The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  As a result, I chose not to reveal much of what had been my special circumstances as a foster child. In the world of ballet, mine was a secret not always easy to keep, but in the world of acting I was an unknown, anonymous. It was completely liberating. At the same time, there was so much to learn. Ballet required expressing and executing everything with body and facial expression; acting, however, employed not only the body but even more so the voice. Dialogue had to be retained, providing an opportunity for me to utilize my memorization skills from years of learning choreography. Acting required choices that lent themselves to an array of styles as varied as the repertoire from Fokine’s Les Sylphides to Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel. I realized I could transition into another performance art as a professional, using the enormous amount of mental and physical discipline that had gone into becoming a dancer. What was profoundly synonymous about both professions was the necessity of élan, heat, the divine principle of life in man—soul.

  I knew how to tap into the purest part of myself without distraction. I held onto my belief that if I could channel the discipline I’d attained through ballet and apply it to acting—or designing, costuming, writing, gardening, musical scoring—my creativity was limitless. That was the greatest gift and lesson of all. I just needed to keep my imagination buoyant. I learned that hunger somehow made the art in my soul click and clarified where it was going and what I was doing.

  Another advantage I possessed, both from growing up in the foster care system and from auditioning in ballet circles, was the painful ability to digest and compartmentalize, taking the most constructive parts of rejection. Giving myself credit for that and knowing I had to begin a second career if I was going to eat, I adopted the approach that Millie and Irene took. Making no promises to themselves or me, they believed that if I went to every audition they sent me on, I would eventually land something.

  By observing the ironclad professionalism of Spencer & Kearney, I learned lasting business principles that would serve me in good stead for many years to come. This began early on when my managers improved my salary after becoming aghast that Seventeen magazine was compensating me with less than scale, a term for the standard professional minimum.

  Millie and Irene embraced my potential, continually reinforcing the idea that I was a valued client. Their stance, like that of most patient gardeners, was that a slow and steady tending would give way to the greatest blossoming. That philosophy wouldn’t always be shared by the show business machinery of New York and Hollywood, which loves to boost overnight stars into the stratosphere only to have them fall precipitously when their younger replacements are hatched.

  I wanted what Millie and Irene wanted for me: consistent work, financial stability, and a creative foothold. Once that compass setting was dialed in, I began to believe that I would become gainfully employed. One of my first jobs was starring in an AT&T commercial opposite fellow struggling actress LaChanze. Years later, we would celebrate backstage over her acclaimed Tony Award–winning portrayal of Celie in the Broadway production of The Color Purple, reflecting on our resilience and the power of motherhood.

  I worked side by side with Spencer & Kearney during those halcyon days when I was doing it all—living next door to the Dakota, partying at Studio 54, touring with ABT II, formerly the Ballet Repertory Company, even seeing commercial residuals for the first time. I was in the chips!

  After I’d stopped in one day to pick up a check, Millie and Irene raised a subject that had never come up before. Without preamble, Millie said, “We want you to think about a stage name.”

  I replied, “Okay, what about Vicki Lynn? After all, Lynn is my middle name.”

  “No,” scowled Irene, “that’s too country-western.”

  “How about Victoria?” I offered, feeling a little embarrassed after having suggested it. Victoria, to me, was a lofty name. One associated with a faraway continent that I was connected to by faceless ancestors. Victoria Falls, running between Zimbabwe and Zambia with its unbridled power and Lake Victoria, shared by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with its massive placid grandeur, connecting people or keeping them apart. Water, I knew, had the ability to shape and mold. I had faith that my new name would carve a way for me through life, the way water carves stone with slow and steady persistence.

  Irene twisted her face into an inscrutable look of deliberation before she finally said in a no-nonsense manner, “Victoria it is. I like it.”

  Both of their phones began to ring and I rose to leave with a cool affection. They weren’t dictatorial, nor were they coddlers any more than they were grande dames. They were mentors, no-frills sisters, part of my team.

  That woman-to-woman sensibility among colleagues and friends, long-standing and new, would form the through line of the next league of women who raised me. Millie and Irene were emblematic of every sister in these years. They trusted me as much as I trusted them.

  For the years I was back in Boston taking public transportation across New England, teaching ballet classes, I never missed a New York audition. Four hours each way. Once again, the Spencer & Kearney team had been inordinately patient, even as they aggressively implored me to return to New York City. After Millie’s usual pep talk and discussing how soon I could get myself back to town, it was Irene’s turn for some pragmatic advice. If I really wanted to make it as an actress, she quipped matter-of-factly, “You’re gonna have to let the dancing thing go; you can’t do both.”

  But letting the “dancing thing” go was like letting go of my family. The ballet studio was the single most consistent home I had known since the age of nine. Yet I had to go where the work was. So, at twenty-six years old, I decided to roll the dice, figuring I had better odds of creating a lasting career as an actress than I would a ballet dancer. To ignore that would have been to my own detriment. So I let the dancing thing go.

  That’s how I ended up returning to New York with that lavish feast of le pomme that had to last until the next day, or until I could find some money. Millie and Irene had secured several auditions: “Georgette the Chaufferette,” an under five, and a L’Eggs commercial not needing my face, only my legs, and a coveted audition to portray Bill Cosby’s daughter in Leonard Part 6, a film for Columbia Pictures.

  I booked it. I booked all of it. There were no words to describe what it meant to prevail over the vicissitudes of my life. While Leonard Part 6 was a commercial and critical disaster—an utter flop—I didn’t care. I had been in a movie with Moses Gunn, Tom Courtenay, Joe Don Baker, the indomitable Jane Fonda, and of course Bill Cosby, who inspired me profoundly. Millie and Irene had promised that the cachet of having played Bill Cosby’s daughter in anything would prove to be a pivotal credit on my empty resume. They were right; I now had a theatrical credential.

  Slowly I began to build some financial stability. This also provided for the needs of my dichotomous life. I was finally able to afford treatments for my hyperhidrosis. Out of everything I would try, nothing had significantly eased the malady except for one incredibly medieval device and regimen that my improving finances and time allowed me to try, one that required me to spend great lengths of time in near monastic solitude. My nighttime ritual would begin by setting my clothes out for the next day with matching gloves. Next, I commenced applying pure aluminum chloride to my hands and feet, then placed them into plastic bags. I bound my wrists and ankles to a suffocating degree with rubber bands, my pores absorbing the chemicals, reducing the sweating. Under my pillow, I would voluntarily reach for my luminous plastic bead rosary, feeling each diminutive oval through the plastic, slowly drifting to sleep as I recited one Hail Mary after another, in meditation, as I had since I was ten. This was my sacramental rite, an acknowledgment of the sins committed by my mother, Dorothy, and henceforth me. I would do penance and pray for absolution.

  In the early morning, I would remove the filmy plastic bags, revealing grayed, shriveled hands and feet, not believing they belonged to my body. I continued my ritual by filling four pla
stic trays with three centimeters of water each, placing two on the table and two on the floor. With all wires in place, I set the alarm clock for twenty minutes and turned the dial to classical music; Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” played in the background. This was the same clock given to me by Mr. Silverman when I was sixteen.

  With my index finger, I scooped a dollop of petroleum jelly and outlined a horseshoe on the back of my hand and across my wrist, so as to lessen the inevitable burns. I sat, completely naked, in front of a metal box called an iontophoresis machine. Setting the intensity of the electric current, I slowly immersed my hands and feet into the trays of positively and negatively charged water. As the current passed through, minerals within the water mysteriously impeded my sweating for a finite four hours every day. Feeling the voltage, every muscle tensed. In my own private war, I battled with mind over body yet together, both elements writhed in unison, reaching toward a final end. I hungered for the simple social interaction of touching another person, to feel the flesh of another without the psychological torture of being deemed a misfit.

  In the next twenty minutes, I would talk to God, sing, cuss, wail, twitch, and beg for mercy for the procedure to be over. When it finally was, the process of removing one hand to turn the machine off always resulted in a mild electric shock. I reflexively collapsed in the chair, relieved and grateful that it was over for now.

  In that precious window, my typical day began. So as not to lose time, I quickly slipped on my preset clothes draped over the chair. As an added precaution, I poured a tablespoon of aluminum chloride in the palm of my hand and distributed it as though it were lotion, slipped on the plastic sheaths disguised by fashionable gloves. All meetings, social gatherings, anything that had to do with shaking hands would have to happen in the confines of those four hours. It was truly a Cinderella existence.

  For a time I endured this austere way of living. But after keeping this up for such an extended time, as my hands prematurely aged, I wondered how much longer I could hang on.

  Fate answered that question none too soon, delivering Tom, the Marlboro Man, to my front door. Wearing a possum-lined leather coat, Tom flew up five flights of stairs, showing off his machismo with a gift of a massive boom box on his shoulder. Before long, I discovered that this blue-eyed light-haired Celtic rogue loved every imperfect misfit inch of me.

  Everything he did was Texan-esque, humongous, gargantuan. BIG! From leasing the loudest Eldorado Cadillac in yellow to ordering Magnum-sized everything. Slightly perspiring, looking like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever with his shirt unbuttoned one too many buttons, he set the box down on the surface of my tub and said, “Everybody needs tunes.”

  I rarely invited others over out of a embarrassment. But Tom just came unannounced and gave me no choice. Once inside, he never showed one modicum of disapproval. It could have been a palace. It just didn’t matter to him. I decided right there and then that I would eventually marry this man not just because of a boom box but because I believed he really cared about me. Love had nothing to do with it; it had everything to do with acceptance.

  A year later, we moved into a studio apartment on the Upper West Side. Tom wanted me to meet his mother, Harriet, a retired nurse and mother of five. Tom, the oldest child, told me one story after another as we drove to her home, coincidentally in Maine. I was intrigued to meet this woman, originally from New Jersey, who was working in an emergency room when her adolescent son, Tom, was rushed in covered with blood after running through a plate-glass door. I marveled at the fortitude Harriet must have possessed to function under such duress. We liked each other instantly. Harriet was nothing like I had imagined. She had a full head of short cropped white hair and was standing in the breezeway, waiting in anticipation. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the unspoken word, what we didn’t say, that we understood between us as women.

  Harriet’s mother, Millie Hruska Worley, a razor-sharp businesswoman with a theatrical likeness to Mae West, owned a home in the prominent community of Rumson, New Jersey. Millie had lofty plans for her daughter, grooming her to be a debutante and exposing her to the best of the best. But at seventeen, Harriet chose a simpler path, falling in love and marrying an Irishman who worked in a cannery.

  One of the things I could appreciate in my adulthood about being a former foster child was that there was no family to answer to or seek approval from. Unlike Harriet having to rebel or worrying about not living up to expectations, I never had any of those limitations. I sometimes witnessed affluent friends twist themselves into pretzels trying to meet every demand that was put upon them, resulting in stress and unhappiness. Where they had the security, they did not have the freedom to explore who they really were; rather, it was dictated to them. There was a familial protocol, a mandate to uphold the distinguished pedigree, forcing them to give up their artistic dreams—if they were to be a part of the inheritance. Many of my trust fund friends confided that they were kept from doing what they really wanted to do and keeping what company they truly wanted to keep.

  Harriet and I talked about such observations, sitting for hours by her potbellied stove as snow fell outside, just the two of us, doing puzzles, knitting, and just shooting the breeze. I asked her, “How did you go from the pressures of working in the emergency room and raising five children to an old house in rural Maine?”

  “Easy,” she replied, and chalked it up to knowing what was right for her at the time.

  After I had dreaded meeting the Scottish matriarch, my preconceived ideas turned out to be wrong. I didn’t want to have to morph into another pleasing personality, an old habit from growing up as a ward of the state. I didn’t want to adapt to meet anyone’s approval. To my utter surprise, she couldn’t have been more warm and accepting.

  I would always appreciate her support that came during a rough period with Tom, after I had become pregnant with my daughter who I would name for Maya Plisetskaya, as I had promised myself so many years earlier. Harriet thought we should get married, although she understood my reservations about Tom when suddenly he went AWOL, a pattern that would continue. No explanations, no clues. He simply vanished into thin air. I had to keep on going.

  Just before I really started to worry, a call came in from my manager, Millie Spencer, letting me know about a commercial audition starring Bill Cosby and famed percussionist Tito Puente. They needed dancers. You guessed it. There I was kicking up my heels to Tito’s soulful rhythms with Maya in my belly.

  When acting jobs appeared to be scarce, I went looking for whatever I could find, not selective, proud of my experience. I had worked as a wardrobe mistress, a dancer, a waitress, a lighting fixture salesperson, a vintage clothing vendor, an au pair, a model, a secretary, a Park Avenue Virginia Slims leaflet giveaway girl. I was that invisible person standing at every corner across America with a board strapped on the front and back of my body, hoping that out of the throngs of people passing me, someone would take my annoying leaflet or sample and wouldn’t toss it in the trash until they turned the corner.

  Later I would look into the eyes of my former self on Park Avenue, take the leaflet, and say thank you. It was a living for me and who are we to judge how a person tries to support herself? I never subscribed to segregating effort. If you tried, it counted. It all mattered.

  With that attitude I promptly secured a temp job as a secretary for Sabena Airlines and got fired. Immediately following, I became an executive secretary at Chase Manhattan Bank for the Broker Dealer Division in the Wall Street district. Even when my boss, Douglas Anderson, stated without amendment, “You’re a terrible typist,” as I braced myself for the inevitable, he continued, “but your personality is good for office morale; you have leadership skills. Now learn how to type.” He actually saw beyond my pregnancy and limited office skills. He was willing to give me a chance and that’s all I needed.

  To support myself and my child on the way, I had to have this job, even though I knew it would be baptism by fire to learn wha
t it would take to keep my desk in the most famous financial district in the world. But who would teach me? As usual, the answer didn’t come the way I expected.

  Stepping off the Staten Island Ferry with purpose, a blond pompadour, spike heels, and a skirt way too short and too tight was Anne Marie, my soon-to-be mentor, saving grace, and future office buddy. She taught me how to type and how to operate the latest high-tech equipment of the era. Snapping gum like nobody’s business, Anne Marie’s fingers undulated at lightning speed, like she was Rachmaninoff himself. How could I ever learn to do that? Practice, practice, and more practice. Not that I ever tickled the computer keys like she did, but I got good enough to make a living and keep my job.

  Still unable to make rent and not willing to wait for another shoe to drop, I turned to Sarah Neece, my former ballet mistress with Contemporary Ballet Company of New York, a company in which I had danced and toured in my post ABT years. Without reservation, she took me in to live with her in one of the most enchanting spaces in all of Manhattan. Secretly tucked behind an apartment building facing Fourteenth Street sat a Hansel and Gretel carriage house, complete with its own private garden entrance. This became my home for a brief and magical period during my pregnancy.

  As a quote attributed to Lewis Mumford has it, “Let us confess it, the human situation is always desperate.” I needed a lifeline. In a time of crisis, Sarah was there for me, creating a haven in her home that I would commemorate by sending her two dozen yellow roses every Christmas henceforth. This ritual was born over a decade and a half ago when I stayed with her, as she and I walked home together from our respective jobs and noticed a solitary street florist, who then tried to sell us his last two bunches of roses. Challenging times would not permit me to purchase Sarah a Christmas gift that year, but I knew she loved flowers—another common thread of the many women who raised me—and I told the near frozen florist, “I’ll take both bunches.”