Unfinished Desires

by Gail Godwin

  “I said a person like yourself. I was more—well—” He grabbed for the nearest comparison: “Uninspiring, like Monsignor’s preaching. I did my duties, I put in my preparations, but the result was never brilliant. Not even close to it.”

  “Why, that’s just criminal modesty, Henry Vick. Who did the newspaper building and who’s designed the new library? You are one of the most distinguished men in this town.”

  He let this pass. Poor girl: in this town, it might possibly be true. “At sixteen, the thing I was probably best at was being a good brother to Agnes. Though she was always the quicker one, she was four years younger, and I guess I took it on myself to make sure she felt protected and appreciated.”

  “Why don’t I have any memories of your sister? I can see your father striding to his office with his rolled umbrella and, I’m sorry to say, always frowning, and I remember your mother once in a floaty gown at the club. I couldn’t have been more than five—she stooped down and kissed me and called me ‘Adelaide.’ Mama told me I said afterward, ‘That lady’s perfume smells like Lavoris,’ though I don’t remember saying it.”

  “Well, you were right on target.” Henry laughed ruefully. “Poor Mother. The reason you wouldn’t have seen Agnes around town when you were little was that she went away with Merry while he finished engineering school and then he joined the Air Corps and they moved from pillar to post.”

  “And there was Chloe growing up in all those strange places. Speaking of wanting one’s little sister to feel protected and appreciated, I’m glad about Tildy’s friendship with Chloe. It seems so healthy—more like a fair exchange.” Madeline’s countenance clouded with an unspoken afterthought.

  “A fair exchange?”

  “Their qualities complement each other’s. Each contributes something. Tildy’s last friendship didn’t really bring out the best in either girl.”

  “You mean Maud Norton. She has certainly become a handsome girl, though a bit flighty.” He did not add like her mother.

  “Everyone assumed Tildy was the stronger personality, certainly our family did, but now I’m not so sure. I think there was something in the combination of those two that created a sort of unholy alliance. When Maud entered third grade and the other girls were speculating about her, it gratified Tildy to take the new girl under her wing and play patroness. Once Tildy even proposed to Mother and Daddy that they adopt Maud. Mama said that someone else would most likely be adopting Maud any day now, because Lily was not exactly suffering for boyfriends. And then as time went on, Mama said Lily would soon be dating the sons of her former dates. Gracious, Henry, how rude of me! You went out with Lily, didn’t you?”

  “For a little while, yes. But she was way too lively and ambitious to put up with a morose widower like me for very long. What about this unholy alliance you say the girls created?”

  “As a team they influenced the others, made the class do whatever they had decided on. But it was a joint thing. I don’t think Tildy could have done it all by herself, even with her wild imagination, and Maud certainly couldn’t have by herself: she was a social nonentity until Tildy chose her. But the two of them made a powerful little engine—who was the engine and who was the fuel I’m not sure even matters. You need them both to drive anywhere.”

  “So where did they drive?”

  “Well, their first drive was, pardon the pun, driving off a lay teacher who had been there forever. Mrs. Prince.”

  “Oh, Agnes had Mrs. Prince.”

  “Yes, Mama’s class had her, I had her. She was a well-meaning fixture. Mama always said that Mrs. Prince wanted too much to be liked and that could be the undoing of anyone.”

  “Uh-oh. Watch out for wanting to be liked too much.” Henry could just hear Cornelia Stratton’s pitiless tone as she framed her pronouncement, and he couldn’t help wondering to what degree she had inspired the driving out of Mrs. Prince.

  “Why, Henry, you don’t strike me as giving two hoots about being liked.”

  “I like to be respected, which is a version of the same thing. But what about yourself, Madeline? How much do you care about being liked?”

  Madeline drew her father’s baggy sweater up around her neck. “I’d first need to ask, Liked by whom? Even if you are, in your usual way, Henry, deflecting the spotlight from yourself.”

  “By all means, do ask it.”

  Am I so starved for adult company that I am enjoying this dialogue with a sixteen-year-old girl, he wondered, or is it that we have found our way to topics I don’t ordinarily touch on during the course of a business day?

  “Well, unlike Tildy, I never needed to have just one special ‘best friend’ I could tell everything to. Probably Mama has filled that role for me. We’re still girls together, giggling in the darkroom about how interchangeable most boys are. Mama had me when she was nineteen, which is only three years older than I am now, and she’s often told me she didn’t really feel like a mother until she had Tildy, who was more of a childlike child. Mama says I was born an old soul, like her sister. Like Antonia, she says, I am wiser and larger-hearted than the average adult. I’m not sure that’s so, but I am sure that Mama likes me as much as Mama likes anyone. Of course, Daddy would walk barefoot over broken glass for me or Tildy, but we’re talking about liking here.”

  I’m sick of being told I’m an old soul, Antonia said to Henry during the very short span of time they were privileged to lie together as a sanctified couple and say whatever they pleased in the dark. I want to be a brand-new soul starting out on life’s adventure. And he had said something not quite inspiring enough, like Well, I hope you’ll let me go with you. To which she had responded with an impatient laugh, sounding in the darkness exactly like her caustic twin: You already are with me, Henry, in case you hadn’t noticed.

  “I’ve said something tactless, Henry. I see it in your face.”

  “No. I was recalling something Antonia said.”

  He saw how valiantly the girl strained to suppress her curiosity.

  “While we were in Rome, Antonia told me she wanted to be a brand-new soul starting out on life’s adventure. I just wish she could have been granted the opportunity.”

  “Oh, why did she have to cross that street without looking?”

  “Well, we were crossing together and I guess she assumed I was looking out for us both. She turned to say something. But she must have been a little ahead of me, because there was a roar and a thump and only one of us was on the ground. It was a small gray van, taking the corner too sharply. It went right on without slowing down and disappeared in traffic. Maybe the driver was unaware anything had been hit. Then people were shouting in Italian, and two very efficient carabinieri materialized instantly. The ambulance came remarkably soon after. This was Il Duce’s faultlessly run city. But she was already gone.”

  “It must have been just—I can’t imagine what I would have done in your place.”

  “I didn’t do much of anything. Everything was organized for us. Our embassy and even the Vatican stepped in. Antonia and I had been received by Pope Pius XI the day before. All I had to do was sit in a room and speak into the receiver to my father and to the Tildens. Someone else even did the work of placing the calls. And then I was back in my old bedroom with Antonia’s unpacked boxes in the corner. And not long after that, Father died, and after that came the war.”

  The girls chattered on upstairs.

  “Oh, Uncle Henry, I didn’t mean to dredge up all that old sorrow.”

  “Actually,” Henry said, “it’s nice to have remembered something so particular about her. To hear her say something she really did say. And you dredged that up for me, Madeline, for which I thank you.”

  “Oh my God, that is priceless!” Tildy shrieked.

  Madeline stood up, all business, and marched to the foot of the stairs. “Okay, little one,” she called up in her strong, trilling voice, “time for us to get going.”

  Did Henry only imagine he heard a note of relief at being ejected
by duty from an embarrassing conversation?

  CHAPTER 13

  All Souls

  Friday, November 2, 1951

  All Souls’ Day

  Mount St. Gabriel’s

  FATHER LOHAN, HIS back to the people, knelt at the altar for the noon Requiem Mass of All Souls’ Day. “Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus, qui labia Isaiae Prophetae calculo mundasti ignito …”

  Maud, the non-Catholic, also on her knees, read the English translation on the right side of the missal. Cleanse my heart and my lips, O Almighty God, Who didst cleanse the lips of the Prophet Isaias with a burning coal …

  She liked following along in the missal. This one, new to the pew racks this school year, was arranged better, had larger type, and was more lavish with illustrations. That must please Tildy, she thought. Before the coming of Chloe, Maud had knelt next to Tildy. Not because they had been best friends but because everything at Mount St. Gabriel’s was alphabetical, and in their class, Norton had been followed by Stratton. Even if Chloe hadn’t been Tildy’s new best friend, she would still be placed now between Maud and Tildy, because Starnes came between Norton and Stratton.

  Maud could see Tildy, on the other side of Chloe, kneeling with her gaze fastened on her open missal. Tildy did not turn the pages. In the old days, Tildy would watch until Maud beside her turned her page, or flipped back and forth between the front part of the book and the feast of the day, and then Tildy would follow suit. Tildy could read the numbers at the tops of the pages fine, but letters played mean tricks on her. In order to read, or do what passed for reading when Maud was not around to expedite things, Tildy had to go letter by letter, like making her way, she said, through a bunch of nasty, belligerent sheep, dragging the ones who had strayed into their proper places. It took her twice as long to do assignments and gave her headaches, but she had learned to do it. Now Chloe could be seen turning the page, but Tildy kept her gaze stubbornly riveted on the previous one. Had she stopped trying to keep up appearances? Or had she not chosen to share her weakness with her new friend?

  Suddenly Maud felt close to tears.

  “If we haven’t heard something by Thanksgiving, it’s not a good sign,” Maud’s anxious grandmother had murmured to Maud’s mother last night, when the two women were putting away dishes in the kitchen.

  “Oh, I am sick of this servile waiting on the whims of rich people.”

  “Keep your voice down, Lily.”

  “I’m sick of keeping my voice down.”

  “The child will hear.”

  “So let her. She’s not a child and she might as well start learning that she may have to make her own way, as I did.”

  “Well, if so, I hope she will make it more wisely than you did.”

  “That is just below the belt, Mother.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn. But it’s not easy, you know, running this place.”

  “I came back to help you, to make your life easier.”

  “You came back because you had nowhere else to go. You had a seven-year-old child with no—”

  “I will not sleep in the same room with you, Mother, if you’re starting on this tack.”

  “Go sleep in Mr. Foley’s room then. He won’t be back until the week after next.”

  “I just might. You know, Mother, when you’re not denouncing me, you occasionally have good ideas. Maud’s Julius Caesar costume was inspired. Only you could have draped her like that.”

  “Then be grateful for my good ideas when I have them. I’m not going to be around much longer.”

  “Oh, when have I heard that before?”

  “Then you’ll have our bed all to yourself. Until you decide to fill it up with somebody else. Though, if I were you, I’d be a little more practical this time.”

  On Halloween, the class had voted a split second place to Tildy as David Copperfield and Chloe as little Emily. Maud would just as soon they’d gotten her own first place. Mother Malloy, handing her the prize (a volume of Robert Burns’s poems), said Maud looked “completely the emperor.” And she did, with her powdered short hair, her tall form draped in Granny’s painstaking toga. But Maud felt she had outgrown dressing up.

  Why were the lips of the prophet cleansed by a burning coal rather than burnt to a crisp? That would be an okay question to ask Mother Malloy. Neither “impertinent” nor “slangy”—two of Mother Malloy’s abominations—but something Maud really desired to understand. There was a world where you got burnt if you kissed a burning coal, and another world where a burning coal, or whatever it stood for, could cleanse you. The secret was how to transform the literal burning coal into the one that could make you a clean new person. Of all the adults in Maud’s smudged life, Mother Malloy seemed to Maud her best hope for learning this secret.

  Maud felt hopeful every time she recalled the half-hour conference about her proposed David Copperfield paper. Though it had started off badly with Mother Malloy’s reaction to her title: “The Pungent Ache of the Soul in David Copperfield.”

  “What made you choose the word ‘pungent,’ Maud?”

  “Well, it seemed closest to the kind of ache I want to write about, Mother.”

  “Then let’s talk about that first. Tell me about this ache.”

  “It’s David’s ache when he’s washing bottles in that factory. He’s crushed in his soul. He thinks he will never get out of this low place and become what he knows he can be. He can’t understand why a smart child like himself should be thrown away. While I was reading this, the ache I felt was his ache, but there was something else happening, too, from my side. And that’s what I want to write about, how you can experience more of yourself as you follow a character through his story. If the story is good enough, I mean. Most stories aren’t. Or they’re not good enough to help you make the transfer. Because you can never stop remembering that this is just something some author is making up. If you don’t feel the ache yourself, you can’t come to grips with what it means to your life.”

  “And do you plan to report these transfers as they occur throughout the novel?” Mother Malloy, who had been listening carefully, seemed surprised but impressed.

  “That’s my plan, more or less,” Maud recklessly bluffed. She really had not thought much beyond her initial brainstorm about the bottle-factory scene.

  “It’s a very ambitious plan for a five-page paper, Maud. Maybe too ambitious. You’ll have to consolidate, keep it tight. And perhaps take a less dramatic title for now. Or certainly another adjective. ‘Pungent’ generally applies to a taste or smell. Perhaps you meant ‘poignant,’ which denotes something sharply painful to the feelings, though ‘poignant’ has been overused by the ladies magazines. Why don’t you take a simple working title that will keep you true to your intention: ‘The Universal Aches of David’—something like that. The perfectly right combination of words may suggest itself to you after the paper is finished. I’ve often found that to be the case in my own academic work.”

  What was the “perfectly right combination of words” to describe Mother Malloy’s beauty? Pale, cool, classic, sculpted, ethereal: all, alas, had the ladies-magazine taint. Maud should know. Those stacks of Granny’s Journals and Companions and Redbooks and Good Housekeepings. Who, after Granny, devoured those stories like chocolate bars? Only now, after David and the bottle factory, they wouldn’t satisfy as completely. Things you habitually loved were always getting downgraded. Like poor Tildy, when Anabel Norton’s eyebrows had shot up on Worth Avenue over Tildy’s photograph.

  Mother Malloy’s beauty was more than just her fortunate proportions, but exactly what more? Maud puzzled over this while at the same time trying to hide her chagrin that she probably had meant “poignant” and not “pungent.” In the nun’s long face, everything was at the right distance from everything else. Eyebrows tilting outward like wings. Wide-spaced gray eyes seemed darker under the hooded lids. Her nose was a fine straight line descending from brow to tip with no indent. What you called a “
Grecian nose.” Habitually she tucked her firm chin into the starched and pleated white neckcloth, as if hoping to be subsumed by her religious habit. But there was reserve and also a deterring dash of—what? Contempt? Surely not in a nun. What then? You loved to look at her when she was at the blackboard, or just now, in full profile, kneeling in the nuns’ choir stall up in the chancel, but you were a little abashed when she chose to look directly at you. Because you could see her attention was on you; she wanted you and all the Davids under her care to be as distinguished as you had it in you to be. It was just that you got the feeling that she cared about something else more.

  “Words are difficult,” Maud had said. “I mean, finding the most … apt ones is.”

  Mother Malloy winced at the awkwardness of the “are” against the “is,” though Maud’s grammar had been perfectly correct. She saw the nun acknowledge this also, with a slight smile.

  “But you are off to a fine start, Maud. I am eager to see what you are going to write.”

  THANKS TO HER mother, Agnes, Chloe knew all the Latin in the Mass, from “Dominus vobiscum” to “Ite, missa est.” She knew that the prayer of the day’s offertory was labeled “secret” in your missal because you said it to yourself and not aloud. On this, the second Mass of All Souls’ Day, the “secret” was: “Be favorable, O Lord, to our supplications for the souls of Thy servants and handmaids, for whom we offer Thee the sacrifice of praise, that Thou wouldst vouchsafe to grant them companionship with Thy Saints.”

  Agnes was now a handmaid, carrying her immortal soul, like a new-laid egg, through the mists and weathers of her purgatorial assignments.

  In the days when Captain Merriweather Starnes was still alive but off fighting the war, Agnes gave Chloe her catechism lessons in their different air base homes. Their faith had sat in the place of the absent father at their many kitchen tables, scarred and stained by previous military families on the move. After Rex Wright became part of their lives, Agnes had her own set of brand-new maple kitchen furniture, but the new father who now made the third at their table felt they used their faith to shut him out. After some unhappy scenes, catechism and Latin were banished to the booth of the downtown diner. “This is our Upper Room,” Agnes would say, leaning forward on her elbows and pulling up the skin of her face so she looked younger. “We are like the early Christians breaking bread in secret. Only our bread is Nabs cheese crackers with peanut butter.”