Seams, Hinges, and Other Disclosures

I write in order to find out what I know.

Patricia Hampl

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Lyon sisters, Katherine and Sheila, who disappeared on their way home from Wheaton Plaza, in Kensington, Maryland, on March 25, 1975. They were on break from grade school and wanted to go to the shopping center to look at Easter decorations and to have lunch at the Orange Bowl, a pizza restaurant. The girls’ brother and friends would last see them at the plaza talking to an older man with a tape recorder. They missed their four pm curfew, didn’t return home by dark. A manhunt began, ultimately spanning several states and many years. More than three decades later, the case remains unsolved, the longest cold case in Montgomery County history. Decades worth of leads have proved fruitless, and heartbreaking. The Lyon sisters vanished somewhere on a sunny, leafy street between a suburban mall and a suburban home.

I grew up a mile and a half from the Lyons’ home, and less than a mile from Wheaton Plaza. Though I was a couple of years younger than they were, I remember the girls’ disappearance well. I was haunted by the black-and-white photos of Katherine and Sheila that seemed to be everywhere that year: at the A&P; at the park; at the library; at the post office. That the girls looked like the girls sitting next to me in the classroom at Saint Andrew the Apostle, and resembled the Brady sisters on television only intensified a nameless sadness I’d feel when I saw the images on errands with my mom, or alone on my long summer walks through the neighborhood, my allowance jingling incongruously in my pocket.

Inside of me now are those two pure faces, posed in schoolgirl portraits. Each time I’d look at the photos at the post office, the seams of childhood pulled apart a bit wider, and I’d catch a glimpse of an adult world burdened by sadness and complications. The sisters broke through the single dimension of first-person childhood, expanding the definition (both lexical and existential) of the word “mystery” in ways that I hope, someday, to try and articulate. It is not going too far to say that if one understands that the material of life has seams and edges, salvage and selvage, one call to the essayist is to attempt to trace that fabric, its folds and hems and tears and seams, without fraying or unraveling all that cannot be understood. In essence, to trace life is to acknowledge mystery.

Patricia Hampl recognizes the ways childhood is marked by half-understood epiphanies beyond the reach of words—those early moments when such seams, and the world’s dimensions, are revealed. In “Parish Streets,” from Virgin Time (1992), Hampl writes about her particular Catholic upbringing—it’s her great subject—but the essay reads less as a tribe member recollecting than as someone who has retreated enough to better recognize that tribe’s patterns and shapes. The piece benefits from cinematic essaying: Hampl moves from close-up (specific narrative scene/moment) to wide shot (there’s the neighborhood below, a map of politics and personal drama) back to close-up—a shifting perspective earned by years of thoughtful detachment burdened by the desire to go back and to make sense.

Like Hampl, I was raised Catholic and feel the lasting imprint. The marshaling of her great narrative details lures me back to the scents of the sacramental, leavened as they were by pubescent hormones. The boy “livid with acne,” the blessed throats, the polite dismissal of non-Catholics, meatless Fridays: this is subject comfort. In detailed character sketches and set pieces, Hampl’s essay is a tour of her churchy past, and her lens, selective and sweeping, captures the stiff postures of the priests and nuns, the boundaries of denominations (“borders more decisive than the street signs”), the rigors and pleasures of the Catechism and of high-perfumed Holy Days. I dare anyone raised Catholic to read Hampl’s essay, or much of her writing for...