The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn

and Cecilia would think, “She’s imagining her own self curtsying in her toe shoes before a huge audience with
her mother
glowing in the front row, watching her on a large stage in an elegant theater. Perhaps Paris.”
    When the soldier shouted, “Women to the left,” “Men to the right,” they all stood stunned. Then quickly, the same soldier, not seeing that they had not moved, yelled for “Doctors” and “Twins.” It was only then that Miriam awoke from the shock of everything that was happening and told Leah and Lettie to go to that line. Afterward, she went to the line for women and Joseph to the one for men. And there ended the least of it—Miriam’s dream of a Pavlova or even an Isadora in the family. For even then, everyone knew that however innovative Isadora was, she was a far lesser talent.
    Lettie wanted so much that her only child, her only daughter, become a dancer. But Cecilia eluded the gift, almost refused to nurture it. She supposed it was possible, too, the gift eluded her. Somehow that was more difficult to accept. But after talking with her sister-in-law Esther and learning how Esther’s
mother, Eva, had pushed and pushed at Adele and Esther to be famous, and seeing the terrible effect this had on Adele, Lettie let go a little more easily of her dream for Cecilia.
    She finally concluded that Cecilia’s becoming a poet was nice. Seeing her standing up there with her words did please her. She just imagined with this daughter she would be able to leave a different kind of legacy. In this country she got greedy. Once, even having a lovely daughter was more than she could have ever envisioned, could have believed would ever happen
…
    While searching for a special nightgown her mother had requested during her last hospital stay—in her last days—Cecilia happened on her mother’s diary hidden deep beneath her soft nightwear. She did not feel guilty when she broke its lock. She had been pushed out of too many rooms too many times, while her mother had talked with the others. And now, especially, she needed to know everything her mother refused to speak about with her. She needed to know all she could about the mother she was losing. She grabbed at anything, as if that would allow her to hold on to her mother a little longer.
    And there it was, there in the diary, that she found more complete answers. Answers to many of the questions that had barbed her mind since she was a child. She took it home and went into a small walk-in closet and sat for hours reading it. Of course, she had overheard some things about a soldier, a bad man, a German, but when her mother spoke of him with the others, she would hesitate and either never quite finish her sentences or grow too quiet for Cecilia to hear.
    A few of the sections she copied over in her own hand on long, yellow sheets of paper, as if in rewriting this, she were allowing herself to become her mother, whichbegan to scare her. Consequently, she decided to break her mother’s lines differently than in the diary, shaping them to look more like poems. It was familiar and created a little distance as to what she was doing, what she was taking in, sort of like when she created the pseudonym Herr M.
    Feb. 1
    When they grabbed my satchel away
    from me, I was left
    holding just the string that had helped
    to keep it shut.
    I tied the string around my hair
    making of it a small bow
    at the top. This kept my hair out of my face,
    for the wind was impossibly harsh.
    That day
    Mother had made Leah and me go to the line for “Twins.”
    I could tell she thought this a good thing—I could tell
    she thought we’d be given special attention. I knew
    my mother’s face so well.
    Karl saw us in that line—saw me. He ignored Leah.
    He came toward me. He came very close
    and touched the string, the bow, my hair.
    He chose me. Suddenly,
    I turned around and found Leah
    had disappeared.
    I