Family Secrets

By John-Paul Marciano

    I was eight years old when my mother had taken my sister and I on an eight-week vacation to Germany without my father. It was an odd circumstance as it was the first time I’d been on vacation with just one of my parents. While not the end of the world, from time to time I found myself curious enough to ask why.

    Over the years, my mother always maintained we couldn’t afford it. But my father always told me it would be bad for business to close the store for eight weeks. While one could say the two stories were similar, I knew my parents well enough to figure out there was more to the story than they were telling me.

    My parents met in a German village in the American occupation zone after World War II. My father was fluent in German and had been tasked with teaching basic German to occupying American troops stationed in Western Bavaria near the city of Ulm. He was told he could get text books from a first grade teacher. That first grade teacher was my mother. They married five years later.

    I flew to Germany 20 years after the eight-week vacation for my grandmother’s funeral. My mother had died three months prior and, because he was still grieving, I talked my father into staying home. The days after the funeral were mostly spent catching up with relatives I hadn’t seen in years and learning about relatives I never knew I had.

    One of my newfound relatives was my mother’s Aunt Trudchen. While Aunt Trudchen was pleasant in a German sort of way, I found her difficult to understand. For one thing, my German was rusty. It had been five years since I had need to converse in that language. Secondly, Aunt Trudchen was a very large woman with lots of extra facial skin causing her to sound like she stuffed her mouth full of cotton.

    It was for these reasons I could only understand the odd phrase or occasional word. I tried to be polite but the entire conversation caused my eyes to glaze over. Luckily my Aunt Crystal, my mother’s youngest sister, was there to carry the conversation. One part of the conversation that stood out was when my Aunt Crystal told Aunt Trudchen that I was a little boy and probably didn’t remember. Because I didn’t know what Aunt Trudchen had said, I had absolutely no clue what it was I wasn’t supposed to remember.

    Over dinner that night, I asked my Aunt Crystal what Aunt Trudchen had said that I wouldn’t remember. She said it had to do with that vacation to Germany on which my mother took my sister and I without my father. I told her I remembered that vacation very well. We spent some time reminiscing about that vacation and I had the feeling my aunt was testing me. What changed the tenor of the conversation was when I jogged her memory regarding some details she had forgotten.

    It was at this point that I told my aunt that I always wondered why my father didn’t join us. I told her I had asked my parents but their stories didn’t make sense to me and I explained why I felt that way.

    My aunt hemmed and hawed for a while before she decided it was time to tell me the unvarnished truth. She told me a story about how my mother had been unhappy with my father for a few years prior and wanted to spend some time with her mother and sisters. They agreed he shouldn’t close his store for eight weeks and it would be better if my sister and I went with my mother. What my father didn’t know was that my mother had no intention of coming back.

    This revelation made sense to me. For months prior to the vacation my mother tried to teach German to my sister and I. She became increasingly frustrated as the two of us struggled to learn a difficult language at a faster than normal pace. Her frustration, which never made sense to me, became clear to me. If she was going to keep us in Germany we needed to speak German fluently if we were to attend school and succeed.

    I then asked my aunt why my mother decided to return to America if her plan was to stay in Germany. My aunt replied that two weeks before we returned my mother sent my sister and I to a museum with my aunts so she could talk to her mother. During that conversation my mother told her she wanted to stay in Germany. But my grandmother told her there was no longer any place for her in Germany. Her place was in America and it was her obligation to return so her children could be raised by both their mother and father.