by Gail Godwin
“The only red nun I know is that red buoy that had better be on the starboard side when you come back from sailing,” said Mrs. Judd. “But yours is undoubtedly the nun kind of nun, since your play is about the school. How come she’s red?”
“Well, it’s a statue in our grotto made out of red marble, in honor of a devout Mount St. Gabriel’s girl, Caroline DuPree, who died before she could become a nun, and her parents gave this memorial, only it never got finished—”
Mrs. Judd stopped pacing and looked dumbfounded. “Surely this can’t be the Caroline DuPree I knew.”
Tildy gasped. “You knew Caroline DuPree?”
“Sure, she was a boarder a grade ahead of me. But I must be missing parts of the story, because she was hardly devout, and Mother Wallingford sent her home in the middle of her senior year.”
“You mean, for good?”
“Well, yes. She tried to jump off the water tower. But the tower windows were either stuck or hard to open and Mother Finney raced up the stairs and grabbed her in time.”
“You mean she wanted to kill herself?”
“That was the story. She was madly in love with Mother Wallingford, and wrote about it to her younger sister, and her parents came to pack her up and take her home. They were all meeting in Mother Wallingford’s office and when they told Caroline what had been decided, she ran off to the tower. I knew she’d succumbed to malaria, because the next fall we held a little Requiem for her. I was a senior by then—class of 1913—and engaged to Harold Judd and finished with school in my heart. I must say, I haven’t given Caroline much thought since.”
Tildy was floored. “Was Mother Wallingford in love with her?”
“Good Lord, no, child. Mother Wallingford wasn’t in love with anybody. I doubt she was in love with God. She was a monster of efficiency. She should have been a man, a governor or a prime minister or something. God was her sovereign, that was clear, but certainly not a lover. Yes, that was the way it was with Mother Wallingford. I always thought she was ashamed of being a woman, even though she did dedicate her life to the education of females. She was always berating the girls, including yours truly, for ‘thinking like a woman.’ It was poor Mother Finney everybody loved. She was so witty and quick and fun to be with, and she had the cutest freckles, and she sat a horse fantastically, even in that nun’s garb. Mother Finney’s the one I’m looking forward to seeing tomorrow, though I expect forty years has taken its toll.”
The inside of Tildy’s head felt like an earthquake about to erupt. Mrs. Judd’s offhand recollections, those of an old girl who had been “finished with school in her heart” since 1913, were shaking Tildy’s assumptions from the ground up. They threatened the very underpinnings of the play. It was one thing to want to add some new characters, to shed light on some old vanities and avenge some old wrongs—to make a breakout from what Mama called Mother Ravenel’s “old party line.” But where did you put this new stuff that had so casually issued from Jiggsie’s grandmother’s mouth—stuff that had preceded the time of Mother Ravenel herself? If people weren’t who you had thought they were—if they weren’t the people Suzanne Ravenel had thought they were—where did this fit in the play?
And if it didn’t fit, what was a creative director to do?
Tildy couldn’t wait to report all this to Mama. In the old days, she wouldn’t have been sure of an audience with Mama on any given evening, but since Mother Ravenel had made her director of the play, she could count on Mama coming to her room every night.
“So how is my baby?” Mama would say. “What’s new with the play?” And, smelling of chemicals and her winter perfume, Mama would curl up on top of the covers next to her daughter and encourage Tildy to tell her, like a child telling a mother a bedtime story, everything she had been doing with the play. Tildy had discovered that she had some of her best inspirations during these storytelling reviews with Mama nodding and snuggling beside her and egging her on.
But no, dammit, she wouldn’t see Mama until tomorrow night, because she was spending tonight, as was her custom, with Chloe.
CHAPTER 28
Revising the Dead
Saturday afternoon, March 15, 1952
Riverside Cemetery
Mountain City
CLUSTERS OF CROCUSES, yellow and purple and white, poked up in their appointed spots in the Vick family enclosure. Soon it would be the first anniversary of Agnes’s death, but Agnes was not buried here.
From the wrought-iron bench inside the pebbled enclosure designed by Malcolm Vick, Chloe surveyed the flat markers of Vicks who had completed their lives so far. Underneath those stones lay the remains of her grandfather Malcolm and the wife who had preceded him in death from drink. And there lay Malcolm’s mother, Agnes, after whom Chloe’s mother had been named. And there lay Uncle Henry’s wife, Tildy’s aunt Antonia. One day Henry would go in the ground beside Antonia. And one day Chloe herself, lying straight and completed in a coffin of her own, would join them.
Outside the enclosure’s ornamented iron fence with the graceful latched gate were other Vicks: a great-great-uncle who had been a Confederate soldier, his wife, who’d outlived him by fifty years, some dead infants, and Malcolm Vick’s father, who had perished in a flu epidemic when Malcolm was nine. Some of these lichen-crusted upright graves had sunk lopsidedly into the earth, which is why Malcolm Vick, after the death of his mother, had designed this enclosure for flat markers only. A cemetery was a place for the living, he had said, and he liked arranging things attractively for future living family members, who could come and sit comfortably in the family enclosure and contemplate their dead.
Before her trip to Rex Wright’s in Barlow last month, Chloe had felt it wrong that her mother was not buried here. But things had shifted since then. Since Rex had proudly shown Chloe the memorial to Agnes with so many of her names missing and too much information about himself, it seemed to Chloe that Agnes, the real Agnes, was free to be nowhere at all and to wander where she would. She could not be contained in a “plot,” either in the bright, flat Barlow cemetery or here in her father’s carefully designed enclosure.
The thing was, Agnes had changed since Barlow. Chloe no longer felt her beside her, instructing her what to do next, and sometimes what not to do—like that ninth-grade class portrait that could have caused hurt feelings. Ever since Chloe had carried out Agnes’s instructions in Barlow, her mother’s spirit seemed to have gone on vacation. Something important had been accomplished between them: Agnes’s spirit had wanted it, but Chloe’s living body had been needed to fulfill it.
Chloe’s body had changed, too. A couple of weeks after the trip to Barlow, she had found brownish stains inside her pajamas one morning. Fourteen, going on fifteen, and it had finally come. She and Agnes had discussed that, too, at the diner. “You may be a late bloomer, like me,” Agnes said. “I didn’t start until sixteen.” Most of Chloe’s classmates in Barlow had started. They hustled off importantly to the bathroom, borrowed nickels from one another for the sanitary pad dispenser. She had kept quiet about her “late blooming” until Tildy became her best friend. Who could keep that sort of thing from Tildy? Tildy had started at twelve and, with Madeline’s coaching, had already graduated to junior tampons. “You have to angle your pelvis a certain way on the toilet,” Tildy told her, “and if it goes in wrong, you mustn’t try to force it or it’ll go all smushy; just pull it out and splurge on a fresh one. Don’t worry, I’ll coach you when the time comes. Madeline didn’t get the curse until she was fifteen.” “Well, then I’m in good company,” Chloe had said.
(“Right up to the end, she wanted me …” Rex’s high, furious voice, crumpling one fist inside the other to keep it from hitting her. “Yes, ma’am, she wanted me. I suppose since you two have been in your Catholic afterlife conversation, you knew about the baby. Or had she told you she was pregnant while she was still alive?”)
No, she didn’t tell me. I wonder why not. Was she afraid I’d be displeased? Disgusted? Woul
d I have been? I knew what they did together, I’ve known the facts of life since I was ten, but all the same I never thought they would start a baby. Why didn’t I allow for the possibility of a baby? What if Agnes had lived and the baby had been born? Would I have been jealous? Or would I have loved it because it was my half sister or brother, and we would all still be living in Barlow?
But Agnes sent me away without telling me about the baby. Why? Was she ashamed? Did she think it would upset me, or that I would love her less? Or, oh God, did she think she had to choose between Rex and their baby and me?
She wanted me to be a good Catholic and she kept saying she wished I could go to Mount St. Gabriel’s one day, how happy she had been there.
Did she make some kind of promise to God? Like, Give Rex and me this baby and I will give Chloe to you, the way mothers were always giving away their sons to God in the Bible?
Maybe she had decided that if I was out of the way she and Rex could live a more normal married life, without the shadow of another man’s daughter always watching them critically and overhearing them at night. She knew Uncle Henry would finish raising me according to her principles. And I was already almost fourteen.
What if all those months of her cramming me with Latin and history and religion at the diner were part of a plan? A plan to transfer me to Uncle Henry and to Mount St. Gabriel’s so she could live a normal life and have this baby and others with Rex Wright?
But she loved me, I know she did. She said I was her best friend. She said we could go places together that others couldn’t go. When I showed her my drawings of the way I imagined she looked at my age, she said, “It’s as though you were back in my girlhood, watching over me like a guardian angel.”
I believe it relieved her to talk about Rex with me in our booth at the downtown diner. She could work things out for herself about this uneasy triangle we were living. But she would never let us go too far; her fairness always stopped us before we went too far. Like sometimes she would say, “This is our Upper Room. We are like the early Christians breaking bread in secret. Only our bread is Nabs cheese crackers with peanut butter.”
But when I went too far and said, “So we won’t be thrown to the lions,” she didn’t laugh. “He is trying, darling,” she said. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.” And then with a little flash of conspiracy, she added, “Because, frankly, I don’t see what choice we have.”
Well, maybe later she decided we did have a choice. One of us goes, one of us stays. Or was it already “two of us stay” by then?
We talked about the hitting, too. I could see it hurt her that she felt she had to explain it, to make excuses. “He’s hotheaded, darling. He just—some people are more combustible than others. I mean, some people are about as combustible as wet wood, whereas Rex, well, he’s like … dry paper.” She laughed at her apt comparison. “And there’s also the question of upbringing,” she went on. “If you grow up in a family of hitters, you learn to defend yourself and hit back. People … families …” She bit her lip, searching for words that would be fair to Rex but also get her point across. “People in families have different ways of asserting themselves. My father’s weapon was scorn, a very understated scorn. He never laid a hand on any of us, but he could wilt you without raising his voice. Now, Merry’s father, your other grandfather, his weapon was a kind of bland passivity. He’d say, ‘Well, okay, if that’s what you want …’ Then he’d sidle off quietly and do exactly what he wanted. But, you see, Rex’s father was a hothead, too. He’d backhand Rex at the dinner table and then, Rex said, he’d look genuinely shocked to see his son lying on the kitchen floor with a bloody nose.”
“But that was men,” Chloe protested. “Whereas Rex hits us.”
She would have felt triumph for winning her point if Agnes did not look so defeated. I have really hurt her, Chloe thought, loving her mother even more tenderly because she could hurt her.
But Agnes, quickly recovering, replied somewhat sternly, “People can change, Chloe. If they love someone and learn to feel unthreatened by them and if they know they are loved, I believe they can change.” Leaning forward on her elbows, she rested her forehead on her fingertips and gazed down at the table of their booth. “I have got to believe that,” she said.
Did she still believe it when he went on hitting her? Did he hit her that day? Whether he did or not, it sure scared him when I said he did. “You misguided little ninny, you weren’t here!” he cried, and I could see two opposite things: one, that he might not have hit her that day, that it hurt him to even imagine such a thing now; and two, that I had the power to ruin his life if he didn’t let me go. I could see his fear, that such a story might get around Barlow, that he’d had something to do with his wife’s falling against the radiator.
Did I really accomplish all that by myself down in Barlow? I’m not sure anymore. I thought Agnes was guiding me because she would want me to live with Uncle Henry if anything happened to her. I felt she and I were working as a team, that we had this thing to accomplish, that I was operating under her guidance and it kept her closer to me. Or did I imagine it because it kept her close?
Now I’m not sure. Since she’s gone on vacation and I can’t think of her buried anywhere at all, it’s hard to say whether she wanted to get this thing done so she could be free from worrying about me—if she thought this thing through me—or if I created the whole thing by myself.
Just as I created those drawings of her crumpled against the radiator in her own blood. (“You never saw how she looked when I found her. I can assure you she didn’t remotely resemble any of these—these bleeding Madonnas.”)
Later Saturday afternoon, March 15, 1952
The Vick house
Mountain City
Chloe had been so absorbed in painting parts of the movable sets, which Uncle Henry had set up for her in the downstairs sunroom, that she hadn’t even realized Tildy was late until the big Packard pulled into the drive. Tildy leapt out of the car and burst through the French doors, leaving John to follow with her things.
“Did you think I wasn’t coming? Oh, what real-looking trees! You are an absolute genius, Chloe. Christ Almighty, you’d think that a family with three cars could get their one poor little girl without a license to her destination on time. But no, Mama was just off and Madeline was just back to get dressed for going on a date, and John and Daddy were nowhere to be found. I was beside myself. I was going to call you but then—”
“But you’re here now,” said Chloe. Tildy’s urgency about everything to do with herself had the effect of calming Chloe and making her feel protective of them both. John edged his slightly stooped form through the French doors, carrying Tildy’s patent leather overnight case and a huge old suitcase with straps. “How you doing, Miss Chloe? You want me to take these upstairs to y’all’s room?”
“Yes, please, John,” said Tildy. “And thank you for bringing me. Only a year and six months to go and then I’ll be able to drive myself.”
“It’s always my pleasure, Miss Tildy.”
“What on earth was in that huge suitcase,” asked Chloe, now beaming because she was so happy to see her friend. “Are you coming to live with us?”
“Ah, you wouldn’t like that,” said Tildy. “I know you: you need to have your private time to commune with your spirits. It’s a very mundane present, so don’t go expecting anything grand. Actually, it’s a suitcase full of Kotex. Mama buys it from some wholesale place that sells to drugstores. That way we don’t have to go to the drugstore and be embarrassed.”
“Oh, Tildy, how thoughtful. I just hate having to go in there and—and I can’t very well ask Uncle Henry.”
“Don’t I know that, Miss Chloe. And when you’re ready to graduate to the next level, I’ll coach you from outside the bathroom door, like Madeline did me. And now, oh boy, do we have work to do! And do I have an earful to tell you! Where’s Uncle Henry? His Jag’s not in the garage.”
“He’s driven into the
mountains to see a man who wants to add on to his hunting lodge but keep everything looking old and rustic. You and I will be dining alone.”
“God! First they stick Greek columns on his new library and now they’re trying to drag him back to log cabin days.”
“He says he doesn’t mind about the hunting lodge. It’s the false mixing of styles he hates. We’re having frankfurters and beans and Rosa left a pan of brownies and there’s some ice cream.”
“Poor Uncle Henry! No, I’ve got to stop saying ‘poor.’ It’s Jiggsie’s grandmother’s pet word.”
“Oh, how did the tea go? Was she nice?”
“She was very conversational. Even though most of it was with herself. She never stopped pacing and you could see the whole front of her black bra when she poured the tea. Jiggsie was her usual sweetly appalling self. But wait until you hear! Mrs. Judd was in the class of 1913 and she knew the Red Nun!”
“She knew—”
“Caroline DuPree was in the grade ahead of Mrs. Judd, and there’s a whole other side of the story. Caroline was in love with the foundress, with Mother Wallingford, and her parents came to take her out of school and she tried to throw herself off the tower but Mother Finney saved her. Oh, bye, John!” She waved out the window as the Packard backed out of the driveway. “And then they took her home and she died of malaria.”
“But what about the whole vocation thing?”
“Mrs. Judd hadn’t heard about that, because she was one of those girls who couldn’t wait to be done with school. All she knew was that there was a Requiem Mass said the next year, when Mrs. Judd was a senior. She didn’t keep up with the school after she graduated. She didn’t even know about the statue or Ravenel’s famous play! But, Chloe, I was thinking on the way over here, you are the key that is going to unlock this whole mystery.”
“I am?”
“Look, who is still at Mount St. Gabriel’s who knew about all that first stuff that happened in the school, who was there right from the beginning?”
