Entry #9: THE HEIRESS

THE HEIRESS

Once upon a time - in 1921, to be exact - a remarkable couple lived unremarkably on the Upper East Side of New York. The husband was a very well-respected psychiatrist and author. The wife was one of the first women to graduate from Johns Hopkins Medical School. The husband was truly, madly in love with his beautiful wife, who not only had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bryn Mawr College in Physics, but also spoke several languages, published research papers as well as a wonderful book of poetry, and painted lovely watercolors - when she was not at her clinical practice. I like to imagine the two of them discussing medicine together at the end of the day, reviewing each other's patients and research.

Then, at age 38, the beautiful doctor became pregnant. I think it must have been a happy surprise. But the beautiful doctor was worried.

She went to her good friends: four sisters in Philadelphia who were the daughters of one of the early robber barons. Only one had married; the other three lived with their mother and were what you might call spinsters. In addition to being fabulously wealthy and at the top of the social elite, they were also lively, affectionate, smart, curious, and well-traveled. They had many wonderful artifacts from their trips around the world.

The beautiful doctor asked her friends to take care of the baby if anything happened.

I imagine the spinsters saying, "Oh, Helen, don't worry so. Everything is going to be fine. But if it makes you feel better, of course we promise to take care of your child."

Things were not fine. The beautiful doctor became very ill and had an emergency caesarean. The baby lived. Three days later, the mother was dead.

The psychiatrist could not bear to look at the child. He surrendered her to the maiden ladies in Philadelphia, and they took in the baby with both great sorrow and great joy.

The baby was named Helen after her mother, and she was showered with affection and given the best of everything. She had maids, and a chauffeur, and everything she could possibly want. She was pampered and adored until at length she went off to Vassar College, and then, after the war, she asked a handsome boy from a good Philadelphia family to marry her.

After the wedding, things went south fast. They bought a house in the suburbs, and the husband got a job in the city. The pretty socialite did not want any children, but a son came along anyway. She hated being a suburban mother and started drinking. Another son quickly followed, and her drinking escalated. By the time she was pregnant with a daughter, she drank all the way through her pregnancy.

If you haven't guessed by now, the pretty socialite was my mother, and the daughter is me.

One by one the spinsters grew very old and died. They left heaps and heaps of real estate and money and possessions to my mother, but it was not enough. She took the other relatives to court and demanded what THEY had received as well. She did not need more money or possessions, but she was greedy and wanted it ALL. She burned many bridges with people who would have been loving relatives - but money and booze were more important to her than people.

Her psychiatrist father - who had kept in touch - remarried and lived quietly in Cold Spring, NY. When he died, he left his modest inheritance to his second wife, who had taken care of him for many years in his old age. My mother was FURIOUS and wanted that money, too.

By the time she was 40 my mother not only owned the house in Radnor, Pennsylvania, that we lived in, but also had inherited two cabins on the Rancocas River in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey; two huge, connected homes on a single estate on the Main Line outside Philadelphia; a giant Victorian home near the water in Rhode Island; and some undeveloped land in Rhode Island as well. She also inherited the contents of the houses: hundreds of valuable antiques; vast quantities of sterling silver; heirloom jewelry of gold and diamonds; old paintings; ancient genuine china - the blue-and-white kind as well as an ancient pink flowery kind; thousands of historic books; plus scrolls and swords and Japanese prints and endless other treasures, from small sculptures made of semi-precious stones to large wall hangings brought back from Asia. And this was all in addition to millions of dollars in stocks and bonds.

Once my mother, like Smaug, had amassed this huge fortune, a curious thing happened. She couldn't handle it. She didn't want to think about real estate or antiques - she just wanted to drink. She began a hasty process if deconstructing and destroying everything she'd fought so hard to get. She called it "simplifying."

She ran the vintage blue-and-white china through the dishwasher and broke it. She put the first-edition, leather-bound books in cardboard boxes and moved them into a wet garage, where they became moldy and dissolved. She left all the jewelry in her top bureau drawer, then one day hired some "housecleaners" off the street who took everything and disappeared.

She gathered up all the silver chafing dishes, pitchers, tea sets, random teaspoons, and chests of cutlery, and put everything in an old safe in the dirt-floored basement of the Victorian house - purposely leaving it UNLOCKED in order to "simplify" her life. Then she hired dozens of random people to work on the house  unsupervised over the winter. No more silver.

She called up antiques dealers and had them cart away truckloads of priceless furniture for a few hundred bucks at a time. For some reason she liked one colonial wooden table, so she sent it to a cheap refinisher who sanded it down, accidentally splattered it with white paint, and then coated it with polyurethane - over the white paint spots.

She had builders chop the charming cupola off the top of the old Victorian house, and add some hideous modern decks with cheesy plywood sides to the second floor. She covered the beautiful old white clapboard with wide, hollow vinyl siding. Then she systematically went around the perimeter of the property and ripped out all the vintage rose bushes and tiger lilies along the beautiful stone walls. There was a thriving patch of raspberry bushes that yielded quarts of scrumptious red berries in late summer - and she ripped those out, too. One day, when all the plants were gone, she announced with satisfaction that she was finished "simplifying" the grounds.

After my brother died, we moved into one of the stone houses in Bryn Mawr. My mother's coup de grace was suddenly deciding she could not afford to pay for oil heat - which of course she could - and abruptly dumping the house at auction for $200,000. Today it would be worth many, many millions.

Future generations would have derived great joy from the ancient books, beautiful jewelry, family silver, and so on, but today every single scrap of it is gone. It took her a long time to do it, but my mother successfully got rid of everything the maiden ladies had given her. The last bits of valuable artwork went to a strange woman who ingratiated herself with my mother to the point that she got to pick whatever she wanted from what was left - and she had a good eye.

Towards the end of her life, my mother would play a game called "what would you like?" The entire contents of her house had been professionally assessed, and nothing of value was left. At that point my mother realized she was surrounded by heaps and heaps of junk, so she started urging me to take things - like old sweaters I had once given to HER. If I actually asked for something - say, an old picture on the wall - she would refuse and say it was for someone else. That was how the game was played.

I visited the house just before Christmas and realized my mother had successfully "simplified" her life to the point that she has virtually nothing to leave to me. Technically she could leave me the old Victorian, but she decreed that it shall be sold after her death rather than go to me. If she can't have it, neither can I.

Just as with the economy at large, there was no "trickle down" effect from my parents' millions. They never, ever spent their money on anything as useless as children. But they took several first-class trips per year to exotic places all over the globe so my mother could say she had seen a live "blue-footed booby" and eaten ice cream on the beach in Costa Rica.

My parents believed that withholding their money from their children and grandchildren built character. If you had any mental or emotional issues, being cut off financially would force you to shape up. If you wanted to go to college, you were forced to scrounge around for campus jobs and grants and scholarships and loans from other people. You also are forced to work indefinitely. When I once complained about being tired of working, my mother - who never worked a day of real work in her life - said briskly, "You're not even 60. You're too YOUNG to retire!"

Leaving nothing to me was clearly my mother's intention. Despite having been given so much during her own life, she was determined NOT to do the same in turn. This is probably the only goal she pursued in her life with any perseverance.

The thing is... I wonder why?