Free Worn Masks by Phyllis Carito

Pistoians made their home. This is where her mother was
born and her mother’s family still lived. Would this help in her quest to know
her mother? She was in a state of suspension, and
her life, as she knew it was on hold. She had a con stant gnawing in the
pit of her stomach.
    The records she requested from the Comune
di Pis toia finally came. They included a note from a man, a clerk who worked
there, who claimed to be a cugino , and who wrote that he would guide her
through all the records. It was like he had been expecting her requests for a
long time. She started to look at the papers, many of them were hand-written.
    Her mother’s birth certificate read, born 1908 to Giovanni and
Elenora Giordano. Mary Grace couldn’t imagine her mother as a baby or as a
child.
    There were certificates for her siblings, two boys, one who died
in World War II, and then twin sisters born eleven
years after her mother in 1919, Maria and Gra ziella. How could this be?
How could she be named for them and never know they existed? Why? Why name Mary
Grace for them? She looked more carefully and saw they had lived for only two
years and died of scarlet fever.
    “ Maria Graziella, Maria Graziella.” Her head was spinning,
hearing her mother call her over and over.
    “ Va bene ?” her father would always ask her mother after she
had received a letter from Italy. “Are you okay, is everything still okay?”
    Mary Grace flipped through different papers, trying to focus. She saw that her grandmother died from
com plications soon after giving birth to the twins. What did it all
mean? Her mother had lost her own mother, and gained and lost two sisters.
Then, she had a child who couldn’t fill
those losses? Mary Grace won dered what her mother ever thought of her.
    She looked at other documents, paying attention to the dates, and
saw that her grandfather remarried barely three years later. So, it was the
second wife, Christina that wrote to her mother and called her daughter. There
were two boys born to this woman, and years later, the daughter, Elena.
    Mary Grace was exhausted by it all. She had spent all day reading
and trying to make some sense of it. She feared the recurring nightmare that
she had since her mother’s death, of her mother calling out to her from the
wheelchair, “ Maria Graziella ,” but was she calling Mary Grace, her
daughter, or was her mother calling back to her lost sisters?
    Following the records was a first of many letters from Elena, her
mother’s younger sister. The cugino in the record room must have given
her Mary Grace’s address. Elena talked about her brothers, and Mary Grace’s
mother’s younger brother Giuseppe and coming with him to America to see their
sister, Teresa. She remembered meeting Mary Grace who was seven years old and
Elena was eleven years old then. 
    It was difficult to believe that they had once met. Mary Grace had
no recollection of that meeting.
    Back to the nursing home and more questions for Aunt Maggie. “I
have been trying to find out about my mother’s family. This sister, Elena, she
came to America to see my mother?”
    “Yes, it is all in the letters. Your mother, I forgive her now,
she should rest in peace, but then I hated her. You learn, Gracie, when you
slap someone back, the slap on your cheek
doesn’t sting any less. We did it for you, Gra cie, Uncle Paul begged me
to write to her family.”
    “What? You wrote to my mother’s family? Answered the letters my
mother received?”
    “No, your mother turned her nose to those letters.”
    “That’s not true, Aunt Maggie. I saw her read them, I saw her
cry.”
    “Gracie, she was cold, years before she was dead, she was a pesce
morte . I wrote to the sister and she wrote to me. Somewhere, somewhere in
the house are those letters.”
    Mary Grace went back to the house. Where? Almost everything was
emptied out. She sat in Aunt Maggie’s living room that had so often been a
refuge for her. She looked in her bag and took