The Interruption

I heard a story at my great-aunt’s place that I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?,” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never before had occasion to meet and whom I doubt I will meet again, explained over coffee (and after the whitefish salad was served, and after I took off my funeral heels, and while we sat watching the boats that were sailing along the lake, through the great, paned windows of my great-aunt’s apartment where she had passed so many years in bed alone—for the most part alone) how it was that our great-aunt came to be born in Chicago.

“Our story begins in Poland,” I said.

“Where?” my sister said.

“You heard me,” I said. I was walking through my living room.

“Where? Where in Poland? Was it the city where the cousins were buried?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” I said. “It wasn’t that side.”

“I know but—”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Is that your line?”

“They’ll go away. So anyway, our Great Aunt X’s mother was born in Poland, but fell in love with a man who was German. She followed him—”

“Uh, oh,” my sister said.

“You know,” I said. “But when she arrived, the lover deserted her. Very sorry story. And so, at least according to the cousin—”

“What cousin?”

“I told you,” I said. “So rather than go back to Poland alone, she stayed as a tutor or governess—whatever they called it—”
“In Germany?” my sister said.

“I said that,” I said. I put a book on the shelf. I was straightening up as I was speaking to my sister. “A friend of the family played the violin—a star of sorts. Anyway, he fell in love—”

“Aha,” my sister said.

“Not yet,” I said. “She didn’t care. He played for her. He courted her. Nothing could move her.”

“But,” my sister said.

“Finally, the story goes, she agreed to marry him only on condition that he take her to America—Chicago, where her sister had settled.”

“And?” my sister said.

“This was all before the war. Meanwhile, the cousin said—meanwhile, the lover who’d left her married someone else and had a family with her. Of course, you know. The lover, the children—none of them got out. Because the camps … are you there?”

“Your phone.”

“It will stop in a minute, I think,” I said.

“That’s horrible,” my sister said.

“Listen, there ought to be a moral to the story, or anyway a point.”

“Like what?” my sister said. “God has a plan? What kind of a—”

“God?”

“Plan.”

Hang on,” I said.

“But anyway, did that man—” my sister said.

“If you change your name,” I said. “The things they don’t tell you—”

“Don’t interrupt. The father. The husband. Aunt X’s father. Did he, when he came to Chicago, continue to play?”

“What?” I said.

“The instrument.”

“Well,” I said. “Great Aunt X could sing, I’m told. Although I never heard her. But what I was saying—”

“What are you saying?” my sister said.

“There is someone who apparently really needs to reach me.”

My sweater was itching.

“Wait,” she said. “Just tell me this. Who do you think she loved in the end?”

“Who?” I said. “Great Aunt X? Or great-great—”

“The mother.”

“I’ve really got to go,” I said. “What are you asking? The one who broke her heart or the one who saved her life?”

“Which?” my sister said. “And how do you know that one of them didn’t do both?”

“Or maybe her child.”

“Or maybe her sister,” my sister said.

My hand was on the button. “Forgive me,” I said.