Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  During his visit, our mother stayed in her room. I asked didn’t he want to see her and he said he’d had a long day in court and was in no mood to be verbally abused. He instructed me to watch her carefully and said that when the time came when I felt she’d be better off in an institution, to let him know; he’d already found a place. “I just thought you two might like to have a little time together first,” he said. He made it sound like a great benevolence on his part. As he was leaving, I made up my mind to confront him: “Did she really ask for me, Buddy?” “Well, when I put it to her that you might be available, she didn’t say no” was his reply.

  She liked to take her meals on a tray in her bedroom and have me keep her company. I would sit in a chair facing hers and she would fork the edges of her food, as though toying with excrement, and take tiny slurps from her teacup, and in between, without raising her eyes or her voice, drop her emotional bombs. Cornelia Tilden Stratton could have learned a lot from my mother.

  I am not going to dump these emotional bombs into your lap, because they belong to the class of unsavory things you wish afterward you’d never heard. Once they are in you, they’re liable to take root, against your will. I suspect that many of her bombs would qualify for that carefully shrouded “sin against the Holy Ghost,” which, as far as I’ve been able to make out from my spiritual directors, has to do with causing a person to despise his God-given human state or despising it in yourself. One of her pet themes was the disgustingness of certain basic human activities.

  However, bearing on the subject of “taking root in you against your will,” there is one I will tell about because it explained something. It was not one of the more unsavory ones, though it may have been the most painful to me.

  Eyes cast down, my mother asked me over lunch one day, “Have you ever known a man, Stubby?”

  I said I had not. “Remember, I entered the postulancy when I was only sixteen.” Though why should she remember? Not one word had come from my family in response to the invitation.

  “Oh, plenty of girls have tipped over by then,” she said, uttering the chuff-chuffing emphysemic laugh I was to hear so often that year. “I myself had tipped over … years and years before I met your father.”

  Then a bit of messing about with her fork, after which she decided not to bring it to her lips.

  “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “you haven’t missed a thing.

  “But I wanted children,” she went on. “Or thought I did. He got two sons out of me, and I thought that was the end of that. The boys were in their teens and I was home free. Then, guess what?”

  As she took a tiny slurp of tea, her eyes couldn’t resist checking the effect this was having on me. I felt like a small animal paralyzed by the gaze of a snake.

  “When I realized it wasn’t early menopause, I did what I had done the first time, when I was off at boarding school. I got into a very hot bath and forced down a fifth of gin, then jumped off a table ten times. Only this time it didn’t work. You hung in there like a tick. I tried it again a few days later and this time ended up spraining my ankle. My last try was to hobble to the house of a Negro woman who was well-known for giving ‘deep abdominal massages’ to white women who didn’t want any more children. But after she started, she told me I was too far along and gave me back the money and sent me home. You had stapled yourself to my womb by then.”

  As I’ve said already, the carpets had been sold off and the house now had many bare floors. Some of these floors, especially in the public rooms downstairs, were of very beautiful oak parquetry in a chevron pattern. Well, one afternoon after I’d “kept my mother company for lunch,” I wandered into the south drawing room and the afternoon light was flowing over the unsealed boards in such a way that it brought out certain stains and dents in one corner and I decided to see what else I could do down on my knees besides praying, which was not going very well. So I brought some cloths and a bucket of warm water and a pumice stone and went to work in that corner. I worked very closely on one board at a time, going with the grain, and not looking ahead at how much else there was to do.

  In chapter 48 of Benedict’s Rule, “De Opera Manuum Quotidiano,” he prescribes so many hours a day of manual labor for his monks. He also prescribes so many hours a day for prayerful reading, lectio divina; but that summer and the winter and spring to follow was neither a reading nor a praying time for me. Those floors were the nearest I came to God that year, and they brought me into a confraternity of sorts, for which I was very grateful.

  I was noticed at the Masses at St. Mary’s. Of course I was noticed. The nun who had returned home to care for her dying mother. It had been our family’s church. My father was buried in its cemetery. The present pastor had come after my father’s death and after my mother and brothers stopped attending that church, but he knew who I was and gave me a warm welcome and introduced me to other parishioners. At first they were shy, as laypeople generally are around nuns, but as soon as I mentioned that I was working on our floors, they couldn’t stop talking. Many of them had old unsealed hardwood parquetry throughout their houses, and there was the vinegar-and-well-wrung-mop faction and the damp-rag-with-fine-sand-and-tung-oil faction, and the adherents of boiled linseed oil combined with lemon, and the advocates of handheld orbital sander versus the sandpaper-only diehards. I was given generous batches of secret recipes for old family floors and lent a grandfather’s old bonnet polisher from his car-buff days. A few members of my confraternity came right out and said they’d be glad to stop by sometime and look at the floors, but I explained that we weren’t having visitors. I didn’t wish to be surprised “out of costume” with my shorn head and bare feet.

  By the end of the summer, I had completed the floor in the south drawing room and had begun on the dining room adjoining it when the season’s first hurricane uprooted a mature palmetto in the courtyard. My brother, arriving unannounced with his chain saw, looked through the window and saw what he took for a workman down on his knees. He was furious, thinking we had hired someone he would be expected to pay, but when he saw it was me in our brother’s clothes, and when he had inspected the shining floor in the south drawing room, he did give me the first hug since I was twelve. He said this restored parquetry would add enormously to the sale price of the house and offered to pay me. I refused, of course, telling him it had been a form of prayer and I was glad to go on doing it as long as I was staying there. “Well then,” he said, “when this is all over, will you let me make a substantial donation to your school?” And I said that was very generous of him and accepted. I thought it would be nice to return to Mount St. Gabriel’s bearing a large check from my family. But after Mother was buried and all the public rooms had shining floors, I reminded him of his offer and he got very defensive and said this was a particularly tight time for him but he would send a check in six months, if that was all right. I said fine, but I think I knew then that I would never see that check. Poor Buddy—I am sure he meant it the day he offered it, but his avarice had become too deeply ingrained by then, and he just couldn’t bring himself to follow through. We don’t choose our families, and they don’t choose us. Though sometimes they can try to keep us from coming into the world at all.

  …

  Sister Paula just knocked to tell me the van is here for us. It seems I will not be riding alone. This is the morning she goes to the podiatrist’s to have her toenails cut.

  Friday evening after Compline

  October 19, 2001

  I had planned to meditate during my time in the van on those words that so struck me this morning in the Prayer for Holy Women: “In our weakness Your power reaches perfection.” But Sister Paula was nervous and needed to be distracted. Going to the podiatrist makes her anxious because a year ago they told her they might have to amputate her big toe, and she’s always afraid they’re going to say the infection has come back. I know she likes to hear stories about Mount St. Gabriel’s, so I was telling her about our plays—though not ab
out the disastrous night!—and about the high standards the girls set for themselves in these plays. This morning she told me that the nuns at our Boston Academy used to call Mount St. Gabriel’s the Order’s “cash cow”—on the evidence that all through its history, whenever we needed anything down there, the Order bent over backward to supply it. That is how Mother Malloy came to us in the fall of 1951, I remember. At the last minute, the current ninth-grade teacher had to take over the secretarial courses at the junior college, so Mother Malloy was sent down to replace her. Of course, I know now that we saw the first evidence of her heart problem on the day she arrived. Unaccustomed to the thin air a mile above sea level, she fainted when I was giving her a tour of the grounds.

  On our return trip in the van, Sister Paula was overjoyed by her good report—the toe has been declared officially out of danger—and because the podiatrist has installed a new Jacuzzi-type foot tub and a young nurse gave her a thorough and loving foot and ankle massage after she had cut and filed the toenails. Sister Paula said she had to struggle to hold back tears of well-being and gratitude. “I felt completely in her hands,” Sister Paula said. Then I thought, Why not ask her about that sentence I was going to meditate on, when I was imagining myself riding alone in silence?

  “There was a sentence this morning in that Prayer for Holy Women,” I said. “‘In our weakness Your power reaches perfection.’ It really struck me. What do you think it means, Sister Paula?”

  And she thought a minute and then said, “I think it means you have to admit you can’t save yourself before you’re fully available to God.”

  I have learned much today. As I used to remind the girls at Mount St. Gabriel’s, “We are all works in progress.” Now I will turn these tapes over to you, Sister Bridget. Praise be to God for my family in Christ.

  CHAPTER 35

  A Midmorning Walk

  Wednesday, October 24, 2001

  Anthony Claret, bishop, 1807-1870 (formerly the Feast of St. Raphael the archangel)

  Grounds of the St. Scholastica Retirement House

  “I LIKE IT that Father Gallagher continues to remember the old feasts,” said Sister Bridget. “In an aging community like ours, October twenty-fourth has been St. Raphael’s feast for most of the nuns’ lives.”

  “You do wonder, though,” Mother Ravenel lightly rejoined, “whose idea it was to bunch up the three major archangels on September twenty-ninth just to leave some spaces free on the calendar.” She was doing her best not to lean on the other nun’s arm, since this was Sister Bridget’s first outing since her open-heart surgery.

  “Well, but new saints do keep getting born,” the superior reasoned in her flat Bostonese, and Mother Ravenel had to quash a fierce bubble of indignity. This was the person who had offered herself as a replacement for Beatrix, who would have picked up instantly on the jeu d’esprit of her remark. Had it been an error in judgment to hand over those intimate cassettes? However, it was too late now. After Mass today, Sister Bridget had reported that she had listened to them and was ready to offer some “comments.” What if those comments should be as stodgy as her last reply? Mother Ravenel girded her loins and resolved to keep her disappointment to herself no matter what came out of this walk.

  “I thought we might sit in the summerhouse,” said Sister Bridget. “It’s such a fine day. All the yellow leaves. How much can you see of it, Sister?”

  So we were back to “Sister” now.

  “As a matter of fact, yellow is one of my better colors. They look like coins drifting down. Blurred coins, of course.”

  “Now there are three steps up,” Sister Bridget cautioned.

  “Yes, I know. I often stop at the summerhouse to regather my thoughts.”

  “Do you have a favorite spot?”

  “I like this corner. It’s out of the sun.” (And out of range from where you can see me from the house.) Mother Ravenel’s rapprochement with Sister Bridget was evaporating by the minute. She felt like a student about to have her work critiqued by a teacher whose credentials might not come up to her standards.

  “You certainly do tell a good story, Sister. I felt I was there. The romantic old building. The mountain air. The safety. The excellence. Girls watching other girls, planning their next moves. My school days seemed dull in comparison. I look forward to reading the memoir.”

  “If God graciously allows me to finish it.”

  “What happened to those girls, Sister? The ones you expelled after the play.”

  “Tildy went over to the public high school. Her sister, Madeline, was already there. I’d had to ask Madeline to leave Mount St. Gabriel’s at the end of her freshman year. Though Madeline was by far the more simpatico of the sisters.”

  “And these were Cornelia’s daughters, right?”

  “Yes.” Where was this going?

  But Sister Bridget surprised her by whinnying like a donkey. “That Cornelia! What a wicked tongue! ‘Actually, we are triplets, but one of us died.’ I laughed aloud when I listened to that part, but I wouldn’t have wanted to come under her fire. And what became of the other girl you expelled after the play?”

  “I’m sorry to say we lost all contact with Maud. Her mother wrote and asked to be reimbursed for the remainder of her boarding fee, which was not refundable. She had signed off on that, and I reminded her of this and never heard from any of them again. I have sometimes wondered if I was too hard on Maud—she and I had been close for a while—but she and Tildy were so bound up, and it was that old rotten-apple-in-the-barrel dilemma. For the sake of the school, I couldn’t risk keeping her on. But Maud was a very smart and attractive girl who applied herself, and I have no doubt she did well. Her father was married to a wealthy second wife in Palm Beach, and that’s where I sent her the morning after the play. Her mother had just suffered a miscarriage and she and her new husband didn’t even have a home yet.”

  “All these lives,” murmured Sister Bridget. Did Mother Ravenel detect a hint of reproof? “I didn’t quite understand—that scene you said was aimed at you—that made you need to go onstage before it got worse—how much worse could it have gotten?”

  “I had to guard against any sapphic hints. That sort of reputation could have brought down the school.”

  “But surely … there’s a tradition of girls loving other girls—or having crushes on nuns in convent schools. I mean, who else is there?”

  “We’re not talking about the Boston Irish, Sister. This was Ap-palachia. Catholics were feared.”

  “Ah, I see. Did you meet Cornelia again?”

  “The whole family came out to the school for Mother Malloy’s burial. Tildy wanted to recite a poem at the grave. I thought it best to give in on that one. It was the Hopkins poem that Mother Malloy had been teaching Tildy just before she collapsed. And then afterward Madeline stayed behind and asked on behalf of the family if I would return Antonia’s old exam book with the note to me. I told her that would not be possible and she said, ‘I thought not, Mother,’ and walked away. Of course, we continued to live in the same city and both girls were married in the basilica—I was not invited to either wedding and didn’t expect to be. When I heard that Cornelia was dying, I phoned and asked Madeline if I could visit. She made me wait for a good long while and then came back to report that though Cornelia could no longer speak, she had indicated no.”

  “What had you hoped to achieve?”

  “I guess I was hoping for some sign that she didn’t still hold me responsible for how Antonia’s life turned out—or, rather, didn’t. And I would have asked for her forgiveness if she thought I had been too harsh on her daughters because of old animosities between us. Not that I think I did wrong in sending them away—there was too much accumulated poison by then: they had been brought up to mistrust me.”

  “But are you still holding yourself responsible for Antonia?”

  “I think if I hadn’t loved her so much—or had been more skilled at hiding my love—it might have turned out differently.”
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  “You know where I felt closest to you on the tapes? When you spoke about envy. That’s an experience I know well. I’ve even envied you old sisters—with all your infirmities and your airs—for having been born early enough to complete your teaching years before our schools closed. I took my final vows four years before Vatican II, and by the time I finished my graduate degree and started to teach in our Boston Academy, nuns were flying out the doors and windows to become social workers and wear pantsuits and live together in apartments. When our academy closed, in 1978, I was forty-two. I asked Reverend Mother if I might be sent down to Mount St. Gabriel’s in Mountain City—I knew nuns were leaving the Order there, too—and she promised to look into it. But the answer came back no. Enrollment was falling and the trustees were hiring lay teachers on a contract basis. More cost-effective. They didn’t have to be housed and fed and clothed. So that was the end of my teaching career.”

  Mother Ravenel chose to shift the subject. “What were your specialties in graduate work, Sister Bridget?”

  “I haven’t finished my comments on your tapes, Sister. They weren’t what I was expecting. I’m not sure what it is you still feel you need to confess—or be forgiven for—in order to go on with your memoir. Surely not a passionate kiss, given to a girl you loved—or feeling jealous and entering early so you wouldn’t be eligible for Queen of the School. And, after close to seventy years of service, surely you’re not still in doubt of your vocation. Maybe you were too hard on some of those girls, but then I’ve never been the headmistress of a prosperous academy. The only group I’ve ever had charge of is this community of aging nuns, and I know I’ve been too hard on you. The time Sister Odelie was whisking that hollandaise sauce and all of you were jabbering in your privileged French and I made her stop because of her pride. Now every time I visit her in her room, I pray for forgiveness for that outburst. If she were responsive, I would beg her for it. It was unworthy of a superior, but that day I felt so shut out, like some servant hired to see you ladies through your dotage. But I have another question, Sister. Do you still suspect that your vocation is ‘tarnished’? And why? Because you first chose it as a way to stay close to your great friend?”