Unfinished Desires (42 page)

When Mother Arbuckle returned with Madeline to the tower, Dr. Galvin, the nuns’ doctor, was with them. Mother Arbuckle later told me that when the three of them entered the tower room, they saw Tildy and Mother Malloy sitting side by side, the nun bent forward with her hands clasped. Tildy told them Mother Malloy often fell asleep sitting up during their tutoring sessions. Mother Arbuckle saw at once that something was not right and sent Madeline off with Tildy and told her to summon Reverend Mother.

They laid Mother Malloy on the floor and worked over her for about fifteen minutes, the infirmarian’s mouth on hers, the doctor pumping her chest. But to no avail.

Dr. Galvin signed the death certificate, and Reverend Mother and I stayed with her in the tower until the ambulance men took her away.

This is as far as I can get tonight, Sister Bridget.

Later, I want to tell you a little about my year of exile, which the Order called my “leave of absence” during 1952 to ‘53, when I was officially caring for my dying mother in Charleston.

Early this morning, I dreamed of my mother in a new way. In the dream we seemed to have begun a new relationship. For the first time, I look forward to discovering parts of her aside from those that failed my needs.

Predawn, Friday
October 19, 2001

I have not slept well, Sister Bridget. I woke from a peculiar dream in which a woman living in our retirement house—she seemed to be a nun from some other order—was explaining to me, “You have to learn to praise God when he is behaving badly.”

…

So I decided to get up and dress and go on with this.

The year in Charleston with my dying mother (emphysema; she was also slipping into senility by the summer of 1952, though she had more than enough moments of scathing lucidity that year). She was seventy-four when she died, which seemed quite old to me then. I have now outlived her by more than a decade.

I was thirty-six that summer. I had been a nun for eighteen years, headmistress of an academy for seven years, and yet when I walked through the front door of my mother’s house for the first time since I’d left it at the age of twelve, I could feel myself shrink back into the despised daughter, accompanied by all the old epithets: “sneaky, sanctimonious, self-advancing” Suzanne, “Old Frump, Old Stubby, Old Stumpy.”

It was the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, which fell on a Friday that year. It was also Friday the thirteenth.

I seem to keep backing away from entering that front door. I will try another approach.

The frugality of my brothers. Euphemism for the stinginess of my brothers. As I said on the earlier cassette, they repaid everything my father “borrowed” from the accounts he’d held in trust before Black Friday. They worked very hard at the law firm and won back people’s respect. But somewhere along the way they developed an obsession with making more and more money and spending less and less. It became a game with them: try to double the amount we made last year and spend half the amount we spent last year. My older brother had married a woman with money, and what she had didn’t “count” in the game. My other brother lived at home with his mother and his mistress, who, conveniently, was a practical nurse, until his forty-ninth year, when he had his fatal coronary. That was in May 1952: another fateful conjunction whose timing couldn’t have been worse—for me. My older brother thought of a way he might save on three months of summer home care for his mother. His late brother’s mistress refused to stay on for the measly fee he offered. His sister was in a teaching order, and everyone knows teaching nuns don’t teach in the summer. So he phoned Reverend Mother and asked if I might be spared for the summer to stay with my dying mother, who had asked for me. And Reverend Mother called me in and said she would give permission for me to have a leave of absence, which might be extended to a year. She said the recent happenings had surely been an ordeal for me and this appeal from my brother could be a blessing and a healing for all. We both knew all that was being left unsaid. After the night of the play and the death of Mother Malloy, and the bishop’s subsequent visit and homily on “misguided creations,” followed by the reconsecration of the tower room and the Red Nun, there were unfavorable murmurings both within the school and in the community of Mountain City. I had expelled two girls, and several more in that class were not to return, though we didn’t know it then. Might it not be prudent to seclude the “high-profile” headmistress, who had somehow been “implicated,” until the dust had time to settle?

And so, on Friday the thirteenth of June, in the year of Our Lord 1952, I arrived after a ten-hour bus ride (my brother would not spring for the costlier train) at my mother’s house. He had a case in court that day and sent his secretary to meet me and drive me to the East Battery, where she waited in the car until the door opened, then drove away.

Just go in. You’ve got to go in sometime.

She answered the door herself, wheeling an oxygen tank. She was recognizable as the woman I had last seen at age twelve, only not as erect and wearing a kind of housedress she would formerly have mocked. She looked me up and down, then began laughing in a mirthless
chuff-chuff way
, until she was gasping for breath and had to put on her oxygen mask. She indicated to me that she could no longer climb stairs and pointed me up to my old room. As I was ascending the staircase with my bags, she whispered hoarsely after me, “And change out of that costume, Stubby, unless you want to kill me with laughing.”

This is all I can do, now. Thank God the jets are back in the skies. Such a sweet dawn roar as light begins to filter through the blind nun’s eyes.

Friday, after morning prayer
October 19, 2001

No priest today; no Mass. There were only the four of us in chapel: Mother Galyon, Sister Paula and Sister Marian from our Order’s now defunct Boston Academy, and myself. Mother Galyon conducted morning prayer and read from the Common of Several Martyrs, since today is the feast of the eight Jesuits tortured and killed by the Huron and Iroquois tribes in North America between 1642 and 1649. We also said the Prayer for Holy Women, and for the first time I was much struck by these words: “Father, in our weakness Your power reaches perfection.”

How does that work, I wonder? I will meditate on it when I’m riding to and from my appointment with the gastroenterologist. But the van doesn’t come until ten, so I’ll go on with the year with my mother.

There were the two of us, rattling around in an eighteenth-century three-story house on the East Battery. All of the good furniture and carpets had been sold by my brothers, and there were lots of bare floors and echoes. I made simple meals—canned soup, sandwiches, creamed chipped beef on toast. She ate almost nothing. I wore my “costume” when I went to Mass at St. Mary’s on Hasell Street and for my walks around the Battery, but inside the house I left off the veil and wore my late brother’s casual clothes. As my hair was clipped very short, I was often mistaken for a man by delivery people. When it started to grow out, I cut it ruthlessly with nail scissors. The first time I did this, I cried. I missed Mother Finney’s “Clip ‘n’ Shave Parlor,” and I missed my community. Mother Finney was to write to me faithfully during my “exile,” until she died of pneumonia in the late winter of 1953. Reverend Mother had told me to say the Office at the usual time whenever possible and while I was doing so to remember that all my sisters in the Order were praying with me.

But this grew increasingly hard to do.

I did find myself thinking about Antonia more than I had allowed myself to do in years. It was probably natural, given the scene in the recent play that I’d interrupted when Tildy (Rexanne/Suzanne) began to read from the exam book in which Antonia really had written a note to me, breaking off our plans to enter together—a note that Antonia must have thought better of sending.

After I had sent the rest of the cast off to the reception, I confronted Tildy and her coconspirator Maud about the meaning of their scene and I confiscated the exam book, over Tildy’s protests that it belonged to her family. Well, the family had done their worst with it; I had already made up my mind about that. What would keep Cornelia from circulating it to do more damage, which could hurt the school?

Before I appeared at the reception I went up to the nuns’ bathroom on the third floor and disposed of that booklet in very, very tiny pieces. The toilets up there were still of the old-fashioned chain variety with the cistern above, and I pulled the chain five times, just to be safe. Those old toilets provided a much more powerful flush than the modern ones, and I remember thinking, as I waited for the cistern to fill up again each time, that maybe we should have kept the old toilets in the boarders’ bathrooms; the new ones were frequently clogged. All modern “improvements” are not necessarily improvements.

And then I went down to the reception and Cornelia lit into me about being a tapeworm and the indirect cause of Antonia’s death—and then followed the tragedy in the tower—and the funeral and the rest of the fallout, which included Reverend Mother’s granting my “leave of absence.” With all this going on, there hadn’t been time until I was in Charleston for me to absorb this new knowledge about Antonia: that she had written me a note, pinpointing the cause of our rupture—what I had done was to kiss her at her sister’s engagement party out at the Swag (that was the name of Cornelia’s fiancé’s hunting cabin). And “Swag” was the key word in Antonia’s note, and when I heard Tildy saying “Swag,” up there on the stage, I realized I had to act fast. Who knew what would come next in the note?

Alone with my mother on that long year of leave, there was plenty of time to think about Antonia, and to ask myself hard questions, such as: Would I have had a vocation if I hadn’t been looking for a way to stay with her? And if the answer to that was no, what kind of vocation could I claim to have now? Was a tarnished vocation still a vocation?

On the evening of my arrival in Charleston, my brother stopped by the house to greet me. He also appeared amused by my “costume.” He asked if there was anything I needed. I wanted to say, “A hug from you after all these years would be a start,” but didn’t. He had changed; there was no play in him anymore. He had put on weight, and his cheeks puffed out in an angry, impacted way. He was not the boy who had foot-raced with me along the beach, or even the boy who lured me up into the tree house, then jumped down and took away the ladder and laughed. This person seemed impatient of anything that might divert him from his grim objectives. He was very put out when I explained that I had never learned to drive. It was as if I had accepted a job under false pretenses. This meant he would keep having to pay for things delivered to the house and have his secretary take our mother to the doctor.

During his visit, our mother stayed in her room. I asked didn’t he want to see her and he said he’d had a long day in court and was in no mood to be verbally abused. He instructed me to watch her carefully and said that when the time came when I felt she’d be better off in an institution, to let him know; he’d already found a place. “I just thought you two might like to have a little time together first,” he said. He made it sound like a great benevolence on his part. As he was leaving, I made up my mind to confront him: “Did she really ask for me, Buddy?” “Well, when I put it to her that you might be available, she didn’t say no” was his reply.

She liked to take her meals on a tray in her bedroom and have me keep her company. I would sit in a chair facing hers and she would fork the edges of her food, as though toying with excrement, and take tiny slurps from her teacup, and in between, without raising her eyes or her voice, drop her emotional bombs. Cornelia Tilden Stratton could have learned a lot from my mother.

I am not going to dump these emotional bombs into your lap, because they belong to the class of unsavory things you wish afterward you’d never heard. Once they are in you, they’re liable to take root, against your will. I suspect that many of her bombs would qualify for that carefully shrouded “sin against the Holy Ghost,” which, as far as I’ve been able to make out from my spiritual directors, has to do with causing a person to despise his God-given human state or despising it in yourself. One of her pet themes was the disgustingness of certain basic human activities.

However, bearing on the subject of “taking root in you against your will,” there is one I will tell about because it explained something. It was not one of the more unsavory ones, though it may have been the most painful to me.

Eyes cast down, my mother asked me over lunch one day, “Have you ever known a man, Stubby?”

I said I had not. “Remember, I entered the postulancy when I was only sixteen.” Though why should she remember? Not one word had come from my family in response to the invitation.

“Oh, plenty of girls have tipped over by then,” she said, uttering the chuff-chuffing emphysemic laugh I was to hear so often that year. “I myself had tipped over … years and years before I met your father.”

Then a bit of messing about with her fork, after which she decided not to bring it to her lips.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “you haven’t missed a thing.

“But I wanted children,” she went on. “Or thought I did. He got two sons out of me, and I thought that was the end of that. The boys were in their teens and I was home free. Then, guess what?”

As she took a tiny slurp of tea, her eyes couldn’t resist checking the effect this was having on me. I felt like a small animal paralyzed by the gaze of a snake.

“When I realized it wasn’t early menopause, I did what I had done the first time, when I was off at boarding school. I got into a very hot bath and forced down a fifth of gin, then jumped off a table ten times. Only this time it didn’t work. You hung in there like a tick. I tried it again a few days later and this time ended up spraining my ankle. My last try was to hobble to the house of a Negro woman who was well-known for giving ‘deep abdominal massages’ to white women who didn’t want any more children. But after she started, she told me I was too far along and gave me back the money and sent me home. You had stapled yourself to my womb by then.”