Even putting aside the sexual assault, I can’t imagine the terror of being taken to a dark room and kept there for days on end. I can’t imagine the pain of a little girl who had no shred of comfort and no reprieve before the next man.
I try to imagine the fathomless black depths of an ordeal like hers, but I can’t.
HER SINGLE SAVING grace in this hellhole was the Indian.
The Indian never left my mother’s side. He held her hand. He held her gaze. In the deepest way imaginable, he held her, cradled her. Within the force field of his compassion, she could drift, give herself over and leave her body behind, below, on the bed beneath the men.
The Indian had long black hair. He wore faded jeans and a white t-shirt. Deep grooves were cut into his grieving face. Sometimes he wept over her plight.
Without him, she would not have survived.
Toward the end, he pulled the shirt from his back and ripped it into two clean white swaths of cotton. Then he used safety pins to tenderly fasten them around her privates. She was clad only in this makeshift loincloth when at long last, he lifted her into his arms and carried her out of that room, down to the street, and over to a hospital.
* * *
THERE WAS NO Indian, of course. The police raided the building and arrested the men on the premises. An ambulance brought my mother to the hospital, where she received—among other treatments—an immense dose of penicillin and a blood transfusion.
Why was her guardian angel a Native American? What did he represent to her?
I couldn’t ask her this question, because right up to the end, she believed he was real.
WHEN MY MOTHER was able to leave the hospital, a judge ordered her transfer to the House of the Good Shepherd for Wayward Girls. According to her, this was for her own protection. Many of the men indicted for raping my mother had ties to the mob. The facility was meant to serve as a safe haven, and her whereabouts were kept confidential.
The Good Shepherd order had many of these houses around the country. After hearing her account, I found a description of one such home, taken from the social services directory of Newark, New Jersey, in 1912:
A Catholic institution for the moral and religious instruction and training of wayward girls and women. Under the charge of the Sisters of Good Shepherd. Two hundred inmates. A laundry is maintained, the work of which is performed by the girls. Contract sewing is also done by the institution.
There is a Magdalene Department for reformed penitents. The inmates are also instructed in undergarment making and general sewing. Girls received into the institution through the Catholic Children’s Aid Association on recommendation of the courts and probation officers.
It would seem The House of the Good Shepherd was a reform school of sorts. The girls in the home were considered inmates. Of all the places to send my mother for protection, why there? One clue would emerge six or seven weeks after my mother entered the House, when her just-developing breasts swelled painfully along with her belly. She was pregnant.
There was no discussion, ever, of the pregnancy. No one seems to have acknowledged its existence, let alone the possibility of its termination. Here, my mind reels. Because her doctors must have known. No medical professional would overlook that possibility in a pubescent female patient who’d suffered dozens if not hundreds of unprotected sexual encounters. They would have tested for pregnancy or, if it were too early for that, scheduled a future test for pregnancy.
Was it a Catholic hospital? That’s the only way I can make sense of this picture—of a child victim of gang rape being forced to carry to term.
Three months into her stay at the house, my mother woke to find the bed beneath her soaked with blood. All that day and the next, great quantities of blood issued from down there as well as dense purplish clots and grayish-purple pieces of tissue. She lay in the infirmary bed and wept with pain and fear as this discharge kept coming, her midsection swathed in towels.
I try to picture my mother in that home for wayward girls, miscarrying alone. Once again, this is beyond my imagination.
Curiously, my mother’s memories of the house held no tinge of bitterness or self-pity. “The house was very strict,” she recalled. “We had to attend mass three times a day. But we were allowed to listen to music after the night mass. And the girls would dance. Oh, how they danced! They were wild. I loved watching them move like that. I envied them, to be truthful. No one ever danced like that in the high society circles I grew up in.”
More curious still, my mother begged to remain in the house even when it was no longer mandatory. “I didn’t want to leave,” she told me. “I wanted to stay there and work as a secretary in their office. I even thought about becoming a nun if it meant I could live there for good. But Mother Cabrini said the house wasn’t the right place for me. She said: You have to face the world again, my child.”
* * *
WHEN I WALKED out of St. Vincent’s and into the parking lot, I was almost staggering. I felt weak with grief, crushed by all my mother had suffered, and stunned with a new recognition.
For the first time in my life, I understood Agnes, my mother’s child persona. Agnes was always pregnant. Always crying, and frightened, and always clutching her belly. No matter how my mother aged—even when she was forty-nine, fifty-three, sixty-eight—when she was Agnes, she was pregnant.
I thought of how much I had always dreaded interacting with Agnes. Flow was frightening and violent and unpredictable, but the raw vulnerability of Agnes was its own kind of threat—more intimate, closer to home, and closer to me.
I’d held Agnes at a distance because I was afraid of her pain. If she ever surfaced again, I would hold her close.
BY THE TIME I reached home that evening, I had my heart set on offering my mother the one thing she still wanted. I spent long hours online that night, researching travel accommodations for the terminally ill, trying to imagine how a trip to Bar Harbor could be managed. We’d have to fly, of course. I had a very busy schedule over the next several weeks, but I could find a way to clear a few days. We would take all her pain meds, and I could learn how to monitor her oxygen levels. I would rent a wheelchair and push her around the streets of her old vacation town. We could sit by the bay and have cups of chowder. Yes, it would take a lot of arrangement and effort, but it was her dying wish, and if anyone could make it happen, I could.
On my way back to the hospital the next morning, I took a detour that would bring me to Lloyd Center, a mall on the north side of town, where there was a See’s Candies shop. I hadn’t been there since my late teens, but the two-pound assortment of chocolate was in the same plain box I remembered—almost all white, printed only with “See’s Famous Old Time Candies” in black and gold script. On the left was a graphic of a little cottage with a smoking chimney, on the right a cameo portrait of Mary See. The design probably hadn’t changed since my mother was there, and for that, I was grateful. The idea, after all, was to offer her a remnant of her long-lost happy childhood.
When I stepped off the elevator and onto the oncology floor, a doctor was just leaving her room, and I rushed up to him. I would secure his permission for a trip to Bar Harbor, and then I would surprise her with the marvelous news.
“You can’t possibly be serious,” the doctor said. “No, she can’t fly across the country in her condition. Even if her medical needs didn’t defy plane travel, which they do, she’s in no shape to make a trip like that.” He sounded angry, as if I’d proposed that my mother take trapeze lessons.
“Are you sure there isn’t some way?” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything to make it work. I don’t care how much it would cost.”
“You don’t seem to realize how fragile she is,” he snapped. “If she had a life-threatening episode on the plane, there would be no way to help her unless they made an emergency landing. It would be terribly irresponsible to risk that.”
I dropped my eyes so he wouldn’t see them filling with tears. “It’s just—can you understand?
I’m her daughter and this is her dying wish.”
“I’m afraid you’re the one who doesn’t understand,” the doctor said. “Forgive me for being so blunt, but even here in the hospital, your mother might not survive the week.”
IT TOOK SEVERAL minutes for me to compose myself enough to enter my mother’s room. When I did, I saw that she’d taken a turn for the worse. Gone were all the markers of improvement from the day before. She was visibly feverish again: sweating, dull-eyed and agitated.
“Miss Florence is not so well today,” said a young nurse who had just come in, as if reading my thoughts. “I thought we were out of the woods yesterday, but her vital signs aren’t looking good right now.”
I set the shopping bag from Lloyd Center on the floor and put the back of my hand to my mother’s forehead. She swatted it away. “She feels warm to me,” I said.
“Her temperature’s up around one hundred and two,” the nurse confirmed.
I dropped into the chair beside my mother’s bed and bent to open the shopping bag. Then I set the box of See’s Candies on her bed table and lifted the lid. Her eyes lit up, but she made no move to take one. In that moment, I realized the doctor was right. Bar Harbor had been a pipe dream all along. She was past eating chocolate. She was past eating chowder. She was not getting on a plane. She couldn’t even sit up.
She was dying. My mother was really dying.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “Stephanie, can you get me out?”
I moved my chair as close to her bed as it would go and spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone. “Mom, your stay here is almost over. I know how hard it’s been. But you’ll be somewhere much better very soon, I promise,” I said, my throat tightening as I spoke. “You’ll be in Bar Harbor.”
She beamed at me. “The doctor said I could go?”
“You can go. You’ll be there very soon,” I said again. “And this time, you’ll never have to leave.”
Chapter 22
WITH MY MOTHER’S death so close at hand, a longing to find other family members took fierce root within me. I knew she had a younger brother named Allan. My mother had mentioned him from time to time over the years. I’d never thought to ask much about him before, but now I began to press her relentlessly.
“Mom, when’s the last time you spoke to your brother?”
“Not since you were little.”
“Where is he now?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “Last I knew, he was with that awful woman. What’s-her-name? It’s Beth, I think.”
“How was she awful?”
“Oh, she was so uptight that time we stayed with them.”
“You mean on our way to Mexico?”
“Yes. They lived in southern California then. Maybe they’re still there. You can look them up: Allan and Beth Mulligan in San Diego.”
“I REMEMBER YOU,” Beth told me stiffly over the phone. “So you’re all grown up now. Well, of course you are. It’s been more than forty years. But I have to tell you, I didn’t think you’d survive another six months. Are your other brothers and sisters alive?”
“What?” I said, caught off guard. “Um, yes. That is, most of them are. Allan died a few years ago.”
I felt a deep pang, saying this of my brother. He was the one with whom I’d been closest by far. It was hard to believe she’d asked this question so casually, as if inquiring about a litter of animals.
“Well, how’s that for irony?” she said. “Allan was the only one we tried to save.”
“Save from what?”
“From your crazy mother. I’ll never forget all the crap she pulled with us. Letting me drive around with all those drugs in my car, holing up in our house for at least a week and barely lifting a finger to help out. I was sure you kids were going to die, hanging around with her. When you all took off again, I offered to keep one child with us. We didn’t have space for more. We took Allan because he was my husband’s namesake. I thought, Let us spare one of them, at least.”
“I see,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “So, do you know where my uncle is?”
“No, I don’t,” Beth told me. “Somewhere in Mexico is all I can tell you.”
“Do you know which city?” I wondered if he could be in Guadalajara, in his mother’s old place, or near it.
“Honey, I’ve got no clue. I haven’t talked to him in years.”
“Oh.” My voice went high and cracked with disappointment.
“Don’t cry,” she said. “There’s a friend of his who’d probably know where to find him. His name is Tom Shaughnessy, and he coaches high school football.” She paused before offering, “I’d ask him myself, but I have my pride.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, scrambling for a pen. “Let me write this down.” She gave me the name of the school where he worked.
“Listen, if you find Allan, tell him to call me,” she blurted, just before hanging up. “I hate to admit it, but I miss that son of a bitch.”
“HE’S BEEN IN Mexico for the past few years, but he can be hard to track down,” Tom told me when we spoke. “He likes to spend time off the grid.”
I’d emailed him late at night, at the address listed beside his name in the school’s online directory. He called the very next day.
I closed my eyes, weak with my yearning for more. “But you do have an address? A phone number? Something?”
“I’m not supposed to pass it on to anyone. He doesn’t want his ex to track him down,” Tom said. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You give me your phone number and I’ll pass it along to him the first chance I get.”
I wanted to argue, to beg for direct access, but I couldn’t let myself come across as hell-bent or unhinged.
“I understand,” I said reluctantly. “All right, then, if you think that’s best.”
“The thing is, like I said, he disappears for long stretches of time. So it might take some weeks for me to reach him. Please don’t take it personal if you don’t hear back for a while.”
So I’d been warned, but it didn’t keep me from hoping. All that day and the next and the next, I kept the phone nearby at all times, even when I was in the shower. I kept it on during business lunches and work meetings. I didn’t silence it upon going to sleep.
A week went by and then another. My mother did not die. She recovered from her crisis and left the hospital, defying the predictions of everyone involved in her care. She returned to her apartment, and I turned to the task of securing hospice services for her. The school year went along at its usual hectic pace, and gradually Allan faded from the forefront of my thoughts.
IN MID-APRIL, after much discussion with Jim, I invited my mother to our home for Easter Sunday. It felt like the right time to risk a family visit. The kids hadn’t seen her in many years, and I knew that after this weekend, they might never see her again. They had grown since she last saw them, too. They weren’t vulnerable children anymore, and my mother was frail and ill.
On this occasion my optimism was rewarded. The whole afternoon was like a dream to me. Jim drove across town to pick up my mother while I cooked at home. When she arrived, I could see that she’d gotten all dressed up for the occasion. She wore a flowing lavender blouse and skirt, and her hair was tied back with a lavender ribbon. She had taken pains with her nails and makeup. She looked like any respectable grandmother.
While I put holiday dinner on the table, she sat on the sofa with our dog curled in her lap. She looked happy and content. If it weren’t for the oxygen tank beside her, the scene might have been an ad for a retirement magazine. Each of our kids took a turn sitting with her, telling her details of their lives and showing her photos.
Eventually, Josh brought out his guitar and played her a few songs he had written. Her face lit up from the first few bars, her longtime passion for music clearly strong within her still. She was rapt with admiration for as long as he played, and she clapped her hands with delight at the end of each song.
It was a day with no abusive words, no hurt feelings, and no self-pity. No blaming, no berating, no criticism, and no rage.
When she got tired, Jim took her home. They made a stop at her local pharmacy to refill a few of her prescriptions, and when they reached her building she thanked him. It was such a small, everyday thing—a man driving his mother-in-law home after a visit—but even this was a rare piece of grace. My mother had always hated Jim. Such simple kindness, rendered and accepted with gratitude, would not have been possible in the past.
When I fell into bed that night, I was filled with a rare sense of satisfaction. In that moment I felt as if I’d not only survived my own childhood, but transcended it, healed from it. After all these decades, I’d gotten my mother to tell her own story, and I’d helped her heal too.
I felt as if I had finally resolved our relationship. I’d built a life of stability and beauty, and invited her into it, and here she was. Here we were.
Not even one week later, still basking in the glow of that beautiful day, I went to visit my mother, and she told me I looked awful. She said my dress was all wrong for me and I’d gained too much weight to go sleeveless. She said I was a terrible mother and my kids were spoiled and Jim was the devil incarnate. She railed at me for not driving her home myself, and for letting her account run out of money. (I had full financial responsibility for her after I took guardianship.) She cursed the day I became her guardian and pushed me out of her room.
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