Secret Lives

by Amoss, Berthe;

  Chapter XXI

  When Aunt Eveline and I had finished constructing the hoop out of coat hangers, Aunt Eveline basted it in all around, making little comments the whole time like, “For heaven’s sake, be careful!” When she had finished anchoring it securely to the skirt, I climbed in.

  “We don’t have to shorten the hem,” Aunt Eveline said. “The hoop makes it just the right length.” She looked in the mirror with me. “I remember dressing your mother in this dress,” she said, tears in her eyes. “She tucked a gardenia in her hair and said, ‘Do you think he’ll like me, Eveline?’ She meant your father, of course. I always think of your mother when I smell gardenias.”

  “There’re still some in the yard! I’ll wear one, too!”

  Aunt Eveline didn’t answer. She touched my black bangs hanging in my eyes and I thought she was comparing them unfavorably to Pasie’s blond curls.

  “You look like your mother,” she said softly. “Darling Pasie!”

  When I dressed Halloween evening, I pinned my bangs back with bobby pins and a gardenia over each ear so that, from the front at least, my hair looked long. The dress had a shape of its own; the lace collar made a low, round neckline with fullness in the right places, and it was possible to believe, since you couldn’t say for sure what was under the hoop, that I had hips. Sandra Lee came in and gasped, “You look pretty!”

  She hadn’t mean to say it, but she didn’t take it back after it slipped out. She gulped, flapped her gold wings, and added generously, “You really do.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Of course, she looked gorgeous. “You look nice, too,” I mumbled. It was the first time we’d ever said anything kind to each other.

  Holly came as a Sagoma. She wore a length of striped cloth wrapped like a sarong and a dozen strings of Mardi Gras beads around her neck. Instead of flour on her face, she’d smeared real red clay, and in place of the scarf, she plaited her hair in a million small plaits showing the nice shape of her head. She looked African and authentic; she was too excited to remember she was mad at me.

  “Now, girls,” Aunt Eveline began, “I don’t want you running around asking for candy at every door, like beggars.” Aunt Eveline always missed the point. “Just walk around quietly and if anyone gives you candy, say thank you, and eat only a small amount and—”

  Aunt Eveline was running on forever about Halloween etiquette when a sheeted figure crashed through the screen door, partly because that is the way Tom naturally goes through doors and partly because this time, another sheeted figure had stepped on Tom’s sheet, twisting it so that the holes for his eyes were in back of his head.

  I was about to tell him and Harold how unoriginal their costumes looked when Tom pulled the sheet off and said, “Addie?” in an unnatural voice. He was staring at me, and I decided it was a compliment.

  “Stay in the neighborhood. Be careful of the dress,” Aunt Eveline continued. “Don’t . . .”

  Aunt Eveline didn’t stop giving advice until we were out of earshot.

  “We’ll go to a few houses first,” Tom announced, bossy as usual, but still staring at me. “That way you’ll have something to eat if you get hungry in the graveyard all by yourself.”

  We only had to go to Aunt Toosie’s, because she gave us so many oatmeal cookies, even Tom and Harold had enough.

  “You don’t have to go if you’re scared,” Tom said, relenting, but we were already waiting for the streetcar.

  “So you can win,” I answered. “I’m not scared.”

  When we arrived at Saint Louis #2 the gate was locked. I smiled wickedly at Tom. “So you went in the graveyard on Halloween night last year? How?”

  “It was a little before absolute dark, I guess, but it was getting dark, and it was full of shadows and dark places. You don’t have to keep the bet, Addie,” he added magnanimously.

  “I’m going in,” I said. “You’ll have to boost me.”

  “Don’t go, Addie!” Holly was peering through the gate at the moonlit city of the dead. “Something’s waiting for you! I see it!”

  “Oh, go on in,” said Sandra Lee. “We came all this way.”

  “I don’t see anything,” said Harold, “except, of course, some dead people and a few ghosts. Ha, ha.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I answered, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “Make a basket for my foot.”

  Tom and Harold wove their hands together. I hoisted the hoop out of the way, put one foot in the basket, and swung over the gate. As my feet touched the earth, the same thought occurred to five people at once.

  “How are you going to get back?” the four on the outside chorused.

  “I—I don’t know!” I wailed.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Tom. “Make a basket.”

  “No! No, don’t,” I said. “Wait till I get back with the chrysanthemums.” And, bravely turning my back on the gate, I started down the narrow aisle between the little houses where dead people slept.

  Clouds racing over the moon made ghost shadows on the white tombs, and the wind whispered its way around corners, changing the ferns that grew from cracks in the tombs to tiny, nervous hands.

  “Mother of God!” I said it out loud. The sharp shadow of my arm stabbed a stone angel. “I promise always to be good. I’ll never aggravate Aunt Eveline again. I’ll turn the other cheek to Sandra Lee. I’ll—” I stopped. Everything looked different at night. I wasn’t sure where the family tomb was. I saw a tomb where the entrance slab had fallen open; maybe the tomb Holly had gone into. I’d made so many turns, I wasn’t even sure where the gate was, either. I turned around and walked back—I hoped. I’d admit defeat. I didn’t care. My heart drowned out other sounds, and I’d run out of promises to offer up.

  The moon came out from behind a cloud and lit some white chrysanthemums into tiny moons. They were decorating a more elaborate tomb-house than ours, one that had an iron grille fence forming a little yard in front. The chrysanthemums were in a vase on the tomb-house steps, behind the gate. Tom would never know the difference. I pushed at the gate and saw in the moonlight a small lock holding it closed. I hitched my skirt in the hoop again and put my foot on the gate handle. I jumped over the fence and grabbed one of the chrysanthemums. Footsteps—I heard footsteps! I knocked over the vase, and it fell on the stone steps with a crash that blotted out all of the noise in the world, leaving everlasting silence and—footsteps. Closer. I couldn’t find a place to put my foot on that side of the fence. I was going to die of fright right there. I looked up and saw—oh, Lord! I saw Uncle Ben’s ghost coming toward me! I could see his eye sockets and his mustache. I could see his lower jaw working. He was stretching out his arms toward me. I turned and threw myself over the opposite corner of the fence and tried to run. Something held me fast. I screamed and screamed and, in between screams, just before I fainted, I heard the ghost cry out in anguish, “Pasie!” Then, the nightmare wave washed over me, drowning out consciousness.

  I came to, smelling water that stunk like flowers in a vase too long. I was propped up against the tomb, and Tom was sloshing chrysanthemum water in my face with the end of his sheet. “Addie! Wake up! Please wake up!”

  “Ugh,” I said. “Stop putting that smelly water on me!”

  Something almost as frightening as the ghost was flying around at the back of my mind. I brought it forward and remembered hearing the sound of tearing silk. I looked down at an enormous slash in my mother’s dress where an iron picket had gone through the skirt when my hoop caught on the fence. I had pulled so hard, I’d bent the hoop into an oval and one side of the dress was torn from waist to hem.

  The ghost was sitting on some tomb steps a few feet away, his head in his hands. “Addie,” he mumbled in shamed tones, “I thought you were Pasie! You looked just like her. Just like her . . .” His voice trailed off in a beery sigh.

  “Uncle Malvern, what are you doing here?” asked Tom in disgust.

  “Huh?” said Uncle Malvern.

  “It’
s night, Uncle Malvern. What are you doing in the cemetery at night?”

  “Same thing you’re doing, boy—not much!” Uncle Malvern laughed happily at his joke.

  Tom groaned, too humiliated to speak.

  “Came for All Saints’ Day,” said Uncle Malvern. “To see the flowers.”

  “But it’s nighttime! The cemetery’s closed,” Tom said.

  “Wasn’t when I came.” Uncle Malvern chuckled at his second joke. “I—I fell asleep, I guess. Came at five,” he added sheepishly and sighed more beer.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Tom said sternly, pulling me up. “Come on,” he added roughly to Uncle Malvern.

  “Here, Uncle Malvern,” I said, giving him my hand. “Let me help you up.”

  “Thank you, my dear. I can manage now.” He rose with dignity.

  We must have made a strange sight sauntering down the aisle of the moonlit cemetery, my arm through Uncle Malvern’s, my other hand clutching the dress and lopsided hoop, which swung from side to side, banging three sets of knees. Tom’s hand felt firm and good on my shoulder. I didn’t even feel like pretending it belonged to Edmond. And even though I’d ruined my mother’s dress, when I saw the Angel Gabriel flying around at the gate, flapping her wings at Harold and Holly, I was glad I had not gone as Joseph. The guard was there, too, and opened the gate.

  “You folks is plumb crazy!” he said, recognizing Holly and me. “It’s against the rules, me letting you out, and it’s against the rules you getting in. I’ll have to report you. Plumb crazy!”

  When I got home, I crept upstairs, praying Aunt Eveline wouldn’t hear me. I ripped the hoop out of the portrait dress and stuffed it behind my pillow. First thing in the morning, I’d ask Nini to mend it, and maybe Aunt Eveline would never notice if I put it back in the chest right away.

  I crawled into bed, but both Jane Whitmore and sleep were far away. Instead I thought of Pasie. I guess it was wearing her dress, and Uncle Malvern thinking I was Pasie, that made her seem very near, a girl only a little older than me, someone I knew and could understand. And I remembered another white dress, a short, summer one. A scene so clear it could have been a memory came to me.

  “George, she’s too young to be without me. She needs me!”

  “Pasie, if you leave, you leave without your child. Lola can take care of Addie. She can do anything you can do, and better.”

  “There’s one thing I can do better than Lola, that only I can do. I can be her mother. Oh, George, don’t be so cruel!”

  “I cruel! You are cruel, Pasie. You are leaving us!”

  “No, George, I am only leaving you. I want my child.”

  “Pasie, you don’t have to leave. Even now. Stay. We can all be together. Please. Please, Pasie!”

  “You don’t understand, George. The point is I can’t stay. Try to understand that.”

  “I don’t understand it. Every marriage has its ups and downs. We just have to weather the storm. I, for one, am ready to forget and forgive.”

  “George, it is not something you’ve done, or anything I’ve done. It’s the way we are.” She paused and then said slowly, without emotion, “I loathe you.”

  I was there, a small child running after her. Strong hands dragged me back. I called her until my throat ached, long after her thin, white-clad figure had disappeared into the banana trees. The man’s arms held me close. I struggled, bit, and kicked, crying for my mother. I screamed myself hoarse, locked in unyielding arms.

  “Addie!”

  A pebble hit the screen. Then another, and another.

  “Tom?” I struggled out of the scene, still clear and hard against a tropical sky.

  “Are you awake?” Tom was under my window.

  “I can’t stop thinking about them!” I slid the screen up and leaned out of my window, glad Tom had come back and I could stop living that scene—a dream or a memory—it made no difference to the misery I felt.

  “Who can’t you stop thinking about?”

  “Pasie, my mother, I mean, and my father. Where’s Uncle Malvern?”

  “I got him to bed. Come on down.”

  I didn’t have a shortcut out of my window like Tom’s and this house told secrets in squeaks and strange noises. I took the back stairs, creaking all the way. Aunt Eveline locked the back door at night, but left the key in the lock. I turned it, holding my breath. It groaned, practically calling Aunt Eveline. But the house remained absolutely quiet.

  “Addie!” Tom was standing on the back porch. “You look like a ghost in that nightgown.”

  “That was a real Halloween, wasn’t it?”

  “Uncle Malvern is a fool. I hate him.”

  “Don’t hate him. He’s sad. He was young like us once. And he hoped for good things. He just never could make them happen. That’s sad.”

  “I know something. I came to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I lied to you. I broke the code, too.”

  “You did? How?”

  “With a word just three letters long repeated over and over. Like you did.”

  “What word?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t say? Did you read the diary?”

  “Part.”

  “Part! What did it say?”

  “It was too personal. I felt funny reading it.”

  “But what did she say? What was personal?”

  “It was about this guy, that’s all. Mush. It was dumb. I didn’t think you’d want to see it.”

  “But you saw it.”

  “I saw enough.”

  “Who was the guy? You mean she liked this man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not my father?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who?”

  “Aw, Addie! Some guy. I don’t know who. And Fifi. She misses Fifi almost as much as this man.”

  “Oh, poor Pasie! I wish I had read it!”

  “It isn’t your business.”

  “What do you mean ‘isn’t my business’? It was my diary.”

  “No, it was your mother’s. Her secrets.” He looked straight at me. “You shouldn’t know other people’s secret thoughts.”

  “I only wanted to know because she was my mother.”

  “That doesn’t entitle you to her secrets.” I didn’t answer. He got up and added, “You wouldn’t have known her secret thoughts if she’d lived. Any more than you know your Aunt Eveline’s. Or mine, Addie.”

  “It was mean and contemptible of you not to tell me in the beginning.”

  “I’m sorry, Addie,” he said, going down the steps. “I just wanted you to know I’d lied. See you.”

  “It’s the lowest thing I ever heard of!” I said, getting madder the more I thought about it. Tom was out of sight, into the dark night.

  I had a strong feeling he was still lying to me. Why hadn’t he told me the word he’d seen repeated? I had an idea it was a name, a name we both knew. I remembered the three numbers I’d seen together just before I realized that four of them meant Fifi. They were 1, 15, and 26.

  Chapter XXII

  I stood at the door to Uncle Malvern’s room. I felt foolish. I’d imagined the whole thing. He’d think I was crazy.

  “Uncle Malvern,” I called timidly. “Aunt Eveline baked some cookies for Aunt Mable.”

  No answer.

  “Uncle Malvern,” I said loudly. “I have cookies. From Aunt Eveline!”

  The door opened, blowing the sour smell of beer at me. Uncle Malvern stood against the background of his perpetual motion machine, a mass of wheels and chains looming still as a tombstone.

  “How nice, my dear,” he said. “They look absolutely yummy.” Uncle Malvern was staring at me absentmindedly, as though he were trying to place me.

  “Tell me about my mother!” I blurted.

  “Your mother!”

  I swallowed. “Did you love her? Did you love Pasie?”

  “Pasie!” He gasped, recovered, and said, “Pa
sie. We all loved her.” His voice caught. “Yes, we all loved her.”

  “I mean, were you in love with her?” I could hardly believe the words I was saying were mine.

  “A lovely girl,” he mumbled. “I used to look at her when Eveline was painting the portrait. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.” He sighed.

  “Aunt Toosie says she was selfish,” I said. “She says Pasie took George away from Eveline. Aunt Toosie says my father really loved Aunt Eveline, and I think Pasie really loved you.”

  Uncle Malvern looked so startled I wished I could take the words back.

  “Brother and sister,” he said in a rush. “We loved each other like brother and sister. Poor Pasie!”

  “Poor Eveline, it seems to me!” I said rudely.

  “My dear, you’re too young to understand.”

  “I’m not too young! I want to know.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you do. Of course you do! But she was lovely, and we did all love her. If Toosie thought her selfish, well, she was human. All the more beautiful because of it.” He sighed, and his watery blue eyes swam more than ever.

  I was afraid to breathe for fear he’d stop talking.

  “You see, Pasie and I—we were good friends all of our lives, like brother and sister. It wasn’t George’s fault, but he didn’t understand her. He was much older, and he didn’t realize how young and delicate she was—her artistic temperament, you know. She became terribly thin in the climate out there—a wraith—and she didn’t want to bother him because he had so much on his mind.”

  Uncle Malvern paused so long, I thought he’d forgotten he was talking to me.