Left Behind

What? "Did you say she beat him up?"

"Yes, we could hear it through the walls. My wife knows more," said Don, and we went upstairs to talk with Marge, a cheerful 50-something woman who padded to the door in bare feet and seated me at their kitchen table with Prim Diefenderfer, another neighbor.

Prim told me that my mother was gone by the time of the fire in the spring of '78. She was already at Austen Riggs and called from there to check on the condition of the cats.

Don recalled that my mother was a hulking woman, six feet tall, he estimated, and Eric was a skinny, short sad sack with a drug habit far worse than my mother's.

Prim volunteered that she saw my mother's paintings once, and they were "very disturbed."

"We found needles in the hall," said Marge, brightly.

I'd been right to feel uncomfortable in that apartment. Her neighbors made me think that maybe my mother wasn't crazy at all, just a druggie, and I suddenly realized that I had been vacillating between those two images of her for more than a decade. The Bergers told me to return another day to talk to Nina Feigin, yet another old-timer, who had been at this peculiarly mummified building since 1966.

It was while looking for an article this year about my Grandma Bea's lawsuit against Rosen that I stumbled upon a September 3, 1981, Miami Herald story on the civil settlement that began: "Claudia Ehrmann, a tormented artist from New York City, came to Florida in 1979 to overcome her madness and ended up losing her life." The reporter, citing psychiatric reports, went on to detail a series of facts about my mother's past, all unfamiliar and horrible:

"She was sexually and physically abused as a child by her father."

"She tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of relaxants."

"She was abducted by three men in the East Bronx, raped and held captive for three days. She was later found dazed in a New York park, inexplicably carrying a piece of lead pipe and some raw meat in her purse."

I read that last part over three times. For a moment, I mused in a detached way: How could I write about a person whose suffering was in such an unimaginable realm? No one could relate to this. Plus the lead pipe/raw meat part was just weird. Then it all sank in, and I fell apart.