Story Three. Part Four. The Finale.
Editor’s Note: Beth Kalet's story Appearances is our featured story. “Appearances” is one of 7 short stories included in Beth’s book Seven Stories, published in 2012. “Appearances” will be published on Hummingbird in parts, one per week over the next weeks.
Beth, a Hummingbird Guest Contributor, is an accomplished writer and editor. Her work, and her own story encouraged us to reach out to her.
In Appearances, Beth explores the notion that people and the lives they lead are not necessarily what you thought, or remembered. In fact sometimes the perception you hold is quite far from the reality.
Book Cover Photo Credit: Diane Pell
Appearances. Part Four. The Finale.
My mother hadn’t forgotten. From a strongbox in her bedroom closet she retrieved a large manila envelope, darkened with age. It was the kind that’s secured by winding a thin red string round and round between two paper discs either side of the flap. “Here you go,” she said, handing it over to me.
She hadn’t heard of Mr. Mayfield’s death, but said she knew that sooner or later, one day Joey would come to her for this. She told me she regretted not making herself easier to find, but said she was glad that now Joey would know what his mother had wanted him to know about his family.
“Did he tell you?” she asked me.
“I asked,” I admitted, “but he didn’t seem to know where to begin. Maybe it’s too personal.”
“It is,” my mother said, “but I am going to tell you anyway. I promised Mrs. Mayfield to keep her secret from her husband and to safeguard this envelope for Joey, but that’s all I promised her.”
When I think about Mrs. Mayfield now, playing this new information about her across the tableau of the performer in jester’s costume, in provocative nightclub clothes, as the very humble mother of a dark and distant teen, I marvel at the secret she kept for so many years. Her deformity was visible. But her shame, as she told Joe, was something no one could see.
It was clear to me that my mother valued her role in this mystery and that she had warm, almost maternal feelings for Mrs. Mayfield.
My father, a lawyer, had drawn up wills for the Mayfields, my mother told me. Nothing unusual there. Back in his prime, he had led workshops for neighbors on simple legal matters and even I knew that writing a will was a good idea. The Mayfields would have written wills to protect their son and maybe to help out Mrs. Mayfield’s parents, if they should outlive their daughter, I figured.
But this thing, this bit of personal business in the manila envelope, was something extra. At Mrs. Mayfield’s instruction, my dad had written into her will, unbeknownst to her husband, a reference to the information in the envelope. Its contents were a secret she divulged to another woman, my mother – possibly on that morning across the picnic table in the back yard. But she wouldn’t tell my dad. Or her own husband.
That envelope. My mother handed it to me easily, as if completing a ritual she’d been waiting years to perform. She laid it in my hands and I could feel its weight.
“Here you go,” she said to me. The envelope held papers, photos and a letter, my mother said. All the material that linked Mrs. Mayfield to a child she’d given birth to years before Joey, before she met her husband and before she became the housewife and mother, the actress we knew. That’s what my mother called her. Not a clown but an actress. I let it go.
It was some time in her late teens, shortly after she and her parents had emigrated to the U.S., while she was entertaining at a club for immigrants in the neighborhood where they’d settled, that Mrs. Mayfield had a fling with an older man. She became pregnant but didn’t marry the man. Her parents insisted she give the child up for adoption. She was ashamed of this, my mother told me. Ashamed, embarrassed, guilt-ridden and deeply pained, “with a thousand needle-pricks every minute, every day,” Mrs. Mayfield told my mother. But she knew, even back when Joe was a small kid, that some day she’d want him to know. And to find his absent half-brother. Her husband never knew. She would never tell him, my mother said. And in entrusting my mom with this envelope full of clues and confession, Mrs. Mayfield turned a part of her life over to a stranger. A stranger who happened to be a neighbor; someone she felt she could count on.
It’s tough to imagine Mrs. Mayfield as a young girl, a teen whose seductive powers got her into the kind of trouble only a girl can know. Now, I try to picture it: the young Mrs. Mayfield in fishnet stockings, a slinky black dress, a red rose in her hair. She sings in a deep voice songs from her homeland. This is the missing image from my childhood and I realize that it may be off base, just as I recognize that I don’t know her first name nor do I know her home country. I do know that once when I was a kid, a friend of her son, I caught a moment of her other self. I didn’t’ know parents could have secrets or pasts or even a sadness that overpowered the present. And I didn’t know that love and sorrow can live simultaneously in one person. Nor did I know that there’s no such thing as luck.
Part Four, Finale, to follow.
Prior Parts of Appearances.
Appearances. Part One.
Appearances. Part Two.
Appearances. Part Three.
To learn more and to purchase Beth Kalet’s book, Seven Stories, please click here. You may also contact Beth through Hummingbird by clicking here.
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