In 1878, to revive a flagging economy, the business leaders
of St. Louis dreamed up a grand idea: the Veiled Prophet (VP) Ball. Seventy-two years later, my mother was
crowned Veiled Prophet Queen, and for me as a little girl, this nugget from my
mother’s past was a fairy-tale come true. For my sisters, Rita and Francie, and
me, there was no distinction between a full-blooded monarch and our
mother.
As kids, we three girls used to pore over scrapbooks bulging
with newspaper clippings about Mom’s VP year. We loved the pictures of young women in glamorous gowns and
dazzling tiaras, their bouquets tumbling with flowers as they waved from their
float in the parade. And Mom, our
mom, beaming and beautiful, in a white
dress of satin and tulle, beaded and sequined, seated on her throne beside the
mysterious Veiled Prophet.
In February, Mom, Rita, Francie and I went to St. Louis, the
first time Mom would return to her native city in three decades. In the weeks leading up to our trip, I
reflected on my mother’s youth and asked her about the jolting changes of her
20th year.
Just days after her VP reign ended, Mom married my father
and moved with him to Camp Atterbury in Indiana where my father was stationed
with the army. Mom recalled, “Our
house, a square concrete place, was at the bottom of a hill, surrounded by
mud. Your dad would take the car
to the base, so I was stranded and alone. I didn’t know how to cook; I didn’t
know anybody...” Even that was better than her first night in Germany a few
months later when my father was again at an army base and she lay in bed,
covers clutched over her face, frantic, as rats chewed the crackers on the
bureau.
I couldn’t shake the image of that young girl leaving her
parents, my beloved Byeo and Poppy, following a year of VP excitement to live
in the mud and cower from rodents.
“Did you miss home, Mom?
Did you …well, not regret marrying Dad, but….well, sort of regret it?” I
asked her.
“Never. He was
the man I wanted…but that night with the rats? That was a low point.”
* * *
Upon our arrival in St. Louis, we were greeted by my
mother’s first cousin, Teddy, and Jane, his Very-Significant-Other. After lunch, Teddy and Jane took us for
a drive around the city, a combination of fun sights – the soaring arch, Union
Station, the brick buildings of the former Simmons Hardware Company founded by
my great-great grandfather – and radical changes jarring to Mom. Her head pivoted as we drove, searching
for familiar landmarks among the skyscrapers, offices, and chain stores.
Our ultimate destination was a synagogue-turned library,
also home to the Missouri Historical Society. When he organized this visit,
Teddy, a long time announcer for the VP Ball and son of a queen himself, had
alerted the curators that a former queen and descendants of the founder of
Simmons Hardware Company would be paying a visit.
Beneath a vibrant, star-studded blue dome, we gathered
around a wooden table to flip through a box of black and white photographs
nestled between sheets of tissue: archival portraits of past VP queens. Along
with the two curators, we gazed at girls of sixty to eighty years ago,
nineteen-year-old-perfect, statuesque in swirling rivers of voluminous satin
trains, frozen in flowing gowns and feathers. Each picture was labeled with a name and a year, and
we’d stop with whispered shrieks, if such a sound is possible, at 1921 – my
grandmother, Byeo; 1929 – Teddy’s mother; and finally 1950 – Mom, in her beaded
white dress of satin and tulle.
“Hmmm,” mused Shannon, the youthful blond curator, as she
eyed Mom’s picture. She turned on
her heel and disappeared down a hallway, leaving us to admire our trio of VP
mothers.
As our whispers became less whispered, the librarians from
the front desk came to check on the commotion. They did not hush us, but grinned and shared in our
excitement as we held out the picture and pointed to Mom. “It was many years ago, “Mom said, laughing
(sort of quietly).
Two tables over, a woman with short brown hair and a doughy complexion sat
reading. She was
extraordinarily gracious, as she did not look our way once, at least not
obviously, and neither glared nor hissed at our ruckus. Had I been in her place, I’m pretty
sure I would have done one of the three.
My sister, Rita, took the photos to the desk to see about
getting copies while the rest of us turned to the other curator. A pale man
with thinning hair, his eyes were bright as he revealed the contents of a
manila folder: individual pages from a catalogue of the 1904 World’s Fair with
pictures of the Simmons Hardware exhibit.
On a bookshelf at home, we have one of the company’s massive
leather-bound catalogues, four inches thick, with gold lettering on the spine.
An illustration inside the book shows horse-drawn wagons going about their
business in the streets around the Simmons factory, buildings still in
existence – we’d seen them earlier - although the company is not.
125 years ago, one could order, at modest prices, corn
huskers, hatchets, augurs, and hoes, washboards, carpet beaters, laundry
wringers, and sleigh bells. For
$48, one could purchase a dozen mounted family grindstones, although the 790 lb
weight seems daunting. Also
pictured, in royal blue and red, the sporty “Run Easy” buggy, ranging from $65
to $85 depending on upholstery and canopy materials. In the eighteen hundreds, even sewing machines, door knobs
and ice boxes were handsome, in black enamel with gold filigree, brass and
solid oak.
The pleasant curator drew our attention to the design of the
1904 exhibit, at first glance, a relatively simple structure, an arch within
rectangular supports, black with an abundance of decoration. “Look closely,” said the curator, and
then we saw – saws! And axe blades and forks! Knives and spoons! Thousands of pieces of cutlery and
hardware fanned out and lined up and placed end to end to form flowers and
intricate designs. Of all the
magnificent structures and exhibits created for the fair in 1904, only two
remain. This was not one of
them.
With sparkling eyes, the curator, a man who clearly loved
his work, said, “Want to see something else we have?” He pulled out an age-stained document sheathed in a plastic
envelope: a certificate to drive buggies and phaetons in the city of St.
Louis. “Check out the signature…”
He was practically dancing. I had
to squint to read the spidery hand.
“Thomas Jefferson….Thomas Jefferson?! No way!”
“Yes!” The man
was bouncing on the balls of his feet and I felt like bouncing myself. “Basically, it’s Thomas Jefferson’s
driver’s license!” he crowed in as much of a whisper as he could manage.
History. All
around us.
Shannon reappeared; we’d all but forgotten her. She pushed a wheeled cart laden with
two cream-colored boxes. “I was
thinking the names sounded familiar…and the pictures too,” she said. She opened the top box. It held a twenties-style pink flapper’s
dress adorned with cotton flowers.
Shannon turned over the tag.
It had been my grandmother’s, the dress she wore on her last night as
queen.
Byeo wore this when she was twenty years old. Mom’s eyes were wide as she said, “I didn’t know it existed.” The tag indicated a donation made in
1960, the date my grandparents moved from Mom’s childhood home. So, they must have cleared out the
attic, gotten rid of some stuff, and the dress landed here. I tried, I tried, to conjure my Byeo, not a black and white photo, but
a girl, alive, filling the contours of this pink flowered dress.
And the other box on the cart?
Fingers clad in latex-blue lifted the lid to reveal layers
and layers of tissue. Shannon
parted the papers and slid her hand under the bodice of a dress, a beaded white
dress of satin and tulle: the dress Mom wore when she was nineteen years old,
as VP queen of 1950.
* * *
In front of the expansive bathroom mirror, Mom and I stand
side-by-side, every spot and sag amplified by lights interrogation-bright. Although she has always counseled my
sisters and me to favor a touch of blush in defense against appearing defeated,
she rarely wears make-up herself.
Tonight, however, she dabs on some foundation and brushes a hint of pink
across her cheeks. She comments
that some of her friends pencil their eyebrows. As I blend Clinique bronzer into my forehead, I respond
that, in my experience, it’s hard to wield brow pencil effectively, although
god knows I was glad for it when I lost my eyebrows to chemo.
Each morning of our stay, while wielding blush and
eye-liner, the available tools for repair, Mom and I have stood before the
mirror and our aging reflections, each bemoaning her own flaws, while shoring
the other against self-attack. She
is eighty-one, I am almost sixty.
(Why bother with fifty-nine? It’s a springboard only.) Her eyelids bother her, and she gives
the loose skin a finger lift, while I use the same digital technique to smooth
the bags creeping into my cheeks.
I embrace my crow’s feet, but this cheek-wrinkle thing is distressing.
With her silver-white hair and high cheekbones, my mother is
beautiful, but I think, for her, the changes have seemed magnified in the
constant presence of her nineteen year-old-self here in St. Louis. “We’ve both been lucky to look young
for so long,” I say, but for me, that is changing, and it will be hard to look
in the mirror when the face gazing back is not the one I think of as my own.
When Shannon brought out Mom’s VP dress, it was
magical. Our eyes swiveled from
the photo, to the dress, to Mom. For some reason, I
have a hard time believing in the past, even my own. That once I crouched on a
weathered gray dock, watching as Poppy struggled to remove the hook from the
first fish I ever caught is a sun-warmed fantasy more than a memory. That once I smeared Coppertone on
little Tucker’s nose as Casey splashed nearby, feeding herself shovels of sand,
is more about the scent of suntan lotion, glare, and heat, than the solid flesh
we were. So much more mystical then, my mother’s youth, as conveyed through
scrapbooks, queenly dresses, and stories of life-before-Lea.
I remember when Mom’s hands were young and smooth, when her
hair was brown, when she looked like the girl in the picture, yet I see that
person so completely in the woman she is now that the two co-exist. The dress, however, was a tangible
remnant, proof of a bygone fairy-tale of excitement, the perfume of flowers,
and the scratch of tulle against bare shoulders.
