Mother’s Day
MOTHER’S DAY
MILLICENT BAXTER
As is the mother, so is her daughter.
—EZEKIEL 16:44
1966
Millicent Baxter’s character and trajectory was formed and informed by her older sister Lucille, who Millicent believed was the only person on earth who truly loved her. While Millicent could easily settle for less, Lucille could not, which worried her.
In early June 1966, at the age of twelve, Millicent arrived home from school and stood just outside the small flat in the East End of London, where she lived with her aunt Fifi, uncle Jack, and sister, Lucille. On that afternoon, Aunt Fifi and Lucille were having a terrible row, screaming obscenities through open windows while passersby made comments or wagers or just made fun.
Millicent, noting the crowd outside, counted the seconds until the screaming stopped or until the crowd dispersed. It wasn’t that she was ashamed or embarrassed by the unseemly display, it was that Lucille might be.
Lucille, a raven-haired beauty who, at twenty-six, was fourteen years Millicent’s senior, cared deeply what people thought and harshly judged the circumstances surrounding her life. She hated the East End and its smells of poverty and grime. It wasn’t meant for her, Lucille was convinced, and late at night when she and Millicent would lie in their shared twin bed, she’d plot their escape.
The sisters shared not only a bed, but a bond, and a mother who had died shortly after Millicent’s birth. Their aunt and uncle had taken them both in out of obligation, and also out of a desire to have a family. Ten years later, the obligation and the family had worn thin. And not just for Aunt Fifi and Uncle Jack.
“We need to be the architects of our own future,” Lucille would say, explaining that unless you have a blueprint for how to get from Point A to Point Wherever the Hell You Bloody Well Want to Be, you’ll end up stuck in a dead-end life like Aunt Fifi: bitter, jealous, and petty. It was an ominous forecast designed, Millicent thought, to ensure that she’d stand beside Lucille. And in truth, while Millicent saw nothing wrong with her aunt, nor their lives, all she really wanted was Lucille’s approval. They were a team, and Lucille promised they always would be.
And so, with dreams that were more strategic than whimsical, Lucille would outline their exit plan. “We need zeros, Squeak,” she said, using the nickname she’d given Millicent after her favorite comfort food: bubble and squeak. “Zeros,” she told her, pulling Millicent close, “are people with money who never had to worry about living in stinking flats above dank butcher shops and next to smelly fishmongers.”
“And how do we find zeros?” Millicent would ask, thinking that maybe she’d help Lucille look for a few.
“By securing a patron to be our saint and our savior,” Lucille explained. And then she set out to do just that. Landing a job as a part-time salesgirl displaying new cars on giant spinning discs in convention centers for rich men in the market for the newest model, auto or otherwise, Lucille made eye contact, made small talk, made unspoken promises that would set her apart, she hoped, from the other beauties twirling nearby.
“Take me for a ride,” she’d say. And they would. It was all fair game, and she played the game strategically until she landed the grand prize.
Sir Rodney Goldstone, an Australian millionaire who was sophisticated, charming, and thirty-three years her senior, fell hard and quickly for Lucille Baxter. He was, she liked to say, her Henry Higgins, and she his Eliza.
But when Aunt Fifi heard about the relationship, she was disgusted. “As I recall,” Fifi chided, “Henry Higgins wasn’t married.”
Goldstone was. The more time Lucille spent with him, the more the fighting between her and Aunt Fifi increased until the fateful day in June of ’66 when Millicent came home from school and heard her aunt call her sister a whore. Millicent, alarmed less by the words and more by the actions, watched as Lucille, suitcase in hand, turned to Fifi before heading toward the door.
“Please forward my mail to the Dorchester,” she said, adding, “ Mrs . Rodney Goldstone, that’s how they know me.”
Millicent watched Fifi’s eyes bulge, and face redden, as she processed this new information. “It was the final straw,” Aunt Fifi would later say.
There was simply no holding back her words. “Take it all!” she screamed, “and take your bastard daughter with you.”
And that was how Millicent Baxter found out that her sister was her mother.