My father was quite literal and did not embellish his stories as my mother certainly did. Except for the story about how my father saved my life, his stories did not have endings. They did not have climaxes. They did not have drama. They just went on and on until I feel asleep.

My mother’s stories, on the other hand, were about gypsies and kidnappings. I remember one about a little girl with a spectacular singing voice who was kidnapped by gypsies. The mother never stopped searching for her daughter. Years later she heard a young gypsy woman singing in the streets. The voice was so beautiful that the mother knew it was her daughter, and there was an idyllic reunion.

My mother loved stories like about Stella Dallas, who sacrificed her own life for her daughter. Am I right, was it Stella Dallas who did not want to hold her daughter back from a life in society, and so, to the mother’s heartbreak and self-sacrifice, she pretended that she was the housemaid? Can you imagine?

To my mother,  all mothers were good. Stepmothers were a different thing. My mother also told stories about wicked stepmothers, yet I seem to remember only the stories about mothers who were the good queens.

My mother was melodrama personified. My brother Sid and my father would smile about my mother’s stories. They called her stories melodramies.

It’s only now, more years later than I want to count, that I wonder how literal was the story my father told me about before I was born. I have to tell you that I embellished his story a little bit as I told it to you — I made it up about the three doors at the top of the long stairs. I am my mother’s daughter, too, and so I had to add a little color.

But here’s where I wonder about how literal the story was as my father told it. I don’t doubt that my father stopped my mother. But my father said he left the store and followed my mother. How could my father have left the store? If my mother wasn’t there, who was there for my father to leave the store with? Who would have waited on customers? My mother and father were the only two people who worked in the store. Would my father have left the store unattended? Only now do I think of these questions. I never doubted a word of the story when my father told it.

And never had my parents ever said a word about having help in the store, but maybe they did. Or maybe this is the only story my father ever told that was more symbolic than literal. Or maybe my father did leave the store without anyone there, so destined was he to save me.