Gail Godwin

by Unfinished Desires (v5)

  “Mama, what was Agnes Vick like?”

  Their dialogues took place in Cornelia’s darkroom at the studio, the best setting, Madeline had learned, for successful tête-à-têtes with Mama.

  “She thought very highly of herself and was something of a prig. The only person at school who loved her unreservedly was old Mother Finney. Agnes was an expert at making you feel you weren’t quite as principled as she was. She was always name-dropping virtues like ‘integrity’ and ‘honor.’ Some people thought she had a wonderful sense of humor, but I never saw it. All her jokes had that treacly wholesomeness. You know, ‘This is funny, it will make you laugh, but it’s still within the bounds of good Catholic taste.’ Her big achievement was that she could put down Suzanne Ravenel. All during high school when Suzanne was scrabbling for power, she had sense enough to keep her distance from Agnes. My, but it was fun to watch!”

  “She wouldn’t join the Oblates of the Red Nun.”

  “That was something Suzanne devised to keep her and my sister’s vocations hot and bubbly. Everything Suzanne cooked up, like the play, was designed to keep Antonia close. The oblate idea was rather fervid and naive, but I kept my feelings to myself. I joined to keep an eye on Tony. If they’d formed a little club to take regular tours to hell, I would have insisted on my right as a twin to go along. Suzanne didn’t dare exclude me. Whereas Agnes Vick was president of Sodality for three years in a row. When you’re already a high-muckety-muck in the Society of Mary, which sponsors the most lavish reception at the end of the school year, when the Queen of the School is crowned, why should you need to take secret vows to a hulk of old marble memorializing a girl who never did anything but die? But Suzanne was very annoyed by Agnes’s turndown. I’ve always thought it was Suzanne who spread the rumor that Agnes couldn’t take the oblate vows because she had petted too heavily with Merriweather Starnes. Suzanne had to ask Francine Barfoot because there had to be five of us to start a club. The other oblate was Suzanne’s little Mexican roommate.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t ever divulge the secret vows, would you, Mama?”

  “Tildy was trying to winkle that out of me the other night when I dropped by her room to tuck her in. You know how Tildy importunes. But I can’t stand to be pinned down like that. I told her I would think about it.”

  “Are you in the mood now?”

  “The truth is, darling, I don’t recall exactly. Nothing was written down; it was much too secret. I can recall the gist, of course. It was typical of the things fervent girls love to swear to in their cliques and sororities. The premise was that your worst fate would be not to fulfill God’s plan for you, and so you had to dedicate yourself under oath to seek the self God had in mind for you, and put everything else second. Oh, now I do seem to remember: one of the vows was to forsake any person who tempted you away from God’s plan for you. I’m going to tell you something, Madeline. After Antonia’s death I had a really bad time. I almost went out of my mind trying to figure out why this bizarre accident had to happen to my sister. I entertained all sorts of crazy ideas, one being that perhaps during the honeymoon Tony had told Henry about the secret vows of the oblates and then it suddenly struck her that he might be the person who was obstructing God’s plan for her and that her duty was to forsake Henry. And she became so confused and distraught about what she should and shouldn’t do that she stepped in front of that van. And now please help me pin up these prints. Not bad for a plain bride, are they? That’s because I understand lighting. I’m seriously considering expanding into portraiture. What do you think? Making people look good is always worth some dough.”

  THE WEATHER ON Saturday morning was so agreeable that Henry Vick and Chloe were waiting for her on the front porch. Faithful to her mother’s “crime plan,” Madeline had pulled over a few blocks from their house and placed the wrapped baby gift in full view on the backseat.

  Chloe could have passed for nine instead of fourteen in her pleated plaid skirt, school blazer, white knee socks, and loafers. She was also carrying her book bag. Madeline knew Chloe’s closet sported more sophisticated attire than this and wondered whether the jeune filie effect was deliberate.

  Henry accompanied them to the car, carrying a basket covered with a checkered dishcloth. “Rosa packed you all a midmorning breakfast. She can’t stand the thought of anybody arriving anyplace hungry. It might reflect on her. Where do you want me to put this, Madeline?”

  “Oh, on the backseat will be fine. Next to the, er, baby shower gift.”

  DURING THE CORKSCREW descent between Black Mountain and Old Fort, Chloe grew pale and silent. Up until then, she had been doing her best to respond to Madeline’s attempts at sociability.

  “You okay over there, Chloe?”

  “I’m feeling a little woozy.”

  “Is it urgent woozy or the kind that can wait till I find a place to pull off?”

  “It can wait.” A pitiful whisper.

  “Then I won’t block that sandpit for runaway trucks. There’s a better spot farther down. Can you last till then?”

  “Yes,” came the muffled reply. The girl had put her book satchel to her face. Madeline recalled her own bouts with passenger nausea on this dizzying descent of road that dropped you eight hundred feet in less than thirty minutes. As soon as she was old enough to drive herself, it had stopped.

  As soon as Madeline pulled off the road, Chloe flung herself out of the car and dashed behind a clump of underbrush. She emerged with her dignity intact. Thank you, but she had her own Kleenex, as well as a traveling toothbrush and a small tube of Ipana.

  Down they went, through Marion, Morganton, Valdese, and Hickory, dropping another three hundred feet toward sea level. Madeline told Chloe about Granddaddy Tilden, the state representative, who could close his eyes and recite all the counties from west to east and the people they were named for. “This morning alone, we’ll have crossed through six. We left our own Buncombe, then we went through McDowell, Burke, and Catawba. Next comes Iredell, that’s when we hit Statesville, and then we’ll dip on down to Barlow, which is in Rowan.”

  “Who were the people?”

  “Well, let’s see. I could rattle them off as a child because it tickled Granddaddy. Colonel Buncombe, Edward B., commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary War—on our side, meaning the side that wanted our independence from Britain. Charles McDowell and his ‘Over-Mountain Men’ slaughtered the Loyalists at Kings Mountain. The Loyalist troops underestimated what they called a band of ragtag mongrels, but the Over-Mountain Men called themselves that because they knew what a real mountain was, and to them Kings Mountain was just a little bitty hill. Thomas Burke and Matthew Rowan were royal governors when we were still a colony. Burke was kidnapped by the Tories, escaped from his prison, and left politics in disgrace because he had broken his oath to the Tories not to escape. James Iredell was the first North Carolina judge appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court after we became a state. He was for states’ rights, but, interestingly enough, he was also a strong advocate for the abolishing of slavery. The Catawbas were a big important Indian tribe, and so were the Cherokees, so they got two counties named after them after they were defeated or driven out of the state. There, that’s Madeline’s state history lesson for the day, compliments of Granddaddy Archibald Tilden, who was a loving man who believed in justice and never talked down to children.”

  They stopped at a roadside picnic ground between Hickory and Statesville and ate Rosa’s sausage biscuits, washed down with sweetened hot tea in a thermos. The sun was warm for February, at least ten degrees warmer in the lower altitude.

  “I think it’s important to keep the dead with us,” blurted Chloe suddenly. “Don’t you think it’s important?”

  “I don’t know how we can help it,” said Madeline. “They remember themselves in us every day. We carry on their work. And, oh, probably we repeat their mistakes. In a way I was carrying on Granddaddy’s work back there in the car. And I’m sure you will influence the world aro
und you in ways that would do credit to your mother.”

  “What do you mean, repeating their mistakes?”

  “I’m not sure. It just popped out of my mouth.”

  “No, you meant something,” Chloe persisted.

  “Well, it would seem logical, wouldn’t it? If we take on their good qualities, some of the less desirable parts of their natures may get swept in, too. You know, weeds with the seeds.”

  “But like what, for instance?” Going into Tildy’s favorite attack mode.

  Examples unsuitable to pass on to Chloe crowded eagerly to the forefront of Madeline’s mind. Old Mrs. Vick, Henry’s dipso mother and Chloe’s own grandmother, teetering in the soused haughty footsteps of father and grandfather before her. The previous mayor’s wife, who had left her prosperous marriage and had a child out of wedlock, just as her mother had done with her. The thirty-year-old father who shot himself with his hunting rifle on his son’s birthday; the son—a close friend of Smoky Stratton’s in high school—finally managing to extinguish himself, after two botched attempts in his twenties, on his thirtieth birthday with the same hunting rifle. Old Mountain City stories, polished up dagger-shiny and sharpened to perforation point, then handed down by Cornelia to her daughters at a tender age.

  “The closest I can get to a ‘for instance,’” Madeline temporized, “is … well, think of someone you love or admire—they don’t necessarily have to be dead—and then ask what qualities of theirs you would like to take on as your qualities. And then ask yourself what things about them you would rather not take on.”

  BEFORE MADELINE HAD switched off the ignition in front of Rex Wright’s farmhouse, a frowning man in a brown leather flying jacket was quick-stepping down the walk.

  “That’s him,” murmured Chloe.

  “Well, remember, I’ll be back to collect you in just a few hours.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Agnes at Rest

  Saturday afternoon and evening, February 9, 1952

  Rex Wright’s house

  Barlow, North Carolina

  CHLOE WOULD RATHER have come alone on the bus. He would have met her at the station and it would have been all on his terms. Rex liked things all on his terms. That’s the way he stayed in the best mood. Agnes had learned that, and Chloe had learned it with her.

  But Mr. Coxe, the lawyer, told Uncle Henry it would be “playing right into Rex Wright’s hands.” Rex Wright might cajole or use other means to make her stay. And then the legal battle would begin all over from the other end. The uncle in Mountain City trying to get back his sister’s child from Barlow. But a legal father, if he was also an upstanding, solvent person, a decorated World War II pilot, a widower about to remarry, would be much more likely to triumph in court over a bachelor uncle, Mr. Coxe said.

  And then Uncle Henry found out that Madeline Stratton was driving down to the Piedmont and would be glad to drop Chloe off in Barlow, even though it meant going out of her way. He told Chloe she could ride with Madeline and visit with Rex Wright and meet his fiancée, and then maybe later a weekend in Barlow could be arranged.

  When the visit business had first been proposed by her stepfather, Uncle Henry had offered to take her and bring her back, but Chloe knew that wouldn’t work. Rex Wright hated Uncle Henry; he said he was the last sterile remains of the snobbish Vick clan.

  The only time Rex had met Uncle Henry, except for Agnes’s funeral, the circumstances couldn’t have been less favorable. It was the time Rex had surprised them all by flying up to Mountain City in his new Beechcraft and whisking Agnes and Chloe away before their visit had hardly begun. On the flight back, in a fit of rage, Rex had threatened to crash the plane into a mountain.

  So Chloe had turned down Uncle Henry’s offer to drive her to Barlow. “Agnes wouldn’t like it,” she’d said.

  Oh, Agnes, if only they would let us do it our way. We aren’t afraid. We know too much.

  But maybe this would work.

  At first Uncle Henry said it was to be a bridal shower of a friend’s big sister, but it turned out it was a baby shower. The kind of thing an old bachelor would be expected to get wrong, Uncle Henry said, laughing at himself.

  Chloe could see that Rex was not in the best mood. He advanced upon them with the demeanor of a man who had been anticipating all the ways he would be patronized by this social butterfly who would drive down the mountain and back in a single day just to go to a goddamn baby shower—and condescend to drop off his daughter as a favor to the sterile remnant of the moldering Vick clan.

  But Madeline kept her greeting brief and respectful and was her charming self. Before she drove away she had coaxed from Rex Wright a begrudging smile of admiration and a gallant bow. Chloe glimpsed him through Madeline’s eyes: a nice-looking war hero in immaculately pressed fatigues and a flight jacket bearing his squadron’s patch. She liked him the better for this vision, and he registered his stepdaughter’s approval. Thus their visit got off to a propitious start. As they headed toward the house, he did not try to kiss or hug her, merely chafed her hands briefly between his. “I’m surprised they aren’t little blocks of ice,” he said. “Riding all this way in that drafty vehicle of hers. I expected she’d have a better car.”

  “Oh, it was warm inside. And we—we had a thermos of tea.” She left out the hot biscuits and sausages that Uncle Henry’s cook had come early to make.

  Be with me, Agnes.

  They went inside. Some furniture had been changed around, but the things left as before took away her breath with the absence they proclaimed. Who would now reach out and snatch the suddenly wanted verse anthology or the golden legends of the saints from the shelves that Rex had so proudly built and stained when he had first brought Agnes and Chloe into their new home? (“Now you girls have a place for your library.”) The books appeared unconsulted since last spring, though she knew they had been regularly dusted. Rex was an obsessive housekeeper. He had taught Chloe how to make a bed military-style, so you could bounce a quarter on it, and how to polish her shoes and iron her blouses.

  She sat on the edge of the sofa, book bag across her knees, waiting for the glass of water she had said yes to because he wanted to bring her something.

  “I don’t hear the chickens,” she said.

  When Rex’s features started to go all putty-like, it was the signal that he was about to cry. But he pulled himself together. “I had to sell them. A stray dog tunneled under the electric fence and got Cackles; then Bomber went sullen and the others wouldn’t lay.”

  “Poor Bomber. He liked Cackles best.”

  “So did your mother.”

  “Cackles was the dowager duchess. Mother always said, ‘Thank you, Your Grace’ when she took an egg from under Cackles.”

  “She worried over them like family. She could have brought Bomber around. Well, we’ve got a busy schedule today. You aren’t here for very long.”

  His mood lifted as he ticked off their agenda. First they’d drop by the coffee shop to show her off to his buddies. (“You’ve been missed around here, honey.”) Then out to the airfield to meet Eric and Jack. (“My grown sons-to-be. Brenda did a hell of a good job raising them.”)

  Then on to the cemetery to see her mother’s new gravestone, afterward meeting up with Brenda for lunch. (“Then the three of us will come back to the house. Brenda wants to do some redecorating, and she’d value your advice.”)

  Careful!

  She hadn’t given Rex’s coffee shop cronies a single thought since leaving Barlow, but there they all were in their same old places, waiting for her like Little Boy Blue’s toys. Ole from the filling station, with his black nails; Jimmy, the dapper little court recorder, who laughed at Ole’s teasing him for his manicures; Andy from the feed store; old Bill Castle, the domestic court judge; and Miranda, the waitress, who was at least sixty.

  “Well, look who’s back in town!”

  “Rex’s been so excited about your coming.”

  “He says to me, But, Jimmy, she’s
only here on Saturday, which means you and Judge Bill will miss seeing her. I said, What’s to stop us coming here on a Saturday? Is Miranda going to refuse to serve us coffee just because there’s no court that day?”

  “Hasn’t she gotten pretty!”

  “Favors her mother.”

  “Would you like a do-nut with your coffee, hon? Well, sure, we have tea, if a tea bag’s okay.”

  “Up there in Shangri-la, they have fancy tea parties with their silver services every afternoon. But I guess she can make do with a bag among friends.” Rex’s voice seesawing between scorn and pride.

  “How do you like your new school?”

  “I like it. My mother went there.”

  “Are the nuns real strict?”

  “Some are, but we have this beautiful—”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on a nun, except Ingrid Bergman in that movie.”

  Chloe unbuckled her book bag and slid out a spiral drawing pad.

  “What you got there?”

  She folded back the pad and laid it on the table. Mother Malloy in three-quarter profile, chin tucked in, wide sleeve in motion, long fingers bunched around a short piece of chalk, writing on the blackboard. “That’s our ninth-grade teacher.”

  “Did you do that, honey?”

  “She can draw anybody.” Rex boasting. “Make it just like them—sometimes more than meets the naked eye.”

  “How do you do it, honey?”

  “I just have to want to—to get the true person. And if I want it badly enough, it comes out that way.”