Only two pages long, but isn’t the title already a story unto itself? The man is never mentioned. Indeed, the story is mostly about what is not there. The aunt refuses to tell the narrator about the terrible things the grandmother has seen. The grandmother and the father tell the aunt she has not lived. The horrors of war and revolution flare up in a sentence or two, go on humming in the background. I cannot separate this story from ‘Conversation with My Father.” I think of it as the matriarchal counterpoint. The final lines: “My grandmother said to all our faces, Why do you laugh? But my aunt said, Laugh!”
Collected in Later the Same Day, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1985
A Personal Anthology 