The Bridesmaid's Daughter

by Nyna Giles

  While I had been away in Japan, my own mother had lost the apartment on Fifty-eighth Street. She moved to Philadelphia, as if she could somehow feel closer to Robin there. Jyl was also living in Philadelphia by then. We were both so worried about our mother. Housing was a continual problem; our mother was always bouncing from place to place. For a short time, she lived at a home for women run by Catholic nuns just outside Philadelphia. None of us understood or knew what to do. In August 1982, Jyl decided to call Grace in Monaco. Grace had sent such a kind condolence note to my mother after Robin died; perhaps she would have some advice for us now. Jyl managed to reach Grace at the palace. The princess promised Jyl she would do anything she could to help. She was planning to come to New York later in September. Perhaps she could see Carolyn then.

  * * *

  BUT GRACE NEVER returned to New York. That September, she was driving her daughter Stephanie to the train station in Monaco when she lost control of her car on the coastal road, crashing through a retaining wall and onto the rocky slopes below. The night before the news broke, my mother had dreamt of two figures tumbling and falling, one of them a small child in pink, the other a larger figure, holding the child’s hand.

  The funeral was held in the same cathedral where Grace had married Prince Rainier, where my mother had stood by her side as a bridesmaid all those years ago. The other members of Grace’s retinue were there to say good-bye, but my mother did not attend the service. By then, she had moved so many times that no one at the palace knew how to contact her to send her an invitation. Even if they had, my mother had neither the strength nor the means to travel.

  * * *

  GRACE’S DEATH, coming so soon after Robin’s, was more than my mother’s fragile health could withstand. She moved into yet another apartment in Philadelphia, this one in the projects, in a very bad area. I remember going to visit her there. It was winter, and even inside the temperature was frigid. There was no bedroom or separate kitchen in the apartment. I noticed that my mother had put a pack of American cheese on the window ledge. Why would she have put it there? Was it to keep it cool because she didn’t have power? Could she pay her bills? I didn’t ask. She was so gaunt—her hair was streaked with silver; she couldn’t afford to color it anymore.

  That day, I kept my coat on throughout my visit.

  I was four months pregnant and just starting to show. I didn’t want her to see, to know that I was going to be a mother. I felt such an intense need to protect my unborn child from her influence, to do things my own way. I stayed for about an hour. Then I left. Looking back, it breaks my heart that I could just leave her there. I was twenty-three. I didn’t know how to help her; I didn’t know what else to do.

  * * *

  MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN via C-section, just as I had been born. I promised her I was going to do whatever it took to give her the childhood I’d lacked. I read Nicole baby books, I played with her, I adored her.

  David and I had moved to an apartment in the suburbs. I gave up working to devote myself to motherhood, to building my normal life.

  It was here at the apartment that I got the call from a doctor at Kings County Psychiatric Hospital in Brooklyn.

  “I am calling about your mother,” the doctor said.

  What was my mother doing in New York? She was supposed to be in Philadelphia. I remember sitting down, preparing for the worst. Nicole was playing on the carpet in the living room, wearing a little pink dress, the light streaming in through the living room windows.

  The doctor explained that my mother had been brought to the hospital babbling and incoherent. Somehow, she had managed to give the doctor my number.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked, terrified.

  “You don’t know?” he asked, sounding surprised. “It seems to us that she has paranoid schizophrenia.”

  I knew that my mother was in trouble. I knew that she was struggling. I knew there was something very wrong. But until now, no one had ever mentioned schizophrenia or a diagnosis of mental illness of any kind. I had no understanding of the disease; I just knew that I needed to do whatever I could to help her.

  The doctor explained they weren’t going to be able to commit my mother. To keep her at the psychiatric hospital, she would have to be a danger to herself or someone else. Instead, they were going to send her to a place where she could be treated, where she would be safe. There was a shelter for mentally ill women age fifty-five and over on the Upper East Side. This would be a stepping-stone to housing, a temporary measure. The staff here would be able to get her the help, services, and treatment she needed.

  This was how my mother found herself at the shelter at the old Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side.

  At the shelter, my mother refused to take any medication. The staff tried to arrange for housing; she wouldn’t participate in the process. She felt she couldn’t trust them. In the coming months, everyone who knew her tried to persuade her to move. My grandmother in Ohio wanted her to come back to Steubenville and live with her there. There was a cousin in Steubenville who offered her a room. Another relative in Florida was going to lend her a condo rent-free until she got on her feet. I tried to persuade her to come to the suburbs near me, so we could be close. But she turned everyone down.

  It was a devastating time for everyone who loved my mother. No one could understand why she wouldn’t comply with the staff and why she turned down our offers of help. It was never explained to us that this behavior was in keeping with her diagnosis; that those who are the most seriously mentally ill don’t realize that they are sick, so they often won’t accept help and treatment. It was only years later that I learned that her obstinacy was actually another symptom of her illness, that what my mother really needed was an advocate, someone to take charge of her life and intervene at every level. I was so completely uneducated about the causes and effects of mental illness. I simply didn’t have the tools I needed to be that person on her behalf.

  I was also preoccupied. I was nearly thirty, the mother of two now; my son, Michael, had just been born. It was during this period that my daughter, Nicole, began to suffer with seizures. The first time it happened, she was two and a half years old, and I was with her and the new baby at the grocery store. Suddenly, Nicole started gripping the cart, staring straight ahead. Her body was rigid; her mouth was opening and closing. I asked her if she was okay, but she didn’t respond; she didn’t even seem to recognize me. I rushed her to the pediatrician. The pediatrician sent me to a neurologist. Nicole had a seizure right there in the doctor’s office.

  We were told she had a seizure disorder and needed to go on medication—but the medication didn’t work.

  No one seemed to know how to help her. We tried everything: different medications, diets, specialists, hospitals. After what I had been through as a child, it was almost more than I could bear. I was the daughter of a mother who had kept me home mistakenly believing I was sick. Now I was the parent of a child who had a legitimate health concern, and no one knew how to help us. We were in and out of clinics and hospitals. My ob-gyn told me I was going through “every parent’s worst nightmare.” Through it all, I refused to let my daughter stay home from school. I needed her to get an education. I couldn’t let her miss out as I had done.

  * * *

  OVER TIME, MY MOTHER established a routine for herself at the shelter, one that she followed religiously. In the morning, she got up and got dressed, always in white. Then she went to Bergdorf Goodman’s to wash in the basins of the ladies’ room. If it rained or if it was cold, she visited the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, where she could listen to classical ballet music on headphones, the same symphonies she had played for me as a child. She had a watercolor set, and she liked to sit on a bench and paint pictures of flowers and animals. She went to church often, taking her place in one of the pews and listening to the sermon, or praying in front of a statue of her beloved Virgin Mary. And every single day, with ritualistic intensity, she went to the li
ttle park set in between the buildings on Fifty-eighth Street to pray. She believed the park was blessed, and that if she went there often enough, miracles would come to pass. She felt that her prayers would someday elevate the park to the level of a shrine for humanity.

  I wanted so desperately to do what I could for my mother. I made sure she always had enough to eat, paying a local diner for her meals. I gave her money. I accepted her collect calls. I drove into the city to take her for lunch, even though it terrified me to leave Nicole alone with a babysitter. We’d always meet at a nearby café or diner—I avoided the Armory as much as I could; the building intimidated me. It was a vast Victorian redbrick building with crenellated towers and Gothic arches. To enter, you had to walk downstairs to a discreet darkened door, through an area stacked with garbage, and up a series of steep metal stairs.

  Now that she was living at the shelter, her obsession with religion and astrology became even more pronounced. She spoke often about the planets, about their movements, how everything was predestined. She liked to talk about “the Father” and how important He was in her life. “The Father” was always telling her what to do, and she was determined to follow His instructions. Other times she would talk about “They.” “They want me to do this,” she’d say, or, “They said I should do that.” When I asked her whom she was talking about, she wouldn’t tell me.

  “We’ll talk about it when the sun is shining,” she used to say.

  She was constantly praying, constantly worried. Concerned that I was sick, that the children needed to go the doctor. I didn’t tell my mother about what was happening with Nicole’s health. I didn’t want her advice or to have her tell me that we needed a miracle.

  After we finished eating, we’d say good-bye, and I’d get back in my car and drive to the suburbs to try to go on with my life.

  * * *

  MY FATHER NO LONGER considered my mother his problem. Since the divorce, they’d had very little contact. To my knowledge, he didn’t ever go to visit her during her time at the Armory, and he didn’t give her money. Malcolm Reybold, once the dashing man-about-town who had captured my mother’s heart, was in his seventies now and living back on Long Island.

  He had already suffered multiple heart attacks when, in January of 1988, he had his fatal stroke. Jyl, Patricia, my mother, and I went to the funeral. My father and I had never been close; I knew my sisters felt the same way. At his open casket I wept, as much for the bond we’d never shared as for the man himself.

  * * *

  AT THE SHELTER, my mother kept to herself; she didn’t speak to the other women who lived there. I think she no longer wanted to be measured or judged by anyone’s standards. My mother living at the Armory wasn’t ideal for anyone, least of all her. But with the distance of time, I can see that the shelter gave her, if nothing else, a roof over her head and the anonymity she craved.

  At the Armory, she had found, in her own way, a place to hide and some peace.

  Then, one day, as she was sitting on the steps of her favorite park, on Fifty-eighth Street, dressed all in white, my mother looked up and saw a camera lens pointing in her direction. She heard the familiar sound of the shutter’s click, click, click.

  She had been captured.

  Part Two

  AFTER

  CHAPTER 17

  In the supermarket parking lot, I finished reading the article about my mother with the photo of her sitting on the shelter steps. By the time I closed the magazine’s pages; I was trembling. PRINCESS GRACE BRIDESMAID LIVING IN NY SHELTER FOR HOMELESS. My mother’s story was there in black and white, for everyone to see. How could I explain to people that my family’s situation was far more complicated than a headline and a magazine article could even begin to convey?

  This wasn’t the last time my mother’s story appeared in print. In 1989, the same year as the magazine article, a book was published about Grace and her six bridesmaids. It was written by Judy Balaban Quine, one of the bridesmaids herself. The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends followed each of their stories, including my mother’s. While Judy was working on the book, she had called to ask for an interview with me. At the time, I had said no. Back then, I didn’t feel that anything good could come from my mother’s story being out in the world.

  When the book was released, however, I bought it immediately and read it closely. Judy described my mother’s upbringing in Steubenville, her time as a model, her marriage to my father. She was kind and gracious in her depiction of my mother’s descent from bridesmaid to shelter, but even so, there was much she didn’t know or wouldn’t say about Carolyn’s struggles.

  For me, the book answered some questions and raised many others. In one section of the book, Judy mentioned that my mother had kept her daughters home from school due to illnesses. Memories of my years spent at home came flooding back to me. Was it possible I had missed as much time as I thought? How reliable was my memory of events?

  I could no longer ask my father. If I asked my mother, I knew, her answers would only confuse me further. Jyl had been so much older than me; she had been busy with her own life by the time my absences became a real problem. As I tried to make sense of what was being written about my mother, I realized that I had no context for what had happened to me as a child. I had simply been too young to understand.

  Perhaps if I applied for my school records, this might at least give me some concrete information. I called my high school, Cold Spring Harbor High. They confirmed they had my records. Not long after that, I drove out to Long Island. The woman in the office had the records waiting for me. I remember she commented that she’d never seen a folder as thick as mine; there were more than a hundred pages. She let me use the Xerox machine, and I carefully copied each record before driving home. Later that day, I took the pages to my room and began to read. Here were letters from the school principal begging my mother to send me to school. Letters from my mother canceling the tutors who were coming to my home to teach me. Letters from doctors confirming I was sick. Letters from doctors explaining that I was healthy. More than one hundred pages documenting the months and years of missed education, the failed attempts of the school to force my mother to send me to my classes.

  I knew with certainty now that my mother had kept me home for the majority of my childhood without any real cause. Perhaps I had some minor legitimate health issues over the years, but nothing that warranted keeping me away from school for months on end.

  After I’d finished reading the school records, I didn’t see my mother again for a number of months. I was too upset. Each morning I looked at my own children getting ready to go to school, and I tried to understand how a young girl could be denied an education for so many years without anyone coming to her rescue. I was angry with my mother, but I was also furious with my father, my school, the child welfare system—in fact, with anyone who’d failed to intervene on my behalf. The cost had been my education, the basic right of every child.

  But the more I learned about my mother’s illness, the more I came to understand the role it had played. When she acted in such strange ways, had she been hearing voices in her head, telling her what to do? When she was anxious and withdrawn, was mental illness to blame? People with paranoid schizophrenia often hear voices; they can be anxious; they suffer from delusions. Did my mother imagine my illnesses? Were they just a part of her delusions?

  I knew that in order to have any kind of relationship with her in the future I needed to talk to her about what I had learned. On Mother’s Day 1990, I decided I was ready. I arranged to meet my mother at the square on Fifty-eighth Street where she went each day to sit and pray. Then we walked together to the nearby diner for lunch, sitting down in the back room.

  My mother began her usual update, telling me about the movement of the planets. On any other day, I would have done my best to listen, while avoiding meeting her eyes. This time, I looked at her squarely.

  “Mom, I’ve seen my school records
,” I said. “I know everything.”

  For the first time, I talked openly with my mother about what had happened to me as a child.

  “I want you to know that there was nothing wrong with me all those years ago,” I explained. “I was never sick. You kept me home for no reason.”

  My mother turned and looked at me.

  “You were having delusions,” I went on. “I know it wasn’t your fault. It was your illness.”

  I explained to my mother that there were medications that could help her, if she would only take them.

  “I want you to know that I forgive you,” I told her. “I have a good life now.”

  I waited. I saw the recognition in her eyes, and I knew she had understood me.

  Finally, my mother spoke. She had tears in her eyes.

  “That’s a lot for a person like me to handle,” she said.

  Did my mother understand what she had done by keeping me home all those years? I didn’t push her any further. We had come far enough—I had said what I needed to say.

  * * *

  THAT SUMMER, my mother’s mother—my grandmother, Dorothy—passed away from colon cancer. I gave my mother money for the airfare so she could say goodbye. I didn’t go to the funeral; I couldn’t leave the children.

  My daughter, Nicole, was still struggling. Along with her seizures, she was experiencing serious developmental delays. We went to every doctor, tried every medication, every possible approach.