The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn Page A

all over her head.
    Cecilia only has one moth hole—right at the top of her head. The crown. She calls it her Seventh Chakra. Believes the light of God is able to pour right into that spot, allowing her to be filled with all the magic that the universe has to offer. Yes, Cecilia does have a way of turning a gross neurotic habit into something poetic, odd, lovely, and disturbing all at the same time.
    Most unfortunately, Cecilia showed her newly created spot to Cecily when Cecily was seven. Under the bushes next to their three-flat apartment, the one my father bought for the Slaughter brothers when they began to marry, the eight year old Cecilia spread her hair and bowed her head to Cecily and asked her if she’d like to kiss it.
“Kiss it?”
Years later, Cecily would tell anyone who would listen, “Thank goodness she has an outlet with her poetry, otherwise she’d end up quite crazy, be institutionalized like Grandmother Slaughter.”
    My father would boast to his friends that the building where Uncles Emmanuel, Abraham, and Samuel lived cost him “next to nothing,” adding, “Of course, I fixed it upbetter than the other properties I own.” Then he would laugh. After marrying Esther, Uncle Benjamin moved into his mother-in-law’s apartment, which was a half a block away. The two buildings were almost identical—each with dark, chipped bricks, a patch of grass in front, and a dirt alley in the back that ran the length of a half mile. I would always feel guilty when I visited, given our mansion in the suburbs, situated on an acre of well cared for lawn.
    Even now I can easily bring forth the smells that permeated the narrow, poorly lit hallways of those two buildings, the scents coming from those small, clean kitchens—cabbage soup, a chicken, tongue boiling in a large old pot. And, unfortunately, the sounds, most especially the shouts—Uncle Emmanuel and Aunt Sonya yelling at each other and, down the street, Great Aunt Eva screaming at her daughter Adele, or
about
her, to anyone who would listen.
    Of course, each brother’s goal was to move to the suburb where we lived, and each eventually did achieve this. By the time I was fourteen, Cecilia, Celine, Cecily, and Celie all lived within several miles of me. But this did not lessen my shame, for within our mansion my father would mock what he called their “matchbox houses.”
    Growing up we would hear her story over and over—how Idyth Slaughter could not adjust to America and left Cecil to go back to Hungary because she missed her country too much, only to return to him because she missed him more and all of this before she turned seventeen. She finally lost him when she was twenty-nine.
    Cecily tells her therapists that Cecil, being much older, must have been both a
great lover
and a father figure to her. “Can you imagine the to-do they make when I say such athing?” she says to Celine, who takes such delight in this as she does all things sexual.
    Through the years her therapists have appeared, sequentially, in their dull, cramped, stuffy offices, scribbling with their pencils—not that they have helped her. However, Cecily’s internist insists that she talk with someone because when he asks her “How are you?” she always says the truth, “terrible,” and it is not about the physical. Cecily, like each of us, has many issues. It was unavoidable given the atmosphere created by the too many adults that hung over us—their thick breath as heavy as the smoke that covered us from their cigarettes—their weighted, buckled histories and agendas continuously smothering us.
    Listening to how handsome Cecil was, of his great charisma and, of course, his brilliance—how there was no one like him, and that is why Idyth got sick after she lost him—we all agreed, was tiresome. Anyway, it has almost become a silent story. Cecil and Idyth now lie side by side at