Hints and Guesses

Jennifer at Thursday Drive, as some of you may know, is my sister. She has recently begun to tell stories of our family. Her stories make me think of other stories, the ones that I write in my head, and of a particular problem, being what to call our stepmother. In real life, we call her by our name. Here, I may follow Jennifer’s example and call her Sue, a deceptively plain name.

While unwieldy (it works better as a book title than a nickname), I have stumbled upon a name that describes her well: Hitler with a Heart of Gold. HWAHOG. HOG for short.

Here are the stories by which she gained this name.

In late September, I ran into my aunt and uncle at a church function. Neither my church nor theirs, we were surprised to see one another.

“We’ve just come back from moving Grandma into a nursing home,” Ann said.

I’d missed making my monthly telephone call to Grandma that month, so it was really no one’s fault but my own that I didn’t know about the move. Still, I did little to quell the small explosion of anger in my chest. Couldn’t Ann have called me before the trip? Was she ever planning to call me? But the anger was useless. Grandma had broken her hip in the spring; Ann hadn’t called then, either.

Since then, Grandma had been in the hospital, and then rehab, and she’d never made the move back into her tiny senior apartment.

Grandma, it should be explained, is the mother of three daughters: Marie, Ann (who stood before me), and Sue, the stepmother. For better or worse, this was the family I’d grown up in, and like it or not, they’d always be part of me.

“She just wasn’t able to live on her own anymore,” said Ann. “We asked her to move up here with us, but she didn’t want to move away from her church and her friends.”

“What about Sue?” I asked, knowing full well Grandma would never have moved in with Sue. Still, Sue lived near Grandma, and I thought she might have tried to make a go of it.

“Sue?” Ann snorted. “She’s like Hitler, or a general.” She caught the look on my face and hastily added, “She’s better now, you know.”

Ann was right. Sue is better now. As far as I know, she no longer beats children. She no longer tells children that if they can’t sleep, they must be feeling guilty about something. She no longer makes children eat whole raw onions for telling lies.

As far as I know.

She does, however, still have a tenuous hold on the truth, and she still uses her influence to stir up family dynamics. Ann has her own reasons for keeping her relationship with Sue, and it helps that she doesn’t want to know about how Sue raised us.

“No. You said Hitler,” I replied. I’d never contradicted Ann before, and my heart pounded. She dropped her eyes, and we moved on to something else.

It was enough to say that, to bear witness to what she really said, and to know what she really meant.

Grandma didn’t last long in the nursing home. She died shortly before Thanksgiving, and I went home for the funeral. Before I left, on the road, at home—every moment I expected a telephone call telling me not to bother, as I wasn’t wanted at the funeral.

In the event, it was my father who got the telephone call—years had passed since he’d formally been her son-in-law, but they’d kept in touch, and he wanted to pay his respects.

My uncle, Ann’s husband, did the dirty deed. Sad, really—the only trouble he would have caused was entirely in their—Ann’s and Sue’s— heads.

The funeral ceremony itself was nearly anticlimactic, although I spent some time trying to figure out if certain family members (besides Jennifer and I) had been left out of the eulogy. Ann’s husband rose at the end to make a few comments and give the benediction.

“These two women [Ann and Sue] have hearts of gold,” he said, referring to their work in the previous week. My eyes and my mind boggled. Hearts of gold? The same hearts that asked my father not to attend the funeral? The same hearts that gave funeral scheduling preference to a grandson-in-law over a grandson? The same hearts that left another son-in-law out of the obituary? As for Sue, the same heart that beat children and inspired guilt where none existed?

Hitler with a Heart of Gold indeed.