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  • Enchantments
  • Robert Schirmer (bio)

After their father had died, and after they had buried him in a private ceremony while standing around a hole dug deep into the clinging earth, Dora’s sons flocked down upon her, in grief more than anger, and asked her to account for decades of tormenting their father, of making him miserable, of reducing his life to the ignominy of having to prove himself worthy of her love over and over again. Why was it that, in life, he had never been able to please her?

Her sons did not confront her at the grave. She had raised them too well for such public exhibitions. No, they waited until the family had gathered back at the house for finger sandwiches, cake, and red wine, all of which she had diligently prepared for them. Even then the boys did not rebuke her immediately. They sat side by side on the sofa, three abreast, their suit jackets unbuttoned, and drank their first two glasses of wine in solemn earnest: it was that tricky third glass that loosened their tongues. They glared at their mother with stricken eyes and demanded an accounting.

“He worked so hard,” they insisted, “for your love and respect, and you never seemed able to give it. Or willing.”

At first they spoke matter-of-factly, so they didn’t sound as harsh as they might have. Dora still felt the sting of their words, the implication of her own wrongdoing. “You remember only part of the story,” she reminded them. “You forget how it was when you were very young.”

Her sons remained unswayed.

“We remember enough.”

“Too much, actually.”

“At any rate you could have given him a break. Mother, you were too hard on him. He thought you hated him. Did you? What had he ever done to deserve that?”

“Or maybe not hate. Resentment then? You can tell us. There’s no more reason to hide. Maybe you resented us, too, the only woman in a house knee-thick with men.”

She listened to the voices of her sons as they collided against [End Page 229] and interrupted one another, yet still acted as a single voice, collectively remembering only what suited them, the details that matched the story they had settled on long ago. How strange to see them forged together by their selective memory when they’d had so many disagreements among them over the years. Briefly Dora looked at their wives, thinking perhaps she would find some understanding in their eyes, some female solidarity; but they sat meek as does on chairs set away from the sofa and the assaulting line of men, and gingerly clutched their wine glasses. Her sons had all married decorous women—women, in short, that bore little resemblance to how they remembered Dora.

“Or was it his hand? That crippled hand of his that you hated?”

“Was that it, mother? Is that the real story?”

“So unlucky, his life. Hell, if his luck rubs off on us, we’re cursed.”

Luck and curses. Dora’s heart contracted, as she listened to it all so carelessly spoken. Almost, almost she wanted to tell them the full story and so unburden herself, of how far she had once gone to alter her life with Nathan; but she had not spoken of any of this in more than forty years, and so the floodgates were difficult to open now. Besides how could she confide in her three restless sons when she could spot Nathan’s image in each of their faces, trying to pry from her a delayed and final apology.

“There’s one more bottle of wine in the kitchen,” she said. “I suppose, if someone would care to open it . . .”

If the boys had been more sympathetic, more receptive to her side of the matter, Dora might have told them I was so young back then, although she only seemed young in retrospect. At the time, 1955, she’d been thirty-three years old with all three sons already born. She might have reminded them of the picture of their father they’d since forgotten—the reckless and hardheaded roughneck, frequently abusive...

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