Worn Masks (2 page)

The Portal

Chapter 3

MARY GRACE HAD left many times in her mind before she physically
left the Maschere home. It started when she learned the exact steps, counted
out, from her Castro-convertible bed in the living room, through the kitchen,
down the hall, and into the bathroom. Mary Grace was ten years old, a small and
timid child. This room would become a portal for her, with its clear angles and
corners, the precise and simple one-inch white-and-black floor tile surrounded
by four-inch tile rounding the old tub, and the door to the attic. There was a
sense of quiet and order that comforted her in the room, and always the
possibilities of leaving the room through another door and to the unknown
attic.

Out of the bathroom life seemed like a blur and she often felt
unable to manage the two languages of home and school. At home the choppy
sounding Italian her parents spoke, and at school the English rules of grammar.
In the bathroom she sat on the corner of the tub facing the closed door; the
entrance had a lock on it, a slide bolt that she was forbidden to lock. Mary
Grace’s mother had told her that her grandfather, Papa, had locked the door and
then had become ill. Her father had to get to him by going out through the
bedroom window and then in through the bathroom window. “
Grazie a Dio
.
The window wasn’t locked, too!”   

To the left of the bathroom door was another door leading to the
attic, set higher, shorter and resting on a step. Mary Grace sat on this step
and watched her father shave, puffing out his cheeks and brushing on the
shaving cream. With one pass of the straight razor he
cleared the cream and whiskers. She’d lean again the at
tic door
and imagine disappearing behind the door. She loved these times when she could
sit and watch him in this safe space. Her father let her be there and acted
like she wasn’t there, talking to his face in the mirror, “lots of chin hair
today.” All the confusion of the household dissipated in this room. There was
clarity between Mary Grace and her father, a brightness that broke through the
dark and dreary feeling in the rest of the house, here in the bathroom when he
smiled at her with his face coated in white cream.

On the other side of the bathroom, tucked to the right of the
toilet, was the largest steam bled radiator in the house, where clothes were
often spread to dry. The window, on the same wall as the radiator, had two
large etched-glass plates full of tiny chrysanthemums. She had seen these
flowers on all the windows cold with moisture from the lack of heat in the
house. Only the bathroom’s chrysanthemums remained all year round. The others
disappeared into tears and then were gone by spring. She ran her fingers down
the texture of the raised glass, the protection of the invisible world of the
bathroom.

For as long as she could remember, even though she knew she was
supposed to leave Uncle Paul alone, she had been determined to get up into the
attic where her
Uncle Paul lived. She
imagined it would be like a dif
ferent land where she and Uncle Paul
could talk without the others yelling over them. She wondered what it was like
to have a room of your own, and if Uncle Paul had special things in his room?
If from his window that was above hers, and that she saw from the yard, if he
could he see above the apartment building that backed up against the edge of
their backyard? Could he see the moon?

Mary Grace knew her Uncle Paul, like her, used the bathroom,
washed in the sink, and had been protected by the same privacy of etched
chrysanthemums. Yet, there was never a towel left, never shaving cream in the
sink, no evidence that he lived here, too.

She flushed the toilet or ran water at the
sink to cre
ate a sound barrier to her mother’s owl ears, and yes,
she locked the bathroom door and then opened the at
tic
door. Her mother was sleeping, and everyone else out of the house the first
time she locked the bathroom door, and turned the knob of the attic door, and
slid
her hand in and up along the wall,
flicking on the at
tic light, before opening the door the width of it.
She became proficient at closing and locking the bathroom door so quickly it
was one continuous sound. She did this with care so it wouldn’t bang against
the towel rack. Mary Grace walked the curved and narrow steps that led up to
the attic and turned and sat on the landing. She had arrived in the place she
was forbidden to go.

Behind her, to the right, next to an old trunk, was a door with a
rosary and a scapula hanging from a thumbtack in the center panel. The handle
was a latch, not a knob. She tried it a few times, lifting and quickly putting
it back into place without opening the door. It was a small door, even smaller
than the attic door.

Bare light bulbs hanging from the rafters acted as a path from the
top of the staircase to the door of Uncle Paul’s room, revealing small circles
of light onto the dry creaky wood boards underfoot.

She was interested in what was behind that door. What was there,
and not there? Who was her Uncle Paul, her father’s brother? He was known by
the distinction of “black sheep” and she learned early that his story
was not open for questions. He was a mystery, com
ing
and going, not always sleeping home, but where did he go? He had a sweet yet
pungent smell about him when he was close. His hands were like her dad’s,
large, dry and rough, yet touched her like a whisper. Sometimes he would be
gone for weeks at a time, and then he
would
always bring her back some trinket, a fancy plas
tic ornament, tucked
into her hand, a horse pulling a cart, a tiny sock with funny Italian coins
jingling inside, crocheted with red and green threads, gently placed into her
hand.

On Mary Grace’s very first visit to the room,
re
leasing
the latch and gently pushing open the door, she tugged on the string and the
bare light bulb in the middle of the ceiling barely illuminated the small room,
but further out from the light in the shadows she could feel Uncle Paul
inhabiting the space; see him looking intently at the painting in front of the
bed, the one that he faced each night. It was a sad room, almost bare but for
the painting. She knew he would have been wishing he were there in that high
field with an old stone church and tall spiraling cypress trees. A shiver ran
through her, but not because she was afraid, but because she too wanted to be
in that field looking at the beautiful church and odd trees. She could feel
safe with Uncle Paul in this room. Was this where he felt safe? Mary Grace
would look at the painting each time she was in the room. She often sat on the
floor, facing the same direction as the bed, being drawn into the landscape.
She had never seen such a large church with a spiral reaching up so tall or
trees tightly swirled and pointing toward that spiral.

She also had never expected the bed to be so small and narrow. She
had heard it creak above her following the sound of him on the house stairs,
then the flush of the toilet, and then more distant the attic stairs. She had
heard his shoes plunk, plunk before the bed took his total weight. This was
just a camp bed, a cot, with two army wool blankets, and no spread. Her father
had an
army blanket, too, but it was not
allowed on her moth
er’s bed, and only used when the electricity and heat
went out to keep Mary Grace warm on the couch. She didn’t touch the ones on
Uncle Paul’s bed. She knew they were scratchy and had the distinct smell of
animal—her friend’s dog had sat next to her once
and the wool blankets smelled like her hands after pet
ting him.

After her visits to his room, she wondered if he could hear their
television, or their fights when she was sent downstairs to Maggie’s apartment.
She wondered what Uncle Paul knew about the arguments, the drinking, the
praying? Had he heard it all?

Mary Grace questioned the interactions she had seen with her
parents and Uncle Paul, the way each time he mounted the steps and nodded into
the kitchen as he was passing, her mother would raise her chin and turn her
back to him suddenly interested in something at the stove or in the sink, while
her father would nod back a quiet “
Fratello, va bene?”
And the words
they chose to talk to her about Uncle Paul when he had moved down
the hall into the bathroom and ultimately up to the
at
tic, were all in Italian and her mother’s words so bitter that
although Mary Grace couldn’t understand she felt like her mother was spitting
out sour milk. Yet, Mary Grace had some innate sense about Uncle Paul. The way
she could feel comforted by Aunt Maggie, she felt seen by Uncle Paul.

Mary Grace felt like he knew something that she needed to know
about herself. She felt connected to him through their eyes in a deeper way
that gave her a sense that he saw her as more solid and purposeful than the way
she felt and moved like a shadowy outline through the house.

Uncle Paul -1

Chapter 4

MARY GRACE SOMETIMES heard her father and Aunt Maggie talk about
how Uncle Paul kept to himself at the sanitation garage, where he worked the
early shift, starting at three-thirty a.m., out in the truck by four a.m., and
then back in the garage by nine-thirty a.m. after the haul was dumped. Six
hours of hard work riding on the back of the trash truck, clearing the streets
of garbage and stench.

Later Mary Grace learned, after work he’d go over to the men’s
club up on the avenue and spent time drinking coffee and looking at the morning
papers, sitting
alongside the old timers.
Her father and Aunt Mag
gie were pleased that the guys at the club were
good to him, respected him, knew what he was capable of, and accepted he was a
man of few words. Uncle Paul was referred to as
solitario
, because he
stayed so much to himself, and always seemed to gaze inward. Mary Grace could
appreciate this because she wasn’t interested in having interactions with other
children at school, but only to watch them interact.

Most times, it seemed when Uncle Paul was back at the house during
the day he napped downstairs on Aunt Maggie’s couch to the sound of her radio,
and then he disappeared upstairs to his room when any of the family arrived
home. Sometimes he went away for a few weeks, and Mary Grace missed hearing him
on the steps and above her when all became quiet in the house.

But, when he returned he would sit on the screened-in porch with
“mia
bella bambina
, with a head full of
biondi
curls, and eyes like the
changing sea.”

“The only grandchild.” And Uncle Paul would tap the dimples in
each of her cheeks and smile at Mary Grace. “
La bella bambina
.”

Uncle Paul asked, “Has your momma read the
pret
ty
letters from Italy?” But when Aunt Maggie or others came onto the porch the
conversation changed. “How many lightning bugs you catch in the jar?” Mary
Grace somehow knew that some conversations were only for her and Uncle Paul.
Mary Grace also knew that he watched her, but that didn’t frighten her, for she
was curious about him and so it felt right that he would be curious about her.
She heard her father tell Uncle Paul he needed to have more friends, but she
knew that he liked to stay alone, like she did. She was, as her father called
Uncle Paul,
piu differente
.

Uncle Paul caught her sometimes when she hid in the space above
the stairs and other times in the backyard on the side of the garage away from
the house. He knew but didn’t tell on Mary Grace when they were calling her.
She sensed he knew she sought calmness for her mind, the stillness of a hot
summer day, which she couldn’t express in words. As the heat stagnated the air
so did Mary Grace languish in the stillness of the heat, watching the shadows
that grew out from the house as the sun circled it with heat and sent a gloomy
light into their closed windows.

Sometimes her father sat on the porch with her when it was too hot
to sit upstairs, and her mother was resting. He told Mary Grace when she was
complaining about the heat that her Uncle Paul never minded the heat. “Uncle
Paul goes away in his mind to the Mediterranean, where there is always a sea
breeze, unlike here, and ponders the days in his life that were warm and
soothing.”

“Your Uncle Paul appreciates the warm days after that frigid
January day along
the East River where he saved a man’s life. He noticed a coat
bouncing on the water like a balloon losing air. The thought of a man drowning,
his air being taken away, lungs filling with water, it made your Uncle Paul
think of the war and seeing men’s lungs fill with blood, and choking out their
air.” Mary Grace remained quiet, so her father would continue the story. He
seemed to be talking more aloud to himself than to her.

“Uncle Paul tossed his coat to the side and jumped into that
January ice water. He grabbed the man’s collar and somehow managed to flip him
over and drag him to the shore. He pushed the water out, letting the air in.
The cold must have stung like a thousand knives and it took weeks for him to
feel warm again, but the man, Rocco, lived.”

Later Mary Grace would learn that most nights Uncle Paul picked up
a meal at the bar from Rocco. After all, Rocco owed him his life, and they had
become friends.

It seemed now that at home Uncle Paul only
con
nected
with Mary Grace, and although she wasn’t sure what he had to offer her, she
liked when he was around even if they didn’t interact.

When he came home in the evening, after eight p.m., after Mary
Grace had used the bathroom to prepare for bed, he didn’t stop at their
apartment, and seemed to walk on his tiptoes to quietly go past their door and
up the attic stairs, but Mary Grace always heard him. And she was sure he heard
her below him turning the Castro-convertible couch into a bed.