by Gail Godwin
Just when Tildy had been fantasizing that she might lose control of herself and start screaming, “I can’t take any more of this torture!” and they would have to call an ambulance, since John wasn’t back yet and Madeline was at the dance and Mama probably down at the studio developing the day’s work, the phone mercifully rang and it was somebody wanting Uncle Henry to build them something and he excused himself and—finally!—she and Chloe headed upstairs to their room, for so Tildy thought of it, since she slept in it almost every Saturday night.
At last Tildy’s announcement had been made, and Chloe had been sulky in her congratulations because she said Tildy ought to have told her sooner that it was not bad news rather than to let Chloe worry ever since Mother Ravenel had called Tildy out of study hall yesterday.
“Yeah, I know, and I’m really sorry, Chloe. You and I both were expecting the worst, but she totally surprised me. I wasn’t trying to keep it from you or anything, but I wanted to wait until all the social activities were over and we could really concentrate.”
“Well, Tildy, I could have enjoyed the Ice Capades and our other ‘social activities’ a lot more if I hadn’t been worrying about you all day.”
However, ruffled feathers had now been smoothed, two sets of teeth brushed, two sets of pajamas donned. The contrite Tildy, having convinced Chloe that she would be absolutely indispensable “with everything from casting to scenery—if ‘we’ decide to take it on,” was now lying on her sofa bed, as she had been envisioning herself doing since yesterday, her bent arm shielding her eyes in order to concentrate better, and Chloe, curled up in a chair facing her, was reading aloud the fresh typescript of Suzanne Ravenel’s old play, typed by Mother Ravenel herself, “with a couple of new revisions, Tildy. As long as we are on this earth—and I hope you will remember this as you go through your own life, dear—God graciously allows us to keep improving on what we have done. As I often say, we are all works in progress!”
“SHOULD I JUST start at the beginning and go straight through?” asked Chloe.
“Well, of course, what else?” replied Tildy, having assumed her customary dominion. “That’s the way the director of a Broadway play does it. He lies back on a couch and closes out all distractions, and the actors read through it for him, and he watches it unfold in his head. Those first impressions received in darkness often give birth to his most brilliant ideas.”
Tildy, assembled on her sofa bed in her directorial pose, her arm flung dramatically across her face, looked more to Chloe like a schoolgirl in pink pajamas portraying, or perhaps parodying, her idea of “a damsel in distress on a sofa.”
What a funny roller coaster this thing called friendship is, thought Chloe as she began to read aloud the prologue to The Red Nun. Ever since Tildy was called out of study hall yesterday, I have been sick with worry. I could see her taken from me, forced to transfer to the junior high in the middle of the year. I was already imagining the things I would miss most about her: her arrogant little pretensions, just like her pose on the fainting couch. All of today was under a cloud for me—Granddaddy’s elegant cafeteria with the colored skylights and all my favorite foods on the tray, then the Ice Capades and the terrific seats Uncle Henry bought for us—because I kept reminding myself that this might be the last time, she would be making new friends at the public school and I would be left behind at Mount St. Gabriel’s, a ghost walking the halls with my mother’s ghost. Even Uncle Henry looked sad all day and I thought, It’s because he knows. Her parents, or probably Madeline, phoned him with the bad news and they’ve decided, all of them, to keep it from me until after Christmas, because I’m a poor thing who can’t bear any more losses. And then we come up to this room and we’re hardly through the door when she springs it on me about Mother Ravenel’s turnaround. Far from being kicked out, Tildy has suddenly been appointed Mother Ravenel’s own artistic successor, and because I’m not jumping up and down and slobbering with congratulations, she sticks her lower lip out and rolls her eyes when I explain how the whole day was under a cloud for me.
“Would you mind reading that prologue through again, Chloe?” mumbled Tildy from her arm-covered face. “I think I hear some creepy music but I can’t decide just what.”
Chloe began again:
“If you go out walking in our dark wood
When the hawk’s face is tucked beneath his wing
And mist has risen in the hollows
And the owl shrieks:
Do not shrink if on your path
You meet a solitary ghost.
Ask it, ‘What did you love most?
And what have you left undone?’
“We can’t use a flute, dammit, because that’s what old Ravenel picked—Elaine Frew’s mother composed a creepy tune on her flute.”
“What about asking Elaine to compose something on the piano?”
“I’d rather go to hell and burn than ask a favor from that stuck-up prima donna.”
“But wouldn’t she be flattered? I mean, keeping it in the family and all.”
“No, Chloe. Besides, as an instrument, the piano isn’t spooky enough. It’s too damned tinkly. Go on. What comes next?”
“Well, it’s God speaking. Haven’t you read it?”
“Of course I peeked at it, but I tried not to read it. I wanted to do it like the directors. Hear it in the dark of my mind. Mother Malloy said in our reading tutorials that hearing things from the lips of others is a whole other way of receiving the word. I told you, I’m dictating my Dickens paper to her in French. It gives things more body. I want this play to have more body. It can’t be all streamlined ghosts marching in a straight line across a page, you know, Chloe.”
“I didn’t say it should be.”
“No, I know you didn’t. But—go on, read God’s lines.”
“‘I smashed continents together to make these mountains. I buckled them into sharp peaks before my doomed dinosaurs reached their fated growth. This big and no bigger, I said … and they became fossils. Then I sculpted my rough peaks, sent hundreds of millions of years of my wind and my rain down upon them, and then polished them with my glaciers. And eons passed like a day and a night, and on one good day, on one particular hill, in my own good time, I decided to set a school.’”
“Cut! Damn it all, who is going to do God’s voice?”
“My mother said Mother Ravenel—or Suzanne—did God, as well as some of the other big parts.”
“Well, I know that, from Mama, but that was in 1931 and we’re in the 1950s. You can’t have a freshman girl doing God’s voice anymore. Theater has become more sophisticated. Can you go through it once more—don’t try to change your voice, but read each word slowly and then leave a pause before the next. And please try not to yawn.”
“‘I smashed—
“No, no: ‘I’ (pause) ‘smashed’ (pause)—like that. The pauses make it sound otherworldly, like He’s speaking slowly in the language of His creatures so they’ll be able to understand him.”
“‘I …’” (Yawn.) “Sorry, Tildy, let me start over.
“‘I … smashed … continents … together … to … make … these … mountains …’”
“Well, the pauses make it better, but what we really need is someone like John’s rumbly Paul Robeson voice that vibrates out of his nostrils.”
“You mean Flavia’s John? I don’t think we’d be allowed to ask people who aren’t in the ninth grade.”
“I know that, Chloe. But why couldn’t we record John’s voice? I’ll have to coach him, of course. What I’d do is say each word and then he’d say it after me and some technical person could string it together and God’s voice would come out of a tape machine offstage. That gives me the shivers; it would be perfect!”
“Who’s going to do all this technical work?”
“Oh, we can find somebody. Go on with God.”
CHAPTER 18
Two Nuns on a Walk
Saturday, September 1, 2001
Feast of St.
Giles, abbot; Commemoration of the Twelve Holy Brothers
Grounds of the St. Scholastica Retirement House
Warm evening, clear and bright, following Compline
“I LOVE OUR evening walks, Mother Galyon. You are very kind to let me hang on your arm. And please stop me if I rattle on too much. There’s so much in my head. We recorded just twenty-eight Catholic deaths in the Boston area today. That’s one of our low numbers, isn’t it? I try not to dwell on it, but one day my name will be on that list, only I won’t be at the other end of the phone to repeat it so you can take down the particulars. And Sister Bridget will have to call down to Mountain City and have somebody spread the word for my old girls to offer up prayers for my soul. I just hope I will have finished the memoir by then, but that’s in God’s hands.”
“How far have you gotten, Mother?”
“This morning I finished the—well, let’s call it an overture to the ‘fifties’ chapter. I’ve been procrastinating by offering a capsule history survey of ‘the decades so far.’ The French would call it reculer pour mieux sauter: I balk for fear of jumping in. Remember those girls on the playground who never could dart right into a moving jump rope but stood there teetering back and forth, bobbing their necks like chickens?”
“What are you balking at, Mother? Watch your step; the gravel’s uneven here.”
“Thank you, dear. You know, I can still see the stars out of the corners of my eyes. You know what I’m balking at? The class of fifty-five. I mean, the class of fifty-five in its ninth-grade year. Those girls and their catastrophic play and the awful aftermath, with its repercussions. You were there.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t have called the play in itself catastrophic. To anyone seeing it for the first time—and most people in the audience were, you must remember—it came across as an ambitious performance with some obscure passages and some funny parts, all of which probably weren’t intended to be funny: that offstage voice of God, for instance. The aftermath was tragic, but not necessarily a direct outcome of the play.”
FOR THE GOOD of us both, help me establish some coordinates, invokes Frances Galyon, Order of St. Scholastica, age seventy-nine, slowing her pace to accommodate this older, shorter, all-but-sightless nun on their nightly walk.
This diminished chatterbox clinging to my arm has been in my life longer than any other person. I have admired and hated her by turns. She was the tall one when I began looking up to her. When I arrived at Mount St. Gabriel’s as a freshman boarder on a Knights of Columbus scholarship, she was in the romance of her novitiate. She floated about the school in her short white veil. She was taking courses at the junior college and also teaching second grade. As soon as I said where I was from, girls began linking us and comparing us. “Oh, Charleston is where she is from. Her name was Suzanne before she became a nun, she was president of her class all four years of high school and the first girl ever to take vows before finishing her senior year. She received her diploma in her postulant’s habit. I suppose you knew her family in Charleston?”
I said I thought my father knew her father. That seemed safe enough. I was a new girl and wanted to have the right connections. “Oh, but her father is dead,” I was quickly informed. “It was a hunting accident the weekend after Black Friday. He was alone in a cramped blind and his elbow slipped and he ended up shooting himself rather than the bird. At least that’s the official story. She had only just come to Mount St. Gabriel’s as a boarder. They wouldn’t let her go home for the funeral.”
Her father had been a prominent attorney who handled a number of trusts, one girl said, and there were rumors that he may have been borrowing from clients, planning to replenish the shortfall with no one the wiser; but then Black Friday came and all his clients wanted to be assured that their investments were safe. No charges were ever brought. That was because, said another girl, quoting her own father, the brothers promised to make good on the shortfalls, and who wouldn’t gamble on keeping your mouth shut in the chance of being reimbursed one day rather than bring charges now and make an enemy of the family and end up with a great big nothing?
The girls my age at Mount St. Gabriel’s (these days I would call them my “peers”) seemed so knowing about worldly things like motives and money. I had expected them to be more pious and innocent, as I am sure my father did. He was pious and innocent himself, went to Mass every morning and prayed for my dead mother, then walked to the roundhouse and began inspecting the flock assigned him. He was a master mechanic on the Southern Railway. In those pocket-size memorandum books the insurance companies used to give away, he recorded for over twenty years his daily ministries to the steam engines under his charge.
Eng 4882 not getting steam to water pump and pump won’t supply boiler …
1369 stoker elevator wasting coal bad …
Eng 4877. Put indicator on superheater damper …
Sand pipes on 4567 not putting sand on rail. Needed pulling out …
4877 flue rod tied on hand rail. Get it off.
Little wonder that I had no difficulty imagining a God who knew the exact number of hairs on my head and kept track of every sparrow that fell to earth: didn’t my father keep track of every beloved steam engine assigned to his care?
As I count myself assigned to Mother Suzanne Ravenel, fellow sinner and sister in Christ, sharing an enforced proximity in this retirement enclosure, and both of us heading toward our diamond jubilees as members of the all but extinct Order of St. Scholastica.
So now, on this evening walk, how do I keep us firmly on the path of the truly present and steer us away from those tempting culs-de-sac of resentment and remorse?
“Do you have a deadline, Mother?” I ask.
“What?” I feel her stiffen on my arm. “Oh, the memoir. I thought for a minute you said ‘death line.’ Well, I promised the girls I would work diligently through the months, and if nothing untoward happens and if I keep my marbles, I hope to bring the final tapes in my suitcase when they fly me down to Mountain City next May.”
“Today is the first of September”—Mother Galyon counted off the intervening months on her fingers—“so you have eight months to go and you’ve already done how much since you began?”
“Well, let’s see, I’ve done all the groundwork chapters—the history of our Order and the establishment and beginnings of the school, with some homiletic digressions about holy daring and a woman’s freedom in God—haven’t those two concepts of our foundress’s always fascinated you?—and I’ve completed the decade chapters all the way up to the fifties, and, as I just told you, I’ve been procrastinating, via my little overture to the fifties, by going back and reviewing the highlights of where we’ve already been.”
“So in four months, aside from all the groundwork and the homiletic digressions, you have covered the first four decades. As the school closed in 1990, you have eight months to cover the remaining four decades. Just doing the math, Mother, your prospects look very good.”
She jerks us both to a standstill and wails, “But what do I do about the class of fifty-five in its freshman year?”
It is as close to her as her own face.
“In the past decades, Mother, the decades you have completed, how did you go about reporting on each class? Say, the class of 1915 or 1930 or 1944?”
“Well, you can’t put in everything, can you? You put in the highlights. The funny things. The inspiring occasions. The outstanding girls. And it’s only just my memoir; it all has to come out of what I can remember. And even if I have been part of the school longer than anyone, there are bound to be gaps. Of course, Beatrix, who’s transcribing the tapes, has been invaluable with the old yearbooks. She phones me faithfully every few weeks. We go through whatever decade I am on—she reads aloud from the yearbooks, and that nudges my memory. For years, you know, when I had my sight, I used to pore over those old yearbooks whenever I had insomnia. I kept them all in my office, and I’d take one or two at a time to my room and leaf through the pages.
Old pictures and the way girls characterize one another and what they leave to one another can tell you so much.”
“Have you and Beatrix begun on the fifties yearbooks yet?”
“Funny you should ask. When she phoned last Saturday, she said, ‘Well, Mother, we’re up to the fifties. Shall I read from the 1950 Scholastica?’ I had it on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘No, let’s wait. I am meditating on an overview of where we have been so far and what was going on in the world at the time.’ But then, you know what? I felt this sudden sense of reprieve. Because the 1950 yearbook would only have the classes of 1950 through ‘53. The awful year, with its 1951-through-’52 freshmen faces, wouldn’t come until the fifty-two yearbook. And it will be the only yearbook that contains that unforgettable cluster of freshmen girls that haunts my soul. In the very next Scholastica their faces would be gone. So I said, ‘Onward, dear Beatrix, full steam ahead into the fifties.’ And she began reading through the graduating class of 1950—that’s the way we do it; the focus is on the seniors. I could call up their faces as she named them and read the little captions under their pictures—do you remember your own caption, Mother Galyon?”
