Listen to Megan Staffel read an excerpt from “The White Horse.”

I knew very little about my mother’s childhood. Even though she was a person who loved to talk, she rarely spoke about her past. For many years I knew only the basics—that she grew up with her parents, grandparents, and a younger brother in a duplex in Brooklyn—facts she reported from the safety of the life she had established in Philadelphia, her adopted city.

It was soon after her death in 2013 that I moved to Brooklyn myself, and one of the first things I did was make a pilgrimage to see her childhood home. It was a narrow, three-­story, red-­brick house that extended a long way down the driveway, making it much larger than it appeared to be from the front. It stood on a residential street with a quintessential American name, Maple Street, and I loitered there for a long time, trying to imagine her living there as a little girl, picturing her running out the front door in a flouncy dress, her dark hair pulled back with a headband, just as I once saw in an early photo.

Her house was at the Flatbush Avenue end of Maple and therefore close to Prospect Park. The park was the only place she spoke about with any fondness, while the street name, Flatbush, which she also mentioned, stayed with me because I thought it such an odd and unmusical sound. Now I too live close to Flatbush, and that unusual word is a normal part of my lexicon.

Even though my mother cut her ties to the city, I enjoyed the fact, when I first moved here, that I had family roots in a neighborhood that was new for me. When I told her about my upcoming move, my mother hadn’t seemed excited. She wasn’t interested in revisiting, even in memory, the places that I now frequent.

She not only didn’t speak about her childhood, she also didn’t talk about her birth family, a large Jewish clan consisting of numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. I met them for the first time when I was in my early twenties at a gathering after my grandfather’s funeral, and I was surprised to discover they were interesting and friendly, people I would have liked to know. These cousins were a wonderful bounty because my childhood had only two, and they lived on the other side of the country. Yet although my mother’s cousins were geographically close, she hadn’t had any contact with them. Was it simply a determination, common among Jews who grew up between the wars, to hide her identity?

I know her father had suffered setbacks in his career as a builder because of anti-­Semitism. I can remember the talk when I was a child—such and such a person wouldn’t give him the job; they didn’t want a Jewish company to do the work—and that was in the supposedly enlightened sixties. My mother, as a child, must have heard even more of it, and I suspect the impetus for her Brooklyn exodus was a desire not to be associated with a city that had a large Jewish population. Even when I was a grown woman, she routinely told people she was from Connecticut.

I remember how eager I was to know more about the place where my mother grew up, but she would never have entertained the idea of taking her family to see her childhood home. That’s a nostalgic trip both my husband and I have made with our children, a way of revealing the power spots, those places that allowed us to become who we are. But my mother didn’t have a benign relationship with the place that had been her first home and, with the same curious spirit I had as a child, I have spent much of my adult life wondering why this was so. I believe it’s the reason I became a writer.

—

Around 1940, my mother’s mother died from a heart attack, and my grandfather sold the Lefferts Gardens house on Maple Street and, with my mother’s brother, who was still in high school, moved to an apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. At that time my mother was already in Philadelphia, attending the Tyler School of Art where she was studying to become a painter. I’m sure she went to her mother’s funeral out of a sense of duty, but she had never been close to her mother, or to any of her mother’s relatives. She was close to her father who was a loving, though judgmental, figure in her life.

The move to 230 Park Place, an apartment house between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues, wasn’t haphazard. Her father’s construction company had built the apartment house, designed by the architect Philip Birnbaum. It has two elegant lobbies with art deco details, and though it contains eighty-­two apartments, its footprint feels modest, because much of the building sits back from the sidewalk. It’s a beautiful building, with a landscaped garden between the two forward wings and an elaborate deco frame around the recessed front door.

My uncle was the one who told me there was a mural in the lobby of 230 Park Place that my mother had painted. She, of course, had never mentioned it. But in 2013, when I moved to Brooklyn, I saw right away that the mural was no longer there. The doorman told me it had been destroyed when they did a renovation. Some years later, I met a woman who had lived at 230 in the early aughts, and she told me that in 2003, the year she sold her apartment, the mural was still on the wall. The image she remembered was a white horse.

In 2023, my husband and I sold our first Brooklyn apartment and, coincidentally, moved to one on Park Place, directly across the street from 230, the building that once had contained my mother’s mural. As soon as we were settled, I decided to ask the doorman if there was someone who might have a photograph of it. My husband, in the meantime, had learned to recognize the super at 230, a tall man with a black wrap on his head who was often out on the sidewalk. One evening, when we were strolling down nearby Vanderbilt Avenue, we saw him sitting in front of a barbershop, doing what people do these days in a spare moment, looking at his phone. I introduced myself and told him why I wanted to find someone with a photograph of the mural.

“I have it,” he said, and told us to come by the next morning at 10 am and he’d show it to us.

Having assumed that it was a fresco, painted directly on the wall like the frescoes my mother had studied during the years we lived in Italy, I was prepared for disappointment. I was certain that any photograph that remained would be either too shiny or too blurry, and would tell me nothing.

—

The next morning, we waited in the lobby. When Brian appeared, he was carrying a bulky pile of folded canvas. There were three large pieces. He opened them up and placed them on the floor and it was clear he remembered how they fit together. Then he told us the story. Back in 2006, the board of directors had decided the painting was too old and badly damaged to repair and asked the super to get rid of it, but Brian knew he could not let it go. It was someone’s work, he said, it would have been wrong to throw it into the dumpster with everything else they ripped from the lobby during the renovation. As he surveyed the canvas he had saved, his expression was a bit amused and disbelieving, which was entirely appropriate for the situation, but I suspected this was his attitude toward much of what he encountered, and may have been what moved him to save the painting in the first place.

“Eighteen years I kept it. When I first got here, you could see a name at the bottom, but it’s gone now. I took my time with a knife, peeling it off the wall, cutting through the glue. Nobody knew anything about it, what it was for, where it was from. It would have been wrong to toss it.”

That morning, viewing a painting my mother had made when she was in her early twenties, we were joined by residents passing through who remembered the mural and had always been curious about the artist. Many told me they missed seeing it every day. Some residents had lived in that building twenty, thirty, forty years, and never understood why the painting had been removed.

Time had changed it of course. The colors were dark and the canvas was threadbare where the doorman’s chair had rubbed against it all the years it was stretched across the wall behind his desk. The surprise for me was that it was representational. My mother had been an abstract painter for as long as I knew her, but here there was a lively white horse with an androgynous, barefoot figure robed in a white gown astride it. The horse and rider are at the top of the canvas, the rider leaning over to communicate with a man on the right who seems to be associated with a woman below him holding a child. On the other side of the canvas there is an ominous looking creature with a large, piglike head and bulbous eyes. A snakelike reptile sits between his upright ears. Below them there’s a young boy holding a bouquet of calla lilies who seems strangely calm, disassociated from the chaos behind him.

The odd duo above him, the pig and the reptile, felt familiar, but I couldn’t immediately say why. Throughout the mural, the colors are muted: browns, ochres, deep reds, and greens, but the white of the horse and the rider’s gown is brilliant against them and it’s clear they have arrived with a mission to save the people from something evil.

And then, as I stood in that elegant lobby, I remembered the stories my grandfather used to tell us when we were children. Grandpa would hold my sister and me on his lap and entertain us with made-­up stories about Oblemagobbles, a great big elephant, and his friend Zuchamazuchas, a mouse who rode in Oblemagobbles’s ear as they traveled through the forest. I can still hear him imitating the strong hearty voice of Obelmagobbles and the small squeaky voice of Zuchamazuchas. We loved those stories, and when we were young, Grandpa was willing to tell them.

The pig and the snake are their brethren. As they stare at me from the canvas, I see malevolence. My mother, who must have heard the same stories when she was a child, had made them ferocious. I don’t know what to make of the boy who holds the bouquet of lilies, but I wonder if the figure on the horse is St. George come to slay the dragon. That was a story I know she liked, but I have my doubts. There isn’t a sword in sight, and the facial expressions on the horse and rider are peaceful. The horse is a strong but gentle creature and the figure astride it is leaning over to listen to the people gathered around. Horse and rider seem to have arrived to counter the dark energy of the creatures on the left side of the canvas.

It’s a powerful painting to have in a lobby. One long-­time resident told me she looked at it every morning before she walked to school. What better message is there, that a protector will rid the world of harm? I believe my mother craved that protection as a child.

And perhaps as an adult also. In her mid-­eighties, she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus. The doctor didn’t recommend treatment because of her age and adopted a wait-­and-­see approach. Over the next five years, the disease went about its business in a mostly symptom-­free manner. But the night after the diagnosis, we didn’t know how polite, and even generous, the cancer would be. She went to bed early and I sat up in the living room with a book. We were both scared and maybe that was what initiated it. She padded into the room—breasts visible under her thin gown—and sat in a chair, her blue-­veined legs and sturdy, narrow feet at the ready to stand up again. Then she told me in an uncharacteristically straightforward manner that her father had molested her when she was a little girl. He played bathroom games with me, she said.

My mother was a naturally gregarious, talkative person and her well-­honed sense of drama made her a mesmerizing storyteller. In addition, her tendency to “hystericize,” her word for making more of things than necessary, was her default mode of communicating anything emotional, which was everything she chose to talk about. So her confession had been delivered in an unusual manner. Stranger still, that night and the next morning before I left, nothing more was said about it. I believed her, of course, but her choice not to discuss it again meant I could put it away in the back of my mind where I didn’t have to visit it too often. In a sense, it was the permission I needed to continue thinking of my grandfather as I had always thought of him, a wealthy man I had never known very well who, in his last years, wasted away from liver disease, even though everyone said he had never been a drinker.

I believed her, in part, because I had experienced that side of my grandfather myself on a visit when he was deformed by illness. It was the summer I was seventeen. I was on my way to the bathroom to change into my swimsuit when he told me, in the thin, tremulous voice of disease and old age, to change right there on the patio, where he lay on a cot in front of the pool. His large body had shrunken to a child’s size, though his bald head, with the big blue eyes staring out of it, was as commanding as always. I did what he wanted, but I did it quickly, pulling my swimsuit up before his eyes could linger, telling myself that a dying person had the right to make such a request. Now, my youthful naïveté astounds me.

Around the time of her cancer diagnosis, my mother told me another story from her childhood. Once, on a late-­night drive back to the city, she was sitting in the back seat next to her mother. She was so sleepy she kept on slumping over until finally her mother guided her head onto her lap. But why, I asked, was that something to remember?

Another fact relayed in a simple manner: It was the only time her mother had allowed physical closeness. I was stunned. My mother, perhaps making up for her mother’s lack of demonstrativeness, embraced too much, and I realize that, as a child, she must have been starved for the natural touch of a parent. As my mother, her embraces were often in reverse—the gesture rising less from the desire to give a hug, than to receive one—and in my teenage years when I needed distance from her, her embraces were not welcome, an avoidance I’m sure she took as rejection. Her husband at the time, my father, was too remote, emotionally, to satisfy her need, so it’s understandable she’d look to her children. I think she was hungry her whole life for the protective touch of a parent, and perhaps the horse and rider, their compassionate faces so focused on the people below, illustrated what she herself had never received. It is clearly a depiction of a kindly person listening, holding out a hand to offer sympathy, help, guidance.

The mural is in the style of the 1930s; there’s a clear influence of Diego Rivera, who was at the peak of his career then and would have been well known to my mother. The yellow and red tones of the scene below the horse where the nasty creatures appear suggest a kind of hell. Maybe the snakelike creature riding between the demon’s ears rules over it.

Was my mother intentional in what she was painting? Did the big-­eyed, nasty pig with the reptile between his ears resemble someone in particular? Was it a message she was sending her father who had to pass that mural each day he lived in the apartment? Might he have moved away because he no longer wanted to see it? Or did the images surface without her awareness of the references to her own life?

The date of construction given for 230 Park Place is 1937. My mother would have been sixteen. So, she must have painted it three or four years later while she was at art school in Philadelphia. That was when her mother died and when her father and brother would have been living in an apartment there. Maybe it was in the summer of 1941. War was brewing in Europe and this young Jewish woman who one year later would marry my father and try to lose her identity in my father’s gentile heritage, created a horse and rider to save us from the forces of darkness. She depicted them plunging into a landscape ruled by a pair of monsters and the kindness in their faces feels like a true kindness, one you could trust.

Was she thinking only of current events, that Hitler was the pig and Mussolini the snake? I believe the answer is both yes and no; images rise from the unconscious because they must. We know all too well that every time abuse takes place in a family, there is tremendous personal and familial pressure to deny it. I hope this has changed in recent years with revelations of abusive behavior entering the cultural dialogue, but during the 1920s, and especially with a repressed and distant mother married to a highly successful engineer father, my mother as a child wouldn’t have had an opportunity to talk, meaning that she would have held it in, burying it beneath layers of normality she must have willed into existence, a habit she continued into adulthood.

I remember her frequent laments over the troubles that befell the people we knew, children troubles, money troubles, drugs, gangs, alcohol, her voice rounding with richness and depth as the sorrows of the world filled it. Such horrors! As I listened, fear would grip me, my stomach would tie itself in knots. Was the intensity of her identification with someone else’s suffering the result of her own story, trapped inside her, bits leaking through any time the door was opened? Perhaps grieving over the troubles of others was all she could allow, at least until the cancer gave her the courage to speak.

I look at the mural again. The horse and rider, benevolence shining in their faces, offer a benediction, or perhaps a better word is directive: Go forth and prosper. That’s what my mother did. She left Brooklyn forever. She went to the University of Iowa for grad school, where she studied with the painter Phillip Guston, a Jew who had hidden his identity when he changed his name, replacing Goldstein with Guston. For my mother, a name change came with her marriage to my father, Rudolf Staffel, when she became Doris Staffel, leaving her father’s name far behind. She taught at the Philadelphia College of Art and devoted her life to painting. Her work was shown in the Philadelphia area and over the years a number of galleries represented her. Towards the end of her life, the Woodmere Art Museum had a retrospective that spanned her long career. At her memorial service, former students spoke of the enormous influence Doris Staffel had had on their lives. For the many of us who own her work, she left a vision of shape and color jockeying with space to hold down powerful rhythms and energies, creating balance. Some have an element of fury about them, but it’s fury contained, softened by the gestures of mark-­making. Her work hangs on the walls of my living spaces and looking at it always gives me pleasure.

—

If there is a hero in this story it is Brian. His decision to remove the painting from the wall with care, fold it loosely, and store it in the basement where it was protected from further damage, is remarkable. In one way, it was a collaboration with the future. He trusted that one day someone would come along and ask about it. And although it wasn’t until the fall of 2023, when I moved into the building across the street and understood, finally, the steps I needed to take, Brian was always ready. I had hoped to find a photograph, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for someone to say, “I have it,” and mean the actual thing.

But this isn’t that simple story. What changes it from a tale of serendipity is that my mother would have tossed the mural into the dumpster herself. She had already walked away from the trauma of her childhood and, as her daughter, I can count the ways that decision guided everything she did, even her embrace of abstract art. Abstraction gave her the freedom to abandon specifics. Working with the movement of color and shape across a canvas, she was released from the story of herself and loyal only to the feelings, rhythms, and sensations of that moment in time when she was at the easel. She had clearly been skilled as a figurative painter, even at such a young age, but that was her old life, the “before” that she had jettisoned. I’m sure she never would have wanted me to see the mural because it revealed too much, and her life in Philadelphia was about balance and control. That’s what she created in her abstractions, with shape, line, and color. And that’s what she created in the spaces she occupied. Her rooms were rigorously curated, everything placed just so. Growing up, my sister and I made fun of her inability to let a jacket thrown down on the couch stay there, or a dirty dish to remain on the counter.

When Brian turned the painting over to me, that lumpy, awkward package of folded canvas, I spread it on the floor in an empty room. It stayed there several months, and the folds in the canvas mostly disappeared. I hired a photographer to document it and, in addition to those photos, there is also an image of the mural with the worn sections replaced by an AI “recreation” of the canvas as it probably was in 1941. It’s eerie, like meeting my mother at age twenty-­one, a decade before I was born.

If I had told her, when I was seventeen, that Grandpa had demanded I change into my swimsuit in front of him, would it have made her pay attention? She once remarked that she always knew her father loved her, implying that she never had that certainty with her mother. But now, after the mural, after her confession, what does that statement mean? Only that she was still submerged in the fiction she’d created.

There is much that I am grateful to my grandfather for, and I need to say that. Because of him, I went through college without any debt. His direct financial assistance allowed me to focus on my studies. He was not only the bulbous-­eyed pig or the storyteller with a seductive tale about friends of unequal power, he was also a generous and charitable man, supporting scholarships at his alma mater. But as we know from current events, a placid surface can hide the dangerous edge. Keep your eyes open, I tell myself. Notice everything. Debauchery often wears a mask.

Had my mother forgiven her father, or had she merely resolved never to acknowledge it to herself or anyone else? That is, until the cancer.

—

After the mural was photographed, my husband and I loosely rolled up the pieces of canvas, maneuvered them into a big cardboard tube, and stored it in a closet. Where it will stay. I understand why my mother never spoke about her childhood in Brooklyn, why she didn’t seem pleased when I told her I wanted to move there. The images in the mural come from a hidden place; they had slipped out before she had reinvented herself, before she became my mother, a woman who grew up in Connecticut and lived in Philadelphia, an abstract painter who continued to make marks on paper, lines and shapes in many colors. She painted even at the end of her life when she was bedridden, holding a board on her lap, the special paper tacked to it, her markers and paints on a tray in easy reach. Her compositions are never stagnant. They are containers for shapes and lines that move with strong, willful energy, restless and vivid. In my mind, I see them searching for calm, searching for a spot where a little girl could lay down her head.

My mother never hesitated to play the part of the adoring daughter, once even sending my sister and me alone, as children, to stay with Grandpa and Grandma, his second wife, for several days. Did we return from that trip unscathed? I know I did; my sister has never made the same claim.

Even without that certainty, I see the many ways the poison has spread. It would take a book to map its journey through the generations, but it’s one I’m not willing to write. Instead, I focus on what my mother made of it—the paintings left to me and this one that so recently entered my life. The images of its mysterious story—faces, bodies, the stunning white horse—mark this block in Brooklyn where I now live in a building that sits across the street, facing the building where the mural first appeared. Living across the street gives me a necessary distance. I’m not her, but I’ve come back to the city my mother escaped from. I hold her past in my mind, but more crucially, I’ve also placed it in a cardboard tube. With this essay it exists in another form, and now, having reached the final sentence, I lay it down gently. ■

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