Even at night, I made sure I wasn’t separated from her for long. She’d put me to bed in my own room, but I often woke up at night; I didn’t like the dark, and the Dream House made me fearful; I could hear noises outside—the wind, some bird or animal scuffling in the trees—and so I’d get out of my bed and go to her. I remember tiptoeing out of my room in my nightgown, careful not to wake my sisters, whose bedrooms were next to mine. Then I’d walk across to the other side of the house, where my parents slept, pushing gently on the door to their bedroom. My mother and father slept separately, in twin beds with a heavy round marble table between them. The coverlets on their beds were a blue-and-white pattern that was rough and not soft at all.
I was scared of my father; he lost his temper easily, I didn’t want to wake him. Often I would curl up in an alcove in their suite, surrounded by books, listening to the sounds of my parents breathing. Sometimes I lay down on the floor next to them. Other times I went to my mother’s side and quietly begged her to get up and come with me to my bed. If I accidentally woke my father he’d say angrily, “Oh, Carolyn, tell her to go back to her own room!” But my mother never did tell me. Instead, she’d get up, and together we’d walk hand in hand to my bed. I recall her slow movements and her hushed voice, getting under the warm covers with her. Then she would hold me, we were together, and I would fall right back to sleep. My mother slept with me in my bed most nights until I was ten years old.
Looking back, I wonder if my mother was also awake in the night, and that’s why she was always ready to come and sleep in my room with me. Or maybe she needed to get away from my father. Or perhaps she did it for a simpler reason: she wanted someone to hold in the darkness as much as I did.
* * *
I KNEW MY MOTHER had been a model when she was younger, but by the time I was born, she had given up her career. It was so hard for me to imagine her life before I came along. She didn’t have any old magazines or photos from her time as a model around the house; she explained that she had lost her portfolio on an airplane many years ago. She never told us stories about her career, and although she was always perfectly turned out, her face powered and with a neat coral-colored lip, she rarely got dressed up to go out to parties anymore. In those days, she was simply my mother, moving so dutifully through the tasks of her day—the cooking, the cleaning, the driving, the laundering. My parents didn’t have any old friends who came to visit to tell me about how life used to be. Occasionally, my father would tell stories about life during their Manhattan days, the clubs and parties they’d attended, but these usually took the form of jokes, often at my mother’s expense.
The only photographs that we had from the past were kept in the cabinet under the dry sink in the den. They were thrown in there randomly, one on top of the other, their edges bent and curling, as if my mother were trying her best to forget about them. I would go there sometimes to look at the black-and-white prints and the faded color ones with the white deckled edges, snapshots of another world. Here were the pictures taken of my mother at Grace’s wedding, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and the dress that looked perfectly white in the photographs, but that I knew was actually palest yellow. There was a group shot of Grace with her bridesmaids and flower girls, and one of my mother and Grace sitting at a small table at the wedding reception. Other photographs showed my sister Jill with Grace’s daughter, Princess Caroline, both girls dressed up in Sunday best with big bows in their hair. Jill was about ten; Caroline was about four years old. The photos were taken the day my mother drove Jill into the city to meet Grace so they could go together to the ballet.
Then there were my mother’s old comp cards, the ones she used to hand out to clients in her modeling days. I loved the comp cards, or “composites,” as my mother called them. They listed her height, the size of her waist and bust, her glove size, and her shoe size. And they showed a photo of my mother the model dressed in a fitted suit and a hat, looking up at the windows of Lord & Taylor’s department store. In the store window, there was another photo of my mother, this time wearing a wedding dress and smiling. The cards fascinated me.
Even as a child, I was looking for clues, pulling at the threads of the past, trying to picture the person she’d been. I loved spending time looking through the dresser upstairs in my parents’ suite filled with all her beautiful things from long ago, her white gloves, the short ones and the long ones for the evenings, her pretty beaded evening bags and her strings of pearls. Then I’d try them on, looking at myself in the mirror, imagining I was a model, too. My mother’s closet
