Part III: What Happens a Cappella? (Chapter 50)

As I work my way through the pile, a photograph falls to the floor.

A picture of Auntie at a slot machine.

On the flip side, it’s a promo postcard from the Nevada Club of Las Vegas, postmarked May 23, 1959, addressed to “Mrs. Gertie Stern, Grace Street Apartments, Hollywood, 28, Calif.”

There’s an ink-stamped message: “We enjoyed having you visit the Nevada Club and hope you enjoyed your visit too. We look forward to seeing you again.”

I flip the card over again. In the photograph, Auntie, although big-breasted like all women in Nana’s family, looks sleek and sophisticated ‒ even at 61 ‒ in a tight striped dress, an obviously expensive garment: the seams all match up, each stripe forming a perfect “V” down her arm.

She’s wearing a corset of some kind underneath; I remember watching her stepping, bent over, into her girdle, her heavy breasts, like long, fat sausages with brown nipples, reaching for the floor. She would stand up straight and pull the girdle up, moaning and grunting as she struggled into it, her breasts jiggling. Mission accomplished, she would pat her flat belly, sigh “ah, yes,” and then load those breasts into torpedo D-cups before reaching back and hooking the eyelets. Finally, before stepping into an elegant evening dress, she would, hands on hips, study her figure in a full-length mirror: front, side to side, and then a quick glance at her backside. “Ah, yes” again. Then on came the silk slip and the final check in the mirror before sliding into a dress from her perfumy and overfilled closet.

But in the photograph, you don’t see this part of the equation. All you see is an elegant and relaxed 61-year-old woman, lit Parliament between her fingers, sitting up straight (“a lady never slouches”) at a slot machine in a Las Vegas casino, about to dump her coins in ‒ or maybe she has already gambled all her “mad money” away and is about to get up and leave.

Auntie wasn’t one to lose control over anything in her life, especially money and people.

And weight.

You don’t see her eyes. She’s wearing harlequin sunglasses, the paste-studded kind that sweep upward, like cartoon ocean waves, from her nosepiece to her temples. At first, I don’t question the sunglasses ‒ Auntie always wore them when she was out on the town ‒ but now, it strikes me as odd that she would wear them in a dark casino, when the people around her are not wearing them: the Black floor sweeper, looking down at the floor behind her; the thin flat-chested black woman playing a slot machine next to the sweeper; the white elderly woman, partially turned away from Auntie; and a young man, looking suspiciously like mafia, walking down the aisle. Her iron-gray hair, stiff and unyielding, is curled tightly and styled like Kim Novak’s in Vertigo.

Auntie comes from that generation of women who, after the age of 15 or so, forgot how to wash and style their own hair. Her line of attack on hair care included a weekly visit to the hairdresser and, in between visits, an aggressive bedtime routine for keeping her hairdo intact for a whole week: toilet paper sculpted around her face, a nighttime hair net, and satin pillowcases.

However, this day’s hairstyle looks fresh and pouffy ‒ probably fixed that very morning.

She wears a double string of pearls around her neck and, on her right hand, a thick silver bracelet in which the end pieces overlap like one of those snake rings. She wears several rings. You can’t really tell in this photograph, but Auntie always wore heavy mascara, eye shadow, eyeliner, rouge, and lipstick. When she smiled, her face seemed to crack, and she always had lipstick stains on her front teeth.

If it weren’t for the tight dress, the heavy makeup, the jewelry, and the gaudy sunglasses, you might think she were a schoolteacher instead of a rich woman out living it up in Las Vegas.

Auntie doesn’t smile (“Ladies don’t make scenes in public”). Still, she’s the star of this picture, and she knows it.

Haughty.

Even her telephone voice was haughty and self-confident; growing up, I would call Auntie long-distance, just to hear that strident voice reserved for adults. I loved hearing her twangy, metallic “heel-lo.” No one else in my family answered the phone in quite the same assured way.

I always got the feeling that Auntie never really cared what went on behind closed doors ‒ I suspect that she, too, lived hard behind the scenes ‒ but she disliked overt public displays of crassness and sin, for example, when Mother never attempted to hide her lifestyle and when I moved in with Doug.

I haven’t given much thought to Auntie in years, but I know she would have loved returning to Sioux City for this reunion.

In some ways, I’m glad she’s gone, though we had some good times together ‒

“What are you doing?” Aunt Gwen says, looking over my shoulder at Auntie’s photograph.

“Oh, nothing. I was just going through some things.”

Gwen, who has a red canvas bag slung over her shoulder, takes the photograph from me and looks at it for a long time.

“That old bitch,” she says, voice shaking. She drops the card onto the table and flips it over. “I’m glad she’s dead.”

“Gwen! What on earth for?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. She was just a creepy person.”

“What’d she do to you?”

Gwen shrugs. “Nothing worth mentioning. It was a long time ago.” She pauses. “You know, I lived with her and Unkie. Back in 1935.” Gwen drops her bag to the floor.

“I didn’t know.”

“I was 11, and ‒ I just don’t want to talk about it.”

I get it. Another family secret to be guarded and, eventually, buried away in someone’s grave. Well, I can understand that. I stand up and hug my aunt, who is now sobbing, seeing, for the first time, an unknown side of someone I have known all my life.

“It’s okay,” I say to Gwen, not one to show much emotion in public ‒ certainly not in front of me.

“A horrible time in my life,” she continues, still sobbing. “Mom and Dad were going through some difficult times, so they shunted me off to Auntie’s. I lived there for almost two years, until after Sally was born.” Gwen pulls away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Oh, Samantha,” Gwen says, drying her eyes with a tissue and pulling herself together. “I’m just being silly. That picture brought back some memories.” Gwen picks up her bag and pulls a sheet of paper and a pen from it. “Actually, I just wanted to give you this. I’m asking all the adults to write a ‘Fantasy Keynote Address.’ Something you’d like to say in public but can’t.” Then, as quietly as she has appeared, she slips away, blending into the crowd.

I stare at the blank page and then slip Auntie’s postcard inside my purse, next to Mother’s letter.