Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “Ah, but we will be seeing more of you, Henry, now that your niece Chloe is to be with us. I am desolate over Agnes. Your sister was dear to my heart. I know we aren’t supposed to have favorites, but even Our Lord had His favorites.”

  “And you were dear to Agnes. Do you remember the Halloween when she dressed up as Fiona Finney, the Irish horse trainer?”

  “Remember? I should say so! I dressed her myself. It was my own riding boots she wore. And to die so young.”

  “Agnes turned thirty-five this past January.”

  A worn-out thirty-five, the last time Henry had seen his sister. The future plighted with her great love, Merriweather Starnes, had been scuttled when his fighter plane went down on Okinawa less than two months before the end of the war. Chloe had been eight at the time. Agnes’s second marriage, to Rex Wright, a member of Merry’s squadron, had turned out to be, Agnes had confided to Henry at their last meeting, “my mortal mistake.”

  This disclosure took place in a booth in a diner in Barlow, two hours down the hairpin curves from Mountain City, Agnes having telephoned Henry the night before. “I want to send Chloe home with you for the Easter holidays,” she’d told him. “Perhaps for longer. I’ll say more when I see you. Don’t come to the house. I don’t want him to know she’s leaving till she’s gone. There’s a little diner in the middle of town.”

  Agnes was one who took great care with words—“mortal” as in human, or as in fatal? He wished he’d asked. Then later, when it was too late to ask, he wondered if his sister could have meant “mortal” as in mortal sin: grave matter, full knowledge, full consent.

  “There are some things in my life now, Henry, that are better left un-described. Chloe will come here to the diner straight from school. Her suitcase is packed and in my car. By the way, I haven’t told her that it may be longer than the Easter break. It may not be. I’ll just have to see.”

  Henry had been glad of the solitary drive down the mountain to Barlow: two hours in which to get used to the prospect of a young teenage girl he hardly knew sharing his home for an unspecified duration. However, by the time he reached the town where Rex Wright had his crop-dusting service, he found himself anticipating certain changes his niece might bring to his bachelor life. They would go out to dinner, to the basilica during Holy Week. He would have the moral satisfaction of being an uncle and godfather called to account for his baptismal promises.

  And having got that far on the drive, he was able in all sincerity to say to Agnes in the diner, “Why don’t you come along, too? You and Chloe can make your home with me as long as you want. It is your house as much as mine.”

  “Please don’t tempt me, Henry. I have to stay here and see what can be salvaged of this marriage.”

  “What can be salvaged of a thing you’ve just admitted was a mortal mistake?”

  “Nothing more or less than just my honor, dear.” She had laughed her self-mocking laugh and narrowed her eyes at him and for a moment was his baby sister again. “For better or worse, Henry, I’m still ferociously attached to my honor. Rex hasn’t had it easy since the war. Bombing the enemy was a lot more exciting than bombing bugs. And I did marry him before God. I said the same vows to him that I said to Merry.”

  WOMEN’S VOICES FLOATED up through the trees. Ravenel’s familiar hustling cadences raced ahead of the lower-pitched, monosyllabic responses of the other.

  Henry rose to his feet just as the ruddy-complexioned headmistress, wearing her customary sunglasses, entered the grotto, followed by a pale young nun.

  “Why, Henry, what a nice surprise. Were you having an audience with our Della Robbia or our Red Nun?”

  Even now, when Henry saw his sister’s classmate and his bride’s best friend in her habit, he could imagine Suzanne impulsively snatching off her veil and demanding of her audience, “There, now! Didn’t I play that part well?”

  “Actually, I was hoping to have an audience with you, Mother Ravenel.”

  “Well, here I am. And this is Mother Malloy, fresh off the train from Boston. I’ve been giving her the grand tour. Mother, this is Henry Vick, the uncle I was telling you about, Chloe’s guardian. Mother Malloy will be taking charge of Chloe’s class, Henry.”

  “How do you do, Mother Malloy.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Vick. I’m looking forward to knowing your niece.” Her voice was low and precise. Only the “fah-ward” proclaimed her Boston roots. But behind those few words about Chloe, which in themselves stopped at the perfunctory, he wanted to believe he heard empathy and a warmth of heart. She was lovely despite her pallor.

  “I am still getting to know her myself,” he said. “And the more I know her, the better I like her. She is deep and she is hurting. She lost her mother at Easter—it was all very sudden, unexpected. This has been a period of adjustment for both of us.”

  “You have been a godsend to that child, Henry,” Mother Ravenel assured him, “and now you are doing exactly right in letting us help you. We will do our best to give her round-the-clock motherhood and guidance, won’t we, Mother Malloy?”

  “The thing is,” said Henry, realizing that the presence of the other nun might ease his task. “I have decided—that is, we have decided, Chloe and I—that we prefer to go on as we are. Chloe will be coming to Mount St. Gabriel’s as a day student and living with me. We agreed on this only this morning, but I wanted to inform you as soon as possible.”

  He could see Suzanne admirably suppressing her annoyance.

  “Well, Henry, this is news. But if it’s what you all have decided, I appreciate you letting me know so promptly. Of course, you understand I can’t refund Chloe’s boarding fee. There are no exceptions, even for an old friend. Besides”—here she managed a laugh—“your money’s probably already been spent.”

  “If it hasn’t been,” was his gallant comeback, “spend it on something wonderful.”

  “And what would you consider wonderful, Henry?”

  “Oh, a memorial ciborium for Chloe’s mother, encrusted with garnets. That was Agnes’s birthstone.”

  “Well, I don’t know if the fee will cover garnets, Henry.”

  “It will if I make up the difference. Have Haywood Silversmiths do it. Her dates on the rim.”

  “What about ‘Class of ‘34’?”

  “That, too, of course,” Henry magnanimously conceded.

  DURING THIS MELLIFLUOUS sparring between the headmistress and the uncle, Mother Malloy took what she hoped were unobserved ragged breaths. Or, rather, she was trying to find her breath. These two persons were well matched. There was history between them. Though Mother Ravenel had clearly been caught off guard by Mr. Vick’s announcement, she had remained in control. What, though, had she meant by “you all”? Didn’t that imply that more than two people were involved in the decision to keep Chloe at home? Or was this a regional quirk of speech? Mr. Vick had an astringent manner, yet was courtly in combat. He reminded her of her professor of Renaissance history at Boston College, Father Galliard: dry, exacting, but always cordial.

  But then, to her dismay, her light-headedness increased. Blue and purple spots showered inside her eyes. She caught herself tilting forward and would have fallen had she not reached out to grab the hulk of russet marble from which Mr. Vick had risen to greet them.

  The next thing she knew, she herself was semireclining on its benchlike ledge, their concerned faces floating above her.

  “—entirely my fault,” Mother Ravenel was saying. “I’ve been dragging her up our hills like she was a mountain goat. Speak to us, Mother Malloy.”

  Henry Vick was offering to bring a glass of water from the kitchen. “Or I have a flask of cognac in my car.”

  “No, please. It was—whatever it was has passed.”

  “When did you last eat something?” he asked.

  “Mother Finney had iced tea and a chicken salad sandwich waiting for her when she arrived,” the headmistress answered for her.

  “Really, I’m better now. It’s ver
y cool—” She was aware that her cheek lay against the red marble and hastened to pull herself upright. “Is this a sculpture I’m seated on?”

  “Why, you’ve gone straight for the protection of our Red Nun,” Mother Ravenel said. “Now you’re truly one of us. Henry, I’m going to presume on you to tell Mother Malloy the story of our guardian spirit. I have been bending her ear until I am weary of the sound of my voice. Meanwhile, Mother Malloy, you take it easy. I’ll be back in a flash with some ice water.”

  Off she dashed, fringed sash flying.

  “Are you subject to fainting spells, Mother Malloy?” Fiddling with his pipe, Henry Vick stood a little apart: a lanky man in his mid- to late thirties; soft voice, furrowed brow, graying brown hair receding at the temples; rumpled seersucker suit. His kind, abstracted manner put her at her ease.

  “I’ve never fainted before. If that was what it was.”

  “My sister, Agnes, was a champion fainter. Always at the dentist’s and sometimes just before an exam. Anytime she was tense or uncertain, you could see the blood leave her face. Then she had to put her head between her knees or she was out cold. The first time she fainted was right after her first communion. She was walking back to her seat with her hands clasped properly in front of her and then suddenly she hit the floor with a thud.”

  “It was the fasting, of course,” Mother Malloy said. “Now children are allowed to drink a glass of juice before.”

  “The monsignor told her afterward that it was a sign of grace; it meant she was taking the sacrament seriously. But she was furious with herself. ‘Everyone saw my panties,’ she told us when we got home.”

  They both laughed. In his telling, she felt the personality of his lost sister. In his laughter, she saw that Henry Vick gained relief in bringing her back through anecdotes like this.

  “Do you have sisters or brothers, Mother Malloy?”

  “I was in a foster home, but there were certain of the children that I felt sisterly toward.”

  “I see. Would it make you queasy if I relit my pipe?”

  “No, I like the smell of a pipe. If I were a man, I would probably smoke one. Please do tell me about the Red Nun.”

  “It’s an unfinished memorial to a young woman who was a student here in the early years of the school. Malaria carried her off the summer before she was to enter the novitiate. Her people were rich Charlestonians; they ordered the marble from Italy and commissioned a famous funerary sculptor. But from the start, things took on a life of their own. White marble was ordered; red was delivered. Then came 1914, war broke out in Europe, and there was no more Italian marble to be had. The sculptor said he was delighted to work with the red—it was Veronese red, more than a hundred million years old. He said he could make something distinctive, really fine. The plan was to have a life-scale young nun in all her particulars, even down to her rosary, seated in front of that Della Robbia Annunciation across from you.”

  Both transferred their attention to the glazed terra-cotta bas-relief of the Virgin looking up, startled, from the open book on her lap to the kneeling Gabriel. The white dove hovered in the blue-enameled air between them. A Grecian vase crammed with lilies was placed equidistantly between Virgin and angel.

  “The young woman—her name was Caroline DuPree—had prayed rosaries here in the grotto, asking Our Lady to persuade her parents to let her be a nun. But the sculptor died while the piece was in its half-finished form. There was talk of the family finding another sculptor, but nothing ever came of it. I’ve always been glad in a way. There is a certain power in her rough form.”

  “Like Michelangelo’s Captives.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Only in my college textbook on Renaissance history. But I felt what you said about them: the power of the unfinished. How I would love to go to Italy!”

  Too late she realized her blunder: this man’s bride had been killed on their Roman honeymoon.

  But he was applying the lit match to the bowl of his pipe with the same tranquil focus—the awful memory seemingly unstirred.

  When the tobacco caught flame, he continued to speak in his equable tone.

  “Mount St. Gabriel girls have made her their guardian spirit. That unfinished marble lap you’re resting on, Mother Malloy, has been snuggled into and worn down by generations of girls begging her to intercede with the Madonna and heal their sorrows or grant their desires. Suz—Mother Ravenel wrote a play about her for the freshman class in 1931. It was called The Red Nun. My parents and I were in the audience. My sister, Agnes, and Antonia, the girl I was later to marry, had prominent roles. Mother Ravenel—she was Suzanne in those days—directed the play and divided her acting talents between several roles, including the voice of God. Since that time, the actual history of the memorial to Caroline DuPree has become entwined with Mother Ravenel’s play, which is revived from time to time. Each class in the academy does a play every year, but the Red Nun revivals are for the freshmen only because Mother Ravenel was a freshman when she wrote it. It’s the tradition. And you know how traditions and legends tend to grow tentacles. And the girls are permitted to add their own material. Within reason, of course. That’s another tradition.”

  “Let’s hope the next production will be soon,” said Mother Malloy, feeling her strength flowing back. “You have made me very eager to see it, Mr. Vick.”

  Early Beginnings

  Over the years the girls have never tired of hearing the story of how our Order was formed. And I never tire of retelling it, because it is such a wonderful example of how intricately God works His purposes in our lives. We must go back in time to the small village of Cowley, just outside of Oxford, England. The year was 1889 and a remarkable Anglican preacher and monk, Father Basil Maturin, recently returned from a very successful ten-year mission in Philadelphia, was leading a retreat at Cowley. One of the retreatants was Elizabeth Wallingford, the future foundress of our Order. Like Father Maturin, Elizabeth was still a member of the Church of England at that time. Her family, the Wallingfords, was a very, very old Oxfordshire family; they and their property holdings are listed in the Domesday Book.

  Now, Elizabeth’s brothers had been educated at Oxford, but in those days women were not admitted to universities. We know from the brief account of her life she has left us that she keenly felt her lack of education. At the time of the Cowley retreat, she had reached the age of twenty-eight, which back then would more than qualify you for spinsterhood. After she had turned down several acceptable proposals of marriage, her father, who doted on her, offered to set her up as head of a school for young ladies in a dower house on the Wallingford estate, but she refused him. How can I teach others, she asked, when I myself have been denied the subjects that were daily fare for my brothers? She said the world did not need any more “schools” to teach girls how to stay home and do needlework and play the piano and manage the servants. She was very much ahead of her time but was powerless to do anything about it.

  Or so she thought until she went to Cowley and heard Father Maturin preach. “Don’t be content simply to speculate what you might be capable of,” he challenged his retreatants. She felt he was speaking directly to her. “You don’t know what is in you till you try. There was much about the Magdalene that she had never used, perhaps never dreamed that she possessed, until she met Our Lord and He set her on the path of true self-development.”

  Ironically, Elizabeth had heard about “the spellbinding Father Maturin” from a former suitor who was now a vicar in the Church of England. He had accompanied her on the retreat, perhaps thinking he might induce her to reconsider his proposal of marriage. But for Elizabeth Wallingford, God had more far-reaching plans in store. “Discontent,” Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, “may be God’s catapult, His way of saying: ‘Go and try yourself now.’ ”

  —from Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered: A Historical

  Memoir, by Mother Suzanne Ravenel

/>   CHAPTER 3

  Drawing the Dead

  Third Saturday in August 1951

  Henry Vick’s house

  Mountain City, North Carolina

  “IT’S AS THOUGH you were back in my girlhood, watching over me like a guardian angel …”

  The girlhood room of Chloe’s mother, from the days when she was still Agnes Vick, looked down over a gently rolling back lawn surrounded by mature boxwoods. The window seat, nestled beneath the slant of the roof, was at present awash in the fiery brilliance of the late-summer afternoon.

  In drawing his plans for this room in 1927, Agnes’s architect father, Malcolm Vick, had included a sketch of his daughter fitted into this space, her long legs doubled to form a prop for her book. Already, by age ten, Agnes had reached the height of five feet six and, though it would throw the house design slightly out of proportion, her father had added a second window to increase the length of the seat and provide for her teenage extensions. It was his hope that Agnes would grace this new house for at least nine or ten years before a husband carried her off to another.

  Chloe had never seen those plans for the Vick house at the corner of Montgomery Avenue and Riverside Drive, but from her mother’s descriptions she had conjured up her own vision of Malcolm Vick’s sketch of his daughter in the proposed window seat.

  And when Chloe herself began drawing in earnest, in the months after her father died, she felt compelled to reproduce that long-legged girl in the window seat again and again. “How do you do this, darling?” her mother would ask. “I know draftsmanship runs in our family, but this is something more. It’s as though you are watching over my girlhood like a guardian angel.” And then her mother had wept, saying, “If I didn’t have you, I might think my whole marriage with Merry was a dream.” And Chloe had said, “Yes, and we can remember him together.”

  The drawings got more interesting as Chloe’s skills improved. She experimented with angles: the girl Agnes as seen from above, from across the room, from outside the window.