I decided to visit my trusted ob-gyn, Dr. Dominic Grecco, someone I had been seeing for more than a decade, to learn more about the double surgery my mother had undergone at my birth. We talked through the C-section and the hysterectomy in detail.
“After such a traumatic surgery,” Dr. Grecco explained, “it is highly unlikely that your mother could have escaped some kind of postpartum depression.”
The doctor told me that because I was such a big baby, the massive incision would have limited her ability to breastfeed and bond with me. It would have been many weeks before the incision healed and she felt better in any way.
“Your birth was the fork in the road,” Dr. Grecco went on, “the turning point in her life from which she never recovered.”
* * *
THE NEW DIAGNOSIS brought me a greater understanding, but also another kind of loss—the knowledge of what might have been. I began to imagine another version of my mother’s life where she could have been helped. In all likelihood, she would still have suffered with some kind of depression. Her life was filled with so many challenges: a cruel stepfather; a career that ended abruptly; a difficult, lonely marriage; the sudden deaths of Robin and Grace. But even so, I have to believe that in this alternate version of events, she might have prevailed.
I began to wonder how it must have been for my father to be married to someone who changed so completely after my birth. I decided to reach out to one of his friends from the time we were living on Long Island. Ross Meurer was an artist; he had been quite a bit younger than my father, and he was still living out in Cold Spring Harbor. We spoke over the phone. Ross told me how lonely and confused my father had been during the years my parents were still married. “Malcolm said he never knew which woman he was coming home to,” Ross explained. “I think he missed the woman she’d been.”
I’d always thought of myself as hidden away at home during my childhood, but as I spoke to Ross, I began to understand that my mother had been hidden, too. When she no longer fit with my father’s vision of a happy, sociable, smiling wife, he simply stopped including her in his world. My father knew nothing about mental illness, let alone postpartum psychosis. He was a man of his times, completely lacking in any sensitivity or insight. I remember my father once pointing out to my sisters and me that if he’d had our mother committed to an asylum, we would never have forgiven him. This much was accurate. In some way, his complete neglect of our mother may have saved her from an asylum, and the inevitable shock treatments and prolonged hospitalizations that might have followed.
But there was one aspect for which I couldn’t forgive my father. My poor mother had known something was wrong with her. She had started sessions with a psychiatrist in Manhattan immediately after my birth. When my father found the check stubs for the therapy, he’d said she couldn’t continue, unless she went to a psychiatrist of his choosing. When she refused, he simply stopped the sessions altogether.
She had tried to get help, and my father had stood in her way.
* * *
I KEPT GOING back to the biographies of Grace. The more I read, the more questions I had. While Grace was solid and certain, with facts and figures, dates and details, Carolyn appeared for a paragraph or two, then vanished again. I dog-eared the pages with my mother’s name so I wouldn’t lose her. I was teasing out the fragments of her story from between the lines of Grace’s; the fragile remnants of my mother’s life were still slipping away and escaping from me.
More than one of Grace’s biographers had written about the alleged affair between Grace and Malcolm. If those accounts were correct, then my mother first learned about the affair in the summer of 1960, just nine months after my birth. This was when she was still recovering from her C-section and hysterectomy, at the same time that she was experiencing her first symptoms of postpartum psychosis. I could only imagine how the news must have affected her at this time when she was already so fragile. And yet there was so much I didn’t understand about what had taken place. When exactly had the affair happened? How long had it lasted? Had it even happened at all?
I could dimly remember visiting my sister Robin in Philadelphia once with my mother and hearing something about some kind of affair. I was about fourteen years old. Robin and my mother were in my sister’s kitchen, sitting close together, talking intimately with each other as they often did. Grace’s name was mentioned. I came closer, hoping to eavesdrop on their conversation. Then I thought I heard my mother say that Grace and my father had had an affair. But even then, it didn’t make sense. My father and Grace? I couldn’t reconcile the idea of Grace, the perfect princess in Monaco, with my father. When my mother and sister saw that I was listening, they quickly changed the subject.
All these years later, as I tried to learn the truth about what had happened, I discovered that there was very little evidence to go on. The only documentation I could find from that era was a Cholly Knickerbocker gossip column from January 1961, which claimed that all was not well between my parents that year:
“Malcolm Reybold, who at one time was a big name in Grace Kelly’s life (in fact, Princess Grace confessed to his wife that they had been a romance), has now moved his quarters to the elegant Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. The reason—to establish residence for a divorce from his pretty brunette wife Carolyn, who was
