Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  Ivy had listened to that recording over and over, and she could hear Grandma Fay’s voice telling how the men in the dark uniforms and caps had pushed them along, trying to get them up the ramp and into the big building. “But my mother stood there watching our trunks come off the boat. They didn’t belong to us anymore, and we needed like a hole in the head to be standing there in the freezing cold. ‘Come on,’ I begged her. And the men were scowling at her and scolding and shouting at us, words that I didn’t understand.”

  Would the wicker trunk contain lace tablecloths and hand-embroidered bed linens, like the ones her great-grandmother had sold to save her family? When Ivy’s great-grandmother had cried over what she’d lost, her great-grandfather had scolded her, “Don’t worry about those old schmattes. This is America. Here we get everything new.”

  “What’s inside?” Ivy asked Mrs. Bindel.

  “I don’t know. It’s locked.”

  Weird logic—Mrs. Bindel could throw it away, but she couldn’t break it open. It wouldn’t be hard. The trunk fittings were rusted and not all that sturdy to begin with.

  “You’re not even a little bit curious?”

  “You want it?” Mrs. Bindel asked with a hopeful, upturned inflection.

  “Well…I guess….” What are you, nuts? A hectoring voice sounded in Ivy’s ear. You just got rid of Mr. Vlaskovic’s old junk, and now you’re acquiring more? “I just wanted to—”

  “So!” Mrs. Bindel beamed and clapped her hands together. “You’ll take it all.”

  Before Ivy could muster a protest, Mrs. Bindel had yanked the little sign from the ground and tossed it into one of the boxes. She pivoted and started back toward her house.

  “Settled!” Mrs. Bindel said, pointing a finger toward heaven.

  4

  I get the pipes and empty paint cans—you can never have too many of those,” David said later that morning, poking the toe of his work boot into one of the boxes now amassed in front of their house. “But remind me why we need a burned frying pan?”

  “Burned and dented,” Ivy said. “I wanted to see what was inside the trunk. She made me take it all.”

  “Made you? That woman drives a hard bargain.” He leaned closer to the trunk and sniffed.

  “I know. It’s stinky. The thing’s been stored in Mrs. Bindel’s garage for decades. God knows what vermin have gotten to it. It belonged to the Vlaskovics.”

  David eyed the trunk with new interest. “So this was Vlad’s. One of his boxes of earth?”

  “It was his father’s. Besides, it’s not that heavy,” Ivy said. The vampire jokes were getting stale. “Think you can pry it open?”

  David got a crowbar from the toolbox in his pickup truck. It took seconds to jimmy the trunk’s hinges.

  “Ta-DAH!” he said with a dramatic sweep of the hand as he raised the lid.

  The wicker creaked. A powerful wave of mildew rose from the open trunk. Ivy put her hand over her nose and peered inside. She felt a tremor of excitement. It was full to the brim.

  “Oh,” Ivy said, picking up a once-white cotton infant’s jacket with pale blue picot embroidery along the edges and a narrow satin ribbon at the neck. Alongside that was a baby’s gown with tiny pin tucks across the chest and lace insets in the sleeves and around the hem, and a matching bonnet. “Aren’t these sweet?”

  She took out the gown. The fabric felt dry and brittle. Out dropped a lock of fine dark hair, tied with a pale blue ribbon. Baby’s hair. Surely whoever had packed this trunk and nestled the lock of hair so carefully into the infant’s clothing hadn’t meant for it to end up getting pawed over by anonymous neighbors.

  Beneath a layer of baby clothes was a woman’s white dress made of semi-sheer fabric. It had a high neck, and there were delicate ruffles across the shoulder and down the front. A wedding dress? Such a shame it was covered with tea-colored spots.

  Ivy dug through the remaining contents of the basket. There were other women’s dresses, one of navy wool with a white scalloped collar and small pearl buttons. Ivy lifted it out. No waist, just a tie in the back. The fabric was riddled with moth holes.

  “What do you suppose…?” David said, lifting out what looked like a coarse piece of white sailcloth. He turned it over. It was a shirt, its tapered sleeves sewn together at the cuffs. A thick leather strap was sewn to the end of one sleeve, and a sturdy-looking metal buckle was sewn to the end of the other. Instead of buttons to fasten the front—or was it the back?—there were smaller straps and more metal buckles. A straitjacket, Ivy realized with a jolt.

  “That story about a crazy son in the attic,” David said. “Maybe it’s true.”

  The front was covered with stains, some dark brown and some yellow. Ivy looked away, feeling as if this was something obscene. Too personal to be held up in public.

  “Put it back,” she said.

  “Hang on,” David said. “This looks interesting.” He handed Ivy a bundle wrapped in ecru lace.

  It was heavy. Unrolling the musty layers, Ivy found a tarnished silver hairbrush. Then a matching hand mirror and a cut-glass jar that fit in the palm of her hand. The jar’s silver lid had a hole in the middle.

  Ivy pried the jar open. Inside was coiled…what? Thread saved by a thrifty housewife? Ivy poked at it. Not thread. Hair.

  The final item in the bundle was a notebook. Flakes from the pebbly black leather cover came off on Ivy’s hand as she opened it. She riffled through lined pages of dated handwritten entries. Between the pages was a piece of thick folded paper. Ivy took it out and opened it. It was a sepia-tinted photograph.

  To one side of the crease stood a young woman with a long, expressionless face and shadows around her eyes. She wore a dark dress with a white collar—the dress from the trunk. Her spider-leg fingers seemed to float over the stolid shoulder of a stern-faced man with a brushy mustache who was seated in front of her. He was dressed in a dark suit and sat with one arm poised, rigid around a bright-eyed little boy. The youngster couldn’t have been more than five years old, but he sat there on his father’s knee, somber and straight-backed as an adult in his short pants, jacket, and tie.

  The photograph broke apart at the fold, and Ivy was left holding just the woman. As she gazed into the emptiness of the young woman’s eyes, she felt overpowering sadness.

  “I’m sure the Vlaskovics never intended for these things to be thrown out,” Ivy said as she stood at the kitchen sink that evening, waiting for the running water to get warm so she could rinse the tarnished silver pieces. “I don’t feel right keeping them.”

  David grunted. He sat at the table with a dictionary, working a crossword puzzle. Vocabulary was David’s latest self-improvement jag, triggered by a tart remark from Rose Gardens’ office manager, Lillian Bailiss, that had sent him to the dictionary for the definition of “philistine.”

  Ivy yawned. It was barely nine-thirty, still too early even for her to turn in. “We’ve got Mr. Vlaskovic’s contact information somewhere. I’ll call him and find out if he wants these back.”

  Even without a personal connection, Ivy had also kept the notebook, the photograph, and the lock of baby’s hair from the trunk. It was odd, the things one could so easily pitch and the things one couldn’t. Without a qualm, Ivy had bagged and given away Grandma Fay’s clothing, her pocketbooks and costume jewelry. What she couldn’t part with had been, of all things, her grandmother’s reading glasses and her rubber-band ball.

  Ivy got out a jar of silver polish from under the kitchen sink. Before she started to work, she squinted through the kitchen window. At first all she could see was her own reflection—the fullness of her cheeks, something new with the weight gain of pregnancy, made her nose seem less like an exclamation point down the middle of her face.

  Her eyes refocused, and she could see the trunk. She and David had left it with its remaining contents out at the curb for Wednesday’s garbage pickup. It was still out there, looking forlorn and hopeful in the dappled glow of the streetlight.

>   David had appropriated Mrs. Bindel’s sign proclaiming it free for the taking. Apparently many folks had found that irresistible, because all afternoon and into the evening a virtual cavalcade of garbage pickers had stopped to check it out. A young blonde, who reminded Ivy of Britney Spears on a good day, had helped herself to the white dress. The woman who’d been at their yard sale and whom Ivy had seen that morning, pushing her two kids down the block, had taken the baby clothes. At twilight Ivy had seen a man with a tall, thin silhouette out there rummaging through what remained. Later she noticed that the box of plumbing innards had disappeared. At one point even Mrs. Bindel was out there looking into the trunk. Giver’s remorse? Ivy wondered. Too bad the bottom was such a mess, or someone would have taken it for refurbishing.

  Ivy ran warm water over the silver back of the hairbrush.

  “Repoussé,” she said. It was a lovely, voluptuous word that perfectly described the ornate, raised design of flowers and hummingbirds.

  “‘Pushed back.’ Eight letters, half of them vowels.” David licked his index finger and made a hash mark in the air. “Now, hush. I’m trying to concentrate.”

  She removed the remaining hair caught in the bristles of the brush.

  “You know that glass dish with the silver lid?” Ivy said. She tucked the strands of light brown hair through the hole in the lid of the jar. “It’s a hair receiver. Victorian ladies saved hair to stuff pincushions and make jewelry. One a lot like this one recently sold for over a hundred dollars on eBay.”

  “Sounds like we still need to hit the lottery.”

  Ivy gouged silver polish from the jar with a damp cloth and began to rub the back of the hairbrush. Black appeared on the cloth as tarnish disappeared from the raised surface.

  “A complete dresser set would be worth a whole lot more,” she went on. “There would have been a half dozen more pieces. Probably a comb, a buttonhook, a…”

  David picked up his puzzle and dictionary and left the room.

  Ivy switched to an old toothbrush, working away at the final traces of tarnish. Then she picked up the hand mirror. Her face looked back from the streaky glass. Chipmunk cheeks aside, she still resembled Morticia Addams, with her long straight hair and bangs, especially at the end of a busy, tiring day.

  She polished the mirror back. Then she went to work on the lid of the hair receiver. She rinsed the pieces and buffed each with a dish towel. Finally she lined them up on the counter and admired the results.

  She remembered the bronze statuette mounted at the base of the stairs. Might as well give it a cleaning while she was at it. She went to the entry hall and lifted Bessie off her perch. A six-inch bolt that stuck down into the newel post was all that kept the heavy statue anchored in place.

  As Ivy carried the figure into the kitchen, she remembered the first time she and David had stepped over the threshold of their new home and how Bessie, with her arm raised, seemed to welcome her personally. Ivy had been overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu—the house had felt so much like the more modest Victorian where her family had lived before her father died. Before her mother started drinking.

  She set the statue on the kitchen counter. She’d seen enough episodes of Antiques Roadshow to know that polishing old bronze was a terrible idea. That poor woman who’d taken Brasso to a Tiffany lamp base had dissolved into tears when she was told that she’d polished away ten thousand dollars’ worth of patina.

  Ivy was wiping the statue with a damp cloth, clearing each of its dust-lined crevices, when she heard a sound from outside. A dry squeak. A moment later there it was again. Sounded as if yet another customer had stopped to see what wondrous items could be had for free.

  Ivy glanced at the clock. After ten. She dimmed the kitchen so she could see out. Beyond the lawn, past Theo’s campaign sign, out at the curb, the lid of the wicker trunk was raised. It lowered a bit, and Ivy could see the head and shoulders of someone out there. A car drove by, and its headlights strafed the shadowy figure. A woman.

  The lid lowered a bit more. Ivy felt a jolt of recognition. Long dark hair. Bangs. Sunglasses.

  If she didn’t know better, she’d say she was looking at herself.

  With a loud clatter, the statuette fell into the sink, and Ivy reached for her throat, groping for her grandmother’s necklace and the hand-shaped good-luck charm that should have been hanging there but wasn’t.

  5

  Stop chasing your tail and think. That was what Grandma Fay would say whenever Ivy ran around the apartment looking for misplaced homework or house keys. Dollars to doughnuts, it’s wherever you think it is.

  So where should it be? Last night the necklace had gotten caught on her bath towel. David had broken the clasp getting it unstuck, and he’d left it on the sink in the third-floor bathroom.

  But it wasn’t there. Not on the bathroom counter, not in the sink, not on the floor or in the wastebasket or behind the radiator or anywhere else in the room.

  Had she inadvertently vacuumed it up? She found the vacuum cleaner, still in the attic bedroom. She removed the dust bag, tore it open, and dumped the contents onto some newspaper. But when she picked through, she found no necklace.

  Methodically, she searched the rest of the house, top down, becoming increasingly ticked off at herself. An hour later she found David watching TV in the den. She stood in the doorway and swallowed a ragged sob.

  David looked over. “Stretch?”

  It was ridiculous. Just because she couldn’t find her grandmother’s amulet…Ivy put her hand to her mouth and sobbed again.

  David sprang to his feet and came over to her. “What’s wrong?” He wiped away a tear from her cheek. “Hey, what’s this about?”

  She told him.

  “That’s it? You misplaced your necklace?”

  “It’s so frustrating. I’m losing things. Seeing things.”

  “Seeing what?”

  Ivy told him about the woman she’d seen standing outside at the curb.

  “Hey, we’d hoped people would stop and help themselves, didn’t we?” David asked.

  “But she looked just like me.”

  David blinked. “Sounds like you were seeing your own reflection—”

  “I’d turned out the light. And I was not wearing sunglasses.”

  “She had on sunglasses?”

  “That’s what I just said!”

  David raised his eyebrows. “Show me.”

  She walked him to the dark kitchen, and they stood looking through the window. Outside, the wicker trunk sat closed at the curb.

  “Wraparound sunglasses,” Ivy said.

  “It’s pretty dark out there.”

  “A car drove by with headlights. I saw what I saw.”

  David turned to face Ivy. “Okay. So a woman wearing sunglasses walks by, stops to have a look in the trunk. Maybe she even takes some stuff.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Big deal.”

  Ivy sighed. “Of course. You’re right. It’s just that”—she hiccupped a sob—“and now Grandma Fay’s necklace is—” The final word caught in Ivy’s throat. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  Of course, she did know. Up past her bedtime and nine months pregnant.

  “Did you look in the—” David started.

  “I looked everywhere.” The words came out loud and whiny. Pregnancy had permeated every one of her defenses.

  David recoiled. “Hey, it’s probably out there partying with my orphaned socks and your missing toothbrush.”

  Ivy snagged a tissue and blew her nose.

  “Want me to help look?” he said. “You know what they say about two heads.”

  “Better than none.”

  She let David lead the way through the house, to all the spots she’d already checked and others that she hadn’t.

  “I told you, it’s gone,” she said when it still hadn’t turned up.

  He put his arm around her waist. “Silver’s not biodegradable. I guarantee, it’s got to b
e somewhere. In the meanwhile you need someone to tuck you into bed. You’ve been up since dawn.”

  Gently but firmly, he propelled her up the stairs.

  Feeling too anxious to fall sleep, Ivy sat up in bed. She opened the small leather-bound book that she’d found in the wicker trunk. She ran her fingertips across a dry, brittle page, over words written in ink from a fountain pen.

  Emilia V.–May 23, 1922

  Emilia. That was an old-fashioned name. The V must have been for Vlaskovic. 1922. Between the wars and around the time that Ivy’s grandmother and great-grandmother had left Europe.

  New journal, new beginnings. Today we moved into this beautiful house on Laurel Street. It is past midnight, but I am too excited to sleep.

  For the first time, this afternoon I stood on the porch, my porch. The meadow across from us is covered with buttercups.

  Across the street there’d been a field? Amazing. Ivy read on.

  As I watched the man that Joseph hired carry in the table Mother and Father gave us, I felt the baby move. I wanted to call out to Mother and Matilda, but my letter will take a week to get to Toronto.

  The baby had been a boy, Ivy was sure of it—just as she was sure that Emilia V. was the long-faced, somber woman in the photograph, and that Emilia’s fingers had tied the narrow blue satin ribbon around the lock of baby’s hair Ivy had found tucked in this notebook.

  As Ivy read through page after page of dated entries, written in flowing script, the flickering ghost image of a woman solidified into one of flesh and blood, one whose days were filled with making a home, waiting for her first child to be born, and yearning for the friends and family she’d left in Canada. Ivy had nothing like this diary to document her own family’s past.

  By July the writing had become tight and crabbed. Ivy imagined Emilia pregnant, writing at a drop-front desk in the living room, clutching her pen, her face pinched.

  Ivy read the entry for August 20 twice.

  When I returned from my walk, I studied myself long in my looking glass. I saw just what I expected. My face is too thin, my nose too large, my complexion pasty. My hair is too short to be described as luxurious tresses and the color is neither blond nor brown. My fingers are blunt and stubby instead of tapering. No wonder Joseph can hardly bear to look at me.