A wave of nausea washed over me. Sweat began to run down my face even though the room was air-conditioned.

"How long did it go on?"

"I don't know."

"Months?"

"Something like that."

"And you were never frightened?"

"No. I was very sexual. I was always thinking about sex."

"Yes, well I can see why." But my sarcasm was lost on her. She obviously didn't see how her father's behavior provoked her sexual thoughts. Being the youngest, she must've felt favored by his attention.

"And you never told your sisters?"

"No. We didn't talk about such things. You don't understand. In those days, people didn't talk about these things they way they do now. They didn't make such a big thing out of it. My downstairs neighbor, Mr. Walshon, was always touching us. You couldn't pass by him without his brushing up against you."

"You mean when you were older?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's different from your own father. And being a child," I said.

"You don't understand. He probably saw all these little girls running around naked all the time."

I couldn't believe that she thought of naked 4-year-olds as being seductive. I couldn't believe she was defending him. "What would you have done if I told you about it when I was 4?"

"I probably would've told you to stay away from him." I wanted to shake her. She was supposed to protect me.

"You wouldn't have said anything to him about it? You wouldn't have confronted him?"

"Well," she hesitated. "If you were frightened, I guess I would have." Her voice was meek, and I could tell that she would have done nothing. Even now, in retrospect, she didn't feel badly enough to fake outrage. The air around me was close. I looked at an etching on the wall of an old man with a beard, a book on his lap. His skin was wrinkled. When I bought it I thought the old man looked thoughtful and kind. Now the face looked as if he were hiding something; now I saw him as an incestuous Old World Jew.

"And your father never did that?" she asked. Had she lost her mind? The woman who was talking to me was someone else.

"No!" I said. Did she realize that my father was her husband? Was she getting confused? "You mean, did your husband, Lew, my father, do this? No!" Would she have felt more justified if my father had been like hers? My head was spinning. I trusted my father completely. When I was 8 I'd loved to read to him. He'd lie down next to me in my bed and I'd lie in the crook of his arm, feeling the thick mat of hair on his chest beneath his shirt. I would read something he liked from Reader's Digest, "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met." Eventually, he'd fall asleep to the sound of my voice, and I'd shake him awake or climb over him to get out of bed. I thought of my own daughter and how I'd always trusted my husband with her.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

For weeks I could think of nothing else but my grandfather. I watched home movies from my childhood. For a living, Zeyde had been a shohet, a ritual slaughterer, raising and killing chickens in the prescribed kosher way. I saw footage of him killing a chicken, gripping it beneath its head and glassy eye, then slitting its neck and dripping the blood into an old tin basin. Then, there he was for my first birthday, standing next to my mother. She lifted my little party dress to show off to the camera the crinoline beneath. I felt my stomach turn. My mother was beautiful, in a taffeta blouse with a spray of beads descending from her neck in concentric circles. She never took her eye from the camera as my grandfather kissed her three times, on the lips, the cheek, and forehead. My father stood smiling behind my mother and after a bit I lifted my hands up to him and he picked me up.

I thought of my female cousins, the daughters of my mother's sisters. One by one I telephoned them and told them what happened. My cousin Stephanie was six years older than I and lived two blocks away over the years we were growing up. "Oh my God," she said. "I never told anyone this. But Zeyde did it to me too. I was 10 or 11. Just developing. I was alone in the house with him. It was summer. It was in the little room. He went for my breasts with both hands and then he slid down the front of my dress and started to go beneath the skirt. I ran away. My mother came home and I was crying. I told her I was afraid but didn't tell her why. She thought it was because I was worried he'd have an asthma attack, and I let her believe that. Afterwards I cried and refused whenever she wanted to leave me alone with him. I let her believe that it was because of his asthma."

"Why didn't you tell her the truth?"

"To protect her, I guess. I must've thought it was somehow my fault. Zeyde was beyond reproach."

I couldn't stop talking to my friends about my mother. On the phone, in restaurants or cars, I told the story of my phone conversation again and again. I became listless and couldn't concentrate on anything. A friend wrote to me about another friend who was bereft because her mother died. As I was writing a condolence note saying I was sorry about her loss, I realized how much I envied her grief. If only my mother had died. Weeks went by and she didn't call me. Finally, a month later, I realized I couldn't keep avoiding her and needed to confront her again. I telephoned and told her caretaker when I'd come by.

I let myself into my mother's apartment. In the foyer on a pedestal was the plaster cast of my head a cousin had done of me when I was a teenager. My mother had touched up the eyes with gold leaf. I remembered the straws in my nose, the wet plaster hardening around my head, the panicky feeling of being buried alive.

My mother sat in her wheelchair impeccably groomed in a gray sweater set, a necklace of gray beads mixed with pearls and garnet-colored crystals around her neck. I refused her offer of food. She would not look me in the eye but she lifted her hands to show off her a gold ring, and slim fingers tapering off into long nails painted red.

"I'm still very angry about Zeyde," I said.

"What do you want me to do? Dig up his grave and yell at him?"

I ran my hand through my hair, accidentally flipping a section over more to the left.

"You look a thousand times better when your hair is combed that way," she said. I felt like punching her. I persisted. "It's not just about him. It's about you."

"What can I say?" Her voice was tinged with anger. I held her eyes in my stare, holding her accountable. "All right," she said. "If I had been there it wouldn't have happened." I leaned back in my chair and felt a shift in the balance of the universe. This was an apology. Wings of white hair stiff with hairspray framed her head and made her skin look more fragile, the wrinkles gathered in soft folds around her nose, a blue vein on the skin, translucent. She was an old woman and I was not going to change her. But I had not let her go to her grave with my secret or her own. I was quiet for a bit and let myself feel sorry for the little girl that had been my mother, the child who was abused by her father but had needed to protect him in order to feel loved. My mother sat with me in silence. Then she said, "You used to be so agreeable."

I smiled faintly. "I know," I said. "But not anymore. Not anymore."

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