“Someone once wrote that telling a story is like a striptease. You don’t want to walk on the stage naked and you also don’t want to take too long to take off your clothes.” That statement perfectly describes the revelatory pace in a new historical fiction by author Mary Morris. Titled The Red House, the brainteaser centers on a woman who suddenly vanishes, abandoning her two daughters and her husband. What she leaves behind are paintings of a red house and featureless figures that look “like ghosts that hang on trees at Halloween”. On the back of some painting was written, “I will not be here forever.”
There was nothing out of the ordinary in the Wilkins home in Brooklyn the morning of March 1972. Each morning Viola’s daughters--- twelve year old Laura, and younger sister Janine-- and her husband saw Viola prepare elaborate daily breakfasts for her family. Viola would routinely devour her food as if it were her last meal. With Laura and Janine at school, Viola would predictably go to work at the local library. In the evenings, at home, she habitually went into the basement of their home and painted.
A creature of habit, Viola would pick up her daughter Laura each day after school. She typically attended school sports events, baked for school fundraisers and made costumes for school plays. There was always a sumptuous dinner ready for the family. True to form, Viola would “eat eat eat” almost gulping her food as if “fearing someone would take it away.” There were never left overs at the Wilkins’ home.
A warm loving mother and wife Viola remained vague about her past. Laura knew bits about her mother’s early years. She knew her mother was born in Italy to a “technically Catholic family” who celebrated Christmas and Easter. Laura knew her mom came from a small town near Naples and was orphaned during the war but little else. Whenever Laura asked why her mother repeatedly painted an odd red house “from many different angles, at different times” Viola’s response was standard, “you can’t tell a painter what to paint.” When Laura inquired about her mother’s war years Viola would answer ”Oh, why dwell on that?” There were no signs, hints or clues that anything was amiss at the Wilkins home and then just like that--- Viola vanished. None of her family ever saw her again.
Was she kidnaped? Did she run away on her own volition? Was she murdered? It was thirty years before Laura, at 42--- the same age her mother had been when she last saw her --- traveled to Italy to find her mother or whatever was left of her.
A literary striptease, The Red House by Mary Morris peels away three decades in a woman’s life to lay bare her most intimate secrets.