The setting for some of my most treasured childhood memories is a one-bedroom condo that stood 75 feet from a white sand beach, overlooking the absurdly blue Caribbean. To my sister and me, it was heaven, with Murphy beds — the coolest gizmos ever — folding down at night and disappearing each day.
To my parents, as with so many American families, the condo was a symbol of postwar success, a tropical retreat where a young family could make memories. But as families age and transform over the decades, those memories can turn a place that was once an escape into its own type of burden.
A secondhand airplane
The story begins in 1968, when I was 13 and we left Long Island to vacation with a family of lime green lizards in a bare-bones motel next to a windy beach on the east end of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. My father had recently purchased a secondhand propeller plane with a cruising range of 1,487 nautical miles, making it possible to fly from New York with just one refueling stop.
My father, Jerry, grew up in a working-class immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn, went to Harvard Law School on scholarship, then flew Navy air transport in World War II before going into commercial real estate. He was a master of selective frugality. When white leather go-go boots became the rage among fourth grade girls, my father insisted I get plastic knockoffs, but he didn’t think twice about flying to Block Island for a tuna on rye.
My mother, Mickie, was beautiful, with short, blond wavy hair — a gift from Lady Clairol — and a wide smile with perfect teeth. She was petite and svelte, but nevertheless swore by Weight Watchers with its low-fat cottage cheese, sprinkled with cinnamon and Sweet’n Low and accompanied by a cool, refreshing glass of Tab. She was one of six women in her Columbia Law School class in the 1940s. But after rejections from all-male law firms, she sold hats at Macy’s, then retired to be Mommy to my sister and me. She channeled her brilliance into presidencies of the P.T.A. and League of Women Voters.
She shuttled me to school every morning, then skating and dance each afternoon. She sewed hems and baked cakes, and perfected the art of the floating matzo ball. She set an elegant table with china and silver and white lace tablecloths, with those sneaky eyelets that revealed baby blue liners below.
Our nightly routine featured what she called “talking time” — when she lay with me on my Serta twin and asked about my day. When she was too tired to talk, we would quietly cuddle.
During that 1968 Caribbean vacation, my father learned of plans to build beachfront “condominiums.” The concept was less than 10 years old in the United States, and these condos would be among the island’s first. In 1969, he paid $26,000 in cash, about $225,000 in today’s dollars, and took ownership of Crystal Cove A7 sight unseen. Then the family set off in his Cessna 421. I sat shotgun, calculating wind speeds and adjusting headings, as my father had taught me to do.
A vacation to remember
The condo sat on the ground floor of a two-story white concrete building with a lagoon and a vast lawn, complete with scurrying iguanas, that led to the beach. Behind the unit and just past the parking lot there were two tennis courts and a saltwater swimming pool, which never seemed strange to me but always surprised my friends when I described it. Our unit, like all of them, had terra-cotta floor tiles and a Scandinavian-style sofa.
We spent most of our day on the beach. Sunscreen was not a thing in those days, but my mother and I tanned without burning, so hours in the sun were more or less the norm. At night — without TV or telephone — we read and played Scrabble and retired by 9.
The next winter, in late 1970, we went down again. I remember my mother gracefully swimming in her two-piece bathing suit with attached skirt. Her tennis stroke was equally well executed, and we played doubles as a family with my father and me on one team against my mother and older sister on the other.
But mostly what I remember on this trip was my mother on a lounge chair doing needlepoint in a green-and-white floppy hat. I carried my Kodak Brownie everywhere, capturing images of seemingly everyone. But I didn’t take any of my mother. Something about her appearance just didn’t seem right, and I was reluctant to document her. I regret that to this day.
A few months after that trip, my mother had a hysterectomy. I wasn’t told any details, and I didn’t ask. In the early ’70s, lots of mothers were having their uteri and ovaries removed, just like kids getting their tonsils out. In no time, she was back to car-pooling and mahjong and all the things I had come to expect from her.
Or so I thought. That summer I was shipped off to Israel, no doubt to be spared watching my mother experience the pain and nausea associated with chemo and her new diagnosis of ovarian cancer, a term my father strategically avoided verbalizing. Later, she was hospitalized at Sloan-Kettering, where I visited her every day. Sometimes I crawled into her twin-size hospital bed and we had “talking time.” But mostly she slept. I stared at her chest as it rose and fell, and I soothed her cracked lips with glycerin swabs.
She came home on Thanksgiving Day, 30 pounds thinner, with her ribs visible through her gray wool sweater dress. I remember how hauntingly beautiful she looked and how proud I was that she was mine. Two months later, and 13 months after I had seen her on St. Thomas in that swimsuit with the skirt, she was dead, at 48.
I was 16. I remember lying on the chintz coverlet on Mommy’s big king bed and listening as my father told everyone who called that I was “fine.”
The crash
The next summer, I began taking flight lessons on Long Island. The airfield was close to the cemetery where my mother was buried, yet somehow despite spending all those hours nearby learning to fly, I never went to her grave.
My father continued to go to St. Thomas, eventually with a wonderful woman he had met — also thin, beautiful and blond. In 1979, the two of them took off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., headed to New York. Over Virginia, the plane lost oil pressure and altitude, and plummeted toward a row of houses. My father skillfully managed to navigate away from them, crashing and burning in a nearby field. The accident was front-page news in the local paper — The Virginian-Pilot — the next day.
While he survived the crash, he never regained consciousness. I sat by his side as one organ after another failed. His partner also survived, and I told her I loved her, but I think I was actually speaking to Mommy. He died two months after the crash, and I vowed never to pilot a plane again.
After a complicated process of settling his estate, my sister and I took ownership of Crystal Cove A7. Although it was never discussed, selling it would have been akin to throwing away the last remnants of our parents’ lives — like putting the final nail in a coffin closed much too soon. So, we kept it and shared expenses: $20,000 split evenly every year.
Rebuilding
I didn’t make it back to the condo for another two years, this time with my boyfriend, David. When we opened the door, the long period of neglect became immediately apparent. Lime green lizards were squatting in the window blinds and the air had a musty smell — so different from the way my mother would have left it.
Neighbors and condo workers who had been acquainted with my parents or their legacy stopped by to check in. Despite barely knowing them, I appreciated their hugs — a physical connection to the happy times my family had spent there together. By this point I had moved on from a childhood existence in Great Neck to a young adult life in New York City with new friends and colleagues. Those acquaintances on St. Thomas were among the very few people in my world who had known my parents.
During the next decade, as I studied medicine — a career choice shaped by my family’s losses — I escaped to St. Thomas several times a year. My sister and I replaced the terra-cotta floor tiles with modern off-white stone and upgraded the motel-style furniture with plush upholstered chairs.
I often sat alone on the beach at sunset when the crowds had dispersed. Fleeting images of Mommy would appear, but then just as quickly disappear. On rare occasions, I allowed myself to cry.
In January 1989, almost 17 years to the day after my mother’s death, David and I got married on St. Thomas, and then months later, we watched in horror from New York as a series of hurricanes brutalized the island. We learned from neighbors that A7 had been flooded and its internal walls destroyed. Luckily, hurricane insurance paid to rebuild everything. I still wanted to keep the place, but my sister decided she was done, and sold me her share. Only a few months after the condo had been repaired, another storm struck, carrying the roof and sofa to the swimming pool. Again, I rebuilt.
The next generations
By 1995, David and I had two young children. We built sand castles, flew kites and played hours of Uno, Rummikub and Scrabble. The condo now had a phone, but still no TV, which the kids came to see as charming. My son and I perfected the art of “noodling,” where we floated together on the Caribbean’s blue waters, buoyed by cylindrical pieces of colorful polyethylene foam and having our own “talking time.”
But as the kids grew up, the crowded one-bedroom with disappearing beds lost its appeal. We played Uno less and finally bought a TV. Expenses mounted, so we opened our doors to renters, who haggled over pricing and complained about squeaky doors. There were more hurricanes — the condo survived them, but beloved local institutions did not. Waterfront insurance coverage became nearly impossible to buy.
Eventually, the concrete walls, the broken porch rails and the cracks in the pool started to really bother me. When we visited, I rarely made it to the beach. I now spent my St. Thomas time maintaining appliances and replacing ragged bedsheets.
One day, I was talking to our caretaker, a woman named Norma who had known my family for years and had seen my last few frenzied trips to the island.
“Joan,” she said, “it is time to sell.” I didn’t have to keep doing this, she explained. My mother would stay alive through my memories. That it was so obvious to everyone but me came as a shock. It revealed a perspective I hadn’t allowed myself to see.
I put the condo on the market and quickly received an unexpectedly high cash offer of $450,000. In a 48-hour solo trip to the island, I packed up the Uno cards and Scrabble set. Before leaving, I took one last walk down Sapphire Beach and retraced the very first trips we took there with my mother. Then I shut the door for the last time as 2022 was drawing to a close.
Sixteen months later, this past March, my daughter became a mother, and I a grandmother. Suddenly, I felt an urge to visit the family burial plot for the first time in decades.
I stood on the grass in front of Mommy’s gravestone on a raw April day and thought about the multitude of ways her truncated life had changed the trajectory of mine. As I sought solace, I thought about the last happy place we had known together as a family. It wasn’t our New York house, where I had watched cancer erode her, but rather that little one-bedroom condo on St. Thomas. Even though I no longer owned Crystal Cove A7, I finally owned all those memories, free and clear.
Joan Bregstein is a professor in pediatric emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and co-teacher of the Columbia Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop.
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