The Light of the World, page 5
“You focus on learning how to get better,” she said. She offered Eva things to do so that she wasn’t stuck in her head. “Try a stunt like that again before I’m dead and in the ground, and I’ll do it myself, Eva. You’re too good to lose.”
“I’ll try, Gran,” Eva promised.
Now, though, with the apartment devoid of the life it had housed for decades, Eva did not know where to start. She yanked open the closet door.
Slung over the back of the door was a plastic and nylon shoe rack that probably dated back to the ’70s. Stuffed into one of the shoe holders was a roll of drawstring trash bags. Eva pulled them out of the stiff plastic and shoved them into her back pocket before reaching up to pull on the light switch cord that dangled from the ceiling.
As a child, Eva had always stayed toward the front of this closet. She’d been worried about monsters. Now, she was curious about what lay beyond the storage rack that was filled with household supplies and bed sheets. She had never been back there.
A chill shot up Eva’s spine. The biting, anxious feeling of desperately having to pee and of knowing that she was where she should not be ate at her stomach. She shoved the feeling away. There was no one left to judge her now.
Eva stepped into the dim space beyond the storage rack. She was just barely able to make out the murky shapes of boxes and what looked like an old-fashioned desk shoved against the back wall underneath a leaning tower of encyclopedias. The air was thick with dust.
From the living room, Eva could hear her mother and father talking. He must have finally arrived. Eva wondered if her mother was going to say anything to him about Eva’s outburst, but the conversation soon dissolved into the quiet sounds of papers being sifted around.
This was a huge undertaking and all three of them knew it, but it was something that had to be done. The property value for this particular building was through the roof right now. Eva wasn’t stupid. Despite her emotional attachment to the place, she knew it had to be sold. She’d pretended she hadn’t heard her father on the phone with a real estate broker inquiring as to what he was going to do with the property now that his mother was gone. People wanted this property. People would pay a lot of money to get it.
Maneuvering one foot carefully around a mop and bucket, Eva twisted her body so that she was she was parallel to the wall and could slip past the rickety-looking storage rack. It rattled as Eva wiggled past it, but thankfully did not tip over. Eva didn’t want to think about what her mother would say if she got herself trapped in the closet by a piece of cheap IKEA shelving.
Behind the storage rack was a small space where Eva could stand. The light here was very dim, so she pulled out her cell phone and turned on its flashlight app.
This space had not been touched in years. A coating of dust more than a quarter-inch thick in places covered everything. Eva’s nose twitched and she sneezed as she pressed herself flat against the wall so that she wouldn’t disturb anything. An odd feeling came over her as she rubbed at her nose. She was uncomfortable, on edge.
Under the bright white light from her phone, Eva was able to see a small stack of shoe boxes next to the desk. They were piled up about waist high and were labeled with faded black letters on yellowing masking tape. The dates were ancient, far older than any story Eva had ever heard her grandmother tell.
Nudging a broken-looking vacuum cleaner out of the way, Eva inched forward and reached for the first box. The cardboard was so dusty it was almost slippery under her hands. Eva clamped her phone between her teeth so she could have both hands free. The box was heavy. She pulled it around and balanced it on the storage rack.
Pulling her phone from her mouth, she set it on the shelf above, pushing aside old aerosol cans to make space. She would throw them into a trash bag once she was finished checking out the boxes.
On the brittle, yellow masking tape label, a date was written in her grandmother’s precise script. Eva stared down at it, chewing on her lip. It was strange to see something so old, and to hold it in her hands and know that it probably hadn’t been touched for thirty or maybe even forty years. To touch something so old seemed almost to violate it. The date on the masking tape was seventy years ago, almost to the day. It seemed like a breach of some unspoken trust between Eva and her grandmother to touch these boxes, but Eva was curious and her grandmother was dead. She could look.
Eva bent and blew some of the dust off the top of the box. It was dated 1935–1940, which was before Eva’s grandmother had met her grandfather. This was when Mary was in her late twenties, in the midst of the Great Depression and a buildup to a world war. This was a piece of history, her history. Eva’s heart was racing. She was about to see it for the first time.
She wanted to call her father in and have him watch as she opened the box, but the words died in her throat as she pulled the top off to find two jumbled clusters of yellowed paper envelopes that had clearly once been tied together with ribbons. There was a leather-bound journal tucked into the bottom that looked suspiciously like the notebooks that Eva’s grandmother had given her for Christmas every year since she turned seventeen. Underneath the two stacks of envelopes was a thicker envelope that Eva could tell contained photographs. The storage rack creaked as she tried to find a more comfortable position where she could get better light.
“Shit,” she muttered. The box nearly slipped out of her hands and the light from her phone wavered. She turned and nearly tripped over the vacuum’s hose as she grabbed another one of the shoe boxes and pressed the top back onto the one she’d just opened. Holding the stack of boxes against her stomach, Eva reached into her back pocket and carefully pulled out a trash bag. She shook it out and shoved her phone into her other pocket. One by one, each of the gross, old aerosol cans was thrown into the bag, and soon Eva had a space wide enough to relocate the boxes to the storage rack. She pushed the trash bag through the space she’d created and it fell to the floor with a clatter, the bag spilling open and the cans rolling out into the hallway.
From the living room, Eva’s mother called, “Everything okay?”
Eva coughed a little bit on the dust that had risen as the bag had tumbled to the floor. “Yeah!” she shouted back. “I found the trash bags and some other stuff. I figured that I’d throw out all the cleaning supplies that are older than me while I was back here.”
“Good job, kid.” Her father stood at the end of the hallway with a stack of books in his hands. “Bring out those bags when you’re done. Your mom wants to do the entry closet today at least.”
Eva gave a mock salute, and he grinned back at her. “Will do.”
When her father was out of sight once more, Eva pushed the stack of shoe boxes that she was holding onto the storage rack’s shelf and turned to collect the rest of them. There were five in total, dating back to 1923, when Eva’s grandmother would have been thirteen years old. Eva had no idea why she would have kept her correspondence and letters from that long ago, but she apparently had, and Eva wanted to have a look at them. She stacked. She stacked the boxes on the storage rack so she could get at them easily from the other side and brushed as much dust off herself as she could before contemplating the narrow gap she’d have to wiggle through once more.
In the hallway, the bag that she’d filled up was lying open and some of the aerosol cans had fallen out. She bent and shoved them back in, then picked up the bag and slung it over her shoulder. After a moment’s contemplation, she reached out and grabbed one of the shoe boxes as well. The faded masking tape dated it to 1925–1926, and it scratched against Eva’s side as she tucked it under her arm. Her entire body was streaked with long gray lines of dust, like skeletal fingers that had reached out to hold her in the darkness behind the storage rack.
“Gross,” she muttered. She left the door open and the light on. There was a mop in there, as well as all the non-expired cleaning supplies. Eva wasn’t sure that they’d get to the cleaning stage today, but she wanted to at least pretend that she’d made an effort to be helpful.
In the bright, natural light of the living room, Eva was finally able to see that the shoe box was not the old, gray cardboard shape as it had appeared to be in the closet, but rather it appeared to be made out of some sort of archival material. The writing on the masking tape label was faded, but the box itself looked almost as if it were brand new. It wasn’t like the others, held together with tape and sheer force of will. Why is this one different? What’s so special about it? She deposited the trash bags and shoe box on the coffee table, lost in thought.
“What do you have there?” Her father peered curiously from where he was looking through a stack of tax returns.
“I’m not really sure,” Eva replied. She brushed as much dust off herself as she could before settling down on the couch and pulling the box toward her. “I found this way in the back of the storage closet. It doesn’t look like it’s been touched since Gran moved in. The one I opened in the closet looked like it had old letters and pictures in it.”
Eva’s dad leaned forward and Eva carefully pulled the top off the box and set it down on the coffee table.
The inside of this box was different than the one that she’d opened in the closet. There were journals in here, little leather-bound notebooks stacked in three perfect rows, four deep. Eva figured that there was one for each month of the year between 1925 and 1926. She reached forward and picked up the first journal, and her father went back to his perusal of the tax returns.
“Don’t you want to look?” She peered up at him, her bangs falling into her eyes.
Her father glanced at her sideways and shrugged. He shifted from his position at the other end of the couch. “Honestly, Eva, this is more important right now. I gotta figure out if I need to file anything for your grandmother.” When she blew her bangs out of her eyes and made a noise like an irritated horse, he laughed and brushed them off her forehead. “You know that I want to read them too, Eva, but this has to come first.”
Eva smiled at him, holding up the journal between her thumb and curled forefinger. “I’ll give you a full trip report, how about that?”
He nodded. “Sounds good, sweetie.”
She sank back into the couch that still smelled like the jasmine soap her grandmother favored. There was another scent there too, of the expensive perfume she wore only when she went out of the house. Cloaked in a sense-memory of her grandmother, Eva opened the diary and frowned. This one was dated September 1, and that wasn’t what she needed. She leaned forward and picked up the journal from the stack opposite. Her grandmother must have been going through some sort of a journal-writing kick because the entry for January 2 was nearly seven pages long. It was no wonder that she’d had to keep a separate journal for each month.
Eva curled back on the couch, propped the book open against her knees, and started to read.
Chapter 4
Mary
January 1, 1925
The first of the year always brings about the most interesting changes. The whirlwind of 1924 has wound down to the slow creep of ice across the river. Change happens slowly when it is so cold that the wind steals your breath away. I envy the bears that sleep through the worst of the winter. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to not have to venture out into the cold.
Got back from home today. Trip fine, long, train was clogged with people.
Mother gave me this diary to record my innermost thoughts, as though I am a girl of ten or eleven, and not living away from home. She thinks that it will help me to become a more actualized person, someone who will be suitable for marriage in a few years. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that a girl working at my age is enough to put most suitors off entirely.
They need the money, though. David and Ovid are growing bigger by the day, and two younger brothers are enough to chase a self-sufficient girl from the house. It isn’t as though father helps much these days. He thinks he’s found the cure for the terrible memories he has of the war in the bottom of a bottle, but it’s just snake water. Mother thinks that I didn’t see it, but when I left on Christmas Day she was crying. They had no gifts for each other, this diary for me, oranges from Florida for the boys, and hours in church for all of us.
David and Ovid are too young to remember what it was like before father went away to war. I remember how he used to be, and I miss the man he left behind in France terribly. He’s shell-shocked, and nothing seems to help anymore. Mother is beside herself. The man that returned from the war is not my father. Mother says I must be careful because father will not say that he is hurting.
I may be a girl alone in the city, but I’ve found safe lodgings and the work is steady. There is no need for her to worry so much, or if there was she could ask me to come back home. The work is all I can ask for. Mrs. Talbot, my landlady, is on good terms with my mother, which affords me some comfort away from home. I am not the only young typist working in the city, and with Mrs. Talbot’s recommendation, I’m swimming in temporary typing assignments.
The latest is a very important attorney—Mr. R.M. Perkins. He is working on a large caseload and wants to hire me for more than just the temporary typist position I took in the fall. Some would think him an odd bird, walking around the court house with me following him like a lost chick, but that could not be further from the truth. He is very much the consummate Victorian gentleman. A bit dated, but a wonderful person. I started just before Christmas and he gave me a five-dollar bonus despite my having worked there only a few weeks. I was honored.
He told me he had three big cases coming up that he might use me for if I could continue to keep up. I thought it was awfully presumptuous of him, but what was I to say? The man gave me more than enough money to pay rent for the next month and a half, just for doing good work.
Mother says he wants something more from me. I don’t think so. He has a wife, after all, and I’m not that sort of girl.
Eva smiled. Her grandmother, even as a young girl, had always been very pragmatic. Her writing was intense but heartfelt. She was dedicated to making the most out of the gift her family had given her.
“Anything interesting?” Her father asked.
“Eh,” Eva shrugged. “Did you know your grandpa was terribly shell-shocked?”
Her father nodded. “My dad, too. Both of ’em had pretty bad PTSD from the wars they fought in. Mom never really talked about that time in her life.”
“She didn’t talk about her life at all.” Eva’s mother’s voice was marked by years of annoyance. “The woman survived a century by being locked up tighter than Fort Knox about literally everything that didn’t directly relate to the conversation at hand.”
“Yeah,” Eva had to agree. “I remember David and Ovid, her brothers, but I can’t ever remember her talking about her parents, or the person she worked for back then.”
“Well, life will do that to you.” Her father went back to his stack of papers.
Eva wasn’t ready to accept that. “But then why keep this record? Why leave it where it was sure to be found when she died? I know that she didn’t like to talk about it, but then why not destroy the diaries so that we’d never get to see her at sixteen?”
When her parents said nothing, Eva knew she had a point. Her grandmother would not have kept these if they weren’t meant for something more than a memory. Somewhere in these twelve little books, there was an answer to a question Eva did not even know how to ask.
She couldn’t wait to find out more.
January 5, 1925
The weather turned better overnight. The snow is still drifting from the storms over the Christmas holiday, but it has started to harden into the crunchy sort that melts during the day and becomes a slippery death trap overnight.
It was warm today. Warm enough that I was able to spend a few minutes outside, chatting with Elsie Goodrich as she smoked her way through three cigarettes. She’s got shaky hands for a smoke eater, and seems to crave the hooch that Doris March makes in her closet as much as she does the smoke she eats.
I like Elsie. She’s a lot like me—sent away because her father came back from the war a broken man. She smokes too much and drinks enough of that awful alcohol they serve in speakeasies that she’s going to end up blind. There was a horrible article in the newspaper that I took from Mrs. Talbot’s pile of firewood. Two people went blind drinking wood-grain alcohol. They’re not sure the poor souls are going to live.
Elsie is always speaking of things as though they have no meaning beyond the off-handedness of her comments. She says that they’re holding up as martyrs the people who’ve died drinking the swill in some of the gin joints in town, and if the two who went blind die, I’m sure they’ll be included in that number. Elsie has a knack for dramatics and rather poetic language when she’s waxing on about something doomed.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I fancied myself anti-prohibition as well. Anything that can kill you isn’t worth dying for.
Elsie is like so many other girls I know. She is a handful of years older than me and working as a teacher at one of the elementary schools set up for Yiddish-speaking children whose parents want them to learn English. She’s Jewish enough that she can pass in that community while still being three generations American and naturalized. They don’t like her in acceptable society and they don’t care for her within the Yiddish community. She is ostracized no matter where she goes. I cannot imagine that: being a pariah among your own people.
Elsie isn’t bothered by it. She tells me not to worry. She just lets it roll off her shoulders like water into a mill. It doesn’t matter, she says, because it’s the part she must play. Someday no one will care if she’s a Jew or Irish or a Chinaman. She says that times are changing. I do worry about her. She puts on a brave face, but it can’t be pleasant, getting the bum’s rush no matter where you try to be yourself. I could never do something like that.
