Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

Tildy had taught Maud to dive and, under the tutelage of her older sister, Madeline, the girls had begun their apprenticeship in flirting with older boys.
    And then suddenly last spring, Maud’s long-lost father, Mr. Norton, whom many of the girls had suspected of not even existing, invited his daughter to spend the summer in Palm Beach with him and his present wife, Anabel.
    “It’ll completely wreck our plans!” Tildy had screamed. “We were going to learn to water-ski. Madeline’s already arranged for Creighton’s motorboat on his day off.”
    “Oh, Tiddly, I really am sorry. But Granny and Mother say I ought to give it a chance. If they like me, they might offer to help with college. Apparently Anabel’s loaded.”
    “Don’t be silly, Maud. With your grades, you can get a scholarship to any college in the universe. You don’t need them. Can’t you postpone it? He’s postponed you long enough.”
    That’s when Maud had suddenly turned on her. “You don’t understand. He’s my father. I want to know him. And—and, I mean, maybe he had his own reasons for postponing me, which, by the way, is an extremely cruel way to put it, Tildy.”
    It was like having cold water thrown in her face. First the abrupt abandonment of the funny, cherished nickname “Tiddly,” invented by Maud, who was the only one Tildy allowed to call her that. And then being accused of cruelty. Cruelty! By her best friend since third grade.
    But there was worse to come, something Tildy could hardly bear to acknowledge as it rolled inexorably toward her like a dangerous wave. All these years Tildy had rested secure in the certainty that she was the most important person in Maud’s life. She had reveled in her role as patron and benefactor. In many ways Tildy had created the Maud who faced her now, a bold new hostility flaming in her cheeks.
    Extremely cruel!
    In third grade, before Tildy had taken pity on her and embarked on her Magnanimous Experiment, Maud Norton had been nothing: an uncertain newcomer, voice scarcely above a whisper, trailing shady rumors behind her. Her mother divorced (or so she claimed). Returned to town from somewhere in New Jersey to help the grandmother run the Pine Cone Lodge. Down on her luck? Ashamed? Abandoned? She said she was keeping her married name so it would “be the same as my daughter’s.” Maud’s mother had a stuck-up air about her, Lily Roberts who now called herself Lily Norton. She was always like that, Mama said, even back in high school, though she hadn’t gone to Mount St. Gabriel’s. Grandfather Roberts was violently anti-Catholic; he bragged that he had jumped off the back of a Mountain City streetcar when two nuns from Mount St. Gabriel’s boarded it. But now Grandfather Roberts was dead and the grandmother wanted Maud to have the advantages of a Mount St. Gabriel’s education, even if it did cost a hundred and fifty a year for a day student.
    But who was “Mr. Norton”? And, as first the months and then the years went by, why did he never show up to visit his daughter?
    “Do you think Maud even has a father?” Tildy had asked her mother after she and Maud had become best friends.
    “Everybody has a father, Tildy,” said Cornelia Stratton. “Whether he’s in the picture or not. What has Maud said?”
    “She doesn’t remember him very well. He sold college jewelry and traveled a lot. But I was thinking, if her father is out of the picture and, say, her mother died, our family could legally adopt her, couldn’t we?”
    “What would be the point of that, Tildy?”
    “Well, I just thought—”
    “Don’t you two see enough of each other as it is? And besides,” Tildy’s mother drily added, “Lily Norton hardly looks as if she’s wasting away. She’s frequently seen dining and dancing with the town’s most eligible bachelors at the Casa Loma Club. If anything, someone else might be adopting Maud before too long.”
    However, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and