Unfinished Desires (35 page)

CHAPTER 30
Dire Alternatives

Evening of April 9, 1952
Wednesday in Holy Week
Mount St. Gabriel’s chapel

MAUD HAD SPECIAL
permission from Mother Ravenel to stay in chapel until the nuns’ Compline and seek God’s will. She had been a boarder at Mount St. Gabriel’s for a week. The Pine Cone Lodge was no more. Her mother and Art Foley were living in a hotel in Atlanta while they house hunted. Lily had told Mother Ravenel that she and Mr. Foley had been married back in February by a justice of the peace and asked Maud to back her up in this little story.

“You mean tell my friends you are married?”

“Of course, what else? It would reflect awkwardly on you, as well, Maud. Mr. Foley and I want to wait and do it right, come June, when we are all three together as a family. Maybe have the ceremony in our new house.”

It was bad enough telling a lie; it was even worse to have to tell a lie that made Art Foley part of her family one minute sooner than he had to be. So far Maud had not told anyone. To Tildy, who insisted on boring into your secrets, she said, “They say they are married but it disgusts me to think so, if that’s all right with you.”

“Of course it’s all right with me, Maud. Your whole life is being turned upside down. But you’ve got your scholarship and you’ve got me. All we have to do is get you through the rest of high school; then you can go to any college you want.”

“But you know as well as I do that the scholarship is just for a day girl, and Lily won’t pay for me to board at Mount St. Gabriel’s after May. She expects me to live with them in Atlanta.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” said Tildy. “You can always live with us.”

“Your mother and father may have something to say about that.”

“All Daddy wants is for his girls to be happy, and Mama and I have been especially close since I’ve been directing the play.”

“But Tildy, I can’t—if I could pay something to live at your house, it would be one thing—”

“Well, look, is it totally over with Anabel and you? I know she and your dad are separating, but couldn’t you write and say you know it wouldn’t be wise for you to go back to Palm Beach just now, but you have this opportunity to live with your old friend’s family while you finish Mount St. Gabriel’s on your day scholarship and if you just had a little saving-face money to pay for your room and board—? Wasn’t she always hinting that she planned to pay for your college?”

“That was
before”
—Maud had to keep herself from shrieking—“that was before I went off with this man at the dance and ruined Anabel’s social aspirations. I would rather die than ask her. It’s bad enough that she’s going to put my father on some sort of retainer, so he can stay at a decent place and not have to go to some state institution.”

“Well, all right,” Tildy said, backing down. “Let’s just get through the play and then we still have almost the whole month of May to think of something. If worse comes to worst, I’ll cash all my war bonds and we can sell off the gold pieces that Granddaddy gave me. They are mine to do what I like with. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Maud was remembering Anabel’s lifted eyebrows last summer on Worth Avenue when she was shown Tildy’s picture. (“Why, she looks like Orphan Annie without a neck. She’s still a little girl, darling, whereas
you …”)

“I’m just touched by your generosity, Tiddly, that’s all.”

SINCE GRANNY’S DEATH
and the dismantling of the Pine Cone Lodge, it had been very hard for Maud to keep track of who she still was inside and what she was up against and who she was going to have to fool. That was why Mother Ravenel had given permission for her to stay behind in chapel.

She was supposed to be praying, only to discover she wasn’t sure what real prayer consisted of. For years she had rattled off her nightly orations, but surely there was something else she was meant to be doing here on her knees if she expected God to tell her what He wanted from her.

Had Maud really indicated to Mother Ravenel that she might—? She buried her face in her hands. Could this be a possibility or was she the biggest liar in the school? Not even Tildy would be allowed to pull this out of her. It was too important—or too dangerous; she hadn’t decided which. In its way it was worse than if she had gone the whole way with Troy Veech. Probably there were people who thought she had: Mimi Weatherby, probably even Anabel thought so, though Maud had tried to explain to her stepmother what had and hadn’t happened during the fateful intermission at the Palm City Club that had gotten herself and Anabel uninvited to Mimi’s party. But this—this new possibility that so far she’d shared with Mother Ravenel alone—if it was true, and if it became known—that she might, that she just
might
have a vocation—it would be a far worse kind of going all the way. Worse in the sense that it would alter other people’s perception of her. And it might change her into something different even if she did not go through with it.

If she couldn’t find her way into the proper way of praying, she could at least go back over it again and try to discern her motives. (Or, as Mother Malloy had instructed her about the martyred St. Thomas Becket, “See how far you can follow the tugs of his dilemma within those boundaries.”)

All this had begun back in March during Maud’s conference with Mother Malloy about her medieval history paper. You were supposed to imagine yourself at some important point in the life of your historical figure and Maud had chosen Thomas Becket, favored friend and chancellor of King Henry II and then later, by the king’s wish, archbishop of Canterbury.

“It’s the conscience part of it that grips me, Mother. I mean, here is his king, the person he owes everything to, they are best friends, and then, through this king and friend, he is given a job where he’s supposed to answer to God first, and he finds he can’t be true to both of them. So what is his deepest duty? That’s what I want to go for.”

“You certainly do go for the deep, don’t you, Maud?” Mother Malloy had a chest cold, her eyes were bleary, and her voice was spectral. But she had a smile for Maud. “It is an ambitious topic, and I’m not going to warn you away from it, because I know your abilities. But try to limit yourself to one or two specific instances and see how far you can follow the tugs of his dilemma within those boundaries. And remember, don’t bite off more than you can chew!”

And then she had honored Maud by wondering aloud, in her congested voice, where Maud’s “many gifts” would be likely to lead her.

“I’d like to do some kind of scholarship,” said Maud, “history or maybe English. And”—wanting to please Mother Malloy—“maybe be a teacher, too. Also I’d like to write—if that’s not asking too much.”

“Why? It all goes together. And you would be
giving
so much.”

The nun looked at her with something so close to admiration that Maud felt bold enough to ask, though they weren’t supposed to ask personal questions of nuns, “What did
you
think you wanted to do with your life, Mother, when you were my age?”

“Like you, I wanted to study and to teach. Since I was raised in the church, it was a straight path for me. I knew I wanted to go into a teaching order and keep learning as I taught. It’s a mutual commitment. You make your vows to the order, and the order underwrites your education. If I had been born a man, I would have tried for the Society of Jesus.” Seeing Maud’s puzzlement, she added, “The Jesuits.”

“Oh,” sighed Maud, “if only we had something like that. A commitment—where you could set yourself on a path and not have to worry about—”

“‘We’ meaning …?”

“Oh, the Methodists; it’s our family’s church. Not that I’m much of one. I’ve been at Mount St. Gabriel’s so long I can flip my missal ribbons through the Mass as expertly as any Catholic girl.”

“But I interrupted you. You were saying ‘and not have to worry about—’?”

“Your education. Becoming what you want.”

“Are you
worried about those things, Maud?”

It was both the surprise and the concern in the nun’s voice that swept away Maud’s composure. “I’m so afraid, Mother,” she heard herself say, starting to break down.

“Afraid of what, dear?”

“That my mother and Mr. Foley won’t let me come back to Mount St. Gabriel’s next fall and I’ll have to—I’ll have to—to
downgrade my dreams.”

Quoting from her own A-plus Dickens paper to underwrite her distress—how much lower could you get?

Was this what life was going to be like from now on, after you “came into,” as Mother Ravenel liked to put it in her “Moral Guidance” talks, “your full cognitive powers”? When nothing was a straightforward emotional exchange anymore, and there was always a hidden motive or a sly bid for advantage.

But Mother Malloy simply said, “I am sorry to hear this, Maud, but perhaps it’s good that you told me. I don’t know what can be done, but I am going to speak to Mother Ravenel. With your permission, that is.”

THAT HAD BEEN
back in March, and this morning at breakfast she had found a folded note tucked beneath her napkin ring. “Maud, please come to my office at the beginning of afternoon study hall. Mother Ravenel.” Her first thought was, What have I done wrong? She didn’t connect it with her talk with Mother Malloy. It occurred to her that Mother Ravenel had somehow found out that Maud’s second part in the play, that of Domenica, who, with her school friend Rexanne, had decided to become a nun, was really based on Tildy’s aunt Antonia, and that the character of Rexanne, played by Tildy, was based on Suzanne Ravenel. This scene, wedged into the crucial final ten minutes of the play, was being rehearsed separately by its two principals, Tildy and Maud. Only during the performance would the other players see the scene for the first time.

“It’s what playwrights call a play’s ‘hidden message,’” Tildy had told Maud in deepest confidence. “It’s something that gives the play its special
frisson
, even though nobody but the playwright knows it’s there.
You
know, Maud; I need you to know so you can incorporate it into your performance of Domenica. Nobody else knows, not even Chloe. I didn’t want her to go consulting the spirit of Agnes and gumming up the works with some
scruple
or other.”

“But what
is
the
frisson
, Tildy?”

“A
frisson
is a little shiver,” Tildy complacently translated.

“I know what ‘a’
frisson
is,” Maud said crossly, Tildy’s possessiveness about the French language having lately become an irritation. “What I meant was, where is the hidden message in this one? Don’t you think I need to know what it is, too?”

“The hidden message,” said Tildy, with a pregnant pause—Maud knew she was either choosing whether or not to confide it or thinking it up on the spot—“is … the unraveling of Ravenel.”

“The unraveling—?” Maud saw Tildy allowing time for fear of consequences to play themselves out on Maud’s face.

“Look, Maud, when she was our age, Mother Ravenel wove her version of things into a play, and now we’re going to
un
weave some of it and correct it with things we have learned since. But this has to be between us. The audience will feel a burst of fresh air, and we will have done a service to those who can no longer speak for themselves, and nobody will be the wiser—except for Mother Ravenel. It will be a secret message to her.”

“COME IN, MAUD.”

Mother Ravenel was seated at a huge dark desk with carved legs, its flat top importantly stacked with papers and baskets of letters. Behind the headmistress, almost like a stage backdrop, were the ranges of the western mountains, with Pisgah and the Rat in prominence just above the nun’s right shoulder. Maud felt spotlighted by the bright sunshine pouring through those double windows. Mother Ravenel, her back to the windows, was in shadow.

Maud took in the office, with its trophies and photographs and, on one wall, a rough-carved little Madonna wearing a sombrero, sitting inside a sort of little house. This was her first summons to Mother Ravenel’s office. “It’s very nice in here, Mother,” she said.

“Take a seat, dear.” The headmistress pointed to a silvery wing chair.

“I want you to know, Maud,” said the headmistress, “that you are sitting in the foundress’s own Queen Anne wing chair. It was one of her great finds. Recognizing it for the treasure it was, she bought it from a junk dealer in Mountain City. Then she and Mother Finney stripped it down and refinished it and upholstered it in that lovely brocade left over from an altar frontal.”

“It’s very nice,” said Maud, running her fingers along the arms.

“And you suit it well. Tildy Stratton tells me she has cast you in the role of our foundress. And she says you have agreed to take on another small part as well. A new character, someone called Domenica, I believe.” Mother Ravenel certainly seemed to be informed up to the minute about the development of the play, yet Maud also felt a probing edge to her tone. Had Tildy told the headmistress that this was the one scene that no one else in the class knew about and that was only rehearsed in private between the two players? Maud didn’t think so.