Unfinished Desires (12 page)

CHAPTER 12
Girls’ Voices Upstairs

A Sunday evening in late October 1951
The Vick house
Mountain City, North Carolina

HENRY VICK WAS
not the sort of person whom one would casually ask, “Are you happy?” But if someone
had
asked, he would have said he was happy at his drawing board, at home or at the office. He loved watching buildings go up; perhaps the excavations thrilled him even more. He looked forward to his first sip of scotch in the evenings, enjoyed playing through the Bach preludes and Chopin ballades he had worked up over the years, and was at his happiest in conversations that kindled some degree of enlightenment in both parties. He loved the Mass and felt himself replenished by God’s mystery each time he received the sacrament.

Chloe’s coming to live with him had brought added items to the list: the many ways the girl reminded him of his sister, Agnes: the neat turn of the long, narrow foot as she set the porch swing in motion; the same profile, the stubborn chin and beaky family nose sweetened by the pursed lips and delicate stem of neck. Perhaps more dear to him were the moments when Chloe was like no one but herself.

At the forefront of Agnes’s personality had been the flash and stab of her wit, the apt conceit (“Rex hasn’t had it easy since the war. Bombing the enemy was a lot more exciting than bombing bugs”) and the mordant self-directed put-down (“Everyone saw my panties”).

At first Henry had wondered if his niece lacked a sense of humor. Then he realized that what Chloe found funny came from her quiet perusal of what went on around her, until out would come a response worth waiting for. (“Don’t you think Mother Ravenel would have made a neat leading lady, Uncle Henry? I mean, if she hadn’t already found her perfect role.”)

The two of them could work in the same room, Henry drafting plans for the new library and Chloe curled up in her favorite armchair doing lessons or making sketches of her uncle on his high stool at the drafting board or playing the piano. She was so easy to be with that he missed her ahead of time when he toted up the few years left of her girlhood in his house. He hoped her future husband would treasure her rare form of tact. Her quiet, steady gift for keeping you company without invading your solitude was probably, Henry thought, why she could produce such uncanny likenesses of people going about their business.

Recently, Chloe’s new friend had entered the picture. On the nights when Tildy stayed over, the girls kept to themselves in Chloe’s room, which Henry had stopped thinking of as “Agnes’s room” even before he and Smoky Stratton had rearranged its furniture to accommodate a sofa bed for Tildy, carried up on the capable shoulders of Smoky’s versatile retainer and chauffeur, John.

The two girls were upstairs now (they had left the door open, which honored him), and he could hear Tildy’s regular barrage of prompts and pronouncements interspersed with Chloe’s murmurs as she concentrated on their very important project, for which he had loaned his (and his late father’s) drafting table, dismantling it from the corner where it had stood since this house was built and carrying it upstairs piece by piece, along with the high swivel stool, to reassemble it in Chloe’s room.

So this is love, Henry thought, smiling at his own discomfort: the prominent architect scrunched into his niece’s abandoned armchair, his drafting pad backed by Rosa’s breadboard balanced awkwardly on his crossed thighs, hoping to smuggle a few clean lines of his proposed new municipal library back through the trustees’ clutter of antiquated addons and impractical revisions.

So that Chloe, upstairs with her best friend, Henry’s niece by marriage, could have access to the best drafting surface on which to compose her ambitious group portrait of their classmates for the ninth-grade bulletin board.

“
YOU KNOW WHAT
I can’t wait for,” said Tildy, balancing on one leg beside Chloe’s drafting stool, “is when you walk into class with it rolled up under your arm. And you go up to her desk on the platform in your usual modest way and hand it up to her and say, ‘Mother Malloy, here is something I created for our bulletin board. That is, if, in your judgment, it’s good enough.’ Then you’ll say, ‘Remember how, the other day, our class president asked me to come up with something artistic and then
you
said, Mother, that we should all think of ways we could make our bulletin board uniquely our own …’”

“You don’t think I should say her name?”

“You have already
said
her name, and just ‘Mother’ is respectful enough for the second time round. Even Raving Ravenel would say so.”

“No, I meant … Maud’s name.”

“I think it carries more weight if you say ‘our class president.’
Her
saying it would be like just any old person in the class had asked you. Oh, for Christ’s sake, say whatever you like.
I
don’t care.”

“Now don’t go getting huffy with me, Mary Tilden, or you’ll wobble my concentration.”

“Oh, heaven forfend, Miss Chloe, that your artistic concentration be
wobbled
by this huffy peon. I don’t give a piddle what you say, I really don’t. I’m not even mad at her anymore. She serves her purpose in the firmament. I merely thought that ‘class president’ is the kind of protocol that cool Boston Malloy laps up.”

“Uncle Henry is right. You are never at a loss for words, Tildy. Though I’m not sure I’d want to hear you exercising your vocabulary on me behind my back.”

“I wouldn’t want you to, either. If you heard me describe you behind your back, your precious modesty would be a thing of the past.”

“Well …” Chloe disguised her pleasure by frowning over her choice of brown shades from the handsome box of pencils her uncle had given her. She plucked out the raw umber and, for contrast, etched in some shadows behind the flaxen-haired Dutch girls.

“Why are you doing the girls in the back row first?”

“Because they’re at the top. I always work down. It keeps you from smearing.”

“When I used to color, I always did my favorite parts first and filled in the rest after.”

“That was with crayons. Besides, how do you know Hansje Van Kleek and Beatrix Wynkoop aren’t my favorite parts?” Teasing, Chloe had learned, went a long way toward deterring Tildy from rampant bossiness.

“Ha, ha. But seriously, just between us, Chloe, why is it that some girls are just always
background?”

“How do you mean, background?” Hansje and Beatrix had the same blunt haircuts. They both wore gray double-breasted topcoats with velvet collars. But Beatrix had her expectant smile, whereas things in Hansje’s expression didn’t match. It was as though two people were having a fight on Hansje’s face.

“I mean background for the others.”

“What others?”

“The ones who matter.”

“And who might they be?” Tildy’s snobbery was sometimes just breathtaking.

“Now, don’t go all arch with me, Miss Chloe. You know as well as I do that some girls just stand out—you think of them first—and the rest make a sort of fill-in. Of course, it’s not the kind of thing I would say in public.”

“You’re not in public, so why not name names?” Chloe moved on across the back row of her sketch: next came sultry Marta Andreu with her cast-down velvety lashes and her ultrafeminine way of hugging herself against the North American cold. Chloe’s mouth watered at the prospect of doing justice to Marta’s purple shawl with green fringe worn over the vicuña coat her father had sent from New York.

“Well, take our mothers’ class for a start, the class of ‘34. There were twelve girls in that class; you can count them in the yearbook. But how many can you name from memory? Okay: your mother, Agnes Vick. And my mother and aunt, Cornelia and Tony Tilden. And Ringleader Ravenel, the former Suzanne. After that the mind just blanks.”

“Tildy, your argument has about a million holes in it. We’re naming them first because they’re ours. I mean, there was Elaine Frew’s mother, Francine Barfoot. She was one of the oblates, and if the oblates weren’t the inner circle I don’t know what was. My own mother wasn’t even an oblate.”

“But the oblates
wanted
Agnes. Old Francine was just a fill-in. She played the flute and did what everyone told her because she was so thrilled to be included.”

Chloe slammed down her pencil. She had put too many purple highlights in Marta’s hair, detracting from the purple shawl before she even started on it. She felt suddenly hostile toward her friend and was glad Tildy would be leaving soon. Under the strict new regime following Mother Ravenel’s recent ultimatum about grades, Tildy was allowed to spend only one night away from home, and that night had been last night. In a half hour or so, the Stratton Packard would roll into the driveway and Tildy, with a martyr’s sigh, would stuff her hairbrush and last-minute incidentals into her smart patent leather bandbox and clump peevishly downstairs into John’s silent custody.

And when, at that moment, a motor’s thrum was heard in the driveway, making Tildy cry out, “Oh, no! This isn’t fair!” Chloe felt vindicated.

Tildy went flying across the room and flung up a window sash. “John, you are
way
too early,” she screeched into the darkness.

“It’s me, little one,” Madeline Stratton’s blithe voice trilled back. “But I’m going to visit with Uncle Henry first, so you girls still have some time.”

HENRY VICK, OF
course, heard the indoor-outdoor calling between the sisters and stifled his disappointment that it was not the Strattons’ chauffeur. It had been dark for hours and he had been anticipating a neat, cordial transition. (“Ah, John, come in. Tildy, John is waiting downstairs. You’re very welcome, honey, always good to have you. Come back soon, hear?”) And then maybe he’d play a little Bach and, as his father used to put it, climb the wooden hill for an early Sunday night bedtime. He was meeting with the library board again tomorrow and not looking forward to standing his ground against their pigheaded insistence on a superfluous portico with columns.

But instead here was Madeline, whom he genuinely liked. She brought her own aura into the room, not at all turbulent, like Tildy’s. She was debonair and conversant, but seemed to keep the emotional side of herself in reserve. Unusual for a girl of sixteen, though tonight, wearing her hair skinned back by a bandanna, she could have passed for a woman of twenty-five. She looked, in fact, ready to have an early night herself.

“What a nice surprise,” he said. “Come to keep an old man company.”

“That was my intention, but—oh dear,” she said, spotting the drafting pad facedown on the arm of the chair, “I’ve interrupted your work. And, I didn’t mean”—she colored slightly—“that I think you’re old.”

“I know. I’m the one who said it. What can I get you, Madeline?”

“Thank you, nothing. I bolted down practically a whole pitcher of ice water before I left home. Oh, Henry, I am so pleased with myself tonight.”

“Sit down and tell me all about it.”

Madeline did look triumphant, in her dungarees and an enormous old cable-knit pullover that Henry figured must be from her father’s closet.