Worn Masks (3 page)

Uncle Paul -2

Chapter 5

ONE OF MARY GRACE’S earliest memories was of her father carrying
her up the stairs after she fell on the sidewalk outside the house. The blood
from her cut knee was staining the side of his shirt, while her sobbing puddled
on his shoulder.

Uncle Paul was descending the stairs when they met, about halfway,
“
O,
la
mia bella bambina
,” he looked into her teary eyes,
then dipped his head and kissed her palm, scraped and stippled with tiny
pebbles, “
Ragazza triste
,” sad girl. She didn’t understand his words,
but his hoarse voice always sounded like he was singing to her from a deep
tunnel that pulled the words in long sounds that echoed and comforted her.

Mary Grace’s desire grew to know more about Uncle Paul. “Why does
Uncle Paul go up the steps over my head?”

“Oh, just be still. I don’t even know what you are trying to say
when there is nothing to say,” her mother warned against her inquiries about
Uncle Paul living above them.

A few years later she and Uncle Paul encountered each other on the
house staircase again, as he was going up the stairs. She had climbed over the
rail and tucked herself into the cavity where the bottom of the attic steps met
the doorway of Aunt Maggie’s apartment.

Aunt Maggie had on previous occasions found Mary Grace in her
cubby and made her promise to stay put while she screamed for her brother,
Luigi, to come with a ladder. Mary Grace’s mother gave her a few good whacks
with the wooden spoon for giving Aunt Maggie a scare.

They hadn’t let Mary Grace inch her way out, bringing her right
foot onto the stairwell between two posts, then swinging herself up, and
wrapping her arms around the banister; finally completing the descent by
swinging her leg over the top of the banister and quickly sliding down to the
bottom. Mary Grace knew the connected steps she would take to complete the
move, if they hadn’t interfered.

On this occasion, when Uncle Paul caught her in the cubby, he
hesitated for just a moment, looked into her eyes, nodded, and then continued
up the steps. She heard him then, above her head, going up the tight and curved
steps of the attic.

Later that night Mary Grace asked her dad if Uncle Paul could eat
with them. She watched as her mom turned from the stove and looked, eyebrows
raised, at her father. He began to say something about how his brother ate
downstairs with Aunt Maggie, but her mom interrupted, “He doesn’t eat at my
table.” Her mom’s voice was like the last lick of an ice cream pop when your
tongue scrapes against the wooden stick, rough and gritty, the sweetness gone.

Mary Grace wasn’t certain about how much English
Uncle Paul spoke, or if it was just that the two
broth
ers, her dad and Uncle Paul, liked to converse in the fast and hand
enhanced Italian. Mary Grace wondered if her mother comprehended all that they
were saying, as she never joined their conversations. 

When Mary Grace sat on the porch with Uncle Paul he would take her
arm and in a sing-song, while he lightly moved his fingers from her wrist to
elbow say: “
uno, due, tre; quattro, cinque, sei; sette, otto, nove
, and
a ticklea unda here.” This concluded with smiling eyes and a delicate
scratching by her arm pit as she giggled. When Aunt Maggie came out onto the
porch, Uncle Paul pulled out his cigarettes and went to smoke, pacing back and
forth in front of the screened-in porch.

Early in the autumn, soon after Mary Grace started school, Aunt
Maggie told her when she returned home from her day in fifth grade, “You must
be quiet.” Wasn’t she always quiet? Then she was told “no piano,” which s
he often did play in Aunt Maggie’s living room. No
pi
ano because that was where Uncle Paul would be convalescing. Aunt
Maggie, sad and shaking more then usual, said, “
Zi Paol ha cavita salute
,”
reverting back to
Italian, as they all did
around Mary Grace when any
thing was out of the ordinary.

Aunt Maggie knew her place, that of an old maid,
living in the home of her parents, and then her
broth
ers. She never found a suitor that would give her security. She
answered to her brothers after both her parents passed. She was always shaking
her head and shoulders, saying, “Oh, hush, hush.
Stata gitt
.” Mary
Grace’s mom said she had a bit of a nervous condition. This command to stay out
of Aunt Maggie’s living room, and that Uncle Paul would not be going up to his
room shook Mary Grace with uncertainty.

Some weeks later Mary Grace peeked through the bars of the
banister at the top of the stairs, where they had told her to stay. Even her
mother had gone downstairs. Mary Grace watched as they removed Uncle Paul on a
stretcher from Aunt Maggie’s apartment. She watched the men in white coats
carrying him on a board covered in a white sheet. “Gone for good,” was her
mother’s explanation as the door closed behind the stretcher and the back of a
bald man whose head was white and smooth as his coat.

Mary Grace ran down the stairs, planning to follow the white
truck, but her mom caught her arm and said, “Upstairs!” Mary Grace pulled away,
and as she passed through the front door, whipped it closed behind her.

She hesitated for just a moment as the glass
shat
tered,
then she ran, ran until she couldn’t run any longer, the stitch in her side
cutting off her breath. She slipped into the park through a hole in the chain
link fence, sat on a swing and proclaimed, “I am going to stay here forever!” 

Hours later her dad came to get her. His eyes were red and he had
about him the sweet pungent smell of Uncle Paul. For just a moment he looked at
her, pushed the hair back from her eyes. “Oh,
bambina mia,
your momma is
very upset. You broke the window in Aunt Maggie’s door. You have to pay for the
window.” 

Mary Grace’s dad took her hand, and they walked home, hand in
hand, without another word.

The Attic and The Porch

Chapter 6

The Attic

IT WAS SHORTLY after Uncle Paul died that Mary
Grace extended her bathroom to attic visits. The
vis
its to the attic consisted of moving from the top step onto the attic
platform, moving to different sections of the floor, where her dad’s tools
where kept, where Aunt Maggie’s trunk was, and finally into Uncle Paul’s room.

On the rare occasion that she talked with her
moth
er,
she still tried to ask questions about Uncle Paul, but the answers remained
cryptic and brief.

“Was Uncle Paul Daddy’s older brother?”

“That’s why he got Papa’s pocket watch, and that’s not around
anymore either. Now you mind you p’s and q’s,
Maria Graziella
. Children
should be seen and not heard,” her mom demanded with bitter saliva escaping at
the corner of her mouth.

Mary Grace wanted to know, but she didn’t know how to find out
about Uncle Paul. Whatever tidbits she gleaned, she pictured: a pocket watch,
gold, with scrolling carved around the edge, and a chain looped onto it. Yet,
she could not put in words what she wanted to know about Uncle Paul having the
pocket watch. She could only focus on the picture forming in her mind, placing
each detail in order. This was a habit she had of thinking about how something
looked, smelled, felt in her hand. Mary Grace could sit very still and look out
as if to nothing, but the picture would be fully formed in front of her.

“Such dilly-dally, wake up. Go clean the . . .” her mom would say.
And poof, the image, the thoughts, would be lost, whatever it was; the cracks
in the sidewalk, how a flower squeezed out from the speck of dirt
in between the crevices; how the sun made her moth
er’s
shadow even bigger, and always overlapping Mary Grace’s. Mary Grace preferred
the shadows
though, not to live in the
burning sunshine where ev
erything gets unmasked. Isn’t that where the
truths lived about Uncle Paul, in the shadows, not in the open light? To be
seen was to be exposed.

There was an order to how everything was placed in the attic room.
She saw the shapes and patterns—there was a faded rectangular spot of about
three feet by four feet in the middle of the wooden floor, where a rug used to
be, and under the front corner of the cot; which was covered in wool army
blankets. There was a pair of worn, brown, leather shoes, and one had a broken
lace. But, something was different since Uncle Paul died. Every other time she
had come up, after the first time she dared to ascend the steps; there had been
a picture drawn in charcoal tucked into the side of the mirror. Some of them
were of a cat or dog, but most were of a bird soaring across the sky. There
were no more new pictures. She wondered where he had gotten them, and where
they had gone to now.

Every detail of the room stayed with her. The light switch was
attached to a string that turned on a bare bulb in the center of the ceiling.
The doubled pastry box string then was strung across the room and attached to
small eyes hooks by the wall next to the door and in the
opposite direction to the window frame by the bed,
ty
ing together all the angles, squares, and rectangles across the room
and into her photo-memory.

When she closed the door she saw her foggy reflection, or was it
Uncle Paul’s eyes she saw, on a small
square
of mirror hanging over a hook, the silver reflec
tive almost all flecked
away. Next to it was a faded towel hanging from a large nail. Why would her
father and aunt leave all of Uncle Paul here?

The Porch

On
un giomo
che fa molto caldo
or a summer scorch
er, the kind of day that brings light waves in front of your eyes,
heat that prickles your skin like a thousand spiders inching over it, and
everything moving in slow motion, Mary Grace was shaken from the daze of the
heat by a stranger. It was during a run of crackling hot summer
days, “Hot like the year you were born,” said Aunt
Mag
gie, who Mary Grace had joined on the porch. Against the house was
the folding chair Uncle Paul used to sit on, and another that was her mother’s,
lined up along with an old wooden kitchen chair, and ending with Aunt Maggie’s
creaky rocking chair. On the other side of Aunt Maggie’s chair was a small
table with one leg propped up on a pack of her father’s matches. In the right
front corner was a wooden box with empty seltzer bottles ready to be changed
out.

Mary Grace had heard neighbors say Aunt Maggie was a fixture on
that porch, but she didn’t quite know what they meant. She knew Aunt Maggie was
different than her mother, who most times didn’t primp herself. Aunt Maggie was
always checking her curly hair in the hall mirror before coming out onto the
porch. Often on the porch she spent time filing her perfectly shaped round
nails and polishing them with a light shade of pink polish. Then she stretched
her hands out along her long thighs until the paint dried. Mary Grace sat next
to Aunt Maggie, and was allowed to stay if she was quiet. She knew how to be
around Aunt Maggie. Unlike her
mother who
would react differently each time you ap
proached her, Aunt Maggie always
was ready to show
her soft under body to Mary
Grace. Mary Grace count
ed the wooden floorboards, with the grey paint
mostly peeled away. Each person passing nodded their hellos to Aunt Maggie, and
some she answered and some she grumbled under her breath “busy-bodies.”

It was late in the day, but the heat had not subsided. After a
while a man approached with a cupped cigarette in his palm, dragging his feet
in heavy brown leather shoes. He had a bulbous nose, pocked skin, and large
round eyes—all so similar to Uncle Paul. Mary Grace wondered if Aunt Maggie was
thinking the same thing, when suddenly Aunt Maggie was on her feet, and the man
was stopping right at their stoop.

“I thought I’d come by and tell you I saw the
cugini
. They
were sorry about Paul. It wasn’t the same going to the old country without
Paul. Sad, sad.”

Aunt Maggie nodded at him, but didn’t seem to be able to speak.
Mary Grace came up behind her.

“Ah, the
bambina
. They asked about her. Sad they would not
have another picture of her. They loved his sketches. That sister-in-law of yours
never even told them about Paul.”

Then Aunt Maggie blurted out, “Let it all rest. My brother,
rest-in-peace, did everything he could. Ah. It is so damn hot.”

“Yes,
fa molti caldo
. I just was passing this way to go to
the cleaners.” He lifted the coat over his arm upward. Tell Luigi I said
ciao.
Ciao
.”

His eyes met Mary Grace’s for a split-second. Who was this man?
How did he know her Uncle Paul? What was he talking about?

She tried to ask Aunt Maggie, but her shoulders were shuddering
and she said in a barely audible voice, “Oh, hush, hush.
Stata gitt
.”
Mary Grace decided Uncle Paul was trying to get a message to her. Mary Grace
closed her eyes, thought about the details of the attic room, pictures that
were carved in her mind’s eye.

The Attic

She would never be able to explain what happened
next, and why when she visited the attic later that
eve
ning, sat on the floor against the door thinking about the man they
had seen, it was the first time she noticed the box. She would say she never
could decide if that box had always been there and that day she was directed to
it, or if Aunt Maggie had somehow, between the time
of the man’s passing on the street and when she had din
ner with
her parents, brought that box there. 

Mary Grace never sat on the cot. She wasn’t sure if it would
squeak or even collapse, as slight as it seemed. She always sat on the floor,
and that day, she sat against the door facing the bed. With the late sun coming
through the window at just the right angle, the light drew her eyes to the
object under the back leg of the cot. She crawled over and reached under to
find a tin box. 

Mary Grace found in the box a faded photograph
of Uncle Paul in uniform together with a lady, squinting and smiling under a
feathery hat, standing in front of a stone church. There was a commendation for
saving
the life of Rocco Santelli, and a yellowed ar
ticle
talking
about the ice floating on the
East River that late Janu
ary day.
There was also an identification badge for the Department of Sanitation, a pocket
watch, and two notebooks of drawings inscribed in faded blue ink:
by Paul
Maschere per mia bella
, and
by Paul Maschere per le due mie belle
.”
There were pictures of the lady, the church, fields, the attic room, the tiled
bathroom, a frozen river, and of Mary Grace’s face and eyes.

She held the books tight against her chest, the stale air in the
attic keeping everything still and heavy. She sat there until they were banging
on the bathroom door. “Unlock this door! What are you doing? Come out of
there.” She put everything back in the box, tucked it back under the cot, and
quietly descended the attic stairs.