Gail Godwin
Page 46
“Caroline DuPree? But why?”
“Because Mother Wallingford was sending her home. That’s what Mrs. Judd said. She was in the class just behind Caroline. Mrs. Judd had never heard about the vocation part that made the parents want the memorial for their daughter.”
“You never told me this, Tildy.”
“I’m sure I must have.”
“This is the first time I’m hearing it.”
“Well, maybe it was just Chloe I told. We were all so separately busy that spring! You and I had our secret scene to rehearse, and Chloe was preparing to surprise me with that prop. I wonder what ever happened to that nasty old prop?”
“So what was your transformation?”
“Well, I went from being Tildy Stratton to being nothing. I had gained twenty pounds over the summer and nobody even looked at me in the halls. Daddy and Madeline were worried—I guess Mama must have been, too, but her way of showing it was to turn away at the sight of me—”
“Oh, Tildy!” Maud’s frostiness had melted right down.
“No, it was interesting; that’s why I’m telling you. First it was devastating, but later I saw it as interesting. For the first time in my life, I had no influence. It was like being invisible—or dead—and watching the world go on without me. Actually, I didn’t want to be noticed, because I hated myself. I went to my classes and had my remedial reading sessions, and that was about it. The school was close enough to walk to, but John or Madeline still had to drive me across town to the psychiatrist’s. He and I talked a lot about Mother Malloy. I think he wanted me to admit that I felt I had caused her death so he could talk me out of it, but I saw right through him. For that entire year I became what I used to call ‘part of the background.’ Madeline was my comfort that whole year, but maybe she gave me too much unconditional love. It was Creighton who pulled me out of it, the following summer at the pool. He would tease me about starting over at the senior high school and how I would be the tantalizing stranger everyone would be wondering about. He made a game out of it: What would the stranger wear? How would she look? In what style would she tantalize her victims? By the end of the summer, I had lost weight and was beginning to feel the old powers stirring again. It was like I was recovering from a long illness. But it changed me, you know, Maud. I could never take my powers for granted again.”
CHAPTER 38
A Correspondence
Chloe Vick
Vick & Associates
5 Zebulon Square
Mountain City, N.C.
Easter Monday, March 24, 2008
Dear Chloe,
These early Easters always feel strange to me. St. Patrick’s Day was only last Monday! Our early church people should have gotten their act together better.
I’ve been to your website. What exciting work your firm does. All that green and solar stuff. I looked at everyone’s photos (two of your associates look younger than my grandchildren) and admired their projects. And I really like your sacred spaces. Our church could use a labyrinth like the one you designed for the Episcopalians.
The reason I am writing (I don’t know your home address) is that I plan to drive up to Mountain City the second weekend in April, to see Flavia (who is celebrating her ninety-sixth birthday) and spend some quiet time at Madeline’s grave. I miss Madeline more than I can say. She was the one person in my life I felt was always on my side, and we all need one of those.
Look, Chloe, is there any chance we could get together? Last time you had to rush off to meet a truckload of stone. Did you finish whatever it was you were making with it? I do hope you can find time, if not for a lunch or dinner, then at least for a springtime walk. Maybe we could meet at the old campus and pay a call on the Red Nun. I never saw her again after that awful night when I went around spraying everything.
Yours,
Tildy
PS. I was unsuccessful in coaxing Maud Norton (now Martinez) away from her busy life in Palm Beach to make the trip with me. She works part-time for the vet who bought her late husband’s animal hospital and now she’s writing a one-act play for some competition. Says it’s about two girlhood friends who meet again in their seventies and exchange life stories. I have begged her to be kind! Last October she visited me in Marietta after reading Mother Ravenel’s memoir. Said it made her miss me, even though neither of us—or anybody in my family—was mentioned in it. Maybe that’s why nobody brought it up at Madeline’s funeral. Have you read it? Maud made an appalling marriage choice when she was seventeen and went through some rough times but married a Cuban-American in her forties and had many good years with him. No children. Maud and I spent three days drinking wine and filling in each other’s blanks for the past fifty-five years.
Here is my email address, if you prefer. You are still a working woman and I know you must be very busy.
To: Riversm200@yahoo.com
From:
Subject: Your April visit
Monday, March 31, 2008
Dear Tildy: A Sunday afternoon would be best for me. Let me know when and where you want to meet. The old campus sounds fine—it’s a technical college now, you know; one of our associates is designing its new EMT training center—but I’d better warn you that the Red Nun is completely covered with graffiti, both carved and spray-painted. See what you started? Yes, I finally read the memoir, but hadn’t when we gathered for Madeline’s funeral. The parts I treasured most were those scattered glimpses of my family: my grandfather Vick remodeling the water tower into a prayer space with Mother Wallingford, the mention of some of Uncle Henry’s buildings, and most of all that image of my mother, even though not named, dressed up as Fiona Finney on Halloween and riding into the grotto on a rented horse.
I miss Madeline, too. She was always kind to me and let me have the privacy I needed, and nobody could have taken better care of Uncle Henry in his last years. And I know she and Uncle Henry had many good years, as you say of your friend Maud’s second marriage. How nice that you two have found each other again.
My project with the stones is coming along—it’s outdoors, so I can’t work on it in winter—but I will probably be working on it for the rest of my life. At least I hope so. Yours, Chloe
CHAPTER 39
The Chapel of Secrets
Monday evening, March 31, 2008
Wooded hill above Chloe’s farmhouse
THAT WAS ITS name, known only to her: a derelict corncrib refashioned by her own hands into a magically small and narrow chapel of logs and native stone. It was her homage to a few unadorned places of prayer she had been lucky enough to visit over the course of a lifetime: a Saxon chapel in the north of England, built of stones from a ruined Roman fort; an anchoress’s shrine in the middle of busy Norwich; a tiny Huguenot church in an upstate New York village. Here, wearing her back brace as she mixed her cement in a wheelbarrow and set her stones, she could keep company with the people she loved, who continued to live in her and through her. Here also, in the silence of her country thoughts, she could continue work on whatever in her was hers alone to complete.
Its slanted walls were bare of any symbol or icon. No markers or plaques memorialized her personal saints, who lived and spoke only within the rhythms of her mind.
Henry: guardian and companion. (“What do we want to do now, Chloe? Go home after the reception? Go to Europe and look at some buildings? Take another year at Mount St. Gabriel’s? Transfer to Mountain City High?”) And eventual dispenser of selected confidences when he thought the time was right. (“We didn’t have a whole lot of time together, you know, but Antonia gave me to understand that what happened out at the Swag changed the path of her life. It was hard enough, she said, to face up to their mutual attraction; but sickening to contemplate that the two of them might cheat on God after they had taken vows.”)
Agnes: mother and best friend. (“It’s as though you are watching over my girlhood in these drawings and preserving me for myself.”) Spiritual tutor. (“Would you co
me straight home from a sweaty day at school and drag your best dress off the hanger and rush off to a fabulous dance without showering and fixing your hair first?”)
Fiona Finney: favorite nun of mother and daughter. (“But, you know, dear, even Our Lord had His favorites.”) Purveyor of requested information in her last days. (“They were just being girls, those oblates. But Agnes wanted no part of it. I told her she was wise, for someone so young, to understand there are enough necessary secrets to be kept—and God knows I have kept my share of those!—without dreaming up unnecessary ones.”)
And the man she had loved—in necessary secrecy—for twenty-six years, a Catholic doctor everyone knew, dead these last fourteen, whom she named only in her prayers and when they were together in dreams. As in life, he was taciturn, but, as in life, he strengthened her, whether present or absent, by her absolute faith in his love.
She shrank from imagining her last fifty-five years packed into a Tildy summary, should she have been willing to fill in even some of her “blanks” for her former best friend.
Nevertheless, as with those few she had loved and trusted, she still could hear perfectly well the voices of the ones she no longer or never did.
(“After the play Chloe and I were never close. Uncle Henry took her off to show her the sights of Europe that summer—not Italy, he couldn’t bring himself to go there again—and then she did one more year at Mount St. Gabriel’s and was very close to Mother Finney in her final days. Of course, when she transferred over to Mountain City High, I was a grade behind and we moved in different circles. She was always a loner, but it was starting to show more. And then everyone got married, even Madeline and Uncle Henry, to everyone’s astonishment, and Chloe insisted on moving out of the Vick house and restoring a dilapidated old farmhouse miles from anywhere that didn’t even have running water or an indoor bathroom. Then when she was almost thirty she sent out invitations to a big wedding, only to cancel at the last minute. Nobody ever knew why until years later, when we got together for some wine and filled in each other’s blanks. Well, I filled in mine, but she left a great deal out! She had been having a long, long affair with a married man, even before her engagement. They kept it very secret; they had to. He was a local person everybody knew, the father of many children—she wouldn’t even give me the number. It started after his son was killed at eighteen. Chloe was in Uncle Henry’s firm by then and she designed the son’s memorial, but she wouldn’t tell me where it is or what it looks like. They were never together in public, and sometimes months went by when they couldn’t see each other. And for the last few years of his life he was bedridden and gaga and she was unable to see him at all. But that would have been tolerable to someone of Chloe’s solitary nature. When she couldn’t be with the ones she loved, she drew their pictures and talked to them and listened for their answers.”)
a cognizant original v5 release october 04 2010
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to:
Jennifer Hershey and Dana Edwin Isaacson at Random House, for their extraordinary editing.
John W. Hawkins, for being my literary agent and friend since 1968.
Mother Tessa Bielecki, O.C.D., for the wonderful phrase “holy daring” in her book Holy Daring: An Outrageous Gift to Modern Spirituality from Saint Teresa, the Grand Wild Woman of Avila (Element, 1994). However, the concept of holy daring set out in this novel was formulated by the character of Mother Elizabeth Wallingford.
The late Mother Kathleen Winters, R.C.E., for fifty years of friendship and spiritual guidance.
The late Mother Margaret Potts, R.C.E., for her 1991 memoir, St. Genevieve’s Remembered.
Father David Bronson, for his help with religious orders and English church history.
Corinne Uzzell Spencer, for her rich memories of St. Genevieve’s.
John Pfaff, director of institutional advancement at Carolina Day School, which in 1987 combined St. Genevieve’s, Gibbons Hall, and Asheville Country Day, for his extensive archival research into St. Genevieve’s yearbooks and memorabilia for the purpose of this book.
The old Victorian building of St. Genevieve’s, at various times an orphanage, a hotel, and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina, before it became St. Genevieve’s in 1908, for providing the setting for my tale. The (now demolished) building, its rooms and grounds—with the exception of the unfinished sculpture of the Red Nun—remain vivid in my memory and dreams. The fictional characters, as well as the Order of St. Scholastica founded by Mothers Wallingford and Finney, are products of my imagination.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, the first two volumes, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. She lives in Woodstock, New York. Visit the author’s website at www.gailgodwin.com.
Unfinished Desires is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Gail Godwin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Godwin, Gail.
Unfinished desires: a novel / Gail Godwin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-912-3
1. Catholic schools—Fiction. 2. Women college graduates—Fiction. 3. Nuns—Fiction.
4. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 5. North Carolina—Fiction.
6. Nineteen fifties—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.O315R43 2009
813′.54—dc22 2008049320
www.atrandom.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Prologue A MEMOIR BEGUN
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 Tour of the Grounds
CHAPTER 2 Uncle
Early Beginnings
CHAPTER 3 Drawing the Dead
Registration Days at Mount St. Gabriel’s
CHAPTER 4 Switching Friends
CHAPTER 5 Mother Malloy’s Ninth Grade, 1951
The morning interviews
Noon—the hour of Sext—the Angelus
The afternoon interviews
Mother Malloy’s Ninth Grade, 1951
CHAPTER 6 The Afterrunner
CHAPTER 7 The Swag
Evening, Tildy’s birthday The Swag
Early Beginnings, Continued
CHAPTER 8 The Pungent Ache of the Soul
CHAPTER 9 Nuns’ Dormitory
Ignatian Examen of Conscience
CHAPTER 10 Madeline
CHAPTER 11 Sister Bridgets Chore List
Holy Daring: A Predawn Digression
CHAPTER 12 Girls’ Voices Upstairs
CHAPTER 13 All Souls
CHAPTER 14 More Indignities
Holy Daring: A Noonday Digression
CHAPTER 15 Tildy Struggles
PART TWO
CHAPTER 16 The Christmas Critic
CHAPTER 17 Shadows on an Outing
CHAPTER 18 Two Nuns on a Walk
A Confessional Cassette
CHAPTER 19 Unmerited Degradation
CHAPTER 20 Grading Papers
> CHAPTER 21 Realignments
Monday afternoon The Stratton house
CHAPTER 22 An Errand for Agnes
CHAPTER 23 Agnes at Rest
CHAPTER 24 Trigonometry Midterm
CHAPTER 25 Silent Skies
Two nuns setting off for a walk
CHAPTER 26 Henry
CHAPTER 27 Auteur/Directeur
CHAPTER 28 Revising the Dead
CHAPTER 29 A Letter
CHAPTER 30 Dire Alternatives
CHAPTER 31 The Play
CHAPTER 32 Act Two
CHAPTER 33 Aftermath
CHAPTER 34 Sister Bridgets Heart
Confessional Cassette Rerouted
CHAPTER 35 A Midmorning Walk
CHAPTER 36 Reunion MAUD
CHAPTER 37 Reunion, Continued TILDY
CHAPTER 38 A Correspondence
CHAPTER 39 The Chapel of Secrets
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THE AUTHOR