THE CABINET

Years ago, right after I had seen the stuffed mother for the first time that Easter morning, my mother asked me how many Mrs. Rumbaughs I had seen. At that moment my mind was too full of the one I had seen to even consider the question. But over time the question never quite dissolved either, and when I asked my mom about it, she just shrugged it off as if she’d only been checking up on my eyesight. It didn’t seem like an issue to her, so I never pushed it until one day I was in the basement.

I was twelve. It was a Sunday after church and bitter cold. For weeks an arctic low-pressure system had nestled into the valleys between the mountains. The ground was frozen solid. Frost heaves turned the roads into chunky vertebrae of asphalt. The rivers were gray and hard as solder. Usually, Mother and I met up with the Twins for some refreshments at the pharmacy, but they were at a prescription insurance seminar in Pittsburgh. Mom wasn’t feeling well. She had come down with a cold and after church had crawled back into bed to take a nap. I told her I would go over to the pharmacy and get her some aspirin and cold tablets. “Hurry back,” she said as she gave me the key to the front door. “Don’t go down into the basement and get carried away with your work.”

“Okay,” I replied, but as I left the room I already knew I wanted to do a few other things while I was there. I had been spending a lot of extra time piecing together a scene illustrating the 1917 sighting of the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal, which I was going to donate for the church raffle. Three young shepherds had seen the Virgin, and I had taxidermed little golden finches to represent them, but the delicate image of the mist-shrouded Virgin was tricky to capture. I tried a piece of painted glass, but it seemed too clunky for a vision. I thought a hologram might be best, but I couldn’t find one. Finally, I settled on a phosphorescent butterfly, which I had ordered through a catalog. But for it to hang properly, I needed to lightly spray the body with a urethane fixative before painting on her robes. This was on my mind as I dashed out of the Kelly Hotel and into the cold. I figured if I hurried I could apply a quick coat before coming back with the medicine.

I crossed the street, and when I arrived I saw that the door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open with my foot, and a wave of warm air passed over me. “Ab?” I cautiously called out. “Dolph?” I closed the door behind me and pulled off my gloves. I figured they hadn’t closed the door properly and were either upstairs or down in the basement.

I walked into the shop and quickly put a bottle of aspirin and some cold tablets into my jacket pocket. Because the heat was on, I figured the spray fix would work even better on the butterfly, so I turned toward the basement. That was when I noticed the hasp and lock had been pried off the door. Maybe Ab and Dolph had lost the key and had to pry it open, I thought. Still, I was suspicious, and a little afraid. But the cash drawer was kept downstairs in the drug room with the week’s receipts, so I got up my courage and opened the basement door. I didn’t want to upset Mom unless something truly was wrong.

The stairwell light was on.

“Hello!” I called down. There was no reply. I listened intently for any sounds. If I heard anything, I could dash out the door. But all was quiet. Then I descended the stairs backward so that if someone was down there I’d be facing the right way to scamper up ahead of them. About halfway down I could see that the rear basement light was also on. I took a deep breath. “Hello!” I called out. Again I received no answer. When I reached the last step, I quickly dashed to my right and slipped into the dark taxidermy workroom. I stood still, and after a minute my eyes adjusted and I could see that the room had not been disturbed. I peeked out of the door crack toward the back side of the basement, where my old cottage used to be and where the Twins had the locked wire drug cage. After a few minutes I didn’t hear any sounds or see anyone.

I stepped into the light and tiptoed to the stairwell and again called out toward the drug cage. “Hello!” There was no response, and as I stood there I could make out that the wire door to the drug room had been buckled open with a crowbar that was left on the floor. A burglar, I thought, and now I was really afraid that the cash was stolen.

“Hello!” I shouted again. I couldn’t see anyone, and even though I wanted to run home, I needed to know about the money. I took one silent step after another, picking my way around discarded bottles of pills until I reached the drug room. I retrieved the crowbar and held it like a baseball bat just in case, but no one was there. The burglary was over with. A few boxes of drugs were ripped open, and bottles were scattered across the floor. I had a suspicion it was the same burglar as before, and because he never seemed too dangerous, I felt a little less afraid. I figured he took what pills he wanted and left. Then I glanced over at the wooden cabinet where the Twins kept the cash drawer. They always kept it locked.

But this time it was partway open, and whoever had looked inside must have gotten a fright, because I did. In a panic to find out about the money I flung open the cabinet door, and when I saw that face I jumped back and screamed. Right in the center of the first shelf was their mother’s detached head—the same one I had seen when I was seven. She still had those slightly glowing eyes and that sewn-together mouth, which gave her a tight-lipped smile. She was wearing a curly black wig pinned to her head.

I had run the first time I saw her, but after a good scream the second time I pulled myself together. After all my taxidermy experience she seemed more of a specimen than a spook. Now I was curious. Why was the head here? Right away I could see that her face had cured badly, and there was a lot of crazing where the skin was pulled too tightly over the raised brows and cheekbones, and around the entire chin. One of the Twins had rubbed saddle soap into her skin to keep it from cracking open. I could smell it as I carefully lifted her from the shelf. She was heavy. I wondered what material they had used to fill in the brain cavity. I raised her up over my head to peer into the neck, but it was solid plaster except for a hole just big enough to slip onto a wooden dowel.

I set her down on top of the cabinet and looked inside. There was a stack of drawers, and I opened the one where the money was always kept. It was safe. The burglar must have seen the head and run for the hills, and the thought of his screaming and scampering wildly up the stairs made me smile a bit with remembering how I had felt years before.

Since there were other drawers, I knew I had to open them. This might be my only chance. In the first one there was a lot of old jewelry that must have belonged to their mother. I opened another drawer and jerked back. It was filled with egg-shaped prosthetic eyes, and as they waddled back and forth and clicked together they stared out at me with trapped, insane expressions. I slammed shut the drawer as if it were incubating some abnormal creation and opened the next.

There was an old black plastic compact with a mirror, a bottle of flesh-colored nail polish, a package of false eyelashes, and bobby pins. Nothing of special interest.

Finally, I checked the last drawer. Inside were two human hands. Where the wrist ended a dowel stuck out, and I guessed the hands on the mother were interchangeable so the Twins could alter the poses. One was closed into a loose fist, as if it could hold an umbrella, or flyswatter. The other was more open, with the fingers curled up a bit for carrying a purse. I distinctly remembered seeing hands on the mother and wondered if these were the same hands, or did the Twins have extras? And if so, how?

I had to find out. I backtracked upstairs to the pharmacy, then behind the counter and up the rear stairs to the hall that bisected Ab’s and Dolph’s identical apartments. I had not seen the mother since that Easter morning when I was seven, and it gave me the creeps to check their apartments because I knew when I saw her body again it would have an effect over me. But I was prepared for that sight.

What I didn’t expect was finding the same body but with a different head. I walked into Ab’s living room, and there she was with a head carved out of wood and painted brightly like the Nutcracker. You would think I would have screamed and jumped back. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was surprising, but in a good way, like when you open a birthday gift and get the doll you have been asking for. I stood there and looked at her and smiled, and right away I wanted to play with her. I stepped behind her and carefully lifted her head with both my hands. It was just as I thought: the heads were interchangeable. Also, the arms could be adjusted back and forth at the shoulders, and when I checked the hands, I saw that they too were removable. Without thinking, I slipped right into doll talk.

“Hello, Ivy,” I said, speaking for her in what I thought would be a German-sounding voice, “how lovely to meet you.”

“And you,” I replied and did a quick curtsy.

“Could you get me a scarf?” she said. “My neck is cold.”

“Yes, Mrs. Rumbaugh,” I replied. There was a man’s scarf draped over the back of a chair, and I reached for it and arranged it around her neck.

“Thank you,” she said.

And then I guessed I was going to find something else in Dolph’s apartment. “Excuse me for a moment,” I said as politely as I could. “I’ll be right back.”

I walked over to Dolph’s door and opened it and found exactly what I expected. The second mother was sitting down, headless, in an overstuffed chair, knitting. Just above the neck of her dress was a four-inch wooden dowel where the head would fit—the head they were repairing downstairs. There was a cup of cold tea on the side table next to her, and the radio quietly broadcast one of Bach’s Sunday cantatas.

At that moment many different responses could have overwhelmed me. I could have been revolted, or spooked, or even gotten sick, but instead the strongest feeling I had was jealousy. It was the most amazing sensation, and entirely unexpected. I was jealous! I wanted one, too—one of these big dolls. And then I realized that the Twins must have been jealous of each other, because there was only one mom and there were two of them. And so they came up with a solution. But just how did they get two moms from one body?

They must have sawed her in half somehow, I guessed. After I checked the moms over, going back and forth between the rooms and looking under their clothes, I figured it out. The sitting mom had wooden legs and was real above the waist, and the one I had first seen had real legs but was a mannequin’s dummy from above her hips to her neck. They couldn’t possibly get two heads, so they taxidermed one and carved a dummy for the other, and then, I guessed, they could mix and match the pieces back and forth. Where the extra hands came from I didn’t know.

At the time I also didn’t know about the Rumbaugh history with Peter and Hermann and the rest of them. I just knew I had what my mother called the “love curse,” and knew I was drawn to wanting to keep her forever the way Ab and Dolph kept their mother.

Then I felt playful again. “Mrs. Rumbaugh,” I shouted out from one doll to the other. “Do you have my scarf?”

“Yes,” I replied to myself.

“Well, if you return it,” I said, “I’ll knit you your own.”

I was so involved in this family conversation that I didn’t hear my mother open the pharmacy door.

“Ivy!” she suddenly called out from below. “Ivy, is that you up there?”

“Yes!” I yelled back, startled, but relieved that it was my mom. “Come see what I’ve found.”

She pounded up the stairs and into the room before I could warn her.

“I knew something was wrong,” she said breathlessly, wrapping her arms around me. “I woke with a start and kept calling on the phone, and when there was no answer my blood froze.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just got carried away playing with some new dolls.”

“What do you mean?” she asked slowly, staring into my eyes. But I was sure she already knew.

“A second mother,” I whispered, and turned her toward the table. “Now I know what you meant when you asked how many Mrs. Rumbaughs I had seen.”

She made a disgusted face. “Oh, I’m so sorry you had to see this. I kept telling the boys that sooner or later you’d bump into her. Guess I should have warned you. Duo non possunt in solido unam rem possidere: ‘Two cannot possess one thing each in entirety.’”

“They sawed her in half,” I said.

She wrinkled up her nose. “I honestly don’t want to know the gory details,” she said. “The first time I saw this second one it nearly killed me. I had to turn off a water valve in the bathroom up here. There was a leak, and it was dripping through. the ceiling. The boys were out somewhere so I just scampered up here as fast as I could and, good Lord, she was sitting here but with a head half molded, like something in a wax museum that had partially melted. It was gruesome—well, anyway I just screamed, and then I still had to pull myself together and turn off the water valve. For some reason I ran down to the other apartment, and there was the standing mother with the real head on. Lord, I screamed even louder. I think that was the first time I realized they had identical apartments. They bought two of everything alike—lamps, ashtrays, pictures, rugs, chairs. Even now the grocer brings two boxes of identical food. If one shops for clothes or shoes he always buys a second set. So it made sense then that they had two mothers preserved, one for each of them. Only, as I’m sure you figured out, there is just one real head. But I know they swap the real head day by day, because they told me.

“When I was working below in the pharmacy, I could hear the boys roll them both around up here, and they do talk to them. I wouldn’t say they have long conversations, but they do have doll-talk kinds of conversations, like ‘Would you like a drink?’ and ‘Did you have a nice day today?’ Things along those lines. Nothing freakish. All very typical, except of course, that she is dead and somehow split in half. Believe me, it was good that I left the pharmacy and took a job in Greensburg.”

“Oh,” I cried out. “I almost forgot. They’ve been robbed. Someone broke into the drug cage. Should we call the police?”

“No,” my mother said, wagging her finger back and forth. “The boys never want the police involved, as you can well understand.” She nodded toward the mom. “Let’s just lock up the place and go.”

That made sense. “Meet you at the front door,” I said, and bolted down the stairs all the way to the basement. I put the mother’s head back in the cabinet just the way I found it. I didn’t want the Twins to know what I had discovered. It didn’t seem right to know something about them they wanted to keep a secret. And it would be rude, too, as if I came over while they were away and played with their toys.

I met Mom back up by the entrance. We jerked the front door closed, and it locked properly.

“It’s that drug addict again,” she said angrily. “I’m sure of it. He’s picked the lock before. I told those boys to get a better lock, but they are so darn cheap.”

Mom and I didn’t talk much after we got home. She was tired and took her medicine, then went to bed. I crawled in next to her and listened to her breathing until she had fallen asleep. Then gently I touched her head and face, her shoulders, her arms and belly, her legs, and down to her feet. She was all there. All mine. And I loved every bit of her.

“Sleep tight,” I whispered as if she were my big doll, then snuggled up beside her. I slept so well that night.