The Mistress's Daughter (10 page)

 

It is summer, 1998. I am on Long Island in a small rented house. It is early evening. I am talking to my mother when her call-waiting beeps. She is gone a long time.

“Hold on to your hat,” she says, coming back onto the line. “Ellen is dead.”

I am on the phone talking to my mother when she gets a call telling her that my mother is dead. It's a little too much like a Gertrude Stein line.

The woman who delivered the news was a friend of Ellen's. I call her for more information. She tells me that it was kidney disease. Ellen was in the hospital for dialysis, but apparently she checked herself out against medical advice, went home, and was found “moribund” on her sofa.
Moribund
—bound for the morgue. She tells me that Ellen's brother was notified of her death and left Ellen's body in the Atlantic City morgue for at least a day while he was at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills.

“He wasn't playing in it, was he?” a friend later asks.

 

How could Ellen be dead? It makes no sense. The first thing I want to do is call her, ask what's going on, and have her say, I had to do something to get your attention.

I call my lawyer and ask him to let Norman know. I don't want to break the news or deal with his reaction.

The lawyer, ever professional, reports back that Norman “appreciated the news, asked after you, and said to tell you that he'd like to talk to you whenever you're ready.”

I drive to Atlantic City with no idea what to expect. The cemetery is near the airport—there's a brick billboard just outside.

 

Laurel Memorial Park

Atlantic City's Most Beautiful Cemetery

For Information Call…New Public Mausoleum

Single Graves

Family Plots

Urn Garden Niches Available

 

According to her friend—who didn't make it to the funeral—Ellen wanted a Jewish funeral. Instead she got a rent-a-minister in gray polyester pants presiding over a grave in the cheap part of an Atlantic City cemetery close to the airport. There are only four seats set up. Her brother, my uncle, arrives with his wife. He is wrinkled like a corn-husk doll and wears a seersucker suit. I extend a hand toward him.

“Remind me,” he says, knowing full well who I am. “What's your name?”

I ask if any other relatives are buried in this cemetery.

“No,” he says.

I don't tell him that I used to drive to his house, and turn the car around in his driveway, like tagging base, touch and go. I don't tell him that I used to sit outside his white brick house—his picture-perfect prosperity—and envy him his Christmas tree and his basketball hoop. And I don't tell him that his sister used to tell me how much she didn't like him.

The rented minister does his thing and I find myself nodding along, saying “Amen” to everything, and trying to make a good impression on my uncle. The grave is open, waiting, the casket next to it, unadorned. I realize that I was half expecting a large show of flowers from Norman, something in the shape of a horseshoe.

I'm thinking Ellen is in there—in that coffin, paying attention. She knows she's dead, she knows how awful it is—I remember her irreverent bursts of emotion, how she would say whatever it was she was thinking. It's depressing as hell but I'm glad I'm there, if only to be witness to this woman's life, the end of this woman's life, to make note of it.

After the funeral, I buy a map and drive around Atlantic City, going to each of the addresses on her letters in chronological order. I find one of the houses and remember a picture she sent me along with a letter saying she was one block from the ocean. It is like déjà vu—I have been here before. The house tour is a downward spiral ending in a prefabricated semidetached town house at the tag end of the street by a landfill. At each location I take photographs—I collect information, images to organize, to comfort myself.

At her last house there are tomato plants growing outside, filled with ripening fruit. Through the kitchen window I see there are still lights on inside. I see groceries on the counter, big bottles of pills, Tootsie Rolls, and Gasex tablets. There is an inhaler on the counter, some cans of Ensure, a lighter. It looks like someone lives here. I go to the front door and ring the bell—why? From her front step, using my cell phone, I dial her number and hear the phone ringing in the house; her machine picks up—her voice on the recording.

Looking through the kitchen window and into the living room, I see something green, a plant decorated with blinking out-of-season Christmas lights. Is this the plant?

What is so sad is that this is a woman who I had to protect myself from while she was alive—and now she is dead and I am doing chin-ups outside her kitchen window, scrambling for clues.

From here, I go further, I look at Atlantic City—stopping at Lucy the Elephant, a wooden turn-of-the-century tavern looking out over the ocean, a window in her ass. I park, walk out onto a fishing pier; the clouds are doing what I call the God thing, splitting light into visible rays. I see dolphins in the distance. I end up in a casino dumping quarters into slot machines. It is getting late, and although I still cannot reconcile anything, I leave with more than what I came with.

A week later, Ellen's lawyer and executor and supposed friend, who was also curiously absent from her funeral, agrees to let me into the house. I rent a car, bring some boxes, some plastic bags, and two of my friends for support.

“I don't know what kind of relationship you had,” the lawyer says as he's unlocking her door. “But I didn't find much, just a few pictures. My wife and I went through it. She's an antiques dealer, she said there's nothing.”

The house has been ransacked—there are candles but no candlesticks, plates but no silverware, and the copper pots and pans I saw through the kitchen window are gone. The lawyer tells me that he and his wife have been organizing things, getting ready for a tag sale. Cleared of anything of material value, the house is still filled with stuff. There is the crocheted afghan that covered the sofa where she was found, lots of ugly candy dishes, weird plastic dolls with music-box bases, supplies from the failed beauty shop she opened a few years before, Christmas decorations. And there is a small blue vanity case—the kind of thing you'd see in a movie, Audrey Hepburn or Barbra Streisand carrying it through the airport, a bellhop following with all the other, larger bags. The case has a built-in combination lock and the latch was open—clearly someone had already looked through it. It is filled with the debris, crumbs of a life lived—encrusted with old makeup, bobby pins, a hair roller, a long-expired ring of birth control pills, loose coins. Either she or someone she knew was king of the silver dollar, because they're everywhere, in every drawer of the dresser. The suitcase sums her up—it wouldn't have surprised me to find pieces of Lego in there or parts of a broken toy. It was, on the one hand, a sophisticated piece of luggage, and yet its condition gave the appearance of having been used by a child, a girl playing an adult. I leave it behind—it's too much, too intimate, like taking her toothbrush from its cup.

 

I go through the house, randomly putting things in boxes, my two friends trailing—asking what I want to keep, what I'm looking for. I am wandering, opening and closing closet doors, having no idea how to add it all up. Devastating, depressing—this was the sum of her life. On the inside the house feels impermanent, occupied by a transient, someone not living in the house but on it, like a squatter. It's messy, as though a hurricane has blown through, and there's no way of knowing if that was her or if someone had gone through it like a pirate, looting. There is nothing of substance—and I don't mean value but solidity. Everything feels like it is made of paper, like it could crumble and blow away. The lawyer lets us into the house—and then about twenty minutes later he finds me and asks, “Will you be done in fifteen minutes?”

My friend takes him aside and says, “Look, this is her mother, this is as close as she's ever been to her mother, so just give her a moment—if you have things to do, come back in an hour or so.”

I shoot photographs of everything, knowing this is it, the one time, the only time, the last time, and I have to try and capture what I can. I have to find a way to save it for later because I can't deal with it in the moment. I photograph her bedroom and the things in her bedroom—closet, headboard (brass but unattached and leaning sharply forward). I photograph the top of her dresser—Excedrin, Johnson's Baby Powder, perfume, candy, a China geisha, a bowl of loose change, and a stack of baseball cards! I photograph the insides of her dresser drawers—each stuffed with unfolded clothing—a lifetime supply of lingerie. I take pictures of her bathroom—thirty-two Chanel lipsticks and dozens of the strange little dolls that are all over the house, six-inches tall and dressed like colonial ladies, in wide skirts, with ruffles and, on their heads, lace hats, orange hair, and weirdly red, clown noses and circus makeup. I photograph the back of the bathroom door—her bathrobe and multiple shower caps. I photograph the other two empty bedrooms, filled with boxes, with stuff she'd clearly brought from the last place, cartons and shopping bags, wrapping paper, shoes still in their boxes. In a corner of the kitchen there is a menorah and then, just behind it, a crucifix, and in front a framed photograph of a dog. I use a half dozen disposable cameras, and when they are done I put the cameras in the boxes.

 

In the front closet, I find a fur: a stole, with her initials sewn into the underside in pink script. I imagine it was among her prized possessions, that Norman gave it to her. A luxury. It must have seemed glamorous when she got it. Now it looks old, mangy. I leave it hanging.

I take pieces of paper; boxes of paper, among them a receipt for a diamond ring from 1963; an old packet of what look like birth control pills, an arrest warrant, a package from Saks that must have arrived recently, two pairs of rubbery “slimming” underwear with the tags still on, one in black, one in flesh color. What size was she? A brown cashmere sweater exactly like the cream one Norman sent me for Christmas the first year we were in touch—the infamous cashmere sweater. In her bedroom her pants are hung over a chair, black jeans, not unlike the black jeans I often wear. They still hold the creases of her body. I put my hand in the pocket; there is a wad of money, loose bills, a pack of gum. This is exactly the way I keep my money. It's the one thing my mother is always on me about: How can you keep your money like that? No one keeps their money like that—don't you want to keep it in a purse? The wad is thick, jammed down into the bottom of the pocket—how many women in their early sixties keep money in a wad in their pocket? It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine.

I am reading a pile of clothes, a messy house, looking for information, clues.

I remember the writer James Ellroy talking to me about his mother's clothing—getting his murdered mother's clothing out of the police evidence room—years after the fact. He talked about taking the clothing out of the sealed plastic bags and wanting to smell it, wanting to rub his face with it.

There is a tendency to romanticize the missing person—to think about her is to allow her in. I hear her voice in my head—unreliable though she was, she is the only one who could explain to me what happened.

When I leave, I put four boxes of assorted paper into the rented car. I have no idea what I've taken, what it might add up to. I drive my two friends into downtown Atlantic City and take them out for dinner at one of the casinos. I feel indebted—I couldn't have gotten through the day without them. The setting is surreal, a faux underwater ice palace. We sit staring at the slowly melting sea-creature ice sculptures surrounding us. The lighting constantly shifts, green and purple and blue—like Jacques Cousteau on acid. The three of us order the same thing—steak and baked potatoes; it's as though we need a good meal to ground us. We are silent, stunned—it's hard to know what to say after a day like this. In the end Ellen pays for the meal. I use the wad of money from her black pants, and whatever is left I leave as a tip.

That night in New York, I clean my apartment. Frantically, hysterically, I go through everything, throwing things out—I have shower caps from every hotel I ever stayed in, soaps, shampoo. I have everything that she had. I throw it all away. I cannot be like Ellen—it can't all happen again the same way.

I think of the flowers she had turned into a plant, the plant I saw through the kitchen window, the plant with the Christmas tree lights turned on, and me, a Christmas baby, the thing that couldn't be forgotten—did she leave the lights on for me?

I struggle with how to narrate the confusion, the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening.

The autobiography of the unknown.

 

A couple of months later, I call Norman—he says, “Let me call you right back.” It's the first time we've spoken since Ellen's death. He tells me that he saw Ellen in Washington not long before she died. I have no idea if this was the first time they'd seen each other in almost forty years or if they'd been seeing each other repeatedly since their independent reunions with me. He tells me that he knew she was sick. The doctor had told her that she needed a kidney, and according to Norman, Ellen wanted him to ask me for one. He becomes adamant; she asked him and he said no. He told her that they couldn't ask me for any favors, on account of how neither of them had ever done anything for me. He tells me he offered his own kidney—that he called his doctor and asked about it. I believe he asked his doctor something about it but beyond that it seems unlikely. We're talking on his car phone because he's afraid to talk to me from his home phone, but he expects me to believe that he could give Ellen a kidney—would he tell his wife, his children? I believe that when Ellen asked Norman, he said no at first and then agreed to ask me and told Ellen that I'd turned her down. That would explain a lot. It would explain why I didn't hear from her before she died.