I said I wished more than anything I could have been there.
The day of my visit, I parked outside the historical society, housed in an old redbrick mansion on Steubenville’s Franklin Avenue. Charlie was waiting for me there. He was a tall and gracious silver-haired gentleman; the library and museum was generally closed around this time of year, but he was opening it especially for my visit, and I thanked him for the kindness. Charlie took me through the oak-paneled entry room directly to the room where my mother’s photograph was kept on a low walnut-wood piano, in a heavy silvered frame. The picture was from 1947, the year that Carolyn was crowned Queen of Steubenville. In the photo, my eighteen-year-old mother is wearing a black-and-white-striped skirt and a cropped black top, her hair sleek and full. It’s summer, and she’s standing sidelong to the camera, with hands behind her back, looking out at the world with such a simple and straightforward happiness. She’s about to leave for New York, ready for the adventure ahead of her.
Although Charlie hadn’t known my mother personally, he knew about her story.
“Everyone my age who grew up in Steubenville knows about Carolyn,” Charlie told me. “She was our Sesquicentennial Queen!”
Then Charlie led me to a back room, crammed with filing cabinets and boxes, where he pulled out an album devoted to Steubenville’s 150th anniversary celebrations. We looked through the pages together, finding photograph after photograph of my mother, sitting on her silvered throne, wearing a long embroidered velvet cape, a crown on her head, and carrying a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses as proudly as any scepter. Charlie had even unearthed my mother’s high school yearbook, her photo still unfaded, preserved with all the freshness of youth. Then he handed me a large file marked CAROLYN SCHAFFNER; inside were clippings from magazines, advertisements from her modeling days, features from Seventeen and Charm. There was the cover of McCall’s taken by Avedon, the Coca-Cola advertisement that my father had helped to arrange. I went through the pictures one by one, some of them new to me, each one a treasure.
Then, at the back of the folder, was a clutch of articles from the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period when my mother was staying at the shelter. I had guessed they would be there. FROM FAIRYTALE TO FLOPHOUSE, the headlines read.
Charlie looked at me with kind eyes. A true gentleman, he didn’t press me for more information.
But there was one last item he wanted to show me. We went to his small office at the back of the building to sit down. Here he pulled out two letters. I think it had taken him a while to work up the courage to show them to me.
The first letter was from Congressman Doug Applegate, writing to the mayor of Steubenville, Bill Croskey, about my mother in 1989. It turned out that both Doug and Bill had been in high school with my mother. After the news broke that Carolyn Schaffner was living in a shelter, they decided to rescue her. Doug had written to the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, asking for his help bringing Carolyn back to Steubenville. Mayor Koch had responded. He wrote that had looked into the matter but had learned that Carolyn had resisted all efforts to provide her with housing and that nothing further could be done. Doug and Bill were forced to drop their attempt to bring Steubenville’s queen back home.
I had no idea that the town’s representatives had written to the mayor of New York to ask for his help. That they had tried to do this for her touched me more than I could explain to Charlie. She had been appreciated by her hometown in ways I had never imagined.
After I finished reading the letters, I told Charlie about my mother’s illness and the role it had played in her life. I felt that by telling him, I had brought him information that he hadn’t been able to locate in all his files and archives. He nodded; a true historian, he understood. I thanked him for his generous hospitality—and for the tributes to my mother that meant so much to me.
After I left the historical society, I drove the short distance to Pennsylvania Avenue, to the street where my mother had grown up. The row houses were exactly as I remembered them, each one identical to the next, with steep banks leading up to front porches and peaked gables. I pulled up outside 1416 Pennsylvania Avenue, where I’d visited my grandmother with my mother as a small child. I stepped out of the car. The air was frozen, the ground hard underfoot. My grandmother was long gone. I stood outside, looking up at the building, wishing for some kind of sign. But nothing stirred, not a twig on a tree, not even a bird in flight. Turning around, I saw a small corner store with its windows boarded up across the street. I realized this was the old candy store where my mother had taken me when I was a child.
That weekend, I was able to reconnect with family members I hadn’t seen in many years. I met with my mother’s cousins Patricia and Jacqueline, who had been close to her during her childhood and teens. They remembered my mother with
