The Truth about Mary Rose (5 page)

“No,” said Pam, “you don’t love me best in the world. You love somebody who’s been dead thirty years better than me. You love Mary Rose better than me.” And she hung up.

I thought about what she said, and I thought she was being silly. Maybe I did love Mary Rose, but Mary Rose was dead. The way you feel about somebody who was dead was different from how you feel about somebody who was alive. You could always love somebody who was dead, and you never had to worry about how that person felt about you. That person wasn’t going to get mad at you if you didn’t look for her box over the weekend. But a living person was going to get mad if you didn’t show up.

I didn’t find Mary Rose’s box on Friday, but I decided to go back with Uncle Stanley on Friday night.

“I’m glad you changed your mind,” he said, while we were driving back. They live just over the George Washington Bridge, in Tenafly. “Pam will be very happy you’re coming. She sure was mopey last night. Why didn’t you want to come?”

“I wanted to come, Uncle Stanley,” I said. “I always want to come. There’s nothing I’d rather do than be with Pam. I just wish we could see each other all the time.”

Just for a second, Uncle Stanley turned to smile at me. “I’m glad the two of you like each other so much. I guess it must run in the family. Your mother and I were very close when we were children. I used to follow her wherever she went. I thought she was the greatest person in the world.”

“And Mary Rose too?”

“What?”

“I mean—I guess you felt that way about Mary Rose too,” I said.

“I never let her out of my sight,” Uncle Stanley said.

“Mary Rose?”

“No, your mother, I mean. She used to get so angry at me. She’d yell and stamp her foot and shake her fist. But she never hit me, and God help anybody who did!”

“She’s still like that,” I said. “She yells a lot, but she hardly ever hits. But Uncle Stanley, did Pam tell you why I wasn’t going to come this weekend?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Well, it was because I was looking for Mary Rose’s box. You know, the one you carried out of the building the night of the fire.”

“Oh!” Uncle Stanley said. He didn’t say anything else.

“Grandma said it was a shoe box full of things Mary Rose collected. She said she thought it was up in the attic or down in the basement, but so far I haven’t been able to find it.”

Uncle Stanley switched on the radio. For a while we listened to the six o’clock news. After the weather forecast, I said, “Uncle Stanley?”

“Yes?”

“Was it a shoe box? I mean, maybe it was another kind of box, and I’m just looking for the wrong kind of box.”

“I don’t remember what kind of a box it was.”

“Do you remember what was in it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Grandma said they had to pry your fingers off it. You just wouldn’t let go. She said you didn’t cry or say anything or ask any questions, and she said the doctor said you were in a state of shock.”

“I guess so,” he said. “I don’t remember.” Then he said he was going to buy some baseball tickets for the New York Mets game the next Wednesday night for Ray and himself, and did I think Manny would like to go along.

“Definitely not,” I told him. “He hates baseball even more than my father does, but, Uncle Stanley ...”

Uncle Stanley kept on talking about baseball, and how interested he always was in it, and how happy he was that now he had a nephew who liked to go to games with him, and that maybe he’d try to take a little time, and work out with Ray. He understood Ray was a great player ...

I could see he didn’t want to talk about Mary Rose. And I could understand. If somebody died, saving your life, I suppose you’d never get over it. I think if it was me, I’d want to keep talking about her. I’d want to tell everybody I met how wonderful she was and how I missed her. But I could understand how somebody else might be suffering so much that he just couldn’t talk about it without falling apart. Especially somebody who wasn’t much of a talker anyway, like my Uncle Stanley.

So I didn’t ask him the questions I wanted to ask. And I really wanted to ask him those questions. Because he was the only one who was there that night, and the only one who could really tell me what I didn’t already know.

Pam was looking out of the window when we drove up the driveway. I know she saw me get out of the car, but she dropped the curtain, and moved away from the window so I shouldn’t think she was watching for me.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Aunt Claudia said. “Pam’s been acting like she doesn’t have a friend in the world.”

My aunt turned her cheek when Uncle Stanley bent down to kiss her. So he kissed her cheek, but she didn’t kiss any part of him. My parents always kiss head on. It always looks funny to me when I see Uncle Stanley kissing Aunt Claudia.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Don’t ask!” she said. “My ankles are so swollen, you can hardly see my feet.”

“Well, why aren’t you lying down?”

“Sure! And who’s going to give Margaret and Olivia their baths, and take out the dog, and straighten up ...”

“Well, that’s what Norma is for.”

“That girl doesn’t do any work unless you stand over her.”

I went upstairs. Pam was in her room, but the door was open. Next room, the door was closed, and behind it came the sounds of Jeanette’s violin. Usually when Jeanette was playing her violin, Pam had her door closed. So I knew she knew I was here because the door was open.

“Hi, Pam,” I said.

“Oh—Mary Rose? I didn’t think you were coming,” she said, acting cool, like she didn’t care.

“I didn’t come because of you,” I told her. “I came because of the baby mouse.”

“Oh, Mary Rose, wait till you see him,” Pam said. She reached into the Mouse House, and brought him out, and handed him over to me. He was a wonderful little white fur mouse with a tiny blue ribbon around his neck, and little black eyes and a black pointy nose. He was smaller than the mother and father mouse or the big sister mouse.

Pam had two other doll houses. One was a Japanese doll house with a family of Japanese dolls, and the other was an old Victorian Mansion doll house with an old-fashioned-looking family. The Mouse House was something Pam had made herself, and that I had been helping her decorate. The rooms were made out of different sized boxes that you could always move around. Pam, who was on to macramé, had made macramé bedspreads, curtains and wall hangings for all the rooms. She had used walnut shells and anchovy tins for beds, and lined them with pieces of material. I had painted a mural on the bathroom wall—three mouse mermaids chasing a bunch of catfish. I had also made two window shades for the kitchen windows out of toothpicks and strips of gift-wrapping paper.

“What will you do for a crib for him?” I asked.

“I haven’t decided yet. I’m trying to think of something that has sides so he won’t fall out.”

“How about a matchbox? That’s about the right size, and then we could glue toothpicks on the sides for bars.”

“That’s a good idea.”

We had to go down for dinner then. The two youngest girls had eaten earlier, so it was only the five of us—my aunt and uncle, Pam, Jeanette and me.

Aunt Claudia kept asking me questions about my father. Had he found a studio yet? How many more paintings had he sold? Was he happy to be back in New York again? Every time I was over visiting, she generally would talk about my father. I guess she liked to talk about him as much as my grandmother did. Aunt Claudia had been studying painting for the past couple of years. She did a lot of still lifes. Usually the ones she did had a vase of flowers and a couple of apples or oranges or bananas rolling around on a table.

She always kept on saying that I should be very proud of my father, and not listen to what ignorant people had to say. She said there weren’t many people who had the courage to give up everything for their art the way my father had, and that the greatest artists who ever lived usually were not understood in their own time, and mostly died paupers, and so did their wives and families.

There weren’t any empty, small matchboxes in the house, so Pam and I brought a lemon upstairs. We cut the lemon in half, and each of us had to suck our way through to the peel. We would end up with two empty lemon halves, and one of them could serve as a temporary cradle for the baby mouse until we could make him a permanent one.

Sucking lemons also made us feel better. We both needed to suffer since we had made each other unhappy.

“It was my fault,” I said, after I had finished. “And I’m sorry.”

Pam was still running her tongue around the inside of her lemon half, and shuddering. I waited for her to finish, and then I said again, “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Pam said. “It was my fault. It’s stupid to be jealous of somebody who’s dead, and I’m sorry.”

“Well, let’s both be sorry, and never fight again as long as we live.”

“All right,” Pam said, “and, Mary Rose, will you promise me one thing?”

“What?”

“When you find Mary Rose’s box, you won’t open it until I’m with you.”

“But, Pam, I have to open it.”

“You have to open it just to make sure it was her box, but you don’t have to look at what’s inside until we’re together.”

No! I thought inside myself. No! I don’t want to share that box with Pam. I don’t want to share that box with anybody. I want to find it, and take it upstairs to my room and lock the door. I want to open it slowly, and look inside. It won’t glitter like a treasure, I know that, but it will look like something I’ve been looking for all my life. I don’t know what that is, but I will know it when I look in the box. And the box is for me. Because I’m Mary Rose, the second Mary Rose. And she and I are connected in a way that doesn’t belong to anybody else.

Pam said, “Are you going to promise or not?”

She was sitting so close to me, I could smell the lemon on her breath. I could lie to her, I thought. I could tell her I’ll wait, and then go ahead and look. She’d never know. But I was never good at lying. Mom said listening was sneaky and dishonest, but the reason I always had to listen was really because I am a very honest person. I like to know the truth. Grownups never tell kids the truth, so the only way you can find it out for yourself is to listen. But I don’t lie. Even when Mom catches me and asks was I listening. Maybe I won’t answer, but if I do, I’ll say yes, I was. Even if I know she’ll get mad and yell.

So I didn’t say anything.

“All right, Mary Rose,” Pam said. “If that’s what you want, it’s OK with me.”

I knew it wasn’t OK with her. I couldn’t stand that it wasn’t OK with her. Maybe I’d never find that box, I told myself, although I knew I would. But maybe it would take weeks before I did, and anything could happen in the meantime.

“OK, Pam,” I said, “I promise.”

Then we compared the two empty lemon halves, and decided hers was the neatest. Mine still had pieces of white along the inside walls while hers was perfectly smooth. We made a little lemon cradle for the baby mouse, and I made him a yellow bunting with purple peace signs, and Pam made him a macramé rug for his room, and we never mentioned Mary Rose for the rest of the weekend.

I lost another day looking for Mary Rose’s box because of Manny.

Sunday night, after I got back from Pam’s, I went to bed at nine. I thought I would get up early next morning, and get started down in the basement. It must have been around 1
A
.
M
., I woke up and was on my way to the bathroom when I heard my parents talking. They were still using my grandmother’s bedroom while she slept downstairs in the little room next to the kitchen.

“He said no,” my mother was saying. “So I said, ‘How about going swimming with Ray?’ ‘No!’ he said. ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘maybe you and I could go down to the planetarium tomorrow, and Mary Rose could stay with Grandma for the afternoon.' 'I’ve been there a few times already,' he said. 'I don’t feel like going again.' Honestly, Luis, I’ve never seen him like this. You know, I told you before we left Lincoln that Manny would be all right, but that Ray would have a rough time adjusting. Was I ever wrong!”

“You can’t figure these things,” said my father. “Ray had so many friends in Lincoln. Everybody knew him. Look at that party his baseball club gave him, and all those telephone calls! The day we moved, anytime I looked at him, I thought he was going to start crying.”

“That’s right,” said my mother, “but it didn’t take two or three days after we got here, and he was off again—playing ball with the two Reilly boys up the block, and going swimming with that crowd of kids from around the corner, and joining the Y.”

“It’s good, it’s good!” said my father. “I’m happy to know that he can get along wherever he goes. And Mary Rose?”

“Oh, her!” I stayed very quiet, held my breath, and flattened myself even flatter against the wall. My mother laughed. “You really weren’t worried about
her,
were you?”

My father laughed too. “I guess not. How can anybody worry about Mary Rose?”

“I do worry about the way she keeps sneaking around listening in to things you say when you don’t know she’s there. I wish I could break her of that. It’s gotten worse since we came here, and I just don’t understand what makes her do it.”

“Well,” said my father, “she has to have
something
wrong with her, doesn’t she?”

“I guess so,” said my mother. “She is really a darling, isn’t she?”

Which is one of the reasons why I listen. Because like I say, you never know the truth unless you listen. My mother will never tell me face to face that she thinks I am just about perfect, except for this one fault. Neither will my father.

It was a real windfall that night. They went on and on, laughing and saying how pretty I was, and smart, and funny, and just about perfect in every way, and wasn’t it a good thing I was asleep, and couldn’t hear them because I’d get a swelled head. Well, I’d heard them talk this way about me before—lots of times—and I didn’t have a swelled head. I’d heard them talking about my brothers too. They really liked us. I guess my mother liked Manny the best, and my father liked me the best, and they both worried about Ray the most—so that we all came out even.