Gail Godwin

by Unfinished Desires (v5)

  “The dark chapter started at the end of my first summer with the Nortons, but it developed very slowly and insidiously. I had been accepted at the Cortt Academy, and Dr. Cortt had assigned me some books so I could skip into the junior class in the fall. I told you my father had got a job selling Cadillacs, and it kept him sober—well, except for relapses. He was a born salesman—he liked making money selling something he believed in; he said it was like getting paid for being his better self. He had been the top East Coast salesman of Balfour college jewelry when he met Lily, and now he was on his way to becoming the top salesman at the Cadillac dealership in West Palm Beach. Anabel changed her Cadillac there every other year and passed her ‘old’ models on to him, so he knew his product. But most important, he knew the kinds of clients he was dealing with.”

  “The Palm Beach supersnobs?”

  “No, the supersnobs drove imported cars: Jags, Porsches, Rolls-Royces—especially vintage Rolls-Royces—or they bopped around town in these perky Hillman Minx convertibles. Mr. Weatherby drove a 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom and had a chauffeur’s cap from the same year—”

  “Now wait—that’s the cuckolded husband whose wife was having an affair with that reptile who came on to you at the dance.”

  “Yes.” Maud briefly closed her eyes. “In 1952, when my father started working for the dealership, the Cadillac was beginning to carry a bit of a stigma. At the Palm City Club, members would sometimes refer to it as ‘the Chosen People’s car of choice.’”

  “Did your father tell you that?”

  “No, they weren’t members. Anabel was one of the Chosen People herself. I heard it from—a cynical member who happened to be buying a Cadillac from my father. As I was starting to tell you, my father knew the people he was dealing with. They were medium-tier social climbers who wanted the most luxurious automobile made in Detroit. And part of his sales routine for the more serious ones was to invite them to his home for afternoon tea; it was always tea or lemonade and little sandwiches, served by the cook on the oceanfront terrace.”

  Maud briefly shut her eyes again and then appeared to have come to a decision. “This is not an oral-storytelling competition; I’m simply telling my oldest friend how I threw away my young life—threw it away with the compliance of just about every adult involved, except one. So I’m going to toss the element of suspense and plunge in. One afternoon in the summer of 1952, I came back from the beach carrying a dual-language edition of Herodotus and my new Greek dictionary. I was Maud Norton, just turned fifteen, headed into the eleventh grade of a top private school, having narrowly escaped my direst scenarios for myself. My mother wrote regularly. I knew she missed me, and I usually cried after I read her letters, but she also sounded excited by her new life, and I was sure they would be starting another baby soon and I didn’t want to be around for that. So I was feeling pretty wonderful as I approached our house, and there on the terrace, drinking lemonade, were my father and a customer. Against the backdrop of Anabel’s Mediterranean-style villa, the two of them looked like an advertisement for the good things of life. Both were in white, my father in white trousers and polo shirt, the younger man in tennis clothes. I watched him watching me approach, and then I got close enough to see who it was. My father introduced us and I said, ‘I thought you went into the Army’ And he said, ‘The Army wouldn’t have me. So now I’m buying a used Coupe de Ville from your father and sitting for my real estate license. Maybe I can make myself into a new man yet.’”

  “Oh, holy jumping Jesus, Maud, please don’t tell me it was the reptile.”

  “It was Troy Veech.”

  “Maud, I can’t stand it. How far did it go?”

  “As far as it could. With all the trimmings. The father gave the bride away on Anabel’s terrace, and the Veeches held the reception for the couple at the Palm City Club. My mother couldn’t attend because she was finally about to give birth to a little Foley after two miscarriages. I was seventeen and, by the way, still a virgin, though a very pawed-over one by my fiancé. But he wouldn’t let us go all the way. It was part of his myth: his redemption by a maiden.”

  “Yeah, I remember you said he asked you to run away with him at that Christmas dance and promised to send you to school. The whole thing sounded so implausible. But then you clammed up and wouldn’t confide any more details, except that your leaving the dance with him had ruined Anabel’s social hopes. I imagined him as a creepy older man who liked to prey on young girls.”

  “Troy was thirteen years older. He was thirty when we married. He had a sort of sinister contempt about him, and he probably spotted a budding cynic in me. He had overheard me snarl at my date for asking me if I knew what a dance card was. I think that’s what drew him to me: he recognized someone like himself who saw through the fakery but chose to participate in the game. But when we went out for our walk, he surprised me by revealing another side of himself, a wistful idealism—no, more like a nostalgia for idealism he’d already lost. And we ended up necking heavily. Until then, I had never even been kissed by a boy.”

  “Well, who had? This was the early fifties, besides which we were more or less under convent quarantine. But I don’t understand how you came to marry him. And he was having an affair with Mimi Weatherby at the same time?”

  “That was over by then. But her husband found out afterward and she admitted it and he served divorce papers on her. Then she became the social pariah and left town and Troy resurfaced in Palm Beach and the gossip mill sided completely with him. He’d had the reputation of a black sheep for a while, but the Veeches were an older Palm Beach family than the Weatherbys and Troy was still in his twenties and might still redeem himself. It was all very romantic and idealistic and got more so when he fell in love with a young girl raised in a convent. Everyone loves the story of a pure young girl saving a black sheep, and everybody but one adult jumped on board, even the weird sisters. I could say I got shanghaied into being the star of a fairy tale being constructed by other people, but the fact was, I was under the spell of the fairy tale myself.”

  “But were you physically attracted to him, Maud?”

  “God help me, yes. Except when I was studying, I existed in a trance of unrequited lust for almost two years. There were times—there were times during our year-long engagement when I crawled all over him and begged him to take me. But he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t. He would smile and do everything else—but never that.”

  “Maud, I have raised two daughters and helped to raise Ruthie’s daughters. And I can’t conceive of myself or Creighton or even the most laid-back parent I have ever met allowing things to come to such a pass. But you said there was one adult who didn’t get caught up in the fairy tale.”

  “Art Foley, of all people. He and my mother drove down for the engagement party, and he took me off by myself and said, ‘Maud, you aren’t going to like me for this, but I have to put in my two cents because you’re Lily’s daughter. I think this whole thing is premature. You are sixteen and you’re committing yourself to matrimony in a year’s time. Why not just remain free and finish college and see how you feel then? You could go to Agnes Scott and be nearer your mother. We’re not fancy people and we can’t offer you a mansion, but we care about your future.’ And I said, You don’t think my future is safe here, then?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Why not? I’m still planning to go to college. It’s just that I’ll be married and can devote myself fully to my classes without all the social distractions. I’m already accepted at Florida Southern, and we’re going to have a little apartment in Lakeland. Troy will be selling Palm Beach real estate during the week, so I’ll have all that time alone in the apartment to study. I’ll be a sort of weekday nun.’ But when I said Troy’s name I caught the look on Art’s face. I said, You don’t like Troy, do you?’ and he said Troy didn’t seem ‘wholesome’ to him. ‘Wholesome’! I thought. ‘Mr. Foley, you didn’t seem very wholesome to me when you were pawing my mother on the porch of the Pine Cone Lodge a
nd with all that glop in your hair.’”

  “Why wouldn’t the Army take Troy?”

  “He gave sarcastic answers to some of the psychological questions. They told him he had an insolent attitude and wouldn’t submit well to military discipline.”

  “Why did he have the reputation of a black sheep?”

  “He kept getting kicked out of schools for one thing and another. Breaking rules. Attitude. Failure to apply himself—” Maud tilted her head back and raked her fingers through her lavender-tinted gray bob. She plucked at the black extensions the stylist had attached in honor of Halloween. “And then there were the drugs.”

  “Oh, no,” said Tildy.

  Some shift of angle or trick of lamplight had transformed Maud’s countenance into that of a weary old sibyl reviewing her sins.

  “But that was all over when you two married—I mean, wasn’t it?”

  “I thought so. Or maybe I didn’t let myself think about it. At first it was just the occasional hash, as a sort of—enhancement to our love-making. Then we looked forward to it. And, as time went on, we got into the hard stuff.”

  “Ah, God!” cried Tildy. “I’ve been there.”

  “You? I don’t believe it.”

  “No, my daughter, Liza. I’d rather it had been me, if I could have spared her. I went through her withdrawal in this house. In those first seventy-two hours, she called me names I didn’t know existed to insult human beings.”

  “Is she—recovered now?”

  “Well, you know how you’re only permitted the gerund form. She’s recovering. She’s a licensed massage therapist now and makes a very good living just going back and forth between rehab spas. When she was in the worst of her withdrawal, I rubbed her body for hours. It seemed the one form of contact she wouldn’t fight off. She says she doesn’t remember it, and maybe it’s better left that way so her career choice is all her idea. She still doesn’t like me a hundred percent, but there’s a tenderness that wasn’t there before. It’s now been eighteen years. It almost destroyed Creighton at the time. He couldn’t forgive himself for being the physician who couldn’t protect his own child. Although he gave her the Valium injections and sat by her bedside at night so I could get some sleep. Valium eases the extreme anxiety of withdrawal. You can stand your baby going to pieces a little better if you can spare her the worst of the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Oh, Tildy. I wish I had known. If we had kept in touch, I might have been of some use to you. I could have served as a … a recovering counselor or something.”

  “How did you get back? And what about Troy?”

  “Troy died from mixing substances. Our marriage was pretty much finished, but we still had our ‘warrior weekends’ in Lakeland, though I had dropped out of college by then. After his death, Anabel paid for me to go to a rehab facility in Boca Raton. She was reaching the end of her rope by that time—this was three years later, and my father had fallen off the wagon yet again. She threatened to kick him out and start divorce proceedings. But while they were still trying to patch things up, he tripped on the stairs to the stone terrace and fell on his head and never regained consciousness. Ironically, he wasn’t drinking at the time; he was carrying out a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and simply missed his footing.”

  “How sad!”

  “Well, but it did give Anabel a chance to mourn him like a proper widow and go about reconstructing him into a more perfect Cyril Norton. I needed to do some reconstruction, too. For me, he’d been more of a vague outline of a father than a substantial person with his reasons for having become what he was. Anabel made it possible for me to recover a bit of lost ground. I lived with her long enough to finish Palm Beach Junior College and then she married again, a retired bank president and teetotaler, and they moved to Colorado and became hiking and skiing addicts and she was asked to be on all the boards—the Aspen Music Festival and so on. So that ended happily, at least as long as we stayed in touch.”

  “But what about you in the meantime, Maud?”

  “Oh, I eventually got a degree in social work by teaching night courses of English as a second language. There was great need in the early sixties when the Cuban exiles started pouring into South Florida, and I was in particular demand because I was practically bilingual with all my Spanish. But after my narcotic interlude, I lost my ambition. I still loved learning things for themselves, but the desire to excel seemed ephemeral and somehow—antisocial. Thus my choice of social work, which I wasn’t at all suited for. The people you thought you were ‘helping to improve’ kept backsliding in the most unimaginative ways. There was a disheartening rate of recidivism. You remember Mother Ravenel’s pet sign-off: ‘Remember, girls, you are all works in progress!’ Well, more and more mornings as I headed off to my caseload, I would catch myself muttering bitterly, ‘Remember, girls, you are all works in deterioration.’ To cheer myself up, I took on more night jobs teaching English as a second language. Those Cubans were ambitious—they desired to excel. One man who signed up for my class already spoke fluent English, but he told me he wanted to get good enough to understand the jokes and the nuances. That was Max. And one night after class—I had been telling them stories in English about Miss Mendoza’s famous Spanish conversation class with all the dating tips and dancing lessons—he invited me to go dancing with him at a tango club. And that, old friend, brings me to the end of my tale of woe. We had almost thirty years of happiness, though he had a volatile temper and was definitely toward the macho end of the scale, but every day that passes since he didn’t come through his heart surgery brings him nearer to perfection in my memory.”

  “It’s like the time you and I went to the Sunset Park Inn to have tea with Jiggsie Judd’s crazy grandmother, and she was going on about the perfections of the late Mr. Judd and then she says, ‘And I’ll tell you something, girls, and you can remember this when you are widows: He was even more perfect after he died.

  “I never had tea with Jiggsie’s grandmother, Tildy. I never even met her. You must be confusing me with Chloe.”

  “No, it was you and me and Jiggsie. Remember how Jiggsie kept setting things afloat in her teacup? She had the most appalling manners. It couldn’t have been Chloe because she was waiting for me over at her house. We were going to work on the scenery for the play.”

  “No, Tildy, I wasn’t there.”

  “Oh, well, you seemed to be. But you always were, that year, you know, when you and I weren’t best friends anymore. Even when I was furious with you, I carried you around with me and saw things through your eyes as well as my own. You were a sort of companion consciousness. Listen, Maud, where will you live now?”

  “I’ve rented one of those time-share places on the beach while I look around.”

  “Are you sure you really want to go on living in South Florida? People say it’s getting awfully overcrowded down there.”

  “People have been saying that for the entire fifty-five years I’ve lived in South Florida. Besides, I have my little network there. I’ve become very close with the members of my writing group. We perform a sort of alchemy on one another. And also I’ve promised the vet who’s buying Max’s surgery that I’ll come in several days a week. I’m a familiar face at that reception desk.”

  “Oh, if you’re going to continue working—”

  “I look on it as a transition. Maybe even a transformation. Maybe I’m turning into something else, only I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”

  This way of putting it struck both awe and alarm in Tildy. What if, once again, Maud was going where she couldn’t follow? “Is it anything like when you were being sent off, the morning after the play, and you felt you wouldn’t know what was in the package until someone opened it at the other end?”

  Maud laughed. “I guess you could say that. Only now I’m a seventy-year-old package. And who’s still around to open me? It could be worth exploring in a piece of writing: the transformations at different junctures of one’s life.”

 
; “With your group, you mean.” Tildy tried hard not to show jealousy.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps just for myself. Perhaps I’ll turn into a scribbling crone.”

  “But aren’t you interested in traveling?”

  “If you mean going on tours and cruises with other seniors—no. Max and I had wanted to visit Cuba, if it had been possible, but it wasn’t. The only travel that still interests me is the mental kind. But what about you, Tildy? Your grandchildren are grown and you’re finished with the cancer, right?”

  “So far, so good. My hair has even come back, but I’ve gotten so enamored of this costly wig that I find it simpler just to plop it on—”

  “Well, it fooled me—and it totally fooled my stylist. I showed her the photo that you emailed.”

  “Why were you showing her my photo?”

  “Because I looked like such a hag next to you that I panicked. I hadn’t been to her since Max’s funeral. She cut off about eight inches of scraggly gray and put on this rinse and these silly extensions.”

  “You ought to consider maybe going an ash-blond, Maud.”

  “I think I’ll wait and see what I turn into next before choosing a hair color for it,” Maud replied rather frostily.

  “I went through a transformation once,” said Tildy, taking cover in the safer past. “It was that year I had to repeat ninth grade, over at the junior high. Also I was seeing a psychiatrist twice a week because old Ravenel had told the principal I had threatened suicide.”

  “How mean! Why would she do that?”

  “Oh, it was stupid Jiggsie’s fault. She went back to the reception and told people I was on my way to throw myself off the tower. That’s why everyone ran up there—to stop me. That time we were having tea at the Sunset Park Inn with Jiggsie’s grandmother—only you say you weren’t there—Mrs. Judd told us that Caroline DuPree had threatened to throw herself off the tower—”