Carmen smiled. “As far as my own mother’s things, like you, I have a few preliminary instructions.”
“Carmen, how hard can it be?” Dee Dee asked sarcastically. “We cut the tape, open said box, and take out the contents one by one. Sort into three piles: save or analyze, donate, throw the hell out. Does that sum it up?”
“Thanks for that summation, Counselor,” Carmen said, taking a sip of her wine. “One word of warning. My mom led an organized but dull life. She was a minister’s wife, okay? She was a lovely mother, generous with her time and energy, a . . .” Carmen felt her words catch in her throat as the image of her mother’s smiling face floated into her mind. One constant about her mother: she was always pleasant and usually smiling. “Mom was a precious darling,” she added wistfully. “But there won’t be much here worth saving. And everything of sentimental value that I wanted, I’ve already claimed.” She paused. “What I’m trying to say is don’t be afraid to put things in the trash sack. You won’t hurt my feelings. A few items of clothing that she tucked away, purses—she liked her purses—a scarf or two, perhaps, some scrapbooks. Mommy was a homebody, and she didn’t socialize much outside church—bridge with her little group of friends and movies once in a while with Dad. If he approved of the film, of course.” Carmen added, “She was your traditional Mad Men–era 1950s housewife.”
Carmen put on a Branford Marsalis CD, grabbed a handful of snack mix, and opened a box marked “Joan, Misc.,” the notation in her brother Howie’s nearly illegible handwriting. A couple of blouses; a Bible bound in white leather, now worn and peeling, inscribed to her by a “Mrs. Workman, with gratitude”; some Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins novels; old LPs, the vinyl discs encased in shabby and torn covers, the art faded by time, moisture, and handling; a well-worn paperback copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God—Carmen set this aside—framed photographs of Carmen and her younger brothers, Ralph and Howie, high school and college graduations, Howie’s wedding, her mom and dad on a cruise. Would Dad like to have these? Carmen wondered. She wiped a tear away.
A photo of . . . Carmen lost herself in memories as she thumbed through a small album of her own baby pictures and photos of her mother, aunts, and uncles from the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, judging by the clothes, and Uncle Jack in his Army Air Corps uniform from World War II.
“I thought you said your mother never went anywhere!” Dee Dee’s voice carried across the room. She held up her hands, one clutching a stack of postcards and photos, the other a passport. Carmen set her wineglass down, rose, and took the passport from Dee Dee, opening it.
“France, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands . . .” She scanned her memory for the itineraries of her parents’ later cruise vacations, but none of them matched the countries stamped on the pages of the now-expired document. “This passport is . . . Wow, this is from the late ’50s, early ’60s.” Hmmm, the stamps are faded. Kind of hard to read. She frowned. As far as Carmen knew, Mom had never mentioned anything about going to these places. In fact, she hadn’t talked much at all about her life before she married Carmen’s dad.
“Well, she was definitely there, and in New York, Baltimore . . . no, that’s a postcard to her from someone named RS,” Dee Dee said, her attention riveted to the stack of black-and-white photos she was flipping through. “Oh, wait . . . here’s a photo of your mom! At least I think this is her. You tell me. She looks like you—same dimples. Here she is at the Eiffel Tower . . . Versailles! Hmmm. London. Big Ben in the background. She was quite a globe-trotter. And—” Dee Dee stopped.
Carmen stepped closer and nudged her. “What? What is it? Let me see that.”
“Oh yes, that’s got to be your mom,” Elise commented, now peering over Dee Dee’s other shoulder at the tiny photo, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. “You do look like her—dimples, smile. Is that your father? I used to hear about Reverend Bradshaw and the church a lot, but I haven’t actually met him . . .” Elise’s voice faded away.
“No, that isn’t my dad. So that can’t be Mom,” Carmen observed, frowning. The woman in the photo was beaming; she looked joyful and appeared to be laughing just when the shutter had clicked. She held herself with a jaunty attitude, and her clothes were stylish. Carmen didn’t recognize the man at her side in the picture. Her breath caught for a second, then Carmen smiled. Of course.
“No. That isn’t Mom. That’s probably Aunt Tricia. Well, she wasn’t really my aunt. She and my mom were first cousins, but she looked just like Mom, and they were close in age, just seven months apart.” But even as Carmen spoke, as she studied the photo more closely, she knew her words weren’t true. “No. Wait. That is my mother. But . . .”
Who’s the guy?
She leaned in to the photo, taking it from Dee Dee’s fingers. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the young man standing next to her mother, his arm draped protectively around her shoulders. He wore a military uniform; it looked as if it was from the Army, she thought. Carmen looked up at Dee Dee and Elise. She turned the photo over. The handwriting was unfamiliar.
“Jo and RS, April 1963”
Jo.
For a moment, no one spoke. Carmen knew that the gazes of Elise and Dee Dee were riveted to her face. She felt them staring at her. She continued to study the woman in the photo—now a stranger—looking from her to the soldier and back again. There was no doubt. This was Mom. But who was the man? The photo had been taken before she was born. She glanced at the photographs Dee Dee still clutched in her hand. And then she grabbed her cell phone.
She was startled when a hand that felt like a bracelet of steel encircled her wrist.
“Who are you calling?” Elise’s voice was sharp.
“My dad. I’m going to ask him—”
“No, you aren’t,” Elise interrupted.
Carmen jerked her arm away and glared at Elise. “What are you talking about? This is not your business.”
Elise nodded. “You’re right, it isn’t.” She gestured toward the photo. “And have you considered that this might not be your father’s business? That these treasures of your mother’s are hers alone, from the days before she married him? From the days when she was known . . . to someone, anyway, as Jo Adams and not Mrs. Reverend Howard Bradshaw?”
Carmen felt tears forming in her eyes. “But . . . h-he would know . . .”
“He might not know,” Dee Dee said, a matter-of-fact tone in her voice, a contrast to the stern one in Elise’s. “Just because you marry someone doesn’t mean they know everything about you. Maybe you should finish going through all of these boxes before you make that call. You should read through these letters.”
“What letters?”
Dee Dee took two steps toward the coffee table and withdrew a packet from a box: a neat stack of letters bundled together and tied with a red ribbon. She handed them to Carmen, whose hand was shaking. The top letter was addressed to “Miss Joan Adams” in care of a post office box in Harlem. The return address was “Lt. R. S. Topolosky, Ft. Knox, Kentucky.”
Carmen’s hand was trembling. “W-what does this mean?”
Elise shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t have to mean anything other than your mom had a life before she married your dad. Judging from the address, it looks as if she lived in New York City for a while. And that—”
“And that she traveled to . . . Europe!” Carmen said loudly, her voice quivering. “What the hell! My mom never went anywhere!”
Dee Dee giggled. “As far you as you knew.”
“It looks like there was a lot more to her than you realized,” Elise added in a mild tone.
The ribbon holding the letters together was shredded and worn, a bit stretched and barely holding together the assortment of papers and letters. One envelope had worked itself loose and suddenly floated down to the floor.
Elise knelt to pick it up. “Here you go. This one is trying to get away.”
Carmen took the envelope and sat down on the couch. Gently, she slipped it bac
k under the ribbon and set the bundle on the table. Her mind was still spinning from the notion that her mother, whom she’d thought of as the consummate “church lady,” had not quite been who she seemed to be. Elise and Dee Dee retreated to give her some privacy and continue their sorting while, absently, Carmen’s gaze wandered back and forth across the room, then returned to the coffee table and the writing on the front of the envelope on top of the stack. It was in the same handwriting. The words danced in front of her eyes. The return address was the same as the last one she’d seen: from a Lt. Topolosky. The mailing address on the envelope was the same too. Only the addressee’s name was different. Carmen gasped.
Elise and Dee Dee whirled around.
“What is it?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Where is it, where is it . . .”
“Where is what?” Elise asked.
“The magnifying glass. Ah! Here it is. Okay,” Carmen murmured to herself as she rummaged around the table sending the papers flying as if they’d been attacked by the Tasmanian Devil.
She finally found the tiny snapshot Dee Dee had first excavated, then held the magnifying glass in her hand like Sherlock Holmes, moving it close to the image. The photo had been taken on a sunny day, but neither her mother nor the soldier were wearing sunglasses, so both were squinting. The soldier’s left hand rested gently on top of Joan’s shoulder. Joan’s left arm was bent at the elbow, her hand resting on the soldier’s. A flash of light there had been caught by the camera, the reflection of sunlight from a ring. A ring with a gemstone. Carmen’s breath caught in her throat. A wedding ring.
Mrs. Joan Topolosky.
Chapter 8
Carmen
Elise and Dee Dee were giddy with curiosity about the contents of the letters as well as the photos and mementoes they’d found in the old boxes. Carmen knew that. But they didn’t stick around.
“You need some breathing room,” Elise said, hugging her gently.
Dee Dee followed suit. “Yes, you do. Some private time to read and absorb your mom’s words. I gotta scoot. Satan’s spawn number one is probably waiting for me.” She sighed dramatically in imitation of her eldest daughter. “Prom season is upon us. Shopping for ‘the dress.’”
After they left, Carmen poured another glass of wine, clicked off the music, and sat down on the floor in front of the coffee table. The letters, a stack of papers, and the photo albums were spread out across the top. The two shabby little boxes had contained a lot more than she’d realized when she picked them up from her dad. The memory of his odd behavior and even more odd expression caused her to wonder now if he’d known what they contained. She thought he did.
The setting sun cast a warm glow across the room, one last bow before sinking below the horizon. The light was amber in color and illuminated small specks of glitter that had attached themselves to the red ribbon tied around the letters. Carmen touched it, and a few of the sparkles came off on her fingertip. She didn’t know where to begin.
No, that’s not true. I know where to begin. I just don’t know if I should.
Carmen focused the organizational side of her brain. She started with the documents, resisting the urge to read each one; she smoothed out the old papers and placed each one flat, creating a neat stack. Carmen then picked up the letters, slid off the ribbon, and organized them chronologically by postmark. Many of them were from her grandparents, Nona and Pops, a few were from distant relatives in Georgia, and several had a New York return address. These were from her mother’s favorite cousin, Dorothy. The first of these letters was addressed to “Miss Joan Adams” from “Mrs. Dorothy Fortune.” Carmen smiled. She remembered Cousin Dorothy—one of her mother’s many first cousins—as a ninety-plus-year-old dynamo, before she passed away. The postmark year was 1949.
She moved on to the booklets and pamphlets and other miscellaneous pieces of paper. Next, she looked at the photographs, most of which were in small albums. Unknowingly, perhaps, her mother had helped her: each album was labeled in her mother’s or grandmother’s handwriting. The earliest date was in 1938, and Joan would have been eight years old.
Carmen chuckled at the image of her mother with plaited hair and scraped knobby knees, skinny and grinning, a cat-that-caught-the-canary expression on her face. Her smile exposed lots of teeth that seemed too large and too many for her small face. Next to her stood a little boy of similar height and age, his neatly ironed and tucked-in plaid shirt a marked contrast to Joan’s rumpled skirt. He squinted, as if the sun was in his eyes, and his face had an ambivalent mask, as if he was concerned about something. Carmen smiled. Judging from Joan’s defiant expression, Carmen rather thought her mother might have been up to some mischief, an assumption based on some of the stories she’d heard from her grandparents and uncles years ago.
“Oh yes, that Joanie was something else! Always up to some devilry!” Uncle Marshall, her mother’s older brother, had often said in the evenings after a huge holiday dinner, which Joan’s family was famous for.
“Hush up, Marsh,” her mother would say in passing, usually wearing a mysterious smile as she moved quickly from kitchen to dining room and back again.
Uncle Marshall would roll his eyes and wink at Carmen, who was enthralled and incredulous. It was difficult to imagine her mother as anything but an angel and Reverend Bradshaw’s saintly wife.
Carmen read the neatly printed caption below the faded snapshot.
“Joanie and Cricket, summer 1943”
Chapter 9
Joan
Cincinnati, 1946
“Crrriiiccckkket! Ima pop you in your head!”
“Uh-uh . . .”
“Uh-huh!”
“Ow!”
Cricket’s yell hit decibels unmatched by a Wagnerian soprano.
“What is going on out there?” Winona Adams stepped onto the back porch. She did not look happy.
Cricket stole a quick look at Joanie, who glared back at him, her hand balled into a fist.
“Nothing!” he said, wiping away his tears with the back of a grimy paw.
Joanie was crouched off to the side of him, her face hidden behind the branches of the sticker bush. She could see the bottom half of her mother: white-and-black-checked apron, faded blue housedress, and black shoes. Her mother didn’t move. That was a good sign. Then she took a step into the yard. Uh-oh.
“Do I have to come over there?” Winona called. Now her hands were on her hips. Joanie’s stomach muscles clenched.
“Noooooo,” both children called out.
“Humph,” Mrs. Adams commented. “Y’all behave, all right?”
“Yeeessss, ma’am,” Joanie and Cricket answered in unison. The screen door squeaked when it closed.
“And Joan Ann, don’t get filthy out there, now. Dorothy Mae’s coming, you hear me?”
“Yes, Momma!” This time only Joanie had answered.
Both she and Cricket looked down at her dress, smudged with grass stains and the imprints of sweaty fingers, and at her bony knees: one was caked with mud; the other had a prominent scrape on it.
Mrs. Adams’s voice carried again. Startled, the children froze, and Joanie, who’d started to say something to Cricket, closed her mouth.
“Hubert, will you please oil up that door? I just cain’t listen to . . .” The sound of her voice faded as she moved toward the center of the house. Joanie smiled. Her mother was from a place she called “middle Georgia,” and when she was annoyed about something, the vowels in her words stretched out and a “fixin’ to” or “cain’t” would slip into her sentences. Joanie thought that was funny, the way Momma talked, but she would never let her mother know that.
“You in trouble now. Pro’bly get a whuppin’,” Cricket whispered loud enough to spook the bunny rabbit they’d been stalking.
“Shut up!” Joanie snapped at Cricket. She swatted at him too, but this time she missed. “Now look what you done!” A flash of white cottontail caught her attention, but one blink lat
er it was gone.
Cricket grinned. Joanie was always hitting him or trying to. He’d never admit it, but he liked it when Joanie did that. He loved Joanie, and she loved him back. She was his best friend. So he swatted back at Joanie, then ran. And ran and ran, so fast that his legs hurt. Joanie ran after him.
Cricket didn’t run out of space—the yard was huge. The street Joanie lived on was one street over from where Cricket lived, both streets within the boundaries of the city but only just. At the end of the block, there was a cornfield and then railroad tracks. On the other side of the tracks, or so Joanie’s father said when he didn’t know Joanie was listening, lived a man named McCulloch who owned something called a still. Joanie’s brothers were warned repeatedly to stay away from it because it was known to blow up occasionally, which Joanie thought was so funny. How could a thing that was supposed to be “still” blow up?
When Hubert Adams got a job on the railroad, he and Joanie’s mother, Winona, moved up to Cincinnati from Georgia by way of Kentucky, and as soon as they could, they grabbed up a little “spot” of land, as Hubert called it, as much space as they could afford. They were city folk now, but the country they grew up in was not left behind. Nona, as she was sometimes called, brought as much of the red clay of Georgia with her as she could; Hubert’s contribution from Kentucky was a handful of tobacco seeds and a couple of sturdy plants that would grow into his favorite string beans. The same was true of Cricket’s parents, transplants from Alabama. The city was growing too fast and expanding too wide for any one person to own real acreage anymore—even old McCulloch’s boundaries were being whittled away by development and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks. But the yards back along their neighborhood were still generous, and there was space for the children to roam, for a family to keep chickens (no roosters—too noisy) and a garden that would yield enough tomatoes, melons, string beans, cucumbers, kale, and mustard greens to feed the family or to give away or to sell if necessary. Hubert’s small patch of tobacco thrived (even though he didn’t smoke much anymore), as did the Kentucky Wonders, more than Joanie liked because it was her job to pick them, and no matter how hard she tried, she always got a spider bite for her trouble. And when she did, she’d run to her parents, who liked to walk the boundaries of their small domain in the early evening, treading carefully in the rows amidst the thick scent of honeysuckle and the humidity, imagining themselves home again.
The Secret Women Page 5
