Worn Masks

by Phyllis Carito

  As she looked around the room she remembered the tension that followed her announcement, like they were all held dangling and not knowing who would fall first. Her father got up and turned off the television. He walked out of the room into the bedroom he shared with his wife. It seemed all sound had ended. Mary Grace and her mother became frozen in the blue to grey light that slowly condensed into a white spot in the middle of the television. They were drawn toward the darkness until their eyes couldn’t capture any more light from the tube. Shut down.

  It would be three years before her mother would say a word to her. And many more years before Mary Grace found herself back in the living room.

  Now all these years later Mary Grace called a junk man to take the couch and she had to leave the room when they struggled to remove it. She felt lightheaded as the movers turned it on its side to get it through the kitchen doorway. They struggled to keep it closed as they brought it down the stairs. They heaved it onto a waiting truck. It was then that Mary Grace noticed the Castro convertible logo had faded and frayed and the dark-haired smiling girl in her long nightgown was now almost unrecognizable.

  The Portal

  Chapter 3

  MARY GRACE HAD left many times in her mind before she physically left the Maschere home. It started when she learned the exact steps, counted out, from her Castro-convertible bed in the living room, through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the bathroom. Mary Grace was ten years old, a small and timid child. This room would become a portal for her, with its clear angles and corners, the precise and simple one-inch white-and-black floor tile surrounded by four-inch tile rounding the old tub, and the door to the attic. There was a sense of quiet and order that comforted her in the room, and always the possibilities of leaving the room through another door and to the unknown attic.

  Out of the bathroom life seemed like a blur and she often felt unable to manage the two languages of home and school. At home the choppy sounding Italian her parents spoke, and at school the English rules of grammar. In the bathroom she sat on the corner of the tub facing the closed door; the entrance had a lock on it, a slide bolt that she was forbidden to lock. Mary Grace’s mother had told her that her grandfather, Papa, had locked the door and then had become ill. Her father had to get to him by going out through the bedroom window and then in through the bathroom window. “Grazie a Dio. The window wasn’t locked, too!”

  To the left of the bathroom door was another door leading to the attic, set higher, shorter and resting on a step. Mary Grace sat on this step and watched her father shave, puffing out his cheeks and brushing on the shaving cream. With one pass of the straight razor he cleared the cream and whiskers. She’d lean again the attic door and imagine disappearing behind the door. She loved these times when she could sit and watch him in this safe space. Her father let her be there and acted like she wasn’t there, talking to his face in the mirror, “lots of chin hair today.” All the confusion of the household dissipated in this room. There was clarity between Mary Grace and her father, a brightness that broke through the dark and dreary feeling in the rest of the house, here in the bathroom when he smiled at her with his face coated in white cream.

  On the other side of the bathroom, tucked to the right of the toilet, was the largest steam bled radiator in the house, where clothes were often spread to dry. The window, on the same wall as the radiator, had two large etched-glass plates full of tiny chrysanthemums. She had seen these flowers on all the windows cold with moisture from the lack of heat in the house. Only the bathroom’s chrysanthemums remained all year round. The others disappeared into tears and then were gone by spring. She ran her fingers down the texture of the raised glass, the protection of the invisible world of the bathroom.

  For as long as she could remember, even though she knew she was supposed to leave Uncle Paul alone, she had been determined to get up into the attic where her Uncle Paul lived. She imagined it would be like a different land where she and Uncle Paul could talk without the others yelling over them. She wondered what it was like to have a room of your own, and if Uncle Paul had special things in his room? If from his window that was above hers, and that she saw from the yard, if he could he see above the apartment building that backed up against the edge of their backyard? Could he see the moon?

  Mary Grace knew her Uncle Paul, like her, used the bathroom, washed in the sink, and had been protected by the same privacy of etched chrysanthemums. Yet, there was never a towel left, never shaving cream in the sink, no evidence that he lived here, too.

  She flushed the toilet or ran water at the sink to create a sound barrier to her mother’s owl ears, and yes, she locked the bathroom door and then opened the attic door. Her mother was sleeping, and everyone else out of the house the first time she locked the bathroom door, and turned the knob of the attic door, and slid her hand in and up along the wall, flicking on the attic light, before opening the door the width of it. She became proficient at closing and locking the bathroom door so quickly it was one continuous sound. She did this with care so it wouldn’t bang against the towel rack. Mary Grace walked the curved and narrow steps that led up to the attic and turned and sat on the landing. She had arrived in the place she was forbidden to go.

  Behind her, to the right, next to an old trunk, was a door with a rosary and a scapula hanging from a thumbtack in the center panel. The handle was a latch, not a knob. She tried it a few times, lifting and quickly putting it back into place without opening the door. It was a small door, even smaller than the attic door.

  Bare light bulbs hanging from the rafters acted as a path from the top of the staircase to the door of Uncle Paul’s room, revealing small circles of light onto the dry creaky wood boards underfoot.

  She was interested in what was behind that door. What was there, and not there? Who was her Uncle Paul, her father’s brother? He was known by the distinction of “black sheep” and she learned early that his story was not open for questions. He was a mystery, coming and going, not always sleeping home, but where did he go? He had a sweet yet pungent smell about him when he was close. His hands were like her dad’s, large, dry and rough, yet touched her like a whisper. Sometimes he would be gone for weeks at a time, and then he would always bring her back some trinket, a fancy plastic ornament, tucked into her hand, a horse pulling a cart, a tiny sock with funny Italian coins jingling inside, crocheted with red and green threads, gently placed into her hand.

  On Mary Grace’s very first visit to the room, releasing the latch and gently pushing open the door, she tugged on the string and the bare light bulb in the middle of the ceiling barely illuminated the small room, but further out from the light in the shadows she could feel Uncle Paul inhabiting the space; see him looking intently at the painting in front of the bed, the one that he faced each night. It was a sad room, almost bare but for the painting. She knew he would have been wishing he were there in that high field with an old stone church and tall spiraling cypress trees. A shiver ran through her, but not because she was afraid, but because she too wanted to be in that field looking at the beautiful church and odd trees. She could feel safe with Uncle Paul in this room. Was this where he felt safe? Mary Grace would look at the painting each time she was in the room. She often sat on the floor, facing the same direction as the bed, being drawn into the landscape. She had never seen such a large church with a spiral reaching up so tall or trees tightly swirled and pointing toward that spiral.

  She also had never expected the bed to be so small and narrow. She had heard it creak above her following the sound of him on the house stairs, then the flush of the toilet, and then more distant the attic stairs. She had heard his shoes plunk, plunk before the bed took his total weight. This was just a camp bed, a cot, with two army wool blankets, and no spread. Her father had an army blanket, too, but it was not allowed on her mother’s bed, and only used when the electricity and heat went out to keep Mary Grace warm on the couch. She didn’t touch the ones on Uncle Paul’s bed. She knew they were scrat
chy and had the distinct smell of animal—her friend’s dog had sat next to her once and the wool blankets smelled like her hands after petting him.

  After her visits to his room, she wondered if he could hear their television, or their fights when she was sent downstairs to Maggie’s apartment. She wondered what Uncle Paul knew about the arguments, the drinking, the praying? Had he heard it all?

  Mary Grace questioned the interactions she had seen with her parents and Uncle Paul, the way each time he mounted the steps and nodded into the kitchen as he was passing, her mother would raise her chin and turn her back to him suddenly interested in something at the stove or in the sink, while her father would nod back a quiet “Fratello, va bene?” And the words they chose to talk to her about Uncle Paul when he had moved down the hall into the bathroom and ultimately up to the attic, were all in Italian and her mother’s words so bitter that although Mary Grace couldn’t understand she felt like her mother was spitting out sour milk. Yet, Mary Grace had some innate sense about Uncle Paul. The way she could feel comforted by Aunt Maggie, she felt seen by Uncle Paul.

  Mary Grace felt like he knew something that she needed to know about herself. She felt connected to him through their eyes in a deeper way that gave her a sense that he saw her as more solid and purposeful than the way she felt and moved like a shadowy outline through the house.

  Uncle Paul -1

  Chapter 4

  MARY GRACE SOMETIMES heard her father and Aunt Maggie talk about how Uncle Paul kept to himself at the sanitation garage, where he worked the early shift, starting at three-thirty a.m., out in the truck by four a.m., and then back in the garage by nine-thirty a.m. after the haul was dumped. Six hours of hard work riding on the back of the trash truck, clearing the streets of garbage and stench.

  Later Mary Grace learned, after work he’d go over to the men’s club up on the avenue and spent time drinking coffee and looking at the morning papers, sitting alongside the old timers. Her father and Aunt Maggie were pleased that the guys at the club were good to him, respected him, knew what he was capable of, and accepted he was a man of few words. Uncle Paul was referred to as solitario, because he stayed so much to himself, and always seemed to gaze inward. Mary Grace could appreciate this because she wasn’t interested in having interactions with other children at school, but only to watch them interact.

  Most times, it seemed when Uncle Paul was back at the house during the day he napped downstairs on Aunt Maggie’s couch to the sound of her radio, and then he disappeared upstairs to his room when any of the family arrived home. Sometimes he went away for a few weeks, and Mary Grace missed hearing him on the steps and above her when all became quiet in the house.

  But, when he returned he would sit on the screened-in porch with “mia bella bambina, with a head full of biondi curls, and eyes like the changing sea.”

  “The only grandchild.” And Uncle Paul would tap the dimples in each of her cheeks and smile at Mary Grace. “La bella bambina.”

  Uncle Paul asked, “Has your momma read the pretty letters from Italy?” But when Aunt Maggie or others came onto the porch the conversation changed. “How many lightning bugs you catch in the jar?” Mary Grace somehow knew that some conversations were only for her and Uncle Paul. Mary Grace also knew that he watched her, but that didn’t frighten her, for she was curious about him and so it felt right that he would be curious about her. She heard her father tell Uncle Paul he needed to have more friends, but she knew that he liked to stay alone, like she did. She was, as her father called Uncle Paul, piu differente.

  Uncle Paul caught her sometimes when she hid in the space above the stairs and other times in the backyard on the side of the garage away from the house. He knew but didn’t tell on Mary Grace when they were calling her. She sensed he knew she sought calmness for her mind, the stillness of a hot summer day, which she couldn’t express in words. As the heat stagnated the air so did Mary Grace languish in the stillness of the heat, watching the shadows that grew out from the house as the sun circled it with heat and sent a gloomy light into their closed windows.

  Sometimes her father sat on the porch with her when it was too hot to sit upstairs, and her mother was resting. He told Mary Grace when she was complaining about the heat that her Uncle Paul never minded the heat. “Uncle Paul goes away in his mind to the Mediterranean, where there is always a sea breeze, unlike here, and ponders the days in his life that were warm and soothing.”

  “Your Uncle Paul appreciates the warm days after that frigid January day alongthe East River where he saved a man’s life. He noticed a coat bouncing on the water like a balloon losing air. The thought of a man drowning, his air being taken away, lungs filling with water, it made your Uncle Paul think of the war and seeing men’s lungs fill with blood, and choking out their air.” Mary Grace remained quiet, so her father would continue the story. He seemed to be talking more aloud to himself than to her.

  “Uncle Paul tossed his coat to the side and jumped into that January ice water. He grabbed the man’s collar and somehow managed to flip him over and drag him to the shore. He pushed the water out, letting the air in. The cold must have stung like a thousand knives and it took weeks for him to feel warm again, but the man, Rocco, lived.”

  Later Mary Grace would learn that most nights Uncle Paul picked up a meal at the bar from Rocco. After all, Rocco owed him his life, and they had become friends.

  It seemed now that at home Uncle Paul only connected with Mary Grace, and although she wasn’t sure what he had to offer her, she liked when he was around even if they didn’t interact.

  When he came home in the evening, after eight p.m., after Mary Grace had used the bathroom to prepare for bed, he didn’t stop at their apartment, and seemed to walk on his tiptoes to quietly go past their door and up the attic stairs, but Mary Grace always heard him. And she was sure he heard her below him turning the Castro-convertible couch into a bed.

  Uncle Paul -2

  Chapter 5

  ONE OF MARY GRACE’S earliest memories was of her father carrying her up the stairs after she fell on the sidewalk outside the house. The blood from her cut knee was staining the side of his shirt, while her sobbing puddled on his shoulder.

  Uncle Paul was descending the stairs when they met, about halfway, “O, la mia bella bambina,” he looked into her teary eyes, then dipped his head and kissed her palm, scraped and stippled with tiny pebbles, “Ragazza triste,” sad girl. She didn’t understand his words, but his hoarse voice always sounded like he was singing to her from a deep tunnel that pulled the words in long sounds that echoed and comforted her.

  Mary Grace’s desire grew to know more about Uncle Paul. “Why does Uncle Paul go up the steps over my head?”

  “Oh, just be still. I don’t even know what you are trying to say when there is nothing to say,” her mother warned against her inquiries about Uncle Paul living above them.

  A few years later she and Uncle Paul encountered each other on the house staircase again, as he was going up the stairs. She had climbed over the rail and tucked herself into the cavity where the bottom of the attic steps met the doorway of Aunt Maggie’s apartment.

  Aunt Maggie had on previous occasions found Mary Grace in her cubby and made her promise to stay put while she screamed for her brother, Luigi, to come with a ladder. Mary Grace’s mother gave her a few good whacks with the wooden spoon for giving Aunt Maggie a scare.

  They hadn’t let Mary Grace inch her way out, bringing her right foot onto the stairwell between two posts, then swinging herself up, and wrapping her arms around the banister; finally completing the descent by swinging her leg over the top of the banister and quickly sliding down to the bottom. Mary Grace knew the connected steps she would take to complete the move, if they hadn’t interfered.

  On this occasion, when Uncle Paul caught her in the cubby, he hesitated for just a moment, looked into her eyes, nodded, and then continued up the steps. She heard him then, above her head, going up the tight and curved ste
ps of the attic.

  Later that night Mary Grace asked her dad if Uncle Paul could eat with them. She watched as her mom turned from the stove and looked, eyebrows raised, at her father. He began to say something about how his brother ate downstairs with Aunt Maggie, but her mom interrupted, “He doesn’t eat at my table.” Her mom’s voice was like the last lick of an ice cream pop when your tongue scrapes against the wooden stick, rough and gritty, the sweetness gone.

  Mary Grace wasn’t certain about how much English Uncle Paul spoke, or if it was just that the two brothers, her dad and Uncle Paul, liked to converse in the fast and hand enhanced Italian. Mary Grace wondered if her mother comprehended all that they were saying, as she never joined their conversations.

  When Mary Grace sat on the porch with Uncle Paul he would take her arm and in a sing-song, while he lightly moved his fingers from her wrist to elbow say: “uno, due, tre; quattro, cinque, sei; sette, otto, nove, and a ticklea unda here.” This concluded with smiling eyes and a delicate scratching by her arm pit as she giggled. When Aunt Maggie came out onto the porch, Uncle Paul pulled out his cigarettes and went to smoke, pacing back and forth in front of the screened-in porch.

  Early in the autumn, soon after Mary Grace started school, Aunt Maggie told her when she returned home from her day in fifth grade, “You must be quiet.” Wasn’t she always quiet? Then she was told “no piano,” which she often did play in Aunt Maggie’s living room. No piano because that was where Uncle Paul would be convalescing. Aunt Maggie, sad and shaking more then usual, said, “Zi Paol ha cavita salute,” reverting back to Italian, as they all did around Mary Grace when anything was out of the ordinary.