Secret Lives

by Amoss, Berthe;

  “If you think my stories are about your mother, why don’t you want to know about her?”

  “I’ll find out about her my own way! And I’ll know a lot more as soon as I—” I caught myself before I said “as soon as I look in her cedar chest.”

  “As soon as you what?” Holly was instantly alert.

  “Oh, nothing.” I tried to make it casual.

  “It’s got something to do with your mother’s chest! You’ve got the key!”

  My eyes flew open in surprise. Was she really a Sagoma?

  She laughed delightedly and said, “I told you I was a Sagoma! Let’s go to the attic!”

  “Wait a minute, now, Holly. It’s my mother’s cedar chest.”

  “You’re going up in the attic alone? Where it’s dark and scary even in the daytime?”

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “You’ll need me. It will be much better if there’re two of us.”

  I started to give her more arguments, but I was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea—less scary and more fun. “Well,” I said, “maybe, but we ought to wait until Aunt Eveline goes to bed.”

  “No, it’s better now. She’s busy in the kitchen, and I have to go soon.” Holly opened my door.

  I could hear Aunt Eveline talking to Nini, and Aunt Kate was bound to be in her room, working on the Sorrowful Mysteries. I should have paid more attention to the shadow that moved across the lighted hall, but Holly was already opening the attic door and I tiptoed quickly behind her.

  “We can’t use the light,” I whispered, my hand on the switch.

  “No,” Holly whispered back, “they’d see us.”

  We groped our way up the stairs. “I know where things are,” I said still whispering. “Hold on to me, and when we get to the chest, we’ll just have to feel what’s inside.”

  “And take what feels interesting to your room!” Holly said.

  I was excited myself; I was sure we were on the verge of a great discovery.

  At the top of the stairs, we turned left into the attic. A tiny bit of light came from the little outside window and from the hall door we’d left cracked open. The grandfather clock loomed over us like a black ghost, and the floorboards groaned under our feet.

  “Here!” I said, reaching the chest. “I’ve got my finger in the keyhole!” I put the key in and turned the lock. The lid creaked open and the fresh smell of cedar flooded my nostrils. I reached in through soft layers of silk and cotton. I felt the stiff brim of the Panama hat Aunt Eveline loved, and groped for something interesting.

  “Ah,” whispered the Sagoma, both hands deep in rustling tissue paper. “I feel here the secrets of the past. I—”

  I didn’t have a chance to ask her what she meant. Everything happened at once: my hand closed on something cold and hard, the attic flooded with light, and footsteps pounded up the stairs.

  Sandra Lee was in the lead, Aunt Eveline right behind her.

  “I knew I heard someone in the attic!” Sandra Lee cried triumphantly.

  Aunt Eveline took in the open chest and our guilty looks. “I’d almost rather have found a common thief!” she said, angrier than I’d ever seen her. “What are you doing?”

  “We—we just wanted to see the portrait dress, Aunt Eveline,” I lied.

  “I’m sorry,” Holly mumbled. “It was my fault for asking to see it,” she added nobly, laying down her life for her friend.

  “The key,” Aunt Eveline demanded, holding out her hand.

  I placed it on her flat palm.

  “Adelaide, go to your room. I will mete out your punishment later. Holly, tell Nini what you have done. I am certain she will chastise you.”

  Chastise sounded even worse than meting out. I looked at Holly and felt sorry for my friend when I saw her face. I turned to Sandra Lee, concentrating as much hate into a glance as possible.

  “What brought you here?” I said between my teeth.

  “My homework,” she said sweetly. “I needed the assignment.” Even Sandra Lee looked subdued by Aunt Eveline’s reaction.

  Four unhappy people trooped down the steps. But all was not lost. In the pocket of my dress my hand was still closed over something hard and cold. I felt its shape with my fingers, and right then I knew what it was.

  When we got to the bottom of the attic steps, I reached out with my left hand and tried to squeeze Holly’s. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but she was holding something close to her skirt. She managed a weak smile. I stole a glance at Aunt Eveline and knew I’d never done anything so wicked. I got into my room as quickly as possible.

  For once, it was Aunt Eveline who shut the door. I took my hand out of my pocket. I was holding my mother’s prayer book. The mother-of-pearl cover looked new, exactly as it did in her portrait. The cover was carved with a profile of Christ, and the spine of the book was strengthened with gold. It was locked tight by a gold clasp and there was no key. My fingers shook as I forced the lock and broke it open, showering a white, powdery dust in my lap. Something was funny about the pages—they were thick, and stiff, and starting to crumble. Then I saw that the Key of Heaven text had been painted over in white and the pages were full of small numbers in my mother’s neat handwriting. It was “what was white and must be opened every day”! The numbers were the code she’d written Aunt Kate about. I’d found her diary! My mother’s secret thoughts!

  Chapter X

  The afternoon after we were caught, I stayed in my room alone with a tantalizing diary I couldn’t even read. As if my secret life wasn’t bad enough, my real life had become desperate. Aunt Eveline was cold to me and very polite. My punishment, she said (and she was right) was knowing I’d sinned. Holly had been banished from Three Twenty by Nini and Tom was at track every afternoon. I was supposed to take Pumpkin to the park every day, but I didn’t feel like doing that. Now, it was almost time for Little Orphan Annie, and even Sandra Lee might have been better company than no one, but I’d scared her so much, she’d started listening to her own radio. I stared at the diary ready to rip the pages out. I needed help but I didn’t want anyone else to read it.

  I made up one good Jane Whitmore scene entitled The Ferry Boat Ride. In The Ferry Boat Ride, Edmond and I are crossing the river in the late afternoon, and he notices that the golden rays of the setting sun are not as golden as the soft curls that have escaped my hair ribbon and frame my face so charmingly. As he touches my cheek with trembling fingers, the sun sinks behind the earth, and I feel his passionate lips on mine.

  Then, when I was all ready for The Proposal, the scene turned into a conversation between Edmond and me that went like this:

  “Hurry, Jane! We’ll miss the picnic!”

  “Oh, Edmond, let’s leave the others as soon as possible. There’s a place by the lagoon I want to paint. The light will be just right early in the afternoon.”

  “But I want to show you off! You look lovely in that hat.” He obviously adored me. He was about to propose, and I had already written my answer in my diary.

  “I hear Mable and Louis are engaged!” I said.

  “So she claims,” Edmond answered.

  “She has her ring and I think it’s divine! I mean, it’s a match made in Heaven, don’t you think?”

  “She’s been carrying the torch for Louis long enough, I’ll say that!”

  “Edmond, that’s mean.”

  “Well, Louis likes being a bachelor.”

  “Poor Louis, then. Only, I think he’s a flat tire and he’s lucky to have found someone who’ll put up with him!”

  “Jane! I thought you liked Louis! Listen, Jane, marriage is an institution, but marriage is love and love is blind, and therefore, marriage is an institution for the blind! Ha, ha! Get it?”

  “Ha, ha. I get it. Straight out of last month’s College Humor!

  “Jane, you wound me!”

  “Let’s go back. It’s going to rain.”

  “Jane, you’re not mad at me, are you?”

&nbs
p; “No, of course not. Why should I be? Hurry. Let’s go home.”

  Next door Sandra Lee was playing her phonograph so loud, it broke into my Jane Whitmore scene.

  “I can’t give you anything but love, Ba-by!” the voice on the record screamed. “Love’s the only thing I’m thinking of, Ba-by!”

  “Sandra Lee!” I shouted. “Turn that thing off!”

  “Don’t you like music?” she screamed back.

  I looked across the short distance between our bedroom windows. Sandra Lee’s golden curls shone like a halo around her head.

  “I love music!” I hollered and slammed my window shut.

  “Psst!” My door was open and there stood Holly. She slipped in and closed it carefully behind her. “I sneaked over,” she said. “I had to know! Did you find anything? I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” I lied.

  “Oh, well,” said Holly, nonchalantly, “we’ll just have to try again.”

  “Try again! Are you crazy? I wouldn’t try again for anything! Besides, I don’t have the key anymore.”

  “We can try my way,” said the Sagoma.

  I groaned as she took out her scarf.

  “Listen! There’s something going on! Can’t you feel it? Don’t you want to know what’s happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I’m always telling you. If you can’t feel it—a Sagoma knows! I know something. You have only to ask.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “I wouldn’t dare go to the attic, if that’s what you mean!”

  “You have to dare! In this life,” said the Sagoma, “to dare is to live!” She looked very pleased with herself. “Besides, I saw your Aunt Eveline leave for church.”

  “Aunt Eveline will kill us if she comes back and finds us,” I said, but I was weakening. I could see that Holly was bursting to tell me something, and she was determined to do it her way. I wanted to know what it was. “Last time we were very unprofessional,” I said. “We left the attic door cracked and I didn’t pay enough attention to who might be in the house.”

  “No one’s here now!” Holly said, wrapping the scarf around her head. “Let’s go!”

  We went carefully. I could still hear Sandra Lee’s record, and Nini was singing “Keep the Homefires Burning” in the kitchen.

  When we got to the cedar chest, Holly went through the usual mumbo-jumbo of dusting with the feather duster. We placed our hands on the lid and closed our eyes. After a short time, the silence began to fill with distant automobile horns and an occasional bird singing as it flew past the little attic window.

  I sighed loudly.

  “Shh!”

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  “Will you shut up?”

  “That’s not polite,” I answered. “Aunt Eveline could come back any minute. Nothing’s happened. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “There!” Holly said triumphantly, standing up. On the lid where her hand had been was a snapshot in a little ivory frame.

  “It appeared from nowhere!” Holly said.

  “Holly, what is this?”

  “It just appeared,” she said stubbornly.

  “You certainly don’t expect me to swallow that!”

  It was a snapshot of my mother with a man who was not my father. The man had dark hair parted slightly to the side and slicked down so flat, it looked lacquered. His face was in shadow, but I could see a mustache, and I could tell he was looking fondly at my mother.

  He was terribly good-looking, wearing knickers and a bow tie. He looked like Edmond. My mother was looking straight at me, laughing.

  “Holly! Where did you get it?” Even as I asked I knew she’d found it in my mother’s chest. “You had to bring me all the way up here to give me this?”

  She didn’t answer. Looking very smug, she turned to leave.

  “You got it in the chest, didn’t you?” I yelled. “And you know who it is because Nini tells you things. And you put them in stories because you just love to pretend you’re a Sagoma! That’s why you’re so interested in my mother!”

  I felt triumphant until she shouted back. “Then that makes my stories true, doesn’t it? Because if Nini tells me things, they’re true. So there!”

  “Addie?” Aunt Kate’s wobbly voice floated up from the foot of the stairs. “Come down from the attic!”

  We ran down the steps as fast as possible.

  “What were you doing up there?” Aunt Kate asked in her querulous tone.

  “Nothing.” I knew Aunt Eveline would never have told her about my stealing the key.

  “Do nothing in your room, then. Or better, say your beads.” Aunt Kate touched my hair and her voice softened. “We have to take care of you,” she said. “You’re still our little girl.”

  I wanted to stamp my foot and scream, “I am not your little girl!” I mumbled it instead.

  Aunt Kate, who is not always as deaf as she claims, heard part of what I’d mumbled, and said, “I remember when your mother said that! It was Christmas and she’d just come home from Florence. I remember . . .”

  Aunt Kate smiled to herself and her voice trailed off after her memory. I escaped to my room with the ivory-framed snapshot.

  JANE WHITMORE BACK HOME

  A knock on the door.

  “Kate!”

  “Yes!”

  “May I come in?” My golden hair, combed out, hung to my waist. I was wearing the nightgown Eveline had made for me; she had spent two whole days trimming it with Irish lace. In my hand I held my silver-backed hairbrush.

  Kate smiled. She was sitting in bed, wrapping Christmas presents. I climbed up next to her and sat cross-legged. I began to brush my hair, conscious of the firelight playing on my curls.

  “Thank you for talking Eveline into letting me come home,” I said.

  “How nice to have you home—my baby sister. Will you ever grow up, dear?”

  I giggled. “Never. I will stay a little girl forever. At least, Edmond seems to think so. Look at this snapshot Mable took of us. He’s looking at me as though he thinks I’m just a child.” Kate took the picture in her hands.

  “Edmond is not going to grow up, either,” said Kate in a different tone. “Youth becomes you, but it’s high time Edmond amounted to something—and he never will.”

  “Oh, Kate! You don’t know him. He’s grown up, all right.” I smiled to myself. “He’s going to get his own apartment and he’s going to write a book. Stories about the war.”

  “How can he write about the war when he didn’t even go?”

  “He did too! He may not have gone overseas, but he was in the army.”

  “The supply corps! In Atlanta. He didn’t even leave the South!”

  “He says his stories will be true. A definitive work about the South, and the war.”

  “If I know Edmond, they will not even be work, much less, definitive.”

  I jumped off the bed. “You’re mean, Kate!”

  “Oh, darling,” cried Kate, laughing. “You are the dearest child! Don’t be mad at your old-maid sister! It’s just that there are so many fine young men crazy about you. Why, look at Louis! He wouldn’t marry Mable if he could have you. I just want you to be sure when you choose.”

  “I’ve chosen Edmond, Kate,” I said quietly. “I hope you grow to like him.” I turned and left Kate staring after me.

  Chapter XI

  You said you were coming over to get Lad Comes Back.” Tom shoved the screen door open in his gentlemanly manner and let it bang behind him. I had come downstairs to find Holly and make her tell me who the man in the snapshot was, and she had just informed me that only in her Sagoma state could she possibly tell.

  “I forgot about Lad whatever-it-is,” I said carelessly. I was too wrapped up in what was happening to worry about a fictional dog. Edmond had turned into the only man my mother had ever loved, the one in the snapshot. He was on the tip of my mind the way words are
sometimes on the tip of the tongue, and just out of reach.

  “You forgot about Lad! I certainly hope you don’t forget about Pumpkin!”

  “It was because my friend came over I forgot.” I pointed at Holly, sulking on a kitchen stool. It was her first legal visit since Nini had chastised her. She glared at Tom and followed Nini into the dining room. Holly was very good at exits.

  “She doesn’t look very friendly.”

  “That’s because she’s mad at me.”

  “A great friendship.” I ignored that and Tom continued, “Here’s Lad Comes Back anyhow. You’ll like it! In this one, Lad gets stolen and—”

  “Don’t tell me! I want to read it.”

  “Okay. I’m late for practice. Please don’t forget to take Pumpkin out. I made the team and I’m going to pole-vault in the track meet next Saturday. I have to practice every day, even Sunday, and I need my sleep, so I can’t go to dancing school Friday night. Isn’t that great?”

  The opposite of being asked for the contest in advance is finding out you won’t even get half a dance the whole evening.

  “Are you going?” Tom asked.

  “Not if I can help it,” I answered. I could just see Sandra Lee and Harold waltzing by Denise, Elizabeth, and yours sincerely, Adelaide Aspasie.

  “Well, don’t then.” Tom kicked the screen door half open and crashed through, letting it slam behind him.

  “That boy’s manners are terrible!” said Aunt Eveline, coming into, the kitchen as the screen door exploded against the doorframe. “Just because his father is not at home is no reason for Mable not to discipline him.”

  “Manners aren’t important,” I said. “It’s sincerity that counts.”

  “My dear, manners are the expression of sincerity. Good manners . . .” She was off again, but I wasn’t listening. Tom had meant, was I going to the track meet, and I thought he’d meant dancing school.

  “Tom!” I shouted out the back door.

  “Ah-de-la-eed! Are you listening to me?”

  Tom wasn’t in sight.