Carolyn watched as the leaves slipped from the trees, fall shifting into winter. Her due date came and went, the baby getting bigger and heavier with every passing day.
When her water finally broke on November 22, 1959, Malcolm was out, socializing at Sherman’s. Snow was falling, covering the trees surrounding the house in a thin mask of white. Carolyn called her husband to tell him she needed to go to the hospital.
At Huntington Hospital, Carolyn was put in a gown, prepped for surgery, and wheeled into an operating room. She had always known that she was going to have another C-section. In those days, if you’d had a prior caesarian, you didn’t have the option of delivering any other way.
After the anesthesia was administered and Carolyn was no longer conscious, the doctor took his scalpel and made a long, vertical incision starting from above the belly button, working his way through fat and muscle until the abdomen was fully opened. The surgeon then cut into the womb, so that I could be brought into the world.
I was a large baby, ten pounds ten ounces, fine and healthy. The mother on the operating table was another matter. Right away, the surgeon could see that the uterus was extremely stretched out from carrying such a big baby; it wasn’t contracting in the way that it should after a delivery. He tried to massage it to help it to contract, but nothing was working. Carolyn was beginning to hemorrhage. This was an emergency. The surgeon was going to have to remove the uterus in order to save her life, an extremely complicated and risky procedure. The womb was connected to Carolyn’s body by a complex network of blood vessels; it wasn’t going to be possible to remove all of it. The surgery took more than two hours, with the surgeon having to repeatedly clamp and suture to stem the bleeding.
When Carolyn woke up from the surgery, she was told that she’d had a baby girl, and hysterectomy.
She stayed in the hospital for more than a week after the surgery, doing her best to recover. The first few days, she could barely roll over or sit up without help. Her abdomen was black with bruising, and there were thick staples holding her middle together. She had lost so much blood during the surgery that when she finally looked in the mirror it was as if she were staring at her own ghost. When she coughed, the pain was so excruciating she thought her insides would spill out. She wasn’t able to stand up to visit the baby nursery, so the nurses brought me to her bedside. But my mother was so weak, it was hard for her to hold me. Each day, the nurses asked my mother for a name to put on the birth certificate, but Carolyn was too exhausted to decide.
Malcolm barely came to visit. Carolyn knew he was disappointed. He had been hoping for a boy. She’d even put a little blue blanket with a white ribbon trim in her overnight bag, convinced that she would be able to give him what he wanted. Malcolm may have decided on my sisters’ names but he showed no interest in choosing mine.
For an entire week, I remained nameless. The nurses felt so bad for me that they spent as much time holding me as they could, and they gave me the nickname Cuddles. Then, the night before my mother left the hospital to go home, she had a dream about a young French girl carrying schoolbooks and wearing a trench coat. My mother decided to give me a French-sounding middle name—Suzanne. My first name would be Nina, meaning “grace.”
CHAPTER 14
Nina
Not long after we returned from our France trip in the spring of 1972, Jill brought home a friend, Marcia, from college. It was a weekday, and I remember I was sitting in the den, watching TV, wearing my yellow and orange pajamas I had picked out to take to France.
Marcia came into the room and looked at me coolly. “Why are you not in school?” she asked.
It was a good question, even if I hated the judgment it implied. Why wasn’t I at school? Anyone could see I was healthy! Even my mother believed I had been cured at Lourdes! I was twelve years old, and under Marcia’s cool gaze, I felt ashamed. For the first time, I acknowledged to myself that it was wrong for me to be home all the time.
Meanwhile, my mother was directing her attention elsewhere, completely preoccupied with Robin, who still wasn’t well. No longer my mother’s primary concern, I seized my opportunity for freedom. Jill was working as a mother’s helper during her summer vacation for a family out in the Hamptons. I decided I wanted to spend as much of the summer as I could at the beach with her.
Amagansett was about a two-hour drive from our home, but it was as far from my mother as I had ever ventured. Jill was almost twenty and living independently from our parents, working, studying, and with her own social life. To a twelve-year-old, she was impossibly grown-up and independent, with her long, straight brown hair, parted in the middle in curtains, and her stylish clothes. We had a lot of fun that summer. I think Jill knew exactly how restricted my life had been until now, and she felt a responsibility as my elder sister to show me the world. With Jill’s encouragement, I got my own babysitting job, taking care of an eighteen-month-old for a couple who lived nearby. The first day I was terrified. My mother had never encouraged me to have any responsibility whatsoever—homework or even the smallest household chore was considered too strenuous—but Jill kept reassuring me that I could do it. And I did; I took
