Unfinished Desires (24 page)

Mother Ravenel had thrown a monkey wrench into Tildy’s original plan for John to drive the five ninth graders to the funeral and then on to the cemetery. “Your idea that Maud’s fellow officers should attend Mrs. Roberts’s funeral was a good one, Tildy. It shows your natural bent for leadership. But there is no need for you girls to miss an extra class period by going out to the cemetery. Strangers have no business at a burial. The interment should be for bereaved friends and family members.”

“Mrs. Roberts was not a stranger to me, Mother Ravenel. I’ve stayed over at Maud’s hundreds of times, ever since we were little girls.”

“Ye-es,” drawled the headmistress, eyeing Tildy sharply from across the big desk. “Though you and Maud aren’t so close anymore. But if you feel
you
must go to the cemetery, Tildy, have your mother write Mother Malloy a note saying she wishes you to go.”

“That woman!” exploded Cornelia, dashing off the note. “Always meddling in our lives!”

The other girls having been chauffeured back to school, Tildy rode with John to the cemetery, mulling over her new relationship with Mother Ravenel, who was still an adversary, but suddenly an advantageous one. The Ravenel had power—she could expel you or uninvite you back. Or, as she had done after Tildy’s first report card, she could threaten probation, with its threat of failure and expulsion. But she could also, as people with power were privileged to do, suddenly bestow power on chosen ones. As she had done when she’d suggested to Tildy that she might direct a 1952 production of
The Red Nun
. But why had Mother Ravenel chosen Tildy? Mama was suspicious of her motives. “Suzanne Ravenel has meddled in our family life from the very beginning. The first day she entered Mount St. Gabriel’s, she started weaseling her way into my sister’s affections—Antonia, who never could resist a sufferer, befriended the lonely little boarder from Charleston, even before that father did away with himself the weekend after Black Friday. And then there was talk that she would be sent home because there was no money, and she had a sort of junior nervous breakdown and was packed off to the infirmary, where she had her legendary meeting with the foundress—God only knows how much of
that
was true and how much she made up out of whole cloth, because Mother Wallingford was on round-the-clock opiates for her brain cancer. Following her death, Suzanne was free to fabricate whatever would serve her own legend best. After that, she never left the school—who paid for it is anyone’s guess. Old Mother Finney once told Agnes Vick, who was her pet, that Mother Wallingford had arranged a full scholarship for her before she died.”

Tildy’s mother now watched her anxiously for any evidence that she might be “going over” to Mother Ravenel. The knowledge gave Tildy an exhilarating flush of power: her hard-to-pin-down, contemptuous mother fearfully examining her baby for signs of desertion to the enemy.

“She isn’t trying to maneuver you into thinking you have a vocation, like she tried to do with Madeline, is she?”

“Good grief, no, Mama, I’m far too egotistical to make a good nun. She says I have leadership qualities that haven’t found their proper outlets yet. She says she was the same way. One day in freshman study hall she just picked up a pencil and started writing a play for her class. She said it was like taking dictation from a higher source.”

Cornelia made a sour face. “I’ve never understood why writers think they have to blame their scribblings on ‘a higher source.’ Why can’t they just own up to the job and let it go at that? And, Tildy, you have always enjoyed bossing other people around. Your leadership qualities didn’t just burst into bloom because she has condescended to notice them. Anyhow, I hope you can infuse something new into her tiresome girlhood theatrical. It needs a shot of new life. It needs—”

“What, Mama? It needs what? Each class is allowed to add its own material, you know. That’s part of the tradition. Tell me what you’re
thinking!”

“Oh, some sort of breakout from the traditional old party line.
Her
party line. Maybe some scenes from behind the scenes.”

“Like
what
, Mama? Please be specific. Look how you helped me sharpen up Uriah Heep’s disgustingness. What
kind
of breakout? What scenes behind
what
scenes?”

“Don’t be so importunate, Tildy. You know I can’t stand to be pinned down. Let me go away and think about it.”

Monday, January 21, 1952
The cemetery

Maud knew she would remember every detail of Tildy’s grand arrival at the cemetery for as long as she lived.

There they had stood around the open grave, the pitiful remnants of Granny’s funeral. The old people in their shabby hats and coats looked half dead themselves in the cruel winter light. Her mother leaned in a little too close to Mr. Foley, who had overcreamed his pompadour. The raw wind pasted the minister’s black gown against his skinny body and he held the prayer book at an absurd distance from his eyes. Maud had heard him jokingly apologize to her mother, as their paltry little group of mourners labored up the hill to Granny’s waiting grave, for leaving his reading glasses behind in the pulpit.

Everywhere, in this sad little scene she found herself part of, Maud perceived elements that boded compromise and outright danger to her best hopes.

It now seemed sinister that she had chosen “The Downgrading of Dreams” as the final title for her
David Copperfield
paper, which had earned her an A plus and a note of high praise from Mother Malloy. This triumph had taken away some of the sting of the Palm Beach debacle and the aftermath of having to explain to Granny and Lily why she probably would not be invited to stay with the Nortons again, but it was a short-lived triumph because Granny had slipped away from them soon after the paper was returned.

Though it departs from your original and perhaps overly ambitious plan of pinpointing the universal aches throughout the novel and showing how they achieve the transfer from character to reader, thereby enlarging and authenticating the reader’s experience, your paper’s narrower and sharper focus has the power of felt emotion kept in service to a theme. Yes, it is a fact, as you point out, that unmerited degradations abound in our fallen world, but it is also true, as you go on to say, that they often call out the finest creative strengths of the human soul. “The Downgrading of Dreams” is a testament to reading and writing at its best. This is excellent work, Maud
.

Mother K. Malloy, O.S.S
.

Tildy’s trilby hat with uptilted black feather appeared at the rim of the hill just as Dr. Clark was inviting the assembled mourners to come forward and cast a handful of soil on the casket. Then came the rest of her: the mop of tawny hair that had caused Anabel Norton to compare her to Orphan Annie, a too long black coat with a fox collar (probably from Madeline’s closet), an old-fashioned lace fichu that looked like plunder from an old trunk, the outfit completed by black gauntlet-length kid gloves, dark stockings, and opera pumps. Oh, glorious, dramatic Tildy, moving smartly across the turf to stand by her side! Maud, who had not been able to weep at the funeral, felt welcome tears sliding down her cheeks. She had assumed that Tildy had returned to school with the other girls.

Maud’s mother went first to cast her handful of soil on Granny’s casket, followed by Maud. Had it not been for Tildy, who stuck to Maud close as a bodyguard, Mr. Foley would have slipped into third place and made it look like he was the appointed protector of Maud and her mother. Maud had that remembered sense of Tildy anticipating her requirements sometimes before she herself knew what they were.

“Now, here is what I’m going to suggest, Maud,” Tildy said, jumping right in with her old officiousness as soon as the mourners began to disperse. “John is waiting below with the Packard. You have the rest of the day off, am I right? So do I. Mama wrote a note. Why don’t you come home with me? Flavia will make us some lunch. I have a new room—it’s much nicer. Madeline switched with me. We could just hang around for the rest of the day. If you want to, that is.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I want to, but I don’t know whether I’m supposed to ride back with my mother and—them—in the limousine.”

“Well, let’s go ask your mother and see what she says.”

Monday afternoon
The Stratton house

“How did you get Madeline to switch with you?” asked Maud, curled up in the window seat of Tildy’s new room.

“It was her idea. She did it one Sunday when I was spending the day at the Vick house. She and Flavia slaved all afternoon to surprise me. The bed was too big to move, so here I am in it.” Tildy luxuriously stretched out her arms and legs in four directions, like spokes in a wheel. “It was back in October, when everyone was feeling sorry for me.”

“Why were they feeling sorry for you?”

“Oh, my grades took a dive and old Ravenous called me in and said I had to shape up or she’d put the black mark on my eternal record. And I was having a pretty awful time with old David the Copperfield. Then Mother Malloy offered to tutor me twice a week to improve my reading techniques, and Madeline worked with me at night. We’d read together, like you and I used to do, Maud.”

You mean I’d do the reading and you’d lie with your eyes closed and listen with a superior look on your face, and then afterward I’d explain the significance of everything we’d read, thought Maud, feeling bitterness over Tildy’s family security, over her private hours twice a week with the beautiful Malloy, and fear and disgust at what was probably going on right now between her mother and Mr. Foley back at the Granny-less Pine Cone Lodge. But she also felt exultant to be alone with Tildy in this large sun-filled room.

“I can’t imagine giving up a room like this to anybody,” she said.

“Oh well, Madeline is like that. She’s always thinking of others. Mama says our aunt Tony was just the same. This was Aunt Tony’s room when she was a girl. And then when she came back to live here with Mama and Daddy when Mama was expecting Madeline, it was her room again. There’s still stuff of hers in boxes under the window seats. Old clothes and things she left behind when she married Uncle Henry.”

“Was that her lace fichu you wore under your coat today?”

Tildy shot up to a sitting position. “God, you are
amazing
, Maud! How did you
know?”

“I just had a feeling,” Maud played along. With Tildy, nothing could be as mundane as a simple deduction. It had to be magical, supernatural.

“You always did have a jillion dimensions, Maud. You must be psychic, too. Chloe has some psychic powers. But”—Tildy rolled her eyes in exasperation—“she uses
hers
mainly for contacts with her dead mother.”

Tildy’s mentioning of Chloe at all transferred them to slippery ground. The second revelation, however, especially accompanied with the eye rolling, could be read as a breach of loyalty to her present best friend and an invitation to “talk about” Chloe. If Maud were to remain above reproach, she must not rise to the bait.

“With her …
dead mother?”

She nevertheless had risen.

“I really shouldn’t be discussing this with anyone,” said Tildy. Frowning, she carefully rearranged her legs tailor-fashion on the high bed and leaned forward, a hand on each knee. Both girls had shed their funeral clothes and wore jeans. Tildy had found a pair in Madeline’s closet that fit Maud’s longer body. “But it’s been a bit worrisome.”

“What are these contacts like?” Maud asked, throwing shame to the winds.

“Well, she constantly draws her. You know how she’s always drawing. She can make anything look like the spitting image of itself. She fills page after page with drawings of her mother. Agnes when she was our age, at school. Agnes the way she looked in the days before she died. Collecting eggs from the henhouse, or sitting across from Chloe at this diner where they went to get away from Rex, the stepfather. She must have hundreds of these drawings.”

“But drawing someone—that’s not exactly contacting the dead—”

“Wait,” said Tildy ominously. “I haven’t finished. Then she
consults
the drawings. She doesn’t do this much when I’m around, but she does it enough that I know she must do it a lot more when she’s alone.”

“How do you mean ‘consults’?”

“Oh, she’ll snatch up her pad and flip to a drawing, or sometimes she’ll start a new Agnes, and you can see her
meditating on it
, like you would a holy icon. Sometimes she’ll speak to it, ask it questions.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Like, ‘Is it right for us to do this?’ I mean, at first you think she’s asking
you
, because you’re the only other person in the room, but she’s not. She’s asking the picture; she’s asking Agnes. It’s like she’s praying to the Virgin or something. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Is it right to do what?”