Worn Masks

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by Phyllis Carito


  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?

  The Curtain Pulls Back

  Chapter 17

  ARMED WITH THE translations of the letters Mary Grace went to see Aunt Maggie. Aunt Maggie sighed. “Uncle Paul, he lived in Italy with the family to work.”

  “What does this have to do with my mother?”

  “Aspett, listen, you want to know? Yes?”

  “Yes, Aunt Maggie, I want to know.”

  “Uncle Paul went to Italy, he was a careless young man, sent to the famiglia, to Papa Maschere’s older brothers, made to work long hours in the quarry, to diventae un uomo, tobecome a man. He had grown strong, and he had found love. He had met the beautiful Caterina.”

  Mary Grace remembered Uncle Paul’s sketches.

  “They were come per la magia insieme, this is like magic, special together. Uncle Paul, though, he had to return to America because of the war. It was coming and he had to get out. Everyone thought that by returning he’d be able to later bring Caterina to him. Capisci? He had to leave Caterina there.”

  “Okay.” Mary Grace noticed Aunt Maggie was shaking.

  “When he could, he would come back for Caterina, but during the war she had gone with her family and met a bad end.”

  “What do you mean, Aunt Maggie?”

  “Ah, for such a smart girl you know nothing. Their family, her parents, Caterina and a younger brother all were killed in an accident fleeing the bombings.” Mary Grace saw the pain in Aunt Maggie’s face about these people she didn’t even know, but she knew that they meant so much to Uncle Paul. They sat quiet for a while.

  Mary Grace saw Aunt Maggie’s eyes were full of sadness for Uncle Paul. But, still, what did this have to do with her mother?

  Aunt Maggie continued, “Giuseppe, your mother’s brother also worked at the quarry. He and your Uncle Paul had become friends. Uncle Paul had to come back here. Giuseppe kept connected with our Maschere family in Ravello, a small town above Amalfi, which is where Papa came from.”

  Uncle Paul and Giuseppe Giordano? Mary Grace tried to absorb this new information. She could remember that there were times that Uncle Paul disappeared for a while.

  Now she realized her mother knew where Uncle Paul had gone on these trips and that he had known all about her. Somehow, he was a threat to Teresa. It wasn’t these letters from cugina Rosalie; it was Uncle Paul who connected the families? It was so much to think about.

  Plus, Mary Grace was still trying to absorb that Uncle Paul had had his own life, and a now this confirmed love and loss in Italy.

  The next time Mary Grace went to see Aunt Maggie she brought one of the sketchbooks from the attic, but Aunt Maggie pushed it away.

  “Your mother, Teresa, came here because she was no happy in Italy. That is her family story. Find the letters from your mother’s sister.”

  “What? What letters? Other letters? Aunt Maggie, what are you talking about?”

  “Teresa lived in Boston with cugini when she came, and thought she would be a big fashion designer, but she was seamstress in the factory.

  “She was at a wedding that your father and Uncle Paul go to because Giuseppe set up that they be invited. I always thought Giuseppe wanted Uncle Paul to like your mother, but instead it was your father that felt she was a tesoro (treasure) and he wanted only to marry her.

  “She wanted romance, love letters, fancy, fancy.

  “Your father he was a simple hard-working man, a good family man. So, now you know about the letters. She married your father so she don’t have to go back to crawling on her knees to her own father.”

  Aunt Maggie sighed. “Coming to America and not being the designer she thought she would be was one thing, but being disowned by her own family, by her own father, for being involved with a man whose family, although now in America, came from the sud, below Napoli, came from niente, nothing, had left her no choice to go home to Italy.”

  Her mother had come here, wanting to be something more than a wife and mother? Once she married into the Maschere family did Teresa regret it?

  Aunt Maggie hesitated then, and was quiet for a while. “We were not good enough for them. That is what she believed. Her family, her brother Guiseppe, and her sister Elena–they know.” Mary Grace noticed Aunt Maggie tense up, sighing, and shaking. She should just stop this right now, but Mary Grace was realizing that she did need to know, as here it was again, missing pieces–why were the Maschere’s not good enough?

  “What are you talking about not good enough? You said her brother set it up? Did my mother even talk to her family about me? I don’t understand Aunt Maggie. What did you do? What did your family in Italy do?”

  There was nothing but questions and more questions, or maybe just one. “My mother was so miserable. Was she always so miserable?”

  Or was it only after having me? This thought Mary Grace did not voice, could not say out loud.

  Gaining or Losing Ground

  Chapter 18

  MARY GRACE SPENT another evening drinking two glasses of wine and then another, and finally a fourth. This is terrible, just terrible. Nothing about this family is any good! Family? Were we even a family or were we just a bunch of misfits? She spoke out loud to no one. She spoke into the walls of her apartment. She went over and over in her head Aunt Maggie’s stories.

  I have to stop. I’m so sick of these ghosts haunting me. Why can’t I just accept that my mother didn’t love me? But, why? It was her lowest point. She stayed in bed for the next two days.

  Oh, Gracie, when was the last time you were happy?

  The lake. Into her mind surfaced the last time just she and her father had gone up to the lake. Dad, you didn’t just work and drink, you really liked to fish. Remember how you liked to sit by the water. To sit where it was quiet. Remember, I would draw pictures, pictures of the ducks and geese on the edges of the lake. I liked to draw every detail, like how their feet sunk into the muck where the ground was soaked, draw their feet and beaks, and the distinctions among them. Dad, you were next to me, fishing, we were quiet together. She smiled remembering her father asking her what the names were of each of the animals she had drawn. Together they had named them—stretch neck, crooked beak, and bean head—the last one in Italian—testa fagioli.

  It was so long since she had thought of it, that she did draw, that she and Luigi had laughed together. Dad, help me. I did what you asked. I took care of her. And now I am taking care of Aunt Maggie, but there is so much I didn’t know!

  I’m not going crazy. Maybe I do need to know who my mother was, and what made her so miserable all her life. The past doesn’t go away. Didn’t Aunt Maggie find that out even though she tried to bury her past, it didn’t go away until she finally exposed it?

  Was Aunt Maggie talking about the love letters or the letters from Italy to her mom? She kept insisting to Mary Grace about letters from her mother’s sister, but Mary Grace had yet to find any other letters. She had searched in Aunt Maggie’s apartment and there was nothing in her dresser drawers, nothing in the trunk up the attic, nor in the many boxes she found in the cellar.

  Maybe Aunt Maggie was confusing the letters, mixing them together in her mind.

  Part III

  Records from Pistoia, Italy

  Chapter 19

  MARY GRACE READ about the Tuscany hills between Lucca and Florence where Pistoians made their home. This is where her mother was born and her mother’s family still lived. Would this help in
her quest to know her mother? She was in a state of suspension, and her life, as she knew it was on hold. She had a constant gnawing in the pit of her stomach.

  The records she requested from the Comune di Pistoia finally came. They included a note from a man, a clerk who worked there, who claimed to be a cugino, and who wrote that he would guide her through all the records. It was like he had been expecting her requests for a long time. She started to look at the papers, many of them were hand-written.

  Her mother’s birth certificate read, born 1908 to Giovanni and Elenora Giordano. Mary Grace couldn’t imagine her mother as a baby or as a child.

  There were certificates for her siblings, two boys, one who died in World War II, and then twin sisters born eleven years after her mother in 1919, Maria and Graziella. How could this be? How could she be named for them and never know they existed? Why? Why name Mary Grace for them? She looked more carefully and saw they had lived for only two years and died of scarlet fever.

  “Maria Graziella, Maria Graziella.” Her head was spinning, hearing her mother call her over and over.

  “Va bene?” her father would always ask her mother after she had received a letter from Italy. “Are you okay, is everything still okay?”

  Mary Grace flipped through different papers, trying to focus. She saw that her grandmother died from complications soon after giving birth to the twins. What did it all mean? Her mother had lost her own mother, and gained and lost two sisters. Then, she had a child who couldn’t fill those losses? Mary Grace wondered what her mother ever thought of her.

  She looked at other documents, paying attention to the dates, and saw that her grandfather remarried barely three years later. So, it was the second wife, Christina that wrote to her mother and called her daughter. There were two boys born to this woman, and years later, the daughter, Elena.

  Mary Grace was exhausted by it all. She had spent all day reading and trying to make some sense of it. She feared the recurring nightmare that she had since her mother’s death, of her mother calling out to her from the wheelchair, “Maria Graziella,” but was she calling Mary Grace, her daughter, or was her mother calling back to her lost sisters?

  Following the records was a first of many letters from Elena, her mother’s younger sister. The cugino in the record room must have given her Mary Grace’s address. Elena talked about her brothers, and Mary Grace’s mother’s younger brother Giuseppe and coming with him to America to see their sister, Teresa. She remembered meeting Mary Grace who was seven years old and Elena was eleven years old then.

  It was difficult to believe that they had once met. Mary Grace had no recollection of that meeting.

  Back to the nursing home and more questions for Aunt Maggie. “I have been trying to find out about my mother’s family. This sister, Elena, she came to America to see my mother?”

  “Yes, it is all in the letters. Your mother, I forgive her now, she should rest in peace, but then I hated her. You learn, Gracie, when you slap someone back, the slap on your cheek doesn’t sting any less. We did it for you, Gracie, Uncle Paul begged me to write to her family.”

  “What? You wrote to my mother’s family? Answered the letters my mother received?”

  “No, your mother turned her nose to those letters.”

  “That’s not true, Aunt Maggie. I saw her read them, I saw her cry.”

  “Gracie, she was cold, years before she was dead, she was a pesce morte. I wrote to the sister and she wrote to me. Somewhere, somewhere in the house are those letters.”

  Mary Grace went back to the house. Where? Almost everything was emptied out. She sat in Aunt Maggie’s living room that had so often been a refuge for her. She looked in her bag and took out the information from Italy, and a second letter that came from Elena, written mostly in English.

  Elena talked about “our beautiful village above the town of Pistoia, casa en Pescia.” She sent photos of the Piazza del Duomo, and the San Zeno Cathedral.

  How much did Mary Grace need to know from this woman, this Aunt Elena?

  Elena was born when Mary Grace’s mom was twenty-six years old, and Mary Grace was born when her mom was thirty years old. Mary Grace tried to get it straight in her mind. Elena was her mother’s half sister, her aunt, born about four years before Mary Grace was born.

  There were also photographs of each of the eight children of Giovanni Giordano, living and dead, Giovanni’s proud brood.

  The one of Teresa must have been taken before she left for America. She was standing at the door of their house, her head tilted to one side, and she was squinting into the sun. Mary Grace thought maybe she looked uncertain. Her hair was long and wispy around her face. Mary Grace had never seen her mother’s hair not cropped short and combed flat. She had on a long patterned dress and pumps. She wished the picture was in color, not in black and white, and yet she could tell this dress was not the dreary black that she always knew her mother to wear.

  She pinned that photograph above her desk and looked at it for a long time.

  Che cosa fai?” What are you doing? She could her mother’s voice.

  Mary Grace heard the words so many times. “Che cosa fai? Go sweep the steps.” or Che cosa fai? Go wash the socks in the sink.” Always commands mixed with words she never really understood.

  Che cosa fai?

  I’m finding out who I am mother. Mary Grace declared to herself.

  She felt strengthened by the way Elena spoke in her letters, and awkward about the way Elena encompassed her as if they had been always been connected. The way Elena spoke about her own mother, Momma Christina, with such love and respect, in some strange way it consoled Mary Grace, and in other ways it was so foreign to her this show of love. This was not a concept comfortable to Mary Grace.

  A new set of letters arrived from Elena’s younger brothers Francesco and Giovanni, Jr. They were in Italian and from what Mary Grace could decipher they were welcoming her into the family, as if it had only been too long since they had spoken, not that they had never met her before.

  The photographs included the family house with the Colline Montalbano rising behind it. There were two other photographs of the inside of the house showing the open living room and kitchen. And, a poor copy of an old black-and-white photograph of Momma Christina as a young woman, and on the back she, or the brothers had written “Benvenuto—sei famiglia.”

  It all made Mary Grace feel anxious, the way that change drives you to new places and brings fear of those new places that tries to pull you back. It was like she waiting for someone to catch her, “Maria Graziella how dare you talk to my sorella?” Of course it would be her mother warning her not to engage. Mary Grace reverted to being an observer, taking in the details from these new exchanges, but not participating emotionally. Using a magnifying glass, she looked at the photographs, moving around the room seeing modern and old mixed together. There were flowers, squashes, and herbs, hanging upside down from the beam in the kitchen over a worn butcher block. On the walls were beautiful tapestries, and on inlaid wood tables were stunning vases and other ceramica.

  What an amazing and beautiful place, so well kept. Mary Grace was challenged by the warmth and brightness of this place. She was struck by the feeling of family in the letters and even in the photographs. Could Mary Grace ever feel a part of this family?

  She had to admit she did look forward to their letters. With dictionaries and translators she spent hours poring over them. They told her about Papa, their father, and her grandfather, long deceased. They told her they tried to reconnect with her mother, Teresa, after he was gone. They called her Maria Graziella. She still shivered at the name.

  Mary Grace even started playing the piano again in Aunt Maggie’s living room, remembering how it was to sit there and play “On Top of Old Smokey,” and how easily it came back to her as her fingers played on the keys. It comforted her again. All this uncertainty suddenly felt like it was leading somewhere, like she was close to understanding something about her own life,
by understanding her mother’s life.

  Then an unexpected letter arrived, from Giuseppe, written by Elena. She had gone to visit him and as he dictated, she wrote, “I am happy, as so we all are, to know you are well, we had worried for you.”

  Mary Grace lingered over those words, wondering what they meant, that they worried for her? She was doodling on a pad by her bed, thinking—her mother was one of eight siblings. She was doodling the number eight. She thought about the precision of compensatory movements in figure skating, the continuum line that curves and crosses forming 8.

  She fell asleep to the motion of the figure eight, and she saw the salt timer on the kitchen stove, thrown at her by her mother, the eight breaking apart–her mother had split the family. She awoke confused. Had she fallen to sleep–or was she remembering—her mother had spilled the salt, but that wasn’t what she just heard in her mind–her mother had split the family. Why? Why had her mother been so angry with her? Mary Grace only knew that she had cleaned the salt from the floor, and then brought a salt timer from one of her childhood games and left it in the kitchen for her mother.

  It seemed everyone tread softly around Teresa, everyone tried to appease her. Maybe Teresa was more like her father than she would want to know. And Mary Grace was getting obsessed with the fear she was like her mother.

  This was a restless night for Mary Grace. So many people, and names, and stories crashing together, like waves pounding the shore with the unexpected undertow ready to take you down at any moment.

  Aunt Elena

  Chapter 20

  ELENA WAS A beautiful woman with long salt-and-pepper hair, intense light brown eyes, and a large mouth that filled her thin face out. Mary Grace saw that Elena was the sister of Teresa. She saw her mother in the shape of the face, and the mouth, but the eyes were opposites. Her mother’s dull, Elena’s sparkling with smile in every photograph.

 

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