Unfinished Desires (31 page)

“Yes. At first I thought she might have said ‘deluding.’ So I asked, to be sure. Suzanne had somehow gotten between her and God, she said, and as time went on her intention felt watered down. Whereas Suzanne’s fervor seemed only to increase. As if she was feeding on Antonia’s former vocation, was how Antonia put it.”

“Oh, God, Henry,” came Cornelia’s affronted protest from beneath the hood. “This is the first time I’m hearing this. Why did she never tell
me
that?”

“Maybe because she thought you had other things on your mind. You were about to become a mother for the second time. And also maybe because I came right out and asked. I was wanting to ask her to marry me by then, but I didn’t want to be competing with a vocation, even a stalled one. Antonia assured me that she no longer had the least desire to be a nun. She did want to give her life to God, but she trusted that He would show her how. And then she told me how being with little Madeline so much had given her the notion that she would make a good mother herself. The funny thing was—well, she practically proposed to me that day, if you want to know the truth.”

“Henry, hold that expression and don’t blink. Count to ten. There, I may or may not have captured something. But that’s enough for today. Suddenly I am worn out.”

When Cornelia emerged from her covering she had a persecuted look.

“Am I going to get the platinum treatment?” Henry asked.

“That depends on what develops on the plates. But either way, this little interlude of ours has been an unexpected development, hasn’t it?”

“Let me take you out to lunch.” Thinking better of it even as he was proposing it.

“Thank you, but I never go out to lunch. Flavia makes me a thermos of soup. Since I fired my last secretary I’ve got a backlog of stuff to do. But what do you think she meant about the Swag? What could have happened out there?”

“I wasn’t there, Cornelia. I was off at college, remember?”

“But what do you think it could have been? Did Antonia ever say anything about it after you were married?”

“Ah, we were only together such a short time,” Henry answered, taking refuge in his standard equivocation. He saw no reason to offer further confidences to his sister-in-law, especially considering Cornelia’s animus toward Suzanne. Lying beside Antonia in the dark and talking, after they had diligently worshipped each other’s bodies, as per their wedding vows, had been the most daring and intimate thing he’d ever done with anyone. Antonia had felt the same. She had told him about the disturbing kiss in the woods, out at the Swag. (“It came out of nowhere. I’m not saying I didn’t respond; it was the first time anyone outside my family had kissed me on the lips. But everything became muddied after that. I started wondering whether she wanted God in the same way I did, or did she want to have God through me.”)

“I just know Antonia was heartbroken when Suzanne joined early,” said Cornelia. “She completely lost her spirit. She wouldn’t even be Queen of the School. Suzanne’s betrayal left her stunned.”

“But isn’t that a normal response to a friend’s betrayal? You are stunned. You thought you knew someone and then you find out you didn’t. Isn’t it possible that, deep down, Antonia was relieved?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Henry.” Cornelia looked as though she couldn’t wait to be rid of him. “All these revelations are too much for an ordinary working day. All I know is I still get convulsive when I think of poor Tony’s ruined senior year. And now she’s dead, and I’m just learning she never got her wish to be a mother! And meanwhile that devil continues in power, still worming her way into our lives. You know what she is up to now? She wants to win Tildy away from me!”

CHAPTER 27
Auteur/Directeur

Saturday afternoon, March 15, 1952
The Ides of March
Suite of Nita Netherby Judd
Sunset Park Inn, Mountain City

TILDY WAS PLEASED
with how things were going with
The Red Nun
. The play had been cast, and everybody had a part; some girls had more than one part. The scenery was being constructed and painted by Chloe, with offstage supervision from her architect uncle, and Daddy and Tildy had finally finished recording John’s (carefully coached) delivery of God’s lines, with creepy pauses in just the right places.

So far, not one disgruntled murmur had reached Tildy’s ears. Nobody had gone complaining to Mother Ravenel, either, because Tildy would have been informed by the headmistress. The two met regularly so Tildy could update her on the progress of “their” production, as the Ravenel now indulgently called it.

Art was turning out to be easy, compared to people. People kept behaving out of character, or exposing alarming new facets. Take—well, take anyone in her
life
, for that matter.

First, take Chloe, since Chloe was still her official best friend. Chloe had now gone into the second stage of her mysticism, or whatever it was. After she and “Agnes” had done whatever they did down in Barlow to shake off the stepfather forever, she admitted to Tildy there had been “teamwork” between (dead) mother and daughter, but offered no details. However, Chloe was throwing herself into the scenery, and, thanks to Uncle Henry’s help with the movable sets, it was going to be really spectacular.

Tildy had continued to spend Saturday nights with Chloe because the play needed to be blocked out in scenes, and Tildy found that her creative faculties worked best when she lay on her sofa bed with her eyes closed and Chloe read slowly through the play until Tildy envisioned a kind of
square
around a certain body of material; then she would cry “Stop!” and have Chloe make a big colored block around that scene. They had done this so often that Tildy knew the play pretty well by heart. She could
see
it, stacked up in its red, blue, yellow, green, brown, purple, and black scenes, on the insides of her eyelids when she lay in bed at night. And Chloe was patient and steadfast: she would read a scene over and over until Tildy had seen whatever it was she needed to see. Very unlike Maud, who used to sigh heavily at some point and say, “All right, Tildy, open your eyes and let’s move on, okay?”

Maud posed a dual problem these days. On the one hand, she seemed grateful, almost humbly so, for their revived friendship; she sought Tildy’s counsel about the smallest things. But there was at the same time in Maud a disturbing new standoffishness. Tildy could not remember this holding back in their previous friendship. Maud seemed to be keeping certain parts of herself in reserve. Tildy was at the moment in the midst of puzzling this out. She felt sure that if she could get to the reasons, it would be more like the old Tildy-and-Maud equation, though of course now Chloe had to fit somewhere into that equation.

Maud’s life over at the Pine Cone Lodge was disintegrating by the day. It wasn’t even the Pine Cone Lodge anymore: the sign had been taken down and an up-and-coming real estate firm had put a binder on the house. If the city planning board gave the go-ahead next week, the sale would go through and the company would start turning it into apartments for older people who wanted to be within walking distance to town. And that meant Maud and Lily Norton and Mr. Foley would have to move out immediately and leave the house “broom clean” within thirty days of the closing. That was part of the negotiated sale price, which Maud was being coy about, though Daddy had said he had heard Lily had done very well because this same real estate bunch was buying up more old houses on the same street and planned a sort of enclave for well-heeled oldies who’d had their driver’s licenses revoked.

Recently Maud had overheard her mother and Mr. Foley discussing whether it would be more economical to rent temporary lodgings in Mountain City so that Maud could finish out her school year “at home” or for them to go ahead and invest in a house in Atlanta, where Mr. Foley’s home office was, and fork over a boarding fee to Mount St. Gabriel’s for the remaining month or so.

“Oh, Christ, Maud, don’t be silly—you can stay here with us!” Tildy had expostulated, though she knew she would have to win over Mama, who seemed to have taken against Maud.

But it had become easier to bring Mama around to her wishes since Mother Ravenel had made Tildy the director of the play. Tildy exulted in her new power over Mama: Cornelia was on jealous alert for the first sign that her baby was being stolen away by the enemy.

But Maud had rebuffed Tildy’s offer. “Thank you, that’s really sweet of you, Tildy, but, you know, I am going to
pressure
them to let me board. That’s what will work out best for me, I’ve decided.”

Why
being cooped up as a boarder would work out best for Maud was beyond Tildy’s comprehension. There was something being kept from her, but she could not figure out what. It had to be more than Maud’s antipathy for Art Foley, because there was certainly nothing new about
that
.

Meanwhile, Maud was devotedly immersed in
The Red Nun
. She had learned all of her lines for both of her parts—although Tildy was still writing more lines for the second part.

Before Tildy had cast the play, Maud had respectfully asked if she might “try out” for the part of Mother Wallingford, the foundress. “We’re not going to have tryouts,” Tildy told her. “They take too long and people tend to imagine themselves capable of roles that are completely unsuited to them. You waste valuable time paying lip service to the democratic process. Mother Ravenel feels the same. She cast all the parts for the play’s first performance in 1931.”

Then Tildy had let a suspenseful pause go by before she put Maud out of her misery—and granted her double what she’d asked for. “It so happens, Maud, that I have
already
cast you as Mother Elizabeth Wallingford. You have the gravity and bearing of an aristocratic English foundress. Nobody in our class could wear Mother Wallingford’s own cape as well as you.”

Tildy watched Maud’s countenance change from disappointment to relief. Only there was a shadow of the new aloofness, too. As if she were having a small side thought about how juvenile all this fuss about a mere school play was.

“But in my production, the person who plays the foundress has to play another role, as well,” Tildy went on.

“What role is that?”

“It’s a character I haven’t finished creating yet. Each class is allowed to add their own material, as long as it honors the spirit of the original production. Mother Ravenel has given me permission to add new characters who come later in the history of the school. Your second character will be a girl named Domenica. She’s the best friend of a girl named Rexanne. The two of them plan to emulate Elizabeth and her friend Fiona by becoming nuns together.”

And then take John and Flavia, those monoliths of dignity in Tildy’s home life. They had behaved totally out of character after Tildy invited them into the dining room to listen to Daddy’s and her finished tape of John speaking God’s lines. She had ceremoniously brought the machine to the table, laid it on a mat, and pressed the button. After a series of hisses and pops, the hollow magisterial voice caused both John and Flavia to step back in alarm from the reel. But as it rolled on (“I smashed continents together …”), with its pregnant word spacings indicated by the director, the couple regained their usual composure. However, by the time God got to the part about deciding to create a school “in my own good time,” where God’s voice swung up a notch, both John and Flavia turned away from her, and Tildy saw their shoulders were shaking. Her first thought had been “They are so moved they’re
crying,”
but then Flavia gasped that something was “boiling over on the stove” and ran to the kitchen, even though it was midafternoon and nothing was cooking. John held out a few moments longer before blurting a strangled “Thank you, Miss Tildy” and bolting through the kitchen’s swinging door after his wife. From the other side of the door came a horrid release of stifled laughter as the couple made a hurried escape to their quarters over the garage.

And then, just yesterday, Friday, there had been the completely out-of-character behavior of Mother Malloy during their tutoring session. They had been working up Tildy’s medieval history paper the way they had worked up her
David Copperfield
paper. Tildy was first encouraged to extemporize aloud, and then together they’d narrow her enthusiasms down to manageable proportions. Tildy had chosen Eleanor of Aquitaine as her topic and, having anticipated being congratulated by Mother Malloy at finding a perfect fit for herself, was dashed when the teacher said many others in the class were writing on Eleanor, too. “Well,” said Tildy, rising above her setback, “but it’s what you do with the topic, isn’t it, Mother?” “There’s certainly enough of her to go around,” the nun agreed, smiling. “What do you plan to do with her, Tildy?”

And Tildy had launched confidently into her extemporization: “I would like to use a lot
of French
, Mother, maybe compose it in French, the way we did with my Uriah Heep paper. This time it seems
really
appropriate because she was a French queen before she was an English one.”

Last time, when they had been working up her Uriah Heep paper, Tildy had simply tossed out highlights of things that had caught her fancy about this grotesque figure, relying on her gift for pulling excitement (or repulsion) out of the air, and liberally sprinkling it with what people called her “precocious” vocabulary, meanwhile watching Mother Malloy closely to measure the quality of her nods. Steering by the more vigorous nods, Tildy had been able to narrow down to the topic that had earned her a B plus: what made Uriah so disgusting and what parts of his disgustingness were truly evil?

But this time the nod method wasn’t working so well. None of the nun’s nods could be called vigorous.

Tildy had chosen Eleanor of Aquitaine because that was the person in the period they were studying who seemed most worthy of her imagination. Given the right parentage and all those lands, Tildy felt sure that she, too, would have made a superb queen at fifteen, which she would be on her next birthday.

Given more encouragement, she was about to voice this certainty aloud, but Mother Malloy was sitting very still, hands folded on her lap, head bowed, and so Tildy searched for something less egotistical and hit on the idea of
fifteen alone
. Mother Malloy loved concision and modesty—she was always counseling them about “not biting off more than you can chew” in their presentations.

“I was thinking, Mother, maybe I could just take Eleanor at fifteen, basing it on all the history that was going on around her, all the fascinating people, and why she and Louis had to consolidate their holdings, and … no, wait, Mother, I’ve got a better idea. I could just do the marriage—or even Eleanor, on horseback, a fifteen-year-old duchess, riding toward the young king she has never met, with all her vassals and trappings, and show why—”

Mother Malloy did not raise her head. She seemed scarcely to be breathing.

Then she stirred herself and apologized, explaining that she had been having trouble sleeping lately, and asked Tildy if she would mind going over her proposal again.

Three of the most dependable people in Tildy’s life: the teacher who had spent hours encouraging her to express herself in new ways and the two house servants whose adoration she had taken for granted ever since they had taken turns pushing her wherever she wanted to go in her stroller; within a single week, two of them had run out of the room laughing at her, and she had put the other one to sleep sitting bolt upright.

It made you think twice before taking anybody’s fealty for granted. Thank goodness there were some new people in her life to make a fresh impression on today. At the moment, Tildy sat next to Jiggsie Judd, the new boarder who had recently been demoted to ninth grade by Mother Ravenel, on the scratchy backseat of Jiggsie’s Spartanburg grandmother’s ancient Oldsmobile, being driven by “Bob,” a cigar-smoking man in Levi’s and a plaid wool jacket. They were on their way to the Sunset Park Inn to have afternoon tea with Mrs. Judd in her suite. Bob seemed to be an uncertain mixture of friend and retainer to Jiggsie’s grandmother. Jiggsie said he “went everywhere with her” and “stayed in the room smoking when she had company at home,” but Granny wrote him a check for fifty dollars every week; Jiggsie had seen her doing it. Since Tildy had been in the car, Bob had related several bits of information about Mrs. Judd, whom he referred to as “Nita,” in his sarcastic smoker’s voice: “Nita” still had her license, but she liked him to drive so she didn’t have to pay attention to where they were going; “Nita” refused to part with the 1937 Oldsmobile, whose yearly upkeep cost them more than a new car, because her late husband had bought it for her the year before he died; “Nita” tended to dwell in the past, but she was right good company. His tone teetered between affection and condescension. Tildy was encouraged by the “dwelling in the past” part, however, because this afternoon she planned to ransack the memory of Mrs. Nita Netherby Judd, class of 1913, for the purposes of the play. Think of it: 1913 was only three years after Mount St. Gabriel’s opened. Mrs. Judd would have known the foundress in her prime!