Unfinished Desires (40 page)

“No,” said Cornelia, “I want you to come with me to the reception. Tildy may show up there to watch this ‘postlude’ that’s being tacked onto her play. I certainly would, in her place. What has she got to lose now?”

“What do you mean, Mama?”

“It doesn’t take a sleuth, Maddy, to see the writing on the wall. Tildy’s career at this place is finished. Maud’s, too, from the sound of it.”

“Let’s just
find
Tildy first,” her father suggested, digging in his pocket for car keys.

“I’ll come with you, Bernard,” said Henry Vick. “I’ll get my flashlight, too.”

It was a rare occasion, thought Madeline, as the two men set off for the parking lot, when someone called Daddy by his Christian name rather than the nickname Mama had awarded him as an engagement present. Her heart went out to her uncle, who always seemed to know the right thing to do.

BECAUSE OF HER
increasing deafness, Mother Finney avoided school receptions, except for the Feast of Our Lady and graduation, preferring to help Betty replenish the serving trays in the kitchen or get a head start on the washing up, but tonight the old nun moved resolutely through the main parlor, nodding and shaking hands with parents and old students, accepting their congratulations on Chloe Starnes’s fond depiction of her. Chloe was why she had offered herself to this din, where all sounds, from the clatter of a fork to a loud laugh, were rendered equal in volume by her undiscerning new hearing aid. She wanted to thank Agnes’s daughter, and to give her a hug, for taking the trouble to consult
Adventures with Our Foundress
, and for restoring some of Mother Wallingford’s bold spirit to the play—particularly how Lizzie would tease, or even torment, you to ward off your pity. These girls, God bless them, had banished melodrama from the mortifying deathbed scene, and how delighted she was to have stayed alive long enough to see it gone!

ACTING ON A
hunch of Henry’s, Smoky Stratton and Henry Vick had gone to the grotto, where their two flashlights now played on the spray-painted Red Nun.

“Kilroy was here, all right,” said Tildy’s father.

“And ‘Satan’ correctly spelled this time,” Henry wryly noted.

“Good work, Henry. We’re on the trail. Where to next?”

“Chloe might know something. Let’s go find her at the reception.”

“You go, Henry. I’ll stay out here and look a few more places. I’ve about had it with Mount St. Gabriel’s. A good local Catholic education is one thing, but there’s just too much bad history between Cornelia and her old nemesis. Tildy’s benefited a lot from Mother Malloy this year, but next year she’ll be better off with Madeline over at Mountain City High.”

HAVING SCOUTED FOR
Tildy in the academy’s upstairs classrooms and bathrooms, Cornelia hastened them along the trophy corridor to the reception. She was glittery-eyed and overstimulated—dangerously so, Madeline felt. You could all but see the sparks of malice shooting ahead of her.

“Let’s mingle, until I decide what to do,” Cornelia instructed Madeline when they reached the main parlor. “There’s the archfiend herself being fawned on by Francine Frew. Keep a sharp eye out for Tildy—I think she’ll show up, one way or another.” She gave a malign chuckle.

“What
, Mama?”

“
‘Satin
Ravenel.’ I’m afraid I was just fantasizing how Tildy might suddenly creep up behind the headmistress and spray it on her back, right in front of everybody. Spelled properly this time, thanks to our erudite Maud. There’s Rebecca’s mother; I might as well start with her. She might know something I don’t.”

The last time Madeline had been in the main parlor was on registration day, back in September, when Cornelia was too busy to accompany Tildy. That day Tildy had been shooting sparks herself, after the unhappy confrontation with Maud, who had just returned with “airs” from Palm Beach. Tildy had blazed up at Madeline in the little side room off the main parlor where the new ninth-grade teacher was holding her interviews, and Madeline, seeing that her little sister was about to lose control, had sent her off in search of Henry and Chloe. She’d stayed behind to talk with the beautiful nun from Boston and explain a few things about the bitcheries at Mount St. Gabriel’s, but most of all to put in a few words about Tildy’s intrepid but fragile young soul.

Now she spotted Mother Malloy speaking to the Dutch parents over by the Infant of Prague, still in his Easter robes. Madeline waited until they were finished and then stepped forward, rewarded to see the nun’s weary countenance brighten.

“Oh, Madeline, how glad I am to see you.”

“Oh, Mother, I was just remembering how we met in these rooms last fall, when I brought Tildy to registration.”

“And you know what I enjoy remembering? That day in the grotto when you told me about that girl’s poem that sent you into hysterics and got you in so much trouble—the one about Elizabeth Wallingford’s ‘pulchritudinous hair’—I don’t think I have laughed so hard since. Madeline, what did you make of tonight’s play?”

“It was going great, then something went very wrong at the end.”

“I thought so, too. Have you seen Tildy?”

“Daddy and Uncle Henry are looking for her outside. She ran off in a rage, Maud said. And Mother Ravenel sent Maud to the dormitory. She has ‘excused’ both of them from the reception.”

“That seems hard.”

“Yes, well, she was really offended by that last scene with the two girls on the bench.”

“I couldn’t understand where that was headed. And when Mother Ravenel went up onstage, I was completely at sea.”

“She thought they were mocking her in that scene. That Domenica was based on my aunt Antonia and that Rexanne was based on herself, Suzanne, back when they were going to enter the Order together.”

“Was
it based on them, Madeline?”

“From what I’ve been able to gather, it was, Mother. It was supposed to be just a hidden message, addressed to Mother Ravenel alone, but she ran up onstage and stopped it before it could be finished—I mean, accounted for in a symbolic way. Now she’s arranged for some kind of ‘postlude’ during the reception so people won’t go home in confusion.”

“Ah, confusion,” repeated Mother Malloy, the brightness having drained from her countenance. “But where do you think Tildy is?”

“
EVERYONE! MAY I
please have your attention? Thank you. Friends, we have a surprise for you. There is going to be a postlude, a very short one, to the play you have just seen. Some of you may have been puzzled by the ending. I see you nodding. You thought you were missing something, yes? Well, you were. After the School Spirit’s farewell song, there was supposed to be a brief but important coda by the Narrator in which she explained how each scene represented a major thread in the school’s history. But this coda got left out. Yes, it got left out. Tonight’s production
of The Red Nun
contained some ambitious new experiments, and some of them turned out well, while others did not. But we are not going to send you home baffled. As I said earlier, we are all works in progress, and this play, first performed by the freshman class in 1931, continues to be a work in progress, too. And now I’m going to turn this over to the present ninth grade. Just stand back and make a space for them.”

Rebecca Meyer stepped forward and began to read from a paper in her meticulous, rather detached voice:

“Tonight we have traveled far back in time to tell you how we came to be. We have overheard God planning our school even before its mountains were in place. We have seen the mist rising in its dark woods and heard the owl shriek while the hawk sleeps. On its paths we have met ghosts who sang to us because we knew the right questions to ask: what did you love most and what have you left undone?”

Scanning the reception crowd, Henry Vick failed to locate his niece. He thought it probable that Chloe was off somewhere with Tildy, helping her lick her wounds. That’s what friends were for. The two of them had worked so passionately on this wretched play. Hours and hours at his house. He had spent hours on it himself. Suddenly he saw its ridiculous and depressing side: a school play, written by his sister’s ambitious classmate back in the thirties. His late wife, Antonia, had played the foundress, wearing her cloak, the same old English cloak Maud Norton wore tonight. His late sister had played Mother Finney, wearing the same old Irish riding boots Chloe had worn tonight. Why were they all still in harness on this moribund merry-go-round?

Preferring the darkness, he went outside again and leaned against a spindle corner post on the west porch. In night-lit Mountain City below, he could pick out many of his father’s buildings. Earlier this month had been the groundbreaking for his own library—the hated columns to be tacked on so people could keep living in their fantasies of what the past was like.

Chloe might be better off over at Mountain City High with the Stratton girls. He could tell that Bernard’s “I’ve about had it,” meant business. Once, earlier in the school year, Chloe had said that if Tildy ever got kicked out of Mount St. Gabriel’s for bad grades, she would feel like a ghost wandering its halls.

Had the living Vicks as well as the living Strattons “about had it” with its halls and Victorian spindle posts and Gothic Revival windows and the company of its ghosts?

Mother Ravenel’s insistent little handbell pierced his meditations. Not wanting to leave the darkness of the porch, he moved closer to a window and watched through the glass. She was in her element, she who had played the comic Lord Babberly in
Charley’s Aunt;
now she was playing the Headmistress in Cheerful Control. She was interpreting their evening for them, tying up any loose ends so everyone could go home assured that the fortress safeguarding their daughters was as intact as ever.

She then turned the proceedings over to unflappable little Becky Meyer, who read from a script that was apparently a review of the play’s scenes. Then each girl stepped forward and took her bow, and of course there was Chloe, as she had been all along. He hadn’t been able to find her because he had forgotten she was still dressed up as Mother Finney.

He went in to claim her. Running to him, she stumbled over the skirts of the habit.”Where have you been, Uncle Henry? Tildy and Maud did something awful, but nobody will say what. And she wouldn’t even speak to me at intermission.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Tildy. She hated my Red Nun. I thought she’d be so pleased.”

Now was not the time to tell Chloe about her vandalized prop.

“Do you know where Tildy is now?”

“She’s probably up with Maud in the dormitory. They’ll go back to being best friends. It’s so unfair. I read that play over to her at least a hundred times while she lay on her sofa bed with her eyes closed. I took dictation whenever she had an idea and typed it up. And she kept that scene with Maud a secret from me! And now she hates me because of the prop. But Mother Finney hugged me and told me I had made her happy and that Agnes would be so pleased.”

Henry found himself echoing Bernard Stratton in the parking lot. “In that case, what do we want to do now?”

“I want to put on my own clothes and go home.”

“Then let’s go,” said Henry.

AFTER THE POSTLUDE
and curtain calls in the main parlor, Mrs. Nita Judd presented Elaine Frew with a little token of her appreciation (a silver grand piano to go on her charm bracelet) for being so good to Jiggsie, but now she was uncertain what to do about her present for Tildy (a gift card announcing a year’s subscription to
Seventeen
magazine), who was not at the reception. Jiggsie told her grandmother that both Tildy and Maud were in big trouble having something to do with the last scene in the play, which nobody knew about. “That’s Tildy’s mother over there with Mother Ravenel,” Jiggsie said. “Maybe you could just leave the envelope with her. These stupid boots I borrowed are pinching my feet. I’m going up to the dorm to change into my Capezios.”

“Well, come right back, sweetie, so we can say our good-byes. Poor Bob’s waiting out in the car to drive us back to Spartanburg.”

But when Nita Judd approached the woman Jiggsie had pointed out as Tildy’s mother, she saw that she was locked in some kind of grim exchange with the headmistress. She went instead to pay her respects to Jiggsie’s ninth-grade teacher, poor Mother Malloy, who was speaking with a very pretty girl. Malloy looked completely done in. Nuns punched no time clocks, drew no salaries, and belonged to no unions, but were expected to work till they dropped.

Mother Malloy had hardly finished introducing Mrs. Judd to Tildy’s big sister, Madeline, when Jiggsie was back again, still in the borrowed boots that pinched. In her usual fey manner, she announced to no one in particular, “I just saw Tildy on her way to the tower. She’s planning to throw herself off—like that Caroline person tried to do.”

MADELINE WAS ALREADY
running down corridors and up stairs. It was as though she and Mother Malloy had been suddenly able to read each other’s minds. Malloy would keep the others off and do whatever else was necessary while Madeline got a head start. Thank God she knew her way around this old pile! At the third-floor landing, the wood stopped and the linoleum started. At this level, there were only nuns; nobody needed the extra touches. Her running feet slapped along linoleum corridors, and up another flight, and then pinged up the circular iron staircase to the tower room. She was panting as she flung open the heavy door. She cursed like a sailor as she felt along the walls for a switch. She had never been up here at night.

A familiar titter came out of the darkness. “Naughty, naughty. You sound as bad as me.”

She found the switch. “Tildy! What are you doing?”

“I was trying to write in the dark because I couldn’t find the goddamned light. But your eyes get accustomed pretty fast.”

Three of the blue velvet window-seat cushions had been sprayed in jerky white letters.
SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL
. Tildy, still in costume as “Rexanne,” was aiming the can at a fourth cushion.