It’s been a long time since I wrote down a heavy-duty family story. This is the beginning of one, and there are yet more to come.

This is only the first part of this one. There will be more than one more continuation.

I take a deep breath and say: Here goes:

My mother loved deeply in theory, but grudge came first before love. My mother loved her sister Tante Fanny so much, yet after Tante Fanny’s death at twenty-seven — my mother then only twenty-five –  my mother did not keep in touch with Tante Fanny’s children.

I do believe that my mother and Tante Fanny were dear close sisters. I do believe that there were times one would not buy a blouse for herself without buying one for the other.  For once, my mother’s recounting of this story was not altogether romanticizing. This was true, and without, perhaps, being too exaggerated.

There were my mother’s beloved sister’s twin daughters, Ida and Sylvia, now adults, sitting in our living-room. I’m guessing they were five or six upon their mother’s death. I don’t know where Francis was at this time, the boy delivered before his mother died.

We had a huge oval rounded photograph of Tante Lena, my mother’s other sister, with one of the twins. Who can say which one. The twin was huddled against Tante Lena.

Now, you understand, my mother was convinced that her beloved sister, Tante Fanny — Gitte Fagel, after whom I was named — had died from a vile venereal disease contracted from her husband. His last name was M–. Now I cannot remember his first name, though I should remember it for I had heard his name cursed enough.

My mother’s fury at M–, Tante Fanny’s allegedly straying husband, exceeded my mother’s love for Tante Fanny’s beloved children left behind, and, furthermore, in my opinion, her love for her beloved sister even though after fifty years, my mother still cried her heart out for the memory of Tante Fanny.

The young motherless twins, Ida and Sylvia, had known their mother. Francis never knew his mother. And you realize that the three children’s last name was also M–.  From my mother’s point of view, all the M–s in the world were the dirt of the Earth.

What might it have meant to those motherless children to know the love of their mother’s sister, their aunt Sophie — what might it have meant to them to hear stories about their mother from the lips of their mother’s beloved sister Sophie, their Tante Sophie, my mother, Sora Hashke. We will never know what it would have meant — or not meant.

I believe that M–, the father, had moved away from Springfield, to New Jersey I think, with his children. The twins were well into adulthood when they came to Springfield for one visit. They came to our house. They sat in our living-room.

WAIT, NO, they hadn’t moved to New Jersey after their mother’s death. They had lived in New Jersey while their mother was alive. Now I remember. Of course. Their having lived in New Jersey all the while is basic to the story.

According to my mother’s oft-told story, Tante Fanny had come to visit her for a week. It was during this fateful week, so my mother’s story went, a woman selling apples had come to the door of the lonely husband’s apartment, and, when the apple-selling woman had left, the husband had contracted a vile venereal disease which he passed on to his wife who subsequently died in childbirth giving birth to the baby boy Francis. Every time my mother mentioned the name M–, she added “May he rot in Hell,” for what my mother, true or false, felt he did to my mother’s most dear sister, Tante Fanny, Gitte Fagel, Golden or Good Bird whom I was named after. And my mother would spit to make the curse more powerful.

So, at this visit in our living-room, my mother went on about how much she loved the twin daughters, Ida and Sylvia, Tante Fanny’s children. The expression on the twin’s faces said it all. My mother loved them? When? Where? How? In what way?  My mother loved them in her heart and never saw them, never called them, never anything them?

Sitting on a maroon couch, one of the daughters called my mother on it. I don’t know whether it was Ida or Sylvia. How would I know, for they were identical twins.

I don’t remember what words the twin who spoke up said. But I do remember my mother’s defending her love for them. How absurd it was to my mother that they would think she didn’t love them. “What I wunsch for you,” she said. “What I wish for you.” As if wishes were horses.

I know my mother hated the children’s vile father M– with all her heart. I can vouch for that. That was clear. Yet when it came to her love for Tante Fanny’s children, my heart sank — in my heart, I could only agree with the twin daughter that my mother’s love for her beloved sister’s children was nowhere to be seen.

To be continued…