Worn Masks by Phyllis Carito Read Free Book Online

to
be prepared. It struck Mary Grace then, that
once they were all gone she would nev er know any more about them. All
the times as a child she thought she wanted to know. Did she still want to?
    Mary Grace exposed her own past. “I found Uncle Paul’s box years
ago.” 
    Aunt Maggie turned pale, unsteady, and then shook her head no,
patted Mary Grace’s cheek, and hobbled in the living room saying, “It is time.
We were not to tell, never to speak a word. Please try to understand. Only you,
Gracie. That is all that mattered.”
    “What are you talking about?” Mary Grace felt overwhelmed. She
thought, Fear has paralyzed us, our entire lives, but why ? Aunt Maggie
had been a jittery woman, hiding on her porch, and always disappearing behind her brothers’ lives. While Mary Grace’s mother had
hid den in her bedroom with the curtains drawn. Was Mary Grace hiding, too? Secrets and lies and living
be hind worn masks.
    Mary Grace chastised herself: I’m not going to know until I
confront it. Do I want to end up like either of them? Yet, wouldn’t it be
easier to just leave the childhood baggage behind and live my own life?
    Then, like every conversation in her head it circled back to her .
“Why couldn’t my mother just . . . ?”
    Children are to be seen and not heard. That’s
why, Ma ria Graziella.

 
    Part II

 
    Aunt Maggie
    Chapter 12
     
    MARY GRACE HAD regularly visited Aunt Mag gie at the house
after her mother was gone, and now she often
visited her in the nursing home. Aunt Mag gie had been moved there not
long after Mary Grace’s mom died. Aunt Maggie
had first become agi tated and nervous, and then began hearing people in
the ceiling talking to her in Italian, telling her they knew her secret, and
she had cried out, “ Basta, basta cosi !” She had had enough. She couldn’t
take it anymore. Aunt Maggie sat by the steps to the cellar with a broom
because she swore the man with the slouch hat had come back and that he was
down there in the cellar, with Camille, a girl from up the street, hiding
behind the furnace. Aunt Maggie wasn’t eating or taking her medicine. She must
have developed dementia. She had no training
for being an independent woman after ev eryone was gone from the family
home.
    Mary Grace resigned herself that she would have to spend her
weekends going through Aunt Maggie’s apartment, the cellar, and attic, and put
the house on the market.
    On visits to the nursing home Aunt Maggie kept bringing up her
mother’s family again. “Mary Grace you have to talk with them.” Mary Grace was
fighting voices of her own in her head as she toted around the backpack that
held all her family papers straining her shoulder. She had searched through
every piece of paper in the house where her dad and mom had lived for
thirty-four years, and then her mom had lived alone for twelve years after
that. None of it directly helped her know who her mother was any better, or why
Aunt Maggie suddenly felt her niece had to know about her mother. Mary Grace had no expectations to find anything use ful
in Aunt Maggie’s part of the house. Yet, Mary Grace was becoming interested to
connect the missing links. Aunt Maggie must know something. Maybe she could
help her. Then Mary Grace got the call from the nursing home.
    They were requesting a meeting with Mary Grace, and it had to be
during the week, another afternoon taken off from work, but for Aunt Maggie’s
sake Mary Grace made the appointment. She
assumed Aunt Mag gie had been experiencing a normal dementia of aging.
Mary Grace was so surprised to hear that the nursing home had Aunt Maggie
seeing a psychologist.
    The psychologist seemed fresh out of graduate school to Mary
Grace. She played the part beautifully, with her stickpin skirt and tailored
shirt, her hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. “The nursing staff
has been reporting odd behavior in the interactions that your Aunt Maggie is
having with other residents.” She slowly mouthed