by Gail Godwin
Mother Ravenel had thrown a monkey wrench into Tildy’s original plan for John to drive the five ninth graders to the funeral and then on to the cemetery. “Your idea that Maud’s fellow officers should attend Mrs. Roberts’s funeral was a good one, Tildy. It shows your natural bent for leadership. But there is no need for you girls to miss an extra class period by going out to the cemetery. Strangers have no business at a burial. The interment should be for bereaved friends and family members.”
“Mrs. Roberts was not a stranger to me, Mother Ravenel. I’ve stayed over at Maud’s hundreds of times, ever since we were little girls.”
“Ye-es,” drawled the headmistress, eyeing Tildy sharply from across the big desk. “Though you and Maud aren’t so close anymore. But if you feel you must go to the cemetery, Tildy, have your mother write Mother Malloy a note saying she wishes you to go.”
“That woman!” exploded Cornelia, dashing off the note. “Always meddling in our lives!”
The other girls having been chauffeured back to school, Tildy rode with John to the cemetery, mulling over her new relationship with Mother Ravenel, who was still an adversary, but suddenly an advantageous one. The Ravenel had power—she could expel you or uninvite you back. Or, as she had done after Tildy’s first report card, she could threaten probation, with its threat of failure and expulsion. But she could also, as people with power were privileged to do, suddenly bestow power on chosen ones. As she had done when she’d suggested to Tildy that she might direct a 1952 production of The Red Nun. But why had Mother Ravenel chosen Tildy? Mama was suspicious of her motives. “Suzanne Ravenel has meddled in our family life from the very beginning. The first day she entered Mount St. Gabriel’s, she started weaseling her way into my sister’s affections—Antonia, who never could resist a sufferer, befriended the lonely little boarder from Charleston, even before that father did away with himself the weekend after Black Friday. And then there was talk that she would be sent home because there was no money, and she had a sort of junior nervous breakdown and was packed off to the infirmary, where she had her legendary meeting with the foundress—God only knows how much of that was true and how much she made up out of whole cloth, because Mother Wallingford was on round-the-clock opiates for her brain cancer. Following her death, Suzanne was free to fabricate whatever would serve her own legend best. After that, she never left the school—who paid for it is anyone’s guess. Old Mother Finney once told Agnes Vick, who was her pet, that Mother Wallingford had arranged a full scholarship for her before she died.”
Tildy’s mother now watched her anxiously for any evidence that she might be “going over” to Mother Ravenel. The knowledge gave Tildy an exhilarating flush of power: her hard-to-pin-down, contemptuous mother fearfully examining her baby for signs of desertion to the enemy.
“She isn’t trying to maneuver you into thinking you have a vocation, like she tried to do with Madeline, is she?”
“Good grief, no, Mama, I’m far too egotistical to make a good nun. She says I have leadership qualities that haven’t found their proper outlets yet. She says she was the same way. One day in freshman study hall she just picked up a pencil and started writing a play for her class. She said it was like taking dictation from a higher source.”
Cornelia made a sour face. “I’ve never understood why writers think they have to blame their scribblings on ‘a higher source.’ Why can’t they just own up to the job and let it go at that? And, Tildy, you have always enjoyed bossing other people around. Your leadership qualities didn’t just burst into bloom because she has condescended to notice them. Anyhow, I hope you can infuse something new into her tiresome girlhood theatrical. It needs a shot of new life. It needs—”
“What, Mama? It needs what? Each class is allowed to add its own material, you know. That’s part of the tradition. Tell me what you’re thinking!”
“Oh, some sort of breakout from the traditional old party line. Her party line. Maybe some scenes from behind the scenes.”
“Like what, Mama? Please be specific. Look how you helped me sharpen up Uriah Heep’s disgustingness. What kind of breakout? What scenes behind what scenes?”
“Don’t be so importunate, Tildy. You know I can’t stand to be pinned down. Let me go away and think about it.”
Monday, January 21, 1952
The cemetery
Maud knew she would remember every detail of Tildy’s grand arrival at the cemetery for as long as she lived.
There they had stood around the open grave, the pitiful remnants of Granny’s funeral. The old people in their shabby hats and coats looked half dead themselves in the cruel winter light. Her mother leaned in a little too close to Mr. Foley, who had overcreamed his pompadour. The raw wind pasted the minister’s black gown against his skinny body and he held the prayer book at an absurd distance from his eyes. Maud had heard him jokingly apologize to her mother, as their paltry little group of mourners labored up the hill to Granny’s waiting grave, for leaving his reading glasses behind in the pulpit.
Everywhere, in this sad little scene she found herself part of, Maud perceived elements that boded compromise and outright danger to her best hopes.
It now seemed sinister that she had chosen “The Downgrading of Dreams” as the final title for her David Copperfield paper, which had earned her an A plus and a note of high praise from Mother Malloy. This triumph had taken away some of the sting of the Palm Beach debacle and the aftermath of having to explain to Granny and Lily why she probably would not be invited to stay with the Nortons again, but it was a short-lived triumph because Granny had slipped away from them soon after the paper was returned.
Though it departs from your original and perhaps overly ambitious plan of pinpointing the universal aches throughout the novel and showing how they achieve the transfer from character to reader, thereby enlarging and authenticating the reader’s experience, your paper’s narrower and sharper focus has the power of felt emotion kept in service to a theme. Yes, it is a fact, as you point out, that unmerited degradations abound in our fallen world, but it is also true, as you go on to say, that they often call out the finest creative strengths of the human soul. “The Downgrading of Dreams” is a testament to reading and writing at its best. This is excellent work, Maud.
Mother K. Malloy, O.S.S.
Tildy’s trilby hat with uptilted black feather appeared at the rim of the hill just as Dr. Clark was inviting the assembled mourners to come forward and cast a handful of soil on the casket. Then came the rest of her: the mop of tawny hair that had caused Anabel Norton to compare her to Orphan Annie, a too long black coat with a fox collar (probably from Madeline’s closet), an old-fashioned lace fichu that looked like plunder from an old trunk, the outfit completed by black gauntlet-length kid gloves, dark stockings, and opera pumps. Oh, glorious, dramatic Tildy, moving smartly across the turf to stand by her side! Maud, who had not been able to weep at the funeral, felt welcome tears sliding down her cheeks. She had assumed that Tildy had returned to school with the other girls.
Maud’s mother went first to cast her handful of soil on Granny’s casket, followed by Maud. Had it not been for Tildy, who stuck to Maud close as a bodyguard, Mr. Foley would have slipped into third place and made it look like he was the appointed protector of Maud and her mother. Maud had that remembered sense of Tildy anticipating her requirements sometimes before she herself knew what they were.
“Now, here is what I’m going to suggest, Maud,” Tildy said, jumping right in with her old officiousness as soon as the mourners began to disperse. “John is waiting below with the Packard. You have the rest of the day off, am I right? So do I. Mama wrote a note. Why don’t you come home with me? Flavia will make us some lunch. I have a new room—it’s much nicer. Madeline switched with me. We could just hang around for the rest of the day. If you want to, that is.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I want to, but I don’t know whether I’m supposed to ride back with my mother and—them—in the limousine.”
/> “Well, let’s go ask your mother and see what she says.”
Monday afternoon
The Stratton house
“How did you get Madeline to switch with you?” asked Maud, curled up in the window seat of Tildy’s new room.
“It was her idea. She did it one Sunday when I was spending the day at the Vick house. She and Flavia slaved all afternoon to surprise me. The bed was too big to move, so here I am in it.” Tildy luxuriously stretched out her arms and legs in four directions, like spokes in a wheel. “It was back in October, when everyone was feeling sorry for me.”
“Why were they feeling sorry for you?”
“Oh, my grades took a dive and old Ravenous called me in and said I had to shape up or she’d put the black mark on my eternal record. And I was having a pretty awful time with old David the Copperfield. Then Mother Malloy offered to tutor me twice a week to improve my reading techniques, and Madeline worked with me at night. We’d read together, like you and I used to do, Maud.”
You mean I’d do the reading and you’d lie with your eyes closed and listen with a superior look on your face, and then afterward I’d explain the significance of everything we’d read, thought Maud, feeling bitterness over Tildy’s family security, over her private hours twice a week with the beautiful Malloy, and fear and disgust at what was probably going on right now between her mother and Mr. Foley back at the Granny-less Pine Cone Lodge. But she also felt exultant to be alone with Tildy in this large sun-filled room.
“I can’t imagine giving up a room like this to anybody,” she said.
“Oh well, Madeline is like that. She’s always thinking of others. Mama says our aunt Tony was just the same. This was Aunt Tony’s room when she was a girl. And then when she came back to live here with Mama and Daddy when Mama was expecting Madeline, it was her room again. There’s still stuff of hers in boxes under the window seats. Old clothes and things she left behind when she married Uncle Henry.”
“Was that her lace fichu you wore under your coat today?”
Tildy shot up to a sitting position. “God, you are amazing, Maud! How did you know?”
“I just had a feeling,” Maud played along. With Tildy, nothing could be as mundane as a simple deduction. It had to be magical, supernatural.
“You always did have a jillion dimensions, Maud. You must be psychic, too. Chloe has some psychic powers. But”—Tildy rolled her eyes in exasperation—“she uses hers mainly for contacts with her dead mother.”
Tildy’s mentioning of Chloe at all transferred them to slippery ground. The second revelation, however, especially accompanied with the eye rolling, could be read as a breach of loyalty to her present best friend and an invitation to “talk about” Chloe. If Maud were to remain above reproach, she must not rise to the bait.
“With her … dead mother?”
She nevertheless had risen.
“I really shouldn’t be discussing this with anyone,” said Tildy. Frowning, she carefully rearranged her legs tailor-fashion on the high bed and leaned forward, a hand on each knee. Both girls had shed their funeral clothes and wore jeans. Tildy had found a pair in Madeline’s closet that fit Maud’s longer body. “But it’s been a bit worrisome.”
“What are these contacts like?” Maud asked, throwing shame to the winds.
“Well, she constantly draws her. You know how she’s always drawing. She can make anything look like the spitting image of itself. She fills page after page with drawings of her mother. Agnes when she was our age, at school. Agnes the way she looked in the days before she died. Collecting eggs from the henhouse, or sitting across from Chloe at this diner where they went to get away from Rex, the stepfather. She must have hundreds of these drawings.”
“But drawing someone—that’s not exactly contacting the dead—”
“Wait,” said Tildy ominously. “I haven’t finished. Then she consults the drawings. She doesn’t do this much when I’m around, but she does it enough that I know she must do it a lot more when she’s alone.”
“How do you mean ‘consults’?”
“Oh, she’ll snatch up her pad and flip to a drawing, or sometimes she’ll start a new Agnes, and you can see her meditating on it, like you would a holy icon. Sometimes she’ll speak to it, ask it questions.”
“What sort of questions?”
“Like, ‘Is it right for us to do this?’ I mean, at first you think she’s asking you, because you’re the only other person in the room, but she’s not. She’s asking the picture; she’s asking Agnes. It’s like she’s praying to the Virgin or something. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Is it right to do what?”
“Oh, whatever is in the plans. She was going to do a class portrait for the bulletin board. Remember? You asked her to contribute something artistic.”
“Yes, I remember.” Maud also remembered the look of hate Tildy had shot her that day, and the way Tildy had pretended not to hear Maud’s request but had acted as though it was her idea for Chloe to do something.
“Well, she had the portrait all sketched out and was starting to color in the faces and do the clothes—God, Maud, it was fantastic, it was like watching each girl came alive on the paper. She’d done Hansje and Beatrix in their matching chesterfields, and Marta Andreu hugging herself in her purple shawl, and then I had to go home, and the next thing I’m hearing from Chloe is that she’s not going on with the portrait—it’s all off. I mean, she’d finished it by then, she’d done my beaver coat to perfection, and Dorothy Yount wiping her eye, but she told me she wasn’t going to present it to Mother Malloy for the bulletin board.”
“Why?”
“Because. She said people might not want their secret sides posted on the bulletin board. That’s when I asked her who’d been influencing her. I thought maybe Uncle Henry.”
“Was it?” Maud wished she knew how she herself had looked in Chloe’s portrait. Would she recognize her own secret side?
“She said nobody had influenced her, but she got that look she gets when she’s ganging up with Agnes against me. And then what she said after that was pure Agnes. She said, ‘I just asked myself how I would feel if I were those other girls.’ Agnes was so fair-minded. That was her big thing, Mama said. I never met Agnes, but I feel I know how she feels about everything, through Chloe. Chloe is haunted by her.”
You are beginning to sound like you are, too, thought Maud. “You really think so?”
“If you want to know what I really think”—Tildy was scowling—“I think Chloe is trying to become Agnes.”
“But why would she want to do that?”
“To keep from being herself and making up her own mind about things.”
Maud’s next obvious question would have been “What things?” and she could see that Tildy was waiting for her to ask it. The old rhythms of her exchanges with Tildy were back in play again. She knew she would get more by slowing them down and expressing scruples.
“After all,” mused Maud, looking down intently at her own knees, “her mother only died last spring. That isn’t even a year ago yet.”
Then Maud had her awful thought: It might have worked out better for me if Granny had lived on with her tricky heart and Lily had died. Granny and I could have carried on the Pine Cone Lodge trade; I could have shopped and kept accounts and finished at Mount St. Gabriel’s on the day scholarship I won at the end of eighth grade. I could have made perfect grades and earned a scholarship to college. I would have escaped, even without the Nortons’ help. Now I’m not sure I will escape. I’ve heard them talking. Art Foley wants to move to Atlanta and take us with him. It will be like David Copperfield losing ground at the bottle factory. All the gains I have made for myself here in Mountain City will pass away and I will have to start all over at the bottom again. But I’m not a genius like Dickens, and I’m not a man, and I’m not the favored character in a novel under the loving protection of a biased creator.
I may never reclaim my lost ground.
> “Maud!” cried Tildy. “I have to know what you are thinking right this minute!”
How much have I missed her? Her bossy commands, her infuriating dramatizing of herself, of everything that touches her life. Do I want to be part of those dramatics again? Give up the autonomy I have built for myself in ninth grade and go back to sleeping over at the Strattons’ and feeling grateful to shelter under her security? Do I want to go back to those fits and stabs of jealousy that used to make me hate myself and her?
“Maudie, are you crying?” In one motion, Tildy had sprung from the bed and was nuzzling against Maud in the window seat. “You have got to tell me. I know that look. It’s not just your granny. It’s more.”
She may not be able to read worth a damn, but she sure can read me.
“Everything is just awful,” Maud said. Her face felt rubbery; she fought to control it, then gave herself over. “My life is going down the drain,” she sobbed into Tildy’s Orphan Annie curls. “They’ll take me away from Mountain City. Before she died, Granny told me she suspected they were already married, but she intended to stay alive so I could live with her and keep my scholarship to Mount St. Gabriel’s. But now they’re going to sell the Pine Cone Lodge and the Nortons can’t rescue me anymore—they’ve got their own problems and Anabel may leave my dad. He fell off the wagon when I was there at Christmas because I disgraced myself at a dance with this awful person named Troy Veech, who necked with me and asked me to marry him and said he’d send me to school, and then went off to join the Army. I ruined Anabel’s chances for getting into Palm Beach society and she’s fed up with my father and now I am going to lose everything.”
