Together, we’d go to a nearby diner for lunch, spending the next hour or so picking at our food and trying to make conversation.
My mother usually wanted to talk about astrology. She was obsessed with star signs and the movement of the planets.
“The planets are colliding this week,” she’d say, shaking her head. “We have to be very careful. It’s a dangerous time.”
She was always concerned, always anxious. She had a lot of advice. If I talked about my husband, she’d tell me I should leave him. If I brought up something about my children, she told me that I should take them to the doctor; she was worried about their health. She was concerned about me, too. She wanted me to see a doctor; I didn’t look well.
“We need a miracle,” she’d say to me. “I’ve been praying for a miracle for you.”
But when I tried to talk to my mother about what we could do to improve her own situation—how we could help her find a stable place to stay—she’d shut me down.
“We’ll talk about it when the sun is shining,” she’d say.
And that was that. She didn’t want my help. More than anything, she seemed to want to be left alone. I had spent so long trying to separate myself from my mother, forging my own life in order to survive; I’d even changed the name she had given me, Nina, spelling it with a y, to set myself apart. Now, as we sat on the opposite sides of the table at the diner, it was as if a thousand miles stretched between us. During those lunches, we were careful to avoid eye contact. My mother looked off to either side, remaining alert to danger. I stared at my plate. I didn’t want to catch my mother’s eye; if I did, I usually regretted it. She had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.
After lunch, I got back in the car and drove home to the suburbs, back to the careful, normal life I had built for myself, my fortress.
My mother remained living at the shelter for a decade, until 1998. At that point, she developed a heart problem, which meant she could no longer legally stay at the shelter, and we were able to move her to an adult home on Long Island. She spent her last years at a nursing care center, where she died in 2007 at the age of seventy-nine.
When my mother was alive, I never managed to learn what had made her the way she was, why she was so removed from the world, how the once glamorous model and bridesmaid ended up sleeping each night in a shelter. It was only after she was gone that I was finally able to understand what had happened, to go back to the past, in search of the woman my mother had been before I was born—and to the childhood I’d lost after everything changed.
Part One
BEFORE
CHAPTER 1
Carolyn
The young woman in the photograph isn’t my mother yet, and she isn’t Grace’s bridesmaid. It’s the summer of 1947, and she’s still Carolyn Schaffner, about to leave Steubenville, Ohio, for New York City. She’s so young, barely nineteen years old, slender and pale-complexioned, with angled cheekbones and her dark hair in a pageboy, smiling out at the future ahead of her.
Carolyn had wanted to live in New York for as long as she could remember. Growing up in the little clapboard house on Pennsylvania Avenue in her hardscrabble hometown, she always felt as if she belonged someplace else, if she could only figure out how to get there. Her parents had divorced when she was young, her father moving away to Virginia. Her mother, Dorothy, was dark-haired like Carolyn, with the good looks of a movie star, and she quickly remarried. Dorothy had two more children with her new husband, Joe. Carolyn often felt that her half brother and half sister were her mother’s real family, and that she—Carolyn—was somehow on the outside, watching them from a distance. Joe ran a small laundry service. Carolyn’s new stepfather was a tall, coldhearted man, who believed that her role in the house was to provide unpaid labor for the benefit of him and his children. There were always dishes for her to clean, messes to clear up, her brother and sister’s clothing to wash. The smog of Steubenville’s steel mills left behind a layer of grit on every surface of the house that, despite her weekly scrubbing with pine and Lysol, never stayed away. It was easy to displease Joe. If Carolyn missed her curfew in the evening by as much as a minute, her stepfather would bolt the doors and refuse to let her in. Then she would have to stay with her friend who lived across the street, or walk three miles to her cousins’ house to find a bed for the night. When Carolyn returned in the morning, the stack of dishes in the kitchen sink was still there from the night before, waiting for her to wash them.
When Carolyn was younger, her birth father, Harold Schaffner, would occasionally come to visit. Each time, Dorothy would warn Carolyn, “the bad man is coming.” Before long, the visits from the bad man stopped and it was only when Carolyn turned fifteen that she decided she wanted to seek out her true father. She went to the local police chief and asked for help. The police chief managed to track down Harold in West Virginia. That summer, Carolyn spent two months with her father, meeting her two half siblings there.
After she graduated from high school, she got a job in the local department store, in the children’s shoe division. She worked and saved as much as she could, but she worried that if she stayed in Steubenville too long, she’d
