Secrets She Kept (3 page)

“You’re talking crazy, Rudy, and I won’t listen to any more. Go to bed.” I wrapped the remainder of the loaf of bread in a cheesecloth, as if I planned to return it to the pantry. As soon as he and Vater were snoring I would slip what food I could to Herr Weiss in the shed.

Rudy grabbed two sandwiches from the board and headed for the stairs. “Don’t mock me. It’s a dangerous pastime. You don’t want me to report you, do you?” He turned and raised his brows in mock surprise. I wasn’t entirely sure he was teasing. “Next time you do something Vater’s forbidden, best wipe your shoes.”

He pointed to the caked mud on my socks and school shoes. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to and I don’t care. I have my own life apart from Mutti and Vater now, so why shouldn’t you? It’s time you grow up, little sister.”

HANNAH STERLING

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1972

Old houses creak in the day; at night they moan as if their bones crack and separate. Sleeping in my old room felt just as creepy as when I was a kid. Shadows from the tree limbs outside my windows still loomed with outstretched arms, still danced on the wallpaper opposite my bed. There was still a family of hoot owls
 
—generations old
 
—calling to one another after midnight, unnerving my feeble attempts at slumber. And the safest place was still buried beneath my mountain of patchwork quilts, head and all.

By 2 a.m. I gave up and pulled on jeans and one of my old high school sweaters still hanging in my closet.

Thankfully, the electrician had come out to reconnect the line the day before, so I flooded the house with light, top to bottom. It didn’t
seem so spooky then, just old and a bit decrepit, in serious need of care
 
—care someone else would give. The telephone couldn’t be reconnected until midweek, but Aunt Lavinia was the only one I’d call, and a little space from her was in order.

Tea, good and strong, would surely keep me awake, but might make me think more clearly. Tea had always annoyed Mama. She’d liked her coffee, strong and sweet with cream, as if she couldn’t get enough, as if somebody’d take it from her if she didn’t hold on with two hands. Maybe that’s why I liked tea
 
—plain
 
—just to spite her, just to be different.

The kettle whistled. I poured steaming water into the pot, stirring the leaves. Tea leaves constituted my solitary return to nature
 
—rejecting tea bags in the modern era. Real leaves redeemed time. I pulled my sweater closer and cradled the mug in my hands. So many things I did, so much of my life felt in response
 
—or more in reaction
 
—to my mother.
Which is crazy. This has to stop.

A list. The first thing I ever did to focus on a new project for my classes was to make a list. I ripped a sheet of notebook paper from my school binder and scribbled at the top:
Understanding Mama. Moving Forward
. Those two things encompassed my goal. Everything else fell between.

The first step was to go through the house, top to bottom, and search for clues. I’d no idea what kind of clues. Mama and Daddy were both dead, after all.

But what if Mama kept a diary, or what if Daddy did?
Hard to imagine, but I wrote it down:
Look for diaries, family pictures.
I listed the rooms, determined to remain objective: Kitchen
 
—the easiest to tackle. After having spent the summer cooking there, I felt pretty sure there wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen, but I’d tear apart every cupboard and cookie tin. In the process I’d see if there were things I wanted to keep. Everything else, Clyde could deal with.

Most of Mama’s kitchen pans and utensils had come from rummage sales and yard sales. She didn’t believe in spending money on herself, and truth be told, there wasn’t much to spend. Clipping coupons and
saving string and a ball of rubber bands and using tinfoil twice or three times was a way of life. All of that I’d toss in the trash, and feel guilty in the process.

Next, I’d tackle the bathroom, then the living room. The cellar and attic stored little. Mama hadn’t been in those in years as far as I knew, but I added them to the list. My old bedroom was as familiar as the back of my hand. I only needed to go through boxes of high school stuff and see if I really wanted to keep anything. I’d leave Mama’s and Daddy’s room for last. It conjured too many memories of last summer and Mama dying. I couldn’t think about that, couldn’t get sidetracked by memories or misplaced emotion.

I flicked the power switch on Mama’s old electric radio on the kitchen counter. Cat Stevens belted out “Morning Has Broken,” then The Main Ingredient came on the air and we vied for the right to sing “Everybody Plays the Fool.” The line “And there’s no guarantee that the one you love is gonna love you” surely seemed to fit. It didn’t have to be a man, a boyfriend
 
—as if I’d ever get to that point. All that about loving yourself before you could love someone else might have something to it. And what about God’s love for me? I believed in that, but where were the arms to hold me? How could I love myself if my own mother couldn’t love me? How could I believe Aunt Lavina’s assertion that Mama’s attitudes had nothing to do with me? How could they not? Neither set of lyrics helped.

At half past noon I finished the kitchen. I’d found a couple of old wooden spoons
 
—ones Daddy had carved from a fallen maple the summer he took up whittling, thinking it might be a nice sideline. But Mama had frowned when he’d given her the spoons and stuffed them in the catchall drawer. He never carved another thing. My mind ran through the year’s hit parade, and I wondered if there were lyrics for spurned love. I tossed the wooden spoons on the countertop in my “save” pile. I should have a song too.

Mama wasn’t one to hide money in canisters or Ball canning jars on the backs of shelves like Aunt Lavinia. Unlike so many Depression-era parents,
Mama never hoarded cash for a rainy day, even though she saved tin foil and rubberbands. She’d lived simply, as though everything important was inside her rather than outside, though she never showed what that was. Though grim and frugal, she was generous to a fault, which made no sense to me. Generous people are known to be happy people, but not Mama.

I pulled a can of tuna fish from the pantry and grabbed a loaf of brown bread I’d picked up from the local grocer. That bread
 
—that grocer
 
—reminded me of a day years back . . . I couldn’t have been more than five or six. Mama, Aunt Lavinia, and I had stopped in the grocer’s to do our weekly shopping, which for Mama generally amounted to a small sack of flour, salt, half a pound of sugar, one paper sack of staples, and a pound and a half of red meat she’d spread through the week to add to Daddy’s butchered hog and chickens and occasional fish from the creek beyond the house. Anything else we grew in the garden.

A tramp came through the door and asked the clerk if he could work
 
—maybe sweep up out front and empty the trash, unpack boxes, whatever needed doing
 
—for food. He asked the clerk if he knew of anybody needing an extra hand in exchange for a place to sleep and board. But he talked funny
 
—a lot like Mama.

The clerk turned him out straight away, saying they didn’t need his kind. Aunt Lavinia whispered that nobody’d let a stranger sleep in their barn. No telling where he’d been or what he’d been up to, let alone where he was from, dirty as he was. His faded brown suit jacket was ripped in the sleeve as if he’d been in a fight, and even the top of one of his shoes had come away from its sole.

When the man left by the front door, the grocer called the sheriff. Just as we were leaving the store, the sheriff came over and ran the man off the town bus bench for loitering.

Mama stood stock still, staring after the sheriff. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or frightened or if she approved of what she’d seen. Her face was blank. But she took me by the hand and marched me back into the grocery, shoving our purchases in my arms and leaving Aunt Lavinia standing outside.

Mama pulled a loaf of white bread from the shelf
 
—something we never store bought
 
—along with two bottles of soda pop. She ordered the grocer to cut a half-pound of bologna, sliced thick, and a quarter pound of American cheese, sliced thicker
 
—a veritable feast of riches. She plunked down money I knew Daddy would prohibit and marched me back outside with this largesse. Whisking past Aunt Lavinia, who’d waited impatiently in the late September sun, Mama searched the street both ways, then nearly ran the tramp down chasing after him, me breathless, on her heels.

My visions of a lakeside picnic high up the mountain vanished as Mama caught up to the man and laid a firm hand on his shoulder
 
—a thing I instinctively knew no well-bred Southern woman would do and that every woman in town would gasp over and some did. When the tramp turned, almost fearful, she thrust the grocery sack into his hands, then pulled half the apples from our bag and added them to his. She squeezed the man’s arms and searched his eyes, her chin quivering, as if offering a silent benediction.

That thin, wearied man looked so sad and startled and half frightened that I thought he might fall over. He never even looked in the sack, but his eyes grew big as saucers till the tears overflowed.

He stared at Mama the longest time, as if he meant never to forget her face, then looked down at me. He smiled and leaned down, stroking my hair till I wanted to turn away. But he lifted my chin with his finger and his thumb gently stroked my cheek. Neither he nor Mama ever said a word, which I thought strange even for her. At last she shuddered, then just turned on her heels and headed for home.

I remember looking back at Aunt Lavinia, half worried that she’d tell Daddy and he’d be mad at all the money spent on a stranger. But Aunt Lavinia just stood there with her mouth open, then shut it, turned, and walked the other way by herself.

I followed Mama home, trailing her at a clip. Halfway she seemed to lose her steam and grow suddenly weary. When we reached the house, she walked straight to her room and locked the door. Two hours I heard
Mama cry
 
—the only time I ever heard her cry. She didn’t shed one tear at Daddy’s funeral a good ten years later, but she bawled two hours of heart-wrenching sobs for a tramp she didn’t know.

I hadn’t thought of that day in a long time. It had seemed so out of character for Mama and yet so like her at the same time.
Who were you, Mama? How could you treat a perfect stranger better than you treated me or Daddy and have that seem natural?

What Aunt Lavinia had said about Mama being foreign was the first I’d thought about Mama’s accent in years. Once, a cluster of mean boys in grade school had tormented me on the playground, shouting, “Your mama’s nothing but a Nazi spy! You should hightail it back to Krautland!”

Daddy’d said that simply wasn’t true, that they were just ignorant young mountain children and not to pay them any mind. Daddy’s comfort had been enough for me then, had enabled me to stick my nose in the air at school, even though I’d felt stabbed inside.

But now I wondered.
Was Mama’s accent why she’d connected so strongly
 
—so strangely
 
—to the tramp, or was it the puzzle of some great emotion, foreign even to her? Was her accent why the other women in the church and community kept their distance, or was it her standoffish nature?

Three more days I spent rummaging through the house, attic to cellar, turning cupboards and dressers and closets and drawers inside out, even tapping for hidden walls and loose floorboards, as foolish as I knew that to be. I sorted for donations and trash and packed the few odds and ends I wanted to keep. That felt like progress, better than leaving it all for Clyde to handle.

By Friday I felt sick of the house and its contents. I’d given up looking for diaries and mysterious family photo albums. There simply were none. The only room left was Mama’s and Daddy’s.

Going through Mama’s personal things was a love/hate pilgrimage. I found the Bible I’d been given in second grade at Sunday School in
the bottom of her bedside stand. Mama had learned to read English with my Bible. She’d read it sometimes and wept. If she knew I saw her, she’d close it and push it away, like she didn’t want me to see. I never understood that.

Every drawer held the scent of her homemade lilac sachet, alternately making my stomach ache and filling my heart with a longing I knew I’d never satisfy. Seeing strands of her faded gold hair in her hairbrush made me grip my stomach and throw the brush in the wastebasket.

Not a thing was out of place. Five dresses hung in the closet
 
—one for church, one for shopping, three for the house. She’d owned a pair of black pumps for Sunday sitting beside a polished pair of brown tie shoes, heels worn down, for every day. When other had mothers donned open-toe sandals and patent leather heels, my mother had ignored the fashion and continued to wear the plainest clothes and “sensible shoes,” as if she didn’t deserve better, as if dressing like a pauper helped her martyrdom. And yet I knew part of her had looked down on those women who’d dressed to the nines, as if they’d missed the point of living entirely.

In a last attempt I pulled the dresser from the wall and searched its back. I turned the oval dressing table mirror over . . . nothing.

I laid on her bed, the bed she’d died in, and waited the longest time to see if I felt something, anything, wondering if I might be given a sign. Please . . . please, God. Help me understand. Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing. It was that nothingness that felt like suffocation
 
—like all the air being gradually sucked from the room.
Who were you, Mama? Did you feel anything at all for me?
Finally, I cried a good long cry and fell hard asleep. I didn’t dream, and never woke until the phone rang.

My first call on the newly reconnected phone. It had to be Aunt Lavinia. I couldn’t bear talking to her now.

The phone finally stopped ringing for the space of thirty seconds and started up again. I groaned and dragged myself from the bed because I knew she wouldn’t give up until I answered.

“Hello?”

“Miss Sterling? Hannah Sterling?”

“This is she.” A lump rose in my throat.
No, please don’t let something have happened to Aunt Lavinia. Dear God, I’m sorry I was so mean to her! Please . . .

“Miss Sterling, this is Ward Beecham, your mother’s attorney. Allow me to offer my condolences on her passing. I’m sorry I’ve not done so sooner.”

My heart nearly stopped.
Thank You, God!
“It’s all right, Mr. Beecham. I never gave you a chance. It’s just been
 
—”