Tante Fanny

Tante Fanny’s Jewish name was Gitte Fagel. That is my Jewish name too. It means Golden Bird or Good Bird.

You remember my mother was born in Russia, the youngest of seven girls, and her father died soon after she was born, and life was hard.

Tante Fanny was two years older than my mother. When Tante Fanny was nine years old, she was so miserable, she tried to drown herself in the river.

I have also told you that my mother held grudges. My mother couldn’t let go of anything easily. She blamed Tante Fanny’s unhappiness on Russia. My mother never forgave Russia.

My mother and Tante Fanny were very close. When they both immigrated to the United States and lived in New Jersey, neither one would buy a blouse without buying a blouse for the other. There was no sister in the whole world as good as Tante Fanny.

Tante Fanny married a Mackler. I don’t remember her husband's first name. Tante Fanny and her husband had twin daughters. I cannot remember their names. This whole story happened long before I was born. It has to be so, for the custom was that you would name a baby only after someone who had died, and I was named after Tante Fanny. Although Tante Fanny's story took place before my time, how well I remember my mother's stories about her beloved sister.

At some point in this story, my mother had moved from Newark, New Jersey, to Thompsonville, Connecticut. This was when my mother was married to her first husband. Tante Fanny and her husband and twin daughters still lived in New Jersey.

One summer Tante Fanny left her husband alone for a week and came to visit my mother. My mother later regretted that she had invited Tante Fanny and that Tante Fanny had come.

Here’s the story: While Tante Fanny was visiting my mother, a woman selling apples knocked at the door of Tante Fanny’s apartment. One thing led to another, and the woman left Tante Fanny’s husband with apples and a vile venereal disease.

Soon after, Tante Fanny became pregnant with a boy, Francis. Due to the venereal disease she had caught from her husband, Tante Fanny died in childbirth. She was twenty-seven years old, my mother twenty-five.

My mother's grief over Tante Fanny’s death was so great and she cried so much that she got consumption and was in a sanitarium. While she was in the sanitarium, my mother asked her husband to bring her an apple the next Sunday when he came, but he didn’t bring her an apple. My mother felt he didn’t want to spend the money because he was sure she was going to die anyway. It was then that my mother vowed that when she got well, she would leave her husband. She never did forgive him for not bringing her an apple.

My mother never forgave Tante Fanny’s husband either. Not in the slightest. In my mother's eyes, Tante Fanny's husband was a murderer and a fiend.

Somehow my mother’s vendettas strengthened her. She fed off them. They sustained her life force, as if without such vindictiveness, she would shrivel. Her self-righteousness was so bad that anyone who bore the name Mackler automatically became a vile evil person.

As much as my mother proclaimed her love for Tante Fanny, her resentment of the man who had murdered Tante Fanny and who lived while Tante Fanny was dead was greater than her love for her now deceased sister. My mother never was an aunt to the two motherless twin daughters or to Francis who never knew his mother. How could my mother have been an aunt when she would not speak to or even look at their father, Tante Fanny’s killer? My mother cried endless streams of tears for Tante Fanny, and yet neglected the children of the sister that she so loved.

Even though I knew at a very early age to take my mother’s stories with a grain of salt, this story nevertheless had its repercussions.

As ridiculous as it may seem, that I was named after Tante Fanny made me fear that somehow I would have that awful disease. I don’t really remember the fear so much as the relief when I never did have it.

There is worse. I was not a big-hearted person.

I had rescued the family portraits from the basement of my mother’s house, including Tante Fanny's portrait.

My cousin Francis, then married and a father himself, came over and asked me with a sweet smile if he could have the portrait of his mother, the oval-framed beveled glass portrait of his mother that you see a photo of above, and I said no. Firmly, just like that, I said no. Oh, my, how like my mother I was. After all, Francis was a Mackler.

Years later, after my mother had died, my sister Eleanor said to me, “You didn’t really believe those stories Mommy told, did you? Tante Fanny never had venereal disease. She died of childbirth fever. It was rampant in those days. That’s all there was to it.”

The world my mother inhabited was a world of ogres and innocent victims. And yet it seems that sometimes the ogres my mother made were the innocent victims.