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And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder 1st Ballantine Books trade ed Edition
Author(s): Deborah Spungen (Author)
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Publication Date: September 29, 1996
- Edition: 1st Ballantine Books trade ed
- Language: English
- Print length: 408 pages
- ISBN-10: 0449911411
- ISBN-13: 9780449911419
Book Description
“Honest and moving . . . Her painful tale is engrossing.”—Washington Post Book World
For most of us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy. Here is the incredible story of an infant who never stopped screaming, a toddler who attacked people, a teenager addicted to drugs, violence, and easy sex, a daughter completely out of control—who almost destroyed her parents’ marriage and the happiness of the rest of her family.
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
For most of us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy. Here is the incredible story of an infant who never stopped screaming, a toddler who attacked people, a teenager addicted to drugs, violence, and easy sex, a daughter completely out of control–who almost destroyed her parents’ marriage and the happiness of the rest of her family.
“Honest and moving…Her painful tale is engrossing.”
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
From the Paperback edition.From the Back Cover
us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy. Here is the incredible story of an infant who never stopped screaming, a toddler who attacked people, a teenager addicted to drugs, violence, and easy sex, a daughter completely out of control–who almost destroyed her parents’ marriage and the happiness of the rest of her family.
“Honest and moving…Her painful tale is engrossing.”
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
From the Paperback edition.About the Author
Deborah Spungen received her master of social service and master of law and social policy degrees from the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work in May 1989. She is the executive director and founder of the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia. She lives in Philadelphia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The doctor who delivered Nancy had worked his way through medical school as a prize fighter. He was very tall, muscular, and always in a tremendous hurry. I saw him once every month during my pregnancy, and before each visit I prepared a list of questions. (How will I know when I’m in labor? Will it hurt?) Each month the list got longer and longer, because I never asked him any of the questions. I was too intimidated by him. He seemed so busy.
I was twenty years old and I’d never had a baby before.
By my seventh month the list was quite long. On the day of my appointment I examined it nervously while I sat in my religious philosophy seminar—I was in my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. My friend Janet passed me a little wadded-up piece of paper and giggled. The professor glared at me. Janet had come up with by far the best name to date: Nebuchadnezzar Spungen.
My obstetrician’s office was right in the midst of the Penn campus, which spreads across several blocks in West Philadelphia. As I waddled across the campus, I convinced myself that this would be the day I would have an office talk with him. I would not be intimidated.
I was quite a sight now in my maternity dress, knee socks, and saddle shoes, and I got some funny looks from the other students. You didn’t see many pregnant students on campus in 1958. At Penn, in fact, you saw only one—me.
When I got there, I had my blood and urine tested and sat down in the waiting room. A pregnant woman who was about my age came in with her mother and sat down across from me. We were due at about the same time and had chatted a bit during previous visits. Now I smiled at her, but she just stared vacantly ahead. Her mother took her hand, squeezed it, and turned to me.
“It died,” she said softly.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“She’s carrying a dead baby. He said she might have to carry it another month. Maybe longer.”
I swallowed, looked away. I was afraid if I looked at the girl too long maybe it would happen to me, too. I wondered if such a thing could happen to me, and if it did, how I would tell. How would I feel? I didn’t know. My baby was very active, seemed to move around constantly. That was all I knew.
The nurse finally led me into a tiny examining room. It was cold in there. I waited, watching the traffic down on Walnut Street, clutching my list, which was moist now.
The doctor had a deep, booming voice. I heard him out in the corridor, before he burst in. He seemed to fill the room.
“How are we feeling?” he barked.
“Okay,” I replied weakly.
He vigorously scrubbed his enormous, hairy hands, dried them, and put one of them over my bare abdomen. He began to prod and poke.
“Any complaints?”
“I … well, no. But I was … I mean, I do have—”
The phone rang. He reached over and picked it up while he continued to poke around. “How often?” he said into the phone. “Okay, get yourself over to the hospital. I’ll meet you there. Ten minutes. ’Bye.”
He hung up and was out the door in one stride. He stopped, turned back to me as an afterthought, and smiled. “The baby’s doing fine.”
Then he was gone.
I sat on the table so long the nurse came in to ask if something was wrong. I wanted to burst into tears, but I did not. I just sat there on the table with my list, feeling very alone.
Frank, my husband, had been stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the army reserves since the first month of my pregnancy. Actually, he’d already left when I discovered I was pregnant. I kept hoping I wasn’t. One day, at a friend’s wedding, I thought my period actually had started, and I dashed, delighted, for the ladies’ room. I was wrong.
Frank and I knew we wanted kids, but we were thinking five years away, not immediately. He had just graduated from Penn and wouldn’t start working until he got out of the army, though he had already landed a good job with an accounting firm in New York City. Our plan had been that he would commute to New York every day from Philadelphia until I finished school. Then we would move there. I was majoring in foreign languages and wanted to go into foreign trade. I wanted a career. New York seemed like the very best place for us. We wanted to work our way up together. We wanted to travel to Europe. We wanted adventure.
Unplanned pregnancies were very common then. Just about everyone I knew had at least one unplanned child. Frank and I ended up having two. There were abortionists around, but you didn’t go to them—at least not if you were a nice Jewish girl, which I was. And Frank, well, Frank was a nice Jewish boy. Maybe he had been driving a truck when we’d met three years before, when I was still in high school. Maybe he had been running with a tough crowd and had a bit of a wild reputation himself. No longer. He had settled down, gone to college, and worked hard.
We never discussed an abortion. It simply wasn’t an option. In 1958 you just made a shift, changed your original plans, and looked forward to your new ones. In 1958 you had fewer options.
With Frank in the army I reluctantly moved out of our little apartment on campus. It had cockroaches and mice and only one electrical outlet, but it was our first home and I loved it.
I moved back into my old room at my mother’s row house about ten blocks from campus. Since Mother worked, I made dinner when I got home from school, then stretched out and watched The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. In retrospect, it was a very easy pregnancy. I was a little tired and had some backaches, but my health was fine.
It’s just that I was so confused, so lonely. None of my friends had had babies yet. I had no sisters, or brothers for that matter. I tried to be low-key about it with Mother, but during the fifth month I finally sought her out.
It was bedtime. I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair.
Mother was very upset that I was pregnant. She thought I was too young. Also, my father had died during my early infancy and I wondered if the idea of someone, anyone, being pregnant reminded her of her pain. So we never talked much about my being pregnant. We talked around it. We discussed a trip to Europe she was planning. We debated current films. We talked about anything we could think of besides what was really on our minds. We were a lot alike in that sense—neither of us was comfortable discussing personal feelings with someone else. We just weren’t that sort of people, Mother and I. We got along perfectly okay. Our relationship just wasn’t very close.
“I’m nauseated in the morning,” I said quietly.
She said nothing.
“Were you?” I asked.
“A couple of times. When I had my coffee.” She put her brush down, looked at me. “We should buy you some maternity clothes.”
That was the only conversation we had about my pregnancy.
I took my list home with me from the doctor’s office and added to it “How will I know if the baby is dead?”
A week later Frank came home.
He had a bristly crew cut and big muscles in his arms. He was very proud of how hard his stomach was and kept kidding me about mine. We talked about names for the baby. I tried out Nebuchadnezzar on him and realized how long he’d been away when, for a brief instant, he didn’t know I was kidding.
We looked at baby furniture. We looked at apartments and decided to keep living with my mother while I had the baby and finished school.
As soon as Frank got settled he put on a shirt and tie and took the train to New York to make arrangements for starting his job. He was twenty-three and was starting a new life. As it turned out, his accounting firm now had an opening in their Philadelphia office, and Frank grabbed it. It meant things would be much smoother. Everything seemed to be going smoother now that Frank was back.
We could always move to New York in a year or two.
Five weeks before the baby was due I was sitting in my political science conference course—we sat around a large, round table—when several sharp pains shot through me in rapid succession. They were so strong I gasped.
The doctor who delivered Nancy had worked his way through medical school as a prize fighter. He was very tall, muscular, and always in a tremendous hurry. I saw him once every month during my pregnancy, and before each visit I prepared a list of questions. (How will I know when I’m in labor? Will it hurt?) Each month the list got longer and longer, because I never asked him any of the questions. I was too intimidated by him. He seemed so busy.
I was twenty years old and I’d never had a baby before.
By my seventh month the list was quite long. On the day of my appointment I examined it nervously while I sat in my religious philosophy seminar—I was in my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. My friend Janet passed me a little wadded-up piece of paper and giggled. The professor glared at me. Janet had come up with by far the best name to date: Nebuchadnezzar Spungen.
My obstetrician’s office was right in the midst of the Penn campus, which spreads across several blocks in West Philadelphia. As I waddled across the campus, I convinced myself that this would be the day I would have an office talk with him. I would not be intimidated.
I was quite a sight now in my maternity dress, knee socks, and saddle shoes, and I got some funny looks from the other students. You didn’t see many pregnant students on campus in 1958. At Penn, in fact, you saw only one—me.
When I got there, I had my blood and urine tested and sat down in the waiting room. A pregnant woman who was about my age came in with her mother and sat down across from me. We were due at about the same time and had chatted a bit during previous visits. Now I smiled at her, but she just stared vacantly ahead. Her mother took her hand, squeezed it, and turned to me.
“It died,” she said softly.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“She’s carrying a dead baby. He said she might have to carry it another month. Maybe longer.”
I swallowed, looked away. I was afraid if I looked at the girl too long maybe it would happen to me, too. I wondered if such a thing could happen to me, and if it did, how I would tell. How would I feel? I didn’t know. My baby was very active, seemed to move around constantly. That was all I knew.
The nurse finally led me into a tiny examining room. It was cold in there. I waited, watching the traffic down on Walnut Street, clutching my list, which was moist now.
The doctor had a deep, booming voice. I heard him out in the corridor, before he burst in. He seemed to fill the room.
“How are we feeling?” he barked.
“Okay,” I replied weakly.
He vigorously scrubbed his enormous, hairy hands, dried them, and put one of them over my bare abdomen. He began to prod and poke.
“Any complaints?”
“I … well, no. But I was … I mean, I do have—”
The phone rang. He reached over and picked it up while he continued to poke around. “How often?” he said into the phone. “Okay, get yourself over to the hospital. I’ll meet you there. Ten minutes. ’Bye.”
He hung up and was out the door in one stride. He stopped, turned back to me as an afterthought, and smiled. “The baby’s doing fine.”
Then he was gone.
I sat on the table so long the nurse came in to ask if something was wrong. I wanted to burst into tears, but I did not. I just sat there on the table with my list, feeling very alone.
Frank, my husband, had been stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the army reserves since the first month of my pregnancy. Actually, he’d already left when I discovered I was pregnant. I kept hoping I wasn’t. One day, at a friend’s wedding, I thought my period actually had started, and I dashed, delighted, for the ladies’ room. I was wrong.
Frank and I knew we wanted kids, but we were thinking five years away, not immediately. He had just graduated from Penn and wouldn’t start working until he got out of the army, though he had already landed a good job with an accounting firm in New York City. Our plan had been that he would commute to New York every day from Philadelphia until I finished school. Then we would move there. I was majoring in foreign languages and wanted to go into foreign trade. I wanted a career. New York seemed like the very best place for us. We wanted to work our way up together. We wanted to travel to Europe. We wanted adventure.
Unplanned pregnancies were very common then. Just about everyone I knew had at least one unplanned child. Frank and I ended up having two. There were abortionists around, but you didn’t go to them—at least not if you were a nice Jewish girl, which I was. And Frank, well, Frank was a nice Jewish boy. Maybe he had been driving a truck when we’d met three years before, when I was still in high school. Maybe he had been running with a tough crowd and had a bit of a wild reputation himself. No longer. He had settled down, gone to college, and worked hard.
We never discussed an abortion. It simply wasn’t an option. In 1958 you just made a shift, changed your original plans, and looked forward to your new ones. In 1958 you had fewer options.
With Frank in the army I reluctantly moved out of our little apartment on campus. It had cockroaches and mice and only one electrical outlet, but it was our first home and I loved it.
I moved back into my old room at my mother’s row house about ten blocks from campus. Since Mother worked, I made dinner when I got home from school, then stretched out and watched The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. In retrospect, it was a very easy pregnancy. I was a little tired and had some backaches, but my health was fine.
It’s just that I was so confused, so lonely. None of my friends had had babies yet. I had no sisters, or brothers for that matter. I tried to be low-key about it with Mother, but during the fifth month I finally sought her out.
It was bedtime. I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair.
Mother was very upset that I was pregnant. She thought I was too young. Also, my father had died during my early infancy and I wondered if the idea of someone, anyone, being pregnant reminded her of her pain. So we never talked much about my being pregnant. We talked around it. We discussed a trip to Europe she was planning. We debated current films. We talked about anything we could think of besides what was really on our minds. We were a lot alike in that sense—neither of us was comfortable discussing personal feelings with someone else. We just weren’t that sort of people, Mother and I. We got along perfectly okay. Our relationship just wasn’t very close.
“I’m nauseated in the morning,” I said quietly.
She said nothing.
“Were you?” I asked.
“A couple of times. When I had my coffee.” She put her brush down, looked at me. “We should buy you some maternity clothes.”
That was the only conversation we had about my pregnancy.
I took my list home with me from the doctor’s office and added to it “How will I know if the baby is dead?”
A week later Frank came home.
He had a bristly crew cut and big muscles in his arms. He was very proud of how hard his stomach was and kept kidding me about mine. We talked about names for the baby. I tried out Nebuchadnezzar on him and realized how long he’d been away when, for a brief instant, he didn’t know I was kidding.
We looked at baby furniture. We looked at apartments and decided to keep living with my mother while I had the baby and finished school.
As soon as Frank got settled he put on a shirt and tie and took the train to New York to make arrangements for starting his job. He was twenty-three and was starting a new life. As it turned out, his accounting firm now had an opening in their Philadelphia office, and Frank grabbed it. It meant things would be much smoother. Everything seemed to be going smoother now that Frank was back.
We could always move to New York in a year or two.
Five weeks before the baby was due I was sitting in my political science conference course—we sat around a large, round table—when several sharp pains shot through me in rapid succession. They were so strong I gasped.
