The Cedar Chest’s Secret

For many years, I’ve kept my guilt regarding the cedar chest a secret, ashamed of my lack of self-control. This Christmas I’ve decided to make a clean breast of it and confess.

To begin with, I admit to being an incurable bookaholic. I always have been. One of my earliest memories is of standing behind my mother as she washed the lunch dishes, pulling at her apron strings as I begged her to read “just one more chapter, please, just one more chapter.”

I don’t recall my mother ever refusing to leave the sudsy pan, dry her hands, and follow me to the living room. We’d curl up together and while away the afternoon, deep in our love for the printed word. A devoted amateur actress, she read with passionate expression. I would listen, mesmerized, carried away on the wings of her words.

When I finally learned to read on my own, I experienced one of the greatest epiphanies of my life. There was magic to be found on the printed page; words had the power to sweep me into another time, another place, another spirit.

I read everything from the cereal box on the breakfast table to the set of university encyclopedias published in 1902 which I discovered in my grandmother’s attic. (It wasn’t until I couldn’t find the word “airplane” that I recognized the venerable age of this fascinating reading material and stopped using then as reference material for school projects).

I soon wanted my own library. While other children hounded their parents for toys, I begged for books, books, and more books.

Christmas presented a paramount opportunity for my supplications. Each autumn I prepared a long list of titles, any of which I’d be delighted to find beneath the tree. Since we had no bookstore in our small town, Eaton’s catalogue was the only source of these desirable items.

One very special Sunday afternoon each November, my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table, that lovely plump volume open in front of us, while I selected the books I most desired from the limited selection on the pair of pages offering reading material.

My mother, wise to my penchant for devouring books the moment they arrived in the house, never let me know when she was picking up the parcel from the post office. She most definitely never revealed where she hid the package until Christmas.

By this time, my addiction to books had made me sly and unscrupulous. No book could remain unread anywhere within my ability to ferret it out. One day when I’d become desperate for a good, fresh read, I began a quest for her hiding place.

I dug through closets, into their darkest, most remote corners and topmost shelves. I burrowed under the sheets and towels in the linen cupboard, and even checked beneath the mattress in the guest room.

Stymied, later that afternoon I followed my mother into my parent’s bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. I watched as she opened the cedar chest beneath the window. My father had made it for her when they’d gotten engaged, and she kept her most treasured possessions inside…her wedding gown, my christening dress, her collection of hand-embroidered linens and, anathemas to a fan of children’s writer Thornton W. Burgess, her fox fur capes. The wily hero of many of Mr. Burgess’s stories, Reddy Fox had found his way into my heart and left me with an abhorrence of all garments made from animal pelts. My mother, well aware of the fact, must have believed that nothing could induce me to invade the cedar chest that housed them.

I watched as she folded a pillowslip she’d finished decorating with moss roses. As she bent over the cedar chest to store her handiwork, I started to turn away.

Something caught my eye. Peeking out from beneath a lace tablecloth was the top corner of a shiny new book!

Possibly realizing her faux pas, my mother hastily lowered the lid and glanced in my direction. Had I seen it? The question mirrored in her eyes.

Struggling to appear nonchalant, I began to hum, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” as I swung my legs against the chenille bedspread and gazed up at the ceiling. She hesitated, then drew a deep breath, and headed out of the room.

“Come along, Gail,” she called as she started down the stairs. “We have cookies to bake.”

I skipped along after her, visions of how I’d invade the cedar chest later when I was alone upstairs dancing through my head.

That evening, after I’d been tucked into bed and my parents were settled in the living room listening to Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen on the radio, I slipped my bare feet out onto the cold linoleum and tiptoed across the hall to my parents’ room. I carried a small flashlight my father had given me the previous Christmas…in case of power outages, he’d said. I’m sure he’d never intended it to be used for book burglary in his own home.

Trembling with the thrill of the forbidden, I eased open the cedar chest, slipped my hand beneath the folded linens, holding my breath and grimacing as my hand brushed against the furs of those poor, dead foxes, and felt them…not the usual two but four, count them, four slick, new books, their dust jackets smooth and beautiful as silk.

I slid out the top volume and read its title, The Secret of Shadow Ranch. It was the Nancy Drew mystery I’d craved for the past two years, but Eatons had always sent a substitution. My breath caught in my throat.

Resting my back against the cedar chest, I sat on the floor, opened the Carolyn Keene classic to page one, adjusted my flashlight, and began to read. I had to stay alert for the slightest indication that either of my parents was about to come upstairs.

Oh, the bliss of those stolen moments. My heart hammering, I read Nancy’s adventures for more than an hour. My feet felt like blocks of ice on the cold floor, I shivered in my pajamas…and I continued to read.

Then I heard my father suggesting a cup of tea before bed. I eased open the cedar chest, slid the book gently back beneath the tablecloths, and scuttled back to my room.

Snuggled beneath the covers with the flashlight still warm in my hand, I drifted off to sleep. Visions of Nancy Drew and her friends Bess and George riding the range at Shadow Ranch replaced the sugarplums that were supposed to dance through my head.

The next morning, as I glanced across the breakfast at my mother, guilt washed over me. I was destroying her joy in the big surprise she must be planning to spring on me on Christmas morning with the presentation of that long-desired Nancy Drew title.

I tried to admonish myself. You should be ashamed of yourself. You must never, never do it again.

Yet that night, as my parents listened to a Christmas concert on the living room radio, I once again eased open the pages of The Secret of Shadow Ranch and read on. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I’d devoured all four books and was contemplating rereading Shadow Ranch.

No, I told myself sternly. You’ll bend a page, you’ll crack the spine. You’ll leave evidence. Quit while you’re ahead.

As I unwrapped each book on Christmas morning, my gushing enthusiasm might have been a tip-off to less trusting parents. Both avid readers, they understood (or believed they understood) the extent of my thirst for the printed word. My mother, confident in the fact that nothing could induce me to touch those fox furs much less burrow beneath them, watched me, her expression bright in my reflected joy. Cradling my treasures in my arms, I curled up in a corner of the couch and, in the glow of the multi-colored tree lights, settled down to indulge myself in a full Christmas morning of reading.

My clandestine activity continued during the next three Christmases. It might have gone on longer had I not made a major mistake.

My favorite author at the time was L. M. Montgomery. I’d read all of the Anne books and had been longing for one of the author’s more mature stories called The Blue Castle Not an easy book to find, it was proving as elusive as The Secret of Shadow Ranch years earlier.

But joy of joys! A week before Christmas it appeared in the cedar chest. Reading it by the light of my flashlight, I was thrilled by the courage of heroine, Valancy Stirling, and identified with her desire for freedom and self-expression. It was so romantic, the ending so absolutely wonderful. When I finished it two days before Christmas, I hugged the volume in the darkness beside the cedar chest. Perfect, perfect little book!

On Christmas morning relatives descended on our home. It was my parents’ turn to host the Yuletide dinner. One of my maternal aunts wandered into the living room to find me in my usual corner of the couch, rereading The Blue Castle.

“Well, Gail, I see you got another book,” she sighed in mild exasperation.

“Yes, a perfectly lovely book.” I put my finger between the pages of the first chapter to mark my place and beamed at her.

“Another novel, no doubt,” she scoffed, sitting down opposite me. “I never read anything but the newspapers myself. Those things are nothing but nonsense.”

“Oh, no they aren’t!” I couldn’t bear to hear my beloved books defamed. “This one is about a girl who leaves home to nurse a sick friend and falls in love with the town outcast. Later she discovers he’s really a millionaire, they get married, and live happily ever after.”

“Do they now?”

My stomach doing a flip flop, I turned to see my mother standing in the living room doorway. My finger slipped from page six.

Her lips curled into a smile. She winked and turned back into the turkey-scented kitchen.

My mother died several Christmases later, a victim of cancer. Her legacy to my love of literature lives on in my heart and home. The Adventures of Reddy Fox, The Secret of Shadow Ranch, and The Blue Castle remain beloved parts of my library. As for the cedar chest, it sits in my living room, symbolic of those happy Christmases when a book and a mother who understood could make my dreams come true.