by Selena Kitt
“I don’t believe you,” Erica choked as a city bus blazed by, drowning out her words in a fit of exhaust. It turned the corner as Patty got into her vehicle.
“And if I have anything to say about it, she won’t,” was the last thing Patty Wendt said before slamming her door closed.
Erica let her father lead her back to their car parked in front of the gallery. He drove home in silence, both of them lost in thought. Whatever tenuous bond they’d begun to rebuild during their shopping trip to Hudson’s had been broken again, and Erica went straight to her room when she got home, her father up to his bedroom in the loft, with no Solie there to object.
She had homework for Father Michael’s History of the Catholic Church class, but she didn’t feel like writing her essay on her “favorite Pope” tonight. Her excitement about meeting “The King”—Elvis Presley himself—had been dampened, not only by her inability to find a suitable, and preferably irresistible new dress, but far more by the fact her best friend wasn’t going to be around to share it with her.
The things she’d listed to Leah’s mother were just a few of the experiences the girls had shared over the years. She couldn’t count the number or put a price on the value of the things they’d shared. Even after what had happened between Erica’s dad and Leah, after they’d gotten involved and fallen in love, even after, Erica hadn’t been able to let go of Leah’s friendship.
Besides, she knew love when she saw it. She’d seen it in her father’s eyes when he looked at Leah, had known, somehow, even before they told her. She remembered the way his face had lit up the night he’d taken them to The Bronze Door—one of Detroit’s fanciest, most expensive restaurants—when they had raided Erica’s mother’s old wardrobe and had each worn one of her dresses out for the evening.
That’s it!
Erica bolted down the hallway, away from her father’s room in the loft, going to the other end of the warehouse, where his studio was. Back there, to the left of her father’s studio proper, in a place serving as their version of a basement or storage, were her mother’s things. Her father couldn’t bear to part with them when they moved, and so they were here with their camping equipment and skis and things they just didn’t use very often or at all anymore.
She and Leah had raided her mother’s things looking for clothes. Her mother had grown up rich and spoiled—that’s what her father used to teasingly say—and her tastes had never changed. Her dresses alone, from designers like Maggy Rouff, Edward Molyneux and Coco Chanel, were worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. The straight, pencil-thin designs had leant themselves to Leah’s figure more than hers, but Erica filled out the busts far better.
Erica leafed through her mother’s things, dresses mixed in with skirts and blouses, in no particular order. She remembered her wearing many of them—the smart sailor dress she liked to wear to dinner, the white Chanel suit she often wore to church. Erica looked and looked, not quite sure what she wanted to find, remembering with a smile how she and Leah used to play hide and seek, using this as one of their favorite spots.
And then she found it—a gorgeous day dress, black chiffon with a fabric belt and a flowing skirt, it was patterned with feminine white daisies. The label said it was Chanel and Erica remembered her mother wearing it only on one occasion—their first communion. There were pictures of her in it, both Leah and Erica in their bridal-like white dresses standing in front of her. And Erica remembered a hat, the sweetest little black pillbox hat with black lace with a white daisy on the side.
There were hundreds of hatboxes lining the wall beside the wardrobe—literally, hundreds. Her mother had loved hats. She looked at the looming stack. Did she really want to go through all of them? What if the hat had been lost or given away? She sighed, reaching for the closest box. Well, what else did she have to do—besides wash and set her hair, shave her legs, and paint her nails?
She didn’t know how many she’d gone through—the hatboxes were all stacked beside her in front of the wardrobe so she knew which ones she’d already opened—before her discovery, but it was a lot of them. Dozens at least—snoods, pillboxes, cloches, French berets and button plate hats—in a myriad of colors.
It was just another hatbox from Hudson’s, a plain brown square box with a Victorian couple on the top and the slogan, “75 Years of Looking Ahead.” She didn’t even notice the weight of it because it was a bottom box. Erica lifted the lid, sifting through tissue for a glimpse of black or daisies, and instead found more boxes.
She recognized them immediately—flat, stacked metal boxes with latches on them. They were all grey and had a black stripe down the side. Leah and Erica had found boxes just like these in the secret room under her father’s bed. She pulled the top one out of the hat box, trying to flip the latch and finding it locked.
Curiosity killed the cat. That’s what Leah always used to say to her, whenever Erica found herself faced with a dilemma like this one, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to know. That was part of the reason that Leah’s disappearance bothered her so much—aside from the pain of losing her friend. Not knowing was killing her.
Erica pulled out the next box, and the next, and the one after that, four of them in all, finding them all locked. Now what? She remembered the keys in the desk under her father’s loft. There were hundreds of them. She’d spent three days trying them in the padlock after she’d discovered the hidden room under her father’s loft bed. It was no wonder she hadn’t found it before, considering the floor to ceiling tapestry hiding the door from prying eyes in the first place.
Finally she’d found the right key, and like Alice down the rabbit hole, she’d discovered a whole new world. At first she’d just found the darkroom—a darker darkroom than the one adjacent to her father’s studio—with the “art” books full of photographs of nude women in provocative poses. The more she looked, the more she realized her father was taking illicit pictures—the photos hanging on the clothesline above the developing table told her as much.
And then she’d discovered the other room, another hidden door through the darkroom, the one with the projector inside and boxes just like this one containing reels of film. If the photographs had shocked her, the movies had astounded her. She was scandalized, horrified, disturbed—and, as always, curious.
The more she’d watched them, the more she felt compelled to watch more. And the more she watched, the more curious she became about what she’d seen on film, each titillating sexual act leading to the next even more lascivious act, and the watching soon became doing, and before she knew it, she and Bobby Harris were recreating the things she’d seen on celluloid.
And of course, she hadn’t been the only one who fell down the rabbit hole, had she? She’d dragged Leah with her, and it had all dominoed into a heap, ending with Erica paying the price for her initial curiosity, punished with the fact that somehow, in the midst of all the sexual experimentation going on—and she had to admit, there’d been a lot of it—her father and Leah had ended up not only in bed together, but in love with each other. Enough in love that they were planning to get married.
Until Leah disappeared.
So Erica knew, looking at the metal boxes, they must contain film, although probably not of the unwholesome variety. These were probably home movies from a long time ago, back when they lived in the big house on the river, back when her mother was alive. Or maybe they pre-dated even those? Erica considered this, knowing the exact location of their existing home movies on a shelf in their living room.
And in the end, her curiosity won out again, in spite of her misgivings. She put the lid on the box, grabbing the dress and abandoning her search for the hat, taking it back to her room. Instead of risking sneaking into her father’s desk for keys that might or might not unlock the metal cases, she spent an hour with a bobby pin, sitting on her bed and fiddling until, finally, she heard it click.
When she opened it, expecting reels of film she’d have to hold up to the light to discern t
heir content until she could sneak in and use the projector, she was surprised to find two red leather bound books, side by side, with “Five Year Diary” in gold lettering on the front. She opened the first one—there was no lock, just a red leather flap with a gold edge—looking at the date written at the top in her mother’s handwriting: January 1, 1934.
How old would she have been then? Around Erica’s age now… maybe twenty? She opened the other book, checking the date on top—May 12, 1936. Clearly her mother had more to say than a five-year diary had space to contain. She put the later-dated diary down, picking up the first one, knowing she should put it back, that what she was about to do was wrong. She always knew, the inkling of her conscience nagging at her, and somehow she always did the wrong thing anyway.
Erica opened one and began to read.
Chapter Three
Leah now knew why the wood floors—and walls and ceilings—were always gleaming at Magdalene House. The girls spent most of their time doing chores, washing dishes, cleaning toilets or scrubbing floors, and even their “leisure” time consisted mostly of knitting or sewing. The nuns were nurses, not teachers, so there was no education going on except of the religious variety. Besides, the girls in the house ranged in age from thirteen—fourteen, since Lizzie had just had a birthday at the end of August—to thirty, most of them averaging between seventeen and twenty, and it would have been difficult to teach them all at a common level.
Of course, learning about God’s will and His plan for them in His infinite wisdom was a lesson they could all be taught, and the nuns accepted this task with relish. After the initial beastly medical examination, Leah had hoped her humiliation was over, but it turned out Sister Benedict’s attitude toward her wasn’t personal. All of the girls were reminded on a daily basis they had committed the worst possible mortal sin and they were being punished for it.
Every night after dinner but before bed, all thirty-two of them were required to get down on their knees in the sitting room in front of the nuns, four rows of eight, and beg God’s forgiveness. And if they didn’t—there had only been one instance of rebellion Leah had witnessed since she arrived—the sisters at Magdalene House had pointers and paddles and they weren’t afraid to use them.
The nuns taught the girls the value of silence, how to walk softly on the wooden floors, how to whisper when they were speaking and only when communication was an absolute necessity. Even on days when the doctor or social worker came and the nuns lined them all up in those wooden chairs Leah had seen on her first day outside of the examining room, appointments scheduled throughout the day, the girls were expected to remain quiet, keeping their hands busy with knitting or sewing projects.
And the nuns had plenty of those, most of them involving gray broadcloth. They must have received a huge donation from a generous donor, because they had bolts and bolts of it, along with yards and yards of white cotton. The girls who could sew spent many afternoons on machines sewing the gray dresses or white nightgowns they all wore from patterns. Marty had once told her the nuns recycled everything, and it was true. When it was time for a new girl to join them, they would remove the old label sewn into the back collar of each dress with a seam ripper, and replace it with a new one. They had a rotating name system and labels for each. The only thing that changed was the size of the dresses or their nightgowns, and most of those could be altered or hemmed. They were, after all, maternity dresses, made more like tents than anything else.
The best job was knitting the “going-home outfits” for the babies. The nuns had a wall of shelves full of yarn in the sewing room—pink, blue, white, yellow, green, every possible pastel color combination. They also had hundreds of knitting patterns and the girls were encouraged to make tiny booties, diaper covers, little jackets and, of course, baby bonnets. They would sit in the front room where it was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, ten or fifteen of them at a time, knitting needles clacking, whispering back and forth when the nuns were otherwise occupied.
When an outfit was completed, it was packaged in tissue and a flat, white box. There were stacks of these boxes in the sewing room, filled with outfits the girls had made. Sometimes stacks would disappear, loaded onto trucks, and Leah wondered if they were being sold to mothers who didn’t have time to knit their own baby outfits.
The girls who never got the hang of sewing or knitting were the unlucky ones. They all had chores, of course—the chalk board on the second floor detailed those quite clearly—but while Leah and the other sewing girls made dresses and sweet little baby things, the other girls spent their time in the laundry.
The nuns ran a large laundry out of Magdalene House. Leah had only been in the laundry room once, stumbling into it by accident. It was an enormous operation, and both the nuns and the Magdalene girls put in their time there, but other women came to work every day in the laundry too, washing sheets from the hospital next door, bleaching them in the hottest water and ironing them with mammoth machines, creating walls of steam. It was stifling in there, like a sauna, only not so nice.
Poor little Lizzie worked in the laundry, never having learned to sew. When she broke one of the sewing machines, the nuns decided to put her to work elsewhere, and the laundry was the logical place. Lizzie said they laundered diapers there too, for the babies delivered next door, but others as well. Hundreds of them came through at a time. Trucks arrived early, five-thirty in the morning, dropping off dirty ones and picking up the clean ones.
She told them about it sometimes, whenever the girls in her room escaped to the turrets, taking a transistor radio with them as they snuck up the back stairs after hours. They would sit in a circle and pass a cigarette around—they were contraband, like gum and radios and Faygo pop—and listen to Tom Clay spinning the tunes while they talked about movies or hairstyles, but mostly about home.
“Who’s the new girl?” Leah asked, passing the cigarette from Lizzie on her left to Frannie on her right without taking a drag. She didn’t smoke, didn’t even like the smell of it, especially since she’d gotten pregnant, but the other girls all smoked like chimneys as much as they could get away with.
“She’s not a girl—she’s almost thirty!” Frannie took a long, deep draw on the Lucky Strike.
“What’s wrong with her?” Marty asked, accepting the cigarette from Frannie and tapping an ash into the ashtray sitting on the floor in the middle of the circle. “She looks...”
“She’s retarded,” Lizzie piped up. “I heard Sister Benedict telling Mother Superior about her. She’s a mongoose.”
Leah met Marty’s eyes and they burst out laughing.
“What?” Lizzie frowned, accepting the cigarette from a still-giggling Marty.
“It’s Mongoloid, ya goof. A mongoose is a weasel.”
“Anyway, she’s the new ‘Jean.’” Frannie leaned back on her arms, groaning at the weight of the belly in her lap. She was bigger than all of them, and due later.
“I heard she was raped,” Lizzie said, tucking her Shirley Temple curls behind her ears. She had the face of a china doll, and her curls were natural, unlike the tap-dancing Miss Temple, who used to spend hours in curlers—at least that’s what all the magazines said.
Frannie snorted, massaging her huge belly. “Yeah, right, me too.”
“Really?” Leah raised her eyebrows at the swarthy brunette. Frannie had skin like café au lait, and the biggest, darkest eyes Leah had ever seen. She was sure her real name wasn’t Frances or anything like it.
“No,” Frannie giggled. “But that’s what I told my padre when he found out.”
“Wasn’t it your basketball coach?” Marty asked, watching Leah pass on the Lucky Strike. Marty had procured the pack from one of the laundry women. She could always get things, it seemed—gum and Faygo pop and cigarettes. Leah knew it wasn’t her favorite brand, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“He told me he loved me.” Frannie accepted the cigarette, blowing an impressive smoke ring—she was the only on
e of them who could. “Would do anything for me. Wanted to marry me.”
“What happened?” Leah asked.
Frannie smiled, handing Marty the cigarette. “Turned out he was already married.”
“What about you, Lily?” Marty inquired, reaching her bare foot across and nudging her with her toe.
Leah shook her head. She wouldn’t talk about Rob. She couldn’t bear it.
“My boyfriend wanted to marry me, but my parents wouldn’t let us.” Marty took a second drag on the cigarette like she was a drowning woman sucking at the air. “Dick was from the ‘wrong side of the tracks.’ Besides, I heard he got some other girl knocked up. My daddy had one of his guys go beat the crap out of him.”
“What about you, Lizzie?” Leah smiled over at the little blonde on her left. Lizzie was everyone’s favorite, so impossibly young and naïve, she always spoke her mind and got away with it. “Did your daddy beat the crap out of the guy who knocked you up?”