Unfinished Desires (25 page)

“Oh, whatever is in the plans. She was going to do a class portrait for the bulletin board. Remember?
You
asked her to contribute something artistic.”

“Yes, I remember.” Maud also remembered the look of hate Tildy had shot her that day, and the way Tildy had pretended not to hear Maud’s request but had acted as though it was her idea for Chloe to do something.

“Well, she had the portrait all sketched out and was starting to color in the faces and do the clothes—God, Maud, it was fantastic, it was like watching each girl came alive on the paper. She’d done Hansje and Beatrix in their matching chesterfields, and Marta Andreu hugging herself in her purple shawl, and then I had to go home, and the next thing I’m hearing from Chloe is that she’s not going on with the portrait—it’s all off. I mean, she’d finished it by then, she’d done my beaver coat to perfection, and Dorothy Yount wiping her eye, but she told me she wasn’t going to present it to Mother Malloy for the bulletin board.”

“Why?”

“Because
. She said people might not want their secret sides posted on the bulletin board. That’s when I asked her who’d been influencing her. I thought maybe Uncle Henry.”

“Was it?” Maud wished she knew how she herself had looked in Chloe’s portrait. Would she recognize her own secret side?

“She said nobody had influenced her, but she got that look she gets when she’s ganging up with Agnes against me. And then what she said after that was pure Agnes. She said, ‘I just asked myself how I would feel if I were those other girls.’ Agnes was so
fair-minded
. That was her big thing, Mama said. I never met Agnes, but I feel I know how she feels about everything, through Chloe. Chloe is
haunted
by her.”

You are beginning to sound like you are, too, thought Maud. “You really think so?”

“If you want to know what I
really
think”—Tildy was scowling—“I think Chloe is trying to
become
Agnes.”

“But why would she want to do that?”

“To keep from being herself and making up her own mind about things.”

Maud’s next obvious question would have been
“What
things?” and she could see that Tildy was waiting for her to ask it. The old rhythms of her exchanges with Tildy were back in play again. She knew she would get more by slowing them down and expressing scruples.

“After all,” mused Maud, looking down intently at her own knees, “her mother only died last spring. That isn’t even a year ago yet.”

Then Maud had her awful thought: It might have worked out better for me if Granny had lived on with her tricky heart and Lily had died. Granny and I could have carried on the Pine Cone Lodge trade; I could have shopped and kept accounts and finished at Mount St. Gabriel’s on the day scholarship I won at the end of eighth grade. I could have made perfect grades and earned a scholarship to college. I would have escaped, even without the Nortons’ help. Now I’m not sure I will escape. I’ve heard them talking. Art Foley wants to move to Atlanta and take us with him. It will be like David Copperfield losing ground at the bottle factory. All the gains I have made for myself here in Mountain City will pass away and I will have to start all over at the bottom again. But I’m not a genius like Dickens, and I’m not a man, and I’m not the favored character in a novel under the loving protection of a biased creator.

I may never reclaim my lost ground.

“Maud!” cried Tildy. “I have to know what you are thinking
right this minute!”

How much have I missed her? Her bossy commands, her infuriating dramatizing of herself, of everything that touches her life. Do I want to be part of those dramatics again? Give up the autonomy I have built for myself in ninth grade and go back to sleeping over at the Strattons’ and feeling grateful to shelter under her security? Do I want to go back to those fits and stabs of jealousy that used to make me hate myself and her?

“Maudie, are you crying?” In one motion, Tildy had sprung from the bed and was nuzzling against Maud in the window seat. “You have
got
to tell me. I know that look. It’s not just your granny. It’s more.”

She may not be able to read worth a damn, but she sure can read me.

“Everything is just awful,” Maud said. Her face felt rubbery; she fought to control it, then gave herself over. “My life is going down the drain,” she sobbed into Tildy’s Orphan Annie curls. “They’ll take me away from Mountain City. Before she died, Granny told me she suspected they were already married, but she intended to stay alive so I could live with her and keep my scholarship to Mount St. Gabriel’s. But now they’re going to sell the Pine Cone Lodge and the Nortons can’t rescue me anymore—they’ve got their own problems and Anabel may leave my dad. He fell off the wagon when I was there at Christmas because I disgraced myself at a dance with this awful person named Troy Veech, who necked with me and asked me to marry him and said he’d send me to school, and then went off to join the Army. I ruined Anabel’s chances for getting into Palm Beach society and she’s fed up with my father and now I am going to lose everything.”

“No, you are not,” declared Tildy. Maud could feel her old friend shudder with the thrill of this outpouring of new melodrama. “You must tell me every single thing that has happened, and then we will decide on a plan.”

Confessional Cassette, Continued

Dawn, Monday morning
September 10, 2001
Feast of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, confessor (1245-1305)
Mother Ravenel’s room
St. Scholastica Retirement House

I guess you’ve been wondering what happened to me, Beatrix. But no, you didn’t know I’d begun this personal tape to you ten days ago. That was after Mother Frances Galyon had suggested during our evening walk that I turn over the “toxic year” to someone I trusted and cared about, and that certainly describes you, dear Beatrix.

There is nothing like a week’s vacation in the hospital to make a person put her priorities in order and show her where she has been fudging. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly fine now. It was something I have trouble pronouncing in which the intestine knots itself up in little kinks and you have to watch your diet carefully from then on, but it took a while for them to diagnose it and make sure it wasn’t something worse. I spent several days on a painkiller drip, drifting in and out of fugues. At one point I was sure I had already died, and at another, time flattened itself out like an intricate carpet and I saw the episodes of my life woven into their divinely appointed places, and not all of it belongs in a school history. What I came to call the “toxic year,” after I had lived through it, was fallout from things set in motion long before. I must accept responsibility for the role I played throughout, but I must also accept that mine was only one of many roles and, furthermore, that it is insulting God’s mercy to go on flagellating myself as prime blamee, if I may coin such a word.

At the start of this personal tape to you, I said my story had its beginnings in the early 1930s, when my best friend, Antonia Tilden, and I decided we wanted to enter the Order together. I think it is best to go back to that time, maybe even further back, to our first becoming friends.

Antonia and Cornelia Tilden. They were identical twins but easy to tell apart. Antonia’s superiority of soul shone through her beauty like a light from within, while Cornelia’s identical features seemed harder, as though chiseled from without. Cornelia was dreaded for her critical eye and scornful tongue. In contrast, Antonia was comforting and unthreatening to be with. In her there was none of the meanness and silliness of most girls her age. She had a way of treating everyone as equally worthy of her regard. Now, this is a rare and admirable quality—I think Our Lord Himself must have had it—but it can certainly exasperate someone who hopes to claim a major share of that person’s attention or be chosen as that person’s “most beloved.” You have only to page through the Gospels to come upon Peter making a pest of himself again and again: “Whom do you love most, Lord? Who will sit next to you in Heaven?” Impulsive Peter, stepping out of the boat, into the waves, to get to Our Lord first, and having to be saved from drowning.

Antonia befriended me; I would never have approached her first.

I was a new boarder from Charleston. My mother had told my father that she would divorce him if he didn’t send me away to school. She said our eighteen-room house on the East Battery was no longer large enough to contain us both. She had always called me her “pelican child,” saying I’d come out of her body determined to tear her slowly to pieces, whereas my older brothers had slid out like “little greased otters.” She loved telling people in my presence, “I first thought Suzanne was the beginning of early menopause.” She called me her “sneaky surprise package.” By the time I reached adolescence, she had compiled a whole list of “Suzanne” epithets. I was “sneaky, sanctimonious, self-advancing;” so many of her adjectives began with
s
that I came to believe she had chosen my name because it would alliterate well with those qualifiers. She also liked to call me things prefaced by “old”: “Old Frump,” “Old Stumpy,” and “Old Stubby,” the last of which seemed particularly unfair, since I was better built, with a longer torso and legs, than either of my brothers. I had my father’s wandlike body and his finer features.

But this is not going to be the story of my mother’s dislike of me. It has taken a good portion of my lifetime for me to comprehend that there is, and has been all through recorded history, many a mother who cannot stand her child. I was merely one of those children. That was part of my pattern, one of the episodes in the “carpet” I saw spread out before me during my painkiller fugues in the hospital. But I wanted to provide you with a little background of how I came to Mount St. Gabriel’s as a boarder. “One of us must go,” my mother had said, and my father, who had probably seen this coming for some time, did not want to lose his comfortable home. Furthermore, since he was from an old Catholic family, divorce was anathema to him.

I loved Mount St. Gabriel’s from the moment I set eyes on it. Unlike the other new boarders, I was not the least bit homesick. From the very first, I felt that Mount St. Gabriel’s was my home. I loved the thin, clean air of the mountains, so energizing and bracing after Charleston’s sultry closeness. I loved the nuns, old and young, sweet and crabby, every one of whom behaved more like a mother to me than the woman I had left behind. I was enchanted with my adorable little roommate, Soledad, who’d had her own hand-carved prie-dieu shipped to her from Mexico City. I liked going to Mass in the chapel and following in the daily missal my father had given me, with my initials in gold on the cover. I loved knowing and following the church seasons and the feasts of all the saints and martyrs. Even Mount St. Gabriel’s cuisine satisfied me, though it was fashionable among the boarders to complain. The school was founded by an Englishwoman, so its normal fare was roast meats or savory pies, boiled vegetables and stewed fruits, with bread-and-butter puddings or sponge cake for dessert—and trifle on special occasions.

I had been given a chance to start over and win love for myself, and this I set about doing on the very first day of school.

The Tilden twins were in the row next to mine, Antonia at the front of the row and Cornelia just behind her. I was at the end of one row and they were at the head of the next, so I could observe them simply by looking forward. At first I studied them as a unit: What would it be like to have a twin? What if there had been another of me? Would my mother have devised epithets for us both? They dressed alike, which made their individual “touches” stand out more. Cornelia wore colored shoelaces in her oxfords, pink or yellow or light green; Antonia’s were always brown. Antonia pulled her honey-gold hair back rather severely from her forehead with tortoiseshell barrettes; Cornelia let hers loop forward, and she would regard you slyly from behind its heavy side wave.

I listened more than I talked, those first weeks at Mount St. Gabriel’s. I listened to what the old girls said about the other old girls and about the nuns. I heard that the English foundress, Mother Elizabeth Wallingford, then in her late sixties, had a deadly tumor growing in her brain and all anyone could do for her now was “make her comfortable” up in the infirmary. Mother Fiona Finney was pointed out to me, the Irishwoman who broke horses in her youth and had come over with Mother Wallingford. She was very busy, performing a great many jobs at once, from sacristan to baker to riding instructress, but you would see her rushing through the halls or picking up her skirts and flying up the stairs. “There she goes,” someone would say. “She runs up to that infirmary every chance she gets. Poor Finney is going to be devastated when Wallingford goes!”

I learned that the Tilden twins’ father was in the state legislature in Raleigh and that their mother was an accomplished homemaker who sewed all the girls’ clothes. But Cornelia went into a “humor” or fainted if she had to stand still to fit dresses, so Antonia had volunteered to do it for them both. Cornelia, they said, had the cruel tongue. A new girl, wanting to make an overture of friendship, had asked “which kind of twins they were,” and Antonia was gently explaining that they were the identical, not the fraternal, kind when Cornelia spoke up and completely dashed the poor girl. “Actually,” Cornelia announced in a baleful voice, “we are triplets, but one of us died.”

I was good at sports, as most girls are who have older brothers. I could run fast and played a good game of tennis and I liked organizing team sports. At the end of the school year I was voted one of the four field day captains for the grammar school, and our team, the Green Team, won the trophy. I had chosen Antonia Tilden as my cocaptain. Cornelia Tilden, captain of the Red Team, was very put out that I, rather than she, had gotten her sister for cocaptain because I’d drawn the straw for first pick. But I think Cornelia had begun to resent me long before this.

However, I am jumping ahead.