A. AHomes - The Mistress's Daughter

Under the photographs and all through the boxes there are notes, scraps of paper with little rhyming poems scrawled in pencil and pen and always signed “JC” (Jack). Who was he to her — a lover, an old friend, a friend of her father’s? I know from my research that he was arrested more than once for gambling, that he owned a dry cleaning store and later lived in Atlantic City. And I know how sad Ellen was when he was ill and after he died. How did they meet? He had a wife, Katherine — I see her name on some of the documents and I find a card from her to Ellen. Clearly, he cared a great deal about Ellen — he once wrote me a letter, attesting to the validity of Ellen’s stories about her mother.

The boxes are like a paper trail version of This Is Your Life . Inside one of the boxes is a smaller box marked Master Bedroom. I peel cracked cellophane tape off. Inside is an open metal file — in each compartment a manila folder, each folder trouble, a case in and of itself, literally. The rack is filled with file after file of real estate transactions gone wrong, buildings bought and sold, backup loans, trusts, deeds, dozens of letters to lawyers, lots of back-and-forth, motions to counter, depositions. Motion for leave to withdraw as counsel for plaintiff and for counterdefendant. There is nothing about this that is good news. At the back there is an old telephone message book — with duplicates. Call Rudy at work. Ms. Watson — important. Re Rose, verification was sent on wife last week. For Alex, re Lackey could he come by at 3pm today? It’s been years but I feel like returning the calls. Hi there, can you tell me about Ellen Ballman? How did you get to know her? Was she nice? Was she fair? Was she a good person? And then there is yet another file with a note on top. Please talk to Ellen about this! She’s annoying me to death about it. What does she want me to do except bring it to your attention!!! There is a piece of paper — on which someone has scrawled “For Your Information” and a notation that looks like “EB hours 300 as of 8-8-89.” (I take this to mean she has served three hundred hours of community service so far, but I could be wrong — maybe she had three hundred to go.) It is attached to a document that reads:

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR MONTGOMERY

COUNTY MARYLAND

Criminal No *****

Upon consideration of Defendant’s Motion for Modification or Reduction of Sentence, the State having deferred to the Court’s ruling, and verification having been received that——has completed the terms of her probation, it is…

ORDERED, that the guilty finding against the Defendant in this case be, and the same hereby is, STRICKEN, and it is further ORDERED, that a disposition of Probation before Judgment under article 27, Section 641 be entered, and it is further ORDERED that supervised probation be, and the same hereby is TERMINATED, and case closed, and it is further ORDERED, that the hearing scheduled for August 5, 1989 be removed from the Court’s calendar.

I do not think that the above pertained to Ellen. I think it pertained to the woman who was sentenced along with her, and was sent to Ellen to prompt her to complete her community service. Curiously, the woman who was sentenced along with her was the same woman who called my mother to tell her — us — that Ellen was dead.

There are pharmacy receipts. I jot down the names of the drugs and make a note to look them up. Meprobamate, for short-term relief of the symptoms of anxiety. Tenormin, a beta blocker used to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. It is also used after a heart attack to improve survival. Dyazide, a potassium sparing and thiazide diuretic used to treat high blood pressure and swelling due to excess body water. Wygesic, an analgesic combination used to relieve pain. Premarin — conjugated estrogens used to reduce menopause symptoms. Imipramine, a tricyclic anti-depressant used to treat depression.

Just going through the list gives me chest pains. Maybe her father really did die of a heart attack — her maternal grandfather did at age fifty-three. Whatever was going on, it sounds complicated by her emotional state — did she have high blood pressure, did she have a heart condition? “It was all those damn diet pills,” my father said. “No matter what they said to her she wouldn’t stop taking the diet pills.” She was depressed, anxious, and dying when she checked herself out of the hospital, and she could have been saved.

Does any of this come as a shock? Not really. Among the first facts I had about my mother came from the private investigator — interestingly, an adopted woman who had never searched for her own family — who said, “In a nutshell she was indicted and driven out of town.” I never knew exactly what she was talking about, but it’s starting to make sense. I find articles about Ellen in the Washington Post —stories about her business practices, which amounted to her and a friend running a “chop shop” for documents in which they changed people’s income records, forged tax documents, and without customers’ knowledge qualified them for loans in excess of what they would otherwise be allowed to borrow. In court she admitted to falsifying documents for mortgages worth tens of millions of dollars and was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term, three years’ probation, and ordered to perform five hundred hours of community service.

What was surprising to me was how it all seemed to go on and on for years and years. The arrest and conviction were just the last straw. Not everything she did was illegal, but even that which wasn’t was done in the most difficult way possible — there was no grace. Did she plan these things? Was she scheming all along? Did she have a pathological need to make a deal, to do business in a certain way? Did she just not know how to do it the right way? It would seem that to do anything the way it was supposed to be done was fundamentally against her grain. There are times I think maybe she was a sort of Robin Hood and it’s okay, and then I think not. The possibility that it is pathological makes me want to know more about her father. I write to the FBI and request his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, only to find out that it was destroyed on schedule in 1971 according to government rules pertaining to document storage. But at least it confirms something — there was a file.

My mother as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde — always on the run, a Bonnie on her own always looking for Clyde, always looking for her father. And just as one worries about a genetic predisposition to a heart attack, I worry about a genetic predisposition to gambling, to midlife disaster. Will I suddenly become a criminal? I think about her in relation to the father — he too had midlife career disaster, not exactly criminal but certainly unbecoming. The bank he was president of went under largely due to a kind of good-old-boy mismanagement — the bank’s board favored loans to officers, directors, and their relatives above a responsibility to customers. I wonder if it was some sense of themselves as exempt from the rules that brought them together. Were they clever and crafty together? Did they take pleasure in their outlaw status — did they think they would somehow get away with it — what ever that might have meant? I think of Ellen in middle age — a woman with physical and emotional problems, cobbling it together, living alone in a kind of postmodern version of the Atlantic City portrayed in Louis Malle’s brilliant 1981 film.

And in the end, almost after the fact, I find an unopened letter from the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland, dated March 29, 1989. I open the letter, “There are no words which can fully express my sincere appreciation for your most generous gifts to the Hebrew Home. The Computers will allow us to do our work more effectively and ultimately, the residents of the Home will benefit.” The letter goes on to acknowledge the donation of four computers, five monitors, five keyboards, and a printer. I find myself wondering if this is a Robin Hood moment — all the more compelling because the letter was never opened.