Unfinished Desires (33 page)

“Caroline DuPree was in the grade ahead of Mrs. Judd, and there’s a whole other side of the story. Caroline was in love with the foundress, with Mother Wallingford, and her parents came to take her out of school and she tried to throw herself off the tower but Mother Finney saved her. Oh, bye, John!” She waved out the window as the Packard backed out of the driveway. “And then they took her home and she died of malaria.”

“But what about the whole vocation thing?”

“Mrs. Judd hadn’t heard about that, because she was one of those girls who couldn’t wait to be done with school. All she knew was that there was a Requiem Mass said the next year, when Mrs. Judd was a senior. She didn’t keep up with the school after she graduated. She didn’t even know about the statue or Ravenel’s famous play! But, Chloe, I was thinking on the way over here, you are the key that is going to unlock this whole mystery.”

“I
am?”

“Look,
who
is still at Mount St. Gabriel’s who knew about all that first stuff that happened in the school, who was there right from the beginning?”

“Mother Finney.”

“Dick Tracy! And which student was she closest to in the class of 1934?”

“Well, that would be Agnes.”

“Right!”

“I still don’t see how I am—”

“Wait, let me finish! Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world for you to seek out Mother Finney and have a little talk with her, say you want to know anything she can remember about your mother, and then after that you can tell her we’re trying to amplify the character of the foundress for this updated version of the play, and get her talking about that, and then you could say, ‘Oh, and you must have known Caroline DuPree, who died before she could realize her vocation—what was
she
like when she was at the school, Mother?’”

“But she must have wanted to be a nun at some point—I mean, her parents went to all that trouble to import the marble and hire the sculptor. I mean, it’s one of the legends of the school.”

“And who created the legend? That’s what we want to find out!” Tildy practically sizzled with electricity. “Was it there before Suzanne Ravenel’s play? Or how much of it did she invent?”

“But surely Mother Finney wouldn’t have stood by all those years and not spoken up if there was something not—”

“That’s what we have to find out,” said Tildy imperiously, turning her attention to Chloe’s scenery panel of the grotto. “Now, I would have colored the Red Nun in first, but you’ve done all the trees and left her white.”

“Well, this is the way
I’m
doing it. I have to see if there’s anything else I need to see about her after all the background is filled in.”

“I wasn’t criticizing, Miss Chloe. I was just saying I’m the impetuous child dying to scribble with her red crayon and you’re the subtle artist.”

“I think I’m going to use a high-gloss house paint on her,” said Chloe. In her backing-off moments, the articulate Tildy was impossible to resist. “That way she’ll stand out from the water-based paint on the trees. She’ll look more three-dimensional and
solid
. I was even wondering, should I make her a size bigger. What do you think?”

“You mean bigger than she really is?”

“Just a—a sort of impulse I had.”

“You know what?” Tildy marched back and forth in front of the panel. “I think that is an excellent idea. Make her larger than life. A force to be reckoned with.”

“But what if—what if I find out something from Mother Finney that will make her less of a force?”

“It won’t make a difference to the
statue
. She’s there, sitting on all her history of—just sitting there. She’ll be the same whatever loss of force Caroline’s story suffers.”

“But—shouldn’t we wait until we hear what Mother Finney has to say? There might not be anything.”

“Oh, there’ll always be
something,”
said Tildy, with a toss of her shaggy curls. “Everybody has their own version of everything. What I’m trying for is to expand the scope of this play, to break open Mother Ravenel’s same old party line. And Monday is St. Patrick’s Day, so you have a perfect excuse to seek out old Finney and wish her the luck o’ the Irish and then slip in the other stuff.”

Monday afternoon, March 17, 1952
Feast of St. Patrick, bishop and patron of Ireland
Mount St. Gabriel’s

In the morning sow your seed and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good
.

Mother Finney bent over her seedlings. The sun, soon tilting toward summer, blazed through the glass of the greenhouse and penetrated the layers of her serge habit, warming her old bones and smoothing the kinks in her joints.

Yesterday the pale sprouts had struggled to lift their tiny shoulders out of the flats. Today the trays of variegated foliage promised tomorrow’s harvest. Soon there would be clusters of ripening tomatoes, snap beans, peas, summer squash, cucumbers. In Ireland her family, thrifty though prosperous, had never forgotten the 1845 famine and grew their own seed potatoes; but here at Mount St. Gabriel’s, with a hundred boarders and the nuns and staff to feed, plus the cafeteria lunch for the day girls, it was more economical to buy them by the truckload from a New Jersey farm. Mother Finney’s garden was no longer really a necessity, not as in those first years of the school (when she had grown potatoes to bake, boil, and store) and again during the Depression years and World War II. But the sisters and students were so vociferous in their praise: a “Finney tomato” was “the way tomatoes
used
to taste,” a butterhead lettuce from her garden the crispiest and sweetest of them all. Doctoring her aches nightly with Ben-Gay cream and soaking her arthritic fingers twice daily in warm water, she submitted to their enthusiasm. She anticipated serving the first homegrown salad of the season to young Mother Malloy, who had trouble digesting the starchy Mount St. Gabriel’s fare.

Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. Even those who live many years should rejoice in them all. Yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many
.

She rejoiced in her accrued years, though as she looked back over them, it astonished her that she could have traveled so far and done so many things. And yet her life felt exactly hers: she could not imagine any other. Of course, she’d had her companion in holy daring for two-score of her fourscore and nine. It was twenty-two years and two months now, that Lizzie Wallingford had been gone.

She could also tote up days of darkness already lived through. Surely the author of Ecclesiastes knew that dark days weren’t always in the future: that they were given for you to endure and remember as you journeyed along, spreading them out, as it were, over your allotted span.

Her hearing was muted, her cataracts “ripe,” as reported by the eye doctor, but when you’ve walked the same halls and stairs and grounds for forty-two years, and heard the same Masses and prayed the same prayers, you can make do with less acute portions of sight and sound. In the night, she was either wakeful and alert, keeping God company, or visited by episodes from all over her life. They came tumbling in as they would, in dreams and in reveries, until she sometimes wished she could give them the slip and remember episodes and scenes from some other life besides her own.

Yet in daytime she was increasingly forgetful. She could not count on herself to look at a face and match it with a name, though she knew perfectly well who the person was. She could no longer pluck the precise word she needed out of the air at the precise moment she needed it. Even the names of vegetables she sometimes forgot.

Yesterday a woman had come looking for her here in the greenhouse. A sharp-faced, jet-haired girl from the very earliest years of the school, she was now the sharp-faced, jet-haired grandmother of that new little boarder who had been put back a grade. Such a lot of questions she had, this lady, whom Mother Finney remembered as being exactly the same as a girl, always plucking you for information, yet talking as she plucked. Pluck, pluck, cluck, cluck. She had asked Mother Finney if she remembered running up the tower stairs to save Caroline DuPree from throwing herself off, the day the DuPree parents came to remove her from the school. Everybody had talked about it. Mother Finney was a heroine.

Mother Finney said her memory was not what it had been, but she was sure there had been no heroics on her part.

Then the lady wanted to know when it was that Caroline DuPree had decided to become a nun. Was it before or after she was sent home?

Ah now, I really couldn’t say.

And what was this story about the Red Nun? That little girl who’s directing the play was all over me yesterday when Jiggsie brought her to tea at the inn. I had to tell her it was completely new to me, this devout Caroline DuPree who died before she could realize her vocation. Yet I understand there’s a memorial in red marble—

That there is, yes—an unfinished memorial, in the grotto. Would you like to see it?

The lady would love to, but was in too much of a hurry today; her driver was waiting, she was in complete charge of a magazine subscription business, very profitable, left to her by her late husband. Did Mother Finney remember how all the girls in the class of 1913 adored her? And off she had scurried, without waiting for an answer, still talking as she backed out of the greenhouse, because someone named poor Bob liked to get home before dark.

And here, this afternoon, came another visitor, a fawn of a girl with a clear-cut chin who made her way cautiously yet deliberately between the trestles of flats. Mother Finney knew exactly who she was but, alas, grasped in vain for a name. She remembered only the mother’s name: Agnes, Agnes Vick, then something else, then another name after that. Agnes, the special one, though you weren’t supposed to have favorites. Though Our Lord certainly did.

“It’s Chloe,” announced the girl, bless her. “You know, Agnes Vick’s daughter? I wanted—I wanted to wish you a happy St. Patrick’s Day, Mother.”

“Ah, Chloe. I was just now thinking of your mother.” Which was true, having seen Agnes’s face approaching in the girl’s steady eyes and distinctive chin. “Tell me, dear, how are you getting along?”

“Oh, I—” The girl swallowed and bent her head.

“I know, it’s hard,” she comforted the girl. “We know she’s with God, but it’s those of us left behind who feel the lack of her. I pray for her every day—and you along with her. And how are you finding the schoolwork, Chloe?”

“It’s going okay, I think. I mean, I have to study to make good grades, but my mother coached me in some subjects before I came to Mount St. Gabriel’s. And Mother Malloy, our teacher, is wonderful—she makes you
want
to excel.”

“She’s a godsend, our Mother Malloy. And you’ve made friends?”

“Well, Tildy Stratton and I are pretty close. I’m helping her a lot with the ninth-grade play. Our class is doing
The Red Nun
—Mother Ravenel appointed Tildy director. We’re adding some new scenes. The girls are allowed to do that.”

“And what scenes might you be adding, dear?”

“Well, we definitely want to amplify the character of our foundress. What she was really like, you know, in her prime. You’re the only one at Mount St. Gabriel’s who knew her then. Mother Ravenel talks about her a lot, but she only met Mother Wallingford at the end, when she was dying, and we have to remember that Mother Ravenel was only twelve at the time.”

“That is so,” said Mother Finney, pressing her lips together. With crooked but firm fingers she pinched suckers from a staked tomato plant. “Mother Wallingford wasn’t herself in those last days. She should be remembered for the many things she accomplished when she was well.” (The overwrought and completely imagined “deathbed scene” in Suzanne Ravenel’s school drama had remained an undiminished source of distress to Mother Finney, who had, since 1931, been obliged to watch several generations of girls “play” Elizabeth Wallingford and Fiona Finney.)

“Oh, what things, for instance, Mother? We’re looking for new material. We want to open up the play some. Even Mother Ravenel said it needed new blood.”

“You know, dear, after Mother Wallingford died, I wrote down everything I could remember. The Order kindly made it into a chapbook. You’ll find copies in the school library. At my keenest, Chloe, I was no writer, but you’ll find far more of Mother Wallingford in that account than I can tell you now. I’ve become so forgetful.
Adventures with Our Foundress
, it’s called. And it was. One adventure after another. Mother Wallingford believed in practicing what she called holy daring.”

“Oh, yes, Mother Ravenel’s always talking about that. And there’s this other thing we were wondering, too, Mother. What was the true story about Caroline DuPree? Was it like in Mother Ravenel’s play?”

The jet-haired old girl from yesterday and now young Chloe, interrogating her about Caroline DuPree.

Mother Finney was realizing belatedly that Agnes’s daughter had come to the greenhouse with a purpose other than to wish her a happy St. Patrick’s Day. So intent they were, these adolescent girls, about their upcoming play, which was, after all, only the latest rehash of an earlier adolescent girl’s play—a play that had overrun its course, in Mother Finney’s unasked-for opinion, and was best retired with all its misleading fabulations.

“Ah, child. I’ve become so very forgetful. She was a girl who died. And her parents commissioned the sculpture, which was never finished. And then Mother Ravenel, when she was only a girl herself, wrote the play. I’m afraid that is all I can tell you, dear.”

Chloe toed up a sagging white sock with the opposite loafer, trying not to show her disappointment. “Oh, well, we were just wondering.”

How Mother Wallingford would have loathed
The Red Nun
and all the wishful delusions that had gathered around the girl’s “legend,” thanks to a later girl’s play. And yet, it was Mother Wallingford herself who had given permission for that ton of marble to be unloaded right in front of Our Lady in the grotto. From the moment of delivery things had taken on a life of their own. Veronese red instead of the pale Carrara that had been ordered from Italy. Then the First War, the death of the funerary sculptor, followed by the death of both DuPree parents. “Rather an uncouth companion for our Della Robbia, isn’t she?” Mother Wallingford had soberly observed. “However, Mother Finney, let us stop and count our blessings.”