My Mother and Me

Chapter I

I’ve known for years that I would write this book. I wanted my mother to have this marker. But I didn’t want to begin writing while she was alive. That would have meant writing each day with the shadow of her death in my mind.

So I waited.

My mother was ninety-six years old when she died. She lived a long, privileged life and died at home, which was where she wanted to be. I arrived at her apartment a half hour later, called 911, and told the operator that my mother was dead.

New York City has a checklist of things that have to be done when a death is reported . . . Two emergency medical technicians came to her apartment . . . Shortly before they left, two police officers arrived.

I called my mother’s internist (who had known her health was failing). He’d promised that, when the time came, he would call the Medical Examiner’s Office and ask that they waive the requirement that her body be autopsied at the morgue so she could be sent directly to the funeral home.

A homicide detective came to the apartment and interviewed me. He asked what medications my mother had been taking and looked at some pill bottles. The inquiry, he explained, was necessary because my mother had died at home and was not in hospice care.

I don’t remember what any of the people who came to the apartment that afternoon looked like. Some of what happened that day will be etched in my mind forever. Some is blurred.

I spoke by telephone with the Medical Examiner’s Office.

A team from Riverside Memorial Chapel arrived at the apartment and removed my mother’s body.

There were calls to family and friends.

I’d thought I would begin writing this book as soon as my mother died. A week passed. Then a month. Too much else was going on . . . Canceling her credit cards and closing bank accounts . . . Answering condolence letters . . . Emptying out her apartment . . . The administration of her estate . . . The other parts of my life . . .

I wanted time to sit back and reflect before I began.

My mother knew I’d be writing this book. And I want you to be honest, she’d told me. Don’t make me out to be a saint. You should put in the things I did wrong too.

And the affairs were part of our marriage, she added. You can write about them too. It wouldn’t be much of a book if you left them out.

My brother and sister aren’t talked about at length in the pages that follow. That’s not to minimize their role in my mother’s life. Rather, they’re entitled to their own recounting and interpretation of her narrative.

I knew my mother first from the perspective of a young child. Then as an adolescent, an adult and, finally, as a mature adult. I was fortunate to have had her though all those stages of my life. The more she aged, the more time I spent with her and the better we came to know each other. We came to see each other not just as mother and son—although that was always at the core of our relationship—but as people with identities that went beyond our mother-son bond.

Her story is the story of relationships as they emerged and changed over time—some new and some old, some casual, some familial, some romantic.

If she’d been born in today’s world, she might have risen through the ranks at a financial institution or philanthropic foundation. But she grew up in an era when few women from financially comfortable families had careers—particularly not women who were beautiful and married at age nineteen.

None of my friends from adolescence or the early years of my marriage had a career, she told me. It’s hard to put yourself in another generation, so I can’t say what would have happened if I’d been born later. In my generation, the goal was to get married.

She was a city girl who spent four decades living in the suburbs.

She was a conscientious parent and carried the family through a harrowing eight years when my father was debilitated by depression.

She experienced soaring highs and hard falls.

She deconstructed and rebuilt her life several times.

Her character evolved from a self-described selfish woman to someone with a deep well of empathy for others.

She was a remarkable conversationalist. One reason for that is she was verbally gifted and knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. She had a thirst for knowledge and never stopped learning. But equally important, she was genuinely interested in other people, who they were and what they had to say. When she asked someone about his or her life, she genuinely wanted to know the answer.

She empathized with other people’s struggles. She believed that little people were entitled to as much opportunity, dignity, and respect as big ones.

She was strong-willed and a sentimental mush.

She had a wonderful sense of humor and laughed out loud at things she found funny but rarely told jokes.

Late in life, she was happy and felt completely fulfilled.

She grew old gracefully and met the struggles of old age without complaint. In her final years, she was content and serene.

There came a time when she felt that she had lived long enough and was ready to die.

I’ve tried to write her story in a way that reflects how I see her and how she saw herself.

My mother’s father kept a scrapbook filled with family photographs, marriage contracts, death certificates, and other documents that date back to the mid-nineteenth century. He bequeathed it to her when he died. The pages have grown brittle with the passage of time. Pieces break off when I turn them. One of my mother’s maternal aunts researched another branch of the family tree, typed up her findings, and made several carbon-paper copies.

These histories are a good place to start in understanding my mother. She felt connected to the names and faces in them. Her feeling of family reached back to a time long before she was born.

My mother’s maiden name was Eleanor Nordlinger. For ninety-six years, she was known as Ellie. Her paternal ancestors were German Jews who lived in a town called Nordlingen. The oldest photograph in my grandfather’s scrapbook shows an old man and woman surrounded by family. They are David Nordlinger and Babette Ottinger Nordlinger (my mother’s great-great-grandparents). The photo was taken on June 13, 1870—their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Three months later, David Nordlinger (who’d been born in 1794) died. Babette, six years younger, lived until 1875.

One of the young men in the photograph was their son, Henry Nordlinger. Henry had come to New York in 1850 at age twenty-one and set up a business importing dried fruit, coffee, and sugar to America. His son (Edwin Henry Nordlinger) graduated from the City College of New York and joined his father at Nordlinger & Co. Edwin married a woman named Henriette Bacharach, who had spent her early years in France before coming to America with her parents.

Edwin and Henriette had one child—Henry Harold Nordlinger, my mother’s father.

The maternal side of my mother’s family had roots that stretched even deeper into American soil.

Moses Reis (my mother’s great-great-great-grandfather) was born in Alsace Lorraine in 1770. He and his wife came to the United States with their five children in 1833 and settled in New Orleans. Their granddaughter, Ellen Emsheimer was born in 1837 and moved with her parents to Natchez, Mississippi. At age fifteen, Ellen married Lehman Lehrburger, who had come to the United States from Germany in the 1840s. Eventually, they settled in Geneva, New York, where their first child (Simon Lehrburger) was born.

Simon was a traveling salesman who represented wholesale houses and sold dress trimmings (lace, braids, and other ornaments) throughout New England. At age thirty-one, looking to improve his circumstances, he co-founded a company called Lehrburger & Asher that manufactured and sold fur coats in Boston. The following year, 1891, he married Mathilda (Tilly) Frank whose grandparents had come to the United States from Germany in the 1850s.

Simon and Tilly Lehrburger had four children, including Elise Lehrburger (my mother’s mother).

That’s the cliff notes version of my mother’s ancestry. Other than her parents, the only person mentioned in the preceding paragraphs who she knew was her grandmother Henriette (who died when my mother was six years old).

The family history becomes more vibrant for me when it reaches my mother’s parents. I knew them well.

My grandfather was born in 1893. Throughout his life, he was known as Harry. He grew up in a New York City apartment with his parents and his mother’s three sisters—Martha, Florence, and Blanche. Blanche never married. The other sisters did.

My grandfather had a remarkable mind with a particular gift for analytical thinking and mathematics. He was offered a faculty position after he graduated from college at Columbia but went to Columbia Law School instead. Later, he founded a small law firm that survived for decades. He very much wanted to be a judge and would have been a good one. He was smart, hard-working, and had absolute integrity.

A friend once told him, Harry, you’re very honest. My grandfather replied, There’s no such thing as very honest. Either you’re honest or you’re not.

But he didn’t know how to play the political game and never came close to becoming a judge.

Sometime around 1960, my grandfather’s law firm hired a temporary secretary when one of the women (the lawyers were all men, and the secretaries were all women) was out of the office for several weeks. The temp didn’t get along with the other secretaries, who went as a group to my grandfather and asked him to fire her. The issue became moot when the temp left of her own accord. Several years later, my grandfather saw her on The Tonight Show and looked at the firm’s old employment records to make sure it was the same person. Her name was Barbra Streisand.

My grandfather was admirably open to new ideas and curious about them. He evinced a wide range of intellectual interests from opera and astronomy to literature and Norse mythology. If someone asked him what time it was, he might have responded with a ten-minute exposition on how to make a watch. But one could be certain that the time referenced in his answer would be accurate.

His photograph is in the 1913 Columbia yearbook. The activities and accomplishments listed beside it include participation in the Class Debating Society, the Philharmonic Society (he played the violin), and the Boar’s Head Society (which was devoted to reading and discussing poetry). His honors included induction into Phi Beta Kappa and being awarded an honor called the Van Buren Prize in Mathematics. Above his name, the yearbook editors saw fit to insert the legend, Nordy. His intellect is improperly exposed.

My grandmother (Elise) was born in 1903, the last of Simon and Tilly Lehrburger’s four children. She had two older brothers (Richard and Lyman) who everyone in the family adored. A fourth child (Alan) had been born in 1899 and died at age two after contracting pneumonia. Early deaths were common in those days. Tilly died of pernicious anemia in 1916 after a long debilitating illness.

My grandmother went to Simmons College in Boston for a year, then transferred to Teachers College at Columbia in New York. She never graduated. She and my grandfather met on a blind date. He had proposed marriage to six women (each of whom declined) prior to proposing to my grandmother. She accepted and they were married on November 8, 1924.

My grandmother was happiest when she felt needed and was helping others. She was devoted to family and friends. She made no pretense of being an intellectual. She and my grandfather were remarkably different from each other. At times, their only compatibility seemed to be at the bridge table. He played a mathematical game. She had exceptionally good intuition when it came to cards.

They were married for fifty-one years. Decades after their passing, it’s impossible for me to think at length about one of them without thinking about the other.

My mother was born on December 28, 1925. Prohibition was the law of the land. Earlier that year, a biology teacher named John Scopes had been tried and convicted for the crime of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution to students in Tennessee. Penicillin as a weapon against bacterial infection