Unfinished Desires (34 page)

And as the two of them stood contemplating the unfinished memorial, the foundress ticked off the blessings on her fingers.

“Number one, God allowed her to remain unfinished, a reprieve beyond our wildest hopes. This hulk of marble is a much more bearable concession. As you know, I was prepared to endure a life-size Caroline DuPree, sculpted down to her finite particulars, complete with the Scholastica habit and rosary,
in red
—affronting Our Lady until these mountains crumbled, so that her parents could idealize a troubled daughter rather than punish the school. Number two, the parents are safely dead, and no one will commission another sculptor to complete the job. And number three, most important, no scandal from that girl’s unfortunate obsession with me has jeopardized all we have built here.” Here she gave a bitter, outraged laugh, and Mother Finney knew she was recalling the girl’s supreme infringement, the final straw. The lovelorn Caroline DuPree had sneaked into the nun’s dormitory, off-limits to students, and spent the night in Mother Wallingford’s closet. Or part of the night, until she gave herself away stifling a cough. She had come equipped to camp out in the recessive angle of the foundress’s L-shaped closet, which she had reconnoitered in a previous violation of the rules, when all the nuns were in chapel. In her knapsack she had stuffed a lap robe for warmth, a Mason jar and a washcloth should she need to relieve her bladder, and had even packed herself a nocturnal snack of a sandwich and juice.

“Why?” Mother Wallingford had demanded, having fastened her veil, thrown on her cape over her nightgown, and marched the girl downstairs to her own room.

“I wanted to be with you for one night, Mother,” came the sobbing plea. Then, cannily, a religious note was inserted. “Our Lord, He … nobody would stay awake and watch with Him. I wanted to show I could.”

“You are confusing things” was the icy reply. “You are a very confused girl, Caroline. Get into bed and do not leave your room until I send for you.”

“Not even to come to breakfast or go to the bathroom, Mother?”

“You have the contents of your knapsack to tide you over on both accounts.”

“Won’t you at least kiss me good night, Mother?”

“Certainly not.”

MOTHER FINNEY’S POCKET
watch now said ten to three, allowing her to release Agnes’s little daughter from her unproductive visit to a forgetful old nun. “I must be on my way, Chloe, to ring the bell for None. Come and visit me again, and best of luck with your play.”

“I hope you’ll come see it, Mother.”

“Oh, I expect I’ll be there. And remember, I’ll be praying for your mother and for you too, dear.”

She stopped off at the kitchen to wash and soap her hands under the tap, drying them on a fresh towel with the priestly care that precedes a sacred duty, and then set off, with her slight limp from a girlhood horse fall, down the trophy-lined hall to summon the nuns to midafternoon prayer.

WITH EACH STRONG
peal of the bell, she sent up prayers for her dear departed Agnes and for Agnes’s slyer and more timid daughter. She prayed for all the girls, past and present, who, whether they had flourished or fallen or strayed, had partaken of Mount St. Gabriel’s root system.

She recognized the footfalls of her various sisters as they crossed the landing above the gated stairwell: the discreet swish of young Mother Malloy’s rubber-soled brogues; the flighty high step of Juilliard-trained Mother Lacy, humming a chant under her breath; the motivated tread of the headmistress, Mother Ravenel.

Suzanne.

“Tell me about the new girls, Mother Finney.” It was the beginning of the school year, 1929, and Mother Wallingford’s violent morning headaches had first sent her back to bed and at last driven her to make an appointment with the doctor.

“There’s a nice new boarder, from Charleston. Suzanne Ravenel. Holds herself straight as a switch. Not a whit of homesickness. Says the air agrees with her for the first time in her life and that she has never been so happy.”

“She told you that?”

“She’s at my table. A forthcoming girl, but quite respectful. She’ll do well with us, I think.”

“One wonders, though, what such a statement says about her home life.”

Then all of the apprehensive September, the blighted October. The nun’s doctor had sent Mother Wallingford straight to the neurosurgeon. There were tests at the hospital. The X-rays. The spinal tap. The needle biopsy. Consultation between specialists by long-distance telephone. Medicine to alleviate the pressure on the cerebellum. The bad news, wrapped in alleviative phrases: “maximal feasible removal,” meaning some of it might be cut out, giving the patient some extra time until it grew back. To take all of it would leave “unacceptable damage,” meaning the patient would be better off dead. The foundress was first stoic, then angry. She was only sixty-seven, there were many things to be done for the growth of the Order, for the improvement of the schools. She metamorphosed into a demon of efficiency. Lawyers were summoned, overseas calls booked, new documents drawn up, signed, and cosigned. Just in time. Her mind and personality deteriorated daily.

The end of October brought Black Friday, followed by the Monday morning telephone call from the Ravenel brother in Charleston. Their father killed in a hunting accident. The girl not to come home for the funeral. Her nonrefundable board and tuition prepaid to mid-December. After that, more modest arrangements must be found for her back in Charleston. No money for her to continue at Mount St. Gabriel’s. However, not possible for her to live at home with the mother.

“The girl who lost her father is here with us in the infirmary,” Mother Finney told Mother Wallingford, who had occupied a room there since she went on the intravenous painkiller.

“Which girl, Mother Finney? Do you expect me to keep up with every girl in my present state?”

“The nice little girl from Charleston we’ve talked about. Suzanne Ravenel. She’s taking it hard that she has to leave us when the term finishes.”

“Then why must she leave?”

“There’s no more money. And she can’t live with her mother. There seems to be a problem about the mother.”

“There always is. The mother is an opium eater; that’s the problem.” The foundress erupted into the unnerving high-pitched cackle of her illness.

“No, that was—I think you’re confusing her with someone else, Lizzie.”

“I’ll thank you not to ‘Lizzie’ me. What is the point of a rule if we ignore it and address one another by first names? And I’m not as impaired as you’d like to think. I know whose mother you are talking about. And a very effective method of abdication, too. Send the girl to me. Who better than myself to enlighten her about a mother’s abdication?”

“When Reverend Mother told the girl about her father and asked if she wanted anyone to accompany her to chapel, do you know what she said?”

“For God’s sake, Fiona, be specific. ‘She’ who? Reverend Mother or the girl? Doesn’t the girl have a name?”

“Suzanne Ravenel, Mother. The boarder whose father had the shooting accident in Charleston. Reverend Mother was very touched. When she asked the girl if there was anyone she would like to have with her, Suzanne Ravenel said there was only One whom she needed and He was always with her anyway. Reverend Mother suspects she may have an early vocation.”

Again the eerie high-pitched cackle. The tumor seemed to have robbed the foundress of her rich, mellow tones. “Reverend Mother suspects everyone of having an early vocation. Send the girl to me. I’ll put her straight about mothers.”

“I was wondering, Mother—”

“I’m not your mother, Fiona. Your mother died a good Catholic death from having too many babies. Now who’s becoming forgetful?” Another cackle, this time triumphant and mean.

“I was wondering,” ventured Mother Finney, now barred from using both first names and religious ones, “if we might look to the trust for keeping Suzanne Ravenel here with us. We could do it on a year-by-year basis, if you see fit.”

“I’ll be in the ground before the end of this year, Fiona. Certainly, let’s sign up your little protégée and shield her under Father’s munificent umbrella. You can do it yourself. You have power of attorney now.”

“I’d rather we signed together. You still can, you know.”

To Mother Finney’s chagrin, Mother Wallingford dissolved into a squall of grief. Forlorn yowling noises poured out of the foundress’s mouth, interspersed, which made it all the sadder, with completely lucid sentences. “Oh, Fiona, why do you allow me to be so cruel to you? It’s the pressure, the pressure … some iron giant is pressing my head between his iron hands and soon I will squash like an overripe fruit. Oh, Fi! Fi! Fi! What has it all been
for?”

The morphine drip was increased that night, and during the following week Mother Finney arranged for a sum to be set aside for a full room-and-board scholarship for Suzanne Ravenel, to be renewed annually through high school and junior college for as long as the girl proved herself worthy of it.

The foundress was given credit for the idea by Mother Finney herself. That was the kind of thing that furthered the school legend. Just as the Red Nun was allowed to become part of that legend in order to protect the school. Suzanne was brought to Mother Wallingford’s infirmary room for a short “audience” with the dying foundress during what Mother Finney judged to be one of the foundress’s more lucid moments, of which there were fewer and fewer. Though the audience lasted less than five minutes, it twice veered toward disaster. The first time was when Mother Wallingford went into a screed over bad mothers, shouting out some lines from De Quincey about his cold and unforgiving mother, who had driven him to opium. (“The whole artillery of her displeasure unmasked!” Mother Wallingford had screeched in the unnerving, high-pitched voice.) This was diverted by Mother Finney’s quick reminder that we also had a Divine Mother who can contain all our sorrows because she herself is the Mother of Sorrows, a quote that was later to find its way into Suzanne Ravenel’s report of her one and only meeting with the dying foundress, attributing these lines to the foundress.

The second close call was when Mother Wallingford, incoherently muttering something in Latin, had tried to embrace the girl, who then became entangled in the intravenous drip. Mother Wallingford screamed at Mother Finney’s efforts to disengage them, accusing Mother Finney of trying to steal her rightful child. Then the infirmarian came running and Mother Finney led away the frightened Suzanne. Mother Finney sat beside the girl’s bed and prayed the rosary with her until Suzanne Ravenel fell asleep.

None of this became part of Suzanne Ravenel’s later remembrances. True to the spirit of romantic hindsight by which one builds a personal myth, the whole thing was represented by Suzanne as having taken place in dignity and affection between the dying foundress and the chosen beneficiary. Mother Finney had no place in this myth.

CHAPTER 29
A Letter

Mrs. Creighton Rivers
984 Cherbrooke Lane
Marietta, GA 30064

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Dear Tildy,

Rebecca Meyer (now Birnbaum) from our ninth-grade class helped me trace you through Ashley Nettle. Ashley said you go by Mary now, but I hope you won’t mind if I call you by the old name, at least for the purpose of this letter.

I hardly know where to begin. Let me start by saying I was sorry to hear of your husband’s death. I have such pleasant memories of Creighton Rivers. He raised me from a dog paddler to a crawler and was always so sweet with us at the pool. He used to call you “Tantalizing Tildy.” You predicted he would marry your sister, Madeline.

I, too, am widowed. My husband, Max, a veterinary surgeon, died two and a half years ago. I have just sold our house, along with Max’s office building and surgery. We had no children, and last February I lost our beloved golden retriever, Daisy. The prospect of my independence verges on the terrifying, but I am in good health, knock on wood, and will try to meet the demands of this new freedom.

I wonder if you knew that Mother Ravenel wrote a school memoir,
Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered
, which was published in 2006 by a Mountain City printing press. Becky told me about it and then kindly sent me a copy, at my request, advising me to read it as a fascinating document of a lost “girl world.” Becky is a psychiatrist in New York working with adolescents. She “rediscovered” me through a guest column I wrote for the
Palm Beach Post
about a dyslexic boy reading to an old golden retriever.

It was a mixed experience, reading through
Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered
. Some pages made me nostalgic for the “holy daring” and the excellence of the whole endeavor (I mean the founding of the school), and on other pages I felt she was making up her own version as she went along, putting in what she liked and leaving out what didn’t suit her. But then I thought, Maybe that’s the way all our memories work. If you haven’t seen it—and if you want to see it—I’ll be glad to send you my copy.

I feel I could go on and on. The problem would be organizing all I want to tell you and ask you! Remember our five-page papers for Mother Malloy? Be concise and modest, she would say; don’t bite off more than you can chew. So I am going to stop here and go out and mail this before I start finding fault with it. My street address is on the back of the envelope, and I also include my cell phone number and my email address. I would dearly love to hear from you, Tildy. It was the reading of Mother Ravenel’s memoir—in which neither of us is mentioned—that made me realize how much I have missed you all these years.

Maud Norton Martinez