Worn Masks (5 page)

Back in Time

Chapter 11

AUNT MAGGIE COULDN’T climb the stairs very well, her knees knotted
with arthritis. “Honey, you’ll have to go through everything yourself.”

She could just hire someone to pack the boxes, get rid of clothes,
and phone the Salvation Army for the furniture, but Mary Grace couldn’t stop
thinking about the neighbor who had come over to her at the funeral. “It was so
difficult for your Aunt dealing with your mother. But now she has to be alone.”
Mary Grace had an eerie feeling herself, an unsettled lingering where she
thought she’d have relief. She convinced herself that since she was here she
might as well clean out all those years of stuff left by her parents. Plus, she
was worried about Aunt Maggie.  She could see now how she had aged. She seemed
frail and sad. Wouldn’t it be liberating to not have to deal with her
sister-in-law anymore?

Although she had avoided the nursing home, Mary Grace spent a lot
of time at the house going through one bureau, one box, at a time. Each took so
long. What did any of it mean? Why did her mom save what she had? Was there a
reason why no one talked about Uncle Paul? Was the box still in the attic? Mary
Grace only wanted to go back to the sense of quiet and peace in that attic
room.

Still, she was dutiful, completing her tasks, canceling
prescriptions, filling out insurance forms, packing j
ewelry and a few other things she felt, for some un
known reason,
she couldn’t dispose of yet. There were few relatives to contact or send thank
you notes to, and fortunately Aunt Maggie took care of them.

In the evenings she sat with Aunt Maggie and worked from her
computer while Aunt Maggie watched television and nodded off in the chair. But,
Aunt Maggie also tried to have a conversation with Mary Grace about her
mother’s family. “There is her family and they should know.” Mary Grace was
tired of it. She just wanted the distraction of the manuscripts she had brought
from work.

At one point Aunt Maggie took her fingers and tried to gently lift
Mary Grace’s eyes to her, with slight pressure of her fingers under Mary
Grace’s chin, like she had done to her sometimes as a child, but Mary Grace
turned her head and said, “Oh, it’s been a long, long time since she was in
touch with them. Just let it go, Aunt Maggie.”

Did Mary Grace care at all about her mother’s life? She just
wanted all of this to be finished. She hoped now even the dreams would fade
away.

Had Mary Grace lost compassion for every one? Now she felt herself
turning away from Aunt Maggie.
Mary Grace always had mixed feelings where her father was concerned,
but she could not be mad at him, only feel bad about him, that she couldn’t
understand well enough what ever drew him to her mother.

Why would she go through this now? She wasn’t a child.
It is
over! Done. Why should I care?

Mary Grace knew people thought her odd, living alone in her third
floor walk-up apartment, never being friendly, and never accepting invitations
from people from work or her neighbors.
If you asked her landlady she would shrug her shoulders and have
nothing more to say than, “She pays the rent, doesn’t bother no one, doesn’t
ask for nothing.”

Mary Grace
liked it that way. It kept everyone away from her. And she had
her own secrets. Men had come
and gone,
because she had so little to give them. Vis
its
with Aunt Maggie had persisted over the years, but al
ways away
from the house. How absurd to meet her around the corner by the bakery to take
her to lunch, and take her shopping.

“When you drop me off, maybe just say hello to her?” Aunt Maggie
would ask.

“No. I’ll drop you at the corner. Her bills are paid. I have no
reason to see her.” Mary Grace hadn’t thought she could handle going to the
house. It brought up so much anger in her.

Why was she reliving all this–maybe it was normal grieving. But,
what had ever been normal about Mary
Grace
and her mother?
Maybe Mary Grace would al
ways suffer from
her mother’s ways–the threat of the wooden spoon instead of the hug.

The next day Aunt Maggie called her downstairs, handed her a tin
with keys, instructing: “This one is for the closet downstairs, this, the tin
box in the pantry, and this,” she hesitated, “the trunk in the attic.” Mary
Grace realized that death permeates our heads. Now, Aunt Maggie was trying to
be prepared. It struck Mary
Grace then, that
once they were all gone she would nev
er know any more about them. All
the times as a child she thought she wanted to know. Did she still want to?

Mary Grace exposed her own past. “I found Uncle Paul’s box years
ago.” 

Aunt Maggie turned pale, unsteady, and then shook her head no,
patted Mary Grace’s cheek, and hobbled in the living room saying, “It is time.
We were not to tell, never to speak a word. Please try to understand. Only you,
Gracie. That is all that mattered.”

“What are you talking about?” Mary Grace felt overwhelmed. She
thought,
Fear has paralyzed us, our entire lives, but why
? Aunt Maggie
had been a jittery woman, hiding on her porch, and always disappearing behind
her brothers’ lives. While Mary Grace’s mother had
hid
den in her bedroom with the curtains drawn. Was
Mary Grace hiding, too? Secrets and lies and living
be
hind worn masks.

Mary Grace chastised herself:
I’m not going to know until I
confront it. Do I want to end up like either of them? Yet, wouldn’t it be
easier to just leave the childhood baggage behind and live my own life?

Then, like every conversation in her head it circled back to
her
.
“Why couldn’t my mother just . . . ?”

Children are to be seen and not heard. That’s
why, Ma
ria Graziella.

Part II

Aunt Maggie

Chapter 12

MARY GRACE HAD regularly visited Aunt Mag
gie at the house
after her mother was gone, and now
she often
visited her in the nursing home. Aunt Mag
gie had been moved there not
long after Mary
Grace’s mom died. Aunt Maggie
had first become agi
tated and nervous, and then began hearing people in
the ceiling talking to her in Italian, telling her they knew her secret, and
she had cried out, “
Basta, basta cosi
!” She had had enough. She couldn’t
take it anymore. Aunt Maggie sat by the steps to the cellar with a broom
because she swore the man with the slouch hat had come back and that he was
down there in the cellar, with Camille, a girl from up the street, hiding
behind the furnace. Aunt Maggie wasn’t eating or taking her medicine. She must
have developed dementia. She had
no training
for being an independent woman after ev
eryone was gone from the family
home.

Mary Grace resigned herself that she would have to spend her
weekends going through Aunt Maggie’s apartment, the cellar, and attic, and put
the house on the market.

On visits to the nursing home Aunt Maggie kept bringing up her
mother’s family again. “Mary Grace you have to talk with them.” Mary Grace was
fighting voices of her own in her head as she toted around the backpack that
held all her family papers straining her shoulder. She had searched through
every piece of paper in the house where her dad and mom had lived for
thirty-four years, and then her mom had lived alone for twelve years after
that. None of it directly helped her know who her mother was any better, or why
Aunt Maggie suddenly felt her niece had to know about her mother.
Mary Grace had no expectations to find anything use
ful
in Aunt Maggie’s part of the house. Yet, Mary Grace was becoming interested to
connect the missing links. Aunt Maggie must know something. Maybe she could
help her. Then Mary Grace got the call from the nursing home.

They were requesting a meeting with Mary Grace, and it had to be
during the week, another afternoon taken off from work, but for Aunt Maggie’s
sake Mary
Grace made the appointment. She
assumed Aunt Mag
gie had been experiencing a normal dementia of aging.
Mary Grace was so surprised to hear that the nursing home had Aunt Maggie
seeing a psychologist.

The psychologist seemed fresh out of graduate school to Mary
Grace. She played the part beautifully, with her stickpin skirt and tailored
shirt, her hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. “The nursing staff
has been reporting odd behavior in the interactions that your Aunt Maggie is
having with other residents.” She slowly mouthed each word. “It would seem your
aunt is blocking the way when a male resident comes down the hall. She is
pushing men away from other women in the sitting area.”

Mary Grace questioned, “Are you sure my aunt is doing that? That
wouldn’t be Aunt Maggie.”

The psychologist continued. “I wanted to talk to you
about what we believe is the cause of this
aggressive be
havior. Maggie has revealed an incident that may have left
her with detrimental feelings all of her life.”

Mary Grace resisted laughing and saying that
“Aunt Maggie didn’t
have a life.”

The psychologist had an aide bring in Aunt Maggie. Then the
psychologist began to relay the story that Aunt
Maggie had revealed to her earlier that week, adding ev
ery few
words, “Is that so Maggie?” And Aunt Maggie, chin tucked into her chest,
nodded. Mary Grace heard
the
words but couldn’t connect them with Aunt Mag
gie.
A
man, a man who the family knew as a friend,
had ab
ducted her when she was twelve years old on her way back from
getting bread at the bakery up on the avenue. She had wanted this chore, this
show of her being a big girl. It wasn’t her fault, but he had ruined her. 

All the years Mary Grace had just tagged Aunt Maggie as a typical
old maid, the child who stays at home to take care of aging parents. Mary Grace
had not thought past that. Thinking about it now, she had admired Aunt Maggie
in photographs, her classic 1930s movie star look, strong cheek bones, full
lips over a wide smile of straight teeth, a curvy figure with shoulder pad full
shoulders, ample breasts proportionate to her waist and hips, ending with long
dancing starlet legs. Why wouldn’t she have had suitors? 

It seemed none of that mattered. It was not that there had been no
suitors good enough for her. “She believes the event ruined her. Do you
understand? A girl, who was defiled had to stay in the house, was not longer a
candidate for a gentleman. She had to take care of her parents, and over the
years watch her brothers live their full lives.”

“What?” Mary Grace’s mind was flooding with thoughts about interactions
over the years. “How could this be? No one knew. No one helped her.” Mary
Grace’s
voice trailed off. This was
horrendous. Was it any won
der Aunt Maggie was screaming in her actions
about what she had never before even whispered.

Mary Grace just couldn’t believe it. She
pushed back. “Could it be some random dementia and not that she is really
recalling pieces of some horrid past event?”

“Your aunt does not have dementia.” That was that. The nursing
home had informed her. Sitting across from Aunt Maggie, Mary Grace cupped Aunt
Maggie’s arthritic hands in her hands. They sat quiet in the late afternoon
light coming through the slats of the blind in her room. Is this what had
happened, some unspeakable life event, to the women Mary Grace had seen when her
mom was in the nursing home, women locked in to memories ingrained in their
minds, where their lives had walked off a cliff? 

Mary Grace took the house keys from her car,
and back at the house tried to find some hints to what Aunt Maggie was talking
about. How many times had this man come to the house? Had Mary Grace ever met
him—an old man with amnesia for his violent behaviors—or still smiles for
little girls?

Mary Grace decided to take to the nursing home the black-and-white
photographs she found in the tin box in the pantry. Although when she showed
them to Aunt Maggie, her aunt could hardly make out most of the people–the
combination of her macular degeneration, and how the photographs had faded to
grey—Mary Grace described them. “ . . . many people sitting around a table in
the cellar, a party, maybe it was my father’s birthday? Who would be there?
There are men standing together.” Mary Grace hesitated. “Was
he
there?”

The Aunt Maggie she knew so well, eyes and head down, averting
everything, asked, “Is there a chicken on the table?” 

“Yes, I guess, there is a big dish with what
could be pieces of chicken over pasta–was that
polla alla cacciatora
?”

“My momma would put on her
gremiule da ma
cellaio
, a butcher’s apron, take the big knife, and
go into the backyard. I’d watch from the window as the chickens scurried. They
knew she was there to take one of them. She wasn’t wearing her
gremiule
da
cuoco,
cooking apron, held up full with feed in it for them. Momma was fast
as she bent over to snatch one. Then with one quick twist she’d wring the
chicken’s neck. The head would flop over, but the feet would still be
shuddering.” Aunt Maggie’s shoulders were trembling as she said this. “She’d
grab the pot, place it next to the chopping block. I could never watch the
rest.”

“Who else came to the party, Aunt Maggie?”

“Nana. Wasn’t Nana there? She’d have a sweater on, always a
sweater. She made them. She made one for me and under the buttonholes she had
sewn a beautiful piece of blue ribbon. Nana was always crocheting, knitting,
always sewing. She had a button box and a ribbon box. She let me have a scrap
of the same blue ribbon to hang my scapula around my neck,” she took a breath,
looked over to the psychologist who nodded at her, “but it didn’t matter.”

“What didn’t matter?”

“The El, the train was screeching above me on the elevated
tracks.” Aunt Maggie looked as if she was going to be sick, her nostrils
twitching. “Garlic, and sweat.” Aunt Maggie’s head curled into her chest, her
arms inched across her body to hold herself steady.

Aunt Maggie became quiet, and then she said, “The
amico. Papa’s
amico
. He was from the city. A big shot. He wore a shiny suit and a slouch
hat. He ripped off the buttons of my sweater. My scapula didn’t protect me. He
unraveled my ribbons.”

The psychologist consoled Aunt Maggie, saying it was never her
fault. She had held on to this for sixty-eight years! Aunt Maggie looked at
Mary Grace. Mary Grace couldn’t breathe. She believed it now. How could this
have happened to her aunt? How could no one ever have told her? 

Aunt Maggie wept saying, “Your momma, I heard her. She told your
father I could have stopped him.
“She’s dirty, opened her legs, phew, a
puttanta! She wasn’t so innocent.”
Your mother said that. Never would I
look her in the eye after that.”

Mary Grace’s mother knew! Was that why she disliked her? It seemed
crude, but would she really blame Aunt Maggie? Her mother was always so
righteous, somehow too good for everyone else, always turning her head away
when people spoke, like listening to them
was
below her. Mary Grace felt the sting of her moth
er’s coldness, and the
times she had heard her cut Aunt Maggie off in mid-sentence. 

That evening Mary Grace cried as she had cried as a child,
whimpering into her pillow, “It is like there was an entire family story that I
never knew about.”

And, as there was no one else, she consoled herself.
You were just a kid, Gracie. Families are crazy. It
is a terri
ble thing, but why are you getting all hung up on this now?

Mary Grace couldn’t answer that. She was
exhaust
ed.
But she didn’t go to sleep.

Mary Grace got back up and studied every photograph, which one was
Papa’s trusted friend? How did her father and Uncle Paul really feel? She went
back into
the trunk. There was nothing to
reveal what had hap
pened to Aunt Maggie, but again she saw the carefully
penned letters from her dad to her mom. Before she had been certain there
couldn’t possibly be anything useful in the letters. She hadn’t been interested
before in reading them—but, now she wanted to know, what were they doing in
Aunt Maggie’s trunk?