My mother’s checkbooks
We emptied my mother’s City Island apartment during the month after she died alone. The first visit was to find the deed for the grave at the Bronx cemetery where my father and she are buried. It was in a file marked “grave deed.” The apartment was spotless, beds made, garbage emptied, as if she knew she wouldn’t be back when she left in severe pain five weeks earlier.
My husband wanted to start taking things out right then and there, including her stash of toilet paper, but I balked. Magical thinking: if I could keep everything intact, maybe she was still here. We barely made a dent during seven tearful attempts, hauling catalogs and junk mail to the recycling, taking bags of family photos and boxes of files to my house. I sat paralyzed by indecision, reading date books and letters she had saved for decades.
Last week, the movers came and trucked most everything to mom’s condo in a retirement community in Lakewood, NJ. As they prepped the expensive move, I sat on her terrace for four hours looking out at the boats on the water. Two adult swans with three babies swam near the tiny beach below. I remembered taking my kids with my mom and grandma to feed swans with stale bread, and I wondered if moving all the stuff was the right decision. Eventually, we’d have to close up the other place too.
I did not know what else to do. Charity won’t pick things up during the pandemic and even if they would, my brain won’t process what to keep and what to toss. My friend Heather calls packing up the home of a deceased loved one “dismantling a life.” I don’t want to dismantle the life of my beloved mother, but it has to be done and the job is mine.
My mother was meticulous. Her cleaning standards were very high. Her clothes were always pressed. Grooming and beauty maintenance were passions, to the point that the saleswomen at the Clarins counter at Lord & Taylor had her phone number. They called her “Miss Mary.”
Her approach to bill paying and record keeping was likewise scrupulous, if not at all punctual. She balanced her checkbooks…eventually. And then kept them forever. Someone might come after her about her charge card at Gimbel’s in 1971, and when they did, damn it, she’d have the cancelled check to prove she’d paid.
Checkbooks dating to the 1970s were neatly stacked in her desk. I am looking at every single one. When we found them, my husband wanted me to put them right in the trash, but I couldn't. You probably think looking through someone’s cancelled checks is a pointless and boring exercise. I found the checks to be a pretty evocative record of my mother’s life, and the life of our family.
She used checks to pay for everything, from groceries at the A&P and Gristede’s to whatever it is she was buying at Korvettes. I saw the checks she wrote so my brother could go to Camp Pelican and take social dance at Barclay’s. Our vacations at the Horseshoe Motel and Mullins Mountain Spring in the Catskills: I remember going for a week. Was it really only $90?
Our college tuitions, the membership fees for the New York Athletic Club at Travers Island, the mortgage bills, birthday checks for all my cousins, wedding gifts. At one point the Pelham Newcomers Club seemed to be bleeding her dry. There was a mysterious recurring $10 payment to a Tom Rubetone. The name was vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it. He always did something called “signing the check over” — using it to pay another bill. I don’t think you can do that anymore.
My mother paid all the bills, but occasionally I was startled to see a check, or sometimes two or three in a row, written out by my father. What the hell was going on there? I wonder. Was she a tad late, as she often was, or was she feeling under the weather, or what?
I saved two checks. One was written out to “Miss Christina Kelly” for $20 in September of 1979. It was cashed by me at a bank in Hamilton, NY, where I was in my freshman year at Colgate. It was, I am sure, a present for my 18th birthday. The other check was written in August 1980 for $1,160 to the Fraternity Management Association. That covered the room and board at the squalid fraternity I had decided to live in my sophomore year.
The rest are in the recycling bin.