Unfinished Desires (41 page)

“That’s enough!” said Madeline, snatching the can.

“Take it—it was sputtering out anyway. How did you know where I was?”

“Jiggsie said you were going to throw yourself off the tower.”

“That little imbecile. She asked where I was going and I said I had some business in the tower and she got all excited and asked me if I was going to throw myself off like Caroline tried to do and I said I just might. She is so stupid.”

“Tildy, Daddy and Henry are outside combing the grounds for you with flashlights. Mama and I have been looking in all the classrooms and bathrooms. We have all been
worried.”

“Well, I deserve some worry!” shrieked Tildy. “My night was ruined! My play was stolen from me! I damn this whole place to hell and everybody connected with it, including Chloe and Maud.”

Slow footsteps were heard on the metal stairs. A haggard Mother Malloy appeared. Leaning against the door frame to catch her breath, she asked Tildy, “Do you include me, too?”

Madeline was to isolate that scene and play it back to herself throughout her life. She would try to watch it as she had witnessed it that night, before she had known what was coming next. But in all her replayings, she could never completely block out the impurities of hindsight. Because after the experience itself, you always did know what was coming next.

Tildy made a mewing sound and stumbled forward. Mother Malloy met Tildy halfway and gathered the girl into her arms. “Come,” she said, “let’s sit down. Oh, dear, somebody’s been at work on these cushions. Let’s find one Satan hasn’t claimed yet.”

Then there was this—forgiving calm. The tower room seemed swathed in it, as though the three of them were wrapped in clouds. Madeline stood—but it almost seemed she floated somewhere above, just watching and hearing. Mother Malloy was teaching Tildy a poem. “It’s a poem I remembered while watching your play, Tildy. I love that poem. How could I have forgotten it? I’ll say a line, then you say it. You’ll learn it by ear, which you do so well. And then, perhaps, you’ll help me teach it to the class on Monday.”

The two sat side by side, Mother Malloy bowed slightly forward, hands clasped on her lap, and Tildy, now drained of her violence, leaning against the nun’s shoulder.

“‘I have desired to go—

“‘I have desired to go—

“‘Where springs not fail—

“‘Where springs not fail—

“‘To fields—where flies—no sharp and sided hail—’

“‘To fields—where flies—no sharp and—’” Tildy balked at the startling syntax.

“‘No sharp and sided hail—’” Mother Malloy led her through it.

“‘No sharp and sided hail—

“‘And a few lilies blow.

“‘And a few lilies blow.

“Go and find Mother Arbuckle,” Mother Malloy told Madeline. “Bring her here as quickly as possible. She’ll know what to do. Go quickly, dear.”

She wants the infirmarian to give Tildy something to calm her, thought Madeline, hurtling down the flights of stairs.

Mother Arbuckle was just leaving the reception with Dr. Galvin.

“Oh, Mother, come quickly! Mother Malloy needs you. She’s up in the tower with Tildy. She said—she said you’ll know what to do.”

Then the return: the brisk rustle of Mother Arbuckle’s skirts mounting the stairs, the doctor’s footsteps right behind; and her own gasping babble as she raced ahead, trying to fill them in about the play going wrong, Tildy running off in a rage, everybody searching—then a girl saying Tildy was going to throw herself off the tower, herself racing up flights of stairs, then Mother Malloy herself arriving in the tower room and miraculously calming Tildy—“but now I think Mother may want you to give her a sedative or something—the poor child’s had a bad night.”

And now the climbers—big sister, school infirmarian, nuns’ doctor, all three short of breath—have reached the tower room, and what do they find?

A nun and a young girl sitting close together on the curved window seat. Behind them the arched windows full of night. The nun is hunched forward, hands clasped. She could be deep in prayer, as Madeline had first assumed of her that afternoon in October when she had come upon Mother Malloy asleep in the grotto on the Red Nun’s lap.

“She’s been doing this a lot lately,” a shaky Tildy informs them. “She can fall asleep sitting up.” She adds, with a halfhearted laugh, “Especially when I’m around.”

“How long has she been asleep?” Mother Arbuckle asks, stepping forward.

Something in the infirmarian’s voice puts Tildy on the defensive. “I’m not sure. I haven’t—she just—I was afraid to move in case I woke her. We were going through the poem again so I can help her teach it on Monday, but then she just dropped off and wouldn’t answer me. The way she does.”

Now Dr. Galvin is in motion and Mother Arbuckle is removing Tildy from the window seat. Madeline sees her noticing the defaced cushions:
SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL; SATAN RAVENEL
.

“Take her down with you,” the nun says to Madeline. “And ask someone to find Reverend Mother and tell her she is needed here at once.”

CHAPTER 34
Sister Bridgets Heart

Thursday, October 18, 2001
Feast of St. Luke, evangelist
St. Scholastica Retirement House

MOTHER RAVENEL WAS
dreaming of her mother. In the dream it was the present time and place and her mother was just a voice in the dark room, but behind its familiar rhythms of scorn it pulsed with a new acceptance of her daughter. Together they had been puzzling things out, her mother speaking for both of them.

“Yes, there are a great many who dance in ecstasy at obliterating great numbers of us, but what is one to do? Put on the surgical mask and rubber gloves and open the mail if you dare, shut down the Senate and the House until the men in yellow can vacuum up the anthrax spores. If you ask me, it may all boil down to whether we outnumber the ones who want us dead. And whether we like it or not, the most evolved don’t necessarily win.”

In the dream she felt so proud. She looked forward to the cornflake breakfast after Mass, when she could report to the other nuns, “My mother came to visit me last night, and she made the most exquisite sense of what’s been happening in the world.”

“And here’s something else to think about,” the voice went on. Amazingly the eighty-five-year-old daughter and the mother dead for almost fifty years were friends at last, equals pooling their thoughts in the dark. “Consider this: all this rabid imagining going on, all over the world, on our side as well as theirs, of how to destroy your enemy most newsworthily. While, meantime, you old nuns are providing an excellent example for all of us by taking the less-newsworthy forms of destruction upon yourselves. There’s something to be said for good old-fashioned day-by-day, piece-by-piece dying.”

She woke with a sob of protest. She had wanted the conversation to go on: there was so much more she wanted from this voice with the new note of friendship she had never known in life.

AFTER MASS, FATHER
Gallagher asked Mother Ravenel to carry the host for him to the quarters of Sister Bridget, who was recovering from open-heart surgery.

“But you’re coming, aren’t you, Father?” She was alarmed that he might be asking her to administer the sacrament to the superior—his schedule was so tight.

“I am. But she sent word for me to bring you. She misses the community. She hoped you’d stay and read the appointed psalm with her after I’ve gone.”

Ten days ago, following breakfast, Sister Bridget had passed out in the half bathroom adjoining her office off the kitchen. Mother Galyon, or “Sister Frances,” whose current task it was to tidy the refrigerator, had heard the fall. Fortunately, the superior had left the bathroom door unbolted. Mother Ravenel, just finishing with her Waterpik upstairs, had heard the ambulance siren, which always shut off discreetly as it entered the grounds of the retirement house. “Mother Odom has suffered another stroke,” she had thought. “How many more can she survive?” Standing in the hallway, she awaited the footsteps of the medics. Mother Odom’s room was two doors down from hers. But no footsteps came. Voices converged in the kitchen. She was starting to feel her way downstairs to “go see” for herself when she heard the cumbrous ascent of Mother Odom’s home helper, Lanie, the one who referred to her as “the old blind nun.”

“Is Mother Odom all right?”

“I’m on my way to her now,” grumbled Lanie. “I can’t be two places at once. Sister Bridget’s heart stopped in the bathroom, but they’ve shocked her back to life and taken her off. Poor thing soiled herself all over the floor, and guess who had to clean it up?”

… she sent word for me to bring you
.

…

FATHER GALLAGHER PLACED
the wafer on the superior’s tongue.

“The body of Christ, Sister.”

“Amen.”

“Let us bless the Lord.”

“Thanks be to God.”

Then the two nuns were alone with each other.

“Thank you for coming, Sister Suzanne. Sit closer. I thought we might read the psalm together. Then you’ll want your breakfast.”

“No rush on my account, Sister. How do you feel?”

“I feel like Lazarus. I must look a fright. How much can you see of my face?”

“I can make out the heavy bruising around your eyes and neck.”

“I tipped forward on the toilet and hit the floor headfirst. So they tell me. I remember very little. There were so many procedures. They ran a tube from my groin into my heart and found I was ninety percent blocked. Then they sawed me open and replaced the valves. That is all a blank. There are days I can’t account for. They also installed a pacemaker, in case my heart gets lazy again. I’m feeling somewhat unsubstantial, Sister, but I’m told I might be around a while longer.”

“I’m very glad for that.” Realizing she meant it, Mother Ravenel found herself blinking back tears.

“How is your school memoir coming, Sister?”

“I’m still in the 1950s.”

“The school closed in 1990—so, let’s see, you have three more decades to go.”

“They will be gravy, Sister, if I can ever get out of the fifties.”

“So much happened?”

“Certain things—
culminated
in fifty-one and fifty-two. You might say they came home to roost. It was a distressing year for me as headmistress. I was sent away on a leave of absence at the end of the school term.”

“Will you tell about the distressing year in the memoir?”

“It’s not the kind of thing that belongs in a school history. The girls responsible were expelled immediately, and some other students didn’t come back the following year. When I get to their class year in the memoir—the class of fifty-five—those girls have been long gone. But they’re stuck there in my memory like a kind of roadblock. There was a mother involved, too: a classmate of mine. The intent was to embarrass me by inserting material in a class play. The tragic part that came out of it was the death of a young nun. She had an undiagnosed heart ailment from childhood, it turned out, but I hold myself responsible to a large degree. If I hadn’t overreacted that night to something the mother and daughter had planted in the play—a hidden message that they still held me accountable—that young nun might have lived longer, or perhaps still be alive. I think this is what keeps me from dictating the fifties with the same ease I’ve managed with the other chapters.”

“You’ve spoken to a priest?”

“Decades of priests. They either told me I was too hard on myself or that it was an insult to God’s mercy to keep harping on something He’d already forgiven me for. The one I was fondest of told me I was ‘scraping the cauldron’ of that year for more ‘evil snacks’ and to get back to work and see where I fit into God’s design rather than where He fit into mine—”

Sister Bridget started to laugh, then grimaced in pain.

“I confided in Mother Galyon on one of our recent walks and she suggested I make a confessional cassette—just the parts that haunt me—then ask God’s blessing, send it off to someone I trust, and let it go.”

“And did you?”

“I dictated a large part of it. It was to a student in that class of fifty-five. We’ve remained friends; she’s the one who’s transcribing the memoir. But after September eleventh, I felt it would be all out of proportion. Beatrix might wonder how I can keep harping on these old wounds when so much worse is happening. I know this is prideful of me, but I just couldn’t face losing her admiration and respect. At this stage of my life, Sister Bridget, someone’s admiration is a precious commodity.”

“Well—Mother Ravenel—we haven’t been the best of friends, you and I, and part of the fault has been
my
pride. But, as your sister in Christ, I offer myself as a replacement for Beatrix. I have some time on my hands, as you can see. Why don’t we say the psalm together now, and you can think it over.

“‘O God, You are my God, for You I long; for You my soul is thirsting …’”

Not until she was eating her cornflakes with the other nuns did it register: for the first time, Sister Bridget, that stickler for the leveling nomenclature of post Vatican II, had respectfully addressed her in the old style, as “Mother Ravenel.”

Confessional Cassette Rerouted

Thursday night, October 18, 2001
Mother Ravenel’s room
St. Scholastica Retirement House

Dear Bridget, sister in Christ, superior of the Order of St. Scholastica,

I’m beginning a new cassette because the other might not have enough room left on it. The initial plan was to limit myself to the front and back of one cassette. But I didn’t want to risk running out of space in the middle of thanking God for His wonderful patience with me—and thanking you for yours.

If you are listening to this now, you will have finished both sides of the other cassette. I was sorely tempted to listen to it all again and try to predict your reactions before taking you up on your offer to be a “replacement” for Beatrix. But I decided to risk it and just plunge in and take advantage of the momentum your offer has generated in me.

I remember all too well where I last broke off dictating this confessional tape. How can anyone forget what they were doing on that terrible day at a little past nine in the morning?

I was telling about my envy of Antonia. And how, when Antonia began to have doubts our senior year, I had the idea of entering early to subdue my envy. Because as a postulant I would be ineligible to be Queen of the School. Well, I did enter early, and she
was
voted queen, but she turned it down, and after that the school discontinued the practice, which I think was wise. Too many feelings get hurt when only one is chosen as the best. Her family’s story was that I “jumped the gun” and broke her heart and spoiled her vocation, which wasn’t true. I knew she was having doubts, but I believe she kept postponing telling me because she knew how disappointed I would be. But she would say oblique things, and I picked up on them. I do think she was hurt by my entering early and not confiding in her, but she certainly wasn’t heartbroken. If anyone’s heart was wounded, it was mine. I had hoped to spend my life serving God with Antonia. She later married a very fine man, a prominent young architect and a good Catholic. Unfortunately, she was killed in a traffic accident on their wedding trip, and this reactivated her sister Cornelia’s bitterness toward me. At the reception after the wretched play, which you heard about in the last cassette, Cornelia accused me not only of being an indirect cause of Antonia’s death, but of “feeding on Antonia’s early vocation like a tapeworm” until I was swollen with it and she was completely emptied out. As she was saying this to me, in a low voice with a social smile on her face in the middle of a crowded room, I remember thinking, This is the lowest point of this deplorable night, and I will somehow get through it.

But there was worse to come.

Cornelia’s daughter Tildy had gone off in a rage because I had intervened onstage and changed the course of the play. Things were getting very, very bad up there and I didn’t know how much worse they might get, and then I saw Cornelia watching me out of the corner of her eye and I knew I had been set up. So I acted quickly, and most people agreed later that when I went up onstage it seemed a natural part of the play. What Tildy and her friend Maud had been doing, you see, was acting out a scene supposed to represent Antonia and me, only they called themselves “Domenica” and “Rexanne.” They were acting out an occasion when Antonia is telling me that it would be wrong to go on with our plans to become nuns together—an occasion that never happened, by the way. But they had an old exam booklet of Antonia’s, and Maud as Antonia/Domenica was reading words addressed to me. In the fall of her senior year Antonia had apparently drafted a letter to me in the back of an old exam booklet, a letter she never sent, but the family had kept the booklet all these years, and now they were springing it on me during a school play—a play I had written at Tildy’s age and had given Tildy the privilege of directing. I had also permitted Tildy to make changes to it—that was part of the play’s tradition. And in all fairness, there were some good added scenes and innovations. But the Domenica and Rexanne scene, which, fortunately, came at the tail end of the play, was aimed at me, and when I heard a certain “signal word” I had to act fast in case it got worse. And even while Cornelia was saying those unconscionable things to me at the reception, I believed I had controlled the damage.

The next thing was, Jiggsie returned to the reception and told her grandmother that Tildy was on her way to throw herself off the tower. Now, Jiggsie’s grandmother was at that time talking to Tildy’s older sister, Madeline, and Mother Malloy, Tildy’s ninth-grade teacher. Madeline started running for the tower, and Mother Malloy was to follow her.

It has always seemed strange to me that I should have been one of the last to know what was happening in the tower. I was still downstairs saying goodbye to parents, making sure every waiter had received his pay envelope; then I stopped by the kitchen to thank Betty, our cook, and Mother Finney, who was helping put things away. I was headed for the chapel to thank God for helping me survive the evening when a girl came running after me to say something terrible had happened.