The Truth About Mary Rose By Marilyn Sachs

Was Aunt Mary Rose really a hero? Or has Mary Rose been living up to a lie?

Background: Marilyn Sachs is best known for a number of interconnected middle-reader books set in a pre-Robert Moses South Bronx in the early 1940s. While in the past I have described her books as “weird and violent,” recounting an unsentimental past which takes a much more casual attitude towards physical violence and parental neglect, in this one Sachs deals with what turns out to be generational trauma and subjective truths in a way that is extremely sophisticated for its target audience.

The Plot: More than thirty years after the events of Veronica Ganz, the Ganz/Petronski/Ramirez family is back in the Bronx, following a series of events including the death of Veronica, Mary Rose and Stanley’s beloved stepfather; their battle axe of a mother suffering a broken hip; and Veronica’s artist husband having finally gotten his big break: a show at the Museum of Modern Art and a position teaching at the Art Students League.

Now middle-aged, Veronica has mellowed out, established a successful dental practice in Nebraska as “Dr. Ganz” and a contented homelife with her three children as “Mrs. Luis Ramirez”. When they move back east, they initially stay with Veronica’s mother, and do their best to get along. Mrs. Petronski has also mellowed out a little bit, although she still expresses her disapproval of Veronica’s husband (divorced, “artistic” and worst of all, Puerto Rican) and Stanley’s wife (she disapproves of her staying home with her children and “living off of” Stanley).

Mary Rose Ganz is nowhere to be found, because we learn in the opening chapter that about a year after the events of Veronica Ganz she was killed in a house fire. Her namesake, Veronica’s daughter Mary Rose Ramirez, worships her dead aunt, and is fascinated by the stories her grandmother tells her about the beautiful, saintly girl that died warning the neighbors.

While the rest of the family is dealing with adjusting to their new life, Mary Rose initially thrives, making a fast friend with her cousin Pamela, and being doted upon by her grandmother, who is thrilled that Veronica named her after Mary Rose. And Mary Rose Jr. becomes obsessed with her namesake, who really exists as only a memory, as all of the family’s belongings were destroyed in the fire: the only existing photograph of Mary Rose is a framed newspaper photo showing the burning building with her aunt trapped on the upper floor, which her grandmother keeps enshrined in the guest bedroom.

Mary Rose Jr. also has adopted her late aunt’s habit of eavesdropping on adult conversations, and becomes privy to Veronica’s discomfort with the way her mother is still dealing (or not) with her death 30 years later:

“Not for a minute is she ever out of my mind.”

“Poor Mary Rose,” said my mother. “I wonder what she would have been like as an adult.”

My grandmother made an impatient sound. “She was marked from the start. I knew from the beginning she was too good to live.”

“Oh, Mama,” said my mother, “how can you say that?”

“I know, I know,” sobbed my grandmother. She was crying now, and so was my mother and so was I.

“But she was such an angel, such a perfect child… she had no faults. Look at the way she died- saving other people’s lives- a child, not even twelve.”

After the fire destroyed the building, the family moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx (although going by 2023 maps the streets mentioned are actually over the county line into the city of Yonkers). Stanley took over the family dry cleaning business and successfully spun it off into a chain of stores and has moved across the river to Tenafly, NJ. While her mother seems to think Mary Rose’s worship of her aunt is mostly harmless (occasionally gently reminding her that Mary Rose Sr. was a real person and not a saint) and her grandmother openly encourages it and dotes upon her because of it… Uncle Stanley is far more reticent about the matter.

When Mary Rose finds out that the only thing saved from the fire was one of Mary Rose’s “souvenir boxes” that six year old Stanley stumbled out of the building with, Mary Rose becomes obsessed with locating it, and during a car ride back to Tenafly quizzes her uncle relentlessly about it:

“Was it a shoe box? I mean, maybe it was another kind of box, and I’m looking for the wrong kind of box.”

“I don’t remember what kind of box it was.”

“Do you remember what was in it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Grandma said they had to pry your fingers off it. You just wouldn’t let go. She said you didn’t cry or say anything or ask any questions, and she said the doctor said you were in a state of shock.”

“I guess so,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

Mary Rose does eventually find the box, and the “treasure” it contains is a quantity of photos clipped out of jewelry catalogs: rings and bracelets cut to fit on her fingers and wrists, necklaces taped together to fit over her head. There is also a pulp paperback cover of a sultry redhead that Mary Rose has labeled “ME,” and a number of paper cigar bands in the box, which leave Mary Rose puzzled.

The box is a point of contention between Mary and Rose and her cousin, when Pamela quickly realizes that Mary Rose had gone back on her promise not to open it until they were together- and also that Pamela dismisses the contents as “junk”. When Uncle Stanley sees the box, he is initially amused, but when he sees the cigar bands he is clearly upset.

There is no time for an explanation, as his wife goes into labor right at that second, and Veronica arrives to watch Pam and her sisters while Stanley goes with his wife to participate in “natural childbirth”.

Late that night Mary Rose wakes up when Stanley returns from the hospital, and she hides in the linen closet to eavesdrop on him and her mother, learning that the newest baby is a boy… but also confessing to Veronica why all of the renewed attention on the fire and Mary Rose’s death has him so upset:

“Pam was wearing those cigar rings from Papa’s cigars.”

“Poor boy!” my mom said. “I guess you’ll never forget that night.”

“She hated me,” Uncle Stanley said. “And when you or Mama weren’t around, she’d tease me and pinch me and tell me horrible stories about how I was going to die…. I’m not over with it. I’m thirty-six years old, I have a wife and five children, and I’m still afraid of Mary Rose.”

Stanley tells Veronica his memory of the night of the fire, when he had had been left in Mary Rose’s care while the rest of the family was out, and she had bullied him out of the cigar band, and then told him to carry the shoe box out of the house when the fire started. It was really six year old Stanley who had rung the doorbells on the way downstairs, saving the other residents.

“All she could think about was getting her boxes out safely. Not me and not anybody else. She went back to get her boxes, and that’s why she was trapped.”

Her illusions shattered, Mary Rose becomes hysterical and is found in the closet by her mother and uncle, who are pretty angry that she refused to heed their warnings about eavesdropping, and now has overheard something really upsetting.

But for once Sachs leaves her readers on a hopeful note: a nurturing, 1970s kind of Dad, Luis Ramirez comforts his daughter, and tries to reassure her that neither her grandmother or mother or uncle Stanley have the whole truth about Mary Rose, and tells her that she shouldn’t feel cursed by bearing the name of a cruel bully, that she is her own person. Pamela gleefully reports that Stanley and Veronica burned the contents of Mary Rose’s box and likened it to an exorcism. Mary Rose is concerned when she sees Pamela initially display some resentment towards her new baby brother and worries that she will treat him that same way Mary Rose Sr. treated Stanley, but is reassured when she sees the cousins interacting with Luis’s son from his first marriage and having fun. Families contain multitudes.

In fact, the only person who seems to have zero lessons is Mary Rose Sr., who makes a ghostly appearance in Mary Rose Jr.’s dreams, as blurry as the newspaper photo her grandmother saved, petulantly demanding to be reunited with her missing box. When Mary Rose asks Aunt Mary Rose about the night of the fire and if Stanley’s account was true, but she only asks “What fire?” and disappears.

I wasn’t feeling bad. And I wasn’t hurting for anybody. Not for Pam or for my grandmother or for Mary Rose.

Sign It Was Written In 1973:

They were both planning on going to see a Shakespeare play that evening down in Central Park, and he could come along if he liked

“Central Park at night!” said my grandmother. “It’s not safe!”