Read some excerpts…

Author’s Note

In 2014, while looking through archives of family papers at the University of Iowa, I came across an old, faded folder in which I found a stack of poems written by my great-aunt, Mary Cromer. I had not known that Mary wrote poetry. In fact, I knew very little about her except some stories my father told me. This book is a work of fiction inspired by imagining her life. The poems herein are all hers.

Excerpt 1: 1906

Even as an infant she knew the substance of each sister as they passed her among themselves. Carol was sturdy; Helen, wispy; Ruth was round and small. Each of them had their own scent, too—Carol like grass and sweat; Helen, like soap from laundry days; and Ruth, whose scent changed from roses to lavender, depending on what scents Mother had on her dresser. And their touches were different: Carol, 11 years old, held baby Mary calmly, lightly; when Helen held her, she felt an unsureness. Ruth, at 4 years old, could only hold the baby while sitting down, but was the most expressive of the sisters, cooing and stroking her until Mary felt pressed and began to cry.

“Mary, Mary, quite… contrary,” Ruth sang the new song she had learned.

“That’s enough, Ruth,” Mother said, and picked Mary up and put her in the carriage or her crib.

Although Mother was also there from the beginning, her presence was subtler, passing, unfamiliar. “Take the baby, would you, Helen?” And Helen would hold Mary and try to feed her from the bottle, but Mary didn’t want it. Mother couldn’t stand her fussing. “It’s all that baby does, is fuss,” she said, weary of them all, of moving from one two-horse town to another.

Then it was warmer and they were outside often. On the softness, a soapy smell, familiar. Outstretched, an arm that moved and could move her. Mary pushed and bent, pushed and bent until—Oh! the shock of an entirely different view, breathless, blue-blue overhead, so deep, with streaks and puffs of white. She reached up with her arms and grabbed…her feet! She rocked on the itchy green that smelled like her sister, immersed and lost in the new view and her whole self and then a shadow hovered over her, furry and strange smelling. It sniffed her and then out came its long, long tongue to lick her face from chin to bald head—a frightening and new exhilaration. Someone called out, “Spiff! Get over here!” and then, “I’m so sorry, Lela! That dog is harmless but he does what he does.” And before she could let out a scream there was another familiar high voice—“Mother, Mary turned herself over!”

Mary felt Mother lean over her. Her small arms unclenched her feet and rose to be picked up, but Mother stood up, hands on her hips. “Lord, here we go,” she said, wearily. Then the scream that had been held back inside Mary’s body like a sneeze came out, full force.

Excerpt 2: 1928

The next morning during naptime Mary brought out the typewriter and chair again. Out there in the yard she typed up all the half-finished poems in her notebook, tentatively at first, then more confidently as she got used to the sound in the outside air. It was quite different to compose a poem on the typewriter. She wasn’t sure she liked it, although the clear inked words felt more permanent, more readable on the page than the scrawling in her notebook. She found a piece of canvas in the shed to cover the table.

Mary followed this routine for the next several days, sometimes during morning naps, sometimes in the afternoon. One morning it rained and she had to stay inside; the canvas protected the table well enough. It was peaceful to be out there. My refuge under the trees, she thought—maybe there was a poem in it.

At the beginning of her third week with Mrs. Willingham, an awful thing happened. Awful, as the neighbor said, but it could have been so much worse. Mary had been at her table outside, musing, when she saw the neighbor—Henry was his name, she remembered—running across his backyard toward her. Oh, discovered, she thought and waved at him. Would he think it terribly odd, or even wrong of her to be out here typing in the late morning? “Hello! Hello!” he was calling out frantically. “Is everything okay?”

Mary stood up and in a moment she knew everything was not okay. Turning toward the house, she saw smoke wafting from the kitchen window. She had smelled something in the air, but assumed someone nearby was burning brush, not thinking much about it. She hoisted up her skirt and ran to the house. Inside, Mrs. Willingham was leaning at her bedroom doorway, confused. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” the old woman cried. On the stove a wooden spoon was smoldering; the edge of the curtain had caught fire and the room was filled with smoke. The neighbor Henry Dillon ran in shortly after Mary, assessed the situation, and began pumping water into the sink. “Grab a bowl!” he yelled at Mary, who broke from her frozen state to retrieve one. After a couple of dousings, the fire in the curtains was out. Henry tossed the burned spoon out the window and turned to Mrs. Willingham.

“It’s alright, Cora. It’s all fine.” He took her by the arm and walked her out to the porch. Mary heard him talking calmly to her.

“Looks like you didn’t close up the stove after breakfast,” he said when he came back in. “You’re a lucky one.” He eyed Mary skeptically. “What the heck are you doing out that at that table every day? Clackety-clack.”

So the sound traveled, she thought in her daze. Her palms were cold and sweaty. She wiped them on her skirt. “I’ve been typing. Typing my poems.”

While the place burns down, she finished her pathetic sentence in her head, guessing Henry Dillon was thinking the same. She was grateful he didn’t say so.

Later, Mary thought if she had just taken charge—if she had been the one to put the fire out, or at least to walk Mrs. Willingham to the porch and soothe her and explain, the woman might have let the incident go. But Mrs. Willingham was frightened, and even though both Mary and Henry Dillon tried to explain that what had happened that afternoon was an accident, she could not understand what they were saying. “But where were you? Where were you?” she asked over and over, not even looking at Mary. She demanded that Henry call her daughter. It was arranged that Henry’s sister would come out from Cedar Rapids to care for Mrs. Willingham the rest of the week. Mary dragged the table back into the shed. Another call was made from Henry’s house, and Father arrived at dusk to pick her up.

Excerpt 3: 1956

Years later, after a time at the Mental Health Institute, Mary returns home…

The new fact that Mary no longer felt so afraid of her didn’t mean that Mother had changed, really, but she had relaxed a little in Mary’s presence. A couple of weeks after she returned home Mary had heard Mother speaking to Father in the kitchen. “Well, the quirky girl is back—but not the sad one or the negative one—and that’s good.”

Mary could not recall what she had done or said since she returned that was quirky, but she didn’t mind. She noticed that Mother always said “Well” at the beginning of her comments, as if the “well” would balance out the rest of the sentence.

Father had moved down from the attic to the empty bedroom on the second floor. After a few nights, he said he couldn’t sleep and got Eddie to remove the guest bed and bring his cot down from the attic. (They left the old oak desk and his typewriter.) So now the three of them were on the same floor: Father at the end of the hall, Mother in the middle, and Mary across from Mother’s. At night she could hear them breathing—first Mother’s regular snore, then steady sighs from Father’s room, barely audible. Only when Mary heard them for a while could she fall asleep.

All through the fall months, Mary did not think of the MHI. She checked herself regularly for “slippage,” for the creeping feeling of uneasiness, but the feeling was not there. Had the shocks really altered her brain? Because, unlike the other losses of memory (she could no longer remember Eddie’s children’s names or what they were up to anymore), she could remember what it felt like to go down, to be down. Sometimes it was as if she hadn’t been at the MHI at all, that she had simply been away and come back, since that was how the family treated her.