Page 4 of A Mother’s Love

Sometimes neither of her parents would come home, and Halley was alone.

It frightened her at first, but she fed herself from what was in the fridge when she got hungry.

She would sit in her room and talk to her dolls and play, or watch TV in her father’s study.

And then one day, miraculously, Sabine left after a particularly vicious fight with Bill, and never returned.

A week later, he told Halley her mother was never coming back.

Halley didn’t know what that meant for her and was afraid to ask.

All she remembered was the enormous feeling of relief that the beatings would stop.

She was six then. She could tell that her father was happy too.

Once Sabine left, her father gave parties all the time, and filled their large, comfortable Park Avenue apartment with his friends, whom Halley had never seen before.

No one paid any attention to Halley for the first year, but she was cursed with her mother’s dark hair, green eyes, and beautiful face.

Their housekeeper was there in the daytime, and the parties went on all night.

She was seven the first time one of her father’s friends put his hands on her.

He began stroking her arm in a strange way, and tried to pull her into a bedroom with him, and Bill told him to stop.

It was the only time he ever intervened.

After that he treated her like a toy for his friends’ amusement when they hugged her too tight, or sat her on their laps.

Her father ignored her entirely, as though she was someone else’s child.

He never believed her when she complained about them, so she stopped telling him what they tried to do, and figured out ways to avoid them herself.

If they were drunk enough, it was easy to run away from them and hide until they left.

If they were sober, they didn’t dare insist when she resisted or escaped from them.

—

She was almost eight when another one of her father’s friends reached under her skirt, and that time no one saw.

She ran away and hid in a closet until he left.

There were others after that, always wanting to touch her in private places, but she was artful at avoiding them and fleeing to another part of the apartment where she could hide.

She was afraid to go to bed when his friends were there.

Once one of them came into her room and got into bed with her, but he was so drunk he was easy to get away from.

She was small but fast, and clever at disappearing.

She slept in her closet after that. Her father said they were just having fun, and meant no harm, but she didn’t believe him.

She knew the look in their eyes now, and what they would try to do after that.

None of them ever succeeded. She didn’t let it happen, and knew that only she could save herself, no one else would help her.

She had no protectors or allies. The adults in her life were dangerous. She had only herself to rely on.

When she was still eight, her father told her that her mother had died of an overdose.

She hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d left two years before, and no one had beaten Halley since.

She wasn’t sad when Bill told her that Sabine had died, but she knew she should be.

She was just relieved to know her mother would never come back to hit her again.

She had been afraid Sabine might come back and do that again one day, and that Bill would let her.

Halley went to the funeral with her father. They were the only ones there. Bill’s parents had died by then, and they buried Sabine in the same place as his parents. She was thirty-four years old.

Halley spent the next five years avoiding her father’s friends.

She knew when to stay away from them. By the time she was thirteen, she had a womanly body, with small firm breasts, a tiny waist, her mother’s long, graceful legs and exquisite face.

Many of her father’s friends tried to take advantage of her, and Bill turned a blind eye, just as he had to the beatings.

But she was an expert at avoiding them. She was well aware that she was a burden to her father—he made that clear.

He had housekeepers take care of her in the daytime, but they never stayed long.

In light of the debauchery they knew went on there, they always quit.

Halley didn’t care. They were no protection for her anyway.

When she was thirteen, her father stepped over the line himself, one evening before he went out.

The housekeeper had already left for the day.

They were alone in the apartment, and he’d been drinking all day with his friends and had come home to change, as he often did.

He walked into her room while she was studying at her desk, and she turned when she heard him come in.

He was naked and very drunk and invited her to take a bath with him.

She was shaking as she kept her eyes on his face, and wouldn’t let herself look any lower.

Knowing she had to get out of the room she pushed her way past him, mumbling some excuse, and he staggered when he tried to follow her.

Then he didn’t try to find her, and went to his bathroom alone.

She couldn’t forget the way he had looked at her, and she hid in a closet until she heard the apartment door close behind him.

She never trusted him again, and locked her bedroom and bathroom doors after that whenever he was in the apartment.

She had no illusions about him. He was just like his friends.

She lived in enemy territory, with no one to protect her, no one she could turn to or ask for help.

She had no friends at school because she couldn’t bring them home.

And her father’s family name, background, and social status protected him from all suspicion.

No one would have believed her if she told them, and she wouldn’t have dared.

She rarely met his girlfriends. They didn’t look like nice women. They treated her like an annoyance.

When she was fourteen, one afternoon after she came home from school, two policemen came to the apartment to tell her that her father had been killed in a car accident.

He was fifty-six years old. She sat in the living room and talked to them like an adult, which she was by then, because of the life she had lived.

She had no living relatives. The officers took her with them to stay in a children’s shelter.

Her father’s lawyer came to talk to her there the next day.

He explained that there was a trust for her education and related expenses when she turned eighteen, and a small second trust from her paternal grandparents when she turned twenty-one, but no funds were available until then.

Her father hadn’t expected to die so young and had made no provision for her until she reached eighteen.

He had spent most of his money. There was very little left, barely enough to pay his debts.

The apartment would be sold and the proceeds added to her trust, with no access to it until she turned eighteen, no money until then, and no one to take care of her.

She had four years ahead of her with no means of support.

She was sent from the shelter to a state orphanage on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

There was no funeral for her father and she wouldn’t have gone anyway.

His lawyer arranged for him to be cremated, according to his wishes, with no religious service, and buried in the family plot with Halley’s mother and grandparents.

He had wanted no funeral, and had said he was an atheist. His lawyer took care of everything.

He offered to take Halley to the burial and she refused.

The other children at the orphanage were from poor families and younger than she was.

They had no trusts to look forward to at eighteen, but they might be adopted.

She was told by the superintendent of the orphanage that at fourteen it was unlikely that anyone would want to adopt her.

Two families tried her out as foster parents, and said that she hid all the time, refused to engage, barely spoke to them, was closed off and uncommunicative, and they returned her to the orphanage.

She preferred it there anyway. She didn’t trust the fathers in the two homes she was sent to.

She knew what men were capable of. It never even occurred to her to want a family that would love her.

She couldn’t conceive of it, having never been loved by her own family.

She couldn’t even imagine what that felt like.

Halley spent the four years in the orphanage without complaint, until her eighteenth birthday.

She felt safe there. She helped out in the office, to have something to do after school.

She attended public high school a few blocks away, made no friends because she was too ashamed of where she lived, and was reticent with the teachers.

Her own home had been far worse than the orphanage.

She had time to study there and the counselors and teachers were kind to her.

She was a good student, and a school counselor had helped her apply to college.

She remained shy and unengaged. She enrolled at Connecticut College, and was released from the orphanage like a prisoner who had served her time when she turned eighteen.

Her counselors had helped her get her high school diploma six months early, and she left as soon as she got it, with no fanfare and a few discreet goodbyes.

She had formed no close relationships, and didn’t want any.

In four years she hadn’t opened up to anyone.

The funds from the trust were waiting for her in a bank account.