so that it was all chin and nose and nostril, to me a familiar chin and nose and nostril, my grandmother’s chin and nose and nostril, I would know them anywhere, at any time and from any angle; but why, why would they bring her body here, to this house, this room, this bed—
The nose exhaled, the chin ever so minutely quivered. Wrong!
I thought my chest would crack open and my heart bounce onto the floor. I scrambled down the stairs three at a time to find my mother and, choking on the words, asked her what—who—that was lying in her bed.
It took her a moment to absorb what I had said. Then she explained that it was my uncle Peter.
My uncle Peter, who shared some of his mother’s physiognomy. Her nose, her chin.
“He was up so early,” she added. “He went to deal with—matters.”
“Which matters?”
If my mother found it difficult to have a child who asked questions like this, she did not give any indication. Not usually; not then.
“With Huffy’s body,” she answered simply.
“What did he do with it? To it?”
“He arranged for it to be taken away and …”
“And?”
“My father did not believe it was what Jews should do. He believed their bodies should be buried.”
“I don’t understand.”
She put her hand on mine. “He arranged for your grandmother to be cremated.”
I looked at her, confused.
“That means incinerated. Burned instead of buried.”
I shuddered. “All of her?”
“All of her.”
“Has it happened—already?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. He took care of it. The logistics. That’s all I know.”
It was a lot to take in, a lot to put together. “When is the funeral?” I asked.
“Your grandmother didn’t want a funeral. Your aunt doesn’t want one either. And what your aunt wants …” She paused. “Huffy wished to be cremated, and then—then I don’t know what. It’s like she’s still here. I have a feeling it will be like that for a long time.”
If I was so very perceptive, how did I miss so much, how did I miss the central thing?
Was it because I was still just a child? Was it that? Or was it because the central thing had been hidden—purposefully, and with great care—from Huffy herself?
The central thing: this, too, was shared by my two grandmothers.
I had seen Sylvia’s chest deflate—her bra that is, under her dress. And I had seen her reach in to inflate it again, meaning arrange the pad bulked up with crumpled tissues that stood in for her flesh. And I had seen her bra on the hope chest, folded over on itself, its aggregation of padding and tissues peeking out from behind the skin-colored fabric.
No one had ever explained who had taken away a part (two parts) of her body, or why.
What with all that dressing and undressing happening behind closed doors, I had not seen anything equivalent to Sylvia’s deflating chest in Huffy, and nor had I put together all the signs of her changing habits and diminishing energies. What I learned I learned later. The Operation—the mysterious operation that established the ritual of Morning Time—turned out to be a double mastectomy that Huffy had had in October 1965. In 1968 she had a recurrence of the cancer and another surgery, after which the doctor came out from the operating room and told my father, my aunt, and my uncle Peter that he had been unable to remove it all; the disease had spread too far into her body.
“He shook his head,” my mother told me, shaking her own head as she conveyed this scene to me long after the fact. “With that one sentence everything was different … forever different …”
Improbable though it seems now, absurd, really, in view of who this woman was and what her mind and character were like, her children, working in collaboration with the surgeon and our family doctor, agreed—plotted—that very afternoon not to tell my grandmother the truth about herself, about her body, about her body’s fate. Instead they invented a diagnosis, rheumatoid arthritis, that would serve to explain her intermittent pain and weakening and require her to stay in bed for long stretches at a time, like one of her favorite writers, Colette.
For a brief time a stack of Colette’s novels appeared by my grandmother’s bed, in beautiful patterned-paper dust jackets, and my aunt talked about dear, darling Sido—Colette’s mother—and how she and Colette, like Madame de Sévigné and Françoise, were connected in the way that the two Harriets were, beyond mother and daughter, best friends; best friends for all time.
Yet there was something even stranger than this fabrication, this pretend diagnosis that my aunt and my uncle and my father and the doctors devised, and that was the fact that my grandmother went along with it, acting as though she weren’t dying so that her children could act as though she weren’t dying, even though she told a friend of hers, who later told my mother—who was like a great fishing net collecting all the stray, and many of the essential, pieces of information that helped convey the truth of these lives, or a far truer truth than the rest of these people lived by—that Huffy knew perfectly well that the cancer had metastasized and that she was mortally ill.
Everyone was acting, everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made). A family that had quite literally written, or story-analyzed, itself into a better, sunnier life, a life where everyone went by new names (and nicknames) and lived in a new or newly done, or redone, house in a new neighborhood in a new city, was unable to write itself out of death. No, not even the Mighty Franks could manage that.
The house filled up with more people.
I went upstairs and changed into a black turtleneck sweater, an article of clothing I wore only when we went skiing. Being unable to cry, I felt I had to find some way to participate, to show people, my aunt above all, that I, too, was upset. When I came downstairs again my mother took one look at me and said, “We don’t dress in black just because someone has died. That’s not who we are or what we do in this family.”
I was ashamed to have been seen through so clearly. I returned to my room and changed back into my school clothes.
I was coming down the stairs again when the doorbell rang. It was Barrie and Wendy, the girls who lived across the street and were our oldest and closest friends. They had come to see if my brothers and I were all right. Their eyes were red and swollen. They called Grandma Huffy “Grandma Huffy” too. But then we were practically related—that’s how we explained it when people asked what we were to each other, since we were so obviously something.
Barrie and Wendy nestled between my brothers and me chronologically, boy-girl-boy-girl-boy, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest. We sometimes broke down into different pairs and configurations; sometimes we fought with one another, but mostly we adored each other. After school and during the summer, we were often inseparable, playing games and doing art projects and putting on shows together or playing handball or building forts up on the hill—my time with them constituted altogether the most, virtually the only, “normal” time in my childhood.
What practically related us was marriage. Trudy, their aunt, was married to Peter, my father and aunt’s brother and our “outlying” uncle (Herbert was the outlying uncle on my uncle and mother’s side but brought no parallel interlacing into our world); this meant that we had first cousins in common. It was a very Mighty Franks sort of situation and had not come about by accident, either. Trudy had worked as Huffy’s secretary for a time at MGM and had made a good enough impression on my grandmother that when Huffy finally became exasperated by Peter’s taste in women, who inevitably fell short, way short, of The Standard,