T
here were secrets before Eva. There were things I kept hidden, buried, long before Eva and Ted Wilson moved in across the street. There were a hundred things I didn’t say, and a thousand more I could barely even admit to myself. But the summer of 1960, when our neighbor, old Mrs. Macadam, died and the Wilsons moved in, marks for me the moment at which all of those secrets began to rise to the surface. I think of them now, shimmering like objects underwater, coming in and out of focus, obfuscated and then revealed. Exposed and then concealed.
“Somebody’s moving in!” Mouse squealed, throwing open the kitchen door.
“Don’t slam the door, Mouse!” Francesca said as she followed behind her little sister, shaking her head in the disapproving way that made her father call her Miss Ninny. At eight years old, Francesca was everything I was not as a child: tidy and polite, a good student, obedient and kind. Mouse, who was six, was my secret favorite, my kindred spirit. Unruly, untidy. Feral even.
It was the first week of July, and so hot. My hair frizzed and curled at my neck, my hairline beaded with sweat. I was in the kitchen struggling to unclog the drain with a plunger, the smell of potato peels (or whatever other sludge had clogged the delicate innards of our house) making me reel with nausea.
“Mama! Mama! There’s a family moving into Mrs. Macadam’s house. They’ve got a rocking horse and bunk beds, and a bright red car!” Mouse clung to me, tugging at my apron, stepping on my feet. “Do you think they have little girls?” she asked.
“Let’s go look,” I said, walking with her to the bay window in our living room, where I could see a moving truck parked in front of the Macadams’ house with a bright red Cadillac sedan parked behind it.
There was, indeed, a giant painted rocking horse, the kind on a metal frame with springs, as well as a crib, a set of bunk beds, and a whole stack of Hula-Hoops. “I think they might have some children,” I said, nodding.
And then, as if on cue, three children came bolting out of Mrs. Macadam’s house followed by a young woman, a very pregnant young woman, who stood on the front steps with both hands on her hips. Behind her loomed a tall man in a suit and a fedora.
I watched, riveted, as the smallest child, a boy of maybe four or five, wearing a cowboy hat and rubber chaps, chased down the two other children, both girls, shooting his cap gun dangerously close to their faces. I watched through the window as the mother silently voiced her objections, shaking her head but smiling. I also watched as the man circled the woman’s very large waist with his arms and nuzzled her neck. I felt myself blushing as she stretched her neck to the side, as if to expose more flesh for his hungry mouth. Then she collapsed into silent giggles, hitting him with the oven mitt in her hand and shooing him out the door. He obeyed, blowing kisses and tipping his hat as he made his way to the shiny red car, into which he disappeared and drove off down the road.
When he was gone, the woman put her hand on her back in the way that enormously pregnant women do, as though she were trying to stretch a kink out. A worker emerged from the moving truck, carrying a large cardboard box. She smiled and spoke to him briefly, gesturing toward the house with her free hand.
“Whatcha looking at?” Frankie asked, coming from the bathroom smelling of Aqua Velva, still wearing his undershirt. Undressed, Frankie always looked like a boy rather than a man. At 140 pounds, he weighed just a little more than I did. His belts never fit; he used a leather hole punch to add extra holes. He was
a small man with a big personality,
he liked to say, though this was always accompanied by a slight grimace, the consequence of growing up small with a mean daddy, his bravado crafted in response to years of torment. It was one of many things that endeared me to Frankie early on. He was, in many ways, like a child himself; his joy was enormous, but so too were his disappointments and rage.
“There’s a family moving in across the street,” Francesca said. “And they’ve got a boy. He looks
naughty
.”
“Looks like we lost our chance at old lady Macadam’s house,” Frankie said, peering out the window as he wiped a bit of shaving cream from his cheek. “Though it seems they might need the space more than we do,” he said, as the brood of children emerged again, this time from the crawl space under the front porch. Each of them was grass stained and dirt smudged.
Mouse was elated. “Can I go play?” she asked, rushing toward the door. She was still wearing her pajamas.
“Go put some clothes on first,” I said. “And let their mama know I’ll bring over a coffee cake in an hour.”
The house that Frankie and I owned in 1960 was in Hollyville, Massachusetts, only a half-hour train ride from Boston, but, in those days, still quite rural. We lived on a dead end drive with only four other houses: the Bakers, the Bouchers, and the Castillos. And across the street was the house that Mrs. Macadam lived in for fifty years before she fell asleep and didn’t wake up.
Mrs. Macadam’s son and his wife discovered her body a whole week after she passed away when they came to take her to the hair salon, and it made Frankie and me feel like terrible neighbors. There’s a fine line though between being a good neighbor and being a busybody. I’ve always erred on the side of caution, keeping my nose out of other people’s business. Though we shared this dead end drive and a telephone party line, we left each other alone. There were no other children on our street, the other residents much older than we, and so we had nothing but proximity in common. Frankie made much more of an effort than I, waving a hearty hello to Mr. Boucher as he mowed his lawn or to Mrs. Castillo as she tended her terminally ill roses. Offering to help Mrs. Baker carry in her groceries. But Mrs. Macadam rarely left her house. Her porch light came on only some nights. And she didn’t subscribe to the
Herald
or the
Globe,
so there were no newspapers to pile up in her driveway after she died. Maybe if I’d been paying more attention, I would have noticed that by the end of that week the mailman was struggling to get her mail into the stuffed mailbox. (Though, if you ask me, perhaps he should have gone and knocked on Mrs. Macadam’s door himself.) Regardless, with or without our notice, Mrs. Macadam went to bed one night that spring and didn’t get out again until the coroner came a week later and carried her out. Her son and daughter-in-law spent a week emptying the house out, and then he planted a F
OR
S
ALE
sign in the front yard next to the lilac bush, which was in full bloom by then.
Frankie had talked to Mrs. Macadam’s son every time he saw him that spring, inquiring if there had been any offers made. Any bites. They stood in the driveway, the way that men do (arms folded across their chests, shuffling their feet, gesturing and nodding). But the son just shook his head sadly, probably wishing his inheritance were more than this sad old house with its sloping front porch and tired roof.
“It’s got
five
bedrooms, Billie,” Frankie had said one morning.
I froze, shaking my head. We’d bought this three-bedroom house more than ten years before, when we were still newlyweds, Frankie optimistic that we would fill the two extras with children by the time we celebrated our third anniversary. But three years of trying brought nothing but blood and heartache and had made those two rooms (the rooms Frankie had painstakingly painted and furnished) feel like tombs for our lost children. Finally, in 1952 we adopted Francesca and then, two years later, Mary. Without any empty rooms left, Frankie had seemed sated. He appeared to resign himself to our small family. Having a baby, or adopting another baby, would have meant starting over again. And as much as Frankie had dreamed of having a large family (he had had five sisters), I knew he didn’t miss those sleepless nights, the vigilance of parenting toddlers. The constant fear.
But what he didn’t know that late May morning, as he peered through the kitchen window at the F
OR
S
ALE
sign leaning a little to the right, was that I was pregnant again: probably just a few weeks along as far as I could tell, which didn’t mean anything except that I was just a few weeks closer to losing another child. But my plan this time had been to keep quiet about it. No need to get Frankie’s hopes up; he was the most optimistic man I’d ever met, a trait that I found to be somehow both endearing and pitiable. If I told him, he’d have been out in his shop by noon building a cradle that would only remain still and empty in the garage.
“With a little spit shine, it could be a real beauty,” he had said, nodding at the house across the street. That was one thing about Frankie. He was able to see the potential in things. I’m fairly certain that was the only reason why he’d wound up with me in the first place. When he’d first met me, ineptly typing a whopping forty words per minute at Simon & Monk, a large insurance firm in Cambridge, a pencil stuck in my frizzy red hair and refusing to wear a girdle, it wasn’t my great beauty he’d been riveted by but rather what he might be able to turn me into. I was a fixer-upper in his eyes. A girl with some real potential.
Growing up on my parents’ farm in Vermont, I’d wanted nothing but to get away as soon as I graduated from high school. I’d been accepted into Wellesley College, but my parents insisted that I turn down my spot and go to secretarial school in Boston so that I might make something
useful
of myself. What they really meant was that I should find a husband, start a family. If I’d gone to Wellesley, I’d have been surrounded by girls, with no marriage prospects in sight. My mother’s dreams were not of a girl on the college swim team, an academic, a librarian (which is what I’d hoped to be). They were, instead, of grandchildren and holidays spent around an upright piano no one but my mother knew how to play, singing Christmas carols. I’d have gone to Wellesley anyway, but I had no way to pay the tuition. It didn’t help that Gussy had just gotten married to her own Frank (Frank McInnes, her high school sweetheart); my mother wouldn’t rest until both of her girls were safe from spinsterhood.
When
my
Frank came into the office where I was pounding at the behemoth electric typewriter with two fingers, he saw me as a project, and I saw him as a way to appease my mother. Unfortunately, he was no Frank McInnes. For one thing, he was Italian. And even worse, he was Catholic.
My
Frank couldn’t be further from Gussy’s Frank with his quiet intelligence, his good looks, and manners, and my mother would never let me forget that. But Frankie was vibrant and loud and funny, and I liked him. And better yet, he liked me.
That’s what my thinking had been when Frankie Valentine, all five feet six of him, walked into the office where I worked pushing his mail cart and whistling “O Sole Mio.” When he leaned against the desk where I was miserably typing up underwriting forms and said in his slow, sly way, “Well, if it isn’t the new girl. And even prettier than they say.” (I’d never once in my life been referred to as pretty.)
That was my thinking when Frankie took me out dancing and managed to make me feel graceful for the first time in my whole life, when he crooned like Vic Damone in my ear, his breath hot, both his feet and hands quick. When he walked me back to my apartment and kissed me on my doorstep. (A man had never put his hands—or
lips,
for that matter—on me before, and certainly never sang love songs in my ear.)
And that was my thinking when I told Frankie I’d marry him: that he was the first and only man who had loved me (who might ever love me enough to marry me), and as a plus, I’d be getting my mother off my back while still getting in one last jab. That had been my modus operandi for most of my life at that point. I truly didn’t think beyond that moment when I walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Church, and saw her in her mother-of-the-bride dress crying tears of both relief and sorrow. It wasn’t fair to Frankie of course, and it only took the first miscarriage to realize that.
We’d only been married a couple of months when I got pregnant the first time. But just a week or so after Dr. O’Malley confirmed the pregnancy, I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, bleeding so heavily I thought I might be dying. Frankie had held me and whispered, feverish in his reassurances, “We’ll try again. It’s okay. We’ll keep trying.”
And we did. Three more pregnancies, each one lasting just a few weeks longer than the first, making the agony of each loss successively more painful. Frankie mourned those lost babies intensely, insisting on giving them each a name:
Rosa, Maria, Antonia,
convinced they were all girls, though it had been too early to tell. At Sunday mass, he lit a candle for each one, whispered prayers with his eyes shut tightly, hands clenched together. And though he never said so, and would never have placed blame on me, I blamed myself. Blamed my body for failing him, for failing those little girls.
Not long afterward, Frankie arranged for the adoption of Francesca, and he offered her to me like a gift. He was what I imagined the perfect father to be, coddling and cuddling and spoiling her with his affections. My own father had been a shadow in my childhood: up before dawn, working until dusk, arriving at the dinner table exhausted and starving. His interest in us was no different than his interest in his cattle, except that unlike his prized heifer, we could offer nothing useful in return. Frankie, on the other hand, loved being a father. He lived to make Chessy happy, singing her songs and tickling her belly, proudly showing pictures of her to anyone willing to peer into the depths of his cracked leather wallet. And when Francesca was two, I could see that hungry look in his eye, that now-familiar desperation. “She needs a sister,” he’d said. “Every girl does.” And so we adopted Mary, our little
Mouse,
and we were finally a family. Frankie was content with his girls, his
ladies
as he called them. And I was careful, making sure there would be no more pregnancies, and no more miscarriages.