The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (10 page)

D
URING THE TIME
Cecilia's mother was dying, Cecilia was trying to tell her something about herself that she knew her mother would rather not know—something Aunt Lettie would not want to carry with her to the next world. Yet Cecilia continued, even though it was clear Aunt Lettie chose to skip over Cecilia's small but consistent mentions of Herr M. Maybe it was the nickname Cecilia had given him that bothered Aunt Lettie so much, proving to be a trigger—a reminder—for her. The
Herr,
of course, too German. However, the more Cecilia used it, the more his real name faded, until finally, the latter did not have the acute impact within herself as to what he—Herr M—had done to her. The metaphoric distance she created with this pseudonym did help. Every time she heard his real name mentioned Cecilia would grow nauseous and her body would quiver. At those moments she would feel like a small, trapped animal.

Aunt Lettie would never live to know Herr M's real name, and for this I knew she was grateful. It was not that she did not feel enormous concern for Cecilia. It was, I believe, quite the opposite. Given her own history, even if she had been healthy she probably would have thought that she was the last person who could help her daughter. Yet, it was so clear how much Cecilia wanted to tell her mother. Cecilia thought, “After all, she
is
still here. She
is
still my mother. And I need her.”

Because Aunt Lettie could not seem to stand to hear even an edge of her talk about Herr M, she would abruptly change the subject and say, “Cecilia, could you adjust my pillow?” or “Could you bring me another blanket?” Cecilia was more than happy to do this for she knew her mother was close to death and she would have done anything she felt might extend her life by a day, an hour—even
minutes. During those days, hours, and minutes, they were standing in separate earth—separate dirt—as Aunt Lettie was about to leave this world, leave Cecilia in what Aunt Lettie was known to call “this fallen place.” The only thing Cecilia could not seem to do for her mother was to stop bringing up Herr M.

Cecilia watched her mother's whole being become translucent and she envied her—her thinning journey out of this life almost over. There Aunt Lettie sat with that permanent shunt—just the right place for a beautiful pin, except this was under layers of her skin—for the transfusions that gave her back a little life for a week or two. They allowed her to go home and even go out to lunch and for a drive next to the lake right after new blood was infused into her. However, as her sickness progressed, the more quickly the healthy cells became polluted with her disease, and ultimately all a transfusion did was to give her enough energy to leave her bedroom and go downstairs for some sunlight for an hour or two. Then, Cecilia's father would carry her back to her upstairs room, which she kept dark—the shades always drawn.

Her bully-critic was not literary, but all too literal—Adonai, solemn in the temple, about to inscribe her in the
Book of Death,
Lucifer grinning in hell hoping to greet her or, going the furthest back Cecilia could remember, the god Thoth waiting patiently to weigh her soul. “Who knows?” she thought.

Flashes of Karl would arrive more quickly to Lettie the sicker she became. Sometimes she would see him in his uniform standing over her and then, just as quickly, his image would evaporate into the stale hospital room air as if he were never there. Had never existed. He would always show up
unexpectedly in the corners of her room, frightening her. So nothing had really changed from when she was at the camp, except that after she got out and came to America, married Samuel, and had Cecilia, he did show up less and less. She had almost begun to believe it was possible that someday he would disappear forever. It was only when she got sick for the final time that he started appearing more frequently.

Sometimes, too, her own mother and father would appear in the hospital room, waving “goodbye”—or was it “hello”? Each had one arm in the air, so together they formed the wings of a single bird. And sometimes a gorgeous bird would quietly materialize next to her bed and carefully fan her, try to cool her. Lettie would reach out to it when it appeared and attempt to touch its feathered tips, as if by doing so she would be transformed into a healthy being by the bird's majesty. But she could never quite get to it—touch it—before it, too, disappeared.

She would tell Cecilia about the bird—that she thought it was an ibis. “A scarlet ibis!” she would exclaim, and then she would remind Cecilia to make sure to bury her in her red suit. She told her many times where to find it in her closet.

Lettie knew Cecilia would try hard to appear calm as she went along with her ibis image. Cecilia would tell her about how in ancient Egypt the ibis was always buried in the deceased Pharaoh's tomb so as to ensure the Pharaoh safe passage to the next world and Lettie, not quite listening, would smile and return to the story of her parents' last wave to her—how its arc had formed the wings of a single bird. She did let Cecilia in on a bit of the less awful details of her past as Cecilia got older—and that wave seemed safe enough. They would have this conversation, over and over. Almost all talk near the end became a repetition. Lettie made sure of this.

In fact, the last time she had seen her parents and they waved goodbye was many years ago. A Tuesday at 9:20 A
.M.
She still had her watch on—no one had yet taken it from her—and for some reason it felt important to make a record of that moment in her mind. Tuesday, February 1—a day filled with a heavy, awful smell that she would learn to live with, a smell she would never entirely forget, from which she would never get clean enough.

Her parents' wave had been so casual, as if nothing too terrible was happening—as if they were trying to assure her and her sister, Leah, that they, “of course,” would see them both tomorrow. That is how Lettie would always remember it—and all the moments that came before and after…

Lettie's mother, Miriam, had gently pushed Leah and her out of their line when the officer shouted for “Doctors” and “Twins,” whispering to them in Yiddish,
“Geyn, Geyn
” in her most gentle mother voice. Joseph, their father, nodded with a forced smile as if saying, “Do as your mother says,” as he often told them out loud in better times. And, as always, Lettie and Leah did what they were told to do, because Miriam and Joseph were good parents and had always given them the best advice.

Often when Lettie focused on her own daughter—her daughter with the auburn hair and violet eyes—it was easy to forget about the past. “Beauty does that,” she would tell Samuel, who never wanted to hear her mention any of it—meaning the camp and Karl. She did understand this, though there were times she wished he would allow her to talk about it. All of it. She wanted to think at least she was able to do that with her husband if she had chosen to, but it was not true.

Now, in the hospital, she has become more like Samuel when Cecilia tries to talk to her about this man, Herr M, whom she knows has hurt her daughter. She sometimes even
wonders if Cecilia calls him this because of the stories she has heard from relatives about the
German.
She had forbidden herself to share too much of her sad history with Cecilia. She wanted so much to protect her, always fearing others cared about this less.

She does, however, have moments when she thinks if she were given just one more remission, if she could become a little stronger, maybe she could help Cecilia—talk with her. That is what she ambivalently prays for to her “so-called God”—the one she can never quite believe in again or forgive. But she also feels that whatever has happened to her daughter is already done and that she is most probably not the right person to ease Cecilia's pain—and so this prayer only rises to a weak flutter inside her.

Another way Aunt Lettie would change the subject was to ask Cecilia to read to her, to take out the books filled with the “good pictures” on the nightstand shelf next to her railed hospital bed. The ones on Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Stravinsky. It was the old Europe—before both wars—that she loved to drift back to, a time before she was born—Paris, 1912. The performance of
Afternoon of a Faun.
Her mother, Miriam, had gone there with her own mother to see the great Nijinsky dance. Miriam was twelve. The same age Lettie was when Miriam let go of her hand and uttered the words,
“Geyn, Geyn.”

After a little while had passed she would tire of looking at the books and she would ask Cecilia to place the tape of Debussy's music from the ballet in the small CD player kept on a shelf in the medicine cabinet in the hospital bathroom. Cecilia would put the player on the sink's thick rim and the music would flow into the room where she
lay in bed. She would then ask Cecilia to dance. “Dance Cecilia.
Dance to the music,”
she would say with such passion and joy—her words sewn together with just a touch of desperateness.

Cecilia would always try to resist—it made her too upset to do this. Aunt Lettie had not become the ballet dancer her mother Miriam had wished. Both she and Leah had been well on their way to giving this to their mother before the train came for all of them. “I could have granted my mother that wish, if the war hadn't ruined everything,” she would whisper to her American relatives. “I was
that
good.” Then she would pause and say, “No one had seen anything like it.” Cecilia could always hear what she imagined to be her Grandmother Miriam's voice fluttering into her mother's when she talked about the description of the ballet. “Nijinsky as the Faun! On stage he became half-animal, half-human! The difference between his flesh and costume indecipherable. He wore coffee-colored tights with brown spots. They were also painted on his bare arms and legs.” Her voice was filled with an uncharacteristic exuberance and authority, especially when she added, “A tight, gold cord wig with two small, flat, curled horns cupped his head.” Cecilia imagined when her mother said this that her arms rose up as if she were placing a crown atop her own head. She would strain to listen to all of this as she lay curled on the floor of her bedroom, behind her carefully opened door.

Cecilia knew she lacked the talent to become a ballerina even though her mother would never admit to this and had her take unending lessons. When she became a poet, Aunt Lettie accepted it, and Cecilia could tell that eventually it did make her proud—prouder than she could
ever express, for Aunt Lettie had trouble showing strong emotions, both positive and negative. After the war, she was only capable of giving herself teaspoons of pleasure—if that.

She never told Cecilia that she found her poems too unhappy and that she feared that her own heavy grief had seeped into her. But Cecilia knew it. Nor did she tell Cecilia how she loved the applause at the end of her readings, but Cecilia could see it as her mother looked around and watched the others' enthusiasm and then nodded a
yes
to her. Sometimes when Aunt Lettie heard the applause, she would close her eyes and smile wistfully and Cecilia would think, “She's imagining her own self curtsying in her toe shoes before a huge audience with
her mother
glowing in the front row, watching her on a large stage in an elegant theater. Perhaps Paris.”

When the soldier shouted, “Women to the left,” “Men to the right,” they all stood stunned. Then quickly, the same soldier, not seeing that they had not moved, yelled for “Doctors” and “Twins.” It was only then that Miriam awoke from the shock of everything that was happening and told Leah and Lettie to go to that line. Afterward, she went to the line for women and Joseph to the one for men. And there ended the least of it—Miriam's dream of a Pavlova or even an Isadora in the family. For even then, everyone knew that however innovative Isadora was, she was a far lesser talent.

Lettie wanted so much that her only child, her only daughter, become a dancer. But Cecilia eluded the gift, almost refused to nurture it. She supposed it was possible, too, the gift eluded her. Somehow that was more difficult to accept. But after talking with her sister-in-law Esther and learning how Esther's
mother, Eva, had pushed and pushed at Adele and Esther to be famous, and seeing the terrible effect this had on Adele, Lettie let go a little more easily of her dream for Cecilia.

She finally concluded that Cecilia's becoming a poet was nice. Seeing her standing up there with her words did please her. She just imagined with this daughter she would be able to leave a different kind of legacy. In this country she got greedy. Once, even having a lovely daughter was more than she could have ever envisioned, could have believed would ever happen
…

While searching for a special nightgown her mother had requested during her last hospital stay—in her last days—Cecilia happened on her mother's diary hidden deep beneath her soft nightwear. She did not feel guilty when she broke its lock. She had been pushed out of too many rooms too many times, while her mother had talked with the others. And now, especially, she needed to know everything her mother refused to speak about with her. She needed to know all she could about the mother she was losing. She grabbed at anything, as if that would allow her to hold on to her mother a little longer.

And there it was, there in the diary, that she found more complete answers. Answers to many of the questions that had barbed her mind since she was a child. She took it home and went into a small walk-in closet and sat for hours reading it. Of course, she had overheard some things about a soldier, a bad man, a German, but when her mother spoke of him with the others, she would hesitate and either never quite finish her sentences or grow too quiet for Cecilia to hear.

A few of the sections she copied over in her own hand on long, yellow sheets of paper, as if in rewriting this, she were allowing herself to become her mother, which
began to scare her. Consequently, she decided to break her mother's lines differently than in the diary, shaping them to look more like poems. It was familiar and created a little distance as to what she was doing, what she was taking in, sort of like when she created the pseudonym Herr M.