Author: Dawn Raffel

My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache.

“What are you thinking?” my grandmother said.

The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.)

“A beauty,” he said.

He said it was true, the story he told: “Ven I vas a boy”—before the wars, before the influenza. He said Sully was owned by a neighbor he’d had. “A beautiful mare,” he said to me. “Magnificent. The apple of the village. The neighbor vas poor, of course.” At last and in time and at very great length, he was persuaded, this neighbor, with a marvelous regret, my grandfather said, to part with her, to sell her to a traveling show.

He missed this horse.

One day in the spring of the following year, the traveling show traveled back to the village. Everyone went, my grandfather said. Every last soul who could scrape the amount to pay for a ticket. “And vot do you think?” He raised his hands, reddened from labor. “Sully broke rank the minute she saw her old master again. A plume, she had. A feather. She ran to him, ran out of the ring.” He saw through the fence posts, my grandfather did. “He threw his arms around her neck! But he could not afford to buy her back.”

“And?” I said, though I had heard it before, and more than once, and asked again.

“The horse collapsed that very night.”

He was old, my grandfather. “A plume this high.”

“Why are you telling a story like this to a child?” said my grandmother, when all was done, as was her way.

She served us cake, golden.

I had a new question.

My grandfather chewed. “Vell,” he said. There was no one alive in the village, he said, not anymore, at least not that he knew. The man did not get out, he said. “So far as I know.”

“You know, there are people,” my grandmother said, as she captured a crumb, “who eat to live.”

“Ve live to eat,” he said.

She gave him a napkin.

He died when he was very old. He’d stopped speaking English.

“What is this?” the night nurse said. “This language of his?”

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.