At this point, I asked the writer to stop the tape machine. I knew the conversation had already gone too far.
The biography came out the following year. In the book, the writer focused on the alleged affair, overlooking all the other elements of the friendship that had been so important to my mother. After the book was released, I glanced at the sections about my mother and then put it away. Even the thought of what she had written about the affair was too confusing, too painful.
* * *
AT THE NURSING HOME, my mother’s health took a rapid turn for the worse. She weakened very quickly. I remember going to see her at the hospital where she had been taken for tests. Jyl had been called there, too. Our mother was conscious but barely able to speak, propped on pillows in her bed. We spoke with her doctors, trying to figure out how to make her comfortable, what to do next.
That day, I remember, my sister had brought along a framed photograph of our mother in her modeling days. The photo had been given to Jyl by relatives. I had never seen anything like it before. In the photo, my mother was still in her twenties, wearing a pale blue dress embroidered with white flowers and holding a matching lace parasol, her dark eyes looking slightly upward. The picture was from the cover of McCall’s magazine dated August 1948. After I got home from the hospital that day, I found the same issue of McCall’s on eBay, bid on it, and won. When the magazine arrived, I had it framed and hung it on my dressing room wall.
Not long after that, we learned she needed a feeding tube in order to eat, but she was refusing to let the doctors insert it. In the coming days, she drifted in and out of consciousness. I remember the final phone call, the nurse telling me to come to the nursing care center right away; they didn’t know how much longer my mother had left. I drove there immediately. I remember walking into the room and seeing my mother in her bed, so tiny under the expanse of covers, her mouth opening and closing like a bird. I sat with her. I held her hand. I told her I loved her, that I didn’t want her to go.
My mother died that night. She was seventy-nine.
We didn’t have a funeral for her. My father and Robin were gone. There weren’t any friends or family left to invite that we knew of. Jyl and I decided to split her ashes. I remember going to the funeral home, where they gave me a gold box filled with my half, along with a poem titled “In Loving Memory of Carolyn Reybold, the Rose Beyond the Wall.”
Near a shady wall a rose once grew,
Budded and blossomed in God’s free light,
Watered and fed by the morning dew,
Shedding its sweetness day and night.
I knew it was most likely the same poem they printed out for all the families, but the words moved me all the same. The rose beyond the wall, my beautiful mother, always out of my reach.
CHAPTER 18
After my mother’s death I went through a period where I couldn’t be alone without breaking down. If I got in my car and my husband or children weren’t with me, I would start to cry and couldn’t stop, the sobs taking over my entire body until I couldn’t even turn the ignition, let alone get out of the driveway. I met with a psychologist who didn’t believe in medication, and he told me I needed to think positive thoughts whenever I felt the sadness coming on. This didn’t work. Eventually, my internist prescribed a course of medication, and that helped me to feel stronger. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t change that my mother was gone and that the losses of the past had outlived her.
When someone so close to you dies, you reach for whatever you can find of that person, just to keep them with you a bit longer. But there was so little I had left of my mother. By the time she died, she had very few possessions remaining, just a handful of photographs of my children I had given her, some books, and some items of clothing. There were no remnants of her youth, no jewelry, no letters; even the bridesmaid’s dress had gone. And besides the framed cover of the magazine on my wall, there weren’t any other pictures from her modeling days.
I began to spend my weekends at the New York Public Library, going through old copies of Seventeen and Mademoiselle searching for her image. The librarian would bring me bound volumes of magazines, and then I would turn the pages, looking for her and finding her over and over again. Each time I saw her face, I recognized her immediately, the beautiful young woman in the photograph, turning to look at the camera. But what had happened to that smiling, hopeful girl? Where had she gone? I had never known her.
My children were getting older. After Nicole turned twenty-one, she moved into a group home with five other housemates with developmental disabilities. My son moved across the country, to L.A., to pursue a career as an actor. Danielle went away to college to study fashion merchandising.
I had time now, time to see what else I could find of my mother, to look for her traces.
* * *
THERE WAS A thin mask of snow on the banks of the Ohio River and a weak sun pushing through ice-gray clouds as I drove across the bridge to Steubenville that day. I was returning to my mother’s hometown for the first time since she’d brought me here as a young child. Back then, we had been running away from my father, from the school officials hounding her with telephone calls and letters.
This time, I’d arranged to meet the president of Steubenville’s historical
