The Missing Portrait

By Geraldine Glodek

Pregnant at sixteen in the 1960s, Mary Frances McDonald was expected to bear her baby secretly and forget about it. Twenty-five years later, while trying to learn what became of her child, she discovers that The Vermont Home for Unwed Mothers she was driven to while blindfolded never existed. She returns to her Pennsylvania coal town to confront the driver, her mother.

But Joyce McDonald isn’t talking.

The only thing Joyce appears to remember is nearly dying of shame over rumors that her daughter conceived a child upstairs in a dance hall in a fling with so many boys the father could have been anybody. In order to find the truth and her child, Mary Frances must unravel a tangled conspiracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geraldine Glodek
• Release date: Apr 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301874064

Geraldine Glodek

Author of THE MISSING PORTRAIT, formerly published in hardcover, paperback, and e-book by Echolocation Press, Nova Scotia. E-book modified and republished by Geraldine Glodek at Smashwords.com temporarily, and then withdrawn.Author of NINE BELLS AT THE BREAKER: AN IMMIGRANT'S STORY, Barn Peg Press, Iowa CityGeraldine Glodek has published fiction, poetry, and essays in various literary magazines.Although some listings mistakenly categorize some of Ms. Glodek's work as "women's fiction," this author writes accessible literary fiction for both women and men.

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THE MISSING PORTRAIT

a novel

by

GERALDINE GLODEK

Originally published in hardcover, paperback, and e-book by Echolocation Press

This electronic edition modified and published by Geraldine Glodek at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 by Geraldine Glodek

Cover design copyright 2011 by Brian Treadway

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Ecoholocation Press hardcover and paperback editions have been catalogued in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Glodek, Geraldine

The missing portrait : a novel / by Geraldine Glodek.

ISBN 978-0-9877565-0-3 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-9877565-1-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3557.L63M58 2011 813'.54 C2011-907235-1

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting that the hard work of this author is the author's livelihood as well as a creative endeavor meant to be enjoyed for its own sake.

EPIGRAPH

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself.. . . I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth.

—— James Naylor, 1616 - 1660

Chapter 1

Up da Mine

I’M A RAT. I get to tell the Pennsylvania parts of this tale. Any rat in this town could tell you how Mary Frances McDonald, a Mount of Olives Catlick High School girl, conceived her child in December, 1962.

First, a little about rats. The actual furry, run-around-in-your-cellar kind, like me. The kind that ran around the coal mines, too. From the very beginning of the mines here, back in the 1800s, every rat who valued his life learnt at least one word in many languages—FIRE! Fire’s the first word a greenie miner learnt to holler in English. He yelled it into the gangway after setting a charge to blow in a breast, and it got passed along in English and the zillion other European tongues the miners spoke.

Miners were fond of the rats. Never mind bosses who told them to whack the rats with a pick. Rats, as any miner can tell you, are the most truthful and trustworthy creatures in the world, which is why you can take me at my word when I tell you the story of Mary Frances McDonald and her baby. Miners trusted rats with their very lives, you see, for rats had a nose for deadly gasses and an ear for the slightest shift in the earth. Rats could sense when the teeniest crack in a timber support was about to yawn and the whole post give way. All new miners got the same good advice from the old-timers: When the rats scram, you scram.

Mount of Olives had near 20,000 people back in the days of big coal. By the time our Mary Frances came into the world, there were only around 5,000. She lived in a tiny coal patch called Otterdale, about a mile outside the town. Here’s how she conceived her baby. It happened in the former United Mine Workers building on Bloke Street in Mount of Olives. Da Mine, the locals called the place because their greenie ancestors, whose native tongues had no T-haych, had a hell of a time pronouncing their T-hayches. Da Mine was a three-story brick structure turned dance hall for teens. To get to the top floor, her and datdare Dolan’s boy crossed the long dance floor to the stairs, walking on opposite sides of the room, pretending not to be going upstairs together. On the second floor they had to sneak behind the back of Jack Nash. Nash was a commuter sophomore at Bloomsburg State College. He was spinning forty-fives on a record player wired to speakers down below. His only light was a bendy-neck lamp atop a stack of flipped-over beer crates. He was sitting on a metal stool at a card table. Oh, he knew that duo was tiptoeing by, all right, but he didn’t let on. They wouldn’t be the first, wouldn’t be the last.

Hand in hand, they worked their way to a tiny, windowless room, where a pull-down stairs was waiting. Once they reached the attic floor, where all the lights were out, Dolan’s boy slid a piece of sheet metal over the floor opening so nobody would accidentally fall down the steps in the dark. The floodlights at Tom Collar’s gas station across the street lit up the white ceiling and cast a faint, milky light in the front part of the room.

Watch you don’t trip over the barbells, Dolan’s boy warned.

The barbells and other training paraphernalia belonged to a kid from Black Hollow. The kid had been training for the Olympics. From the rhythmic clanking of metal and the strained breathing, you could tell that someone in the shadows was helping himself to the kid’s equipment.

Dolan’s boy went over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out.

Mary Frances stood in the center of the room. Where? she said. Her tone was meek, her voice soft, like she was talking in church. Where do you want me?

A boy came to her from behind and slid his arms around her. He squeezed her tiny little tits and kissed the back of her neck. Right here’s good, he whispered, backing her up and easing her down onto the kid’s push-up mat.

Mary Frances turned her face away from the window. She closed her eyes and pretended she was only ten years old and in the House of Mirrors at Willow Grove Park near Philadelphia. She relived the night she skipped ahead of her grandmother and lured the poor woman smack into a clean glass panel that didn’t lead to a passage after all. So immersed was Mary Frances in that memory that she almost giggled at the sight of Gram’s nose squooshed against the glass, her curly gray bangs flattened and bunched like a steel scrubby. But that did not spare her from noticing there were four boys giving it to her up there on the kid’s mat. Not like what Dolan’s boy had told her. He said there’d be three, himself included, no names for the others. But there were four, one after another, done within two Elvis songs, one by the Shirelles, one by Stevie Wonder, and one by Mary Wells. Seconds afterwards, the boys were zipping up and predicting a win for Mount of Olives High by two touchdowns as they headed back down to the dance.

Dolan’s boy turned back and poked his head up once through the trap-door hole. Watch you don’t trip over the barbells, he said. Then he went downstairs.

So, what the hell. Who’s to say who the father was? And what could Mary Frances do but hide out in wunna demdare Homes, as they called them with a wink, during the showing months, and give the child up?

The Home her mother drove her to, far away, and far into the night, was only for girls who signed in advance to give their babies up. The one mirror in the place was so tiny and positioned so high on the wall that all a girl could see of herself was her neck and her head. The intent was to keep the little fools from pondering their big bellies. Less to forget later. As you can imagine, a girl never got to see her child either. Mary Frances never even got to see the little slimy, purplish foot kick straight up the second the child was pulled loose from her body. The doctor, a broad-shouldered man bent below the blue sheet draped over her knees, did a handoff to a nurse, her hair teased and sprayed into a helmet, who pivoted and ran the squirming bundle three yards through the square arch at the end of the birthing room.

Chapter 2

Filthy Rumors, That’s All

AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE NAVY, our Mary Frances is back in the Coal Region, hoping to find out what became of her child. She’s got plenty of questions, but her mother, Joyce, isn’t doing any talking.

Joyce still lives in Otterdale. There’s only a single string of houses separated from the two-lane by a narrow street and a green. A dirt alley splits the patch into equal halves. On the lower end are ten small coal company duplexes—halfa-doubles, the locals call them. On the upper side of the alley are four single homes once occupied by families that ran the huge colliery beyond the workers’ houses. The colliery, reduced to one crusty concrete building and foundations packed with weeds, shut down around 1955.

It’s winter now and Mary Frances is cruising along the two-lane, observing her mother’s house, a humble halfa-double next to the center alley. The snowplow has made a swipe down the front street but the alley is drifted near up to the top of the fence pickets. Joyce’s old blue Chevy has been cleared of snow. Mary Frances, instead of making a right turn into Otterdale, turns left into the cemetery on the hillside. She takes the horseshoe drive around the life-sized statue of an executed Jesus in his mother’s arms, exits the cemetery, and pulls into the lot at the Otterdale Fire Company. Looking down across the snowy green, she’s annoyed at the sight of her mother’s cleared-off car. It’s plain that her mother’s been up and around, has even driven someplace and back. Just isn’t answering her phone—that’s the game.

Mary Frances walks to her old home, knocks on the front door, and sticks her head in. Mom? Mom, it’s me. She’s smacked by the smell of plastic as she stamps snow onto the brown carpet sample and removes her boots. A clear plastic runner covers the burgundy carpet all the way through to the dining room. New clear plastic coverings, stitched onto the flowered chair and sofa, have replaced a set of brittle, yellowed ones.

Mom?

I’m upstairs, Mary Fran. I’ll be right down.

On the wall shared with the neighbor are twelve eight-by-ten school portraits of Jack, Mary Frances’s older brother, who died in a drag race back in the 60s. These portraits from Grade One to Grade Twelve are arrayed in rigid rows like military graves. The other walls have dozens of photos of him in all sizes. There’s Jack in black and white, napping on a baby blanket on the floor, Jack pulling a toy duck by a string, Jack riding a tricycle, Jack bouncing a ball. There are color photos of Jack flashing his first driver’s license from the seat of a white Studebaker, Jack hosing down the car, Jack at the Bloomsburg Fair, handing little Mary Frances, seen from the back, the kewpie doll he had won for her at the cork shoot. His green eyes are full of mischief.

There are no pictures of Mary Frances on the walls. Portrait photos of her are crowded together on the maple coffee table. The one of her as a new Navy recruit towers over her eleven school portraits, one short of the usual dozen. There is none for eleventh grade, which would have been taken in September of 1963 had she started the school year on time. But no, she was having a baby. The absence of the portrait is cunningly downplayed by the random placement of the others.

The eyes on the girl up to Grade 10 are a child’s eyes, full of curiosity, trust, and a sensible dose of doubt. In those, Mary Frances wears a Catlick-school uniform, a white blouse and plaid vest. The senior portrait is a girl all fancied up, her hair teased and sprayed into a stiff beehive. For that, students did not gather assembly-line style in school and get plunked down in front of a plaster wall. No, for these final portraits, individual appointments were made at a professional photography studio. Mary Frances remembers going behind a privacy screen to strip from the waist up to don one of the six strapless bras laid out. The photographer’s assistant, Mrs. Gromyko, came in holding a blue chiffon wrap, chattering indecipherably with open safety pins between her front teeth as she draped the wrap onto the customer and tugged it into place, leaving Mary Frances’s skin bare from the neck to the edge of her shoulders.

It isn’t just the chiffon drape that makes Mary Frances’s senior portrait stand out on the coffee table. No, it’s more in the eyes. They are eyes that have seen things not seen by the eyes of the girls in the plaid uniform. They have a tinge of bitterness and despair. Looking at this collection of school pictures now, Mary Frances wonders if her mother still rattles off the same excuse to anybody who notices, despite the mish-mosh arrangement, that there are only eleven. The whole county can recite the excuse for the missing portrait: the poor girl broke her leg at her aunt’s house in Vermont on the last day of August and couldn’t get back to Pennsylvania by the day the school pictures were taken.

Mom? Mary Frances calls out again.

Joyce McDonald, holding a wicker basket with crumpled white sheets, appears in the archway. A sturdy woman with a square build, she has a jolly face and green eyes like both her children, only with the brazen mischief seen in so many of her son’s photographs. Her gray hair, short and tightly curled, stinks of a new permanent wave. She grins. Well, I’ll be. Our Mary Fran, back in town. She sets the basket at her feet and spreads her arms.

Mary Frances, leaning over the basket, gives her mother a hug. Happy New Year, Mom. A week late, but, cheers!

Joyce, swinging her out to arm’s length, looks sideways at the boots by the front door. You came in through the parlor door, she says, wagging her finger. Didn’t you, you rascal?

I couldn’t get to the kitchen door. The side yard was full of snow all the way through to the kitchen porch. How ’bout a shovel? I’ll clear the walkway for you.

No, no, I have a boy coming to shovel it. Come sit down, she says, gesturing toward the dining room.

Still no sitting in the parlor.

Never. You know that. Don’t tease, now. So tell me, are you out of the Navy, Mary Fran, or just home on leave?

Out. Retired after twenty-five years. Mary Frances recalls telling her mother all about that when she returned home in early December. She does not remind her.

And did you just fly in? Where was it, Philly? Harrisburg? Over here, sit. Joyce pats the arm of the tan sofa in the dining room, catching her imitation ruby birthstone ring in the tatted doily. Her fingers tremble and tangle with her daughter’s when both women try to free the ring. The doily drops to the floor. Joyce, elbowing her daughter aside to pick it up, shakes her head. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’d drop my own head if it wasn’t attached. So which was it, Mary Fran, Philadelphia or Harrisburg where you flew in?

Philadelphia. December 7th. Mary Frances sits down on the couch, facing the profile of her mother in the brown vinyl recliner, which faces the television. Mom, I have to ask you something. I know it’s not your favorite topic, but— But can we talk about my baby?

Joyce says, "December 7th you flew in. Pearl Harbor Day. You know, your father was near sent to Hawaii on datdare Arizona, the ship that took the worst pounding."

Yes, I heard.

You’da never been born if they hadda sent him to Pearl Harbor. I was just pregnant with our Jackie then, when your father was sent to the Mediterranean instead. Or was it Japan? Let me think. And then I had those two miscarriages between our Jackie and you. Five years apart that put you and him.

Mom, I checked the state registry in Vermont. There’s no record of me there. No record of me or my baby. It wasn’t in Vermont, was it? I had my baby somewhere else, didn’t I?

Of course, it was Vermont. Say, let me run down the cellar and throw these bedclothes in the washer.

Couldn’t that wait a few minutes?

No, I need to get them started. I won’t be long. Joyce takes the basket down to the cellar.

Patience, patience, patience, Mary Frances chants. She sits looking about the dining room, noting that the furnishings have not changed since her high school days. Like most Coal Region homes, the dining room has no eating table. It’s a sitting room. In the corner, just past the other end of the couch, is the triangular china cabinet that holds the good dishes, the ones that get used only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthdays. It holds pieces of china collected from the days when the State Movie Theater existed in Mount of Olives. Movie goers got a rose-patterned plate, cup or saucer with each admission in 1957. Mary Frances notices that the butter dish and two cups, saucers, and dessert plates are missing. Recalling the doily falling onto the floor, she wonders if her mother has dropped and broken them.

Joyce returns from the basement, grunting as she settles into the recliner. She pushes down the side handle that raises the leg rest with a hardy thrust. Where’s my glasses? Joyce says. It’s getting so I forget everything these days. Can’t find my glasses. Can’t find my teeth. What next?

Maybe you left them in the kitchen. I’ll go look, Mary Frances says, leaning forward, starting to get up.

A look of panic flares up in Joyce’s eyes. No, no, don’t! I don’t need them unless I’m reading or watching a show. Sit, sit.

Mary Frances frowns and sits back.

Joyce puts on a bright smile. Like my new perm? She tugs on the bangs. They spring back into little corkscrews.

Nice. Just have it done?

This morning. There’s a girl down the next patch just opened a beauty shop. She’s very good. Holly, her name is. The names they give kids these days. Why, in the old days, you wouldn’t dare approach the baptismal font without a saint’s name. The priest’d throw you out on your ear.

Maybe I’ll try Holly. I’m back here a month and haven’t gotten around to finding a hairdresser yet. A whole month I’m back in the Coal Region, Mom.

And look at your hair. Still straight as a poker. Red as a robin’s breast. No gray yet. And you’re still such a tiny little thing.

They keep you pretty fit in the Navy. But I’m out a whole month already. A whole month I’ve been around, Mom.

Is that right? Well, I’ll be!

On Christmas I told you about the corner house I rented, remember? Over in Black Hollow? Same block we used to live on. A halfa-double. The Howards still live on the other side of the wall. I told you all this on Christmas. Don’t you remember?

Was it Christmas you were here?

I was here on Christmas. And a little before. I helped you bring the decorations down from the attic. Remember I said I’d help you haul them back up? I’ve kept trying to call to see when you wanted it done. I see you got it done. Mary Frances lets out a sigh. Mom, don’t you ever answer your phone?

Yes, that nice boy, Rick Trounov, carted all the boxes up for me. He helps me a lot. So how long till you’re out of the Navy?

I’m done. Retired. I got out on December 7th.

Joyce smacks herself on the forehead. That’s right. December 7th. Pearl Harbor Day. You know, your father was near sent to Hawaii in 1941.

"Yes, on the Arizona, the ship that took the worst pounding by the Japanese. Mom, please, can we talk about my baby?"

You were in the Navy a long time.

Twenty-five years.

And now you’re out and moving next door to the Howards. How are they these days?

Fine. They’re fine. Mom, don’t you ever answer your phone?

"When I can get to it.