Hidden Secrets

Every house and consequently everyone has secrets.  Things that are hidden away, carefully packed or tucked away from prying eyes for only you to know and see.  If Life is A House, then the life lived inside of that house could be a house of: horrors; mystery; cards; straw; pain; the rising sun; or a fun house; the list could go on infintium.

We recently moved to a new house, a bit bigger than our previous dwelling and absolutely free-standing.  Having resided in row homes and apartments for my whole life, living in a detached house with its own driveway, porch, yard is completely new for me.  I haven't wanted to rush into decorating it rather I want to live in this house to have it tell me what it wants, how it should be dressed and layered. It's an interesting house, done in the early 1920's Arts & Crafts style and it is rich with a mysterious history, a tale of celebrity and intrigue.  There is rehab work here literally and figuratively and the neighbors have been slowly filling us in on the details of what it used to look like and about the former owners.  The house was a shambles over the past decade.  Sometime within the past 4 or 5 years it was purchased and flipped — transformed from its decaying decrepitude and rebuilt with its character intact.  Since we are the third set of owners since the rehab, I didn't think I would find much in the way of things hidden and left behind.  The past owner carefully stripped away all of her physical material traces and left the house bare but beautiful.

One night when I was putting away clothes and trying to empty some boxes, I got a powerful feeling to look inside of the original closet within the walk-in closet room on our 2nd floor.  Really, we have a walk-in closet that should be our son's or could be a guest room!  Since it's so well appointed and organized, I'm not about to tear it apart to convert it back to a room.  Anyway, as I started poking around in corners I happened to look up into the corner of the original closet and I saw two pieces of paper sticking out of the wall and ceiling of what should be the door jamb of the original closet.  The photos opening this post were the finds hidden away up there, two old nude photos that look as though they fell out of a time capsule from 1943.  I felt as though I had discovered a secret about this house.  It reminded me of two events of my childhood, of finding things I should have found, hidden in secret alcoves.

When I was about 7 years old, I found an old box of condoms placed in the cornices of the area where the basement stairs form small shelves underneath of themselves. In this negative space is an area that can be used for creating nooks or shelves.  This was in an apartment building where we were living in the mid 1970's.  I was trying to find a place to hide something of my own, money, a secret code, some small spy toy with which I was obsessed.  I wasn't the first person to use this spot, obviously.  The box was small, 3 inches by 3 inches and about a half-inch high, kind of perfect for slipping in a few coins or a note.  I remember having no idea what the word condom meant and I thought the condom itself was some weird balloon.  Most likely I filled it with water and tossed it off of our balcony into the street.

I told about my find of the box to the lady down the street who was my guardian angel and adopted grandmother, Mrs. Rhoads.  I remember when I told her about how the box was labeled, she grew pale and concerned.  Now, Mrs. Rhoads was the epitome of a grandmotherly type.  She had grey curly hair, a round soft apple pie face and she wore big, round owlish glasses.  She smelled of sweet talcum powder and rouge and she was always crocheting.  Mrs. Rhoads was the first person in a long line of angels in my life who saved me, cared for me and told me that I could be anything I wanted.  Her consternation about this intriguing little box was warranted.  But to the 7 year old spunky tom-boy that I was, I wanted to keep it for myself.  Oh, the arguments that ensued.  She wanted me to bring the box to her immediately; she'd give me something else for me to use as my treasure box.  It was an old dirty thing, why would I want such a thing?  Now, having come from a broken home where inappropriate sexual deeds were common, I think I had some idea that what I found wasn't fit for a 7 year old.  Then again, by the time I was 7, I had already had my fair share of inappropriate things happen to me that weren't fit for a 17 year old.  An early sexual education is putting it in too clinical and mild of terms.  Poor Mrs. Rhoads, if her hair hadn't already been going white, I'm sure this incident added a few new silver streaks to her curls.   After a few weeks of hanging onto this precious box, Mrs. Rhoads prayers were answered, it fell apart from repeated use.  I found something else to use and another hiding spot for my spy gear and mad money.

As a teenager my first cousin, Darcy and I were oddly obsessed with my father and his early death. My dad died when I was 6 years old, on my 6th birthday, from a drug over-dose.  It's the fact of my life and I'm not sad or melancholy about it, it just is.  By the time he died, my mother had already been married and divorced twice — first to my father for about 2 years, and then to Ray, the horrible and abusive step-father who molested me.  By the start of 1st grade, in September of 1973, I was already damaged goods with a twice divorced mother.  I was an original latch key kid living in a single parent-household.  We were not a common sight in suburban, lower-middle class Aldan, PA - Delaware County.

By the time I reached 13 I was ripe for all kinds of mischief and eager for delving into the back story about my father, about whom I knew almost nothing.  Darcy and I were spending the weekend at our Bobbci's house and were sleeping in what used to be my father's room.  We were conjuring spirits, taking sheets of tracing paper and making pencil rubbings from his desk and bureau to find evidence of his handwriting and to read what he had written.  Remembering my find from under the stairs from years before, we went down to the basement to rummage hoping to find some tucked away scrap or hidden map to his life.  Up in the cellar eves we found a letter shoved under the floor boards.  I can barely remember what was written.  It was a letter to my father, from some friend of his who was in jail.  My dad had been in and out of jail a few times, probably for petty theft and drug offenses.  We had the letter in our possession all of ten minutes before my grandmother came down to see what we were up to and she saw what we had found.  Before I could even read it, Bobbci grabbed the letter from Darcy and tore it to shreds.  We were yelled at, punished and prohibited from poking around the house ever again.

My father's death had taken a toll on my grandmother and she was forever crying whenever I saw her.  As an adult, I can see that my grandmother had a lot of loss and sorrow in her life.  She was a proud woman from hard-working, cold Polish stock.  I'm sure seeing me reminded her keenly of my father, I look just like him.  It couldn't have been easy to deal with, his young death and my erie resemblance to him.  But as a kid and a teenager, her tears were like crocodile tears and her cold demeanor was off-putting.  The shredding of that letter felt like whatever small part of him I had as my own was taken away from me.  We never talked about the incident again and I felt ashamed and angry for a very long time since all I really wanted was to know who my father was and what about him was in me that was good.

Finding these nude photos in my new house brought back a rush of feelings for me, about sexual conduct and hidden sexual secrets.  These photos have probably been in this house for over 60 years.  How no one else found them before is a mystery that will never be solved (unless they belong to the past former own, and then the mystery of how they came to be behind a door jamb of a closet within a closet is another tale).  I choose to believe that some young man had a cache of stag photos in this room and this hiding spot was out of mom's, grandmother's or his wife's knowledge.  They may have been titillating for their day but in today's world they are a quaint reminder of a secret that no longer needs to be shameful.