Seeing a Mother Through Depression

A friend of mine, Peter Trombi, was at UCLA in the middle 70s not long after I decided to leave my tenured position at Stony Brook for one more attempt at a marriage with my first wife. She had left me with the children in New York City to make a further try as a choreographer in the Los Angeles area.

Southern California was never an appropriate place for me, and it reminded me of nothing from Buffalo or New York City, and certainly seemed far away from anyone or anything related to my growing up.

Still, at the beginning, Beverly Hills – just as Rodeo Drive was wrapping itself in a reputation for glamour, and housing prices had not yet gone skyward – was seductive.  I gave it a shot, and also at first there were some contacts that helped.

Peter asked me to give a colloquium on a topic he had heard me lecture on previously, though I guessed the audience at UCLA – with some in attendence having come over from Cal Tech – had inappropriate background for it. So, I wasn't surprised, despite trying to keep up my enthusiasm throughout, the talk wasn't working, When I got to the end, I expected few of those telling items of a successful talk, questions.

Thankfully, Peter played a role. Starting with the phrase, "Your handwriting is interesting, " he proceeded with, "Did you grow up in a convent?"

"No," said I, "But my mother did. Why do you ask?"

Peter, of Catholic background, was  perspicacious – certainly a rare quality in mathematicians, and he had a telling answer. "I've never seen anyone write their r's like that except those who were trained by nuns."

Sure enough, Peter had hit upon the source of my poor penmanship – significant in grade school for those my age, though it disappeared from the curriculum over 45 years ago – starting from 2nd grade on. I had completely forgotten that my mother had taught me to write before I went to school. Those strange r's still punctuated my handwritten works, just as they did hers.

No one in the middle 70s wrote their papers on a computer, and few typed them directly. So, when you received communication – say, as I did then, often from Europe – you could see that different cultures had decidedly different penmanship. Yet, I had never seen any one else who used such r's as did I and my mother.

And there were other distinctions, too.  My eclectic reading – again, so different than that of other mathematicians, was certainly the result of books lying around read by my mother. This gave a jolt to what was a growing-up half-truth, that my mother had never cared for us children. She had at one time, and then, upon the death of a fifth child, just lost any desire to interact with us. Alas, that was much of my childhood, and awfully close to all of it for my two youngest siblings.

Still, before alcohol, and her inner battles with her mother took over completely, there were signs of a person who influenced us, strongly enough you cannot easily erase its effects to this very day.

Peggy Fried in her late teens Peggy-Teens.jpg and her early 20's Peggy-20s.jpg.

What legacy could we regard Peggy as having left? It has to be her autobiography, even if it has yet to be published or even been seen except haphazardly by a few souls curious about Taylor Caldwell and one of her daughters. On the John Birch Society website you will find TC is one of the six faces with short bios. These includes Birch and Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch.

TC has what she calls her own autobiography: a piece of work titled, Growing up Tough. Those who put that JBS site together gave it high praise. Explicitly, they said, beyond other of TC's conservatively driven novels. This is strange from the view of someone (anyone, really, as I have found out) who has read a good portion of Peggy's autobiography.

For example, Chapter 2, gives bruising evidence that Anne Caldwell, TC and Peggy formed three generations of abusing mothers. TC rose straight up and out of the horrors of a poor, brutal Scotch family. Still, she carried it with her, and passed it to Peggy. Peggy, though, was too weak to pass on the legacy. Yet, TC's phrase from Chapter 2, as Peggy blasted them at her children, were a constant part of the household at 67 Hendricks Blvd.

Chapter 2: Annie Caldwell (1880-1953): I had selected this chapter, as the first I was intending to make public, because I saw in it behavior my mother had received from her mother; that I heard about from my mother in the most telling manner. It was thrown at me, with the same vehemence she describes as it coming from her mother. I have retyped the original typewritten scan here.

Her official obituary appeared as LifeStory&PersonID=99394433 in the Buffalo evening news, the day after she died. It named her (four) children, and her grandchildren (seven total, five of them my kids), and said nothing else. My brother Robin and Sister Drina did not consult with me on the obituary, though they knew I was available by e-mail in Ontario, Canada – where I was giving talks, a few hours from Buffalo – when she died. In particular, they obliviously overrode the careful plans Karen and I had made for Peggy with hospice.