Read Online Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin - Free Book Online Page A

third year. She had been at Mount St. Gabriel’s since seventh grade. Her oversized blouses, she explained, laughing, to Mother Malloy, were always tight by Thanksgiving break, and her father said it was a waste of money to buy two sizes of everything. “At Sain’ Gabriel, Mother, my clothes they begin beeg and then they grow small. Jus’ the opposite of me!”
    Marta looked, and was, more mature than her classmates. She had been held back in school in Havana, Mother Ravenel had told Mother Malloy, and during her year of shame at having to repeat a grade had formed an unsuitable attachment. Subsequently she had been sent off to Spain to spend a year with a great-aunt. “I am making an exception,” said Mother Ravenel, “by letting her room with Gilda Gomez, who is a good, cheerful girl and knows our ways. I am allowing them to speak Spanish when they are alone, though that’s generally against our rules. Marta is from a prominent Cuban family, and she has a baby sister who will be coming to us in a few years.”
    Four of the new day girls were graduates of St. Jerome’s, the parochial grammar school across the river. They would be bused the fifteen miles back and forth daily for the privilege of receiving a higher Catholic education. Even though one of them had a surname beginning with Y, Mother Ravenel had seen fit to bend the rule so they could arrive as a morning group, minus one mother, who worked as a court recorder. These girls and their mothers hung together, wary and faintly scornful of Mount St. Gabriel’s interview day with the parents. “Lora Jean could have come here just fine by herself, Mother Malloy. She’s the one who’s going to be at Mount St. Gabriel’s, not me.”
    Lora Jean Cramer. Kay Lee Jones. Mikell Lunsford. Dot Yount. Tonight, before Compline, go through the roll and match images to names. Lora Jean, no-nonsense and stocky, a junior edition of her mother. Kay Lee, green-eyed and fey, with a strawberry-shaped birthmark on her neck—Mrs. Jones was the absent court stenographer. Mikell, tall, straw-haired, and tomboyish: must take after her father, since Mrs. Lunsford was dark, tiny, and demure. Dot, sneezing apologetically into a wet handkerchief, was allergic to goldenrod, Mrs. Yount explained. Also, as though ticking off her daughter’s further accomplishments, to eggs, tuna fish, nuts, and chalk dust.
    Thus the four transfer girls from St. Jerome’s across the river. But try to fix them in your mind as individuals.
    A last-minute cancellation: Lidia Caballos, from Venezuela, had eloped with her cousin. “Her father is taking steps to have it annulled,” Mother Ravenel told Mother Malloy. “He’s furious about the non-refundable boarder’s deposit. He didn’t see why, if the annulment goes through, Lidia can’t come to Mount St. Gabriel’s next semester. I told him I was very sorry, but it would be setting the wrong tone with the other girls.”
    Mrs. Frew had driven all the way from Knoxville to enter her stately daughter, Elaine, as a boarder in the academy as Mrs. Frew herself, the former Francine Barfoot, had entered as a freshman boarder in the fall of 1930. “I was in Mother Ravenel’s class, back when she was our talented Suzanne and our class president. She chose me to compose and play the flute music for our freshman play, The Red Nun , which she wrote herself. My time at Mount St. Gabriel’s was so happy, Mother Malloy. Unfortunately, Daddy passed away and I had to drop out my junior year. It broke my heart. But here is my Elaine, to finish what I started.”
    Elaine Frew, an advanced musician, was to have piano lessons twice a week from a retired concert artist in town who handpicked his few students and charged a fortune.
    “Except for her flute, Francine Barfoot was rather undistinguished, but she tried hard at whatever she did and you could trust her to be loyal. Not enough is said about those girls who are content to lend bulk to the class pudding rather