There was no bear in the basement. It was their mother, and I wish they had told me the truth. If they had just tugged nervously on their wattles and stammered as they do and simultaneously admitted that it was their mother and that they couldn’t stand to live without her and had lovingly preserved her so she would live with them forever, then I would have understood. To me it would have seemed tender of them, even normal, because without realizing it I was inflicted with the same mother fixation, even though I didn’t know entirely what it was. Like any seven-year-old, I never wanted my mother to die. In a broad way I knew she would die someday, but that someday seemed so distant that it had no real power over me.Anyway, I just wish Ab and Dolph had managed to tell me it was their mother and explain exactly what they had done to her, because without the facts, my imagination ran wild with what I had just seen in the basement.
At T.P.C.C. parochial school, Sister Nancy said I had been blessed with an infinite capacity for prayer because during quiet reading she observed I was content to reread the same Bible page over and over. One day she silently hovered above me for several minutes. Her billowing presence was like a cloud in the shape of a person. I put my finger next to the last sentence I’d read and glanced upward. With her face leaning over me her white fleshy cheeks were soft and plump as marshmallows. She looked me directly in the eye and nodded reverently. “I see you have the sacred gift of focus,” she whispered. Her rosewood crucifix swung before me like a hypnotizing pendulum.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She always knew in advance the answers to her questions. Only the truth would fail to disappoint her.
“You can read the same page over and over and find in it a deeper meaning each time. Is this true?” she asked.
Her face was so neutral that even if I lied to win her favor I still wouldn’t know to agree or disagree with her.
“Yes, Sister,” I said, pleased with the fullness of her attention. “After a while I can begin to read between the words, between the lines, and before long I can imagine an entirely different story based on one page.”
“When I was your age, I learned that the faith of the saints was made infinite through imagination,” she said. “I have come to understand that a prayer repeated results in countless meanings, and those meanings are united through the conviction of faith.”
I understood Sister Nancy entirely. True devotion was the result of including all thoughts while excluding none, which is why even after my mother and I had left the pharmacy, the image of the Twins’ mother continued to loop swiftly through my mind like a page repeated this way and that, obsessively modified as if I were styling a doll that had an endless wardrobe of accessories.
I could imagine Mrs. Rumbaugh from all angles—front to back, top to bottom, and with each pose I imagined her German accent calling out: Love me, honor me, obey me, keep me alive in your hearts, and I will never abandon you at your time of need. Even in death she commanded her sons, and in my imagination she now commanded me. She did not want to be forgotten, and I knew I would always remember our meeting because a Rumbaugh switch had been turned on within me and from that moment it could not be turned off.
“Are you sure you saw Mrs. Rumbaugh?” my mother asked on that Easter Sunday as we scurried home from the pharmacy.
“Yes,” I said impatiently.
“Did you see more than one?”
Honestly, I didn’t understand just how suggestive the question was, nor did I have any patience to consider it at the time. I was still a kid, and the moment Mom set me down feetfirst on the sidewalk, I began to race up Main Street to Candy Land. I wanted her to buy me one of those large Italian Easter eggs molded from white sugar and elaborately trimmed with
pastel ribbons and rosebuds of icing on the outside. Earlier in the week I had examined one closely, and she’d promised me I could have it for an Easter gift. But it wasn’t in the Easter basket she’d given me that morning. I was disappointed because I loved holding the viewing end of the egg up to my eye and peeping into the glowing sugar cave, which was nimbly arranged with tiny painted furniture like the room in Good-night Moon, with the kittens and mittens and bowl of mush.
My mother wasn’t the scolding type, but once she lurched forward and caught me from behind she didn’t let go. Her lips pursed, and then in a strained whisper she said, “We’ll talk about the bear later, honey.”
“But it wasn’t a bear,” I said. “Remember!”
“How could I forget?” she replied, and held a finger across her lips. “Let’s just go home for a while and settle down.”
“Can I get the egg first?” I pleaded. I was desperate to get it, desperate to have something to distract me from the image of Mrs. Rumbaugh, who was still pacing room after room in my mind while calling for me to love, honor, obey, and listen to her forever.
“It’s Easter,” Mom said softly. “Candy Land is closed. But you will get one. Trust me.”
My first impulse was always to trust her rather than fight her, and as I let my disappointment fade I held her hand and kept abreast, my three steps to her two and my two breaths to her three.
We crossed back over Main Street to the Kelly Hotel. The
elevator was broken, and by the time we hiked up the stairs to our third-floor rooms, we were hot.
“Let’s just take off our dress clothes for a bit and cool down before going to lunch,” she said. It seemed to me that before I could answer she was stripped down near naked. And the moment I saw her a strange door opened within my heart. I was gripped with a sudden fear. It was when I stared at her smooth body that I fully realized she was going to die—not someday—but in my lifetime. I stared up at her, and inside I felt a horror that I knew was not just a passing fright. This was a feeling that emerged from deep within me and not from without. I felt limp. The grief of her death was already circulating triumphantly through me as I stood dead still. She had no idea what fear had just captured my heart, and she smiled at me as she lifted her knee and bent forward to deftly roll her stocking down her calf and into a perfect silk doughnut. Her warmth, her pink flesh, her easy way of undressing and hanging up her good clothes with care made her seem so vulnerable. My eternal love for her, by contrast, made her physical life seem temporary and defenseless to me. I was entranced with everything about her—her coal black hair, her woolly smell, her joyful voice that wrapped me in a cocoon of love. She was going to die, and the person I loved heart and soul above all others would be gone and I would be left alone and made tiny and fragile inside the skin of my loneliness and sorrow. I reached out and threw myself against her and pressed my face into her soft belly and the tears poured from my eyes and spilled down
her legs like loose pearls. I will love you and honor you and obey you, I thought, and keep you alive in my heart and I will never abandon you at the time of your need. Never.
She thought the sight of Mrs. Rumbaugh in the basement had overwhelmed me, but it wasn’t that at all.
“You’ll be fine, pumpkin,” she said soothingly, her face lined with concern. “Don’t you worry about what those silly old men do.” And she stroked my head and wiped the tears with her quick fingers.
Yes, it had been surprising to discover Mrs. Rumbaugh stuffed like a hibernating bear, and although she was spooky, she only really terrified me because she reminded me of my mother’s mortality, and in some penetrating way I must have been marked with the knowledge that Ab and Dolph loved their mother as much as I loved mine and that they were driven to preserve her in whatever form they could. In an unspoken way I accepted what they did, and why, and it seemed right—for them and for me. I looked up at my mother and said, “Don’t worry. Someday I’ll do the same to you, too.”
She blanched, and before she realized she had said it she uttered, “Oh, my God, you have the love curse of the—” Then she held her hand over her mouth and stepped away, but it was too late. I had heard her, and somehow I knew I was cursed with loving my mother too much.
“What curse?” I asked innocently.
“You won’t understand right now,” she said hastily. And to wall off any chance for an explanation, she announced, “Let’s
get dressed again and go down for Easter lunch.” Then tenderly she leaned forward and whispered, “And then to get that egg.”
I kissed her on the lips, and my whole mood changed. My troubles dimmed and I felt renewed, as if nothing had happened. The curse had withdrawn in the face of her perfect love. We were making plans together, slipping on our clothes, glancing at our twin selves in the mirror, laughing and fussing with each other like nesting sparrows. And for a time our plans for the present blotted out any worry over an empty future.
We started down the flight of stairs to the first-floor restaurant. Mom was wearing heels and was concentrating on each step as if inching across thin ice. It occurred to me as we slowly descended that behind every closed door in the hotel was a secret. Not as big perhaps as Mrs. Rumbaugh being stuffed and hidden away, but I had an awakening sense that doors were locked not just to keep unwanted people out but to keep secrets captive within.
In an instant this one thought doubled the size of my world, and I suspected the secret side was the more fascinating half. It seemed to me that I was walking inside a maze of secrets. As I drifted down the dimly lit hallway and past the nicked-up doors, each muffled sound, television set, cough, and creaking footfall suggested a blueprint of private worlds that dared me to investigate them. I could feel my skin crawl with the delight and good luck of living in the Kelly Hotel, and it seemed to me
the secrets here were as rich and mysterious as any inside an Egyptian pyramid.
Just before we reached the dining room door, I was struck with a question. “What would happen if there were no secrets?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” my mother said briskly. “Until you go to heaven, there will always be secrets.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
Mom paused. “If nobody had anything to hide, it would mean that everything is allowed,” she replied.
“What does that mean?”
“It means if there were no laws,” she explained, “people would behave like animals. It would be the survival of the fittest.”
That seemed alarming to me. “But nobody really knows what animals are thinking,” I said. I was small, and I still liked rules. They made me as large as anyone. But without rules I was just a child. Anyone could do anything they wanted with me.
She bent close toward my face, knowing what I was getting at. “Ab and Dolph are very good people,” she said. “You have to realize that. I know it is difficult to believe, but you can’t judge them just on what you saw. You have to understand why they did it, and maybe then it will make sense to you. As they say in court: Audi alteram partem—‘Hear the other side.’”
“I’d love to,” I said, wondering what they might say about why they had preserved their mother as if she were one of the
kittens they had stuffed and dressed as a Red Cross nurse with a pink-and-white-striped dress and starched white hat.
“I know they are good,” I replied. “They love their mother, and nothing can be greater than that.”
“You keep believing that rule,” she said, smiling broadly, but her lips were just bluffing for her eyes, which narrowed as she studied my face, perhaps for further signs of what she had called “the curse.”
In the Kelly Hotel there were two public rooms, which just about everyone in town referred to as “Heaven” and “Hell.” There was the tavern on the ground floor and a ladylike dining room directly above it on the first. They were opposites in every way. The tavern was not a room where women who were out shopping would stop for a refreshment or lunch. They had their own location, in the white wicker dining room that Mrs. Kelly had softened with lace sheers over the windows and hooked rugs with summer garden themes of sweet peas and spring onions and zebra tomatoes on the waxed wood floor. The room was heavily scented with tiny watering cans of cinnamon potpourri decorating each round table.
Beneath the dining room, the tavern contributed another sweet smell, like unpicked fruit that had gone to rot. The odor was the combination of southern pine sawdust shoveled thickly across the tavern planks, spilt beer, and tobacco juice. Mr. Kelly always dressed head to toe in starched white bar clothes. He looked like an overcooked ham in sterile bandages and preferred to serve men. Men with girlfriends made him uncomfortable, and married men with girlfriends made him
short-tempered. Men who brought their wives in to drink were treated politely but privately scorned as men who “compromised” their wives’ reputations. Mr. Kelly never served children in front of the bar but would allow us to order drinks from the kitchen pass-through so we could run them up to guests for tips. But that wasn’t often, because the hotel wasn’t much of a hotel but more of an apartment building filled with every indigent Kelly in town.
They all—parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren—lived there and occupied nearly all the rooms, except for the three my mother and I kept and the two briny-smelling rooms that were set aside for men who had to sleep off their beer. The doors to these rooms were kept open for airing out unless they were occupied.
When we entered the dining room Mom stiffened, and her feet stuttered nervously like the hooves of a spooked horse. A group of brightly dressed church ladies had taken over most of the room and were giving a baby shower for a young, very pregnant woman. Her crimson legs were venomously swollen, and she sat with them propped up on an upturned case of Huggies. On the floor below her legs was a damp bar towel and a bowl of ice.
“All the tables are full up,” Mrs. Ushock said directly to my mother, and propped her hands on her wide hips, which made her twice as large. Her sharp red elbows stuck out like angry arrowheads. She was a farmer’s wife and mother of the young woman. I had often seen her in the pharmacy.
I looked beyond where the ladies had stacked both Easter
gifts and baby gifts on the tables. The back of the room was entirely filled with families out for Easter dinner.
Mom didn’t respond to her. “Let’s leave,” she said quietly to me, and turned to go. I hesitated. Those bloated legs seized me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The young mother’s baby was yet unborn, but already the mother seemed full of decay. Each day the baby would grow stronger, taller, smarter, while the mother became older, weaker, and needier. The fear of my mother’s mortality struck me hard again, but before I could dwell on it her strong hand clamped down on the top of my head and she briskly swiveled me around like a potato she was peeling.
“Why can’t we wait for a table?” I asked.
“I really don’t want to,” she said hastily.
“Why?”
“Because Mrs. Ushock and I know a little too much about each other,” she said.
“Wouldn’t that make you friends?” I asked.
“Or not,” she said, hewing her words. “There is such a thing as knowing someone too well.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What do you know about her?”
“It’s the other way around,” she replied. “But I’ll tell you when the time is right.”
“Is it a deep secret?” I asked, fishing for any hints of her past, or mine.
“Oh, yes,” she said gravely.
“Worse than the stuffed mom?”
“That’s hard to top,” she whispered. “But this one is pretty good as well.”
I knew she had to be referring to my father—a subject for which I showed no curiosity. For a long time I had thought my mother had me by Immaculate Conception. I imagined she simply wanted me so badly that I just appeared—that she prayed for me and nine months later I arrived—an answer to her prayers. It was an answer that was entirely fulfilling because it meant my love for her was as vast as her desire for me.
Who my father was should have been an important question on my mind. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t because I was angry about not having a father or was heartbroken. I simply had no interest in one because I had all the love I desired: the right kind of love—mother love. And from the moment I was born I think my mother and I both knew we no longer needed men because, between us, we had all we wished for.
One day I told Sister Nancy that my mother had me just as Mary had Jesus.
Sister smiled. “All life is a miracle,” she said. “But you have a father somewhere. Only the Blessed Mother conceived through Immaculate Conception.”
I refused to believe her.
After school Sister must have called my mother, because at dinner that night Mom asked if I wanted to know about where I came from. We were eating tomato sandwiches with bacon she had fried up in an electric skillet. She was carefully
separating a strip of fat from the lean. I was gazing out the window. Sometimes we didn’t look each other in the eye when we spoke because doing so made the room feel too small. I think our time spent staring out at the sky developed our interest in odd weather.
“You know,” she reasoned, “I’m going to have to tell you about him someday.”
“I don’t want to know,” I replied matter-of-factly.
“I thought you would say that,” she said. “So I’ve come up with a plan. Whether you want to know or not, I’ll tell you when you turn sixteen.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I must,” she insisted, and reached out and took my hand. Her touch was an irresistible force, and I could feel myself bending toward her.
“Because of your age,” she continued, “I won’t tell all the details right now. But trust me, at the moment of your sixteenth birthday I’ll tell you every bit of what I know.”
“Do you mean there are parts that you don’t know?” I asked, thinking that was curious.
“Yes,” she answered, and smiled in a way that suggested the mystery was amusing and not frightening. “So maybe you can help me clear up a few things.”
That invitation was very satisfying, and I thought, Okay, I’ll wait and then we’ll work on it together. It will be a mother-daughter project.
As Mom had said, I’d find out about my past when the time was right. That suited me fine as we stood in the doorway of the restaurant with Mrs. Ushock looking so hawkish, because suddenly I was no longer interested in an Easter lunch or family secrets but far more interested in the candy egg. I hopped loudly down the steps to the ground floor.
Mrs. Kelly was in the lobby wringing out the steaming head of a filthy mop. Her hands were twisted into knots, and the gray water streamed into a metal bucket. She had bulky upper arms and a large chest, kind of a uni-breast that was tucked under her dress like a bag of laundry. “No rest for the wicked,” she grunted, then laughed as she ran a blotchy hand through her damp hair. “If only you could imagine the necks I think of when I choke off this old mop.”
Mom jerked her head toward the upstairs restaurant. “I could add a few names to your list,” she said.
Mrs. Kelly snorted out loud. “Spare me!” she said, and waved off Mom’s thought. “Don’t let your past spoil your future.”
“True,” Mom agreed, and stood a bit taller.
They spoke in adult code, which in my mind looked like a crossword puzzle I couldn’t work out.
Mrs. Kelly looked down at me. “Happy Easter, Ivy darling,” she said. “I have a little something for you.” She gave me a stage wink, which was as bright as a camera flash. She set down her mop and wiped her hands on her dress as she slipped behind the check-in counter. From a lower shelf she
lifted out a little basket with the candy egg nestled in shredded pink and green cellophane.
“For you,” she said warmly, and swung it toward me. “Happy Easter.”
I removed the egg as if it were a newborn baby and peered into the dazzling cave. I examined each object: the little yellow table, the matching chair, the rabbit silhouette on the wall, the tiny basket of colored eggs. Every detail of the interior created an immaculate, radiant world which was perfectly arranged in every way. Each decoration was so spotless and tidy that only pure thoughts and deeds could inhabit the inside. As my mother said, only heaven was a place without secrets, and staring into the egg was like peeking into heaven through a keyhole.
Then I saw the tiny braided rug on the floor, and it reminded me of the little painted rug on which Mrs. Rumbaugh was mounted. Suddenly the egg’s perfection was spoiled with the reminder of the bear story the Twins had told me, and that was what put me off more than the stuffed mother. They had lied, like Judas lied to Jesus, and that made me angry.
“It’s the same rug,” I blurted out to my mom as she turned from Mrs. Kelly. “The rug under the Twins’ mom is exactly the same as the one in the egg.”
I handed her the egg as if it had turned rotten in my hands. She held the back porthole of the egg toward the overhead light and peeked in. After a moment she lowered it. She smiled and shook her head back and forth with amused astonishment.
“They are so bizarre,” she declared lightly, and laughed a bit.
“They’re creepy,” I whispered.
Mom looked up toward Mrs. Kelly, who seemed to be paying too much attention, and before I could say more about what I had seen in the basement she instructed me to use my manners.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kelly,” I said, smiling with the egg held tightly between my two hands.
“You’re welcome, darling,” she replied, stepping out from behind the counter to give me a kiss.
Then Mom and I walked back up the stairs, quickly past the restaurant, and past the hallway of secrets, which reminded me that Mrs. Kelly and Mom were speaking in code.
“Why does everyone know more about me than me?” I asked.
“Ivy,” Mom said, “you are the lucky one. You get to live in a world full of secrets while all of theirs have been answered.”
That stumped me for a moment. “But that’s not fair!” I cried out. “I want answers, too.”
“When you are sixteen,” she said playfully. “Unless you want to know now?”
I covered my ears with my hands. “I don’t want to hear any more,” I sang. “Sorry I asked!” The thought of knowing anything about my father threatened my all-consuming love for my mother.
By the time we entered our rooms my mind had seized on another idea.
“I was wondering,” I asked. “Do the Twins play with their mother as if she were a big doll? I mean if they just have her hidden around the house like a Halloween decoration, it’s pretty scary. But it doesn’t seem frightening to me at all if when they play they say ‘Yes, Mother’ and ‘No, Mother’ and are being really sweet as they wheel her around the pharmacy displays and help her shop. And I wonder what kind of voice they make to imitate her. Would it be a high-pitched voice like a parrot squawking, ‘Abner, you eat your vegetables’ and ‘Adolph, you get back to work!’ Or would it be some old man’s froggy voice trying to squeak out a lady’s voice?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Mom replied. “I’ve never heard them talk for her. You have to remember they don’t want anyone knowing about her. It’s a secret.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s against the law,” Mom said dramatically. “Which is why you can’t mention this to anyone or they might be put in jail.”
“Okay,” I said. It seemed easy enough to forgive them. Even though they had lied to me, I could understand why because Mom had said they could be sent to jail.
At the time I didn’t realize their lie was a defense against the fear they had of losing their mother. I was still too young to understand that most lies were not about stealing or fighting or cheating but were just ways by which a person shrinks their whole world down to a size they can keep protected in the palm of one hand.
“Look!” She pointed toward the pharmacy.
Across the street the Twins were peeking out at us from their upstairs windows. As soon as Mom pointed at them, they closed the blinds.
“Don’t be afraid of the Twins,” she advised. “They’re like two befuddled kids, and in a way I think it’s up to us to take care of them. Well, at least I thought I always had to.”
I smiled to myself. It was just as I thought. I scared them more than they scared me. It was a certain kind of power I felt over them. Instead of being reduced by what they thought of me, I now felt larger with the thoughts I had about them. I liked that.