakfast after Mass, when she could report to the other nuns, “My mother came to visit me last night, and she made the most exquisite sense of what’s been happening in the world.”

  “And here’s something else to think about,” the voice went on. Amazingly the eighty-five-year-old daughter and the mother dead for almost fifty years were friends at last, equals pooling their thoughts in the dark. “Consider this: all this rabid imagining going on, all over the world, on our side as well as theirs, of how to destroy your enemy most newsworthily. While, meantime, you old nuns are providing an excellent example for all of us by taking the less-newsworthy forms of destruction upon yourselves. There’s something to be said for good old-fashioned day-by-day, piece-by-piece dying.”

  She woke with a sob of protest. She had wanted the conversation to go on: there was so much more she wanted from this voice with the new note of friendship she had never known in life.

  AFTER MASS, FATHER Gallagher asked Mother Ravenel to carry the host for him to the quarters of Sister Bridget, who was recovering from open-heart surgery.

  “But you’re coming, aren’t you, Father?” She was alarmed that he might be asking her to administer the sacrament to the superior—his schedule was so tight.

  “I am. But she sent word for me to bring you. She misses the community. She hoped you’d stay and read the appointed psalm with her after I’ve gone.”

  Ten days ago, following breakfast, Sister Bridget had passed out in the half bathroom adjoining her office off the kitchen. Mother Galyon, or “Sister Frances,” whose current task it was to tidy the refrigerator, had heard the fall. Fortunately, the superior had left the bathroom door unbolted. Mother Ravenel, just finishing with her Waterpik upstairs, had heard the ambulance siren, which always shut off discreetly as it entered the grounds of the retirement house. “Mother Odom has suffered another stroke,” she had thought. “How many more can she survive?” Standing in the hallway, she awaited the footsteps of the medics. Mother Odom’s room was two doors down from hers. But no footsteps came. Voices converged in the kitchen. She was starting to feel her way downstairs to “go see” for herself when she heard the cumbrous ascent of Mother Odom’s home helper, Lanie, the one who referred to her as “the old blind nun.”

  “Is Mother Odom all right?”

  “I’m on my way to her now,” grumbled Lanie. “I can’t be two places at once. Sister Bridget’s heart stopped in the bathroom, but they’ve shocked her back to life and taken her off. Poor thing soiled herself all over the floor, and guess who had to clean it up?”

  … she sent word for me to bring you.

  …

  FATHER GALLAGHER PLACED the wafer on the superior’s tongue.

  “The body of Christ, Sister.”

  “Amen.”

  “Let us bless the Lord.”

  “Thanks be to God.”

  Then the two nuns were alone with each other.

  “Thank you for coming, Sister Suzanne. Sit closer. I thought we might read the psalm together. Then you’ll want your breakfast.”

  “No rush on my account, Sister. How do you feel?”

  “I feel like Lazarus. I must look a fright. How
much can you see of my face?”

  “I can make out the heavy bruising around your eyes and neck.”

  “I tipped forward on the toilet and hit the floor headfirst. So they tell me. I remember very little. There were so many procedures. They ran a tube from my groin into my heart and found I was ninety percent blocked. Then they sawed me open and replaced the valves. That is all a blank. There are days I can’t account for. They also installed a pacemaker, in case my heart gets lazy again. I’m feeling somewhat unsubstantial, Sister, but I’m told I might be around a while longer.”

  “I’m very glad for that.” Realizing she meant it, Mother Ravenel found herself blinking back tears.

  “How is your school memoir coming, Sister?”

  “I’m still in the 1950s.”

  “The school closed in 1990—so, let’s see, you have three more decades to go.”

  “They will be gravy, Sister, if I can ever get out of the fifties.”

  “So much happened?”

  “Certain things—culminated in fifty-one and fifty-two. You might say they came home to roost. It was a distressing year for me as headmistress. I was sent away on a leave of absence at the end of the school term.”

  “Will you tell about the distressing year in the memoir?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing that belongs in a school history. The girls responsible were expelled immediately, and some other students didn’t come back the following year. When I get to their class year in the memoir—the class of fifty-five—those girls have been long gone. But they’re stuck there in my memory like a kind of roadblock. There was a mother involved, too: a classmate of mine. The intent was to embarrass me by inserting material in a class play. The tragic part that came out of it was the death of a young nun. She had an undiagnosed heart ailment from childhood, it turned out, but I hold myself responsible to a large degree. If I hadn’t overreacted that night to something the mother and daughter had planted in the play—a hidden message that they still held me accountable—that young nun might have lived longer, or perhaps still be alive. I think this is what keeps me from dictating the fifties with the same ease I’ve managed with the other chapters.”