A Soul in Hiding
Nowadays, Maureen thought, everyone says that you’re always supposed to tell the truth. On the talk shows, that’s what the experts say. No more lying to protect people. You’ve got cancer, that’s all there is to it. Not like with Father. No one ever said the word. But now, they say it’s always better to tell the truth. No matter how bad it is.
But Maureen couldn’t imagine having done that. Telling the truth to her daughter. Not because it was bad, the truth about her birth, her... conception…. It was just that… at the time, it wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about. Even now, it would be hard to tell her. How old would Nora Eunice be now? Her birthday was coming up. A week from next Tuesday. She would be—what?—oh dear lord, 49 years old if she were still alive.
A therapist—the one Maureen had gone to after Nora Eunice died—had told her that she should write a letter to her daughter on her birthday that year, telling her everything. Maureen had thought that was ridiculous—writing a letter to a dead person!—and had canceled the next appointment.
But now, sitting here in the basement of this library in this suburb of Chicago, she found herself thinking about her daughter’s birthdays, about which birthday might have been the right time.
Oh, certainly not when Nora Eunice was five or six, sweet and lovely and affectionate. At that age, the stories about Bombardier Magliano were like the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus. Just ways of telling a child that she was loved, in more ways than she could see.
The experts on the talk shows would probably say that Maureen should have told Nora Eunice when she was twelve. Or before. A sort of facts-of-life talk. Well, yes, thought Maureen, that would have made sense. But those were the years when Nora Eunice had begun to put on a little more weight, and the bullying had started. It hadn’t seemed right, to burden her... with all that... racial stuff. So just what are you? and so on. Middle school kids can be so cruel.
Maureen had definitely resolved to tell her daughter the truth on her eighteenth birthday. But that day, when it came, the two of them had a terrible fight, and it would have seemed like a maneuver in a battle: as if she wanted to hurt her daughter, by telling her something awful. But it wasn’t awful, or hadn’t been awful, until it had turned into a secret.
No, she couldn’t have done it that day. It would have been cruel, and false, and wrong.
Maureen placed the composition books back in a stack, a pile really, without bothering to put them in order, and she tied up the bundle with the twine. Her knot was more like a shoelace bow than the one she had found, but it would do. Next to the bundle was the program of today’s event. Maureen glanced idly at it, thinking, without much energy, of gathering her things and leaving. The address of Rosary College caught her eye.
7900 Division Street. These Chicago streets, thought Maureen, they go on forever. This huge flat city. You keep crossing Harlem and Pulaski on the North Side and on the South Side, miles and miles from the places in your memory, strange reminders of other neighborhoods, other times. Echoes. And the east-west streets, too, North Avenue, Western Avenue....
Division Street. Maureen thought of the flat in Old Town, the one she had shared during the war with four other girls from Iowa. It must have been straight east of here, ten miles or so, that rickety old house on Division Street, probably torn down decades ago, who knows what would be there now. She thought of the night when she had slipped out of the USO dance and brought the sailor home. All her roommates were still dancing, her roommates who had been so shocked when they had seen her talking with the sailor.
“I like his accent,” Maureen had told them. “He’s from Louisiana.”
“But he’s….”
“It’s my job,” Maureen had said, “As the most vivacious girl at the dance, it’s my job to start the conversations.” And they had all laughed at her high opinion of herself, because they all knew it was true.
Well, there was one conversation she had never started, and now it was too late. Maybe that eighteenth birthday had been the last chance. After her headstrong daughter had declared herself an artist, Maureen could hardly start a conversation with her about the weather, let alone more serious things. From then on, even when they were in the same room, Maureen felt as if she were watching Nora Eunice from a great distance, across some chasm.
Maybe the TV talk shows were right. Maybe you should always just tell the truth. But how? Maureen still didn’t have a clue as to how she could have done that.
“Excuse me… excuse me? Sorry to bother you….”
It was Miss 3.92, moving into the chair directly across from Maureen, so that the gray-green archive box, in the middle of the table, no longer blocked the view.
“Hello Melissa,” said Maureen. “I’m sorry... I was lost in thought.”
“Oh of course,” said the girl. “There must be so many memories.”
“Well no,” said Maureen firmly. “Not in this box, I mean, not for me, not in this archive. You see, Eunice was the oldest of nine, and I’m the youngest. I didn’t even know her, as a child. She joined the order when I was a baby.”
Maureen realized she was prattling on unnecessarily, but she kept going.
“I’m afraid I don’t remember her hardly at all as a person. I saw her only five times in my life, six if you count waving goodbye to her when I was ten months old. She was a stranger really, no, not a stranger…. A story, a legend....”
What Maureen was feeling was an urgent obligation to be clear, exact and honest. To anticipate misconceptions and correct them before they had a chance to take hold. But even as she spoke, she knew she was still hiding things, for of course there were memories in this basement—just different memories than what Miss 3.92 expected when she used the word, memories so very different than what Maureen herself had hoped to find.
I’m trying to be honest, she thought, I want to tell the truth, but all I can do is keep secrets.
“It must be complicated,” said Miss 3.92. “Such a big family. The age differences. And, well, the thing is, I think someone in the family… should look… at this.”
She reached out and set something carefully on the table in front of Maureen. It was an old notebook with crumbling leather covers.
“My goodness,” said Maureen. “What is this?”
“It seems to be her journal. Sr. Martin—your sister, I mean. There’s a note inside the cover. I guess she found it later, and wrote… an introduction. I only read a few lines.”
“A journal? You mean like a diary?”
“I think so,” said the girl. “From a year... during the war.”
Maureen opened the old notebook, revealing a folded sheet of typing paper, yellow around the edges.
For a moment, she wanted to close the book and push it back across the table to Miss 3.92. She wanted to say, No. No, I won’t read this. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t need any more evidence of my sister’s brilliance and daring. I’m weak and I’m a coward and I lost my daughter and I’m just not up to it. You take this book, and write a paper about it, and get yourself an A, and improve your grade point to 3.94 and I guarantee you’ll get into a very good grad school or law school if that’s what you want and you’ll have a wonderful career.
But Maureen, in her sixty-seven-year-old body, still had the personality of the most vivacious girl at the USO dance, and she could never say a thing like that.
So what she actually said was this:
“Thank you so much. I had no idea she kept a journal during the war. You’re so kind, to share it with me. With all of us, I mean. With all my sisters.”
Because for all her misgivings Maureen knew that she would read the journal, and share the fact of its existence and her first thoughts about it with her sisters, because that was who she was.
“Well, I'll leave you alone with it then,” said Melissa, and went back to her original chair, so that the gray-green box on the table gave Maureen some privacy. What a nice young woman, thought Maureen, who was a little embarrassed that she had been thinking of the girl as Miss 3.92.
Maureen picked up the sheet of paper and unfolded it. She saw the heavy black letters of an old typewriter. The way they looked just after you changed the ribbon. She held the sheet by its narrow yellow margins, and read:
June, 1958
To all my sisters, my Dominican sisters of course, and my Larkin sisters, if someday you should read this, this is the diary of my year without speech. My silent year.
In June 1941, I arrived in Florence to begin my doctoral research. I was welcomed into a small community of Dominican nuns associated with the Church of Santa Maria Novellato. My research was at Fiesole, the Etruscan site outside of Florence, to which I travelled each day in an autobus filled with archaeological workers.
When America entered the war in December 1941, I immediately stopped talking in public. One never knew when a man in uniform might approach, and my accent might reveal me to be a foreigner, a citizen of an enemy power. I also ceased to commute each day to Fiesole. Instead, I volunteered my energies to the curatorial staff at Santa Maria Novellato, to which I could walk each day through back alleys, in my habit, and enter through a hidden side door. Even within the safe confines of Santa Maria, I spoke only to three colleagues. One day I saw a workman studying my pale skin and freckled cheeks. I walked off in a huff, as if I had taken his gaze to be too bold, an offense to my religious vows.
On July 26, 1943, we heard the news of Mussolini’s deposition. I ventured out into the streets, where the symbols of fascism were being torn down, and I spoke openly to the shop girls and to any woman who seemed to wear an expression of genuine delight on her face. It was a joyous time, and I began to think of resuming my studies at Fiesole.
But then hardly a week later the German troops arrived, and took over the city. I made a private vow of silence for the duration of their occupation. This is the diary of that year, from August 1943 to August 1944, during which I never left the small house where I lived with the other sisters. I cooked and cleaned for them, though I have no talent for that work. They accepted me, as their mute, incompetent servant, and protected me, and sinned for me, in daily lies and deceptions. I will never be able to repay them, except with prayers.
When I found this taccuino yesterday, and read it, I considered destroying it, so superficially does it resemble, and yet so distant is it in spirit, from the meditations of a saint. Each page of this diary begins with a line from the Ave Maria in Italian, to make it look as if it were a book of daily devotional exercises. The rest of each page is in English, and is the record of a mind hungry—ravenous, in fact—to express itself in words. I will be the first to admit that I did not vow silence to bring myself closer to the Lord, but rather to survive the devilish power of the Germans. And I did not keep this diary in the spirit of the Rosary, but in a desperate attempt to maintain my faculties of critical thought.
Please, future reader, please understand that there was no spirit of mockery in these pages, no disrespect for the simple soul I was pretending to be. I can state, with certainty, that this is not a document of holiness, nor of bravery. It is, instead, the record of a soul in hiding, in more ways than one.
Sr. Martin de Porres, O.P.
Maureen folded the typewritten sheet carefully, and put it back inside the front cover. Then she turned the page. She saw the handwriting of her eldest sister, almost perfect at the top, in what looked like Italian, that must be the line from the Hail Mary, and then more of a scrawl below. With a little effort she could make out the words in the middle of the page, the words in English.
Well, Eunice Larkin, thought Maureen. So you were a soul in hiding. Maybe we have something in common after all.
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