Unfinished Desires (48 page)

“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: [email protected]
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 come 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.