Left Behind

I won't be able to see you in New York, over your Christmas vacation. I'm going to Stockbridge, Mass. for a rest because I've been nervous & tired.

I miss you very much and I feel bad that I can't see you. I love you very much and I'm sure we will have a good time together once I get some rest.

I'm looking forward to a letter from you.

I love you,

Mommy

I felt a familiar anger welling in me. I barely knew this "Mommy," yet she wrote, "I love you very much" and "I miss you." It was all so hollow and presumptuous. My mother could not possibly have felt anything genuine for a child she hardly saw. In the same box were dozens of stupid generic greeting cards that she had sent me, always late. She had painted some of them herself. Those I liked. But she misspelled my name in most of them. "Nervous and tired" -- how many times had I read those words?

I tried to focus on the parts of the letter relevant to the story: "Going up to Stockbridge, Mass. for a rest" was a reference to her going to an institution, the last one she stayed at before she was released into Rosen's care. It took about two minutes of Internet searching to find the name: the Austen Riggs Center. I called. I wanted to open her psychiatric records, but I learned I would have to jump through a number of legal hoops first. While I waited, I turned to another clue: my mother's return address in New York.

The apartment was still vivid in my mind: cats everywhere, newspapers stacked on the floor, turpentine-soaked rags, crusted dishes in the sink. I returned home after the 1977 visit with my mother and her boyfriend Eric and whined to my father that the apartment had upset me, which I regretted for years. Though I begged him not to, saying, "She won't want to see me again," my father called my mother to ask her to clean up before my next visit. I never saw her again. Then, a year later, Eric died in a fire that he started while smoking in bed, and my mother had a breakdown. It was only when I was in my twenties that my cousin Margaret told me that my mother had been using drugs heavily throughout this period, and I began to wonder if what I had really seen in the apartment was drug paraphernalia. Or maybe it was just paint supplies.

My mother's neighbors at 219 W. 81st St. might have known her true condition in her later years better than anyone, assuming any were still around. To my surprise, they all were.

It was dusk when Don Berger took me outside to show me my mother's apartment, which was on the second floor next to his own. "They were pretty stoned out most of the time, your mother and Eric," he said.

"Yes, I heard she used drugs," I said, trying to appear unfazed.

But I hadn't heard what came next: "They used to have drag-out, knock-down fights. We could hear them through the walls. He was smaller than she was, and she would just beat the [expletive] out of him."