Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “You’ve spoken to a priest?”

  “Decades of priests. They either told me I was too hard on myself or that it was an insult to God’s mercy to keep harping on something He’d already forgiven me for. The one I was fondest of told me I was ‘scraping the cauldron’ of that year for more ‘evil snacks’ and to get back to work and see where I fit into God’s design rather than where He fit into mine—”

  Sister Bridget started to laugh, then grimaced in pain.

  “I confided in Mother Galyon on one of our recent walks and she suggested I make a confessional cassette—just the parts that haunt me—then ask God’s blessing, send it off to someone I trust, and let it go.”

  “And did you?”

  “I dictated a large part of it. It was to a student in that class of fifty-five. We’ve remained friends; she’s the one who’s transcribing the memoir. But after September eleventh, I felt it would be all out of proportion. Beatrix might wonder how I can keep harping on these old wounds when so much worse is happening. I know this is prideful of me, but I just couldn’t face losing her admiration and respect. At this stage of my life, Sister Bridget, someone’s admiration is a precious commodity.”

  “Well—Mother Ravenel—we haven’t been the best of friends, you and I, and part of the fault has been my pride. But, as your sister in Christ, I offer myself as a replacement for Beatrix. I have some time on my hands, as you can see. Why don’t we say the psalm together now, and you can think it over.

  “‘O God, You are my God, for You I long; for You my soul is thirsting …’”

  Not until she was eating her cornflakes with the other nuns did it register: for the first time, Sister Bridget, that stickler for the leveling nomenclature of post Vatican II, had respectfully addressed her in the old style, as “Mother Ravenel.”

  Confessional Cassette Rerouted

  Thursday night, October 18, 2001

  Mother Ravenel’s room

  St. Scholastica Retirement House

  Dear Bridget, sister in Christ, superior of the Order of St. Scholastica,

  I’m beginning a new cassette because the other might not have enough room left on it. The initial plan was to limit myself to the front and back of one cassette. But I didn’t want to risk running out of space in the middle of thanking God for His wonderful patience with me—and thanking you for yours.

  If you are listening to this now, you will have finished both sides of the other cassette. I was sorely tempted to listen to it all again and try to predict your reactions before taking you up on your offer to be a “replacement” for Beatrix. But I decided to risk it and just plunge in and take advantage of the momentum your offer has generated in me.

  I remember all too well where I last broke off dictating this confessional tape. How can anyone forget what they were doing on that terrible day at a little past nine in the morning?

  I was telling about my envy of Antonia. And how, when Antonia began to have doubts our senior year, I had the idea of entering early to subdue my envy. Because as a postulant I would be ineligible to be Queen of the School. Well, I did enter early, and she was voted queen, but she turned it down, and after that the school discontinued the practice, which I think was wise. Too many feelings get hurt when only one is chosen as the best. Her family’s story was that I “jumped the gun” and broke her heart and spoiled her vocation, which wasn’t true. I knew she was having doubts, but I believe she kept postponing telling me because she knew how disappointed I would be. But she would say oblique things, and I picked up on them. I do think she was hurt by my entering early and not confiding in her, but she certainly wasn’t heartbroken. If anyone’s heart was wounded, it was mine. I had hoped to spend my life serving God with Antonia. She later married a very fine man, a prominent young architect and a good Catholic. Unfortunately, she was killed in a traffic accident on their wedding trip, and this reactivated her sister Cornelia’s bitterness toward me. At the reception after the wretched play, which you heard about in the last cassette, Cornelia accused me not only of being an indirect cause of Antonia’s death, but of “feeding on Antonia’s early vocation like a tapeworm” until I was swollen with it and she was completely emptied out. As she was saying this to me, in a low voice with a social smile on her face in the middle of a crowded room, I remember thinking, This is the lowest point of this deplorable night, and I will somehow get through it.

  But there was worse to come.

  Cornelia’s daughter Tildy had gone off in a rage because I had intervened onstage and changed the course of the play. Things were getting very, very bad up there and I didn’t know how much worse they might get, and then I saw Cornelia watching me out of the corner of her eye and I knew I had been set up. So I acted quickly, and most people agreed later that when I went up onstage it seemed a natural part of the play. What Tildy and her friend Maud had been doing, you see, was acting out a scene supposed to represent Antonia and me, only they called themselves “Domenica” and “Rexanne.” They were acting out an occasion when Antonia is telling me that it would be wrong to go on with our plans to become nuns together—an occasion that never happened, by the way. But they had an old exam booklet of Antonia’s, and Maud as Antonia/Domenica was reading words addressed to me. In the fall of her senior year Antonia had apparently drafted a letter to me in the back of an old exam booklet, a letter she never sent, but the family had kept the booklet all these years, and now they were springing it on me during a school play—a play I had written at Tildy’s age and had given Tildy the privilege of directing. I had also permitted Tildy to make changes to it—that was part of the play’s tradition. And in all fairness, there were some good added scenes and innovations. But the Domenica and Rexanne scene, which, fortunately, came at the tail end of the play, was aimed at me, and when I heard a certain “signal word” I had to act fast in case it got worse. And even while Cornelia was saying those unconscionable things to me at the reception, I believed I had controlled the damage.

  The next thing was, Jiggsie returned to the reception and told her grandmother that Tildy was on her way to throw herself off the tower. Now, Jiggsie’s grandmother was at that time talking to Tildy’s older sister, Madeline, and Mother Malloy, Tildy’s ninth-grade teacher. Madeline started running for the tower, and Mother Malloy was to follow her.

  It has always seemed strange to me that I should have been one of the last to know what was happening in the tower. I was still downstairs saying goodbye to parents, making sure every waiter had received his pay envelope; then I stopped by the kitchen to thank Betty, our cook, and Mother Finney, who was helping put things away. I was headed for the chapel to thank God for helping me survive the evening when a girl came running after me to say something terrible had happened.

  When Mother Arbuckle returned with Madeline to the tower, Dr. Galvin, the nuns’ doctor, was with them. Mother Arbuckle later told me that when the three of them entered the tower room, they saw Tildy and Mother Malloy sitting side by side, the nun bent forward with her hands clasped. Tildy told them Mother Malloy often fell asleep sitting up during their tutoring sessions. Mother Arbuckle saw at once that something was not right and sent Madeline off with Tildy and told her to summon Reverend Mother.

  They laid Mother Malloy on the floor and worked over her for about fifteen minutes, the infirmarian’s mouth on hers, the doctor pumping her chest. But to no avail.

  Dr. Galvin signed the death certificate, and Reverend Mother and I stayed with her in the tower until the ambulance men took her away.

  This is as far as I can get tonight, Sister Bridget.

  Later, I want to tell you a little about my year of exile, which the Order called my “leave of absence” during 1952 to ‘53, when I was officially caring for my dying mother in Charleston.

  Early this morning, I dreamed of my mother in a new way. In the dream we seemed to have begun a new relationship. For the first time, I look forward to discovering parts of her aside from those that failed my needs.

&nbs
p; Predawn, Friday

  October 19, 2001

  I have not slept well, Sister Bridget. I woke from a peculiar dream in which a woman living in our retirement house—she seemed to be a nun from some other order—was explaining to me, “You have to learn to praise God when he is behaving badly.”

  …

  So I decided to get up and dress and go on with this.

  The year in Charleston with my dying mother (emphysema; she was also slipping into senility by the summer of 1952, though she had more than enough moments of scathing lucidity that year). She was seventy-four when she died, which seemed quite old to me then. I have now outlived her by more than a decade.

  I was thirty-six that summer. I had been a nun for eighteen years, headmistress of an academy for seven years, and yet when I walked through the front door of my mother’s house for the first time since I’d left it at the age of twelve, I could feel myself shrink back into the despised daughter, accompanied by all the old epithets: “sneaky, sanctimonious, self-advancing” Suzanne, “Old Frump, Old Stubby, Old Stumpy.”

  It was the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, which fell on a Friday that year. It was also Friday the thirteenth.

  I seem to keep backing away from entering that front door. I will try another approach.

  The frugality of my brothers. Euphemism for the stinginess of my brothers. As I said on the earlier cassette, they repaid everything my father “borrowed” from the accounts he’d held in trust before Black Friday. They worked very hard at the law firm and won back people’s respect. But somewhere along the way they developed an obsession with making more and more money and spending less and less. It became a game with them: try to double the amount we made last year and spend half the amount we spent last year. My older brother had married a woman with money, and what she had didn’t “count” in the game. My other brother lived at home with his mother and his mistress, who, conveniently, was a practical nurse, until his forty-ninth year, when he had his fatal coronary. That was in May 1952: another fateful conjunction whose timing couldn’t have been worse—for me. My older brother thought of a way he might save on three months of summer home care for his mother. His late brother’s mistress refused to stay on for the measly fee he offered. His sister was in a teaching order, and everyone knows teaching nuns don’t teach in the summer. So he phoned Reverend Mother and asked if I might be spared for the summer to stay with my dying mother, who had asked for me. And Reverend Mother called me in and said she would give permission for me to have a leave of absence, which might be extended to a year. She said the recent happenings had surely been an ordeal for me and this appeal from my brother could be a blessing and a healing for all. We both knew all that was being left unsaid. After the night of the play and the death of Mother Malloy, and the bishop’s subsequent visit and homily on “misguided creations,” followed by the reconsecration of the tower room and the Red Nun, there were unfavorable murmurings both within the school and in the community of Mountain City. I had expelled two girls, and several more in that class were not to return, though we didn’t know it then. Might it not be prudent to seclude the “high-profile” headmistress, who had somehow been “implicated,” until the dust had time to settle?

  And so, on Friday the thirteenth of June, in the year of Our Lord 1952, I arrived after a ten-hour bus ride (my brother would not spring for the costlier train) at my mother’s house. He had a case in court that day and sent his secretary to meet me and drive me to the East Battery, where she waited in the car until the door opened, then drove away.

  Just go in. You’ve got to go in sometime.

  She answered the door herself, wheeling an oxygen tank. She was recognizable as the woman I had last seen at age twelve, only not as erect and wearing a kind of housedress she would formerly have mocked. She looked me up and down, then began laughing in a mirthless chuff-chuff way, until she was gasping for breath and had to put on her oxygen mask. She indicated to me that she could no longer climb stairs and pointed me up to my old room. As I was ascending the staircase with my bags, she whispered hoarsely after me, “And change out of that costume, Stubby, unless you want to kill me with laughing.”

  This is all I can do, now. Thank God the jets are back in the skies. Such a sweet dawn roar as light begins to filter through the blind nun’s eyes.

  Friday, after morning prayer

  October 19, 2001

  No priest today; no Mass. There were only the four of us in chapel: Mother Galyon, Sister Paula and Sister Marian from our Order’s now defunct Boston Academy, and myself. Mother Galyon conducted morning prayer and read from the Common of Several Martyrs, since today is the feast of the eight Jesuits tortured and killed by the Huron and Iroquois tribes in North America between 1642 and 1649. We also said the Prayer for Holy Women, and for the first time I was much struck by these words: “Father, in our weakness Your power reaches perfection.”

  How does that work, I wonder? I will meditate on it when I’m riding to and from my appointment with the gastroenterologist. But the van doesn’t come until ten, so I’ll go on with the year with my mother.

  There were the two of us, rattling around in an eighteenth-century three-story house on the East Battery. All of the good furniture and carpets had been sold by my brothers, and there were lots of bare floors and echoes. I made simple meals—canned soup, sandwiches, creamed chipped beef on toast. She ate almost nothing. I wore my “costume” when I went to Mass at St. Mary’s on Hasell Street and for my walks around the Battery, but inside the house I left off the veil and wore my late brother’s casual clothes. As my hair was clipped very short, I was often mistaken for a man by delivery people. When it started to grow out, I cut it ruthlessly with nail scissors. The first time I did this, I cried. I missed Mother Finney’s “Clip ‘n’ Shave Parlor,” and I missed my community. Mother Finney was to write to me faithfully during my “exile,” until she died of pneumonia in the late winter of 1953. Reverend Mother had told me to say the Office at the usual time whenever possible and while I was doing so to remember that all my sisters in the Order were praying with me.

  But this grew increasingly hard to do.

  I did find myself thinking about Antonia more than I had allowed myself to do in years. It was probably natural, given the scene in the recent play that I’d interrupted when Tildy (Rexanne/Suzanne) began to read from the exam book in which Antonia really had written a note to me, breaking off our plans to enter together—a note that Antonia must have thought better of sending.

  After I had sent the rest of the cast off to the reception, I confronted Tildy and her coconspirator Maud about the meaning of their scene and I confiscated the exam book, over Tildy’s protests that it belonged to her family. Well, the family had done their worst with it; I had already made up my mind about that. What would keep Cornelia from circulating it to do more damage, which could hurt the school?

  Before I appeared at the reception I went up to the nuns’ bathroom on the third floor and disposed of that booklet in very, very tiny pieces. The toilets up there were still of the old-fashioned chain variety with the cistern above, and I pulled the chain five times, just to be safe. Those old toilets provided a much more powerful flush than the modern ones, and I remember thinking, as I waited for the cistern to fill up again each time, that maybe we should have kept the old toilets in the boarders’ bathrooms; the new ones were frequently clogged. All modern “improvements” are not necessarily improvements.

  And then I went down to the reception and Cornelia lit into me about being a tapeworm and the indirect cause of Antonia’s death—and then followed the tragedy in the tower—and the funeral and the rest of the fallout, which included Reverend Mother’s granting my “leave of absence.” With all this going on, there hadn’t been time until I was in Charleston for me to absorb this new knowledge about Antonia: that she had written me a note, pinpointing the cause of our rupture—what I had done was to kiss her at her sister’s engagement party out at the Swag (that was the na
me of Cornelia’s fiancé’s hunting cabin). And “Swag” was the key word in Antonia’s note, and when I heard Tildy saying “Swag,” up there on the stage, I realized I had to act fast. Who knew what would come next in the note?

  Alone with my mother on that long year of leave, there was plenty of time to think about Antonia, and to ask myself hard questions, such as: Would I have had a vocation if I hadn’t been looking for a way to stay with her? And if the answer to that was no, what kind of vocation could I claim to have now? Was a tarnished vocation still a vocation?

  On the evening of my arrival in Charleston, my brother stopped by the house to greet me. He also appeared amused by my “costume.” He asked if there was anything I needed. I wanted to say, “A hug from you after all these years would be a start,” but didn’t. He had changed; there was no play in him anymore. He had put on weight, and his cheeks puffed out in an angry, impacted way. He was not the boy who had foot-raced with me along the beach, or even the boy who lured me up into the tree house, then jumped down and took away the ladder and laughed. This person seemed impatient of anything that might divert him from his grim objectives. He was very put out when I explained that I had never learned to drive. It was as if I had accepted a job under false pretenses. This meant he would keep having to pay for things delivered to the house and have his secretary take our mother to the doctor.