“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 mother’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 terrible thing, but why are you getting all hung up on this now?
Mary Grace couldn’t answer that. She was exhausted. 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 happened 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?
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 Victorian 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 unfolded 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 inside 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, breathing 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 between 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 Uncle 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 terrible,” 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 dictated 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 between 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 details 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 gotten 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 serene and beautiful pictures.
Mary Grace had hoped when she went back to the box that something would make more sense then before. 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 something 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, Luigi. 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 parents 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 contact 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 letter 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 realized 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 follow 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 Rosalie. 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 because of the courting letters, because she felt duped by his family, and deserted by hers? Was there no heart left?
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