The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter

by Susan Hahn

  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.

  Feb. 1

  When they grabbed my satchel away

  from me, I was left

  holding just the string that had helped

  to keep it shut.

  I tied the string around my hair

  making of it a small bow

  at the top. This kept my hair out of my face,

  for the wind was impossibly harsh.

  That day

  Mother had made Leah and me go to the line for “Twins.”

  I could tell she thought this a good thing—I could tell

  she thought we’d be given special attention. I knew

  my mother’s face so well.

  Karl saw us in that line—saw me. He ignored Leah.

  He came toward me. He came very close

  and touched the string, the bow, my hair.

  He chose me. Suddenly,

  I turned around and found Leah

  had disappeared.

  I kept looking for her

  until he told me she was

  sent elsewhere and

  not to worry.

  He touched my bow, again.

  Called me his

  “pretty little maiden.” Then

  he asked, “How old?” I remember

  saying, “I’m twelve.

  I’m Lettie. I’m twelve.”

  Feb. 2

  A woman shaved all the hair off

  my body. Her hands were quick

  and rough. She said

  it was to prevent lice. I looked almost

  brand new. Then I saw

  the others

  who also had been shaved—older people

  now looking like withered children.

  They told us how the shavings were “good for us.”

  That everything they were doing to us

  was “good for us.”

  Soon the older people disappeared.

  Feb. 3

  Karl came back. He touched my scalp

  and smiled.

  My baldness didn’t seem to bother him.

  Then, he took my hand

  and led me to another room.

  Feb. 20

  Because I had no choice—this was the life

  that was given me—and Karl

  kept telling me I was

  safe,

  I had to believe him—

  too fear-frozen

  not to.

  And I was twelve.

  And the red brick building with the small windows

  brightened by white frilled curta
ins

  and the picket fence around it “looked safe.”

  That’s what I told my small, bald, broken self.

  Mar. 14

  Everything became so familiar, the uniforms,

  all of them, the bodies that inhabited them—

  the strong, healthy ones, the bird-thin sick ones—

  all the smells that were created when they commingled.

  This place where life and death

  collided and the earth opened herself up like the whore

  that she was and swallowed

  us into her putrid womb, this womb

  became my home.

  And because it was my home

  and I was twelve and had no choice,

  I tried to make my mind think everything would be alright,

  but I never truly believed it.

  Inside

  I was violently heartsick.

  June 4

  After mama and papa and Leah disappeared,

  for the longest time I thought they would come back

  and right before the last time the cancer returned,

  I had this dream—that they did. They

  all came through the door of that red brick building

  with the sweet ruffled curtains on the small

  windows and found me standing there.

  Mama took my right hand, papa took my left—

  and we all walked away

  together into the clean

  warm summer air.

  It was only as she got deeper into the diary that Cecilia began to fully understand why her mother kept asking not just for the books about Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Stravinsky, but also for the history books with those awful pictures inside—the books that she dutifully brought her from the library and had to be hidden from her father, buried under an extra blanket in the hospital closet. Her mother was still looking for them—looking for her mother and father and Leah.

  She never found anything in the diary that spoke explicitly of what Karl had done to her mother. The closest she came to writing anything sexual or sensual about him was a mention of his bare, long, perfect legs, his sculpted calves—like a dancer might have. After reading this, Cecilia thought she might faint—she felt herself grow dizzy, her face becoming too hot, as she remembered Herr M standing above her, naked, with his godlike legs.

  Cecilia read the diary many times, each time becoming more and more sensitive to the details—and to the things left out. She had no idea when her mother had written any of this. Clearly, parts of it were quite recent. And since no years were recorded, she knew some of it came from her mother’s still quick memory. And with this she remembered how, in all her notes and letters, her mother never put a year on anything, as if she were trying to protect herself from an exact record of all things and when they had happened.

  After each reading Cecilia threw up and in the last couple of days of her mother’s life the guilt of having read the diary—the secrets her mother kept, the secrets of her mother’s frightening, small girl life—grew larger and the habit of pulling at her hair from the top of her head became wilder.

  On the last day of her mother’s life, Cecilia found her mother tearing out the many petals on a small flower from an arrangement her father had brought her. With each pluck she repeated the words, “The man who loves me hates me.” Cecilia truly did not know if her mother meant her father or Karl.

  She did this until the flower was completely bald. As Cecilia watched from the doorway—a witness to the flower losing its beauty—her eyes filled with tears so much so that it became impossible for them not to flood her face.

  When Lettie saw her standing there, she wanted so much to hold her. Hold on to her daughter forever. Cecilia’s breathing seemed so heavy these past few weeks and Lettie worried what had happened with this man she called Herr M had also made her daughter physically sick. It was then she tried to talk to her about him. She asked her to tell her. Tell her everything. Tell her exactly what he had done to her—her rage against this man who had hurt her daughter in some awful way expanding in her brain, in her heart, pushing at her waning body. But when Cecilia embraced her—held her close—Lettie knew Cecilia could feel how fragile she had become—her bird bones—how she truly was about to break, and she could sense Cecilia’s decision that the time for telling had passed as she released her. So they sat there together, wiping each other’s faces with soft tissue, taking pleasure in doing this and quietly laughing like small girls—the stripped stem of the flower between them. At that moment Lettie could only hope that someday Herr M would get his retribution from someone—someone would hurt him in the large way he had hurt her daughter.

  On that last night, as Cecilia was leaving her mother’s room, she carefully wrapped the naked flower in one of the tissues they had used to wipe each other’s tears and placed it in the pocket of her coat. On the long ride home she kept touching it in its moist blanket. She could not stop. At home the first thing she did was to take what was left of it and press it between two pages of her mother’s broken book. Then, she took the book and buried it deep in a drawer—next to her own most painful, secret thing—never to look at it again.

  Aunt Lettie died twice in her life; both times it was February 1.

  YOM KIP PUR NIGHT DANCE

  At the end of each prayer, she’d add her own—

  to find someone to marry.

  In shul, where the men and women were separated

  by an aisle, she’d lament and vow

  to change the ways she wasn’t good, then

  break the fast with family and rush

  to dress for the Yom Kippur Night Dance.

  There, she’d wait with the girls in taffeta and years

  later with the women in rayon knit.

  Often she took a man

  for the night, let him slide into her

  because she felt she could hold him

  there, pretend her life was like some

  romantic song. Beyond the long somber chants,

  the half wails of the chorus,

  in the dark she’d start to sing

  at the high pitch of happiness,

  her appetite as huge as Eve’s

  before she knew she’d have to leave

  the bliss, bow her head

  and ask again for forgiveness.

  c. slaughter

  WEEKS AFTER AUNT LETTIE’S DEATH, Celie began to experience an acute anxiety that her mother’s sister, Adele, had just died—more and more she was fearing this. If Adele were alive, Celie definitely felt Adele would have told anyone who would listen, “Celie is helping to kill me.” And the fact that I knew that Adele was not yet buried here—was still alive at the time of Celie’s heightened worry about Adele’s existence—is immaterial. (Adele arrived way over a year later—just a few weeks before the conclusion of the Herr M horror.) It is only what Celie chooses to find out or not find out which is important. Some stories we would rather avoid, not know their endings; we would rather have someone pull them from our minds—if such a thing were possible.

  In Celie’s case not knowing—not wanting to find out—was a form of protection, actually a good defense, from the too heavy responsibility she felt as a child—as if five pound weights had been placed in each of her vulnerable, toddler hands. Her mind and body have ached ever since.

  If Celie knew Adele to be dead, she would have thought that she did in some way participate in killing her. The truth is Celie knows Adele has had a terrible life—whether she is alive or dead. Not the kind, of course, that you see on the television these days—the unending, awful stories that make the news. No, Adele had an ethnic American immigrant-influenced twentieth-century kind of terrible life.

  Adele and Celie’s mother, Esther, were separated in birth by two years, Adele being the older sister. Celie’s Grandmother Eva wanted two perfect daughters who were better than any of her cousins’ American-born children. Eva had never become a citizen of this country, and she never learned
to read. Both were secrets. But it was okay to laugh about the citizen part, especially when their family took driving trips and crossed the border into Windsor, Canada. Celie’s little brothers would chuckle about how their grandmother would have to be left there and that would make more room for them in the back seat on the return trip. Eva did not seem to mind such talk—they were her “little men.” That is what she called them. Celie took the threat more seriously, believing they could all end up imprisoned.

  Her brothers did not know about the other secret—that their grandmother could not read. When they moved out of her crowded apartment, Celie was nine, Joshua was two, and Jeremy one. They do not have the same memories of that place that Celie does—they pay no important price, have no psychiatric expense. Everything in life adds up fairly easily for them. Both are now accountants, following in their father Benjamin’s footsteps. Their tally books are neat and precise, their life ledgers always balanced.

  Celie can never wipe her mind clean of her grandmother’s screams—her screams at Adele. They are forever background noise—a tinnitus in her ears. Eva would scare Celie so much that sometimes she would hide in the closet and whisper to the disembodied coats how much she could not stand it. “Adele, stop eating! Adele, you’re too fat! Adele, no man will ever marry you!” Over and over—those words, “Adele. Adele. Adele. Stop. Too fat. No man will …”

  Actually, someone did ask Adele to marry, but when Eva saw the ring she screamed, “You call this a diamond?” Needless to say, the would-be fiancé took himself and his minuscule gem somewhere else and last Celie heard he had married and had two children. “That was many years ago, so perhaps he, too, was dead,” Celie considered, “but then again, maybe not.”