The House on Maple Street Read online

  Chapter 3 - Wardrobe and Magic...

  Gerald searched through Maxine's empty home all afternoon before finally finding the bronze key buried at the bottom of a cardboard box filled with silverware.

  "It would be cruel to resent you for my ill luck now after all you’ve done for me," Gerald held the key into the light streaming in from the window above the kitchen sink. "You just looked so lovely upon Maxine's neck. How do you think I might ever find my way back to her?"

  Gerald found a spool of yarn in a dresser kept in Maxine's bedroom and fastened the key upon a strand of purple which he tied around his neck. He rambled aimlessly about the home, pausing often to consider how he had aged in a mirror, where he suspected the dark, black dye of his beard would soon fade to reveal the true gray lurking beneath so much dye. He sat upon the couch to watch the afternoon's baseball game upon the television, but he found he lacked the will to search for the remote control without Maxine's company. He imagined the sound of Maxine breathing next to him. He imagined the scent of her perfume, thought he heard her shuffling out from the kitchen, bringing him a chill beer she found behind so many bottles of maple syrup. Already, ghosts crowded Gerald's mind.

  So searching for some distraction from the regrets that plagued him, Gerald drifted through the home Maxine had for so many years shared with her husband Richard, the home in which Maxine and Richard had lived a lifetime, in which they had raised a family. Gerald paused to consider the pictures still hanging upon the walls. He imagined himself standing where Richard stood in those snapshots and portraits. He placed himself into those photos where Richard presented football trophies to Tony, where Richard hugged daughter Sarah upon college graduation. Gerald discovered a shoebox brimming with postcards from places Gerald had never realized Maxine had visited in an antique, roll-top desk. He read the scrawled notes written on the back of those cards, and he wondered why Maxine had never shared those experiences with him. Had he talked so much in Maxine's company that she never had the opportunity to tell him of her own travels? Or had Maxine thought it best to sequester the memories of one lover from another, so that the years or Richard and those of Gerald did not smear together as her memory turned ailing in her age?

  Gerald discovered a closet filled with Richard's abandoned wardrobe in the home's empty second bedroom. He was curious how much the slacks and coats might tell him of the man who had taken Maxine for his wife. He would not touch Richard's old Army uniform, but Gerald did not feel too ashamed to search through the pockets of other outfits for clues to the character of Maxine's deceased husband. Gerald had never asked Maxine about Richard, feeling such questions would have been imprudent, might have jeopardized the reunion time had granted to him. Thus while he looked upon golf shirts and bermuda shorts, Gerald wondered if Richard had been tender or cruel. Could one of Richard's vests hint if the husband had placed his wife's wishes above his own, or if that man's goals defined what aspirations Maxine might hope to achieve? Could dress shoes supply Gerald with a sense of Richard's intelligence? What might Richard's ties say of the humor of the man who had worn them?

  Gerald stretched to reach a gray Stetson gathering dust upon the closet's highest shelf. He traced the hat's brim with his finger, admired the fine feathers stitched into the hat's side, thought of older times he knew when it not yet become strange for men to wear hats. He dreamed to remember what it had felt like to wear such a Stetson, and so Gerald set it carefully upon his brow. Something burned against his chest for a second, and his fingers snatched at the key held by the purple thread around his neck. But the key was cool to his touch, and the heat he experienced, Gerald thought, had to have originated from another source.

  His skin still tingling in the surprise of that sudden heat, Gerald turned and saw his reflection in that room's tall mirror.

  Gerald gasped at the face that greeted him in the glass.

  Richard Hanson peered from that mirror where Gerald's reflection should have been.

  "How in the world?"

  Gerald winked, and Richard's reflection winked with him. Gerald clapped his hands. He hopped. He turned. He frowned and smiled. Yet though the reflection contained in the mirror never belonged to Gerald, it matched each of his movements. Gerald's beard vanished, transformed into the cropped haircut in which Richard always kept his silver hair. Weight gathered around the eyes in the mirror, sagged beneath the chin, so that Gerald could not claim the face winking back at him was his own no matter how that reflection matched each of his movements. The clothes Gerald wore were the same as those in the mirror. The necklace of purple string and the small key attached to it did not differ. It appeared that the glass dressed another in the clothes Gerald wore.

  Gerald tested the strange reflection by lifting the Stetson hat off of his head, and in a flash, his natural features returned in the glass.

  "A magic hat?" Gerald's eyebrow arched. "What would Richard Hanson have done with a magic hat? And where would he have found it?"

  That sudden heat upon Gerald's heat returned as he lowered the Stetson back upon his head. In a new wink, Richard Hansen's reflection returned in the mirror. Gerald lifted the hat again and he giggled when his bearded face returned to the glass. And as Gerald set the Stetson a third time upon his head, his eyes caught a flash from that small, bronze key kept at the end of his necklace, where his chest burned in the returning heat.

  "Is it even the hat that's doing it?" Though Gerald gripped the key so tightly that his knuckles turned white, the touch of that charm remained cool. "What else does this house hold in the closets?"

  Gerald found a crumpled, blue baseball cap on the closet floor as he shoved aside work shirts and sweaters. It was a vintage cap from Maxine's favorite team, with white salt stains still circling the brim. Gerald's fingers trembled as they traced the logo's fine stitching. He thought of Ace Henderson, of that pitcher who was always Maxine's favorite athlete. Gerald rushed back to the mirror and took a breath before closing his eyes and tugging that blue cap upon his head.

  The bronze key burned upon his chest, and when Gerald opened his eyes, a new man greeted him in the mirror.

  Ace Henderson matched each of Gerald's gestures and expressions. It was a young man's smile that twisted in the reflection along with Gerald's. The eyes that winked back at Gerald belonged to an athlete in his prime. The reflection's skin was tanned by afternoons in the sun. Sweat pasted the younger reflection's hair to his forehead, as if that image in the glass had just strode off the mound at the end of a complete game. Gerald pulled back his shirt sleeve and flexed his old arm's bicep, laughing as he watched Ace Henderson's younger and stronger muscle follow that movement.

  "It's the key. It's the old, bronze charm."

  Gerald tossed the old ball cap onto the room’s bed and hustled through the home in search of other items of wardrobe. A red scarf with yellow polka dots draped around his neck transformed Gerald's reflection into that of Maxine's second cousin Pearl, whose beautiful youth remained unforgotten among the woman's surviving, elder peers. An orange life-jacket retrieved from the home's attic shifted Gerald's reflection into that of a very young Tony, with his silver hair grown long to fall upon sunburned shoulders. Slipping into the yellow sleeves of a raincoat left forgotten in the mudroom morphed Gerald's image into that of Maxine's daughter Sarah when she had just turned seventeen, with red hair falling down her back, with the green, emerald eyes sparkling in the home's dim light.

  Gerald donned one article of clothing after another as the short, winter day shifted into night. Most of the pieces turned Gerald's reflection into that of some member of Maxine's family, into reflections that portrayed Maxine's loved ones in various stages of their time passed beneath her home's roof. A few pieces of wardrobe presented Gerald with the reflections of strangers he did not know, with faces that left Gerald imagining what connections had brought them to the Hanson home, of how such nameless reflections came to leave gloves and coats behind after Christmas parties and card games. The bronze
key burned each time he donned a new article of clothing, working its magic in every reflection Gerald found about the home.

  "Maybe the key's magic isn't just in the glass," Gerald spoke to himself as he looked upon the young, wide-shouldered form of Richard a masonic ring summoned in the mirror when slipped upon Gerald's finger. "I wonder if the mirror is only reflecting what it sees?"

  Gerald got an idea as the neighborhood dogs howled to announce the postman’s daily arrival. Gerald slipped into a raincoat found in the foyer closet and peeked at his reflection cast by a glass picture frame after his good luck key burned upon his chest. Tony’s reflection looked back at him. Tony’s face from earlier that morning smiled from the glass. Those eyes that earlier smoldered now looked upon Gerald with a glimmer. Gerald hurried through the front door as the postman climbed the porch’s steps to reach the mailbox mounted next to Maxine’s front door.

  “More hair product catalogs?” Gerald squinted so that he did not miss any expression that twisted upon the postman’s face. “She stopped styling the neighborhood matrons’ hair two decades ago, but Maxine never cancelled any of her catalogs.”

  The postman chuckled. “Well, Mr. Hanson, my mother used visit Maxine’s basement salon. I don’t think mom’s ghost will ever forgive Maxine for not setting her perm one last time before her visitation. All of us think the world of your mother.”

  Gerald nodded and swallowed a giggle. “Tell me, have you happened to have seen that Gerald Hollenkamp around much lately? You know, the man with the black beard.”

  “Sure,” the postman answered. “Comes by on the weekends. Seems a nice enough fellow.”

  Gerald couldn’t repress a grin. “That’s a relief to hear, and it means a lot to me knowing Maxine has good people keeping an eye out for her.”

  “Least we can do for Maxine, Mr. Hanson,” and the postman retreated from the porch and continued his route down the cracking sidewalk.

  Gerald hurried behind the front door and laughed in the privacy of Maxine’s home. The old, bronze key had not yet abandoned him. With a slight burn and glow, that key tied around his neck offered a little more magic for his aging days. Somehow, the key would bring Gerald back to Maxine. There yet remained undiscovered closets waiting within Maxine’s home, and Gerald’s heart skipped as he rummaged through the wardrobes gathered during Maxine’s lifetime.

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