Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “You always had a knack for knowing what I needed, Tildy. Sometimes before I knew it myself.”

  “And then when you come down, I’ll turn on the gas fireplace in the den and we’ll snuggle up in front of it and eat Flavia’s soup and sip our wine and you will fill in your blanks for the last fifty-five years.”

  Evening of All Saints’ Day

  Tildy’s den

  “Where should I begin?” asked Maud.

  “Begin Friday night after the play.” As if there could be no possible other starting place in Maud’s story.

  “I thought my life was over when she sent me up to my dorm room. I walked up and down in that tiny little enclosure and thought of wild things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, just—vanishing. Running away. Dyeing my hair and taking a new name. But I didn’t even have the money for bus fare. And where would I take the bus to? I thought of Lily missing me and then gradually accepting that I was dead, and that made me cry. And then I just conked out. Mother Ravenel had said we would talk in the morning, and when I woke up it was early Saturday morning and the birds were chirping and it seemed like a bad dream. After all, she hadn’t said anything about my leaving school. And then my door cracked open and there stood Jiggsie Judd, looking at me strangely. She said, ‘You don’t know what happened, do you?’ And she told me about Mother Malloy. At first I didn’t believe her, and then I’m afraid I thought, If something this bad has happened, Mother Ravenel will forget about her anger at me. But she didn’t. Now the whole thing gets a little surreal, but bear with me. I’m going to try to tell it from my point of view.”

  “Well, who else’s couldyou tell it from?”

  “Oh, you’ll see. This is where I entered the stream of other people’s needs and desires, and I didn’t find my way back to my own stream until twenty-five years later.”

  “God, Maud, this is beginning to sound ominous.”

  “At the time it just seemed like fate to me—the way the cookie crumbles. A woman I know in Palm Beach has this wooden plaque on her kitchen wall that says ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans—

  “Oh, I hate that plaque! I’ve seen it in gift shops. I would never put something like that up on my wall.”

  “Neither would I,” Maud countered coldly. “But nevertheless, that’s what happened to me.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “The next thing was, Mother Ravenel brought me a breakfast tray and told Jiggsie to go away. She said, ‘I suppose she has told you about Mother Malloy’ Then she set the breakfast out on my desk—a bowl of oatmeal, a glass of milk, two pieces of buttered toast, and some grape jelly. I can see the measured, almost respectful, way she placed them on the desk—like she was setting up an altar or something. There was even my napkin in its napkin ring from my place in the dining room. And she told me to please sit down and eat because it was going to be a very busy, very sad day for her and she had to get me on my way. I would be leaving with Jovan for the airport in less than an hour. There was a connection I had to make in Charlotte—”

  “A connection to where?” screamed Tildy.

  “I didn’t know yet. I told you, I’m trying to tell it the way it happened to me at the time.”

  “Sorry.”

  “While I ate—and I did eat—I was hungry—she said she had been on the phone late last night and very early this morning to Mr. Foley and Mr. and Mrs. Norton.”

  “What about Lily?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked: ‘What about my mother? Why didn’t you talk to her?’ And she said, ‘Your mother is in the hospital in Atlanta. She had a miscarriage yesterday. You’re almost a grown girl, Maud. These things happen in married life. Mr. Foley says she’s going to be just fine, though it was a disappointment to them both.’ Then she said, ‘Now, Maud, we are going to pack your things, and I will help you, and while we are doing it, I want you to listen very carefully to what I told Mr. Foley and Mr. and Mrs. Norton on your behalf She was folding my things while she talked; she seemed to know where everything was in my room and where it would best fit into the suitcase. She said she had told them I was one of the most promising girls in the school, but I had been influenced by a friend to partake in a prank of a very serious nature, which could have damaged the reputation of the school. The other girl had been instantly expelled, and because of my involvement she had no choice but to expel me, too. But she had told them that I might still fulfill my potential somewhere else, under the right guidance. She said it was a crucial period in my development, and it could go either way, and she was turning me over to their care. And then she gathered up my dishes and said, ‘Maud, I am going to ask you to remain up here until I return with Jovan to take your things down to the station wagon.’ And I said, ‘But won’t you tell me where I am going, Mother?’ And she told me it had been decided that I would first go to Palm Beach, until my mother and Mr. Foley had found a house of their own. She said, ‘I have been doing a little fence-mending on your behalf in Palm Beach, Maud. You know, you had told me in our discussions that you weren’t welcome down there anymore, but I now believe you thought things were worse than they were. Also, there have been changes. Your father is improving and you could be the means to help them keep that marriage together. Wouldn’t that be a great thing?’ And then she left with the tray and I sat on my bed and tried to register what was happening and what I felt about it. But I couldn’t think. My brain felt like it had been wrapped up for shipping with the rest of me. I was being sent off like a package and would just have to wait until they opened me at the other end to find out who or what I was.”

  “Oh, Maud. If only I had known!”

  “What could you have done?” Maud asked with something close to a sneer.

  “You could have stayed with us and shared my tutor. Hell, with you there, I wouldn’t have needed that damn tutor. We could have kept up with the lessons we missed and entered tenth grade together at Mountain City High. Instead, that brownnose stool pigeon raked in my father’s money all summer and pretended I was a paragon and then reported back to the principal at Mountain City that my reading skills weren’t up to tenth grade! I had to repeat ninth grade over at the junior high. And have a remedial reading coach.”

  “Oh, Tildy!” Maud ached for the demoted fourteen-year-old girl. What a blow to her pride!

  “What I suffered from, of course,” Tildy went on, rather airily, “was given a fancy Greek name in the sixties, and now the schools are stocked with special ed teachers trained to guide us out of our benightedness. My daughter Ruthie is a dyslexia specialist. And you even wrote a column about it in that Palm Beach paper.”

  “But you always compensated with your spoken vocabulary, Tildy. I don’t know when I last heard the word ‘benightedness.’ Do you find reading easier now?”

  “Oh, much,” Tildy laughed. “I get unabridged audiobooks. I even belong to a book club, and my presentations are always riveting. But words flat on a page are still like those horrible hedgerows in Silas Marner. I have to clamber over each one as I come to it and scratch myself bloody. And if I’m scheduled to be one of the lectors at church, I have to work up my lesson a week in advance. But everyone thinks I’m a beautiful reader. Look, Maud, tell me one thing, honestly. When you were sitting on that bed, about to be sent off like a package, did you hate me?”

  “No. I wasn’t thinking about you at all. I told you, I couldn’t think. I was just there on the bed, and that was the way it was, and then I was being driven to the airport, and then I was on the ground in Charlotte, where an airline person met me and walked me to my connection—I was fourteen, remember? And then I was on the ground in Palm Beach, and my father and Anabel were waiting on the tarmac. Anabel was crying and my father put an arm around each of us and said, ‘Come on now, girls, this may turn out to be a good thing.’ And for a while, he seemed to be right.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “It lasted me through high school.
I mean, he had relapses, but they stayed together and my father got a job selling Cadillacs, which he did very well, and it kept him on the wagon—most of the time. Anabel continued to maneuver her way into society, and she liked taking me places and giving me ‘advantages.’ It reflected well on her to be seen behaving generously with her husband’s daughter.”

  “What about that society woman who uninvited her to the Christmas party because you left the dance with that man who came on to you?”

  “Duddy’s mother, Mimi Weatherby. She had a comeuppance of her own to deal with. Her husband was suing her for divorce because she’d been having an affair with a younger man. Actually, it was with Troy Veech, the man I left the dance with.”

  “Good God, Maud, this is like a soap opera!”

  “Well, it gets worse, and I swallowed most of the soap myself. Next comes my enrollment at the Cortt Academy, known to its inmates as the Court of the Weird Sisters. But right now we’ll take a commercial break because I need to go to the bathroom.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Reunion, Continued

  TILDY

  All Saints’ Day, evening

  Tildy’s kitchen

  TILDY LIKED TO be in charge of her settings, and when Maud took her bathroom break she decided it was time to move them to a new one. She had been sinking into a dangerous loss of self as she gave herself over to Maud’s narrative in front of the gas fire. Maud’s story drew you in like the little blue flame. You let yourself forget that it was activated by a remote control that released the propane and produced the illusion of real logs burning. You forgot you were safely who you were, having lived your life and raised your children and fascinated your husband and survived cancer and nine years of widowhood—and kept your pride more or less intact throughout. You were sinking into Maud’s power-lessness as she sat on that bed like a package about to be sent somewhere else.

  Maud was still beautiful. When you reached seventy, the worst that could happen to your looks had pretty much happened, give or take a few more unsightly spots and growths, a few more pieces of yourself destined to be sliced off or suctioned out. But Maud needed to get out of that dreary black. Black dress, black jeans, a dead husband’s old black cardigan. Maud also needed to replace the silver fillings in her molars; they dated her every time she opened her mouth. Tildy had a brilliant idea for scuttling the black—a project that would take them through tomorrow, Maud’s last full day. They would go to Fabric Warehouse and select material and she would sew Maud a svelte swishy skirt, cut on the bias. They needed a project. Tildy had picked up on Maud’s old edgi-ness, like that of an animal that lets itself be domesticated up to a certain point, then darts for the exit. When Tildy had come back from church, she could read from Maud’s face and body language that she had been considering darting for the exit. Maud had always been elusive, other. Whether it was pride, not wanting always to be on the receiving end, or just her nature, she never let you get all the way around her. But now that they had found each other again—and, after all, Maud had come looking for her—Tildy was determined to keep Maud in her life. There were so many things they could enjoy together, thought Tildy, setting out napkins, bowls, and wineglasses on the kitchen counter, but she must go slowly and keep on the alert against that darting for the exit look.

  “A change of scene,” said Maud, entering the kitchen. “Was I putting you to sleep in there by the fire?”

  “Far from it. I’m dying to hear about the Court of the Weird Sisters. But you need fuel and, besides, the Storytellers’ Union of America specifies so many breaks per hour in its playbook. Ta-ra! Flavia’s soup and, of course, more wine, and I’m warming a baguette.”

  “You cover all the angles, Tildy.”

  “I try to. Especially when I’m in the company of someone with a jillion facets.”

  “Oh, my facets,” said Maud, actually blushing. But she did not look like an animal about to bolt when Tildy ladled the thick gumbo and brought the hot bread and poured the wine.

  “Here’s to friendship,” said Tildy.

  “To friendship,” said Maud. Then she sputtered and choked on her wine.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You—at our first lunch—in third grade. You bought us two bags of potato chips and then put yours down on the bench and sat on it. You said, ‘I like to do that. It makes more of them. Why don’t you try it?’ And I did. And after that it became the thing to do. Every day in the cafeteria, all our class sat their little butts down on their potato chips.”

  “Not everyone—I’m sure Becky Meyer never did. But it’s a wonder nobody stopped us, no nun came over and said, ‘Girls, this is indecent.’ God, we had so much power. Or thought we did. We thought we could do anything.”

  Later

  Back in Tildy’s den

  “The Cortt Academy was a strange school,” Maud resumed. “I mean, to me it was strange, after Mount St. Gabriel’s. There was something missing, or slightly off-kilter, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The good part about that was, its unreal aspect made me less anxious about fitting in. The bad part was that because it seemed unreal—everything sort of provisional—I felt free to be whatever I wanted.”

  “That sounds like a plus to me.”

  “Well, but these provisional selves weren’t me. I was trying on roles and seeing how far each one would please someone else. All the other students knew about me was that I was a new girl, something of a goody-goody and a grind, who had transferred from a convent boarding school. Nobody except the Cortt sisters knew that I’d been expelled from Mount St. Gabriel’s. Miss Cortt had spoken to Mother Ravenel on the phone, and, lucky for me, took an instant dislike to her. She told me I was well out of that nun factory and she saw no reason to blot my matriculation at a new school with the onus of an expulsion.”

  “Why did she call it a nun factory?”

  “When I saw which way the wind was blowing in the interview—I mean, Miss Cortt’s aversion to Mother Ravenel—I decided to tell her about Mother Ravenel’s attempt to convert me.”

  “What? Is this true, Maud?”

  “We were having these talks. I was supposed to pray and ask God to show me if I had a vocation. The deal was that Mother Ravenel would come up with the money to cover my boarding fees through high school if I needed the time for discernment—”

  “Good old discernment! She could play a million tunes on that convenient theme. And you never told me this was going on.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I knew I might do it, if it meant securing my education—they send you to college, you know—and I felt I’d lose everything if I had to start all over from scratch with Art Foley as the head of our family.”

  “To think of you as ‘Mother Norton’ boggles the mind.”

  “I might have been a very good Mother Norton. I would have tried to model myself on Mother Malloy.”

  “So if you hadn’t been ‘involved in my prank,’ you would have stayed on at Mount St. Gabriel’s, and one day over at Mountain City High I would have heard through the grapevine that my old friend Maud had entered the postulancy. Would you have invited me to the ceremony?”

  “Tildy, I hate this sort of—retrospective speculation. The whole thing makes me squeamish now. I think what probably would have happened was I would have become a Catholic and then maybe a postulant—and found I couldn’t go on with it. And then I would have felt like a cheat.”

  “But you would have finished Mount St. Gabriel’s by then, and could have taken your pick of colleges.”

  “Well, I finished at the Weird Sisters instead. In only two years, because they skipped me a grade. I became their pet, especially Dr. Cortt’s, the one with the doctorate in classics. She was dying to inaugurate a junior honors seminar where we started reading Herodotus’s Histories on the first day and learned our Greek that way. I also went into advanced Spanish. It was Miss Cortt’s prediction that South Florida would soon be bilingual, and how right she was. They were dedicated women of purpo
se; I used to try to compare them with Mother Wallingford and Mother Finney. I’d think, Well, I have transferred from one academy to another, both started by two women with high educational ideals, but there was always something missing in the equation. Of course, the Cortt Academy was a day school and coed, though there were far more girls—the boys in that crowd mostly went away to boarding school. But there was an absence of something we had at Mount St. Gabriel’s.”

  “Hmm. Maybe it was the Holy Ghost.”

  “Funny, I never thought of that,” said Maud, looking at Tildy with respect.

  We have all these memories in common, Tildy thought, gratified, and I can contribute another point of view. But I must go very, very carefully.

  “Anyway, I graduated from Cortt with honors and had my pick of scholarships, from Auburn to University of Miami to Agnes Scott. Both my families were proud of me, and a few of my classmates were openly jealous. But they need not have been, because immediately after graduation I chose to fling myself into the dark stream of someone else’s ruin.”

  “This is beginning to sound truly ominous, Maud. Do we need to open another bottle?”

  “I THOUGHT WE should have at least a lightweight quilt, for psychological reasons,” said Tildy, returning with more wine and a platter of cheese and crackers—and the quilt. “We need to be under something, so we’ll feel safe, like when we used to snuggle up when you slept over at my house. Oh, Maud. I am enjoying you so much. I hope you’re not wishing you could leave, or anything.”

  “How could I, when you’re satisfying so many of my facets? Okay, here goes with the darkest chapter of my life. After it was over, I wrapped myself in all the humdrum duty I could find. I looked for things that were expected of me, regardless of who was expecting them, so I could get up every morning and fill someone’s needs without having to think about what I had lost. Then one day I woke up feeling furious and realized I was going on forty—and that night I went out dancing with a Cuban-American veterinarian named Max Martinez.