by Susan Hahn
That every victory is a funeral:
When you win a war,
You celebrate by mourning.
So I mourn this troubled man, while I try not to be too upset by all that has happened above—try not to be too upset by what has happened to those whom I love. But it is hard. Very hard.
QUEEN BEE
Queen of me
Queen of my father’s family …
c. slaughter
THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL about the dead weaving the story—their voices being the loom that pulls together what the living can tell only in bits and pieces. In life sometimes I saw myself as the weaver Ariadne who possessed the spun thread that lead Theseus to the center of the labyrinth of her half-brother the Minotaur to slay him and then safely out again. As I have said, I would have liked to have done such things for my family—kill, however metaphorically, “the monster” in some of my relatives. In death, I know all I can offer is our stories. As object lessons? Hardly. But to give them some amount of clarity, yes. Souls still living cannot help but slant, exaggerate, or embellish the facts of their lives. They do not necessarily mean to do this—to sew bias into their words—but they are still too busy, busy living life with all its manifold distractions and misdirected emphases and they do not have access to the full and ongoing adventure. They also depend so much on rumor—on gossip—and that troubles me too, especially when it is about the Slaughter family, both past and present.
Here, no one and no disease can interrupt—stop me short from what I have to say—and that is a good thing for I can tell you some facts not only about the family above, but about the family beneath.
There are many relatives already where I am now. Aunt Lettie, Cecilia’s mother, who mostly prefers to sleep—all sounds to her still have no music, just the march of German soldiers with their black boots slamming onto concrete—and Aunt Esther, Celie’s mother, who is shocked by her troubled sister Adele’s recent arrival and Adele’s—now forever—proximity to her. I felt Esther’s agitation even though she is graves away from mine and I understand her concern, for in life Adele was the cause of great misery to both herself and to others. I could hear the twist of their mother, Eva’s, bones as she turned away from Adele’s, as Eva ultimately turned herself away from this daughter in life.
Great Aunt Eva never wanted her daughter Esther to date, let alone marry, Uncle Benjamin—one of my mother’s brothers. She did not want her to be part of the Slaughter family or anywhere near them. She remembered Cecil and Idyth from down the hall of her first apartment in this country, when both she and Idyth were young wives and mothers. Even before Grandfather Cecil suddenly died, Eva found Idyth too strange—too unable to adjust to America and Eva wanted so much—too much—to fit in, to appear comfortable, and to be successful in her new surroundings. She certainly did not want to add the Slaughters to her list of burdens.
Eva had watched from her door as the men in white coats forcibly took the kicking, shrieking Idyth out of her apartment. She watched from her window as they put her in the white car to be hauled off to the asylum and she carried this whole scenario with her always, forever afraid that if she did not adhere to her rigid concerns—the carefully planned paths she took—it could be she who would be carted away. So it was understandable that when her gifted Esther became infatuated with Benjamin Slaughter it just added to her many fears.
The two women’s separate journeys across the ocean had saved their lives, unlike the families they left behind, but once they arrived both women’s misery proved large. Though Eva, however much she was unhappy, would concede Idyth’s fate was far worse than hers. And Eva rarely felt her own grief could be surpassed.
Grandfather Cecil left many debts since he was not good with his accounts. There was no money to pay anyone after he was lowered into the earth, and the people he owed arrived at Idyth and her frightened children’s small apartment to collect something—anything. They took the precious books Cecil carried in his satchel from Europe—his beloved Tolstoy, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin. They carried away the cheap furniture he and Idyth had bought in this country—their used, discolored pots and pans, even his worn, tweed winter coat and his one black hat that Idyth had carefully patched from the inside.
Idyth screamed hysterically and could not be quieted. Even years later in the mental hospital this was so, though by then she had given up almost all talk—her voice a sporadic, guttural howl, her mind a siege of paranoia with unending images rising up of people arriving, constantly arriving, to take something from her. No pills they ever found could stop the tumult—you could see the terror in her searing stare, see it in how she backed away when anyone approached, even my mother. I actually experienced this directly once and heard my mother speak of it a lot, but only to my father and her brothers, when she thought I was not near.
My mother had wanted to bring her mother closer to where the rest of the family lived—to have her in a small, private house where they took individual care of a few sick people. My father, however, preferred his mother-in-law a three-hour drive away. They would spend hours circling the close-by, innocent looking white brick house with half-drawn, fringe-tipped shades that made the windows look like sleepy eyes, and an arched, white wooden entrance with vines of healthy green leaves laced through it, which was attached to a white picket fence with flowers painted on it, perhaps by the people who lived inside.
I was in the back seat, listening to their too-loud voices with my father repeatedly saying, “It’s safer, much safer the way it is, Rose.” Which really meant safer for him, for his style of living—the pomp of it. Having a crazy relative nearby—that threat—could turn out to be bad for the image he had slowly, conscientiously created and continued to nurture until his death.
“What if she caused a commotion, Rose, or perhaps even ran away?” he would continue. Eventually my mother’s pleas and all high-pitched, tense conversations on this subject stopped, my mother finally saying, with a large sigh, “Okay, Emil. Okay.” So my grandmother stayed put—held in by large, thick, brick walls of a public institution with its dank smells and cold, unending, paint-chipped halls, a heavy, eight foot iron fence locking in the square block it haunted.
When I was six, my mother took me to visit her mother. I do not know what my mother was thinking by doing this—maybe she thought my presence would have a calming effect on my grandmother. I would like to believe this. She dressed me in a polished-cotton flowered dress with large pockets—my summer best. She said the three of us would go out for ice cream. I was excited. It seemed a great adventure—that long ride alone with my mother to see her mother.
I remember leaping out of the car, thinking that my grandmother’s enthusiasm would match mine—to see me, her neatly dressed and properly behaved little granddaughter. Then, I saw her standing there outside the building’s huge steel door. A man dressed in white had a grip on her shoulder. She wore a dark blue smock and her hair was short and gray with a too-blunt cut. To me it almost looked like it had been hacked off with an axe. At the time, reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to children was the fashion and Grandmother Idyth looked like someone who belonged in that scary book.
Yet, however strange and strained she looked, I could not but help run toward her and say “Hi, Grandma, I’m Ceci!” When I did this, she looked at me with great alarm and backed away. Then suddenly she lurched at me, focusing on the pockets of my dress, and stuck a hand into each, grabbing at their insides as if searching for something and upon finding nothing, screamed. She had half-torn the left one from its seams—I remember its droop.
Of course, after this there was no outing for ice cream. My mother and I followed her back to her room. Now, there were two men dressed in white flanking her, each with an even tighter grip on her shoulders. The inside of the building had the odor of a kennel I had been to twice with my father to look at dogs. It made me hold my breath as long as I possibly could, until I had to either breathe in the air or choke. The men stopped us at the door to her ro
om. I never saw where she lived—whether she had books to read, a television, a radio, or even a window from which she could look out.
When my mother kissed her mother goodbye, she did not seem outwardly bothered that my grandmother stood there stiffly with no reaction. I guess she was used to this. I, however, was left quite agitated and on the way home asked my mother too many questions—too many whys. I did not understand why my grandmother pulled at the pockets of my dress, why she did not want to look at me, why she had to live in such a “smelly” place. My mother just kept driving, looking straight forward, and finally said, “That’s the way it is. That’s just the way it is.” And when my questions would not stop, she yelled at me just one word—“Enough!” At that moment I thought of my grandmother tearing at my empty pockets and her wail when she found nothing. That was the feeling I was left with that day too, only I stayed silent, my scream internal. It was my first powerful memory of how little I would receive from my mother and, of course, I was never taken to see my grandmother again.
After Grandmother Idyth was taken away, my mother and her four brothers, Emmanuel (Manny), Samuel, Benjamin, and Abraham were parceled out to distant relatives across the Midwest, each considered the “poor thing” in the family who took them in.
When they reunited as adults, they publicly deified their father and spoke only among themselves about their mother, all the while binding themselves to each other with a unified, enormous dream of possessing all things material—property that they clearly owned and that no one would dare to steal. My father had a staff of lawyers to make sure.
My mother, the oldest, was thirteen, her brothers twelve, ten, nine, and seven, when they witnessed all that had been grabbed from them and my father learned how to use what he knew of their history to be in charge of them. He used this always to be in control of everyone.
Although Grandfather Cecil and Grandmother Idyth are buried miles away, their sons and my father are here and soon my mother will be. Right now she is in a private health care facility with around-the-clock staff taking care of her every need, plus two private nurses she has had at her house for well over a year. My mother’s money saves her—prolongs her unbearably long days on the earth’s thin, broken crust. Perhaps being poorer at this point in the life cycle would be better.
She is oblivious to the horrific news that frequently breaks through the television set, yet no one would want to live as she does now, not able to move without help or get nourishment without a feeding tube. Not that she ever cared that much about the larger world, although she spent much time raising money for good causes at charity events. Everyone wanted to have her and my father at their table. My mother definitely knew how to make an entrance. It is her exit with which she is having trouble.
In her present state she can still recognize people when she chooses to open her eyes—the gift of sight is a faculty she has not yet lost. She can still glance at the anxious faces of her extended family. She has become their entire focus. The mandala of their lives. She smiles at them as they file by and tell her about their daily lives. Everyone arrives at specifically assigned times—her nieces and nephews, Celine, Cecily, Celie, Joshua, and Jeremy, and the twins they married, Joyce and Jocelyn. Everyone, that is, except Cecilia. She sends my mother flowers every two weeks. The flowers are gorgeous and arrive in a glass vase. Her cards are kind and she signs them “with love”—always in the lowercase.
Right before I died, I went blind. I could not recognize faces, just voices. My mother and I had a code. She would ask me a question and I would blink once for yes and twice for no. Mostly I blinked once, for convenience. Then, after years of being sick, then well, then sick again, this cycle stopped and I left suddenly, in the blink of an eye.
Cecilia told me as I lay beneath the ground that the sicker her mother became the more clearly and more vividly she saw things. Unlike myself, the cancer never reached Aunt Lettie’s brain, and her eyes became her most powerful guide through the final months of her life, as if they could see in each finite thing the detailing of the infinite. In late autumn—the last season she went outside for a little enjoyment—she and Cecilia ended up at a local beach. There, Aunt Lettie pointed out the yellow leaves on an oak tree and said with a dazzling smile, “Look, Cecilia, I have found the Golden Fleece. Perhaps Aeetes placed it there for me.”
Aunt Lettie liked the Greek myths because they were far away from real time, real history. When Cecilia as a child would beg her mother to tell her about her own mother and father—“Grandma Miriam” and “Grandpa Joseph”—and what exactly had happened to them, Aunt Lettie would divert her by opening Bulfinch’s Mythology.
I do believe that day at the beach—where the water meets the sky—Aunt Lettie saw the subtle astral colors, which are usually hidden from humans—except perhaps from the greatest painters, who can pick up such vibrations. After I died my own sight returned in such a way.
Here, if I choose, I am able to take in so much from many spheres. It can, if I am not careful, become a buzz a million times worse than the noise of all the cicadas that rise from the ground every seventeen years. When the dialects and the clamor become too much, I travel to a place where the music is choral—the Nada Brahma, the Anahata Nad-am, the Saute Surmad—the original tones of the world, all voices in universal hum. Or I go to the single, pure sound of one delicate bell softly tinkling in a faraway background. Being dead can be quite lovely if one can just let go of body and ego.
I think my mother will have a hard time with this, because of the beauty she was born with and that stayed with her well into her late seventies. She wanted to believe she had no rivals, that she was mythic, and the Slaughter family continuously reinforced this. Now, she has become the extreme image of beauty’s always sad-end story.
Cecilia would snuggle against me when she was almost eight and I was ten and softly—and with much glee—chant “Queen Bee, Queen of Me, Queen of My Father’s Family.” How we would giggle. Even then Cecilia seemed so privileged with the permissions she gave herself for sacrilege—at least on the surface.
After I died, she began limiting herself, becoming strange—in a quiet way, not at all like Grandmother Idyth. She would wash her hair repeatedly, never able in her mind to get it clean enough, while Michael was forever washing towels, then handing her the newly cleaned ones. However, if one touched anything—the handle of a door or just the wood of its frame—Cecilia considered it soiled. She could not wash away the fact of my death, no matter how hard she scrubbed at it. (Similar issues flared up inside her after her horrific encounter with Herr M.)
Michael would visit my grave often and pray to me to help Cecilia. I stayed silent—letting his own good soul speak for itself. It was the beginning of my learning that it is impossible for the dead to instruct the living. It is what we leave them with—their memories of us (yes, I know this is cliché) that can possibly help. With Cecilia I know I was her first audience. How hard I would laugh at her comments on all the folly that surrounded us, and I do believe her memories of this were a part of what protected her from falling into complete darkness.
“Not quite crazy, but definitely mind sick,” is what Michael would say to me. He was right. It took many months for her to pick up a pen and some paper and find an outlet for her grief that eventually would become her above-the-ground bell music. Then the washings, all the tiny tearings at herself, began to slowly disappear—except for the small tonsure she created long ago on the top of her head, which she still carefully maintains, actually prunes, and someday will die with. I am sure the undertaker will find it quite curious.
It is a legacy from her mother, Lettie—an outlet for Lettie, those hair tearings, from her own grief story. Cecilia began to wound herself in such way, too, at the age of eight, as she strained to hear what her mother was saying to the adults. She would open her bedroom door just an inch and try hard to string together the words that were being said, her long hair loosened and swirled around her like a coat of fur, with h
er fingers pulling at a single strand.
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.
