that I was afraid she was going to choke. She kept howling and sobbing and saying, “Huffy wouldn’t want us to cry, she would want us to be brave. That’s what she would want …”
I did not know what to feel, what I felt. It was impossible to find my own sensations in the face of all this raging grief of my aunt’s. Instead I became all eye, one big Cyclopsian eye; a dry eye, because how could any tears I might produce approach Hankie’s, how could they come anywhere near the sight of my father, the man who never cried, dissolving in the garden, becoming an un-father, a non-father, a creature I had never seen before?
Locked in my aunt’s embrace, I became aware of my mother standing in the doorway. On her face there was a look of alarm tinged with dismay. She was there, and then she disappeared.
Soon afterward my uncle came and detached me from my aunt’s grip.
My dry unblinking eye was free now to prowl over all the surfaces on Greenvalley Road, registering every detail that underlined the inside-outness of the day. It had started with the cars, and Sylvia in the window, and the yellow chairs in the garden; now it moved on to the chicken roasting in a stew of carrots and onions and beef consommé, a familiar scent that, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was as wrong as the dining room table covered in a good linen cloth and piled with pink bakery boxes from Benês’s. It was as wrong as the platter of deli meats nearby mummified under layers of plastic; as wrong as the vases of flowers jammed into water unarranged and still wrapped in their cellophane cones; as wrong as Aunt Baby and Aunt Trudy, Uncle Peter’s wife, sitting together on the sofa and holding hands, their legs crossed in opposite directions, their shoes shed onto the carpet beneath them; as wrong as our dark stairwell, which I climbed alone, leaving behind the living room full of people whispering and murmuring and crying; as wrong as my parents’ room, where even though it was still light out the door was closed (as wrong as that too) and where, when I cracked it ever so slightly open (wrong), I saw a body lying (wrong) in my parents’ bed, not on the left, which was my father’s side, or the right, which was my mother’s, but precisely in the center, a body, covered in a blanket and seen, as I was seeing it, severely foreshortened, like the Andrea Mantegna Christ in Famous Paintings, 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
