The Bridesmaid's Daughter

by Nyna Giles

  Charlie looked at me with kind eyes. A true gentleman, he didn’t press me for more information.

  But there was one last item he wanted to show me. We went to his small office at the back of the building to sit down. Here he pulled out two letters. I think it had taken him a while to work up the courage to show them to me.

  The first letter was from Congressman Doug Applegate, writing to the mayor of Steubenville, Bill Croskey, about my mother in 1989. It turned out that both Doug and Bill had been in high school with my mother. After the news broke that Carolyn Schaffner was living in a shelter, they decided to rescue her. Doug had written to the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, asking for his help bringing Carolyn back to Steubenville. Mayor Koch had responded. He wrote that had looked into the matter but had learned that Carolyn had resisted all efforts to provide her with housing and that nothing further could be done. Doug and Bill were forced to drop their attempt to bring Steubenville’s queen back home.

  I had no idea that the town’s representatives had written to the mayor of New York to ask for his help. That they had tried to do this for her touched me more than I could explain to Charlie. She had been appreciated by her hometown in ways I had never imagined.

  After I finished reading the letters, I told Charlie about my mother’s illness and the role it had played in her life. I felt that by telling him, I had brought him information that he hadn’t been able to locate in all his files and archives. He nodded; a true historian, he understood. I thanked him for his generous hospitality—and for the tributes to my mother that meant so much to me.

  After I left the historical society, I drove the short distance to Pennsylvania Avenue, to the street where my mother had grown up. The row houses were exactly as I remembered them, each one identical to the next, with steep banks leading up to front porches and peaked gables. I pulled up outside 1416 Pennsylvania Avenue, where I’d visited my grandmother with my mother as a small child. I stepped out of the car. The air was frozen, the ground hard underfoot. My grandmother was long gone. I stood outside, looking up at the building, wishing for some kind of sign. But nothing stirred, not a twig on a tree, not even a bird in flight. Turning around, I saw a small corner store with its windows boarded up across the street. I realized this was the old candy store where my mother had taken me when I was a child.

  That weekend, I was able to reconnect with family members I hadn’t seen in many years. I met with my mother’s cousins Patricia and Jacqueline, who had been close to her during her childhood and teens. They remembered my mother with nothing but affection and love. They told me about Carolyn’s stepfather and his curfews: when she came home too late Joe locked the door, and she would have to walk three miles to their house to stay the night. I spent time with the daughter of my mother’s half brother, my cousin Tracy. She remembered going with my uncle to New York to look for my mother when she had been living in the shelter, trying to track her down, to bring her home. Her entire family had been so worried about her. No one had known what to do.

  * * *

  AFTER I RETURNED to New York, I went on with my research. I spent hours searching for my mother’s image in magazines. I traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the libraries at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, going through dozens and dozens of back issues. I learned that during the years of her career—1948 to 1956—Carolyn Scott appeared in hundreds of advertisements, and catalogs. I connected with a fashion historian who told me that Richard Avedon had taken the photograph of my mother from the cover of McCall’s—the one that I kept on my dressing room wall. The historian confirmed that my mother was one of the first Ford models and that her success had helped Eileen Ford to build her agency.

  I made contact with Eileen herself, then in the last months of her life. I knew that she must remember my mother because Eileen had been interviewed for the Hard Copy segment about my mother’s story back in the 1990s. In the interview, Eileen described my mother as “one of the most successful junior models we ever had … a sort of a golden girl, living that wonderful life.” When the interviewer asked why she thought Carolyn was living at the shelter now, Eileen said she believed Robin’s death had a lot to do with it. “She was just destroyed,” Eileen explained. “And it’s hard for me to sit here and talk to you and not cry, because it really is a tragedy.”

  After I reached out to Eileen, she invited me to visit her at her apartment on the Upper East Side. Although she was in her nineties by then, frail, with her memory fading, she was still dressed immaculately in a white blouse, pale pink slacks, and a pink sweater. She remembered my parents in their Manhattan House days, how my father always knew exactly what to order at restaurants, and how they went out dancing, all of them together, sometimes until four in the morning. She could recall coming out to our house on Long Island many times in the early years. And she remembered seeing my mother around the neighborhood when Carolyn was living at the Park Avenue Armory shelter. Sometimes Carolyn would recognize Eileen; other times not.

  “She used to go to the ladies’ lounge at Bergdorf’s to wash,” Eileen told me.

  A pained look came across Eileen’s face at the memory. Later, as I got up to leave, Eileen took my hand.

  “You’re Carolyn’s little girl,” she said. “She would have been so proud.”

  As I thanked Eileen, I had tears in my eyes. This compliment from her, someone I admired so much and who knew my mother in her modeling days, meant more to me than I could say.

  That day, I left Eileen’s apartment and walked the few short blocks south to East Sixty-third Street and the Barbizon Hotel. The hotel itself closed its doors in 1981, its modest single rooms now converted into luxury apartments. At the lobby and mezzanine levels—where my mother had once taken afternoon tea with the other residents—there was now an Equinox gym. Gone were the gilded revolving doors where Carolyn first spotted Grace all those years ago, replaced by flat glass panels instead. Of course Mrs. Sibley, the hotel manager, and Oscar, the doorman, were gone, too, the lobby area reduced to a small entryway with elevators. I had read somewhere that a handful of former Barbizon residents still lived in the building, grandfathered in when the hotel had been converted into condos. I asked the doorman if I could leave my name and number with him on the very slim chance that someone remembered my mother. The following week, I received a call from a woman who had lived in the building since 1965—for more than fifty years—but not long enough to remember Carolyn.

  Before I left the Upper East Side that day, I knew there was one more place I needed to visit. I walked back uptown, passing the diner on Lexington Avenue where I used to meet with my mother for our lunches, until the Armory’s tall redbrick towers came into view. I stood on the corner of Sixty-sixth Street and Lexington; the Barbizon was just a few blocks south, the Manhattan House to the east. Until this moment, it had never occurred to me that these significant landmarks in my mother’s life—the Manhattan House, the Barbizon Hotel, and the shelter—were all within five minutes’ walk of one another. Their locations were fixed points in the constellation of my mother’s greater journey. No wonder she wanted to live at the Armory all those years, and no one could persuade her to move. These few blocks of the Upper East Side were the place where she had made her mark and where she had been happiest. To her, this was home.

  * * *

  I KEPT SEARCHING for new insights, more information, but as hard as I tried to put the parts of my mother’s life back together, there were some pieces that still wouldn’t fit. I knew that in order to fully understand her story, I needed to figure out the point at which my mother first began to show symptoms of her illness. From my reading about paranoid schizophrenia, I knew that in the vast majority of cases, symptoms of the disease begin to show in late adolescence or one’s early twenties. But when I met with my mother’s friends and family members, I always asked if they noticed any signs of strange behavior on my mother’s part when she was younger,
in her teens and twenties—and they always told me no. From what I knew of my mother, she only began showing signs of her illness after I was born. By then, she was thirty years old. Was it typical for someone with schizophrenia to have such a late onset? Could the illness have been triggered in some way by my birth and the hysterectomy she’d had at the same time? A friend who worked in the mental health field offered to introduce me to someone at Columbia University Medical Center, who in turn connected me with one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia. I hoped that if I gave him detailed information about my mother, Dr. Lieberman would be able to help answer my questions.

  On the day of our appointment, Dr. Lieberman welcomed me into his office, lined with shelves of books and with windows overlooking the waters of the Hudson River. I sat down on the couch and began to tell Dr. Lieberman as much as I could about my mother, about her childhood in Steubenville, her move to New York. I explained there had been no signs of her illness until after my birth. I brought with me the names of the medications I knew she had taken for her illness after she had moved to the adult home. I explained that she had only been diagnosed as mentally ill much later in life and that throughout my childhood and early adulthood, we had no idea what was wrong with her.

  “In order to diagnose mental illness, there isn’t an ironclad test,” Dr. Lieberman told me. “You can’t take a blood test or perform an MRI to determine the nature of someone’s disease. Instead, you have to rely on symptomatic evidence.”

  He asked me many questions. Did my mother suffer with insomnia? Did she smoke? Did she have a history of hypochondria? Did she experience any trauma in childhood? Did she have any religious beliefs?

  I answered his questions. I explained that by the time my mother received her diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, she was in her fifties. She had been taken to the hospital because she seemed to be having some kind of psychotic episode.

  “The doctors there would have seen a woman who was delusional, and so they made their diagnosis based on the symptoms she was presenting to them,” Dr. Lieberman said. “But presumably they wouldn’t have had access to her prior history and health records?”

  I told him no.

  Dr. Lieberman paused, then spoke.

  “You mother didn’t have paranoid schizophrenia,” he said. “What you’ve just described to me are the symptoms of postpartum psychosis.”

  I was stunned. I had always been told that my mother was schizophrenic, and yet here I was in the presence of the world’s foremost authority on the disease, and he was suggesting a completely different diagnosis.

  Dr. Lieberman went on to describe postpartum psychosis, a severe psychiatric condition that can set in during the first month after a mother gives birth to a child, even more serious than the more common postpartum depression.

  “Women with postpartum psychosis can experience depression, but also mania, confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions,” Dr. Lieberman explained. “Some women actually go on to cause physical harm to the infant—even killing the child—but the delusions can take many forms.”

  I explained that my mother had never done anything to deliberately harm me; her delusions were only related to my physical health. Dr. Lieberman explained that my mother may have had tendencies toward hypochondriasis and other types of obsessive-compulsive behavior even before my birth, but that the postpartum psychosis would have exacerbated those tendencies, magnifying their effect.

  “Today, we consider postpartum psychosis temporary and treatable,” Dr. Lieberman told me. “If left untreated, however, the sufferer only continues to deteriorate, as your mother did.”

  At the end of our session, I thanked Dr. Lieberman for his time and insights, then left his offices.

  I had spent so many years looking for reasons, trying to figure out why my mother had behaved the way she did, why she was so closed off and disconnected, why she’d kept me home all those years.

  Now I knew.

  The reason had been me.

  CHAPTER 19

  That day after leaving Dr. Lieberman’s office, I climbed into my car and pulled away into traffic, but it was hard to focus on the road through tears. As soon as I could, I pulled off and parked the car again. I walked into a store, trying to collect myself enough to continue the drive home. It was a while before I got back in the car.

  When I finally arrived at my house, I went to my computer and looked up the symptoms for postpartum psychosis:

  Delusions or strange beliefs

  Hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there)

  Feeling irritated

  Decreased need for or inability to sleep

  Paranoia and suspiciousness

  Rapid mood swings

  Difficulty communicating

  Obsessive concern over the infant

  It was as if someone who had met my mother was describing her to me.

  In the coming weeks, I spoke with one of the leading experts on postpartum psychosis, Dr. Diana Barnes. I told Dr. Barnes my mother’s story, and she confirmed Dr. Lieberman’s diagnosis. We spoke at length about my mother’s symptoms and about the impact of the surgery she underwent at my birth.

  “As a model, your mother’s whole persona was about femininity and beauty, so the hysterectomy would have been particularly hard for her,” Dr. Barnes pointed out. “She would have felt she had lost part of what made her a woman.”

  Dr. Barnes explained to me that during the years when my mother first became sick, postpartum psychosis simply wasn’t understood the way it is now; it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to treat my mother with any degree of accuracy. The tragedy of my mother’s story is that the prognosis for her postpartum psychosis would have been much better than for paranoid schizophrenia; if she could have been treated, it’s likely that she would have recovered.

  I decided to visit my trusted ob-gyn, Dr. Dominic Grecco, someone I had been seeing for more than a decade, to learn more about the double surgery my mother had undergone at my birth. We talked through the C-section and the hysterectomy in detail.

  “After such a traumatic surgery,” Dr. Grecco explained, “it is highly unlikely that your mother could have escaped some kind of postpartum depression.”

  The doctor told me that because I was such a big baby, the massive incision would have limited her ability to breastfeed and bond with me. It would have been many weeks before the incision healed and she felt better in any way.

  “Your birth was the fork in the road,” Dr. Grecco went on, “the turning point in her life from which she never recovered.”

  * * *

  THE NEW DIAGNOSIS brought me a greater understanding, but also another kind of loss—the knowledge of what might have been. I began to imagine another version of my mother’s life where she could have been helped. In all likelihood, she would still have suffered with some kind of depression. Her life was filled with so many challenges: a cruel stepfather; a career that ended abruptly; a difficult, lonely marriage; the sudden deaths of Robin and Grace. But even so, I have to believe that in this alternate version of events, she might have prevailed.

  I began to wonder how it must have been for my father to be married to someone who changed so completely after my birth. I decided to reach out to one of his friends from the time we were living on Long Island. Ross Meurer was an artist; he had been quite a bit younger than my father, and he was still living out in Cold Spring Harbor. We spoke over the phone. Ross told me how lonely and confused my father had been during the years my parents were still married. “Malcolm said he never knew which woman he was coming home to,” Ross explained. “I think he missed the woman she’d been.”

  I’d always thought of myself as hidden away at home during my childhood, but as I spoke to Ross, I began to understand that my mother had been hidden, too. When she no longer fit with my father’s vision of a happy, sociable, smiling wife, he simply stopped includ
ing her in his world. My father knew nothing about mental illness, let alone postpartum psychosis. He was a man of his times, completely lacking in any sensitivity or insight. I remember my father once pointing out to my sisters and me that if he’d had our mother committed to an asylum, we would never have forgiven him. This much was accurate. In some way, his complete neglect of our mother may have saved her from an asylum, and the inevitable shock treatments and prolonged hospitalizations that might have followed.

  But there was one aspect for which I couldn’t forgive my father. My poor mother had known something was wrong with her. She had started sessions with a psychiatrist in Manhattan immediately after my birth. When my father found the check stubs for the therapy, he’d said she couldn’t continue, unless she went to a psychiatrist of his choosing. When she refused, he simply stopped the sessions altogether.

  She had tried to get help, and my father had stood in her way.

  * * *

  I KEPT GOING back to the biographies of Grace. The more I read, the more questions I had. While Grace was solid and certain, with facts and figures, dates and details, Carolyn appeared for a paragraph or two, then vanished again. I dog-eared the pages with my mother’s name so I wouldn’t lose her. I was teasing out the fragments of her story from between the lines of Grace’s; the fragile remnants of my mother’s life were still slipping away and escaping from me.

  More than one of Grace’s biographers had written about the alleged affair between Grace and Malcolm. If those accounts were correct, then my mother first learned about the affair in the summer of 1960, just nine months after my birth. This was when she was still recovering from her C-section and hysterectomy, at the same time that she was experiencing her first symptoms of postpartum psychosis. I could only imagine how the news must have affected her at this time when she was already so fragile. And yet there was so much I didn’t understand about what had taken place. When exactly had the affair happened? How long had it lasted? Had it even happened at all?