Worn Masks (6 page)

Lost Love

Chapter 13

BACK AT HER apartment, where normally she found peace in the quiet
and comfort in her simple and bare surroundings, the weight of the living room
along one wall covered in books almost from floor to ceiling, Mary Grace
couldn’t focus on any one book to pull from the shelf. A wave of nausea passed
through her, making Mary Grace unsteady on her feet. She heard music playing. A
record scratched along the groove, catching the needle:
my heart has gone
away, my heart has gone away,
repeated over and over
.

It must just be the smells and dreary way the nursing home made
her feel. She had been going so often. The thought of this trauma in Aunt
Maggie’s life, and then how Aunt Maggie was left never to find love, while
Uncle Paul seemingly lost the love of his life all felt sad and heavy on her
heart.

She sat in her one cozy chair, an old stuffed recliner,
and tried to clear her mind. Across from her was a
Vic
torian two-seat couch, nothing you could lie across or sink into.
Again, she ruminated, thinking of the letters from her dad to her mom, what was
their love about? There had been other chairs in their living room back in the
house, but her parents had always sat on the couch, together. Memories like
this kept flooding her mind. Snapshots flashing in front of her in black and
white, which somehow left her with a new awareness of herself. Mary Grace knew
she herself had always held back emotionally, losing any possible love that
tried to come her way, not able to comprehend what keeps love alive.

Should she try to talk to Aunt Maggie? Who else was left that she
could talk to about her mother? It still seemed her mother was at the heart of
her own discontent. Even that first guy she had left with from home hadn’t
lasted long around her, and he had said when leaving, “You’re an iceberg,
loosen up kid.” At the time Mary Grace just focused on the word “kid” and
easily countered for herself, “So, you’re four years older than me and you know
everything!” 

“Iceberg?” 

Mary Grace sat up all night drinking a bottle of champagne, the
apartment dark other than a small table lamp illuminating the letters she was
reading. The love letters sent from her father to her mother, the words on
the worn pages came in and out of the light as she
un
folded them one at a time. Letters that just didn’t ring true to her
somehow, felt somehow wrong. Could her father write such passages of desire?
Her parents, in her memory, never showed this kind of passion or dedication to
each other. Or was her dad’s love hidden behind the whiskey? He was dedicated
to Teresa, but was theirs the kind of
love of your life
that you pour
out in letters?

The next day the drink wore off, but not the
dullness in Mary Grace’s eyes. She stopped along the way to work to light a
candle at St. Raymond’s for her Aunt Maggie, for all the suffering she had
endured. She considered lighting one for her mother—but blew out the thin stick
before she put it to the next candle. If the light of love doesn’t ever happen
for you can you ever feel at peace? She never worried over such things before,
but now it
seemed to her that everything in her life was turning in
side out.

Uncle Paul -3

Chapter 14

AUNT MAGGIE WAS talking about everything now. The floodgates had
opened. She talked about how often Mary Grace’s mother and Uncle Paul fought.
Aunt Maggie relayed that according to Teresa Uncle Paul was always drunk.
Teresa hated having to share the bathroom with him. Aunt Maggie would hear them
as he mounted the stairs and Teresa exited the bathroom.

“You think you have the right brother and that I’m a good for
nothing,” Uncle Paul barked, on a night that
he
had been tossing a few stiff whiskeys down, breath
ing heavily and
struggling to stay focused in his drunken state. He was on the top of the
stairs, turning to go through the bathroom and into the attic.

“Teresa was always annoyed with him for something. She always
complained that he left the bathroom dirty.” Aunt Maggie shook her head. “Your
mother would try to tell him that she had a child to take care of and didn’t
have time to be cleaning up after him, phew.”

Mary Grace knew this was nonsense. She had
seen how Uncle Paul left the bathroom with no trace that he had been there. Why
would her mother treat him that way?

Aunt Maggie continued to revisit the tension be
tween them saying,
“They fought like cats and dogs.” 

“You don’t like my life . . . but you don’t even know
the life you’re living,” Mary Grace remembered her
Un
cle Paul saying sometimes.

“Then sometimes he would say too much. He would say that he and I
knew about her family rejecting her,
knew
she considered our family below her. It was ter
rible,” said Aunt Maggie.
“Finally, one day your mother, Teresa, had challenged him. ‘What do you and
your sister, Maggie, think you know?’ It was quiet and I had hoped my brother
would clear his head before speaking. He knew what he should be saying, and
what he shouldn’t talk about.” Aunt Maggie put her hands to her temples. “He
said what we all wanted to say.”

“Your child, you blame your child for your own life. You had a
child, but you don’t see her!” Paul had screamed into Teresa’s face. The sound
bounced off the hall walls and down the staircase. Aunt Maggie had stood frozen
at the bottom of the steps.

“There was venom between them. Uncle Paul felt bad for your father.
He told me a wife should be your
partner,
your most trusted confidante, and your most .
. . ahh.” Aunt Maggie
stopped. But, she could see that Mary Grace was waiting, listening to every
word.

“He loved you, your Uncle Paul, he loved you so much. For him, you
were all that mattered any more. He hoped for you more than his daily crap of a
life. It was all a mess. Your uncle was a good man, but he couldn’t get out of
his own way when he drank. And he drank because his heart was broken over his
lost love.

“One day when your Uncle Paul and your mother, Teresa, were going
at it, he completely lost it, and he
told her
that I had written the letters, that he had dic
tated them, not your
father. He shouldn’t do that. He should never have done that.”

Mary Grace’s head was pounding. All this was going
on in the house while she was hiding, suspended be
tween
the floors in her cubby off the staircase. What did it all mean? And did any of
it matter anymore?

The Box

Chapter 15

MARY GRACE WENT back to Uncle Paul’s box again and again. She saw
how carefully he drew each
picture, how well
he built the depths of a face, the de
tails of a room, and the emotion
that poured from the pictures made her cry. She couldn’t explain it, the pull
she had to this uncle that had been a shadow coming and going. Somewhere in
time she had realized she painted pictures in her mind all along, but the idea
of her trying to put picture to paper, to paint the images, that unsettled
her. 

Did any of them know how talented he was? She thought maybe that
Aunt Maggie knew. There was something she used to say to Uncle Paul about using
his imagination with drawings not drinks. It had been
said in Italian and Mary Grace had not entirely got
ten it.
Everyone always seemed irritated at Paul, but she couldn’t quite understand
why. The Italian always frustrated Mary Grace.

Yet, Uncle Paul had captured on paper the most
se
rene
and beautiful pictures.

Mary Grace had hoped when she went back to the
box that something would make more sense then be
fore.
She loved to look at the pictures, and on a few there were words scrawled in
Italian, unreadable to her.
On one of the
sketches of Mary Grace there was some
thing about baby and parents but it
was almost unrecognizable and faded out,

“
bamb ni soffr o i gen t ri.
” 

Sometimes Mary Grace wondered if she just exaggerated all her
mother’s meanness just because she couldn’t understand her. That generation
didn’t proclaim love and spoil children. They had survived coming to a new land
and why would they coddle a child to whom they felt had everything? But, who
was her mother, who was Teresa Giordano Maschere? Why did she and Uncle Paul
clash like two cars head-on in broad daylight?

She couldn’t find anything in Uncle Paul’s box that explained the
hate her mom harbored toward Uncle Paul, the Maschere family, or her.

No Heart

Chapter 16

MARY GRACE VISITED Aunt Maggie a few times a week after work. At
each visit she tried to get more information. She knew the possibility of any
visit being the last one that she’d have with Aunt Maggie, or at least where a
lucid conversation could take place.

She pulled her chair up to Aunt Maggie’s chair, their knees
bumping into each other. Next to them was Aunt Maggie’s bed. It was a small
room with institutional florescent lighting. It didn’t feel like a setting for
a personal conversation, but Mary Grace demanded, “Aunt Maggie, you need to
tell me more about the letters, and about my mother’s reaction.”

“You think that is what is important? You act like her–
capatosta,
you understand,
testa de spessorre
.” Aunt Maggie tapped her head,
raised her shaky voice. Immediately Mary Grace felt terrible. She was just so
out of sorts. Mary Grace had created her solitary life and now all this
uncertainty and emotion was playing havoc with her. She would never
intentionally be mean to Aunt Maggie. Wasn’t Aunt Maggie the one who always
gave her a haven to visit, told her she was a good girl, and allowed her to
come downstairs each time tempers flared.

“Oh, Aunt Maggie, maybe I do need to know about her. Haven’t there
been enough secrets in this family? I need to know.” She took Aunt Maggie’s
hand and they sat, quiet, for a long while.

Aunt Maggie looked as if she was falling asleep, her head down
with a slight shaking, and without raising her head or even an eye she started
to talk. She told
Mary Grace, “Yes, I wrote
the letters for my brother, Lu
igi. Teresa was never supposed to know.
Uncle Paul had a great love and really the letters were his feelings about love
from what he had known. Oh, but, Uncle Paul blabbered to your mother all about
it that day when he was drunk. He shouldn’t drink, but sometimes he did.”

Aunt Maggie was quiet for an extended moment, maybe deciding
whether to continue or not, then she said, “Your mother stormed down the steps
into my apartment, she toss the letters on the table, screaming and crying,
‘How
could you do this? Questo famiglia e` pazza! This entire family is crazy! And
I’m stuck with all of you.’”

“Why?” Mary Grace said. “Why was she
stuck
?”

Aunt Maggie looked up at her and just shook her
head again. “It’s a long time ago. Can you let
your par
ents rest in peace?”

But before Mary Grace could answer, Aunt Maggie squeezed her hand.
“Find the letters from her sister.
La sorrella
Elena. I’m tired now,
Gracie.” It seemed Aunt Maggie was done with it all.

No wonder her mom felt betrayed, hated both Aunt Maggie and Uncle
Paul. For a moment she felt a twinge of compassion for her mother. But, wait,
who was this
sister Elena? And why didn’t her
mother ever have con
tact with her own family?

The only possible clues were the other
letters, the letters
from Italy. She remembered finding them in
her mother’s
bottom dresser drawer. Had she thrown them
away?

No, something had made Mary Grace keep the letters. It was because
Mary Grace remembered them arriving in the mailbox, bringing them upstairs to
her mother, and watching a reaction break through on her face, a strange
distant look, not one of remembering joy
but
more of being anxious about what opening the let
ter would bring to her.
Mary Grace had little evidence in interactions with her mother of that kind of
emotion. In most interactions with her mother there was either a blank look or
a glaring anger, yet this memory of her mother opening each letter from Italy
was strong.

Mary Grace remembered when one of them would arrive in the thin
onionskin envelope with red and blue framing and colorful stamps. She loved the
feel of the thin paper and the way the black ink spread across the page by a
hand that made large swooping strokes, unlike her mother’s own tiny and tight
handwriting. Once, she tried to read a letter, sounding out the funny words and
feeling like she was privy to a special world. Her mom had taken the letter
from her hand, read a few lines out loud and then refused to read the rest of
the letter. Mary Grace was intrigued by the sound of the words, they seemed
different then the Italian she heard every day at the house, even though she
still couldn’t understand them. “Who sent you the letter? What did they say?
Who is in the photograph they sent?” 

“
Chiacchierone
. Chatter box.
Stata gitt
!” Then her
mother had taken the letter and sat by the bedroom window quietly reading it
again. Had she been crying? Mary Grace tried to come in the room, but she
shooed her away. Mary Grace had spoiled it. Now she wouldn’t ever let her see
the letters again. Sometimes, when her mother was out Mary Grace had gone to
her top drawer, that was where they were then, and taken the letters out,
looked at the photographs, the odd long dresses the women had on, the dark eyes
and hair of the men. There was one of a little girl, with a large bow in her
hair, almost the size of the side of her head, and scrawled on the back
Elena
.

Mary Grace dug through the boxes she had already packed, looking
for the Bible she had found in her mother’s dresser. In that small Bible with
worn pages she had seen that name. Two lists of names ran down, side by side on
the inside cover. One side was written with one pen, most of the ink was very
faded, and then with another pen and still legible was one more name on the
left side:
Elena Giordano.

Is this who Aunt Maggie was talking about? How did she know her?
And, why was Mary Grace’s name under both lists? The one on the left also
listed Teresa, and other siblings? The one on the right listed only her father
Luigi, Teresa, and herself. Why was Mary Grace’s name in both columns? Was her
mother trying to say that she believed Mary Grace was part of her mother’s
family as well as her father’s family?

Mary Grace went back to the letters, sat with them
spread across the table, the Italian letters, and
she real
ized that there had been more than one writer.

Most were written and signed by
cugina
Rosalie, and
sometimes within her letters was a child’s handwriting
with a line or two signed from:
sua sorella, Elena
. She had never
noticed or realized there was another person talking in the letters. Also,
earlier, there were letters with a fancier and more precise lettering, only
three, and all around the year that Mary Grace had been born. She read the
signature,
Cara mia con affetto, Mamma
. There were so few words Mary
Grace could make out. This was so frustrating.

She had to find someone to read them, and it
took
her awhile to find a translator who could clearly fol
low the dialect unique to the hill town of Pistoia, north of Florence.

From the letters Mary Grace understood that
Elena was a much younger sister of her mother. This child,
Elena, is
mentioned in early letters from cousin Rosa
lie.
Her cousin also tells her in the last letters, about Elena getting married. In
the very last one,
cugina
Rosalie says Elena and her husband, Federico,
moved south from their beautiful Pistoia closer to Naples for him to work in
his family’s cameo export business.

Cousin Rosalie also wrote letters consoling
Mary Grace’s mother, about the
bambina
, telling her it would get easier.
There it was—she rejected Mary Grace from the moment she was born—but why? She
married Mary Grace’s father against the will of her family, but then why would
she treat Aunt Maggie, who was denied love, and Uncle Paul, who lost his
love in the war, why treat them so badly? Was it be
cause of the courting letters, because she felt duped by his family, and
deserted by hers? Was there no heart left?

Cugina
Rosalie warned,
“You are
morte,
dead to
your papa.” It seemed like Mary Grace’s mother was left shattered,
a glass broken but still held fractured in the frame, like the chrysanthemums
glass in their bathroom window, a view of life that could never be made whole
or clear again.

Mary Grace didn’t want to end up a bitter woman, as she believed
her mother had been. Now she felt her mother was haunting her. She felt lost
and confused. She didn’t know what direction her life was going, and she was
tired of feeling like she didn’t belong anywhere. Was her mother’s life
dismantling her own life?