Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  If my mother could observe this window seat from wherever she is now, with me in it, how could I send her the message that I am all right and that I know that we will go on taking care of each other? After all, we spent one night together in this very room, before Rex showed up early in his new plane and cut short our weekend visit with Uncle Henry.

  Chloe could not swallow the notion, put forward too often in recent weeks by people wishing to console her, that Agnes was up in heaven with her adored first husband and her mother and father and all the company of saints as well as Jesus and the Blessed Mother and God Himself. This seemed too simplistic an elevation: the newly dead getting lifted up on their death day (“Going up, folks!”) to eternal life. Where they would then do what? Roam around like they were at a big party, recognizing old friends (and surely some enemies, too)?

  Whereas Chloe could accommodate the existence of purgatory—in which her mother had firmly believed. It was an extension of life’s imperfections, Agnes had said. You stopped in purgatory because you weren’t yet prepared for perfection. Rushing off to heaven before you were ready would make you feel soiled and uncomfortable in the presence of perfection.

  “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?” That was Agnes during one of their “Catechism in Secret” sessions at the downtown diner after Rex Wright had forbidden his wife and stepdaughter to discuss religion “in his house.” (“You two have made your damned Catholicism into a snooty secret society.”)

  It was easy to imagine Agnes in purgatory, and Chloe liked dwelling there with her, just as she had spent much of this phantasmal summer sketching her mother in favorite remembered poses: Agnes as seen from behind, hair in a kerchief, stooping to collect the eggs in the henhouse; Agnes in the diner, leaning forward on her elbows to say something, her face, stretched and framed by her hands, looking suddenly younger.

  If purgatory was like an extension of what most people meant by “daily life,” a place where you found yourself stuck in the middle of a routine you had neither wanted nor expected, but where there was still a chance that something you did or learned today would move you closer to the exit of this disappointing place, then she could follow Agnes through her daily purgatorial assignments.

  In purgatory, there would be things Agnes had to do, things that corresponded to her duties in their house in Barlow. But instead of laundry and chickens and meals and a husband to pacify and a daughter to educate and protect, there would be—

  Chloe faltered. It was like going uphill in your mind; gears needed to shift, but what would the gears in a car translate to if you were talking about human beings?

  In purgatory, the people wouldn’t be there, or the house or the chickens, but Agnes’s soul would be going through the motions until she got it right, until she understood what she had done and what she had left undone.

  There would be no mirrors in purgatory. Agnes wouldn’t need to see her image in a mirror; she would be intent on carrying, with the same care that she transported between her palms a new-laid egg for Chloe’s breakfast, her own immortal soul.

  It felt okay to Chloe to compare her mother’s soul to an egg. With both, the hard part was to carry them intact to their assigned destinations. Which would be—in life—feeding a daughter. And—in purgatory—in purgatory—

  Here Chloe’s metaphor-making powers stalled just as she heard her uncle’s car purr smoothly into the garage.

  “WELL, THE DEED is done,” Henry Vick said, sipping his scotch as Chloe sipped her Coke, he lounging in a wicker chair and she upright in the back porch swing. The shadows had lengthened on the rear lawn, the shiny boxwood hedge had become a deep purple wall, but there was still gold left in the sky. In the kitchen, Rosa, the family cook, reputed to be in her nineties, was frying up chicken to go with the potato salad she and Chloe had made earlier. (“Good child! You know to pull the strings off the celery.” “My mother taught me.” “And guess who taught your mother?”)

  “How did she take it?”

  “Admirably. Mother Ravenel is always at her best when there’s an audience. There was another nun with her. Your ninth-grade teacher, as a matter of fact. Mother Malloy had just arrived on the train from Boston.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s an impressive person; beautiful, in a nunlike way. I found her both informed and easy to talk to.”

  He left out Mother Malloy’s fainting spell. These days he was very conscious of monitoring Chloe’s grieving; he didn’t want to overload her with too many reminders, though he didn’t wish to prevaricate, either. Accepting in advance that he would make some wrong calls, he kept up a constant effort to strike a delicate balance between what she needed to know now and what could wait till later.

  The fainting was something her mother had done, and it was assumed to have caused her death on Easter eve. Her husband came home from giving Saturday flying lessons at the airfield and found her body slumped on the floor of their bedroom. There were cranial bruises from the impact against the radiator. That much Chloe had been told.

  Even Rex Wright hadn’t known that his wife had been carrying a six-week-old fetus, until the coroner informed him. “She hadn’t even told me she was expecting my child!” he wailed to Henry on the phone. “She was always keeping secrets, her and Chloe both. They shut me out every chance they got. For all I know, she told Chloe about the baby, but not me.”

  Henry doubted this and told Rex so. It would go against his sister’s ferocious attachment to her honor. But he wasn’t about to ask Chloe. Henry scrupulously avoided any quizzing of the girl about her last days with her mother. When and if she was ready to tell him anything, he would be there to listen.

  “I wonder what it will be like,” Chloe said, leaning forward suddenly in the porch swing.

  “The school?”

  “The whole thing. The ninth grade. Mother Malloy. The girls in my class. I hope I won’t be too far behind.”

  “Why should you be? You’ve always done well in school.”

  “But they weren’t schools like Mount St. Gabriel’s. Mother said sometimes the nuns would put a girl who’d transferred from another school back a grade.”

  “That’s not going to happen to you.”

  “No,” Chloe calmly agreed, surprising him. “All through eighth grade, Mother’s been teaching me the extras. I know my catechism and we were doing European history and starting Latin. I’d meet her at the diner after school and we’d have Cokes and cheese crackers in the back booth and she’d tutor me out of her old Mount St. Gabriel’s notebooks.”

  “Well, then. You’ll certainly be on equal footing with the other girls. Maybe ahead.”

  This was the first he’d heard about the tutorials at the diner. Had Agnes been preparing to send Chloe off to school months before she summoned him?

  “No, not ahead. Though I’ve been going on with my schoolbooks and her notebooks this summer, since I didn’t get to finish the last month at the junior high. But there’s so much else I won’t know.”

  With the tips of her toes Chloe set the old porch swing going until it sang on its chains. She could not know how much she resembled Agnes at fourteen. The same proud posture, Agnes’s identical jutting chin and beaky nose, the same inward gaze even though she could be looking straight at you. The prehensile way the long feet controlled the motion of the swing. Though she was more serious than Agnes. There was not that flash and crackle of wit always lurking beneath the surface.

  “What sort of ‘elses’ won’t you know?”

  The fine skin between Chloe’s brows crinkled. She licked her lips and shot out her chin. This was her concentration mode. Like a young animal about to leap, she was gathering herself to explore a further outlook. Henry was suddenly pierced to the depths by his young charge. Had he taken on too much? Would it have been wiser to go ahead as planned and let her board at Mount St.
Gabriel’s, where, as Mother Ravenel said, she would have a host of mothers? But Chloe had told him last night that she would be sorry to leave the house her mother had been a girl in. She felt, Chloe said, the presence of her mother watching over her. “And, you know, Uncle Henry, I watch over her, as well.”

  And he, being one of those grown men who still prayed nightly, had fallen asleep praying about it.

  “Well, the other girls, they’ve been together since first grade. To them I’ll be a new girl in the ninth grade—an outsider.”

  “I hardly see how you can be an outsider when there are so many connections. Mother Ravenel was your aunt Antonia’s best friend. And Antonia’s niece Tildy Stratton will be your classmate. Antonia and her twin sister, Cornelia, and your mother were all in the class of ‘34. I’d say you’re as … as entrenched as anyone can be.”

  She paused in her swinging to consider this, then set the swing going again, but in slower motion.

  “No,” she said thoughtfully, “there’s all the stuff these girls have done that I wasn’t there for. And besides that … besides that … Mother was never in the oblates of the Red Nun. Aunt Tony and her twin sister, Corny Tilden, and Suzanne Ravenel were.”

  The otiose oblates, Agnes had scornfully christened them behind their back after she had turned down Suzanne’s invitation to join. Of all the silly, pointless societies, Suzanne’s little group takes the cake. He hadn’t thought of the oblates in years, not even earlier this afternoon when he had been filling Mother Malloy in on the lore surrounding the hulk of red marble.

  “I doubt if your classmates will know anything about that little society.”

  “Well, if Mother, who wasn’t one, told me about them, why shouldn’t Tildy Stratton, whose mother and aunt were, have told her friends about the oblates?”

  “Because it isn’t the kind of thing a grown woman would be proud to tell her daughter. It would be as though I had joined some secret high school society where we gathered in the dark and swore solemn oaths beyond our boyish understanding.”

  “Did—Aunt Antonia tell you what the oaths were?”

  “We didn’t have a whole lot of time together, as you know,” he said, avoiding the issue for now. What good would it do Chloe, when she had to be friends with these girls and respect Mother Ravenel as headmistress, to know that his wife had lain next to him in bed on that brief honeymoon and reminisced about Suzy Ravenel’s high-flown promises they had all solemnly recited, holding hands in front of the Red Nun. (“Oh, dear, we were so earnest, pledging to be true to selves that we hadn’t even met yet. But Suzy convinced us—she adored having secrets with just a few select people.”)

  “Maybe that’s why Mother wouldn’t join—because of the oaths,” Chloe said. “Suzanne—Mother Ravenel—was really put out with her over it. They had to ask this other girl to make up the required number. You had to have five before you could start a club.”

  Registration Days at Mount St. Gabriel’s

  Every fall at Mount St. Gabriel’s we had two full days of registration. Day one was for the preparatory grades, first through seventh—until, in 1943, the state added an eighth grade. The second day was for the high school grades, which we called the academy.

  By the late 1940s, after the anti-Catholic prejudice had died down in Mountain City and people realized what a fine school “the nuns from England” had created in their midst, enrollment in the prep was up to 200 and there were 78 girls in the academy, 15 to 20 girls in each class. We also had a junior college and secretarial school for day students, with an enrollment of about 50 girls.

  In fact, so many prominent local families desired their daughters to have a Mount St. Gabriel’s education that the bishop of our diocese jokingly complained that the Order of St. Scholastica was running a school for Protestant and Jewish girls with a few Catholics thrown in!

  Now, back in the 1880s and 1890s, our school had been a very famous mountain resort, Clingman’s Sky Top Inn. People came to Clingman’s from all over the country for its pure mountain air—one mile above sea level—and its matchless panoramic views. You could face west and see the ranges of the Great Smokies backed up all the way to Tennessee, and you could spin right around the other way and have a commanding view of Mountain City and Long Man River, one of the few north-flowing rivers in the United States, with Beaucatcher Mountain in the background.

  Our building was an imposing three-storied wooden structure in the Victorian style. It had a fabulous gothic air about it. Even after it was razed to the ground in 1963, many an old girl reported that she regularly roamed its corridors and porches in her dreams. It had eighty bedrooms, two dining rooms, a ballroom, an indoor swimming pool, and many parlors. It also had its own water tower, which could be seen from all over Mountain City. The tower was a local landmark. When our foundress, Mother Elizabeth Wallingford, purchased the site in 1909, the tower no longer contained water and she asked a Mountain City architect, Malcolm Vick, to design a room up there where nuns and girls could go and meditate and have the wonderful “God’s-eye view,” as she called it. As she herself had grown up in a large country house in Oxfordshire with tower rooms, Mother Wallingford was able to help Mr. Vick with the design.

  You approached Mount St. Gabriel’s by a long entrance drive lined with Norway spruces that got more majestic as the years went by. The first thing a visitor would notice when the building loomed into sight was the handsome porch that wrapped around three sides of the building. In the summertime the nuns would enjoy the gracious coolness of the porch from their rocking chairs, and on warm days during the school year the academy girls would have their study period on the porches. This was considered a treat. We had boards made that went across the arms of the chairs so the girls could write their lessons in the fresh air. However, the girls had to turn their chairs to face inward because the views would be too distracting. But at the end of the study period they turned the chairs around again and we had a final prayer while “lifting our eyes up to the hills.”

  On registration days, parents would park their automobiles around the edge of the circular driveway and come up the stairs to the formal front entrance with their daughters.

  Inside was a grand, spacious lobby that we called the “main parlor.” It was presided over by our Infant of Prague, who wore vestments, handmade by the nuns, to match the church seasons. And all around this big lobby were small private parlors. For two full days, starting with the prep and finishing with the academy, the teachers in charge of each of the classes would sit in the small parlors and each nun would interview every girl entering her class and that girl’s accompanying parent. These parlor interviews were scheduled alphabetically and, though they lasted only fifteen minutes apiece, much was accomplished.

  —from chapter 2 (“The School Year”) of Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered: A Historical Memoir, by Mother Suzanne Ravenel

  CHAPTER 4

  Switching Friends

  Academy registration day 1951

  Mount St. Gabriel’s

  THE AUTOMOBILES BEARING girls scheduled for the late-afternoon registration interviews swept punctually through the entrance pillars of Mount St. Gabriel’s and decelerated to a ceremonious crawl up the shady tree-lined drive. The Norway spruces had reached their full maturity and the downward-dipping branches from either side formed a gloomy canopy above the cars. The approach had been open and sunny when eighteen-year-old Henry Vick, serving in the role of parent, had driven his fourteen-year-old sister, Agnes, to register for her freshman year in September 1930. Their father was out of town, drumming up much-needed commissions after the Crash the year before, and their mother was on one of her discreet drying-out vacations at a West Virginia sanatorium.

  “Well, there it is,” Henry said to his niece, Chloe, as the picturesque old firetrap came into view.

  “Yes, and there they are,” said the girl. “All lined up like satisfied crows waiting to welcome us. Just like Mother described.”

  There they were
, indeed, the nuns in their row of rocking chairs, taking in the fine late-summer weather from the porch, some of them past their teaching years and a few, like Mother Finney, old enough to have been part of the original faculty. Henry felt the friendly scrutiny of these hooded figures—“satisfied crows” was so typically Agnes—as they identified the arriving automobiles and commented among themselves on the persons inside them. He knew what they would be saying about himself and Chloe—and the remembered Agnes.

  And likewise—having happened to glance in his rearview mirror—he could imagine what they would be saying about the two girls in the yellow Oldsmobile convertible following him.

  “That’s Tildy Stratton just behind us. Her older sister, Madeline, is driving them.”

  Henry could see from the sudden stiffening of Chloe’s shoulders that she was restraining herself from looking back.

  “Is Madeline in the upper academy?”

  “No, not anymore. Madeline’s a junior at Mountain City High.”

  “Ah, she wasn’t invited back to Mount St. Gabriel’s.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because Mother told me about those letters that go out at the end of the year. ‘Your daughter is—or is not—invited back.’”

  You and your mother must have talked a lot about Mount St. Gabriel’s, Henry almost said, but then stopped himself from venturing further.

  But Chloe answered as naturally as though he’d spoken his thought aloud. Henry was growing increasingly aware of this mind-reading propensity of his niece’s.

  “Mother told me lots about the school because we liked going there together in our imaginations. It was a place she’d been happy and safe in, she said. And nobody could follow us there.”

  “THAT MUST BE her up ahead,” said the insolently beautiful sixteen-year-old girl at the wheel of the yellow convertible.