The Truth about Mary Rose

by Marilyn Sachs

  The car was filled with bags from the supermarket.

  “Give me a hand, Mary Rose,” she said. “Where’s Manny and Ray?”

  “Gone. Ray’s off playing ball, and Manny is riding the Staten Island Ferry with guess who?”

  “She’s a nice girl,” my mother said.

  I picked up a package and headed for the kitchen.

  “What a day!” my mother complained, after we brought all the groceries upstairs. “It’s just too hot. Why don’t we all go to the beach?”

  There were drops of sweat on her upper lip, and her hair looked damp and droopy.

  “Do we have to go?”

  “No,” said my mother. “You don’t have to go unless you want to. But I think I’ll take Grandma. It’s just too hot to hang around here.”

  “Do you need my help? I mean, if you take Grandma, you’ll have the wheel chair, and I guess I ought to help.”

  “No,” my mother said. “This time I think we’ll try leaving the wheel chair home. Grandma can manage with a cane, and she can always lean on my shoulder if she has to. I’ll park up close to where the benches are. It will be good for Grandma to walk. The doctor says she should be doing more walking.”

  And Daddy’s running out of patience, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” said my mother. “We’ll buy lunch out, and you can swim the whole afternoon.”

  “Uh, uh,” I said.

  “You look tired,” my mother said. She felt my head with her hand. “I hope you’re not lifting any of those big boxes downstairs.”

  “No, Mom,” I said.

  Of course, what she didn’t know was that I was tired from waking up every night about 1 A.M. My father was out so much of the time, and didn’t get home until late. I never planned on waking up at 1, but it seemed to work out that way. I’d wake up at 1, head for the bathroom, hear them talking, and stay to listen.

  That’s why I was tired. That’s why I also knew that my father’s patience was running out. He wanted our own place. He wanted it very much. He had started to look, and he told my mother last night that she should hire someone if my grandmother really needed live-in help. My father said he wanted to be settled before school started in September. He was going to look for a place in Manhattan. At the same time, he was also looking for a studio. He still hadn’t found a studio, and he wasn’t happy about that either.

  “Well, all right, Mary Rose, and if Daddy should call, tell him not to take anything until he speaks to me. I have something to tell him.”

  “Mom, why can’t we stay here with Grandma?”

  “We are, Mary Rose. For a while. Until she’s better.”

  “But why can’t we stay here after she’s better?”

  “I don’t think it would work out. It wouldn’t be good for anybody.”

  “It would be good for Grandma.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said my mother, “but I’m positive it wouldn’t work out all around.”

  “It’s nice up here in the Bronx,” I said. “Ray likes it, and Manny does too. I don’t want to live in Manhattan.”

  “Who said anything about living in Manhattan?” asked my mother. “Mary Rose, where did you hear that?”

  “It’s fun being near Grandma. I like it here.”

  My mother said thoughtfully, “There’s a house for rent about ten blocks away from here. A man who’s a ceramist lives there, but he and his family are going to Japan for a year, and we could have the house in a week or two if we want it. I saw it this morning. It’s a nice house, with a wonderful studio. Not much of a garden, and the kitchen’s small, but a really large, light studio.”

  “I’ll tell Daddy if he calls.”

  “Well, maybe you could give him the address if he calls. And he could go, have a look. Just say it’s up to him—whatever he thinks best. If he likes it, he could give them a deposit because I’ve seen it, and I’d be satisfied.”

  “OK.”

  “And, Mary Rose ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Just tell him I said it’s entirely up to him. Whatever he decides will be fine with me.”

  My grandmother didn’t want to go to the beach without me. She said she didn’t like the idea of leaving an eleven-year-old girl alone in a house. Strange men were always coming round ringing doorbells, and looking for an opportunity to steal all your valuables, and worse. She heard of an incident, just a couple of blocks away, where this old, respectable-looking woman came to a lady’s door and said she was collecting money for crippled children, and the lady let her in the house, and she must have sized the place up because a couple of days later some robbers broke in, and stole her TV set, and all the watches and money in the house.

  I promised Grandma I would lock all the doors, and only open them for Manny or Ray. When they were gone, I went back down to the basement, swept up the fish pebbles, moved the tennis rackets, and removed the plastic cover from the box it was covering. There were some window screens in the box. Nothing else.

  The phone rang. I ran upstairs to answer it. My father said, “Hi, Mary Rose. Is Mom there?”

  “Nope. She took Grandma to the beach.”

  “I’m glad,” he said. “It’s a real scorcher today. It must be about a hundred degrees down here.”

  “It’s not bad up here in the Bronx,” I said.

  “Well, all right, Mary Rose, tell Mom I’ll be home for dinner tonight. It’s just too hot to go anywhere.”

  “Oh, Dad, Mom said to tell you she saw a great house for rent. It’s got a really neat studio, and I can tell she just flipped over it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “About ten blocks from here. She said to give you the address, and she wants you to look at it. She says it’s up to you, but, Daddy, I can tell she thinks it’s fantastic.”

  “Ten blocks away!” my father said. “I really wanted it closer to work.”

  “I love it up here, Daddy,” I told him, “and Ray and Manny have lots of friends. It would be great for them. And Mom wouldn’t have to worry about us up here.”

  “Mary Rose,” said my father, “you’re beginning to sound like your grandmother.”

  “Oh, Daddy, please!”

  “Well, I’ll go and look at it, but ...”

  “Mom says it’s up to you, but if you like it you can leave a deposit, because she says it’s super fantastic.”

  “She said that!”

  “No, but I know she thinks so.” I gave my father the address, and hung up.

  It was so hot! It was hard just holding your head up. My grandmother didn’t have air conditioning. She said it wasn’t healthy. But she had one of those big floor fans in the living room. I turned it on, and sat up close to it. I could feel the cool blast of air drying off the wet spots on my face, and under my hair. I thought what now? Where do I go. I’ve looked everywhere in the attic, and everywhere in the basement, and I can’t find it. I let the wind blow in my face, and I couldn’t think of what to do next.

  I closed my eyes, and I said to myself, I will ‘count to three, and when I say three, it’s going to come to me where Mary Rose’s box is. So I closed my eyes, and counted ...1...2...3... I opened my eyes but the cold air from the fan was coming at me too fast, and my eyes hurt. I turned off the fan, closed my eyes, and counted again ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ...

  This time, I kept my eyes closed, and listened. That heavy stillness felt like it was wrapping itself around my head, but I didn’t open my eyes. Where is it? Where is Mary Rose’s box?

  There was a noise in the room, out of the heat and the quiet air. I was so frightened that I opened my eyes, but there wasn’t anything. I didn’t want to close my eyes again. I didn’t know what had made that noise, or maybe I did know or thought I knew, but I was afraid to close my eyes.

  I put the fan on again, and the noise of it whirring made me feel better. I walked upstairs to the attic. All of the boxes of photographs and letters and papers had been p
ut into piles by my mother. One of them ‘said, “Check with Stanley.” Another one said, “Veronica,” and another one said, “Mama—throw these out?” I looked up in the storage closet but there weren’t any boxes there. The three large boxes containing the curtains stood in front of the closet waiting for my father to put them back on the shelf.

  My grandmother had said, “Behind the curtains,” and I’d already looked.

  Behind the curtains.

  You just couldn’t expect old ladies to remember everything.

  Behind the curtains.

  I opened the first box, and yanked out some heavy wine-colored drapes with a faded pink lining. There were several of them in the box, and nothing else. The second one had those frilly sheer curtains that old ladies hang up in their kitchens. There was a pair of white ones with blue-checked borders, and a pair of yellow ones with daisies, some bathroom curtains, green and shiny and wet smelling, and down at the very bottom—was Mary Rose’s box.

  Behind the curtains.

  The first thing I did, before I opened it, because I knew it was her box, the first thing I did, was to kiss it.

  But I didn’t open it right away. After I kissed it, I rubbed my hands over it. It felt like any other shoe box, but older. I’m holding a box that’s thirty years old in my hands, I thought. I’m holding Mary Rose’s box.

  The box had TRED-RITES written in the middle. It was a yellow box, but the color was an old yellow, and there were blue shoes walking around the border of the box top. On the side of the box, it said:

  LDS. RD. SNKR.

  5

  It must have been a box that once had held a pair of shoes worn by Mary Rose. Five must have been her shoe size. She was my age when she died, a little older, because she was nearly twelve and I am just eleven and a half. But she wore a size five. I wear a six and a half. Her foot, I thought, must have been small and slim and beautifully shaped.

  There was a lot of string around the box to keep the top on, and the contents from spilling out. I took off the string, and lifted the cover.

  It was Mary Rose’s box. I knew it was Mary Rose’s box before I opened it. And it was her treasure box. There were gold rings, watches, ruby necklaces, diamonds—lots and lots of diamonds, pearl chokers, sapphire bracelets, solid gold charms and rings. I didn’t take any of them out of the box then but I put my hands in, and felt how cool and smooth they were. One of the gold rings I slipped on my finger, and I thought, I’m wearing a ring that Mary Rose wore. I moved the ring off my finger, covered up the box, and slipped the string back over it.

  I carried the box down the stairs with me to my bedroom. I locked the door, and spread them out one by one on my bed. They didn’t all fit, so I put some of them on the floor, and sat in the middle of Mary Rose’s treasures. Some of them had faded, on others the paper was stiff, and beginning to crumble. But most of them were still as bright and shiny as when she first cut them out of the magazines thirty years ago.

  Chapter 8

  I didn’t know what I was going to tell Pam— I mean about how I opened Mary Rose’s box and didn’t wait for her. I never should have promised. I know that. It’s like promising you’re not going to breathe or you’re not going to sleep.

  That night, when it was bedtime, I put everything back in the box. But I couldn’t sleep. It came one o’clock, and I listened to my parents’ conversation as usual. Daddy said OK about the house, and Mom kept saying was he absolutely sure it was all right. She wouldn’t mind at all living in Manhattan, and she realized that living up here in the Bronx would mean a long trip for him every day on the subway. He said no, the studio was fine, and if she liked the house and the neighborhood, that was fine too. Then she said well how did he feel about living so close to her mother. He said that was fine too. And then my mother said, “What’s wrong, Luis?”

  It seemed there were a whole lot of things wrong.

  First of all, my father was disappointed in what was happening between him and his son, Philip. He had been looking forward to New York because he thought it would give him a chance to spend a lot of time with Philip. But although he still wanted to spend a lot of time with Philip, Philip didn’t seem to want to spend much time with him. And when they were together, there didn’t seem much to talk about.

  Then there was the New York Art World. My father hated it. He hated the people and the talking and the parties and the money, and most of the work other artists were doing. I guess he hated just about everything. He had just sold another three paintings, and tomorrow a reporter was coming to see him from an art magazine to do an article on him, and he hated that too. And then, he wasn’t painting. He hadn’t painted since we came to New York.

  My mother said she thought most of the problems would fall into line once we were settled in our own place. But if not, she wanted my father to remember that we weren’t married to New York and could always go back to Lincoln next summer.

  They talked for a long time, but the important thing was that we were going to live in that house up here in the Bronx, and be close to my grandmother. Which made me feel pretty good.

  But I still couldn’t sleep. So after they were asleep, I got up, and opened Mary Rose’s box again. I took everything out, one by one, and tried everything on that was meant to be tried on. Mary Rose had cut most of the jewels out so that she could wear them. If it was a ring, she cut out the center part so it would fit around her finger. With the necklaces, she usually pasted on extra strips of paper and attached the ends so she could slip them over her head. Sometimes she used clear tape or stamp hinges. Just about all of them had fallen off or hung there, dry and brittle. But I could slip them over my head and hold them with one hand. Some of the bracelets were like the rings. You could slip your fist through them. The pins, I guess, she just held up to herself, although some of them had dried up pieces of tape on the backs.

  There was a diamond tiara that Mary Rose had pasted on a paper band that must have fit on her head. It was crushed flat by the weight of all the other cutouts that rested on top of it. When I opened it out, the paper on the sides looked like it would crumble. I slipped the tiara on my head, very carefully, and I looked at myself in the mirror. The tiara had a huge diamond in the center, and spears of diamonds that grew smaller and pointier toward the tops. All of the tops drooped now, but I squinted my eyes, and made myself blurry in the mirror, and there was Mary Rose, pale and beautiful, wearing her sparkling, pointed tiara, and looking like a queen.

  Then it came apart. I thought about taping it back together again. It didn’t seem right to put today’s tape on Mary Rose’s treasures. I put it down, and went back to taking out the other things.

  There were a few whole ads from magazines. There was one of a man and a woman kissing. The woman had her arm around the man’s neck. The arm had a watch on it, and the advertisement said, “A thousand tender words in one—$35.”

  There was another one of a sexy, red-haired woman with a tight, low-cut dress, holding out her hand and smiling at a ring with a great big diamond. The advertisement said, “Jewelry of the future—RHINESTONE—clear-cut and dazzling as an iceberg in sunlight—modern, unashamedly enormous—This supercolossal ring only $10.

  Mary Rose had written something on this ad. It was the only one where she had. She had made an arrow pointing to the woman’s head, and above it, she had written “Me.” She had written the “Me” with lots of swirls, and there was an exclamation point after it that was also fancy. The whole thing looked like this

  It was beautiful. It was the only writing I had that came from Mary Rose herself. I couldn’t figure why she wrote “Me” over that red-headed woman because I knew Mary Rose didn’t look anything like that. Maybe it meant that she wished she had a diamond ring too, or maybe she wished she was a grownup. Probably there was something about that woman in the picture that Mary Rose knew, and I didn’t know, that made her write “Me.” Like she might have been someone who was a famous musician, or maybe a rich lady who gave lots of
money for starving children.

  There was no point in thinking about it. I was so happy to have her writing. It was the greatest treasure to me in Mary Rose’s box. Her own writing!

  There was something else in the box that I couldn’t figure. There were about thirty of those paper rings that go around cigars. They are really paper bands that keep cigars wrapped up in clear plastic paper. When you pull off the ring, the paper comes off too. There were thirty of them in Mary Rose’s box, all of them the same. They had the name EL CAPITAN stamped in the middle, and they were all red with gold borders and a picture of a gold lion holding a gold banner in the center.

  My father never smoked cigars, but I had seen those paper cigar rings before. I knew you could slip them on your fingers. Mary Rose had glued the backs of them, and they were all flattened out and looked mashed.

  It seemed strange that she would have kept them in the midst of all those real jewels. I mean they weren’t real either, being paper, but they were pictures of real things, and the cigar rings were only cigar rings.

  My mother came up the next day, and looked at all the jewels in Mary Rose’s box. She began shaking her head. I knew she was going to start again about Mary Rose being a “poor, little thing,” and I didn’t want to hear that. So I said, “Mom, where did these cigar rings come from?”

  “Ralph smoked cigars,” my mother said. “Not that often, but on special occasions. I guess he must have given her the rings. I don’t really remember.”

  That evening, Uncle Stanley called. This time he had some other news to tell. Aunt Claudia was in the hospital, and there was a new addition to the family. His name was Ralph Edward, and he weighed 8 pounds 2 ounces.

  “About time too,” said my grandmother. But then she began to cry, and said she was happy that it was a boy, and she was even happier that his name was Ralph.

  She and my mother drove to the hospital, and I couldn’t help noticing that my grandmother walked very quickly down the stairs, and didn’t really seem to need her cane at all.