The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  Edith was rather shy around my Barnard friends. This was a departure from the way she had been when I was a child in Brooklyn: She had loved to banter with anyone I brought home and engaged my companions in conversation. But that had all changed, and it was as if she had suffered her own spectacular loss of arrogance and had trouble interacting with others.

  While I was making a comeback, my mother was still wallowing in the overwhelming despair of 1973. She was, in her own way, as broken down as I was—perhaps more so, because I am not sure she ever really recovered. Since she could never speak to me openly about the illness, could never even allude to the fact that I’d never have a child, she suffered alone and in silence about the tragedy of pauvre Loulou. Only occasionally did she bemoan out loud le malheur—the bad luck—that had struck the family.

  Come spring, I made a shocking discovery. I learned that the prior year, several Columbia students had been arrested for drug trafficking, including allegedly selling cocaine. One of those arrested was Sean O’Neill.

  The chasm between us was immense—far greater than I’d realized. I had been able to shut out the more jarring aspects of the popular culture by sticking to the sheltered world of 616. I could pretend there were no drugs at Barnard, or that my promiscuous roommate was an anomaly. But learning of the arrest brought the world of the 1970s into high relief once again.

  And along with the reminder that the world around me had changed, that it was evolving at breakneck speed, was the sense that I wasn’t a part of that world, for better and for worse.

  One evening, Laurie and I were loudly bemoaning the fact that neither of us had ever smoked—not even a cigarette let alone marijuana—and were clearly out of step with most of our peers. One of her suitemates, a worldly senior, overheard us and invited us to her room. She casually lit a joint and passed it around.

  Laurie and I were giggling nervously. We felt as if we were about to commit the greatest sin imaginable, and to us I suppose it was. And neither of us had the courage to do much more than place the joint in our mouth before handing it back to Laurie’s roommate.

  We didn’t inhale and we didn’t exhale. But we felt awfully jolly afterward, happily asserting we had “tried” pot, as if that made us honest-to-God, true-blue members of our generation.

  I had a major decision to make: Vassar had sent forms for me to fill out for the following school year. They had taken me at my word: I would be returning along with other members of the Class of ’77 who were in exchange programs at other colleges or studying abroad. I had to sign papers, commit to reenrolling, and choose a dorm.

  “You’d be crazy to go back,” Laurie declared with her usual bluntness.

  A part of me agreed with her, of course. What could be crazier than returning to a place I had fled in such despair? But I felt compelled, like the criminal (or victim) who is obsessed with returning to the scene of the crime. Mom, of course, was wholeheartedly in Laurie’s camp. She was praying that I’d stay at West 116th Street and abandon this grand illusion of being a Vassar girl.

  Because that is all it was, of course, an illusion. It wasn’t my identity and never could be.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what was propelling me back to a place I’d hated. At some level I couldn’t let go of my idealized notions of Vassar, my sense of it as a passport to a dazzling future. I also needed to prove to myself that I wouldn’t run away again.

  My last days at Columbia, I paid a call on Robert Evans, my friend from the English Department. He suggested to my surprise that we go share a bottle of wine. Off we went to a liquor shop on Broadway, where he peered intently at the bottles on the different shelves.

  “Do you like May wine?” he asked, reaching for a bottle from the store refrigerator.

  I nodded emphatically yes, though I’d never tasted May wine. I loved the sound of it, I loved the idea of it.

  We walked back to his apartment and drank the bottle. It was a German vintage, and I found it sweet and utterly delicious. We chatted and then parted amiably. If I had hoped for a grand seduction—or if he had planned one—it wasn’t meant to be, and, besides, I was terrified of it.

  Instead of moving back to Brooklyn, I rented a room in a Columbia dorm for the summer. I had made up my mind. I felt infinitely stronger and calmer than I had the prior year. I was determined to return to Poughkeepsie if only to prove that I could return, if only to prove to myself that Vassar wasn’t going to defeat me ever again.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Lady in the Pink Bow

  THE UPPER EAST SIDE: 1987–1994

  · 18 ·

  The Lost Art of Penmanship

  My older brother César is a man of faith, devoted to God and prayer. Yet this is what he believes happened to our family: that a cruel and vengeful Lord set about punishing each of us for our arrogance in the most painful manner imaginable, so that it was as if a curse—a curse of biblical proportions—had been placed on our household.

  Our father, Leon, who strode like a colossus through the streets of Cairo in his white sharkskin suits, towering over everyone he met, never recovered from his fall and found it increasingly painful to walk; at the end, confined to a wheelchair, he couldn’t even stand up and the world towered over him. Grandmother Alexandra, so helpless—dependent on us for her every breath—ended her days alone in a foreign land surrounded by strangers. Suzette, my older sister who had spurned us in her youth and scoffed at the very notion of hearth and home, who had moved farther and farther away from the family—Queens, Miami, L.A., San Francisco, London—finally returned. It was too late, of course; both Leon and Edith were gone. She had a child, a boy, Sasha, who became the doctor that she had longed to be, yet lived hundreds of miles from her, and in her solitude, I suspect she finally understood the years when Mom would plead with her to come back. César himself, the only whole one among us, the keeper of the flame, married a wonderful woman, a teacher, and had a family, two lovely daughters, but never the son he craved. There would be no one to carry on our vaunted name, he lamented.

  Then there was Mom of the luminous intellect and eloquent prose and graceful penmanship. After Edith suffered the first of her many strokes, her mind simply crumbled. Her once-elegant sentences became choppy and incoherent.

  And she knew it. That was perhaps the worst of it—that at sixty-four, she was able to observe her own downfall, to chronicle it, remark on it, and despair over it. She cataloged her losses and afflictions as thoroughly as she had cataloged thousands of books over nearly twenty years at the Brooklyn Public Library.

  In the fall of 1987, my mother took over one of my reporter’s notebooks that she had found lying around the house on Sixty-Fifth Street. It was a used pad filled with lots of notes from my various assignments. I was working as a journalist in New York, and notepads were my most essential possession. I had returned to Vassar after my year at Columbia, and though it never became Mary McCarthy’s Vassar, I did finally manage to graduate. I went to work as a reporter, first for the Brooklyn Spectator, a small weekly, and then for Jack Anderson, a nationally syndicated columnist whose articles appeared in the Washington Post and hundreds of other papers. Anderson was regarded by many as the foremost investigative reporter in the country, an avenger of the downtrodden. His voice was that of barely controlled outrage. I had to quickly master the lingo: A State Department diplomat was a “Foggy Bottom cookie pusher,” the U.S. government was “Uncle Sugar,” and any Latin American dictator was routinely called “a tinhorn dictator of a banana republic.”

  I was thrilled to be one of his “junior muckrakers.” Assignments were exotic and often impossible. Mine was to cover the State Department and ferret out secret cables, a mission I undertook with zeal, cultivating diplomats who were loath to leak me any documents, let alone the classified ones Anderson cherished. Later, he sent me to South America to hunt for Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz.

  “I would like you to penetrate Nazi circles in South America,”
Anderson told me in that hypnotic way he had, and off I flew to Asunción. I hadn’t a clue how to look for a Nazi war criminal, let alone one who had eluded capture since the end of World War II. There I was in my twenties, with no experience as a foreign correspondent (let alone as a Nazi hunter), and only one semester of Vassar Spanish, wandering around Paraguay asking total strangers, “Donde esta el Señor Mengele?”

  I didn’t find Mengele in Paraguay. But in trips to Israel and across America, I did locate some of his youngest victims, twins who had been subjected to his horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz when they were children and had never spoken of their past. My articles about the infamous doctor and his long-lost twins helped spur the U.S. government to launch their first major manhunt. As the world took notice of a war criminal they had all but ignored for decades, I felt as if I were living up to the ideal of Emma Peel—I felt like an Avenger.

  I’d returned to New York when Edith fell ill in 1987, and now worked at the New York Post, my first major daily. Assigned to the city desk, I started covering breaking news—a murder in the Bronx of a mother and her little boy; the disappearance of a disabled girl in Staten Island; the death of Rita Hayworth on Central Park West.

  After my shift ended at night, I came home to Mom. I’d often find her bent over one of my notepads. She would be scribbling over old notes or filling pages that still had some lines left. In her own halting way, she struggled to confront the effects of la strocke as she called it, a strange term entirely of her own invention, not quite French and not quite English, misspelled in two languages. In regular entries, she tried to master her unwieldy thoughts and recapture the words that had once flowed from her so effortlessly that she could stand at the stove and dictate a paper I needed for my college literature class while fixing herself a café turc.

  To my eyes the most disturbing evidence of Mom’s decline was in her penmanship. Once the epitome of elegance and style, it had become as crazed and helter-skelter as her mind. The words and sentences that had been so clear and lucid now appeared in strange shapes and odd sizes. They were too big or too small, they’d run upward or downward on the page or else in zigzag, as if scribbled by someone who can’t control their pen or their mind.

  I suppose that she wanted to restore some order by putting her thoughts to paper. Or perhaps she needed to prove to herself that she still had thoughts she could put to paper. The effort—and it was Herculean—made Mom painstakingly methodical.

  Every day, and often several times a day, my mother would begin by posting an entry with the date and hour. She was obsessed with tracking her medications, les pillules—the pills—as she called them. She’d carefully indicate that she had taken her various medicines and was following the doctor’s orders. She was trying to be a good patient.

  It was too late, of course. There had been so many years of self-neglect and punitive behavior. There were the years when she didn’t take her pills with any consistency and her blood pressure soared out of control. There were the years when she was always running, running. There were the years of constant fasting for this religious holiday, that holiday. And then came the years when fasting became a way of life. We had all left home, and she simply stopped eating. For a meal, she’d boil herself an egg and sip café turc while seated in Dad’s old armchair and wonder where we had all gone.

  Yet she shrugged off any and all signs that she wasn’t well. At most, she would go see her old internist at his office on Twentieth Avenue. You could never make an appointment to see this neighborhood doctor—he simply posted his hours and people arrived and waited their turn, sometimes for an entire afternoon. They’d be seen one after the other, five minutes per person, and then they had to pony up some cash for the visit, which they handed to the doctor’s wife, who always seemed in a crabby mood, as if she resented the lot of us. Though the doctor was amiable enough, he rarely offered any thoughtful consultation, or performed an examination beyond the cursory use of his stethoscope.

  The little water pills he prescribed didn’t come close to doing the job, and besides, she didn’t even take them. I wondered if he ever impressed on my mother how sick she really was—none of the assembly-line doctors who took her ten-dollar bills did.

  The hearth had never been rebuilt. The hearth was gone, destroyed, eviscerated, and I couldn’t even remember the last time she’d said, “Loulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer,” which she’d made the mantra of my childhood. It would have meant she still had hope in her heart, when in fact all hope was gone.

  Those months that preceded her stroke, she ran frenetically and all the time. In the morning she ran to work at the Brooklyn Public Library, taking one train and then another. She was so frightened of being late. Her new boss, Dallas Shawkey, had instituted a reign of terror since taking over and systematically destroyed the Catalog Department’s collegial culture. The job that she had loved with all her heart turned into a nightmare.

  If she was late, even by a few minutes, she was penalized. If she made an error, or seemed not to focus, Shawkey took her immediately to task. Finally, she was forced out of her beloved Catalog Department and transferred to a distant branch in Brooklyn where her job was in production—grunt work—cutting and pasting book jackets. She had developed severe arthritis by then, and it was painful merely handling those big scissors. She had also begun to lose her coordination so that her hands shook and were unsteady.

  She would try and try again but it was no use. She got into more trouble for not doing her work properly.

  A colleague, Devika, was concerned by how fragile Edith looked of late. She was always bent over—she didn’t straighten up even when she walked. Devika also noticed that my mother was always rushing to leave at the end of the day, racing out the door. Why the hurry, Edith? Devika asked. Mom broke down and told her of her sick husband who needed her constant care and attention, a husband who was much older than her and was bedridden.

  What she didn’t let on was that Dad was now in a nursing home. After a bitter fight within the family, Isaac had moved to put him away in a facility in Brooklyn. My father was distraught from the start. It was all for Mom’s sake, Isaac kept saying. Dad had gotten to be a handful as he grew older, a big man with lots of physical problems my mother couldn’t handle. Unfortunately, life didn’t get a bit easier for her after he was committed. In a way it became harder. Every afternoon, she bolted from her job, anxious to get back to the empty house on Sixty-Fifth Street despite the fact that no one was there.

  Suzette, the first to leave, stayed true to her word and didn’t live with us again. Isaac had also never returned after college. And I went away to Washington and threw myself into my work for Jack Anderson. César, the most faithful and true one among us, the one who remained with our parents the longest, moved away to be with his new wife in Queens.

  I suppose that he saw that as a step up. There was a time all of us thought anywhere on earth was a step up from Sixty-Fifth Street.

  With Dad in the nursing home, Edith found herself all alone. There she was in that careworn apartment filled with ragtag pieces of furniture and all those books on the shelves—his prayer books, her French novels. After a long day at work, she’d rest in his old armchair by the window and nibble on the one or two breadsticks that constituted her entire dinner. Near her, on an end table, were photos of me at different stages—framed pictures of me as a child, at Vassar, as a young reporter. She would sit there staring at them, sipping her beloved café turc.

  She couldn’t stay for long in that empty apartment without feeling anxious. And so she’d force herself up from the chair and run to see Dad at the nursing home where Isaac had placed him. That meant taking a couple of more trains until finally getting out at an elevated station, which required her to climb up and down steep flights of stairs even though by this time of day, she barely had any strength left.

  Somehow, she would find her way to his room, sit by his side, and coax him to eat, because, unlike her, Leon still enjoyed
food. She’d offer him a peach, a banana, an orange, some mesh-mesh (apricot)—whatever she’d stuffed in the little shopping bag she carried at all times. When visiting hours were over, and she’d stayed with him as late as she could humanly manage, she’d run back to the subway—always spurning our offers to call for a taxi—for the exhausting train ride home.

  Leon, in a wheelchair, with a fragile-looking Edith standing nearby, Brooklyn, 1986.

  She ran so much and so fast that she finally collapsed and on a balmy night in March 1987, a policeman found her lying on the steps of the Fort Hamilton Parkway subway stop a couple of blocks from the nursing home.

  I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, but Mom and I had a habit of chatting every night after one of my own grueling days at the office.

  I was anxious when I didn’t hear from her. Finally, at midnight, César reached me. Mom had suffered a stroke. She was still alive—barely—in the intensive care unit of Maimonides Hospital. It was too late for me to get back to New York—there were no trains, no planes, no buses, and besides, I didn’t even have any money on me. Come dawn, I knocked on the door of a kindly neighbor and asked her if I could borrow enough to get home. There were few ATMs at the time, and I barely had any savings. Armed with my neighbor’s cash, I caught the first shuttle flight home.

  When I reached the hospital, I went immediately to the private room where Mom had been transferred. She was unconscious: She had sustained a massive brain hemorrhage, and there was so much swelling in her head that she was in imminent danger. I was told that only if she were kept stable and the swelling gradually reduced would she survive.

  She seemed in agony those first days, constantly stirring in her bed, oblivious to all of us, aware only of her own torment. If God had shown any mercy toward my mother, it was in this way: She was blessed with extraordinarily compassionate doctors. One, an Orthodox neurologist named Dr. Keilson, watched over Edith as if it were a religious mission. I turned to him constantly. A resident, Dr. Nutti, was so deeply caring he hovered by her side day and night. Dr. Nutti was older and more mature than the typical resident, and he was also European—a native of Italy transplanted to Brooklyn.