Gail Godwin

by Unfinished Desires (v5)

  “I didn’t learn till I got to Mountain City High. You could take either modern dance or home economics as your elective, and you know how I hated to take off my clothes for gym. All those damp girl-bodies with their rancid sanitary pads.”

  “Oh, Tildy, I never forgot you. I went on hearing exactly how you would express yourself about something. Like just now.”

  “I never forgot you, either, and I couldn’t understand why you never wrote. I mean, you knew my address, but I didn’t know yours. You were just ripped out of my life. You weren’t at Mother Malloy’s funeral; you were just gone, and nobody would say anything. I was instantly expelled, of course, but Daddy was going to take me out of there anyway. I had to finish out ninth grade with a tutor. But I went to the funeral at the basilica and the burial in the nuns’ cemetery. There was no way Raving Ravenel could stop me from that. I was the last one to be with Mother Malloy, you know, up in the tower. She was teaching me a poem when she just sort of slumped over. All our family went.”

  “Tildy, you haven’t mentioned Madeline.”

  “Ah, shit. I almost told you on the phone and then I just couldn’t. I guess I figured that if I let you drive here without knowing, we could keep her alive between us a little longer. And all today I kept thinking: Maddy’s still alive in Maud’s car! She’s still among the living in Maud’s mind! I miss her more than anybody, anybody! Are you getting cold? Would you like to go in? I’m quite toasty in my habit, but—”

  “I’m fine. I like it out here in the dark. I don’t want to move. I want you to tell me about Madeline.”

  “In that case, I’ll go get another bottle. Same? Or would you rather switch to red?”

  “Let’s not change anything.”

  “I’m really glad you’re here, Maud.”

  “So am I.”

  IF A STRANGER were observing us from that clump of trees, thinks Maud, he or she would see—what? A veiled woman returning to the dark porch with a lit candle in a glass holder. She sets it down on the table, followed by a bottle, and then arranges some kind of wrap around the reclining person’s shoulders.

  “We’re advised against lighting candles outdoors in this horrid drought,” says Tildy, “but those guidelines are for the stupid and the careless. Now, are you sure you’re warm enough out here?”

  “With all these things draped around me, how could I be anything but?”

  “Here, let me freshen your glass. Thank you, Jesus, for twist-top wine bottles. Are you sure you’re not hungry yet? Supper only has to be heated.”

  “I am perfect. Please tell me about Madeline.”

  “It was just this past December. The cleaning service found her the morning she died. She was fully dressed and lying across her bed. They said they’d seen her do that once or twice before—lie down to wait for dizziness to pass. I’d given her one of those Life Alert watches, but she wasn’t wearing it, because she was going out. It was Tuesday, the day she volunteered at the hospice office. She was living by herself in Henry Vick’s house. You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Sure, but what was she doing in his house?”

  “She married him.”

  “Madeline married Henry Vick?”

  “Yes, well, when Mama got her cancer, Madeline came back from the Peace Corps in Africa to be with her, and things evolved from there. Though I think in their way they were very happy. Both of them were good people who liked to take care of others. My twins thought Madeline walked on water. Whenever Liza got really pissed with me as a teenager, she’d say, ‘Why couldn’t Aunt Maddy have been my mother?’ Finally one day I said, ‘Well, go and live with her. I’ll call her right now.’ And then Ruthie burst into tears and said why couldn’t she go, too, she was tired of being punished for being the sweet twin. So they both went and spent the summer in Mountain City with their heroine and Uncle Henry, and Creighton and I had some peace.”

  “How did Chloe take the marriage?”

  “Oh, Chloe has gotten weirder and weirder over the years. She was almost thirty when she got engaged, living by herself way out in the country in a farmhouse she had renovated. Madeline almost killed herself preparing for the wedding and reception, and then Chloe backed out at the last minute. The groom had already flown in—he and Chloe had studied architecture together at Swarthmore—and poor Maddy had to console him and get him out of town, in addition to making all the phone calls to say the wedding was off. And she and Henry spent weeks boxing up all Chloe’s presents and mailing them back.”

  “Mother Ravenel mentioned Chloe Starnes Vick in the memoir. I was trying to figure that out.”

  “After the canceled wedding she took her mother’s maiden name so the firm could stay Vick & Vick. The latest thing she’s done is turn the Vick house, which reverted to her after Madeline’s death, into a haven for battered wives. And she still lives out in the country all by herself, like an old hermit witch. You know, she never forgave me for defacing her stupid prop of the Red Nun, which almost spoiled the play even before old Ravenel did the job. We were never close after that. Uncle Henry took her off to look at buildings in Europe the summer after the great debacle, and she did one more year at Mount St. Gabriel’s, while old Ravenel was away; then she transferred over to Mountain City High. We weren’t in any of the same classes because—well, that’s another story we’ll get to later.”

  “Did your mother live to see Madeline and Henry marry?”

  “No, all that started up after she died. Who knows what her take would have been? She was glad to have Maddy at her beck and call again—Daddy died in his early fifties; he just keeled over chopping wood. Mama’s cancer was in the larynx, and after they removed her vocal cords, she refused to learn to speak with that little microphone. She told Madeline it was her punishment for saying so many wicked things about people, but that had been her nature, and now she was going to be silent and listen for a change. When she had anything to communicate she would just gesture or write notes. When the priest came, she wrote out her confession and made him take it away and destroy it after he had absolved her. Toward the end, old Ravenel phoned Madeline—she wanted to pay a visit—and Mama wrote, ‘I didn’t want to see her while I was at war; why should I want to see her when I’m at peace?’”

  “And Henry?”

  “Henry’s in the Vick enclosure with Madeline and Aunt Antonia. Little strokes kept erasing parts of him till there wasn’t much left. For a while there, poor Maddy really had an assignment that challenged her fervor for caring for others. And then at the beginning of last year, I challenged her again. I had a double mastectomy and then that horrid chemo, which was the worst part. At this point in my life I couldn’t care less about a couple of missing boobs. And now I am going to get us something warm to drink.”

  Maud was left to make room in her mind for all Tildy’s dead—and Tildy’s cancer. She lapsed into a partial doze until she found herself being covered with yet a third wrap and handed a mug of steaming bouillon.

  “This is laced with the last of Creighton’s cognac.”

  “When did Creighton die? How long have you been alone?”

  “You’re up to your old tricks, Maud.”

  “What old tricks?”

  “You let me go on and on and you hold yourself back. There’s always been this aloof part you keep in reserve. You did it at our first lunch in the third grade, and you’ve been doing it ever since. The only time you ever came close to opening up was after your grandmother’s funeral when I made you come back to our house and you said you were afraid of losing everything. You started telling me about that horrible man who came on to you in Palm Beach, but at a certain point you clammed up, and I could never find out any more. Did you ever see him again? I mean, you’ve lived in Palm Beach.”

  “What man?”

  “You know. The older brother of somebody at that dance where you disgraced yourself—or thought you had. I warn you, Maud, you are not leaving this house until you fill in your blanks as generously as I have
filled in mine.”

  “His name was Troy Veech. And, yes, I saw him again. But for now please go on about Creighton. I remember him well, so manly and good-looking and going to be a doctor. He was so patient about teaching me the crawl when I wasn’t even a member.”

  “Yes, you were, in a sense. Daddy got you those summer passes to the pool.”

  “It wasn’t the same as being a member. I always felt beholden. That aloof part you talk about in me? Maybe it was my pride. It’s uncomfortable always to be on the receiving end. Now tell me about Creighton. It’s so fitting while we’re drinking the last of his cognac.”

  “Okay, but tomorrow it is your turn. And don’t you dare say you’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “I can stay until Saturday—if you’ll have me.”

  “Why not Sunday? If your closing’s not till Tuesday.”

  “Because I’m old and I need a couple of days to recover from all that driving.”

  “You poor decrepit thing. Creighton died in 1998. He was sixty-five and didn’t need to die, but he was careless about his health. You’ve heard the old saw about the lawyer who dies without a will? Well, Creighton was the diabetic doctor—on the medical school faculty, for God’s sake!—who neglected to drink his fruit juice. He lost consciousness and drove into a ravine coming home, and by the time they located him he was dead. I’ve been mad at him ever since. Leaving me a widow at sixty-one. The twins were in their forties, Ruthie’s girls were old enough so I didn’t have to babysit them anymore, and I’d finally got Liza out of the house—Liza had what you might call an extended adolescence—and Creighton had promised me some travel. He and I never went anywhere. Neither of us had ever been to Europe; he was always working too hard. I wanted us to go there while we could both still walk.”

  “You always said he and Madeline would marry eventually.”

  “That’s what we all thought. But ‘eventually’ came and went, and they kept dating until Madeline joined the Peace Corps. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ was just custom-made for her. And Creighton kept on coming to see me whenever he was back in town. Remember how he used to call me Tantalizing Tildy? He told me later that he’d always had a corner of his heart reserved for me, and then one day he woke up and realized I had taken over the whole thing. You remember Mama’s dry-ice remarks—when I told her Creighton wanted to marry me, she said, ‘How strange. When he could have asked Madeline.’ And Creighton went the whole mile. He took instruction, he became a Catholic, we had a huge wedding at the basilica, and he got to go beyond the rail. At the reception at the club afterward, Mama told me I looked ‘almost beautiful.’ Listen, Maud, are you sure you’re not getting hungry?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No, but I’m the hostess and have to ask that.”

  “The bouillon is enough for me. Soon you may have to help me upstairs.”

  “We’ll help each other. Nobody needs a broken hip at our stage of the game.”

  Thursday, November 1, 2007

  All Saints’ Day

  Tildy’s house

  Marietta, Georgia

  Maud woke uneasily in granddaughter Jane’s room. Getting up during the night to go to the bathroom, she had felt the lingering presence of girls. They hadn’t been friendly, but their lack of warmth had nothing to do with her. She didn’t exist for them; they had conflicts of their own and she just happened to be sharing a room with them.

  Morning light came through the drawn blinds, but she couldn’t tell whether the day was going to be nice or not. The digital clock by her bed said eight-forty The house was quiet. Tildy must still be asleep in her room down the hall. Maud could not bring herself to get up yet. She had drunk too much wine, but it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. She postponed another trip to the bathroom because she didn’t want to risk waking Tildy and having to begin the day in the company of someone else. Curling herself into a ball under the bedclothes, she squinched her eyes shut and tried to locate the source of her unease. It wasn’t like the depression after Max died. It was a dislocation accompanied by vexation of spirit and mild panic. If I got in my car right now and drove without stopping, I could be most of the way home by dark— But where was “home”? The empty surgery and upstairs living quarters on Sunset Avenue, where Daisy’s marks had been sanded over and only a mattress and a few cooking utensils were left? It seemed so. Or was it simply that she identified “home” as a place where she could be alone to preside over her history without any intrusions from anybody?

  But this was not the time or place to turn into an old hermit witch, as Tildy had called Chloe. Uncurling, Maud resolved to get herself gracefully through two more days in Marietta, and that was when she saw the folded slip of notepaper that had been pushed under her door.

  8:15 a.m.

  Dear Maud. Gone to 9:00 Mass. Coffee’s made and there’s cereal or last night’s quiche that we didn’t eat. It’s best warmed up in the toaster oven. Microwaving turns it soggy. I’m so happy you’re here. Love, Tildy

  TILDY RETURNED, LADEN with bags, to find Maud dressed in black jeans and Max’s old black cardigan, sipping a Diet Coke at the kitchen counter.

  “No coffee? Oh God, you probably drink herbal tea or something. When you and I were last together nobody had started drinking anything yet.”

  “This is exactly what I like. Max used to drink it all through the day. With a slice of lemon. His ‘virgin Cuba libre,’ he called it. How was church?”

  “Oh, you know, church is church.” Today, in a tweed pantsuit and turtleneck, Tildy was the carefully groomed lady of the email photo. Her tawny hair with its highlights and lowlights stood up as stiffly as a parrot’s crest, making Maud wonder how she had managed to tame it under the veil of last night’s costume. “I’m a Eucharistic minister now; I can give people Communion but I can’t bless it. Today is the Feast of All Saints: for the good dead. I prayed for Madeline and Mother Malloy. And then tomorrow is All Souls’. For the rest of us.”

  “Mother Ravenel wrote about the origin of All Souls’ Day in her ‘Traditions’ chapter,” said Maud. “A Benedictine abbot, Saint Odilo, instituted it during the Middle Ages for all dead monks, but then later his generosity increased and he extended the feast to include all the dead, regardless of how they had behaved, from the beginning of creation until the end of time. She’s at her best in the memoir when she’s being informative about the past or meditating on interesting subjects, like Elizabeth Wallingford’s concept of holy daring.”

  “Good old useful holy daring! I’ll bet old Ravenous twisted that one around like a pretzel to suit her own agendas.”

  “Still, it’s an exciting idea. As I was reading those passages I kept imagining what I’d be like now if I’d lived a life of holy daring.”

  “How do you know you haven’t?” challenged Tildy, unpacking groceries and more wine. “I wonder if she thinks she has, up there in freezing old nun-retirement land? You know, Maud, I still dream about her, and she’s still the enemy. In the most recent dream, she was at some passport control desk, telling Creighton and me that we couldn’t go on together. ‘You will have to choose,’ she said to us, and it was exactly her laying-down-the-law voice. ‘The two of you will not be allowed to proceed together.’ What amazes me is, I didn’t know the damn memoir even existed till you wrote me. By the way, did you bring it?”

  “I did. I’ll leave it with you.”

  “Oh, I think it would be more fun to read parts of it together. And then you can take it away. Or we can make a bonfire. I don’t want any part of her living under this roof. You’d think someone at Maddy’s funeral would have said something, but maybe they were being tactful, those of them who remembered that our family didn’t exactly love her. I wonder if Chloe has read it. Hard to know with old Hermit Witch. She brushed me off when I asked her to have lunch with me after Maddy’s funeral. Said she had a load of stone being delivered for something she was building. I felt like saying, ‘What awful prop are y
ou going to surprise us with now?’ You didn’t want any breakfast, Maud?”

  “I’m a little hungover. Also, my shoulders ache from all that driving.”

  “Well, outside is not very inviting. Cold and gloomy but no rain in sight. If it weren’t for this drought, I’d take you for a walk to the lake, but who wants to see a dried-up lake? So what I thought was, we’d make a big pot of Flavia’s soup—remember how you used to walk in the front door and say, ‘Cause for celebration! I smell Flavia’s soup!’”

  “It was only the best soup in the world,” said Maud, recalling how the smell always roused longing and resentment in her at Tildy’s taken-for-granted bounty.

  “Flavia’s still alive, gardening and canning at ninety-five—her vegetables that will go into the soup. Every fall, her great-grandson brings me more jars than I can use. Daddy left them the Swag, and they and their sons turned it into a truck garden business.”

  “I didn’t think they had children.” Watching Tildy attack a can of beef broth with a twist opener, Maud was touched by how knobbly with arthritis her finger joints were. She was also moved that at age seventy Tildy was still being thwarted in dreams by the family’s old enemy.

  “None of us did. We didn’t find out till after Daddy died. Back in the forties when he advertised for a live-in couple with no children, they applied as a couple with no children. John’s mother lived in town, and John told Daddy about his two little nephews she was raising after John’s sister had died in Chicago. John invented the sister. Now I wonder if Daddy and Mama didn’t know it all along, and that’s why Daddy left them the Swag. You know, to sort of make amends for splitting up a family. You haven’t become a vegan or anything, I hope, because Flavia’s soup calls for steak bones and chuck meat to simmer with the vegetables. So here’s the plan. I’ll put together this soup, then we’ll warm up the quiche and have a glass or so of the dog that bit us, and retire to our respective boudoirs for a good old lazy afternoon nap. And the soup will simmer and we’ll doze and sniff it and feel like we’re thirteen again. How does that sound?”