The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (5 page)

When Lettie would whisper to the relatives in the living room about the soldiers, the train, the camp, only her husband, Samuel, would leave the room. He wanted to forget about all of it. How he hated his wife's repeated returns to her story. It is a small mystery as to why he chose Lettie to marry, for no one brought with her a sadder or more complex history. Perhaps it was because he suddenly found himself to be the last unmarried Slaughter brother, so when Aunt Esther introduced him to Lettie—her young, docile, pretty neighbor—she seemed so right. The terror-stricken, gouged-out pieces of Lettie's soul were not obvious. She had not yet allowed them to rise up to her surface.

When I began my large journey beneath the ground and my parents again began their own grand trips, Cecilia was the only one who entirely stopped—sitting in her chair for well over a year with her strange thoughts about loss and death and cleanliness and then getting up and going through her carefully created rituals to keep her fragile center together.

Initially, I tried to communicate with her that I was doing okay—actually better than she—and not to worry, that there was another side, that the Reform Judaism we were taught in Sunday school had left out a lot, which I have to admit still leaves me a bit angry. The dead are not necessarily serene. (I guess that is already obvious, given my earlier mentions of Aunt Lettie, Great Aunt Eva and, of course, myself.) We bring with us our unfinished business—our angers about being treated badly, our unfulfilled ambitions, our unrequited longings about
love—the innumerable hungers and unresolved issues of the flesh. Of course, some do this more than others. I am on the side of the ones who do this more than less.

Some things definitely are not yet finished for me—maybe never will be—like the impulses to fix, explain, and protect my family. Surprisingly, unconcluded business is okay here—it is the norm. You can imagine when the psychiatrists arrive here how appalled they are, actually stunned, by this fact and it makes the more thoughtful ones doubt doubly what real use they were in life, and rush to seek out Freud and Jung to talk about it and find out what they think.

Here, I have started traveling to Lao Tzu—the Chinese philosopher born five hundred years before Christ, because I need some lessons in the letting go of ego—that which Freud thought to strengthen, as he did with his construct of superego and, of course, there was also his mission to weaken the id. Lao Tzu believes the opposite, that our true nature when left unfettered—untethered by society's aggressive competitions and demands—is quite lovely, gentle, and kind and should be nurtured. (I know this way of thinking is problematic when considering the behavior of a man such as Herr M, so I am left somewhat confused. Probably because I am only at the beginning of an authentic understanding of this new way of thinking.)

Recently a specialist has been hired to carefully move my mother's arms and legs. While he is doing this, he sings Hungarian lullabies to her. This knowledge especially touches me, because I imagine it is reminding my mother of her mother singing to her when she was an infant—a time when Grandmother Idyth was at her calmest, when she had only one child to care for and Grandfather Cecil
was very much alive. I picture him reading his books, his head bent over, his frameless spectacles on, with a smile on his face, as Grandmother Idyth sings to their baby Rose in their native language. A rare, almost singular, above-the-ground moment where everything peacefully and naturally connected for the Slaughter family, when it was at its smallest and, perhaps, at its best.

Because my mother cannot move the right side of her body at all, her private caregivers prop up her in a chair and comb her waist-length hair. There, she watches herself in the mirror, wasting away. Cecilia's hair, too, is almost waist-length. And
yes,
I did—still do—envy Cecilia a bit—her longer life, her distinctive beauty, her high-spiritedness, her explosions of talent. But for all of it this, I am forever aware she pays a large price.

With her auburn hair, deep violet eyes, and pale skin Cecilia is almost a rainbow of contrasts. My mother's eyes have no depth, almost look like cheap blue glass, but coupled with her long blond hair, the result had a striking effect—that is, for a Jew. “The Golden Calf Effect” was what Cecilia called it, and my father made sure his “jewel” was bejeweled with emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, couture clothes—her favorite, Dior—and a white Mercedes—a car which Aunt Lettie always made excuses not to ride in, would not go near, as she would not anything German.

I was the plainest plain—not quite ugly, just rather poorly defined. I looked like my father, with imprecise jelly features, a nose with too much cartilage at the tip, so that when I would smile it would bump into my upper lip and make my face look almost cartoonish. When I wore lipstick, which was not often, there would always be a smudge of it on my nose stem between my nostrils. I was
forever scrubbing it off. Early on I gave up on makeup. The most I ever had on was when I was embalmed.

I was, however, highly accomplished with a PhD in English from Princeton “no less.” My father would tag on the “no less” every time he said Princeton. When my sickness reappeared the final time, I had been the associate editor of a journal entitled
Contemporary Philology
for well over six years. My parents would brag about this, too, and it always made me queasy. My face would grow hot and I would start to sweat. I had no grace.

My most distinctive feature was enormous breasts with huge areolas and long nipples—everything about them felt and looked cowish to me. Only one man obsessed on them. I was, however, quite taken by the whole of him. He was a mechanic—all hands that moved with quick precision. I found his rough, scabby skin and his dirty nails quite sensual—quite reptilian. When he touched me I always felt I was experimenting with the forbidden. I became Eve
after
the knowledge of all the trouble this could cause, and I did not care.

I loved the soiling stimulation. Our house was kept so antiseptic spotless and intact, filled with furniture made in England and France, rugs flown in from the Orient, and crystal from Waterford and Baccarat. If the smallest figurine collected a bit of dust, it was quickly wiped off by a housekeeper, or if an object were for some reason moved from its place, it was upon my parents' notice, immediately set right according to their rules and taste.

I met Wyatt—a high school dropout—when I was sixteen and he eighteen. My mother's car was in the shop a lot and one day, after I got my driver's license, she asked me to pick
it up. I bicycled over there and it was Wyatt who lifted my bike with one arm, as if it weighed nothing, and put it in the trunk for me. I saw the curves of his muscles—their flex—and the strength in his huge hands. I thought, “If it had been a motorcycle he could have done it with equal ease.” Soon after, he started putting those powerful, greasy hands on my breasts and eventually on the rest of me.

He nicknamed me “CT,” a play on “Ceci.” It was for what he called my “cow teats,” which he would milk forcibly with great prowess. The pain I would feel from this was at once excruciating and exhilarating, like continuously being annihilated and then brought back to life. Afterward I would look in the mirror and study how my areolas flamed to a blood red and my nipples further elongated and were cracked from small cuts made by his teeth. Of course, at the time I would have never used such descriptiveness. The seasoning of being here
has
made me freer.

It is true, sometimes in the physical life there is a convergence between over-excitement and humiliation. Even early on I felt this. Had I lived longer I would have written an in-depth essay or, perhaps, a book on it, connecting it to the classical myths with their own seductions, strange conversions, abuses, and exaltations—Zeus as the swan and Leda opening up wider and wider to him, needing to swallow him inside her as much as He needed to enter her, no matter the pain. I had many incidents with Wyatt to draw on.

One winter Sunday afternoon when we thought my house was empty, we curled into each other in the library on the wine color leather couch, naked, covering ourselves with the thickly braided, ecru cashmere afghan that my mother had knitted. All the family agreed it was so absolutely plush and gorgeous, which, in fact, it was. Under its
beauty, Wyatt and I made a tent of baseness—quite the opposite of the dignified decor of the room.

The library's walls were lined with photographs of my parents with the newly rich and, sometimes, truly famous. Over the couch there was a large photograph of my father shaking hands with Eleanor Roosevelt and next to it my mother solicitously bending over Carl Sandburg—her décolletage revealing more than a hint of breasts—offering him another helping of beef as he sat at our dining room table for dinner. He had a polite, but quizzical expression on his face as if saying to himself, “Who are these people and what in the world am I doing here?” When the day of that dinner arrived, Cecilia, at ten, told me almost prophetically, “I'm
never
cooking for Carl Sandburg. I'll just be him and then your mother can cook for
me.”

Wyatt had abruptly spread my knees apart with his muscular thighs—as he always did—and was about to jam himself into me, when my father and my uncles stormed into the room. I still remember how the air smelled with that unexpected burst of old, winter soot. They yanked at Wyatt—pulled us apart—and threw him out of the house. I do not think anyone except Uncle Emmanuel saw my naked body. He focused on my breasts. I saw his long pause and he knew I saw it.

Everyone knew Emmanuel Slaughter to be a smutty man, knew he caused his brother Abraham, Abraham's daughter Cecily, and his own wife Sonya, great unhappiness. After his death Aunt Sonya bleached her gray hair blond again, bought stylish clothes, and put an ad in the personals and, of course, cut her age by fifteen years. Obviously, this did not sit well with the family, but it did give them a lot to
talk about. Celine, her daughter, never acknowledged this. In her mind her mother will always remain “that dowdy, beaten-down, long-suffering broken woman”—something Celine has vowed never to become. After Celine put Aunt Sonya into the ground, she turned away, never looking back, never returning to her mother's grave. And although Cecily promised Celine never to write about her, she is putting Aunt Sonya's “man-packed” grave scene into one of her plays—the men being part of Celine's ever-increasing collection.

Cecily loves to write about our family. The only person she never writes about is her father, Uncle Abraham. While fighting in World War II, he was captured for well over a year, returning to this country a prisoner of his own mind. He was the only person who could brighten Grandmother Idyth's eyes, give them a little life. She would even take his hand. Maybe because he was her youngest—her baby—or maybe because she could tell he understood what it meant to have, if not a broken mind, at least one badly cut into—something Cecily believes she, too, understands well.

When Uncle Abraham returned after the war, as an outpatient in the rehabilitation hospital, he made a bracelet for Cecily. It was a strip of pliable tin with her name carved into it with open delicate spaces around each letter and small, carefully hammered pinpoint indentations in the shapes of two flowers at both ends. She was just a baby then, but as she grew up and grew into it, she has never taken the bracelet off. Because it is so tarnished now and oddly bent, it goes well with the stained look she has costumed for herself—“the stain” first put there by Uncle Emmanuel.

When Uncle Abraham died he left Cecily his Purple Heart. She feels it is the color of her own heart gone
bloodless and when the anger and isolation she experiences grows too large, it is then she takes out her pen to fill the festering emptiness. I do understand this—to a point.

Unlike Aunt Lettie, Uncle Abraham never spoke about the war. About what it was like being held by the Japanese for so long. About what exactly had been done to him; what he saw being done to others. Yet he always listened intently to Aunt Lettie's stories, his face crimson, while everyone waited and hoped that he, too, would say something. That never happened. He took all those experiences into the ground with him.

If you go deep enough into most family histories in this cemetery you will find a gulag, a stalag, a pogrom, a concentration camp, and the souls who stayed so silent in their lives about what happened to them in such places talk freely to each other here. Sometimes the dead historians are allowed to listen. They then find out that their writings, their books, are so incomplete because the many voices who knew so much chose silence and it is also then that the dead historians worry that is why these horrors keep happening over and over again, which indicates an over-thinking of the power of themselves and their writings.

In the weeks and months after Wyatt left, I would pull hard at my nipples, not just for the excitement it would bring, but for how much I needed to remember that he had once been there—in my life, in me. That he truly had existed and how he had the power to make me feel—feel wonderfully wild. When I would tell Cecilia, “He Was My Greek God, My Satyr, My Myth,” she would laugh with such joy, and when she quieted, she would take both my hands in hers and whisper the most melancholy,
“yes, yes,
Ceci, oh yes.”
She never tired of how many times I needed to say this and needed to hear her response. I can still hear her sweet girlish voice.

I often wondered if money were involved—if my father gave Wyatt money to leave me alone—for he never called again, and eventually I learned he had left town. I know it was then that the cells in my body began their slow mutations into an unrelenting grief that would chew at me piece by piece and eventually swallow my life. Of course, there were other factors that conspired with this. I had put myself on birth control pills when they were filled with mega-doses of hormones, which I continued taking for over seven years, always hoping for Wyatt's return. Celine knew a doctor to whom I quite eagerly, boldly, and naively went and came away with a large prescription. Having such a beautiful mother also did not help my anguish, especially as I grew older. I would see the alarm in people's eyes when they first met me, as if I were an alien, a mutation, a mutt, not just a physically unattractive person.