“People talked in front of me…”

People talked in front of me but not to me.  They whispered behind their palms.  They halted their words mid-sentence. 

Best not to speak about it, pretend it wasn't happening. . . .  

I never said a word.  Of course, not a word was said to me.

❧ ❧ ❧

My father was a doctor, surely he knew all about it.

My father knew things that other people didn’t, carried around a storehouse of knowledge, secrets in his head.  These weren’t the kinds of secrets you told your friend or your friend told you—things you weren’t supposed to tell.   They were things other people could know, might know, but generally didn’t–didn’t know the way he did.

My father taught me to orient a chart by the points on a compass.  He introduced me to the earth–what it looks like and how it got that way.  He revealed marvels of climate and land.  He could list the conquests of Charlemagne and name the highest European peaks.  He recalled the distance from Berlin where he grew up to Freiburg where he studied, and what time the trains departed and how long was the journey. 

My father talked of the distant past as if it were yesterday.  He remembered the birthdays of the aunts and uncles and cousins on the family tree he spread out on the living-room rug, and liked to speak their names as if I knew them.  He kept the letters they sent from the far-flung places they had fled to, written in handwriting you don’t see any more, certainly not now, handwriting of another language and continent and age.  He kept the stamps, taught my brother how to soak them off the envelopes and put them into albums. 

But he didn't like our questions, mine and my brother's.  Especially mine.  Robbie was older.  I learned to stop asking them. 

No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling.

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