Who you think you are is only your personal opinion. And if it is only through our blood that the truth can be fully understood, as Ab and Dolph would say, then the facts of what actually happens in a story are always so much more accurate than how it is told.So this is what happened next.
In all the years I had known the Twins they had never come to visit us in the Kelly Hotel. To my knowledge they had never entered the lobby. But as the summer passed and I prepared to leave for college for my calling into the church, they were compelled to come speak to me.
Mom had stayed after Mass to try out for the choir. I knew she was beginning to look for ways to fill her time once I had moved out. I was home when the Twins knocked at our door. I answered. It had been raining hard, and they were as soaking wet as two old otters. They had walked down from the Lutheran church without an umbrella.
I made them stand in the hall.
“Have you thought about our offer?” one of the Twins immediately asked in a sharp voice, picking right up where we’d left off when last we spoke over a year ago.
He caught me by surprise. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I replied.
“A third of the pharmacy, like Dolph and I said,” Ab blurted out. “You can still have it.”
“But I don’t want any part of the pharmacy,” I said adamantly.
“It would be to your advantage to take it,” Dolph said.
I repeated to them what I had promised my mother—that I was going to college, and that I was going to board at Seton Hill, then enter the church and never return. The more mute they remained the more I kept repeating my plans until they literally looked like two wet hens, nearsighted and plucked from worry. I was merciless. They were beaten down, but not defeated.
“Well, you’ll be back,” Ab predicted. “Running off won’t work.”
“It’s your destiny,” Dolph insisted. “You can’t just leave your mother like this.”
“It’s not right,” said Ab. “And your affliction won’t stand for it. We’re warning you. Bad things will happen.”
“We tried to leave once,” Dolph said in a whisper. “Tried to make a break for a normal life. But we had to return.”
“It wasn’t good for Mother,” Ab added. “We hid out in
Youngstown for a month, and it put her in bad health. Nearly killed her. We returned just in time to save her.”
“I’ll be fine, and so will Mother,” I said firmly. “I’m moving on.” And what I said next was calculated to set them into a fury. “Free will trumps the genetic curse,” I said defiantly.
“You can’t possibly believe that!” Ab sputtered, shocked at the thought. “Free will is just stimulus—response. You think because you are hungry and seek food you are free? That’s biology, not brains.”
“I really don’t want to discuss this anymore,” I said. “I’m going to close the door now. I have to get ready to leave.”
Dolph became very agitated. “Yes, yes,” he said nervously. “I can see you are determined to move on.”
“Yes,” Ab said hastily. “Best wishes.” He reached into his pocket and pulled a hundred dollars from his money clip. Dolph did exactly the same.
“Thank you,” I replied as they pressed the bills into my hand. “This is very kind of you.”
“One final thing,” Dolph said. “Just remember that we love your mother, too.”
“But I love her more,” I replied.
“We don’t want anything to happen to her,” Ab said, pleading.
“She’ll be fine,” I said emphatically.
They stood there, shoulders turned down like bent coat hangers beneath the soggy weight of their thick wool coats, and then they slogged away, leaving a puddle behind.
As they departed, their surrender troubled me. I knew they couldn’t predict the future, but their warning about Mother made me nervous because their concerns were so similar to my own.
I took a small suitcase down from the closet. My entrance interview included a one-night orientation. I neatly folded up all the clothes I thought I needed, then organized my cosmetics and toiletries. I was set.
When Mom came home I told her the Twins had come up to the apartment.
“Did they touch you?” was the first question she asked. It was a very odd question, but because I had so much on my mind I let it pass, just like the time she’d asked me how many Mrs. Rumbaughs I had seen.
I laughed nervously. “Just relax,” I replied. “I told them I was going to Seton Hill, and they wished me luck and gave me money.”
“They’ve been very nervous about you going away,” she said. “I just don’t want them stirring up any trouble.”
I didn’t tell her that the real trouble was already stirring up inside me. I couldn’t. Ever since the vacation I had hid my fears from her. If I had any worries with the curse, I passed them off as worries over my calling.
“Please call Sister Nancy and tell her I’ll meet her at the interview.” I insisted. It made me feel better to make plans I could count on rather than dwell on premonitions.
My mother picked up the phone. She confirmed everything.
The following morning I went with my mother on the bus into Greensburg. I didn’t talk much because I was afraid my own words would influence me in the wrong way. After we got off at the stop next to the courthouse, Mom put me into a taxi.
“You be careful up at school tonight,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I leaned forward and put my head on her shoulder. “I know exactly what I’d do with you,” I said slyly.
“Shhh,” she said. “Don’t talk like that. You’re getting ready to go study religion.”
“I thought religion was all about honesty,” I replied.
“Don’t mix up honesty and piety,” she advised. “In the Catholic Church that’s always been a good way to lose your head.”
When she said the word head, we both laughed. It was a Rumbaugh joke between us, and the laughter cleared the air of the tension gathered from me moving away.
She gave me a kiss. “Remember, you are doing the right thing.”
I smiled tightly and nodded in agreement. That was the best I could do. As the cab pulled away from the curb, I blew her a kiss. She blew a kiss in return. It was like we were playing dolls with each other.
There are times when questioning the future is a distraction from fully entering the present. While I had my entrance interview
with a lovely lady, Mrs. Burnes, who did everything to make me feel welcome and comfortable, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of the first time I saw Mrs. Rumbaugh in the basement, because that was when I began to anticipate and prepare for my mother’s death. Sometimes an inner instinct, a gut feeling for something is just as certain as the facts. Facts may be needed to convince other people about what might or might not happen. But I needed to convince only myself, and my gut instinct was triumphant. It would kill my mother if I didn’t go to Seton Hill. It would kill her if I went. I was stuck between these two thoughts as if I were stuck between Ab and Dolph. There was nothing to do but play out the hand I had been dealt.
I finished the interview as if I had been a puppet—polite, poised, and not a word out of place. Mrs. Burnes asked me to step outside while she and Sister Nancy spoke privately. Perhaps they had detected something worrisome about me. Maybe they were just choosing my roommate for the evening. I’ll never know.
There were a few other girls in the hallway. I didn’t want to make small talk, so instead of waiting I took a stroll around the campus. It had been founded on the crown of a hill that overlooked all of Greensburg. I drifted aimlessly along a path and found myself at the entrance to the nuns’ burial ground. I cut diagonally across the grass rows, which were studded with a uniform grid of molded iron crosses. Where their flat black paint had ruptured, crusty blossoms of rust left red stains running
down into the earth. I thought of my mother’s upturned leg on the beach and the blood running into the sand. Landscape is always about mortality, and the red-streaked crosses looked like a defeated army of crusaders heading home. My hope to escape the curse had been defeated, too. I bent my head and said a prayer. It was the best I could do.
I turned toward the northeast and saw the granite dome of the courthouse, and in my mind I could lift it as if lifting the top of a teapot and peer down inside and watch as my mother sat at her courtroom station and recorded trials. Ab and Dolph had said that their separation as boys strengthened the unspoken depth of their bond. I understood what they meant. The farther they were from each other the more intense was their perception, as if distance only magnified their sensitivity. As I stared over at the dome, I seemed to be able to feel my mother inside of me, and yet it was I who came from within her, like a fetal spy sensing everything about her. For a moment I closed my eyes and imagined the heartbeat we shared. I was transfixed with this sanctuary of darkness when I received that final calling.
“Ivy!” the admissions officer, Mrs. Burnes, called out from her office window. Her voice was like a rope come to get me. She waved her hand over her head. Though she was far enough away to be the size of a mouse, the alarm in her clear voice was palpable. Fear stormed through me. In a few minutes Sister Nancy emerged from the ground-floor door, and as she ran toward me she called out my name, which was echoed
again by Mrs. Burnes. My ears became so sharp then. It was as though I wasn’t listening but sounds arrived from within me. Gravel crunched loudly beneath Sister’s rubber-soled shoes. The wind slithered like snakes across the wet grass. Her wheezing was like curtains blowing through an open window.
“Ivy!” she panted, slowly growing closer so that I could read the hysteria in her face, and I knew then without having to be told what she was about to say, because as I turned away and looked out over the crosses toward the dome of the courthouse, I said it first to myself.
“Ivy!” Sister called. I turned toward her and watched her open mouth pull down like the Greek mask of tragedy. Behind her the weather had changed, and overhead the clouds looked like the destruction of an ancient city, with the white cumulus pillars tumbling unsteadily against a smoky sky.
Finally, she reached me, but she was too exhausted to speak. She pressed her hand against my shoulder and bent over. She drew in a halting set of breaths before lifting her head. But my words arrived first.
“My mother is dead,” I said flatly, as if they were the most certain words I had ever spoken. And then everything before me vanished. I passed out.
An ambulance must have been called. I was carted off. Examinations were performed. But I remember nothing of this.
I woke up in the same hospital where my mother was but on a different floor. I was in the emergency room, and she was in the morgue. Ab and Dolph were sitting next to me.
“Ivy,” they said conspiratorially when I opened my eyes and turned my head toward them. “We have to act quickly.”
I knew what he meant. I was prepared for this moment. The curse had trained me well. I slid my legs out from under the blanket and stood up. And though I was in shock, I walked as if following a marked path through fog. The Twins held my hands, and together we padded down the hall and out the door. They had already called Mr. Sweet at the funeral home. He had worked with Ab and Dolph on their mother and would manage my mother’s release from the hospital and deliver her to us as soon as we were ready.
Even though Ab and Dolph had warned me not to leave my mother, it is impossible for me to connect her death to the curse. Simply, she had gone down to Tommy’s Book Shelf to buy me a book to mark the beginning of my college career when the accident happened. After all the crime she witnessed in her work, all the hate and wickedness, she died so innocently. She was walking back up Pennsylvania Avenue and was next to the courthouse when a delivery truck backfired. It startled her, and she caught a heel on a metal service grate, pitched headfirst, and hit awkwardly against the building’s brass standpipe. She must have known she couldn’t get her hand ahead of her face to brace her fall, so instead she turned her face away but hit her temple flush on the raised knuckle of a brass bolt. She fractured her skull. She had a brain hemorrhage and was dead by the time Mrs. Burnes had hollered my name from her office window. Altogether I spent only about four hours at the college. Once my mother died, the curse fully
occupied the space she’d left behind, and whatever religious goals I had gave way to my adoration of her.
When Ab and Dolph and I left the hospital, we drove toward the pharmacy to prepare for her.
“We can help,” they said, and without another word spoken I knew what they meant. We could manage her, as Ab and Dolph had done with their mother, in a traditional way, by skinning her and removing the organs and flesh and then preserving the skin with a better generation of chemicals that would leave her more supple and lifelike, unlike Mrs. Rumbaugh, who had dried out and turned nut-brown over the years. Or we could stuff her and coat her with a thin veneer of tinted resin to seal out the air while securing her true color.
The decision really hinged on whether I wanted to preserve her body entirely, as done with big game, or create an artificial model, which was what I had learned to do with large fish. I wanted both. I wanted some part of her to touch that was real, not just a resin model. Like the faithful, I wanted to touch something sacred—a saint’s lock of hair, a bone, a withered face. To touch what is human, and to feel human in response, was what I craved. So I decided to keep her hands. It seemed a traditional choice—and they are so elegant.
“I have it figured out,” I quietly said to the Twins.
“Any way you want. Right, Dolph?” Ab replied.
“Anything at all,” said Dolph, who reached up from the backseat and put his fingers on my shoulder.
“How long will Mr. Sweet give us with the body?” I asked.
“Before or after embalming?” he replied.
“Before,” I said. “I don’t want any marks. I want to make a mold.” They knew exactly what technique I meant to apply.
While I waited at the pharmacy with Dolph, Ab went to purchase the supplies. As soon as he returned with the five-gallon buckets of mold-grade latex and a plastic liner for a bathtub, he called Mr. Sweet. It didn’t take him long to arrive.
Mother wasn’t badly hurt, so we didn’t have to worry much about rebuilding any of her bone structure. I gave her a kiss, whispered the few things I needed to say into her ear, and then got busy. First, we lifted her into the tub and coated her skin with Vaseline so the latex wouldn’t stick.
The five-gallon bucket was too heavy for me to lift, so I used a quart measuring cup to dip into the latex, then pour over her feet. Dolph watched to make sure I was following his directions. “Slowly,” he cautioned, “or it bubbles up into a honeycomb. It’s not hard to patch, but it will never look natural.”
“Okay,” I replied, and slowed down, trying in part to imagine I was icing a cake, but mostly I was turning over the word natural, which he had used to describe the effect we were trying to achieve. I did want her to look natural, exactly like she had while alive, rather than like some of the twinkle-eyed, stiff-furred, lacquer-lipped animals that every taxidermist had in his shop. I had given a lot of thought to the results I wanted. After making the life-size mold, we could release the body back to the funeral home. From the mold we could then make a positive image using more firm, “human”-grade latex,
which could be skin-tinted. I would add a jointed wire armature to the core so she could be manipulated into positions. I could then paint her with an airbrush so she appeared real. And if I wanted, I could make as many as I wished. But for now, I just wanted one.
As we worked, we made sure the latex got all the way under her outstretched arms and into the folds of skin and over her face until she was fully submerged. Then we waited for it to cure. It didn’t take long.
We had an open casket at the viewing, and Mother looked splendid. Mr. Sweet embalmed her after we returned her to the funeral home. I picked out her clothing and did her hair and makeup. She looked so young, almost like my twin. And with a silk shawl draped across her middle, no one could notice her missing hands, which I had kept for myself. Father Baumann gave the funeral Mass, and Mother was buried in the Rumbaugh cemetery, in the exact spot she had shown me on my birthday. Her death and burial had all happened so quickly. Just some weather blowing through, she might have said.