The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter

by Susan Hahn

  Then Deidre, in her own despair, fury, and turmoil, starts praising Cecilia. With this, Cecilia knows that inside, Deidre is becoming appalling to herself. She speaks too fast and uses too much hyperbole, going over the top with too many empty adjectives. Her speed-dial talk will not quit—like how Cecilia was with Deidre over the phone about her poem. In their individual, almost out-of-control desperateness, Cecilia thinks, “How ridiculously similar we are.”

  By this time Celine returns, beaming, and says, “Cecilia, let’s finish up. I’ve got to go.” They get up and Deidre thanks Cecilia for the lovely time—neither of them extends her hand. Cecilia resists the feeling to do so. She does feel the impulse to say something to ease Deidre’s pain, but she also feels completely depleted and immobile. Deidre then tells Celine how nice it was to see her again. Cecilia and Celine take the elevator. Deidre chooses the stairs.

  Celine flees the building, while Cecilia goes into the Arts Club bathroom. In a stall, she hears a woman enter and go into the adjacent one. It is Deidre. She is weeping, while repeating, “Clubbed by the arts. Clubbed by the arts …”

  This makes Cecilia think again of what Herr M did to her, and then of her Aunt Rose and how my mother’s actions and words clubbed her, and that for Deidre she, Cecilia, has become Rose. It is then she starts weeping as silently as possible, not just for herself, but for Deidre, too.

  Being completely overtaken by her upset, Deidre does not hear anyone in the next stall. However, when a couple of minutes later two women walk in, effervescently praising how well the other looks, she quiets, wipes her eyes with her fingers—smearing her mascara further. She then grabs her lipstick from her purse and, with her hand shaking, attempts to reapply it. Not caring that this probably makes her look even more disheveled, she opens the stall door, turns her face away from the women, and runs from their over-animated chatter.

  Cecilia by then has pressed herself into a corner between the inside of the door and a wall and stands there immobile for several minutes—well after the women have left. What makes her finally move out of the stall is a female voice calling her name—a waitress from the club. She had forgotten to sign for the lunch. As she writes her name, she thinks about how much the afternoon has truly cost.

  NIJINSKY’S DOG

  Nijinsky danced his last dance, “World War I,”

  in January of 1919. He then suffered an

  irreparable breakdown.

  Nijinsky’s dog, if he had one, died last August.

  She was a beautiful animal

  with all that was rational

  beaten out of her strong

  cleanly chiseled head.

  We’d circle each other,

  lonely, in the heat

  of the late summer nights,

  both of us waiting for you—

  for some crumb of attention.

  When I didn’t finish the dinner

  you’d sometimes offer,

  you’d slip it into her bowl

  and she’d spring toward you,

  more starved for love than food.

  I’d watch her from my chair,

  passing the time until you’d turn yourself

  toward me—remember (O please)

  I was there. Out on the ledge

  she’d sit, elegant and damaged—

  her scars buried in her dense gnarled

  fur. Since I’ve come up here I twist

  my hair so hard it snaps

  and now I have a bald spot

  that my barrettes can barely cover. You

  almost seemed to cry

  when you told me that she died.

  But as I came closer I saw

  your eyes completely

  dry. You left her

  on that hot August roof—

  the tar blistering

  her dog feet. She couldn’t stand

  to touch the surface

  so she sat and sat

  on that asphalt edge,

  her mind on fire with memory

  of how you once took care

  with her, gave her a yard

  to play in, rolled with her

  in cool green grass.

  She’d dream of that

  and want it back, before

  the war that destroyed her world:

  your wife’s shrieks take the goddamn

  dog if you leave

  me. And the dog

  in her dog mind thought and thought

  it was all her fault.

  I wish I’d been there

  when she took her leap

  into the too blue, parched

  air, over the anchored

  oak tree and the naive lilies

  reaching toward the idle sky,

  to see her resolve—the pause,

  then the quick

  amazing move—the elevation, the gift

  of rising, her thick mane ablaze

  against the dazed noonday sun.

  How she broke

  free in that grand jeté,

  sailing in holy

  madness past her dog life,

  her soul bounding out

  of her sad dog eyes

  while her ragged body hit

  a barren patch of earth.

  c. slaughter

  AFTER THE MISERABLE lunch with Deidre, Cecilia returned even more so to thinking about the disastrous dinner with Herr M and the all-encompassing consequences of it—of the damage it had done to her, both internally and externally—her broken spirit and the wretched gossip. The debris—the scum—from it something she feels she can never clean up.

  He forbade her to publish the poems. Said he would ruin her career. He said people would know it was his futon in one of the poems—its urine smell, the urine of his child. She had shown three new ones to a friend and her so-called friend had shown them to him. He was particularly paranoid because he was fighting for joint custody of his two year old daughter and in a pit-bull rage he snarled predatorily at her over the phone that the poems—these poems—if read by his wife’s lawyer or worse, the judge, would cause irreparable damage to his chances. As if a lawyer or judge would read a poem and, even if they did, care. Poems as evidence? Not in this country. Never. She sent them out anyway and they did get published. Even though she could not seem to take good care with her body, she felt she could with her art—or at least try.

  In addition, the poems seemed the only way to relieve her humiliation over what had happened. Yet the deadness she felt—a sick bulb twisting into itself, lost in its path of which way was up and out—seemed to be expanding faster than the speed of her writing. This is not to say she did not want to master the art of forgiveness for both him and for herself, but she could not. She read as many self-help book sas she could tolerate—some with religious overtones—and several on the practice of Zen, but none of what she read on forbearance, self-acceptance, and grace could reach the chaos going on so deep inside her. She even taped little sayings on the rim of the radiator cover next to her writing chair, but all they did was fall to the floor when the heat was turned on.

  How she wanted to tell Celie right after it happened. But it was a bad time in her life, too. Emotional. She had just come out of the hospital and was trying to get back to normal. Back to her job at the fancy dress shop. She called her absence an “exhaustion.” The doctors recorded it as a “breakdown.”

  Everyone was told when visiting her there to speak of nothing serious—only things “as light as air,” as one too-perky nurse had put it—so as soon as she was in the car with Celie, driving her home—six days after it happened—Celie wanted to know all the important things she had missed these past couple of months. Cecilia took a breath and sputtered out “Herr” and stopped. When Celie said, “What?” she said, “I meant to say weather—that the weather has been just awful.” Then she smiled and continued, “You picked a good time to be inside.”

  She drove her to her modest apartment and then went to the pharmacy with a fistful of prescr
iptions, returning to the fragile Celie with a bag filled with vials of pills. At that moment Celie most definitely was not the right person to tell.

  How she wanted to tell her mother. But every time she tried it was clear her mother did not want to hear any detail—let alone the whole of it. Her mother, too, had become fragile. Physical. She did persist for a couple of weeks. One day when she mentioned Herr M, her mother just called him a “rascal,” took her hand and said, “Cecilia, I too have had a few rascals in my life.” She could not tell if her mother was being ironic, sarcastic, or her memory had momentarily gone into hiding from her body’s sickness.

  Once, she even brought up Diaghilev—Nijinsky’s mentor—so that she could then segue into Herr M. She told her mother how he took the young Nijinsky from poverty straight to the Ballets Russes. How he tormented him, forced him into unwanted sexual acts. How he threw him out when Nijinsky finally asserted himself and how this contributed to Nijinsky’s eventual collapse—that after he danced his dance, World War I, which he had choreographed so as to capture all the cruelties of war, he suffered an irreparable breakdown.

  No matter that she was dying, Aunt Lettie’s response was sharp and fast, “Art choreograph a war, capture a war—a real war with all its cruelties? Never!” No, her mother did not want to listen to any of this. So they went on to speak only about Nijinsky’s genius. His use of straight lines and angles as opposed to the serpentine and spiral. How he allowed only essential steps into his dance and how this made every move more powerful.

  Then her mother would return to her story of her own mother going to see Nijinksy dance. Aunt Lettie described in detail Nijinsky’s costume as the Faun, just like she had to the relatives, when Cecilia in her room had struggled to hear her mother’s words. Outwardly, Cecilia was enthusiastic with the repetition, because she saw how much this brought her mother an authentic happiness—that this pleasure, gleaned from the long lost past, lit her up and anchored her. Inwardly, after it happened, Cecilia felt completely untethered and lost.

  She could not tell her father. Since his retirement he only liked to concern himself with the smallest of things. Crossword puzzles, the sports section of the newspaper—never the front page. He especially liked to read about golf—the putt, putt, putt into that tiny hole. As for his wife, all he wanted was to take her out of the hospital and put her in hospice. “Yes, close the door on this room,” her mother would say to Cecilia, pointing to herself. Cecilia found those the saddest words she ever heard her mother say about her father.

  It was clear her father certainly did not need or want more grief—or problems—especially from her. They had never spoken about anything important. To him she was pretty much irrelevant, as if her birth was created only by—and for—her mother. Her relationship with him was always formal—lacking any depth of emotion—so, at best, all she would get from Samuel Slaughter was some amount of fluster, like when he heard her read her poetry.

  She could not bring herself to tell Michael. She did not know what he would do—how he would react. He seemed exactly the wrong person to tell, that his response would only add to her own rattled confusion, her shame, her—at the time—amorphous rage.

  So she told no one—at least for a long while—what had happened that night. How, afterward, she could not catch her breath. It was a Sunday—the beginning of the second week of January. That Monday he called to apologize. How he kept saying sorry, sorry over the phone as he had done the night before—after it happened—and repeating his excuse, “I just got carried away,” and his warning, “You cannot tell anyone. Do you understand this? You do understand this? Do you not?”

  It seemed to her she must have had a seizure—her legs and arms started moving uncontrollably, she started gagging and she was having trouble breathing when he was almost finished with her. She remembers her naked body shivering on the bare, hardwood floor, almost quaking, and hearing the same sorry, sorry litany and the same excuse and warning.

  He then sat down naked next to her and said, “Can I make you some tea? Some tea? Some tea?” As if begging. Finally, she agreed to some tea. Much more for him than for her—as if by drinking it, that meant forgiveness.

  Monday she went to the doctor, because of her breath. She still could not catch it and she had a poetry reading in two weeks. She needed her breath and her composure back. Dr. Astrich questioned her about the bruises that were beginning to swell on her inner thighs, her breasts, and the upper areas of her inner arms. He asked, “Did someone hit you, knock you down, pin you to the ground—beat you?” However, because he was becoming increasingly nervous, he made a joke of it and added, “Have you taken up boxing?” She quietly replied, “No, I fell.” She thought, “Like Eve. Naive Eve, naive me, both of us fallen to earth.”

  She kept repeating to him, “I’ve lost my breath and you have to help me find it. I need to get it back.” It did sound odd, the way she put it, but he knew she was a poet and he liked how she expressed herself so he just smiled and did not question her further. Just told her if her breathing was still giving her trouble in a week to come back for an X-ray, which she did. It was walking pneumonia, for which he gave her a prescription for an antibiotic, saying, “This will cure it quickly.” She would, in fact, walk with it—a lodestone on her chest—for six months.

  Then, “Nijinsky’s Dog”—a poem he had never seen—a poem she knew would enrage him even more, was published a little over a year later. The poem existed as a kind of telling—a metaphor—an inaccurate, yet good enough record of how she felt afterward.

  Her only witness to what had happened had died. The dog. His dog. When he left his wife, he took the dog and moved into an attic apartment with her. She remembers going up the winding outside flight of stairs of that house and seeing all the lovely furniture inside, the gleaming crystal fixtures through the large, sparkling panes of glass trimmed with swags of creamy silk. She thought how much she would like to be going there. It was so unlike the narrowing space where she was heading—a place the owner had rented out and seemed to care nothing about—its two small windows bare and filthy. When he greeted her at the door with the dog, the first thing she noticed about her were her large, sad eyes. Then, her fur—so matted and knotted, so uncared for.

  She jumped off his roof in late August of that year. He told everyone she had fallen. “Like Eve? Like me?” Over and over, she thought this. She listened to others talk about it with both outrage and relish. “He left her on that hot August roof to teach a class!” She wanted to scream at them, “She just couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand any of it, anymore. Just couldn’t. So she jumped.” “A grand jeté, sailing in holy madness,” is how she wrote it. “A suicide,” is what she thought.

  Right after she took off her coat he handed her something wrapped in bright colored tissue paper—robin’s-egg blue—and with delight said, “A gift!” When she unwrapped it she found a bracelet. She was surprised—completely caught off guard—and flattered and she could feel the blood rush to her face. All she could think to say was a strong, but flustered, “Thank you.”

  “Silver and obsidian,” he replied with great pride. “I bought it for you. It reminded me so much of your heightened, compelling intensity.”

  She put the bracelet down on his desk, then carefully folded the crisp tissue and placed it inside her purse. She wanted so much to appear organized and calm. In fact, she was all excitement inside. Then, she picked the bracelet up and touched the rounded blade edges of the stones and thought of the burning lava from which they had been born and the lustrous, thick, octagonal silver nuggets that linked the irregular chunks of deep blue obsidian—a rare color for this stone. She loved how the clasp was made of round silver magnets and how easily they met, snapped together, and held tight. She put it on her left wrist.

  He was polite and spoke slowly of how pleased he was to see her and complimented her not on her face or body, but rather on the delicate necklace that hung over the turtleneck of her sweater—a plain silver
chain from which a tiny, turquoise enameled starfish dangled—and how well it blended with her new bracelet. He had a good eye for detail.

  On his worn couch he lead the conversation. First he asked about her mother. There was always a great concern in both his facial expressions and his voice when he spoke of her mother. When she lowered her head and said, “Not good, not good at all,” he shook his and replied, “Too bad, too bad.” It was clear she did not want to talk about her mother’s illness anymore—she was just too close to death—and he immediately picked up on this, changing the subject to that of the intellect, for which she was relieved.

  He talked about how important the role of the poet-critic was in the analysis of contemporary poetry, not just that of the academic, whom he felt sometimes drained all moisture from the topic. This, too, was unexpected—given that he was an academic and a critic, but not a poet.

  He asked her what she thought of several poets and listened intently to her opinions. When she finished, he suggested she consider writing an essay about what she had just said. That he would be pleased to read it. And beyond all this, he continued, smiling, “Maybe we could collaborate on a series of such essays for a book.” She had never thought of herself as a poet-critic, but she very much liked the idea of it, the possibilities of it—another positive invention of herself. At that moment she felt so focused on, and included unlike all her childhood exclusions, especially the insults directed at her from my parents—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—how they always gave her the role of the Wicked Son at the Passover Seder and their labeling of her to the others as the “dandelion.”

  She loved the way he shared his mind with her and she loved her new bracelet. Toward the end of their conversation—right before dinner—he talked about a book he was writing on film noir—why these films continued to be popular. How he believed they still spoke to contemporary audiences about trust-relationships—“To see things in the dark as they truly are,” was how he put it. He then added, “Perhaps after dinner we’ll watch the movie I am writing about right now—The Postman Always Rings Twice—so you can tell me what you think.” She felt so safe with all this talk until she mentioned, “These movies always seem to inevitably involve the betrayal of the most unsuspecting.”