Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (22 page)

“Is it bad?” I asked. She had stomach problems fairly often, from drinking and not eating enough.

“She’s been complaining for a couple of days. I don’t know. I’ll take her to a doctor tomorrow.”

Dad hated doctors. If he said he’d take her to one, he had to be really concerned. I was nervous all day, and checked in a few times. No change.

“Your mother passed out on the bed,” he said later that night.

“Are you taking her to the doctor tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

The next morning, shortly after Mom and Dad woke up, she coughed a couple of times, vomited blood, fell backward on the bed, and took her last two breaths.

“Your mother is dead,” Dad said when he called from the apartment. Her body was taken to the morgue by ambulance. We eventually learned the cause of death: an infected septic ulcer in her stomach, yet another common problem for alcoholics.

Dad and I talked about logistics: a funeral, who to tell, etc. I don’t remember any of the conversation.

I was alone in my apartment. Harrison was at a play date. I didn’t want him to see me upset, so I called his friend’s mother and said, “I’m not sure when I can pick up Harrison.”

“Okay,” she said, suspicious. “Is anything wrong?”

“My mother just died.” It was a short conversation. She didn’t know what to say to me. I was glad to hang up.

In a daze, I actually kept a meeting at Harrison’s school with his preschool teacher. I walked in like a zombie. She asked, “Are you all right?”

“My mother just died.”

“I’m so sorry! Was it sudden?” she asked.

How to answer that? It was sudden, in that she coughed up blood and dropped dead. But she’d been on a slow, steady decline for more than seven years.

“It was coming for a while,” I said.

“Was she young?”

“Sixty-four.”

I tortured myself for quite some time about Dad’s not taking Mom to the doctor for that stomachache. She’d been complaining for days, he said. They might’ve been able to save her life. Dad spent half his life trying to help her. We’d all tried. How could he have known that her stomachache was serious? In her dementia, she’d complain about a headache, and then hallucinate an alien invasion in the next breath. She raved about insects coming out of the walls, and lashed out—verbally and physically—at my father whenever he tried to comfort her. Just getting her to a doctor’s office would have been an ordeal.

I called some friends: “My mother died.” I repeated it over and over again, hoping that the next time, the numbness would wear off and I’d feel the sorrow I knew was coming. I welcomed it. My mother deserved my grief. Logically, I didn’t understand why I was numb from shock over her death. Like I hadn’t seen it coming, or imagined it? My mother hadn’t been functional for five years. She’d been dependent on a caretaker for three. I’d just hoped that being housebound, she was safe, and that despite the horrible situation, she would hold on for a while. I always hoped and dreamed she would get better.

My Lutheran mom was cremated. (Dad keeps the ashes in a gray marble urn under a picture of her in his house.) We had a funeral in
a church right next to the building where we used to live on Central Park West. I spoke about her kindness and beauty, and how brave and loving she was when I had the accident, and all through my life. I remember making pages and pages of notes, but speaking at the podium was a blur. My mom’s best friend, Sarah, talked about Ingrid’s compassion and generosity and classic elegance. My father and brother were unable to speak publically. Andre’s pain was almost unbearable to watch. He was four years younger than me, and only seven when Mom went to rehab for the first time. I wonder if Andre could recall any period of his life when Mom wasn’t drunk, in rehab, or struggling to stay sober.

Reid came to the funeral with me, of course. We brought Harrison and Veronica. In fact, Reid paid for my mother’s funeral. His father came, too, which I thought was a lovely show of support for his new fiancée. Jonathan, his mother, and his sister also came, as well as Harry and his mother and sister. It was an unlikely gathering of every man I’d been engaged to, and their families. It meant so much to me that all of those people from my past could put aside any ill will to say their good-byes to Ingrid. They all adored her.

Only my dad knew what Ingrid had turned into because of her drinking. He’d been under siege for years. When Mom passed, he felt deep grief and loneliness, but also relief. He’d given her unconditional love, and she hurled back nonsensical cruel obscenities at him, his friends, me, and everyone else she came into contact with. He’d spent the last ten years watching her dignity and mental capacity diminish to nothing. As a result, he turned hard the other way and became a health nut—even more so than during his wheatgrass and yogurt phase. He was obsessed with herbs and vitamins, pouring absurd amounts of money into supplements. He had been devoted to
my mother as a caregiver, although they couldn’t have had much of a sex life for years.

After her death, George was a free man, and took full advantage. It was embarrassing to witness how he’d chase after much younger women. Even more embarrassing: he caught some of them. Along with his health regimen, the satyriasis was one more way for Dad to feel young and impervious to the horror of a death like Mom’s.

Guilt came for me. Did my mother start drinking because of the accident? If I hadn’t slipped on the barn cleaner, would she have needed so much wine to dull the pain? She was known to drink before then, before I was born. I’d heard from some of her old friends that Mom was a party girl in her Pan Am days and when she and Dad were dating. My mother’s hard-core secret drinking started after my accident. It then returned after the trip to India. She might’ve turned to wine to get through our rocky adolescent years. Mom wasn’t happy to move to Florida, and worried terribly during their financial downturn. It all piled on.

She was emotionally brittle. The changes and challenges other people toughed their way through with sheer will and determination would have been insurmountable for Mom without a glass of wine. Nowadays, someone with her level of anxiety would take Zoloft. But Dad distrusted doctors and medicine. Mom didn’t want to make a fuss and was probably born with a predilection to addiction. She self-medicated with Merlot.

“I love to get high,” she told me once when I asked why she drank. One was not enough. Five were not enough. Ten. Twenty. A true alcoholic, if she had half a glass, she might as well drink the whole bottle. The whole case.

Months after my mother died, I told Dad about my guilt. “You
can’t blame the accident,” he said. “Your mom had other demons to wrestle with. Things you don’t know about.”

This was my first clue that my mother may have had a dark streak that could have fueled her drinking. I always accepted my mother for what she was to me—the loving maternal embodiment of sweetness who showered me with attention, who was at my side through highs and lows, and was the only one I could turn to in times of need or tragedy. That was enough. That was everything. I never considered that she may have suffered her own trauma as a child or that there were obstacles she may have needed to overcome. It was not her style to burden her pain. Ever.

She never spoke of her childhood, but I could do the math. I knew Mom was born during World War II. Beyond that, her early life was a mystery to me. It was as if life began when she met my dad. I guess I didn’t think it strange that she didn’t talk about her formative years. When I was little, my need for her was so great that I was content for her to be my magical angel. Later, she ducked my questions about her childhood, and I didn’t press. It wasn’t for lack of curiosity. My mother built a wall between her past and me, and I didn’t want to acknowledge it, let alone break it. It’s as if she couldn’t protect herself from her past, but she wanted to protect me.

It’s more difficult to explain Dad’s silence about it. Although I didn’t tell him my feelings until well after Mom’s death, it’s hard for me to believe he didn’t know. What was the big secret anyway? My mother didn’t have a dignified death. What could he have been protecting her from? To the contrary, he might have saved me some suffering, as I believed that I was the cause of the unhappiness that led to her alcoholism.

Ingrid’s Story (pieced together mostly from Dad)

Her father was drafted to be an SS soldier in the Third Reich. He died in battle when my mother was four. Her earliest memories were of bombs going off, and other horrors. From the age of five, Mom had to rummage on the street for things to eat.

The war widow and her young daughter lived in a one-room apartment in Dortmund, Germany. Mom’s mother, my grandmother, got help with their expenses from a string of rowdy boyfriends she brought into their one-bedroom apartment. Mom had to listen to her own mother’s degradation night after night. I think losing a limb is easy compared to that. I thought of the scene in the Hitchcock movie
Marnie
. One of the mother’s drunk clients went after Marnie, with violent results. That could have been a scene out of my own mother’s childhood.

It was, of course, an unimaginably horrible time and many people were forced into desperate acts by the circumstances. Still, it was hard to reconcile the grandmother I remember from my own childhood with this wartime survivor. She visited us in New York a couple of times a year. She was an eccentric woman who couldn’t be bothered to speak a word of English. She smoked and had a low, raspy voice. She would look at us and talk really loud, gesturing broadly. We’d sit there and let her go on. My father would glance at me, like, “What the fuck is she talking about?”

Though I have no memory of it, when I was one, my parents took me across the Atlantic on the
QE2
. They dropped me off at Grandma’s house in Germany for four weeks so they could travel. I was preverbal when they left, but speaking a quite a bit of German when they came back to get me. My first word was
bitte
(German
for “please”). Going from hearing English to German might be why I developed a knack for languages.
¹

As soon as she could, my mother fled to America by boat. She was fourteen, spoke no English, and lived with a distant relative in Connecticut. In exchange for the room, she was expected to clean their house and cook meals like a house servant. Beautiful, young, and lonely, Mom was emotionally and physically vulnerable—the perfect victim for a neighbor who sexually molested her.

She only lasted two years in Connecticut before she ran again. This time, she made it to New York. My mother was discovered and hired by the Perkins Agency to model. (She wasn’t tall enough for Ford.) Then she became a Pan Am stewardess. She had lots of boyfriends all over the world—and then came Dad. He was young, funny, smart, and handsome. He didn’t tell her he was married with three kids; she didn’t let on how damaged she was from her troubled life.

For the first twenty-odd years of Mom’s life, she’d gone from one tragic situation to the next. And then, just when she could start to relax in a fairy-tale life as my dad’s wife with two healthy kids, bam, the accident. For the worst part of my crisis, she remained sober—or at least highly functional, being there for me 100 percent in every way. As I “got better” and took control of my life, she may have felt it was all right to give up some control of hers, and start (or continue?) drinking.

I didn’t want to lose my mother—not to drinking, not to death—but I’m not angry with her. I’m grateful to her and I miss her. Whatever
the reasons for her drinking, it was a disease; I could no more blame her for that than I could blame her if she had been destroyed by cancer rather than wine.

I wish she hadn’t kept her past hidden from her family and friends. If she’d opened up and talked about it, her demons might not have controlled her. She’d kept her dark history to herself for so long, it was second nature. She also never wanted to burden her children with the “when I was your age” sad stories. It was not her style. Just like her stash bottles, Mom closely guarded her secrets, to her detriment, until there was nothing left to hide or protect.

Now that I know more of the story, I don’t feel guilty about my accident and the toll that must have taken on her. But I do feel an additional loss for not knowing her better during her life. If I had, maybe I could have made a difference. And I can’t help but feel some guilt about that.

When I think of you now, Mommy—and I do every day—I think of how you saved
my
life, how you were there for me, how you were my angel. You still are my angel. I love you. Rest in peace. Finally. Rest in peace.

1
.  I’m not fluent in five languages as I claimed on the set of
The Real Housewives of New York City,
unless you count “New York” and “Housewife” as languages (I could make a case for it). I speak only three: English, French, and Spanish. My German peaked at age one. I don’t know why I made that outrageous claim on the show, but then I don’t know why I say a lot of what I say on the show.

W
hen Reid became a single man after seven years of marriage, he was successful, young, and good-looking with one child. Even with his tucked-in T-shirt and phone clipped to his belt, he was a catch. He could have gone the whole “my girlfriend the model” route or just man-whored around for a couple of years. But instead, he sought out an over-thirty almost divorced mother. Clearly, he didn’t want to party. He wanted a family. When we got engaged, we talked about having more kids as soon as possible. Biological siblings would be the glue that stuck Harrison and Veronica together. The clock was ticking on my fertility, though. If we were going to have more children, we had to hurry up.

But first, we both had to get divorced.

Soon after my mother’s funeral, Harry and I took care of that. After years of back-and-forth, we settled on friendly terms.

Reid’s divorce, however, crashed into a wall. And here I thought he wouldn’t be able to handle
my
craziness.