THE ANGELS, THE HATS, AND THE WARDROBE

Joanne Lehman

You find them everywhere—on greeting cards and candles and scatter pins. Best of all, angels are characterized in television shows and movies. Angels remind us there is an unseen force, working to bring good out of impossible, desperate situations and connecting us to all the goodness of our past.

We don’t get much background on angels. In Scripture angels seem to have masculine names like Michael, but contemporary angels are often female, like Tess in "Touched by an Angel." I think of my angels as that "cloud of witnesses." They are my departed kin who remain connected to me in some cosmic way. And although they might not sit on my shoulder exactly, they are nearby, urging me to live my life with humor, grace, and compassion.

One of my angels is surely Rhoda Myers. My Grandma Martin’s older sister was an unseen force even when she was alive—a shadowy figure that I knew only from hushed conversations and an unnatural collection of belongings that gathered dust in a large bedroom on the second floor of my grandparents’ farmhouse in Columbiana County, Ohio.

In a photo album, there is a picture of my grandma and her three sisters when they were young. They are beautiful, dressed in lovely Victorian-era clothing—lace collars, softly draped long skirts, and fancy hats.

In the bedroom where Grandma had stored all of Rhoda’s things, there were a lot of old hats—Rhoda’s hats, castoffs of her wealthy employers in Youngstown. Not content to wear them as they were, she took them apart and trimmed them to her liking.

Jammed into this one room of my grandparents’ home were the entire contents of Rhoda’s house. Chairs and tables and pictures in gilded frames. There were bureaus and mirrors and china dishes and boxes of kitchen utensils. Everything in this storage room seemed exotic to a young curiosity seeker like me. A hatbox on one table held several hats and another held jewelry and fancy hat pins.

We weren’t supposed to go into the room where Rhoda’s things were, but that didn’t stop us. I can’t remember who went with me—I was the ring leader but I didn’t want to go alone. Every time we opened the door to that cold storage room I felt a twinge of guilt, but it was never enough to keep me out. Just enough to make me quiet and quick. Not far inside the door, an old wardrobe held Rhoda’s fine dresses and there were more hats on the top shelf.

Snooping in that wardrobe sent shivers up my spine. Because way in the back, behind the beautiful silk, lace, and crepe dresses, were the wooden legs with their leather straps and metal buckles. Rhoda was an amputee who had lost her "limb," as they always called it, in a terrible farm accident when she was only three. My curiosity about the contents of the wardrobe always stopped just short of its pile of shoes.

After trying on a hat or two, I’d stand on tip-toe to look in the mirror, then hurriedly stuff the hats back where I’d found them and dash out the door, closing it softly behind me. It was a relief to return to the normal world. Soon I’d creep down the steps with a book in my hands—hastily collected from the "library" in the small room adjoining the storage room. If Grandma knew I’d been snooping, she never mentioned it.

Every once in awhile, Grandma went to visit Great-Aunt Rhoda. She usually took something for Aunt Rhoda. One thing she took was a certain kind of cotton stockings—flesh-colored and opaque—to cover the "limbs." Back in those days women almost never wore slacks.

I knew so little about my great-aunt—the mystery woman of my childhood. The person no one talked about in front of the children. The woman shut away in "Massillon," those towering gothic buildings we passed on the way to visit my other grandparents who lived two hours west, near Dalton. As far as I can remember, we never stopped en route to visit Rhoda.

There was something wrong with Rhoda—something besides her loss of a "limb." I never knew exactly what. I don’t think I asked, curious person that I am, because it seemed I shouldn’t. I’ve ventured a question now and then as an adult and still don’t know much. Someone told me she was crocheting a lace tablecloth when she "cracked up." Someone said she married a man with three children and "sewed like a maniac" when he left her. They said she left the bathroom door open when she was in there, and that she could work circles around anyone.

My mother once showed me a letter Rhoda wrote to my grandma. This was before she was "committed." It is hard to conceive that a sister living in Salem would write a letter to a relative living less than 10 miles away, but things were so different then. In the letter Rhoda asked about "that sweet little Joanne." She wanted Grandma to give me a hug and a kiss.

They said Rhoda was "man crazy." And when my grandma got engaged, Rhoda was so jealous she threw her sister’s wedding dishes out an upstairs window. Some thought she was "spoiled" because everyone had fussed over her so much after her accident.

For my part, I wonder how my great grandparents managed to save Rhoda’s life when a doctor and hospital were so far away. How much blood did she lose? Did she suffer brain impairment because of the trauma? It would be interesting to know what diagnosis my great-aunt Rhoda was given at Massillon. Maybe they didn’t diagnose back then. You were just "nuts." Did she have post-traumatic stress disorder? Bipolar disorder? Obsessive-compulsive disorder?

I remember someone brought Aunt Rhoda to a reunion once. I remember how she chattered away, moving her legs restlessly—perhaps a side effect of some medication. They said she was always first in line at the hospital to get her medicine. I remember her black lace-up oxfords with chunky heels and the wrinkled flesh-colored cotton hose.

Mostly, I remember her neat stuff. I wish I knew more about her. Wish I’d really known her. Wish I’d asked to keep a hat and a couple of the foot-long jeweled hat pins in her memory. Wish they’d brought her home to visit more.

When Rhoda lived at Massillon during the 1940s and 1950s, over three thousand "different" people lived there in the "cottages." There were dances and fine dining and beautiful gardens. People lived in these asylums—which may have been just that. They spent their days rocking in the brightly lit day rooms. Community services and rehabilitation programs didn’t exist. Medications and treatments were as crude as the prosthesis hidden in the old wardrobe. Mental patients were locked away, separated from their belongings and their families, but it seemed best for them at the time.

My grandma, whose name was Olive, was aptly named after the olive branch—symbol of peace and hope. She was caught in the web of her times and used what help was available to her and Rhoda. I admire my grandma for caring for Rhoda’s things all those years. She cared for them even when she didn’t know how to care for her violent sister who threw the contents of her hope chest out the window.

Grandma could have disposed of Rhoda’s things—or used them. But she didn’t. She could have allowed us to dress up in Rhoda’s clothes and parade around in her hats, but she didn’t. In the end, that roomful of stuff was sold at my grandparents’ estate auction. Maybe keeping Rhoda’s things all those years was Grandma’s way of keeping hope alive. Maybe she was waiting for a miracle. Maybe keeping these things was, in the end, all she was able to do for Rhoda.

Sometimes now, I fancy Rhoda my angel, flying alongside me. Instead of a halo, she’s wearing a hat trimmed with elaborate brightly colored plumes and secured with a jeweled pin. Is she the reason I’ve been led to work for nearly a decade in the field of mental health education?

Great Aunt Rhoda’s legacy lives on in me in less positive ways, too. I wasn’t even born when Rhoda threw the dishes out the window, but I think I’ve lived my whole life with the silence, secrets, anger, and fear that her presence among us caused. Relatives were watching all of us—my sisters and cousins—afraid we’d turn out like Rhoda. Our elders worked overtime making sure everyone behaved. We were taught to curb our spontaneity and temper artistic urges. We learned to do what is appropriate and to never, ever lose your temper.

Still, I think the memories of my Grandma, Olive, and her sister remind me to have hope and wait for miracles, knowing they may take more than a lifetime to appear. I thought I caught a glimpse of both of them the other day when I was trying on hats in a department store. They were smiling back at me from the mirror.

—Joanne Lehman is a writer and poet living in Apple Creek, Ohio. She is a community relations specialist for the Mental Health & Recovery Board in Wooster, Ohio. Her book, Traces of Treasure: Quest for God in the Commonplace (Herald Press, 1994) won a Silver Angel Award.