The Truth about Mary Rose by Marilyn Sachs Page A

so.”
    “Maybe Uncle Stanley thought she was, but your grandmother didn’t.”
    “Grandma’s just making it all up—about how beautiful and kind and super Mary Rose was. It’s a lot of baloney.”
    “And your mother didn’t think she was mean and horrible.”
    “Maybe not, but she thought Mary Rose was a ‘poor, little thing’ who was different from everybody else. It’s just as bad.”
    “But it’s different,” my father said. “It’s different from what Stanley said, different from what your grandmother said, different from what you thought. Maybe if you talked to other people who knew her, they would tell you something different too.”
    “And she didn’t save anybody’s life. Uncle Stanley did.”
    “And how can you be sure of that?”
    “He said he was the one who rang all the bells going down the stairs, not her.”
    “He said he was the one. But everybody else said she did. I don’t say he wasn’t telling the truth. I only say how can you be sure his story is the right one? Or the only one. How can you trust to the memories of a frightened six-year-old child? How can you be sure that even if he did ring the bells going down the stairs, she might not have gone up the stairs and rung the bells there? I just say how can you be so sure his story is the only one to believe?”
    “I’m so mixed up,” I said. “How can you believe anybody? The way you’re talking, I’ll never find out what happened or what she was like.”
    “And that’s all right too,” said my father. “Just think about yourself. Suppose your grandmother was asked to say what you were like. She’d say you were the most beautiful, intelligent and wonderful girl in the world, right?”
    “Along with Pam, Jeanette, Margaret and Olivia.”
    “Right. But she’d say that. If someone asked your mother, she might say you weren’t too bad, but you did have this little habit of listening in to other people’s conversations. Right? And Manny or Ray would say you were a pest.”
    “Not all the time.”
    “And maybe Pam would say you were fun to be with, and Miss Winkler, your old math teacher would say you weren’t very bright, but maybe Miss O’Neil, the art teacher, would say you were.”
    “And what would you say, Daddy?” I was feeling sleepy.
    “I?” said my father. “I would say you ... you ... were the most wonderful ... rice pudding eater in the world.”
    “Oh, Daddy!”
    “So be fair. That Mary Rose has been dead for thirty years, and she’s not here to speak for herself. If she was, she could tell you what really happened, and what she really was like. But she’s dead. So leave her be. Let her rest in peace. That’s what it means—you know—rest in peace. It means the dead should rest in peace from the living, and vice versa.”
    I was really feeling sleepy now, but my father was all wound up, the way he usually gets when something excites him. He started talking about all the dead people who’d been wronged by the living, and all the living people who were persecuted by the dead. As an artist, he said, you had to forget the past and live in the present. Who cared what Cezanne or Rembrandt or Michelangelo thought? Not him! He cared only for what he thought, and, more important, for what he did. Sure, he said, he liked to look at their paintings, but now was now, and you’d never catch him painting Adam and Eve on a ceiling upside down, or spending years painting the same mountain over and over again. Not him! Let the dead bury the dead. The past was the past, and now was now, and when he painted, he said thank you very much to all the great painters of the past and, “Scram now, and let me work!”
    I fell asleep.
    I slept the whole day. And I dreamed about her. About Mary Rose. But I don’t remember what. Only that I woke up at night again. Maybe it was one o’clock, maybe not. But everybody in the house was sleeping. Nearly everybody.
    I jumped up and opened the door, and there she was, bending