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(“Hier maman est mort” Albert Camus, The Stranger)

Yesterday was the 27^th anniversary of my mother’s death and although it’s haunted me for more than a quarter of a century, I’ve never written down the story of how she died. Although it took many years to be able to articulate the details, by now I have told the story to many friends.  They always seem to find it shocking.  This is the story I tell.

For years my mother had been telling us that she was “not long for this world.” That we were not going to have her around for much longer.  That we should be sure that “daddy’s second wife” did not get her jewelry.  

I never believed her—It just seemed so manipulative, a typical Jewish mother guilt-trip ploy. And in fact, in an opening monologue, the protagonist in a novel by Marge Piercy tells how her mother always said she was going to die soon and in fact was still going strong at 80-something.

However.  The summer that my mother was 61 her blood pressure was skyrocketing out of control – 240/140 I remember one reading.  That was the summer I went to London to do my dissertation research.  She died about three weeks – maybe only two – after I got back to the states after a really idyllic trip.

September 6 – it was a Labor Day.  Monday.  I was having a hard time dealing with the day. In fact, I remember wondering if I was going to be able to pull it together.  That weekend some really good friends had gotten married. An Italian-Jewish wedding—lots of food, drink, partying for two nights. We – my future and now ex hub and I—were part of the wedding party.  We had danced into the wee hours the night before.  I remember that walking back to the car I lost the heel off one of my silver party shoes.  Although I didn’t think of it again until well into the week after I had returned to Ithaca from New York and the funerary events.  

So. I was sitting on the toilet, holding my head in my hands when the phone rang. My future spouse and subsequent ex answered it, talked for a minute, and called – Mara, get off the toilet and come talk to your father.  I picked up the phone, said Hi Dad, what’s up?  Mom died this morning, he said. Just like that.  

At first the best I could muster was a feeble, oh.  Not –what the fuck…. Or you gotta be kidding. …. But just an oh.  However, I collected myself enough to ask my father to tell me how it happened.

Now — although I was almost 29, I was still essentially a child. I really didn’t know much about life, I only barely had an adult’s perspective. In terms of my interactions with both my parents I was the kid, they were the adults.  Nonetheless, despite my fundamentally disempowered state, I knew I needed to get the story out of my father as fully as I could as quickly as I could. My sister and I had not yet begun calling him the Denial King. But I suppose on one level I knew him to be just that. And I knew that if I didn’t get him to tell me the story in specific terms right away, I might lose the opportunity to learn what had happened forever.

This is what he told me.  About two in the morning my father heard my mother get up and –perhaps – fumble around in the closet on her side of the bed. Then he heard a thunk as she collapsed to the floor.  He got up and put a pillow under her head, and then went back to sleep.  When he awoke at 6:30 she was still lying there on the floor. But now she was dead.

This sends most of the people with whom I’ve shared the tale during the past 27 years over the edge.  You mean she might still be alive today if he had dialed 9-1-1, they exclaim. No shit.

But it was even worse than that.  Because there was a practical nurse asleep in that same house, not more than 20 feet away.  There to be on call in case my grandmother needed help during the night– my mother’s mother who had lived with my parents since shortly before I had been born, but who was now in a decline, although my mother staunchly refused to even consider sending her to a nursing home.  Not only did my father not call an ambulance – he didn’t even call for help from the nurse sleeping in the next room.

There’s more.  The death certificate reads occlusive coronary sclerosis.  Which certainly sounds plausible, given my mother’s ill state of health – and checkered health history.  Her galloping aforementioned high blood pressure, something like 240/140 during the summer before her death. Her cardiac vulnerability – first heart attack at 43, at least two other episodes prior to her death.  After all – at 61 she had been retired on disability for 4 years. And she had been having a bad summer. Along with the out-of-control high blood pressure was chronic diarrhea. And stress caused by my aging grandmother’s failing state of health and – really – by her presence in the house.

However.  There’s a good possibility that my mother’s death was not really a natural one, after all, despite the convincing evidence of her chronically poor health, which had surely worsened in the months preceding her death.  When going through her desk later that fall I came upon an index card filled with her writing. On one side she has a list labeled Pro on the left and Con on the right.  On the other side of the card she has written Possible Solutions.  For Pro she writes: 1. Kids will get rid of me fast effectively – Phidippides. [just went to look up the reference and isn’t it just like my mother to cite a person who is not in the encyclopedia, not in the book of quotations, not even in a book of Greek literature in translation.] 2. Pain – I have so many things wrong with me – probably die of stroke anyhow – worse yet – live after one 3.  Morty would get rid of me and my mother at one fell stroke Free could be happy  4.  Too unhappy – just can’t face it – Why bother? Life is worth living and suffering for.

The Cons: 1. Effect on kids – bad at present – Would blame M[orty] 2. Love life – or try to when happy  3. Waste – could still be useful 4.  Not right – looks like spite instead of despair  5.  What would happen to R[osie –her mother]? – Yes but this kind of living is worse than death.

Possible solutions:  1. Commit suicide – try anyhow like night of EJ’s party  2. Try to get Morty to find out just why and when he became so hostile (Impossible) 3.  Make up a good reason for R to move out – why? Tell her about M’s feelings?  4.  Let M go live in Manhattan and walk to work – Stay here. Maybe he can find nice rich young woman healthy  5.  Better yet, get rid of her and me together – Car accident?  6.  Just give up and stop trying – How can you you jerk 7.  Try again – Nah – it will never be!

A sobering document to say the least…. (in fact, for 27 years I’ve kept it close at hand in a top drawer in my own desk). And one that clearly seems to indicate that she had felt despair with her situation and contemplated a deliberate death by her own hand. Although admittedly it’s undated – could be from any time, buried as it was amongst an assortment of letters, lists, the usual desktop detritus.  

There never was an autopsy. My father didn’t want one, and at that time my sister and I would have been incapable of over-riding his strongly asserted preference – if we had even been capable of conceptualizing that perhaps one would be needed, or would help us to understand things in the future. And I’ve been told that the cause of death –“occlusive coronary sclerosis”—really just means that her heart stopped. Like – as the kids would say – duh.   But she certainly possessed the means for self-destruction.  Tucked in a shoebox on the shelf in her closet was a veritable pharmacopoeia. Among the nitroglycerine, the meprobamate, the tetracyline, was more than enough seconal to send her into the next world.  Did we throw the seconal down the drain? – my sister and I did spend an afternoon dumping drugs — or do I remember my father telling me that he did it before he called for the ambulance to come and take my mother’s body away?  

Regardless – he recounted that he thought he had heard her rummaging around in the closet before she fell.  So he—as I – was aware that she possibly might have dosed herself  with seconal just prior to her demise.  But what difference should that have made?  Wouldn’t one feel just as strong a sense of urgency – if not even more poignantly — to call an ambulance if you thought someone you loved, or even just mildly liked, had just taken a handful of barbiturates?

What we have, then, is a double whammy.  My father let my mother die out of negligence.  And my mother might very well have committed suicide.

Seems as if there are at least two stories here.  My mother’s. And my father’s.  

Although of course there are always more than two stories. There’s their story – how they got from the loving couple who used to take walks in the park and read poetry to each other to the embattled state they were in for at least the last ten years of their marriage.  There’s my grandmother’s story – the young widow whose doctor husband died in the flu epidemic of 1918, leaving her with two young children; who went back to teaching school, held two positions and, to make ends meet, had to live with her parents and unmarried sister. Who, after they were grown, and she was finally able to get her own apartment, was diagnosed with colon cancer and survived, but came to live with her daughter and son-in-law, just prior to the birth of their first child, yours truly. And of course there’s my story.  How when my mother died two weeks before my twenty-ninth birthday  I was still something of a child, living in a state of prolonged adolescence, even though I had already left marriage #1 and was working towards my Ph. D. And although, little did I know, that very soon my state of irresponsible innocence was going to end abruptly and definitively.

My mother’s story. She died a bitter unhappy person who felt that her life’s work had been in vain.  This in spite of her thirty year career as a high school English teacher dubbed by so many of her former students as the best teacher they had ever had.  She did not always want to be an English teacher, maybe she never wanted to be an English teacher. Perhaps at one point she had wanted to follow in her long-deceased father’s footsteps and go to medical school. And then later, as a high school student, she had wanted to be a writer. It is this ambition that she took to college when she graduated high school at 15 ½ .  But as the older child of the poor widow she believed she needed to be able to pay her own way as quickly and as predictably as possible.  The medical school part seems to have fallen by the wayside early, and I wonder if she ever really had sufficient interest in and curiosity about the natural world to make her career as a doctor.  She found the unpleasant odors of the body revolting – it was my grandmother who sat with me when I was a child puking with an upset stomach. And if, at the onset of my puberty I neglected to use deodorant, my mother would routinely compare my scent to “the smelly boys” in her class. These “facts” of her life as I experienced it seem to contradict her ambition, or at least to make it seem less realistically realizable. But then who am I to judge?

Surely she must have had some regrets about her relationship to her former ambitions as a writer – and perhaps, most likely, she always felt some bitterness about having ended up as a public school teacher – the sensible path – like the one her mother had been forced to take. She certainly always remained a brilliant writer – particularly of letters. I still hear her voice in the ones from her I have preserved, a quarter century after her death.

She also had a passion for literature, history, and she was something of an anglophile. Poetry played a big role in her relationship with my father. It played a big role within the family they established, as well. My friends would be astounded by dinners at the Witzling’s where my mother would spontaneously break into verse. My sister and I hoped it wouldn’t be Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” to which she banged and heaved and pounded on the table as she recited those racist words.  Once, when she began reciting Wordsworth’s  “Tintern Abbey,” –(“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters! And again I hear/ These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs…..”) — Danny, my first ex, thought she was making it up on the spot.  

Unlike many teachers whose requisite Masters degrees were in Education, a field she considered somewhat contemptible, she was proud to say that hers was a “real” one; she had translated and annotated a medieval Latin poem, “Architranus”.  Of course isn’t it just like my mother to hold the study of education in contempt, the field in which she had been so remarkably successful. 

She had taken some courses towards a Ph.D. but somewhere along the line became convinced that the initials stood for Piled High Drek. Was that just sour grapes?  She got her first teaching job soon after she graduated and pursued a thirty some odd year career in the employ of the arcane New York City Board of Education system.  She became a “regularly appointed teacher” during the depression, when my father was barely earning five dollars per week as a law clerk. Many of the friends she made in her first position at a vocational school for girls remained the closest associates of her life. And unlike several of them who quit teaching after they got married, my mother kept working outside the home.  As she insisted on pointing out from time to time.  When my father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II she maintained their apartment by herself, and again, told us that she would make regular dinners for herself, unlike “some women” who couldn’t be bothered to take care of themselves.

But by the summer before her death all this was well in the past. Her mother had been living with her for almost thirty years. She and my father were locked in silent battle and had been for a long time, at least for a decade. Her children were grown and long out of the house – both working on Ph. D’s,  my sister out in California where she had had what used to be called a nervous breakdown only the spring before. 

Most significantly, at the time of her death my mother had been retired from the NYC public school system for at least four years. She claimed that she was happy to be retired and she bit my head off when I suggested to her that maybe she should consider tutoring disadvantaged kids – since she never struck me as a person who would be content to spend her life reading the New York Times and playing bridge. But she had retired under less than positive circumstances.  Bad enough that she had taken disability, precipitated by the questionable condition of her health — but it was more than that. A bureaucratic shuffle in the better school to which she had finally been assigned and where, for awhile, she had been appointed as Dean of Girls, somehow resulted in her being demoted or feeling that she had lost status. She left that school precipitously, and spent the last two years of her career at yet another (very good) school.  Also, she was profoundly depressed by racial tensions in the New York City school system and she took the criticism of a failing system by underrepresented cultural groups as a personal condemnation.  During the summer before her death her sense of humor, always somewhat macabre, had become especially grim, fatalistic, and despairing.

Then there’s my father’s story.  He got to have twenty-four more years, a whole other life, before keeling over at 88, one fall afternoon as he began to eat lunch. As my mother prophesied, he did have a second wife, he did – as she wrote – find a nice rich young woman. But – and here’s the first irony about that relationship – she was not exactly healthy, initial appearances to the contrary. And she certainly wasn’t very nice, though she pretended to be. But now I’m getting ahead of myself, and really, that’s a whole other story, how my father’s karma caught up to him in the end, although it does break my heart.

My father met my mother when they were both in high school.  But although they had a “platonic” friendship, they didn’t really get together until they were much older, he in law school, she was already teaching.  The book on him was that he was a rather unfocused and desultory student until he discovered his true passion, The Law – and then his whole outlook changed. 

He was the oldest child and only son of immigrant parents who, unlike my mother’s family who were muscovite intellectuals, came from a small shtetl in White Russia, and who never had much education.  A story from his youth: he gave his parents an ultimatum—he  refused to be bar mitzvahed unless it was in a Reform schul.  He graduated from junior college and then went on to law school, where he supported himself  by working as a steward on the Hudson Day Line, the boats that gave tours around Manhattan island and went up to Bear Mountain in the Catskills and back.   An important job for him because he really loved being on the water.  Also because he always said that he never forgot his experience and that’s why he gave wait people extra large tips until almost the last years of his life.

His first working years were difficult and unpredictable; it wasn’t a good time for a Jewish boy to become an attorney. My mother, as the “regularly appointed teacher” had the more secure job. His second position – with what ultimately became a prestigious Park Avenue law firm – was to be his last. He stayed there for over fifty years, until he “sort of” retired at the age of 80.  Because of his love of the sea he attempted to enlist in the navy during World War II, but was rejected because of his lousy eyesight. He ended up being drafted anyway, and served Uncle Sam in the Army Air Corps – as a corporal, a cryptographer.  He was stationed in New Caledonia and, for awhile, in Seattle, Washington. My mother went to stay with him, but although they loved it out there and continued to speak of that time as their halcyon years, they never seriously considered leaving their respective extended families in New York. 

So after the war Mort returned to New York and his life as an attorney. I was born in 1947 and, when my mother was pregnant with my sister three years later, my parents made the big exodus from their apartment in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, to a private house in Queens. The house that my mother died in. That my father was to own for thirty years. His 40 by 100 plot of wilderness. And so began his 26-year commute to and from downtown Manhattan.

It seems as if there were two sides to my father. The householder in Queens, who did the grocery shopping every Saturday morning and visited with the local shopkeepers – Vince, the fish guy, Izzie the tailor, Gum Troy who owned the “Chinese Laundry.” The mayor of Beechhurst as my mother condescendingly called him.  Who “counted the leaves” (another snotty description courtesy of my mother) of the flora on his domain, martini in hand, upon his nightly return from The City.  And the city-dweller himself – who dressed in wool suits, white shirts, ties – in winter a woolen overcoat, even the fedora hat – requisite uniform for the professional man on the move of the 50s and 60s. Who left the house to catch the bus by something like 6:45 AM and did not reappear until the same time in the evening. Who I can remember missing maybe one day of work in my entire childhood.

There’s process here however – When they made their move to Queens my parents could barely afford the mortgage on their $11,000 investment. At first my father probably didn’t have his shirts washed in the laundry, or buy jumbo shrimp in bulk. I seem to recall that in those early days he might even have put in a Saturday morning at the office although I also have images of him pushing my sister in her stroller as we went to the market, playing the three or four very ritualized games that we played.

Slowly, very gradually by the current standards of the trajectory to success, and maybe even by those of his peers, my father stopped being such a struggling attorney and began to gain more and more financial success.  His firm moved to Park Avenue, he finally became a partner in the firm, their biggest client, a major midtown real estate developer took good care of them all.  

By the time my mother died they had been living the good life for more than ten years – semi-annual cruises, season tickets to the NY Philharmonic, the Opera.  Dinners at top New York restaurants.  A very large collection of suits from Saks, with matching Sulka ties. They had arrived – he had arrived.

  Temperamentally, too, there were two sides to my father. One the one hand, he had been described by one of my cousins as ”mild-mannered Morty.”  The guy whose public persona was mild, tempered, kind, and just. When he got angry he lowered his voice instead of raising it.  The shopkeepers loved him because he was so unpretentious; they sought his counsel because he had such a fair and reasoned view of justice and law. The guy who was in the Monday night league at the local bowling alley.  Not only did he count the leaves, but he fed the birds. A good guy.

His mother-in-law lived with him but his own mother, after she broke her hip and could no long live alone in the Bronx, moved to a residential hotel in Long Beach.  Every Sunday he would make the trek out to see her on the Long Island Railroad (he never managed to get his driver’s license, a quest he abandoned after the clutch in our old Hudson burned out during his third driving exam).

And then there was the other side. Even though he didn’t raise his voice he was downright scary when he was angry. His scorn – quietly expressed – was devastating and I often felt that I was fundamentally Wrong. His particular talent was mystification – to undermine while ostensibly building up. At some point he began to spend his evenings snoring in front of the blue flicker of the television. And when did he start muttering under his breath – “Oh Christ” – whenever my Grandma Rosie – his mother-in-law – would speak? 

My sister and I knew that there was something amiss in the dynamics of our family of origin maybe eight years before my mother died. Despite our youthful selfishness, or at least youthful state of oblivious self-involvement, the silent battle into which my mother, father, and grandmother were locked was all too tangible. When Cathy approached my father – took him to lunch? (except that  he always had to be the one who paid) – and expressed her, our, concern – he said thanks very much, every thing is under control.  So much for our intervention.

By 1976, the summer that my mother died, the embattled situation had become fairly entrenched.  Although my parents continued their mutual lives as Culture Vultures, taking advantage of the great wealth of cultural experiences that New York City had to offer; and although they continued to have a great social life, mixing and mingling with their numerous friends from several intertwining social circles, the circumstances at home were fairly desperate.  On one level my father seems to have dropped out, spending his evenings after dinner dozing in his barcalounger by the television’s glow.  Now that I think of it, my mother habitually described his activities with a certain cutting snideness. For example, when he went to some effort to help me get a Eurailpass the last summer of her life while I was in London, she commented: “you must really rate — it’s the first time he’s put himself out for anyone in quite awhile.”  And although she was quite content to reap the benefits of his increasingly solvent financial status, she was snide and sarcastic about the business associates that made that state possible.

My sister and I were out of the house and no help at all. Or. We were young women in our twenties and, age appropriately, were focused on finding our own identities. The spring before, my sister had had a major depressive incident, and had been hospitalized for about six weeks. By the time of my mother’s death, she hadn’t yet felt strong enough to allow my mother to visit her in California. She had temporarily put aside her dissertation and was working for a time in a bagel store.

And I – I felt that I was just beginning to define myself professionally. I was on fellowship in London, staying in a post-graduate residence, doing dissertation research in the British Library and looking at “my” manuscript daily, making a number of interesting professional contacts. It was a very heady time, filled with possibility. For a long time, those two months seemed like my halcyon days.   And I was also missing (at times) my future spouse and subsequent ex, who, it turns out was missing me too, but demonstrating it by sleeping his way through the female staff of the Cornell University library in which he worked. But that’s surely yet another story. Except to say that I had found this out while we were on vacation in Europe together at the end of the summer, so that although we stayed with my parents for a night or so on our way back up to Ithaca, a mere two weeks before my mother died, I was very impatient to get back to my own home to sort this all through.

At 86, my grandmother was failing, and she needed round the clock nursing care. She and my mother were also locked in a less than healthy pattern of relationship, a form of codependency.  My mother described, for instance, how my grandmother would call for her help just as my mother stepped into the bath. And then it would turn out that she just needed a mint from her drawer.   My father continued to harbor a pathological resentment towards her, and my mother continued to be caught in the middle. 

The day my mother died no one really told my grandmother.  They let her sit in her room, in her own little world, watching Let’s Make a Deal with the ear-plug in her ear, oblivious, or semi-oblivious to the constant stream of people up and down the stairs.  And then, that night, my father summoned my mother’s brother, my Uncle Burt, and told him in no uncertain terms that he “wanted Rosie out of the house.”  By the day after the funeral. Thus my grandmother’s days were numbered, too. By the end of the month, her son had put her in a nursing home, and by mid-December she was dead. Just what my mother had so feared. 

Certainly if there’s one person I failed it was my grandmother, for not intervening and telling her about her daughter’s death in a humane way. For not insisting that she come and live with me in Ithaca. But just as it was not possible for the person I was then to countermand my father regarding an autopsy, it certainly wasn’t possible to rally behind my poor grandmother, and come to the aid of the person who had lulled me to sleep with Russian lullabies, but who was alive when her own daughter had died.

Thus I wonder if there really is a way for me to tell my father’s story. I can tell a story about my father, but it’s difficult to imagine what story he might tell.  It seems that so much of my information, my very point of view, is colored by my mother’s words.  Was I talking to him at all during that time?  My mother used to complain that she tried to call me when he was out of the house because he kept listening to, censoring, her conversations.  But maybe that was because it was the only way he felt he could get in on them. To wit, after my mother died, for years my father very deliberately continued her habit of calling each of his two daughters once a week, to check in.

So perhaps this really is a story of maman et mort, of my mother and Mort, my Mommy Estelle and Daddy Morty, the eternal enigma of the story of my family of origin. 

Initially, I thought that my father’s story with Renee, his second wife, was tangential. Was another story. But there was a point where I began to wonder if that’s really the story I have to tell, after all. The crux of the matter.

It’s karmically stunning.  What goes around, comes around, and in the end he got it handed back to him, in spades. Cruelly even – how could the cosmic balance sheet work so quickly and unforgivingly. My father was horrible, mean, hateful, inhumane towards my grandmother. He put a pillow under my mother’s head and allowed her to die. In the end, Renee treated him with the same compassion.

But not only that.  How was I able to maintain a relationship with my father after my mother died?  I always said that I continued to relate to him because, having just lost my mother I didn’t want to then also lose my father, too. But it was surely difficult for me to relate to him in a genuine and present way, seeing as how I believed that he was responsible for my mother’s death and, now that I think of it, perhaps even my grandmother’s as well. I may have blamed my father for my mother’s death, I may have even communicated that feeling when I told the story, but never, before now, was I able to articulate it so plainly, in such clear, unambiguous terms. Likewise, I totally stuffed my anger at him. Completely and absolutely, to the extent that I often was not in touch with it at all.  

Oh – I played the dutiful daughter all along.  Didn’t challenge him about the autopsy. Didn’t confront him about his putting a pillow under my mother’s head instead of calling the ambulance. Didn’t let him know how mean I thought he was to kick my grandmother out of the house. Didn’t push him about the mysterious letter that I had opened by accident along with the condolence cards, that he snatched angrily out of my hands and told me he’d explain “some day.”  Didn’t let on that I knew that the “someone else” he described spending time with was a married neighbor from up the block. And I certainly never communicated to him my real feelings about Renee. 

And perhaps this is where it ties back into my own story once more – that it is surely ironic that because I WAS able to move on and not hold a visible grudge, to at least act like the dutiful daughter – because, in short, I AM a woman of no principles – I am now a fairly well-off woman of no principles. That is – clearly, if we had ever had a showdown of any magnitude, it is likely possible that I would not be one of his two heirs. Not that my cowardice was motivated by anything as pragmatic as fear of losing my future inheritance. Fear of his anger, his repudiation, maybe.

So perhaps this is where I have to add the Renee bit after all. The person who was, in my mother’s prophetic words, “Daddy’s second wife.”

 My father met Renee about a year after my mother had died, a year during which he played the merry widower, quite the eligible and popular guy.  “Someone Else” was only one of several lady companions.  Mort and Renee were introduced by mutual friends. The first thing he told my sister and me about her was that he thought she was too rich for his blood.  On the other hand, that was also part of the attraction. Unlike my mother, and her snide, negative, commentary on his successful persona, which he must not have enjoyed, and which by proxy seems, even, to have been incorporated into this narrative, Renee validated and flattered his successful, debonair, man about town side.  After screwing around for a year – or playing the field, to be more euphemistic, he was ripe. And I believe she went in for the kill. She presented herself as worldly, attractive, fun-loving, exotic even,  a bonne vivante, a woman of means who knew how to live. She snagged him in no time, and soon he was visiting her in Florida and she him in New York; they began planning cruises together, and within less than a year of their meeting they were married. 

My sister and I never shared my father’s enthusiasm for Renee. In the end, perhaps she bought us off so that we stopped actively disliking her and even began to regard her with some affection.  My children liked her – the only maternal grandmother any of them ever knew, which also went a ways to softening my perspective on her.  

In a nutshell, not only was Renee not my mother – which in itself might produce feelings of negativity – but she was someone my mother would have hated, someone with whom she wouldn’t have been able to spend five minutes in the same room. She was loud, crass, materialistic, unintellectual, and a huge phony who loved to talk about the famous people she encountered in the elevator or on the golf course, who gushed about how she loved us but who would retire to her bedroom about 45 minutes into our visits. She loved to spend money. She bought her espadrilles in five basic colors. She smoked at the dinner table. She read popular biography. She threw out shrimp and avocado salad because the container she had taken out of the cupboard was too small to hold all the leftovers. She loved Lucite.

She was also addicted to prescription medicines and went off the deep end one holiday season when she decided to go cold turkey. Actually, that visit, the year she was in the hospital, turned out to be one of the very best of all times with my father, as he, my ex, and my oldest (and only child at that time) – a tot of two and a half – made an impromptu feast purchased from Bloomingdales and other such upper east-side venues, and my son played Santa to my father’s Rudolph. The image of the loving grandfather, crawling on the posh dark blue carpet, driven by the dulcet tones of his sole grandchild.  That felt like an authentic experience at the time and it still does in retrospect, an example of an instance when he was really warm and loving, and I was really emotionally present.

 Although Renee claimed to be clean after that episode, I wouldn’t put my money on it for a second. Her relationship to medicines and illness was just a part of who she was. A twentieth century neurasthenic.  I don’t believe she admitted to feeling well for more than a week at a time, in all the years they were together. When I would call my father (in the later years more of the responsibility for keeping in touch fell to me, partially because Renee made him feel bad that he had to call his kids, while hers called her), and ask how they were doing, his standard reply was “I’m doing well; Renee not so good.” Besides her hospitalization during her psychotic episode, she always had some complaint. Her knee, her lungs, her gut.  Can’t forget how she was hooked on oxygen, as well. She might have been thirteen years his junior, but in the end, you could never have guessed.  And this too was an irony, because although he married a younger, seemingly more exciting woman, like my mother, she was a woman who was not in very good health. 

When they met, Renee had been living in Palm Beach, but she came to New York to visit, and then to make their married life. They bought an expensive pad on the Upper Eastside, furnished it with her stuff according to Architectural Digest, and continued to pursue the bon vivant, kultchah vultchah life style my parents had been following before my mother’s death three years earlier, punctuated by trips to exotic ports of call on various luxury liners.  Over the next decade both her parents died and she inherited their Palm Beach condo, to which she began retreating for longer and longer stays, until finally, she simply refused to come to New York at all.  

Thus leaving my father with the dilemma: stay in New York without Renee or move to Florida and give up his work, his friends, his cultural life, the only place he had ever really lived. In the end, he made the move, although only, as it turns out, about five years before he died. 

So what, really? My father was lucky to find another woman after my mother died. She wasn’t someone I liked, she had different values from my mother? Get over it!  They didn’t have a perfect relationship? Who does?

He finally gave himself permission to stop going into the office – consistent with his denial king persona I don’t think he could ever bring himself to use the word “retired” – at the age of 83. It was about time!

Yes – all the ways in which it was ok were all too clear to me and they provided the lens through which I “officially” viewed the situation all those years. But. The two parts of the narrative, the two strands that I need to explore – or that seem to be what it all comes down to are– my father’s karmic come-uppance, and my own ambivalence towards him, my lack of ability to have a fully genuine relationship with him, because I believed that he was responsible for my mother’s death.  Even though I made what could be characterized as a “mature” decision, perhaps one of my first, ever, one that was based on life’s ambiguous shades of grey, in choosing not to confront him with my astonishment and anger at his behavior surrounding my mother’s death, the event and my feelings about it colored our relationship for the rest of my father’s life. 

This choice was compounded two years after my mother’s death and in all subsequent communications, by my decision to not be frank about my feelings about Renee, to pretend that her craziness was perfectly normal, that we were all one happy family. Perhaps that is why I see it as cowardice as well as self-preservation. On one level, I was always only playing the role of the dutiful daughter. I could never be totally real with him

But on another, I felt genuine affection for him and concern, as I watched his powers grow more and more diminished over the years.  Way back when my children were small and Mort and Renee had been together for less than 10 years I wondered if she really was Cruella Deville, a heartless, selfish, vain, stereotype of a woman. Although my view tempered as time passed by, and I think that in theirs as in all relationships, there were two sides, and no absolutes, in the end, she was not very nice to him. She was not a very good companion for his waning years. And in the end he received just as he had given.

   In a very general way she made him chose between her and the other important things and people in his life. She would throw a tantrum if he received phone calls from old friends of his and my mother’s. She sequestered herself in her bedroom whenever his children and grandchildren came to visit. She stopped going to the theatre, to concerts, to the opera, with him. She ensconced herself in Palm Beach and refused to set foot in New York. She wouldn’t even let him join the local synagogue after he made the move to be with her in Palm Beach, because of some vendetta between that group and her own father, thirty years before.

She was also specifically mean. Once they closed down their New York apartment he came to live in her Palm Beach condo as a guest. The few personal items he had been allowed in the New York pad were whittled down to what could be counted on the fingers of one hand – a clock from his office, a few framed photographs of my sister and me, a commemorative plaque for 50 years of service to his law firm. When he had prostate surgery about two years before he died the housekeepers came to visit him in the hospital, a mere 5 minute drive, but not his wife, who was nursing her own wounds – just what they were specifically at that point is unclear – and could not be bothered to go see him. 

And after the surgery she was particularly nasty about making it clear that it wasn’t really his home.  She continually mortified him about the one clear result of his surgery, his lack of continence. She extorted large sums of money monthly, “for dry-cleaning.” She would only let him sit on certain chairs, the ones she indicated by having the housekeepers mark them with folded towels. And in the end, she kicked him out of her bedroom, so that the final year of his life he spent sleeping on a cot that was set up in his study (although it had stopped being used for that purpose already, when Renee had moved his computer into their guest condo downstairs). I certainly never summoned the nerve to rock the boat and ask him what the story was with his banishment to the den. 

When he keeled over, while eating lunch in that same room, it was the housekeepers who came to his aid.

Not unpredictably, Renee cleared all traces of him from her apartment within a week after he died. And of course neither she, nor any member of her family, made it to the memorial held in New York a month or so later. Where only accolades were offered for this sensitive, caring man, who loved to read poetry, who was dedicated to the law, who was depicted as a loving and caring colleague, teacher, brother, father, grandfather. 

Which he was. Among other things.

When I wrote about my father and my ambivalent feelings towards him fifteen years ago, during the period of my marriage and my own captivity in the child-rearing middle classes, I came to the place where I seem to have just ended up, in which I am brought back to confront all the positive and good things about him, despite those not so good things, most specifically those things that pertain to my mother’s death or to the life he later forged with Renee.

If I had been another person, I might have told him how angry I was that he didn’t do anything to help my mother survive that night when she was in extremis and he let her down.  Or – if HE had been another person, I might have felt that I COULD tell him that I thought he had failed her, and not lose his love.

But as it is, I never questioned him, never confronted him. Our one conversation about it took place on the phone that morning he called. I’m sure he never had a clue about how distressing I found it – and of course as the denial king, he would be unlikely to question my apparent sang froid. I don’t think that I ever allowed myself to fully articulate and experience the range of my emotions – that’s how I was able to maintain the conceit of the dutiful daughter. And, amazingly, it wasn’t all an illusion, either.  I believe, however, that those who have heard this tale over the years would not be surprised to learn that I held my father responsible for my mother’s death.  And even though I did not end up losing two parents that morning my mother died, there is a level on which my father also became lost to me, although we continued to have what could be considered a “good” relationship for another twenty-four years. And now that he’s gone, I continue to long for him, to sorely miss his presence on the physical plane.

And I still haven’t solved the riddle of my mother’s death, either – stroke or suicide – and probably never will.

Mara Witzling

Sept – Nov 2003