Unfinished Desires (22 page)

“Would you call yourself elegant or—since pretty is an insult—how about beautiful?”

“I wouldn’t call myself anything. Certainly not beautiful. I would like to be elegant someday, but I don’t think I am yet.”

They did their dips and sways on the floor with a few other couples. Mrs. Weatherby watched them from the sidelines, her mouth pursed in a thin sarcastic smile. Troy Veech’s tango was passable, but he was nowhere near as secure as Miss Mendoza when she took the man’s part.

“Oh, I think you are well on your way, Maud Norton,” said Troy. As he caught hold of Maud’s waist and bent her backward, he looked across at Mimi Weatherby and almost fell over Maud in the process. “That’s enough of this,” he said peevishly. “What say we go out to the orange court and have a smoke? Though I’m sure your sheltered boarding school forbids smoking.”

“I don’t smoke, but most of the men I know do,” said Maud, letting him lead her by the elbow down some steps, into a sunken court. “My father does. Our priest at school does. And Mr. Foley smokes a cigar.”

“And who is Mr. Foley?”

“He boards at my grandmother’s house. He’s a salesman for a gourmet food company. And he’s a friend of my mother’s.”

“Ah, I see. While you’re away at school. The proverbial traveling salesman.” Troy Veech leaned against a palm tree and lit up. The flare of the match elongated his features and gave them a cruel cast. It occurred to Maud that he was, and had been, making fun of her. How rude would it be to excuse herself and go back to the dance? Instead she decided to stand up to him. “There’s something I’d like to clear up about my school, Mr. Veech.”

“Oh, please, please! Just Troy. I feel worn and ancient enough as it is.”

“Well, if you’ll stop calling me ‘Maud Norton,’ like the whole thing is a joke.”

“I assure you, the last thing in the world I meant—Come, let’s walk, Maud. I’ll give you a short guided tour of our eminent club. The architect who designed it said he was striving for ‘deteriorated magnificence,’ and that pretty well sums up all of us.”

He sounded almost penitent. He led her along a path that zigzagged through closely planted trees. “How old
are
you, anyway?” she asked.

“Old enough to look in the mirror and wish I saw somebody else. A thousand years older than you, my dear Maud. Far from being a joke, you smite me. What was this thing you wanted to ‘clear up’ about your school?”

“It’s not my ‘boarding school.’ I mean, it is for some girls, but I’m a day student. I live at home with my mother and grandmother.”

“Ah, where the cigar-smoking salesman boards.”

She cut through the mockery creeping back into his tone. “I don’t like false pretenses. Mrs. Weatherby was making me sound like somebody I’m not.”

“Mrs. Weatherby does that. It’s her style. If you’re her friend, you might say it’s a form of idealism. If you’re someone who can’t stand her, you’d say she’s a petty snob.”

“I’m trying to figure out which you are.”

“An idealist or a petty snob?” He sounded delighted.

“No, whether you’re her friend or someone who can’t stand her.”

Troy Veech took a deep draw on his cigarette. “I guess I slink back and forth between the two camps. Listen, Maud, do you want to go back and nibble bite-size sandwiches and dazzle the adolescents and be eyeballed by their drunken fathers, or would you like to stroll down to the marina? If we’re lucky, there’ll be a yacht embarking into the great unknown. It’s one of the few sights that arouses what idealism I’ve got left.”

“I’m not really hungry, if you think it’s okay.” She was frankly curious to have a glimpse of Troy Veech’s idealism. “How long is the intermission?”

“Oh, we’ve got plenty of time,” said Troy Veech. “I’ll do my best to make it an educational tour.”

There was no yacht embarking that evening, but before Maud made her scandalous reappearance on the dance floor, having missed three dances on her card, she had learned a few more things, both incidental and otherwise. The first house on the barren sandbar now known as Palm Beach was built by a Confederate draft dodger. Those towering palm trees that loomed over you everywhere had washed in as Cuban coconuts off a shipwrecked Spanish vessel as recently as 1878. People planted the coconuts, and when they grew into palm trees, they named the town Palm City. Later they found out that there was already a town by that name in Florida, so they renamed it Palm Beach. Then came Henry Flagler and his railroad, and he saw the skinny little palm-covered island as a luxurious winter resort. He bought up the property on both sides of Lake Worth, directed the layout of the streets, installed waterworks, landscaped everything to his taste, and invited his rich friends down from Philadelphia.

“And at that point,” Troy Veech told Maud in his never-far-from-mocking drawl (for how long had his fingers been linked with hers?), “Palm Beach shed its upstart beginnings and became the enclosure we find ourselves trapped in now.”

Flagler’s first big hotels were by invitation only: to be invited you had to be gentile. Automobiles were not invited. Flagler allowed only bicycle-propelled padded wicker chairs operated by Negroes to transport guests between hotels and trains. He called them Afromobiles.

Most clubs, including the Palm City Club, still excluded Jews, and Anabel Norton’s father, a Jacksonville department store millionaire, had been a Jew. Everybody had known this when the Nortons moved to Palm Beach, but Mimi Weatherby had taken a shine to Mrs. Norton and chose to keep Anabel’s hopes up as long as Anabel paid court to her and supported her charities liberally.

Duddy Weatherby was an epileptic, had been known to “have fits” in public, and girls and their mothers started weeding out potential disasters early around there.

“LET ME JUST
indulge in a short fantasy before I take you back,” said Troy Veech, as they stood pressed against each other in the shadows of the marina. “One of those yachts is mine. I help you on board, just as you are. We can always dock somewhere later and buy casual clothes. We have a captain, because I don’t want to be bothered with the sailing part. And since this is a fantasy, why not a crew as well? The captain gives the order, the crew hauls anchor, and you and I make our way to the prow. The engines fire up and we’re under way. We don’t look back at receding lights or receding people. Will you come with me, just as I am, Maud, into the great unknown? If you say yes, you will make me a new man. Please say yes. Remembering, of course, that this is only a fantasy.”

Troy Veech was saying: “I can’t believe you’ve never kissed before. No, I can believe it. Your kisses are as fresh as you are. But my, you are a passionate little thing. You feel what you’re doing to me, don’t you? Better watch that. Some cad will press your passion button and you’ll be overboard.”

Troy Veech said: “I have a good mind to walk you right out of this citadel of pretensions and whisk you off as my own. No, I’m not talking fantasy now. I don’t have a yacht, but I have a pretty good car. Would you come?”

“I couldn’t—” Maud’s voice came out ragged and strange. She had not known she could feel like this and was truly baffled as to whether such feelings were sinful or sublime.

“Why not?” His lips moved against her ear, setting off more of the feelings. The mockery was completely gone. “Do you realize what I’m talking about, Maud? I’m offering you my heart. You make me think I still have one. I would marry you like a shot. It sounds crazy, but so crazy it could be the making of us both. You could be a soldier’s wife. I would send you to school and college.”

“I’m
fourteen,”
Maud moaned against the chest of this troubling man. She felt her power where their hips locked, but she wasn’t really tempted. She knew he spoke out of a place too deeply at odds with itself. Nonetheless, she sorted through the people in her life. Who would miss her? Who would envy her? Who would feel betrayed? Who would pronounce her a crazy fool? She could read everyone’s thoughts and hear each voice speaking them. With a pang she realized it was Granny who would miss her most, the Granny who turned the lights off to live in her radio programs and who infuriated Lily by her stoic reminders that “What’s done is done for us, but the child must have her chance.”

“I have to go back now,” said Maud, pulling away. “Especially after what you told me about Duddy.”

“Ah, vanquished by epileptic Duddy. Well, let’s look at you. You can’t go back looking like a ravished maiden.” The mockery had returned, but also a note of relief? “I’ll show you where the locker room is for the women golfers. There won’t be an attendant on duty to stare while you put yourself to rights. Go through that archway, then straight across the cloister through the other archway, and up the spiral stairs.”

Another dance was missed because Maud got lost after “putting herself to rights” in the women golfers’ bathroom. Her cheeks were rubbed raw and her lips were swollen. Her eyes had a hectic shine. Her dress had not suffered, but Duddy’s orchid was crushed. She dropped it in a wicker wastebasket and covered it with paper towels.

The dancers were in the middle of the Virginia reel when she made her entrance. She took out her dance card to see whom she had let down. Someone named Jabbo Trowbridge. Suddenly Mrs. Weatherby was beside her, consulting the card with her. “Jabbo’s got a partner. I’ve covered for you, Maud. Now you’re back and on your own. The last dance is with Duddy, and I’m counting on you not to miss that.”

The drive home with Troy Veech was bizarre. Mrs. Weatherby had arranged that, too. She and Mr. Weatherby had to stay behind and settle with the band and the servers, she said. “Now, Maud, please give my best to Anabel, and tell her I hope to see her after the first of the year. Probably not before then, tell her.” Maud was about to say, “But we’re coming to your party tomorrow,” then realized what was being conveyed. Mrs. Weatherby was uninviting them to her party because of Maud’s behavior tonight. Poor Anabel! “You
will
remember to tell her that, won’t you?” reiterated Mimi, looking hard at Maud. “Yes, ma’am,” Maud assured Mimi Weatherby, “I won’t forget.”

Troy and his little brother bickered back and forth in the front seat of Troy’s not-so-new Oldsmobile. (“I don’t have a yacht, but I have a pretty good car. Would you come?”) Maud and Duddy rode silently in the back. Maud was glad that Duddy had already asked what happened to the orchid during their last dance. “It just suddenly wilted,” she had told him, adding feebly, “I’m sorry.”

Troy Veech pulled up in front of the Norton house. “Well, here we are,” he said in his mocking drawl. But he sounded beaten and tired. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Maud Norton. I wish you every success in life.” He kept the motor running while her date walked her to the door. “Thank you for everything, and good night,” said Maud. She offered her hand and Duddy, without looking at her, gave it a limp squeeze. “Good night,” said Duddy Weatherby.

CHAPTER 20
Grading Papers

Late Tuesday afternoon, January 8, 1952
Octave of the Epiphany
Mother Malloy’s office
Mount St. Gabriel’s

MOTHER MALLOY PRAYED
before beginning the papers.

Your parents found You in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. You were twelve years old. Help me to be mindful of my students’ questions, and the needs behind those questions, and grant me the sagacity and the stamina to guide them toward wisdom and understanding. I ask this in Your name. Amen
.

She graded the papers in alphabetical order. This was her system.

Elaine Frew’s self-complacent, underresearched paper, “The Artist as Outsider,” required some adjustment after Lora Jean Cramer’s workmanlike presentation of David’s two marriages and her conclusion that “sometimes in life you have to make a serious mistake before you find true love.” Mother Malloy went through Elaine’s ornate script, crossing out all of Elaine’s capitalized nouns. Then she laid down her pencil and went to stand by the window. It was half past four. The last of the day’s sun crimsoned the west wall of the garage and brushed the tops of the crosses in the nuns’ cemetery below. As she found herself doing more and more lately, Mother Malloy fantasized an alternate self setting off on an outing. This other self, possessed of more stamina, flung on her cloak and headed outside into the falling light. She breathed in the mountain air and felt better for having come out. The gravel crunched beneath her brisk steps until she veered off onto the woodland path leading down to the cemetery. She remembered Mother Ravenel’s offer, that first day, to give her tennis lessons so they could play together. Another alternate self branched off from the one on the woodland path, and Mother Malloy smiled at the unlikely vision of this tennis-playing self, sash and garments flying, rushing about the court to return the headmistress’s volleys.

In the cemetery she walked along the rows, pausing to read the names and dates on the marble crosses, all carved to the same format, including the cross of the Englishwoman who founded the Order of St. Scholastica.

Elizabeth Mary Wallingford
O.S.S.
1863–1930
Professed February 10, 1893

One day she would lie beneath such a cross, either here or in Boston, and it gladdened her that in death her dates would be no less complete than those of her sisters. For Kate Malloy knew neither the day nor the month of her birth. Sometime in the late autumn of 1926, it was thought. In the foster home they celebrated her birthday on October 2, the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. But in the life she had chosen, the date of her profession was the only one that mattered: August 28, 1948, the Feast of St. Augustine.

Back at her desk from the fantasy walk, she reapplied herself to grading papers.

She stopped by the chapel to calm her stomach before facing yet another Mount St. Gabriel’s dinner. If it were only possible to draw caloric sustenance from the smells of beeswax and incense, whetted by a burst of cold air from a transom window left ajar in the sacristy by Father, so he could smoke.

When You went among us as a man, were there things You hated to eat? All those meals in other peoples’ houses—surely there were certain dishes put before You that made Your gorge rise. I wish I knew what they were. Then as I pick up my fork to address my portion of gluey macaroni bubbling with bacon and Velveeta cheese, I could say, “This is the equivalent of the dish that turned Our Lord’s stomach, prepared by some loving Martha, and He got it down.” But when I imagine Your food I see dates, nuts, flat bread, fruit, fresh fish—in Boston we had so much fresh fish!—washed down with water from a well, perhaps
a serving of wine. All things I would welcome on our table at Mount St. Gabriel’s
.

Four boarders and two nuns sat at each of the round tables in the dining room. Seating assignments changed every fortnight, beginning with the Sunday evening meal. These first two weeks of the new semester, Mother Malloy and Mother Arbuckle, the infirmarian, were sharing a table with Marta Andreu, Gilda Gomez, Elaine Frew, and a high-strung new tenth-grade boarder, Jiggsie (Juliana) Judd. The advance word from Mother Ravenel had been that there was “a lot of work to be done” on Jiggsie. Her father, a golf pro, went back and forth between Florida and the Poconos, and Jiggsie had been in the habit of attending two schools per academic year. Now the parents were at war with each other, and the paternal grandmother, Mrs. Judd, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, an old Mount St. Gabriel’s graduate (class of 1913) and a good Catholic, had taken responsibility for Jiggsie’s education in hopes of preventing the girl from following in the footsteps of her “unreliable” mother. All this from Mother Ravenel, who had added, “If Jiggsie can profit from her surroundings here, she will be invited back for the fall. If not, she won’t. That’s what I told Mrs. Judd in our telephone interview. She understood perfectly, being an old girl herself.”

Jiggsie looked like a delicate cinquecento angel until she moved or opened her mouth. Jiggsie’s jitters seemed to be manifestations of a war being played out inside herself. Her behavior at meals could have been a parody of bad table manners. She shook out her table napkin as if she were airing a throw rug. She plucked a roll from the bread basket, screwed up her eyes at it, then returned it to the basket. She jumped like a rabbit when anyone spoke to her, blinked frantically when asked a question, then mumbled an answer in her flat, wispy voice, usually in monosyllables or with one of several pat phrases, all of which came out sounding rude.

All the more, then, did Mother Malloy appreciate Elaine Frew’s attempts, during this third evening meal of the new semester, to take Jigg sie Judd under her wing. It was done, of course, in Elaine’s typical condescending manner, and with her visible fastidious recoil, but after a few “What?”s and “Huh!”s and “Oh, yeah?”s, Jiggsie was actually heard saying, “Uh, okay” and then, wonder of wonders, “Oh, thank you, Elaine.” It was enough to make Mother Malloy feel sad about the D Elaine didn’t yet know she was getting.

While Mother Malloy was still laboring over a quivery slab of bread pudding clotted with raisins, Mother Arbuckle excused herself—two sick boarders with intestinal flu were awaiting their cup of bouillon from her hot plate back at the infirmary. In passing, she laid a small brown package on Mother Malloy’s lap.

“I picked that up for you. See the note inside.”

“Why, thank you, Mother.”

Back in her office, Mother Malloy unwrapped the package. It was a bottle of something called Geritol. The note read:

Take a nice good swig before bedtime and another before breakfast. Supposed to give you more pep and appetite. Lots of key vitamins and iron. It’s fairly new, but they’re advertising it all over the place. Let’s see if it helps!

Clara Arbuckle, R.N., O.S.S
.

So her wan appetite had been professionally observed. She realized she must take even smaller portions if she were to continue eating everything on her plate, as the girls were expected to do.

A few ninth graders had asked permission before the holidays to change or modify the topic of their paper. This was to be expected and was generally a good sign. Chloe Starnes, whose first proposal was to examine the influence of mothers in
David Copperfield
, had changed her focus to the influence of Agnes Wickfield upon David. “I want to explore how a person’s strength of character can guide someone to maturity, even when that person stays in the background. What gave me the idea was my mother’s name also being Agnes, and even though she isn’t with me anymore, I feel influenced by her. I feel her watching over me and guiding me in my choices.”

The initial plan of Josie Galvin, the doctor’s daughter, had been to compare and contrast Little Emily’s fall (her elopement with her seducer, Steerforth) with that of her friend Martha the prostitute. But before Christmas she made an impassioned plea to concentrate on Martha alone. “There’s so much there, Mother; Martha can take up my whole five pages all by herself. My father says that prostitution was Victorian England’s biggest can of worms. They spent millions of pounds a year on their prostitutes, but the average prostitute, even if she was young, was dead in four years. I’d like to call my paper ‘Martha’s Redemption.’”

“So you think she is redeemed?”

“Oh, yes, Mother. I mean, she had no mother or father, so it was easy for her to fall into bad ways.”

Mother Malloy considered taking a few of the papers to her room. Though sleep threatened to ambush her at untimely moments during the school day, it eluded her when she lay down on her bed at night. Why not get more of the papers done? But in a recent rereading of the Order’s rule, she saw, in chapter 42, “Silence After Compline,” that the foundress, who must have fought against night reading herself, warned against letting it become a “form of conversation that interferes with God’s most private communing with us just before sleep.”

And so, after Compline, she went empty-handed to her room, removed her veil, folded it according to custom with the two straight pins arranged in the form of a cross, exchanged the habit for the flannel gown, washed her face and brushed her teeth at the little sink, took her first exploratory swig of Mother Arbuckle’s tonic (it was both “bitter and sweet,” like the angel’s little book in Revelations), and dropped to her knees on the prie-dieu to perform her Examen of Conscience. Twice, during her review of the day, she felt an auspicious drowsiness, but as soon as she lay flat on her pillow, she was wide awake again and vaguely apprehensive. Sometimes she managed to diminish the unease by sitting up and saying the confiteor and striking her chest three times (“through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”). But other times, like now, it exacerbated her nervousness, and she resorted to her alternate remedy: making a second pillow out of the extra blanket from the closet, then lying at the new elevation with her eyes closed and reciting Hail Marys without counting them until something floated up, then something else, and on and on until she fell asleep.

What floated up first tonight was the pang she continued to feel as an adult when someone spoke slightingly of people without parents. Josie Galvin, heaped round with the fruits of family life, took it for granted that it was easy for Martha to “fall into bad ways” because she had no mother or father. And this in turn evoked in Mother Malloy the spring of her ninth year, when a strep throat followed by a setback of bronchitis had kept her in bed for weeks, and she had watched the sun rise earlier each day and heard the other children leaving for school and, at the end of the day, heard them playing outside in the lengthening twilight. She was infinitely sad and unable to comfort herself or explain why. Everyone was attentive to her; she was a favorite with the foster parents and with the other children. Mrs. O’Neill fussed and worried over her. Mr. O’Neill, a carpenter, made her a pencil box carved with her initials, K.M. The doctor told her she was a very good patient; her fourth-grade teacher visited from school and assured her that she would catch up easily because she was disciplined and smart.

The parish priest came to see her and encouraged her to start thinking about her confirmation name. He taught her a prayer to St. Joseph, which made her want to weep, though she could not have explained why.

O blessed Joseph, happy man, to whom it was given not only to see and to hear that God Whom many kings longed to see, and saw not, to hear, and heard not; but also to carry Him in thy arms to embrace Him, to clothe Him, and to guard and defend Him
.

She had chosen Joseph for her confirmation name, and the parish priest had backed up her choice when others, including the loving O’Neills, had suggested that Josephine might be more suitable.