The Love Curse of the RUMBAUGHS

The Twins

I am a young women now, but when I was seven years old something unexpected happened that changed my life forever. It was Easter Sunday when a dramatic manifestation of the Rumbaugh curse was revealed to me. I found Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh's dead mother - for the first time - and it left the greatest impression.
Abner and Adolph were identical twins, and they grew more and more alike as they got older. There was no simple way to tell them apart,and after years of trying people gave up. Even when one brother was alone shopping along Main Street in our small western Pennsylvania town, people greeted him as 'the Twins'.
'How are the Twins?' a shopkeeper might ask the one who entered his store.
'We are fine,' the single Twin would reply, perfectly comfortable to be both himself and his brother.

They were already old when I was born, and for as long as I remember I had thought they were living pieces of history.

Everything about the Twins aged in a singular way, so that they stood out among other men as if they were an idiosyncratic variation within a breed, like cats with extra toes, or albino birds with see-through feathers. The Twins' waxy white hair was horse tail thick and glazed with the dirty gold colour of old teeth and tobacco, and their thin, nearly transparent skin looked like milk spilled over a road map of blue and red veins. They were pharmacists, and I've never seen hands as clean as theirs, which they hygienically scrubbed to a ruddy glow at the beginning and end of each workday with a strong boars hair nailbrush dipped in a shallow dish of coarse salt.

When I asked if it hurt to scrub his hands, Ab (or it could have been Dolph) replied as if his words were a medical college oath he had pledged to uphold. He held his hands erect before him as if he were drying two white hot flames.

Like many men in fish and game towns, they practised taxidermy as a hobby. The Twins competed in contests at the Westmoreland Country Fair and as far east as the country fairs in York and Lancaster and north up to Beaver Falls and Erie.

It was with great pride that within the pharmacy they displayed their winning entries in dust proof glass and oak cases set on top of the tall shelves. There were dozens, many decorated with blue and red prize ribbons and some with brassy shoulder braids like on an army general. I especially liked the long case that was labelled In gold script across the bottom of the frame THE RUMBAUGH BROOD -FITTER FAMILY CONTEST WINNER. In it was a father mink, a mother mink and a dozen mink children in descending stair step order, with all of them standing straight up in to healthy muscleman poses except for there mother. She was cradling twin mink babies in her arms. Beneath each mink was a name, but I always skipped over them and read just the Twins' names, ADOLPH AND ABNER (PERFECT TWINS), because it made me smile warmly to think of them as cute little minks.

The Twins were told by their Mother that they were betrayed by their father at a very young age. Their mother, Mrs Rumbaugh, with whom the Twins lived, steadfastly forbade the mention of his name.

As a child I stood on a step stool for hours and studied the various displays and creatures, admiring their fixed postures and expressions, the meticulously painted backgrounds and especially their clothes, which the Twins had sewn with the help of their mother. She was good with her hands and made extra money by braiding elaborate mourning jewellery from the long hairs of the dead.

For some inexplicable reason, unknown to me when I was young, I was born deeply in love with the Twins. I adored them so much it hurt to see their physical flaws because 8 wanted them to be perfect in the way you wish a drawing to appear on paper as precisely as you saw it in your mind.

On that astonishing Easter morning, my mother and I had worn matching yellow dresses with wide white patent - leather belts pulled tightly round our waists. We wore identical yellow satin headbands with our black hair pushed back behind our ears and our bangs combed forward to just above our dark eyebrows. She worked red lipstick, and after she kissed me on the lips we examine ourselves s we left the Kelly hotel and walked in or black patent - leather shows down Diamond Street toward the Transfiguration Polish Catholic Church. It was a warm sunny day and I was happy.

After father Baumann led us in prayer, he pointed out how the trumpet - shaped Lily blossoms announced the good news of salvation.
This all created a beautiful staged pageant in my mind and had me thinking about coming back from the dead and what that might mean. Could you come back all healed? Would you remember who you were? Would you remember where you had been while dead? Or was there no coming back for us regular people? Was death for us just a stone hole of lonely black air where there was no difference between keeping your eyes open and keeping them closed?

I had turned towards my mother to whisper these questions in her ear when I saw she was crying. Her open eyes were like shards of ice melting. Suddenly a strong feeling flooded my heart with as much power and clarity as any thought which HD ever entered my mind. I knew she was feeling what Mary had felt. While everyone in Jerusalem was looking up to heaven and praising God, Mary was weeping inside her child's empty tomb. How could Jesus endure leaving her behind, I wondered, when just the thought of leaving her for a moment was unbearable?

I slid my hand across the pew and held hers, which was always warm and soft as the inside of fresh bread. I waited until we were outside before I asked the question on my mind...

'If you die first, would you come back from the dead if you could?'
'Ivy Spirco, if I could look halfway decent and not mouldy like Lazarus, who was more of a zombie, I will. Otherwise,' she said without melancholy, 'I'll just stretch out on a nice fluffy cloud and wait for you.'
'And what if I die first?' I asked.
She waved off the question. 'God forbid,' she said, then before I could hang on her coat sleeve and tug more talk out of her, Ab and Dolph swung forward and blocked our path like a set of identical doors.