The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir

PREFACE

It’s the last luxury. To go early and never come back.

Have a good life, my mother wrote in March 1989, at the bottom of page four of her nineteen-page suicide letter.

This final communication, addressed to me, contained detailed instructions concerning renovations to her co-op apartment in Manhattan, who to rent the back bedroom to and why I should live there; what to tell the attorney handling her fraudulent insurance case (that I was her sister and she had no daughter); what to tell the lawyer who had drawn up the will (that I was absolutely her daughter); what to call the story about her life as a child with spina bifida (Born Dead); how to market the makeup line, Exclusively Yours, which she had conceptualized; who should receive her mink coat and designer dresses; and who to notify (and in what order).

Almost twenty pages of specifics about attorneys, real estate, projects, clothing, and telephone calls. Yet to me, her only daughter and immediate next of kin, she wrote five sentences summarizing the future, present, and past of our relationship:

My spirit will always be with you. Sorry I couldn’t go through all the surgery I would have to have. The pain now is too much. Sorry I wasn’t a healthy mother—but that was the roll of the dice in life. I love you and I’m sorry you’ll have so much to do.

Dolores killed herself on March 29, 1989 (just several months’ shy of her sixtieth birthday), but her dying had been put in motion decades before. Long after she died, I started to identify days and events pivotal in her unraveling. For example, March 19, 1969: On this day, after twelve months of trying to convince a New York State Supreme Court judge that chronic physical pain did not make her an unfit mother (though it necessitated pain medication and frequent hospitalization), the justice concluded that she was, as a parent, maybe not flawed beyond repair, but damaged enough to be dangerous. And thus he severed us. I don’t mean to pretend that we were emotionally joined; my mother was absent psychically and/or physically when I was in her custody. I didn’t know much about her until after we were separated, and I wouldn’t have much compassion for her until long after she died. I only vaguely understood that the judge’s decision to remove me from her custody altered our circumstances—I saw her every other weekend and for half the summer and some holidays. She became bitter and manipulated me, first into believing I wanted to live with her and then into acting out desperate dramas—a disappearance, running away—that she concocted. For her, these scripted acts of false rebellion ended in a contempt citation from the court and supervised visitation. But for me, they resulted in appreciating that lying was ugly and unproductive. It followed that our relationship deteriorated as I grew older and began to recognize, and then resent and disdain, her inability not only to tell the truth but to be inside a day without premeditating every interaction with other people.

Few are the documented facts about my mother’s life before my father and I appeared in it. She had her own fictionalized versions of what happened on each of the decisive days I’ve identified, days described in newspaper articles and court, law enforcement, and census records: On April 8, 1958, she was arrested for assaulting a pregnant woman; at the time she worked for a distributor of diet pills, but she had been a cosmetics industry executive. Seven years before that—on March 19, 1951—her mother died from complications related to multiple sclerosis in a hospital for the indigent in Rochester, NY. My mother’s birth certificate confirms a birthdate, June 4, 1929, in Newark, New Jersey. Federal and state census and city records show that she lived for at least several years in Rochester with her mother and maternal grandmother, who was deaf. Her father was incarcerated in Cincinnati in 1940, but then joined his wife and daughter in Rochester. He didn’t stay long; he made his way, alone, to New York City, where he was arrested in September of 1947 for running a rigged dice game.

The last two decades of Dolores’s life started in 1969, when, at close to forty years old, unemployed, single, and disabled, a court clerk filed the New York State Supreme Court judge’s ruling that removed me from her home. She talked about appealing the decision immediately after it was made. In the early seventies, she even married again, thinking the union would prove to the court that her home was a stable environment (she was convinced that being single was one of the main reasons for the court’s decision, and in retrospect, I have to agree it was likely a factor). Her new husband died of a heart attack on Halloween day while riding a commuter train. For a time, I wondered if she had killed him. If that seems like a stretch, remember that she was indicted for attacking a pregnant woman; I was fairly convinced she purposely caused a fire in her apartment in the early 1980s to collect an insurance pay-out. And I discovered, after she died, how many aliases she maintained and the extent of her fraudulent activities.

After divorcing my father, my mother changed her name back to Dolores E. Buxton (her actual maiden name had been Buxbaum, which her father had changed, though I don’t know exactly when). Buxton was the name she used as the savvy cosmetics executive she had been in the 1950s; in the 1970s, she recast Miss Buxton as a film-production and editorial consultant. Dolores B. Wender was the widow who received disability and became a central character in the 1980s. And then she fashioned KD Buxton, an amalgam of my mother and myself, who appeared after I had moved to France in the mid-1980s to go to school, and was the pen name she planned to use on the books she outlined but never finished writing.

As my mother saw things, her end was merely a bad roll of the dice, an interesting phrase given her father’s lifelong vocation as card shark, pool hustler, and confidence man. A supposition is inherent in such a phrase, that fate trumps free will, that she was powerless to shape her life. Many years had to pass after my mother’s suicide before I was able to think of her not solely as the person closest to me who had wronged me most profoundly by killing herself. I agreed with Arthur Miller, that Suicide kills two people, and I thought for a long time that Dolores had killed part of me.

To undo that kind of psychic filicide meant examining—with a forensic attention—who my mother had been and why she made the choices she made. Which led me to consider what had happened to Dolores before she told her first lie and worked her first scam. How is the interior life furnished when it belongs to someone who has learned truth does not always result in getting what you want? I didn’t know much about Dolores as a young woman, though I suspected she had become practiced at the art of lying by the time she was in her late teens. And I knew nothing of her girlhood save her romanticized and scant tales, though photos attested to the fact that she and her mother, Dorothy, lived for a time with her deaf grandmother in Rochester, New York, which is where my maternal great-grandparents lived, met, married, had children, and where one had died and was buried.

In mid-August of 2012, I drove north, to see what I could see of what remains of my mother’s family in Rochester: the gravesites of her mother and grandfather. Route 15 hugs the western side of the Susquehanna River, and I looked to the red-tailed hawks flying along the riverbank as a promise of clarity to come. Once arrived in Monroe County, New York, I made my way toward the city where my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had lived together at the same time, a place that I, as daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter invested with the mythos of ancestry, though it is only later that I would identify it as a place that both my relations fled. My grandmother to New Jersey, where she met and married my grandfather. My mother to New York City then California, in pursuit of the same man, her father. The day I arrived, thunderstorms were predicted. I stopped and walked along the Genesee River, and the first bird I saw was a blue heron.

Herons always seem to materialize from an imperceptible layer behind the scenes. Nothing is ambiguous about their raspy croaks, which command you to stop what you’re doing and look up. The one at the river passed silently at first; it seemed to have been projected out from the solid expanse of immobile cloud. Another flap of the enormous wings and it released one long syllable, chiseling the silence. In the empty space left behind, the wind riffled the trees and the rain tap-tap-spattered, and the entire orchestration belonged to that bird, the messenger aloft. The sky roiled and darkened with the accelerating storm.

Once you come face to face with a heron, you watch for them. Or, at least that’s what happened to me after coming so close to one I might have touched it by extending my arm. It stood in the middle of a road I had turned down in error. It stood so still that the backward S-curve of its neck seemed articulated of petrified wood rather than living flesh. Its solitary amber eye dilated, and as the bird registered the level of my threat, I gawked, startled by how artificial, how carved it seemed, as if the landscape behind it were fashioned of stone. When the heron unfolded its enormous slate-blue wings and lifted off the ground, I expected a hushed sigh of feathers, but instead there was a silence as old as shale. The kind of non-sound that implies an instant release from the terrestrial. That night I dreamt about the dead.

Once I arrived in Rochester, I drove directly to Mt. Hope, the country’s first municipal Victorian cemetery, where my mother’s maternal grandfather, Albert, is buried. I had planned to walk around, but after a brief amble, decided to motor instead, what with the threatening weather and the immensity of the place, the roads meandering, and the terrain more hilly than not. Lightning flashed on the horizon, and I returned to my car. I drove up and down several of the cemetery’s steep and narrow inclines. Raindrops splashed and just as rapidly stopped, only to start again, and I drove around some more, but the signage was either turned the wrong way or barely legible, and Mt. Hope’s office was closed. I made my way to the exit, passing fallen tree limbs, toppled-over gravestones, and a large scummy pond. In spite of the disorder and disrepair, under the canopy of these tall hardwoods and sloping evergreens and above them the sky like boiled cotton, the place enchanted me.

I decided to cross the city and visit Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, where my mother’s mother, Dorothy, the grandmother I never knew, is buried. Past Kodak’s world headquarters and High Falls, on a road that leads to Lake Ontario, is the strictly ordered, flatter Catholic burial ground. Not a blade of grass seemed out of place. On an index card, I’d printed the information needed to locate Dorothy Buxbaum: section North 26, tier four, grave number twelve. I wondered if my grandfather and then mother had changed their surname to Buxton before or after my grandmother died. And if she was still alive when they did, why she, a Catholic woman, had kept this Jewish name after her divorce from my grandfather.

Each marble and granite marker had been austerely placed and stood upright, clean and readable. Some were decorated with still-new flowers. The act of visiting a place where family once resided and are now buried is infused with the most solemn satisfaction. Which faded when I realized I had brought nothing to leave in remembrance of the grandmother I never knew. And disappeared when I understood there was no marked grave.

At section North 26, tier four, all the markers are small granite rectangles laid flat in the grass. Like Dorothy, everyone in this row died in 1951. Number twelve was at the periphery of the base of a sapling, yet there was no marker. Walk back to the start of the row and count again, I told myself. And again, an ache of disbelief nestled into my sacrum, spreading out like a hand pressed against the small of my back.

As I acknowledged this unmarked spot as where my grandmother was interred, four deer sprinted across another section of the cemetery. A fifth lingered and browsed. On catching my human scent, she lifted her head, and looked toward the sapling where I stood, distracted. An instant later, the doe bounded off in the direction of her herd. A crow sounded from within the thickly leafed treetops, as if the white tail flashing in the dusk had been an intruder to its high nest. When I gazed again at the ground, the sequence—arrival, birds, storm, deer, bird—seemed like some kind of message but made no sense to me.

Underneath my feet were the scant remains of Dorothy, cast in the role of Unknown-Beautiful-Kind Grandmother Who Died Very Young of MS. She had been lowered into an unmarked grave I am sure my mother never visited, at the base of a tree that wasn’t there at the time of burial. What did you expect to find? I asked myself. No discovery would be mine until the next day, when I returned to Mt. Hope and located my great-grandfather Albert’s grave, which, like Dorothy’s (his only daughter), is also unmarked and unremarkably situated in what must be the flattest part of an otherwise undulating cemetery. As I stood at his burial site, I felt a brief gliding across time, the sensing-without-knowing that the reptilian brain offers, which must have tremored at the nape of Dorothy’s neck or tightened in the small of her back when she came to this place to remember her father and saw that intolerably bare rectangle of grass. The true revelation came after, long after, when I finally felt the weight of apprehending a key fact about women on the maternal side of my family. Namely that, across generations, they all endured hardship, physical and psychological traumas; they all died alone, mostly of heartbreak, none of them able to sustain happiness with another person for more than several years.

When I arrived at my great-grandfather Albert’s gravesite, three crows alit on the macadam. They proceeded to waddle, each in its own direction, as if they were the true custodians of these grounds, pranksters who wait in places such as these to play benign tricks on the unwary. And why not these jester corvids precisely at this moment? For me they are totems that signal import (I’ve never encountered a crow who didn’t presage or emphasize an experience), though I must admit that the absurdist part of my mind was visualizing the Three Stooges meet Heckle and Jeckle. Such humorous images comfort me and as I stood there, I