My father was born in 1932 at Dr. Leff’s Hospital in the Bronx. Was there really a hospital called Dr. Leff’s? “Of course there was,” my dad said. “It’s gone now—they arrested Dr. Leff for performing illegal abortions.”
My dad grew up in a one-bedroom tenement apartment on East 116th Street in Spanish Harlem with his parents, Victor and Helen, and his brother, Leon. He slept on a dingy sofa in the foyer until the age of twenty, and spent those first twenty years working in his parents’ mom-and-pop hardware store on East 112th Street. When my dad was six, his mother brought him to P.S. 101 to start the first grade. The teacher went down the list of names, and when she called out “Fred Queller?” Helen nudged my dad forward. The teacher welcomed him and gave him some instructions. My dad turned to his mother, bewildered, and said in Yiddish, “Vos zugt ze?” (“What is she saying?”) He did not understand a word of English.
But my father was a quick study. A few years later he went to a yeshiva in the Bronx where he became an honors student. He was accepted to Stuyvesant—the best public high school in Manhattan—where he was elected senior class president. Then he went to City College. He finally moved out of the house (and slept in a real bed for the first time) when he attended NYU Law School on scholarship. He made Law Review and completed NYU in two and a half years. He went to work as a lawyer for a solo practitioner who paid him a mere forty dollars a week but allowed him to bring in his own cases and put his name on the door. Soon my dad had his own bachelor pad in Washington Square Village in the new art deco high-rises on Bleecker Street. He drove a Cadillac convertible and was known as “the Dancing Lawyer.”
“I never learned how to play ball as a kid because I was too busy working in the store. But I was strong from physical labor—I was the delivery boy, lugging boxes of linoleum on my back to our customers. In high school, when everybody else played ball, I worked out on the ropes, the horse, the mats. And I liked girls, so I went to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association on Sunday afternoons and learned how to dance. In those days it was the fox-trot, the rhumba, the mambo, the samba, the cha-cha. I became very good—you know me when I set my mind to something. That’s how I became known as ‘the Dancing Lawyer.’”
By 1965 “the Dancing Lawyer” knew “Harriette the Actress” from the singles scene in New York. One summer night at a Fourth of July party, Harriette showed up with a beautiful young woman. Fred samba-ed over.
“Harriette, who’s that girl you’re with?”
“That’s my kid sister, Stephanie. She’s visiting from California.” Soon enough, Stephanie, the burgeoning fashion designer, moved into Fred’s bachelor pad. They were married, and Harriette was outed as the mother.
Fred had moved into Washington Square Village at the age of twenty and would live in those buildings until he was seventy-one. My parents upgraded to a two-bedroom in 1969 when I was born, then moved to a three-bedroom on the thirteenth floor when Danielle was born in 1973. Ten years later they rented the one-bedroom apartment next door and broke the wall down to create a lavish Greenwich Village spread. Fred was the original tenant in the building, and the apartments were rent-controlled. When he moved out in 2004, the rent for his five-bedroom/two-living-room place was lower than the market value of a studio apartment.
My parents were self-made dynamos in their respective careers. They typically came home from work after Danielle and I had already been put to bed by the housekeeper. To make up for this, they devoted weekends to us children.
As a designer my mother helped forge fashion trends, and through the years the decor of our apartment reflected the style of the times. In the early seventies the walls were painted brown and the carpeting was orange, the furniture Spanish, dark wood. In the late seventies/early eighties everything was beige—the walls, sofas, tapestries, rugs. In the mideighties, my father got his turn to decorate and created a formica-and-mirror palace. A large, gray modern sculpture stood in the foyer and two Erté drawings hung in the living room, framed in gold. Though the eighties modern fad was outdated almost the moment it arrived, my parents had spent so much money on the custom-made furniture that filled every room they never again redecorated. This decor stretched on into the nineties and began to fall apart—formica curling up at the corners and vertical blinds falling like dead leaves. When Danielle left for college, she bought our dad a black Lab puppy named Samson as a present. Sam ruled the roost, slobbering on the faded gray leather sofas, chewing on the legs of chairs, further turning the apartment into a madhouse. It was in this setting, in December of 1994, that my father casually asked my mother one night over a take-out Japanese dinner if she’d gotten the results back from her routine mammogram.
“Yes,” she answered, chopsticks balancing a piece of sushi. “Apparently there was a barely discernible spot on the film, but my doctors say they think it’s fine.”
My dad was now a famous trial lawyer and a dynamo of a medical malpractice attorney. He pounced.
“What do you mean they think it’s fine?”
The next day my father escorted my mother to the office of the esteemed breast surgeon Dr. Daniel Roses, who performed a needle biopsy. The barely discernible spot turned out to be cancer that had already spread to five lymph nodes. My mother had an immediate lumpectomy, after which she underwent four cycles of Adriamycin followed by Cytoxan—aggressive chemotherapies. Then she underwent radiation. She had just turned fifty-two.
In the months before my mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer, I was angry at her.
Reaching the age of fifty (two years earlier) had left my mother blinking in disbelief. She was a beauty who turned heads when she entered a room. Just like Harriette before her, my mother felt fifty was the beginning of life’s inevitable decline. It sent her into a tailspin. She refocused on her own life with a vengeance—doubling her time on the StairMaster, pouring herself into her business. From my point of view, she’d become shrouded in a fog of narcissism, unable to see beyond herself.
Our birthdays were one day apart in November; as my mother turned fifty-two, I turned twenty-five. I was in pain over my career as an actress—a career that was alive only with the faintest pulse. I’d been dumped by the agency that had represented me since I was fifteen, signed by another, and was on the verge of being dumped again. My close friends were starring on Broadway in Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller revivals, while my prospects were diminishing. My struggles were deeper, though, than just being unemployed. I had begun to lose confidence in myself, in my judgment. I’d been acting in plays since I was a child and had always believed theater was the right medium for my talents and creativity. Evidence had been accumulating that I was wrong. I felt lost, in crisis, ashamed. It was a typical affliction of people in their twenties, but that knowledge didn’t ease my suffering.
My mother had always been oblivious to the details of my life, but she was usually warm and loving. Now something had turned. She seemed barely aware of my presence, and when she did take me in, she was cold. I’d been away for a month trying to hustle work in Los Angeles and stopped by my parents’ apartment the night I got back. My mother wandered into the living room, where I was talking to my father, and said blankly, “Oh, I didn’t know you were here,” and walked out of the room. She’d always had hang-ups about money and they were flaring up. It irritated her that my father was helping me financially. The lavish birthday party he’d thrown for her at the Rainbow Room and the yellow diamond ring the size of a house he’d bought her did not appease her. I was hurt and angry, and for the first time I did not deflect the blame to Harriette. Right before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was—after years of swallowing my feelings—on the verge of lashing out.
I’d started quietly rebelling against my mother’s values years earlier. When I left for college in 1987, I was uncomfortable in my own skin, embarrassed by the person I’d been raised to be. To compensate, I performed self-loathing comic monologues about being a Jewish American Princess from Manhattan for my freshman roommate, Kay. Tears of laughter rolled down her cheeks as I described my humiliation in the sixth grade over showing up at my hip Greenwich Village school in the dead of winter with a dark tan, which tipped the other kids off to the fact that my parents had a condo in Boca. Away from my family, I set about the task of trying to re-create myself. The only signpost I had was my desire to differentiate myself from my mother. She was a fashion designer; I yearned to be an intellectual. She wore Armani, Chanel, Prada; I wore sacklike thrift-store dresses. She dressed in clothes to flaunt her figure; I bought everything oversized to hide my curves. I was drawn to women friends who possessed qualities I wanted to emulate, qualities my mother lacked. Kay, my best friend, was a fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense wry wit who had spent her unhappy childhood in Mississippi reading everything under the sun. I became a literature major, though I continued to act in plays as I had in high school. Of course I couldn’t see at the time that being an actress, even one doing Ibsen and Shakespeare, had obvious elements in common with my mother—the narcissism, the emphasis on beauty and on being admired.
As a little girl I looked so much like my mother that she called me her “clone.” She named me Tiffany after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Her name was Stephanie and my name was Tiffany, and she reveled in telling everyone we were exactly alike. Cringing over the name Tiffany began for me early in grade school. I went to a Quaker school on East Sixteenth Street with the children of Greenwich Village’s avant-garde artists—Phillip Glass and Lee Brewer among them. The other kids had names like Clove and freely roamed the streets of New York by age ten. My father was overprotective and didn’t want his girls taking the public bus, so he hired a driver to take me and Danielle to school. I was mortified. I insisted on being dropped off a block away, but this didn’t trick anyone. In the seventh grade, a black girl in my class told me, not unkindly, that my father’s chauffeur played jazz at night with her father. I wanted to die. All my feelings of shame became wrapped up in the name Tiffany. I could change schools, take the subway, change clothes, but I could not escape the stigma of my powder-puff name. By college, the name was my albatross. It depressed me, caused me severe self-consciousness. I believed my name defeated me from the start—boxing me into a category of shallow, frivolous women.
At twenty-one, I decided to change it legally. I had enough sense to know that to go from Tiffany to something exotic like Maya or India would be ridiculous. I wanted a simple, pleasant name that could adapt to who I was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a middle name to use, so I chose something quickly and arbitrarily. I went to see a friend play Jessica in a production of The Merchant of Venice and decided that would do. Changing my name from Tiffany was an explicit rejection of my mother, and I agonized over telling her. When I finally did, she looked at me with big eyes and said in a singsongy voice, “That’s so funny. I was just thinking the other day that I didn’t like the name anymore and I wondered if it bothered you.” I stared back in bewilderment. My father filed the legal papers. No one has called me anything but Jessica since.
Four years later, I was twenty-five and fuming. Shortly after my mother had snubbed me in her living room, I was gearing up to unleash a lifetime of pent-up hurt and feelings of abandonment. Before I had the chance, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The tension that had been building between us evaporated. My mother was sick—all else was moot. That said, my mother, sister, and I did not grasp the gravity of breast cancer. The possibility of death was never considered. We understood she had an illness, and that was rattling enough to our sheltered family. However, my father knew what breast cancer was. When they were given the news in the doctor’s office, he started to cry. My mother was taken aback, as my father rarely showed emotion.
My mother was shocked to be diagnosed with cancer. She didn’t smoke or drink, she was a careful eater, she was slim, she was a runner. How could this have happened to her?
What breast cancer meant to my mother was losing her hair. To any woman this would be a terrible blow, but to my mother it was pure horror. The night of her lumpectomy, I lay in a cot next to her hospital bed while Roman Holiday played in the background. We had turned on the TV for some distraction, but my mother’s gaze was fixed and vacant. She reflexively stroked her pretty, dark mane over and over. Only worse than losing her hair, she said, would be to lose her breasts. “Thank God,” she kept repeating like a mantra. What she meant was thank God she had the kind of cancer that allowed for a lumpectomy. The way she understood it, the cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes, so there was no need to have a mastectomy. I would find out years later that she’d gotten it wrong: It was not the lymph node involvement that made her eligible for lumpectomy, it was that her tumor had clear margins. But to her mind, a little more advanced cancer was far preferable to losing her breasts.
Once out of the hospital from breast surgery, my mother flew into action. She found the most exclusive wig-maker in New York and promptly ordered four wigs made to look exactly like her hair. She instructed the wig-maker how to make a concoction of her own design: sewing bangs into the front of a Yankees cap and attaching a long brown ponytail to the back. This would be worn during her six-mile weekend runs in the Hamptons. She ordered two of them. Regardless of nausea, vomiting, mouth sores, or lymphedema, my mother exercised on the StairMaster every weekday morning, got dressed in her Armani suits and Manolos, caught the subway, and was in her designer showroom by nine. When her hair started falling out in clumps, she put on the custom-made wigs. She never missed a day of work, scheduling chemo appointments during her lunch hour, and wowed nurses and patients with her spike heels and movie-star clothes. She didn’t tell anyone outside of our immediate family about her breast cancer. Gradually, people at work noticed her sallow complexion, her swollen arm, that her hair was a wig. When asked how she was, she stuck to her story: She was fine and well. My mother brazenly refused to be sick, and she was not going to enable anyone else to view her that way.
The months passed. She finished her treatments, her hair grew back, and she was well. She had triumphed over breast cancer. For a few weeks she talked to me about helping her write a book about beauty for cancer patients: “There’s absolutely nothing out there for the modern woman about how to stay beautiful while on chemo, and I’ve figured it all out!” But the idea fell quickly by the wayside. She was eager to resume her normal life and leave illness behind. And she did just that. She lived every day to the fullest for six years, until the age of fifty-eight, when she was struck again—this time with ovarian cancer.
JANUARY 2002. We checked in at the front desk.
“My name is Stephanie Queller, I’m here for chemo.”
Perhaps it was the difficult recovery from abdominal surgery or perhaps it was because she’d traded in her heels for shiny black Chanel ballerina flats, but my mother appeared much smaller than before.
The nurse practitioner, Andrea, a pretty woman with ginger-colored hair, warmly welcomed my mother, said she’d been expecting her. The effect was Julie the cruise director welcoming her to purgatory. Danielle and I were like my mother’s wings—we hovered on either side of her and went wherever she went. I hadn’t returned to Los Angeles after Harriette’s death. My friends helped sublet my guest house and, though I’d recently launched a new career as a TV writer, I told my agent I needed to remain in New York for a while. Not returning to California presented a natural opening for me to end things with Kevin.
Andrea led the three of us into a back room where she drew my mother’s blood. This would become a ritual: Every session before receiving chemo my mother would give blood for a CA-125 test. It remains the best existing tool for monitoring the disease status in patients known to have ovarian cancer. The results are given in numbers—the lower the number, the better. If she got a higher number than she did a few weeks earlier, the chances were the chemo wasn’t working and her cancer was spreading. The day after chemo was always a sickening experience of waiting for the numbers, like a perverse lottery game in which the prize was my mother’s life.
Next, Andrea led my mother to a large reclining armchair and hooked her up to an IV pole that fed clear liquid chemotherapy into her veins. The room was long and narrow with a wall of windows facing the East River. Each chemo recliner had its own little section by the window, with a couple of chairs for guests. Turkey and tuna sandwiches on white bread and boxes of juice were available for patients in a minirefrigerator. There was a hush in the room, like you would find in a library. It was pleasant to look out at the water and watch the barges go by.
After the initial shock of my mother’s prognosis subsided, we went about the business at hand—resolving to beat the cancer. My mother was extremely competitive. She believed she could do what no one else could do. “I’ll show them,” she’d said defiantly to me and Danielle the first night she’d been well enough to have dinner out at a restaurant. “If they say I have five years to live, I’ll live ten.” We all agreed over dim sum that if anyone could beat the odds, she could—and that ten years from now there would probably be a cure for cancer.
My mother, Danielle, and I settled into our nook overlooking the river. My mother opened a glossy magazine, her customized MedicAlert bracelet—crafted out of chunky gold links and diamond studs—dangling from her wrist. She’d designed it herself: “If you have to wear something for medical purposes, why shouldn’t it be a beautiful piece of jewelry?” Danielle went to get us sandwiches; I glanced around the floor. As usual, the chemo chairs were full. The patients spanned from young to old, in different stages of hair loss. Many wore wigs. My mother’s brown hair was conspicuously graying at the roots. Knowing she had to start chemo, she had decided to stop stressing her hair with dye. She was resolved to do whatever it took to defeat cancer with one caveat: She refused to lose her hair. She insisted that her oncologist treat her only with drugs that did not induce hair loss. Losing her hair was the one indignity she could not bear to repeat.
Danielle returned from the kitchen area and handed us turkey sandwiches. I watched my mom nibble at the bread and page through Vogue while toxic chemicals dripped into her veins. My mother’s usual luster was absent. She still had plenty of fight in her, but we all knew that, this time, things were different.