Page 3 of A Mother’s Love

Halley had had no family of her own from the time she was fourteen, so her decision to have the twins, unmarried at twenty-two, didn’t shock anyone.

There was no one to shock or to help, except the babies’ father to the minimal degree he wanted to be involved.

He had his hands full then with his own three children and a turbulent, failing marriage.

Halley had made no demands, and figured out most of her parenting on her own.

Her being busy with the twins had precluded much of a dating life, and she had virtually no serious love life for a decade, a sacrifice she had willingly made.

She had a few brief minor affairs, and met the love of her life at thirty-five.

Robert Baldwin was two years older than she was, and fell deeply in love with her and the twins.

He was a senior editor at her publishing house, never married, with no children of his own.

They had spent twelve years together, and lived together for ten of them.

He had developed a brain tumor at forty-nine, almost three years before.

He was in the final stages of his illness at the beginning of the pandemic, when he caught Covid.

Officially, he had died of the coronavirus, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway.

Halley had made her peace with losing him.

They would have enjoyed the years after the twins left, and filled them well, but that wasn’t their destiny.

She had to face that now on her own. She had nursed him until the end.

He had decided not to go to the hospital when he caught Covid.

He didn’t want to die alone at the hospital, so he had stayed at home with her and died peacefully in her arms. And miraculously, she hadn’t caught the virus from him, but she had been willing to take the risk to give him the end he wanted.

They had isolated from the twins. He was a wonderful human being and the twins had loved him too.

He was the reason for Valerie deciding to walk down the aisle alone.

Robert had been more of a father to her than her own father was, and without Robert there, she had chosen to walk alone, in memory of him.

The gesture had touched Halley to the core.

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The childhood history Halley never shared with the twins, or as little as possible, had been very different from Valerie and Olivia’s.

Halley’s mother had been French, which was one of the few details the girls knew about her.

Halley’s maternal grandmother, Hélène Vivier, was a young woman at the end of the war, when the Americans liberated Paris.

She fell in love with a handsome boy from California and got pregnant.

He intended to take her back to California and marry her there, to live and work on the farm where he grew up near Bakersfield.

GI’s weren’t allowed to marry in France, and he was going to send for her once he got home.

When they discovered that she was pregnant, they had a marriage ceremony performed by a local priest in Paris, which the Americans didn’t recognize, but which gave Hélène some comfort and dignity.

Both her parents had died during the war, her mother of illness and her father in the Resistance.

Hélène’s handsome GI was one of the last casualties in France and died before he got back to the States.

She could never find his family later, and their daughter, Sabine, was born in 1946.

With no other attributes or skills other than her striking beauty, Sabine became a model in Paris in her late teens.

Her mother had died from tuberculosis by then, and Sabine was on her own.

She was sent to New York for a photo shoot at nineteen, and the modeling agency that had brought her over helped her use her parents’ French marriage certificate to prove the paternity of her American GI father, which allowed her to obtain American citizenship so she could stay and work legally in the States.

She never became a superstar, but she was a very successful model for a time, and rapidly fell in with the fast crowd of celebrities and socialites at the fashionable Stork Club, the last club of its kind, and became one of a bevy of beautiful women who danced and drank their nights away.

Sabine partied for the next six years, was frequently photographed in the press with important men.

At twenty-five, she met William Holbrook IV, the black sheep scion of his aristocratic family.

The family had lost the bulk of their fortune in the crash of 1929, but they had enough left for him to play, gamble, drink, and spend what remained on beautiful women and fast cars, without working, and he was most frequently seen with Sabine, who eventually got pregnant.

Bill did the gentlemanly thing and married her, although neither was in love, or enthusiastic about the marriage or the child, and it didn’t slow down his affairs with other women.

Halley was born in 1972, when Sabine was twenty-six and Bill was forty-two.

Sabine had the distinguished Holbrook name then and she blamed the child for all the ills in her life, a husband who didn’t love her, the fetters of marriage to a man she didn’t love either, her slowly fading beauty from the dissolute life they led, and her modeling career on the wane.

She was no longer the woman everyone stopped to stare at when she walked into a room, and she blamed Halley more than Bill.

If Sabine hadn’t had Halley, she would never have married him.

She was uneasy about abortion, so she didn’t have one.

She married Bill, since he was willing. And he was from an important family.

But she wasn’t happy about him, or the marriage.

Halley’s first memory of her mother was of a severe beating when she was three.

She had spilled a glass of milk at breakfast, which dripped on Sabine’s navy blue suede shoes, and she beat Halley until blood dripped from her ear.

Bill saw her do it and quietly left the apartment.

He had an appointment with his barber and didn’t want to be late.

He left Sabine to deal with the child, as he always did.

Halley remembered his leaving while her mother was beating her.

She remembered the sound of the front door closing as her mother landed another blow. Sabine said her shoes were ruined.

She took Halley to the hospital to stop the bleeding, and said she had fallen down the stairs.

Halley instinctively knew not to contradict her and remained silent when they treated her.

A nice nurse said she was lucky she hadn’t broken an arm or a leg.

And just for good measure, her mother hit her again when they got home.

She said Halley had ruined her day as well as her shoes.

Halley was afraid to drink her milk at breakfast after that, and never did again, no matter how thirsty she was.

She didn’t want to risk making her mother angry again, but it was unavoidable.

That was only the beginning. Sabine unleashed her full fury on Halley from then on, with beatings for any excuse.

She had a violent temper, and hit Halley hard.

A broken wrist, a beating with a jeweled belt buckle that left cuts and marks on her back that couldn’t be explained so they were never treated and left scars, a cut just below her eye from the ring Sabine was wearing, which required stitches.

She told the nurses at the hospital that Halley had fallen into the corner of a table. She was four by then.

Very few memories of Halley’s childhood remained, and there were none of kindness or a gentle touch.

But she remembered each of the beatings for the rest of her life, carved in memory as though etched in stone.

A push down the stairs, a broken arm, bruises on her arms and legs when her mother kicked her, beatings with a hairbrush, headaches from being violently shaken when she caught her mother doing something bad, like meeting men at their apartment when her father was out.

Her mother said she would kill her if she told, and Halley knew she would.

She never understood why her mother was so angry at her and hated her so much.

She tried to be very good, but she was never good enough to satisfy her mother, who told her that nobody loved her.

Halley knew that was true. Her parents demonstrated that to her every day, especially Sabine.

Her mother spoke to her in French and in English.

She was just as violent to Halley in either one.

The beatings got worse as she got older.

The marks and the bruises were there, but usually faded away, though a few stayed.

She lived in constant fear of her mother, and hid from her whenever she could.

More often than not, her mother found her and beat her again for hiding.

Her father never intervened. When Halley was five, Sabine found a new playground, new friends and pursuits.

She became one of the first regulars at Studio 54, where she added drugs to alcohol.

The marriage was almost nonexistent by then, and her modeling had dwindled to an occasional job until the agency dropped her entirely.

She never showed up on time and looked ravaged when she did.

Halley learned much of what was happening when she heard her parents argue, usually at night, if Sabine came home. She didn’t always.