Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  Elizabeth Wallingford embraced a life of “holy daring.” She coined the phrase in her 1890 commentary on the book of Acts, 1 written during her twenty-ninth year when she was drawing near to her conversion, going to Mass daily at John Henry Newman’s church in Littlemore with her good friend Fiona Finney, and seeking guidance about a vocation from Father Basil Maturin at Cowley, Oxfordshire. It was Father Maturin, just returned from a ten-year preaching tour in the United States, who enchanted Elizabeth with stories of American opportunities for the religious. And, as I’ve said to you before, I think it is very likely that his talks at Cowley with Elizabeth were what ultimately tipped him toward the Catholic faith he was to embrace in his fiftieth year, in 1897.

  Another of our foundress’s alluring phrases, one she came to use more and more frequently during the course of her work in America, according to Mother Finney, 2 was a “womans freedom in God.” I’m sure you remember that one! I sprinkled it liberally, like seeds that would fall where they might, into our biweekly “Moral Guidance for Modern Girls” sessions, though I never went into much detail: it would have been precipitate of me, and now I will tell you why.

  The concept of “a woman’s freedom,” to a group of teenage girls in those pre–”women’s lib” times, was a very incendiary notion all by itself. It would have invited reckless misuse. And “a woman’s freedom in God” would have been—well, how can I best put it? If “a woman’s freedom” evokes a stack of firewood laced with nice dry kindling in the home fireplace, then “a woman’s freedom in God” would be like my handing over a box of matches, back when you were under my care, and saying, “Girls, this box of matches has been blessed by the Pope: help yourselves and strike as you will!”

  When you came to me in the academy, most of you were fourteen going on eighteen. Over the years, some of you would seek me out after the “Moral Guidance” sessions and say, “Please, Mother, I want to hear more about this holy daring and freedom in God our foundress was always talking about.”

  And to those of you I thought were ready, I doled it out with discretion. If there are any of you who felt I “jumped the gun,” I ask your pardon, wherever you are.

  Well, digressions must not go on too long; otherwise they might usurp the flow. But perhaps in a future digression further along in this school memoir, I will elaborate, as much for myself as for you, on these connected topics of holy daring and a woman’s freedom in God.

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

  Memoir, by Mother Suzanne Ravenel

  1. This lively and passionate commentary, “Charged by the Holy Ghost,” is preserved in the appendix of Mother Fiona Finney’s invaluable chapbook, Adventures with Our Foundress (Mountain City Printing Company, 1933).

  2. Ibid., passim.

  CHAPTER 12

  Girls’ Voices Upstairs

  A Sunday evening in late October 1951

  The Vick house

  Mountain City, North Carolina

  HENRY VICK WAS not the sort of person whom one would casually ask, “Are you happy?” But if someone had asked, he would have said he was happy at his drawing board, at home or at the office. He loved watching buildings go up; perhaps the excavations thrilled him even more. He looked forward to his first sip of scotch in the evenings, enjoyed playing through the Bach preludes and Chopin ballades he had worked up over the years, and was at his happiest in conversations that kindled some degree of enlightenment in both parties. He loved the Mass and felt himself replenished by God’s mystery each time he received the sacrament.

  Chloe’s coming to live with him had brought added items to the list: the many ways the girl reminded him of his sister, Agnes: the neat turn of the long, narrow foot as she set the porch swing in motion; the same profile, the stubborn chin and beaky family nose sweetened by the pursed lips and delicate stem of neck. Perhaps more dear to him were the moments when Chloe was like no one but herself.

  At the forefront of Agnes’s personality had been the flash and stab of her wit, the apt conceit (“Rex hasn’t had it easy since the war. Bombing the enemy was a lot more exciting than bombing bugs”) and the mordant self-directed put-down (“Everyone saw my panties”).

  At first Henry had wondered if his niece lacked a sense of humor. Then he realized that what Chloe found funny came from her quiet perusal of what went on around her, until out would come a response worth waiting for. (“Don’t you think Mother Ravenel would have made a neat leading lady, Uncle Henry? I mean, if she hadn’t already found her perfect role.”)

  The two of them could work in the same room, Henry drafting plans for the new library and Chloe curled up in her favorite armchair doing lessons or making sketches of her uncle on his high stool at the drafting board or playing the piano. She was so easy to be with that he missed her ahead of time when he toted up the few years left of her girlhood in his house. He hoped her future husband would treasure her rare form of tact. Her quiet, steady gift for keeping you company without invading your solitude was probably, Henry thought, why she could produce such uncanny likenesses of people going about their business.

  Recently, Chloe’s new friend had entered the picture. On the nights when Tildy stayed over, the girls kept to themselves in Chloe’s room, which Henry had stopped thinking of as “Agnes’s room” even before he and Smoky Stratton had rearranged its furniture to accommodate a sofa bed for Tildy, carried up on the capable shoulders of Smoky’s versatile retainer and chauffeur, John.

  The two girls were upstairs now (they had left the door open, which honored him), and he could hear Tildy’s regular barrage of prompts and pronouncements interspersed with Chloe’s murmurs as she concentrated on their very important project, for which he had loaned his (and his late father’s) drafting table, dismantling it from the corner where it had stood since this house was built and carrying it upstairs piece by piece, along with the high swivel stool, to reassemble it in Chloe’s room.

  So this is love, Henry thought, smiling at his own discomfort: the prominent architect scrunched into his niece’s abandoned armchair, his drafting pad backed by Rosa’s breadboard balanced awkwardly on his crossed thighs, hoping to smuggle a few clean lines of his proposed new municipal library back through the trustees’ clutter of antiquated addons and impractical revisions.

  So that Chloe, upstairs with her best friend, Henry’s niece by marriage, could have access to the best drafting surface on which to compose her ambitious group portrait of their classmates for the ninth-grade bulletin board.

  “YOU KNOW WHAT I can’t wait for,” said Tildy, balancing on one leg beside Chloe’s drafting stool, “is when you walk into class with it rolled up under your arm. And you go up to her desk on the platform in your usual modest way and hand it up to her and say, ‘Mother Malloy, here is something I created for our bulletin board. That is, if, in your judgment, it’s good enough.’ Then you’ll say, ‘Remember how, the other day, our class president asked me to come up with something artistic and then you said, Mother, that we should all think of ways we could make our bulletin board uniquely our own …’”

  “You don’t think I should say her name?”

  “You have already said her name, and just ‘Mother’ is respectful enough for the second time round. Even Raving Ravenel would say so.”

  “No, I meant … Maud’s name.”

  “I think it carries more weight if you say ‘our class president.’ Her saying it would be like just any old person in the class had asked you. Oh, for Christ’s sake, say whatever you like. I don’t care.”

  “Now don’t go getting huffy with me, Mary Tilden, or you’ll wobble my concentration.”

  “Oh, heaven forfend, Miss Chloe, that your artistic concentration be wobbled by this huffy peon. I don’t give a piddle what you say, I really don’t. I’m not even mad at her anymore. She serves her purpose in the firmament. I merely thought that ‘class president’ is the kind of protocol that cool Boston Malloy laps up.”

  “Uncle Henry is
right. You are never at a loss for words, Tildy. Though I’m not sure I’d want to hear you exercising your vocabulary on me behind my back.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to, either. If you heard me describe you behind your back, your precious modesty would be a thing of the past.”

  “Well …” Chloe disguised her pleasure by frowning over her choice of brown shades from the handsome box of pencils her uncle had given her. She plucked out the raw umber and, for contrast, etched in some shadows behind the flaxen-haired Dutch girls.

  “Why are you doing the girls in the back row first?”

  “Because they’re at the top. I always work down. It keeps you from smearing.”

  “When I used to color, I always did my favorite parts first and filled in the rest after.”

  “That was with crayons. Besides, how do you know Hansje Van Kleek and Beatrix Wynkoop aren’t my favorite parts?” Teasing, Chloe had learned, went a long way toward deterring Tildy from rampant bossiness.

  “Ha, ha. But seriously, just between us, Chloe, why is it that some girls are just always background?”

  “How do you mean, background?” Hansje and Beatrix had the same blunt haircuts. They both wore gray double-breasted topcoats with velvet collars. But Beatrix had her expectant smile, whereas things in Hansje’s expression didn’t match. It was as though two people were having a fight on Hansje’s face.

  “I mean background for the others.”

  “What others?”

  “The ones who matter.”

  “And who might they be?” Tildy’s snobbery was sometimes just breathtaking.

  “Now, don’t go all arch with me, Miss Chloe. You know as well as I do that some girls just stand out—you think of them first—and the rest make a sort of fill-in. Of course, it’s not the kind of thing I would say in public.”

  “You’re not in public, so why not name names?” Chloe moved on across the back row of her sketch: next came sultry Marta Andreu with her cast-down velvety lashes and her ultrafeminine way of hugging herself against the North American cold. Chloe’s mouth watered at the prospect of doing justice to Marta’s purple shawl with green fringe worn over the vicuña coat her father had sent from New York.

  “Well, take our mothers’ class for a start, the class of ‘34. There were twelve girls in that class; you can count them in the yearbook. But how many can you name from memory? Okay: your mother, Agnes Vick. And my mother and aunt, Cornelia and Tony Tilden. And Ringleader Ravenel, the former Suzanne. After that the mind just blanks.”

  “Tildy, your argument has about a million holes in it. We’re naming them first because they’re ours. I mean, there was Elaine Frew’s mother, Francine Barfoot. She was one of the oblates, and if the oblates weren’t the inner circle I don’t know what was. My own mother wasn’t even an oblate.”

  “But the oblates wanted Agnes. Old Francine was just a fill-in. She played the flute and did what everyone told her because she was so thrilled to be included.”

  Chloe slammed down her pencil. She had put too many purple highlights in Marta’s hair, detracting from the purple shawl before she even started on it. She felt suddenly hostile toward her friend and was glad Tildy would be leaving soon. Under the strict new regime following Mother Ravenel’s recent ultimatum about grades, Tildy was allowed to spend only one night away from home, and that night had been last night. In a half hour or so, the Stratton Packard would roll into the driveway and Tildy, with a martyr’s sigh, would stuff her hairbrush and last-minute incidentals into her smart patent leather bandbox and clump peevishly downstairs into John’s silent custody.

  And when, at that moment, a motor’s thrum was heard in the driveway, making Tildy cry out, “Oh, no! This isn’t fair!” Chloe felt vindicated.

  Tildy went flying across the room and flung up a window sash. “John, you are way too early,” she screeched into the darkness.

  “It’s me, little one,” Madeline Stratton’s blithe voice trilled back. “But I’m going to visit with Uncle Henry first, so you girls still have some time.”

  HENRY VICK, OF course, heard the indoor-outdoor calling between the sisters and stifled his disappointment that it was not the Strattons’ chauffeur. It had been dark for hours and he had been anticipating a neat, cordial transition. (“Ah, John, come in. Tildy, John is waiting downstairs. You’re very welcome, honey, always good to have you. Come back soon, hear?”) And then maybe he’d play a little Bach and, as his father used to put it, climb the wooden hill for an early Sunday night bedtime. He was meeting with the library board again tomorrow and not looking forward to standing his ground against their pigheaded insistence on a superfluous portico with columns.

  But instead here was Madeline, whom he genuinely liked. She brought her own aura into the room, not at all turbulent, like Tildy’s. She was debonair and conversant, but seemed to keep the emotional side of herself in reserve. Unusual for a girl of sixteen, though tonight, wearing her hair skinned back by a bandanna, she could have passed for a woman of twenty-five. She looked, in fact, ready to have an early night herself.

  “What a nice surprise,” he said. “Come to keep an old man company.”

  “That was my intention, but—oh dear,” she said, spotting the drafting pad facedown on the arm of the chair, “I’ve interrupted your work. And, I didn’t mean”—she colored slightly—“that I think you’re old.”

  “I know. I’m the one who said it. What can I get you, Madeline?”

  “Thank you, nothing. I bolted down practically a whole pitcher of ice water before I left home. Oh, Henry, I am so pleased with myself tonight.”

  “Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  Madeline did look triumphant, in her dungarees and an enormous old cable-knit pullover that Henry figured must be from her father’s closet.

  “Please excuse my slovenly getup,” she said, seating herself at the corner of the sofa with the straight-backed aplomb of a full-skirted deb, “but I’ve been switching rooms with Tildy. It’s a surprise for her. Flavia and I have been slaving nonstop, emptying drawers and dragging furniture, ever since I saw you all at Mass this morning. Tildy has no idea—I only thought of it myself during Monsignor’s sermon. Then Flavia reminded me it was getting close to Tildy’s curfew and there was nobody but me to come get her. John’s out at the Swag with Daddy, putting in some improvements before hunting season starts, and Mama’s working late at the studio. I’m hoping this will give Tildy a new start. She’s always coveted my room.”

  “Now your room is—which?”

  “On the upstairs front. Aunt Tony’s old room. It gets the afternoon sun and will be more cheery for studying. Mother Ravenel skewered the poor child last week, as only the Ravenel can skewer. Tildy has six weeks to bump up her grades and improve her attitude, or else.”

  “Or else, what?”

  “Or else Mother Ravenel writes ‘On probation’ on the back of Tildy’s next report card. And it will go on Tildy’s ‘permanent record,’ which the Ravenel always makes sound like eternal damnation.”

  “That does sound ominous.”

  Henry recalled several chaste trips upstairs to Antonia’s room for the purpose of carrying down boxes to be stored in his father’s house while they enjoyed their Roman wedding trip. Both of them had been virgins, she by choice, he by default. Antonia was twenty-one, working full-time in the sisters’ fledgling photography studio. He was the twenty-five-year-old junior partner of Vick & Vick, feeling himself agreeably stretched by sudden new responsibilities, drawing and redrawing to scale his father’s frenzied sketches for the ambitious indoor shopping arcade (touted by the press as “the first of its kind in the South” but left in limbo at Malcolm Vick’s death, the site later requisitioned by the Defense Department when Roosevelt entered the war) and rushing around town collecting paperwork and signatures so his fiancée’s passport could be issued with her married name. Neither had traveled abroad. A few locals who considered themselves politically au courant opined that honeymooning
in Mussolini’s Italy could be iffy. But Henry wanted to see the architecture and Antonia wanted to visit the churches. And Henry’s father had arranged for the couple to have an audience with the Pope.

  “Tildy’s always loved my room—she’d bring in her storybooks and curl up beside me on the bed and we’d read. Or, rather, I would read to her. Flavia and I left my bed for her; it was too heavy for the two of us to move anyway. What I’m hoping is all those good memories of reading in it will make it more congenial for studying. She’s really got to turn things around. There are no shades of gray in the Ravenel’s color chart.”

  “But what about you? Will you feel congenial in your new room? Which room is it, by the way?”

  “It’s the back room on the same side of the house. It used to be Granny Tilden’s sewing room, because it gets north light. It’s never been cozy, but since they’ve made the new tunnel cut through the ravine, it faces a sea of red mud and monster machines. A very uncozy view for a young girl going through so many changes herself.”

  “But you can dispense with coziness?”

  “Oh, Henry, there’s so much I’m ready to dispense with! I just wish I’d thought of the room switch a lot sooner. Thank God the monsignor is an uninspiring preacher, or poor little Tildy would still be sleeping there tonight.”

  Henry strained to hear the girls’ voices upstairs. His wish for Madeline to take Tildy and go home so he could have his early night had been completely preempted by astonishment: how could this vivid young woman speak so passionately about letting things go?

  “At sixteen, I would think, a person like yourself would want to … consume life—stuff as much of it as you could into your pocket.”

  “Is that what you wanted at sixteen, Henry? To stuff as much life as you could into your pocket?” She squinted up at him as though spying at the remnants of his sixteen-year-old soul through a narrow opening.