Where We Belong (15 page)

There is a small, remote kingdom called Bhutan in South Asia set on the slopes of the Eastern Himalayas. Forty years ago, a former king proposed an interesting idea: let’s determine the success of our country by measuring the well-being of our citizens,
not
our economy. His idea became an index known as “gross national happiness,” to counter the existing gross domestic product index. The GNH gauged the country’s success by asking people about their quality of life, their relationship with the environment, how well they were being governed, and their sense of belonging to their culture. Today, Bhutan is not without problems, but the happiness level of its citizens continues to play a role in how the country moves forward.

On a one-acre plot of land in Boulder, Colorado, residents have set the bar high for their GNH index: gross neighborhood happiness.

• • •

During the 1920s, a private mansion served as the prize at the end of a long driveway in the exclusive neighborhood of Old Westbury on Long Island’s North Shore. A family who made millions mining copper built the lavish home and named it the Columns. A total of ten white pillars supported both a second-story porch and the presumption by visitors that those who lived inside were extremely moneyed.

When Amelia Lobsenz and Dr. Harry Abrahams bought the Columns in 1961, it was her money that funded the purchase—money earned mining clients, not copper. Five years earlier, Amelia had started her own public relations firm, Lobsenz PR, a pioneering move by a thirty-four-year-old woman in a male-dominated industry. A gutsy businesswoman and gifted writer, Amelia founded her company on powerhouse clients including the Rockefeller brothers and Nestlé. When they moved into the Columns, Amelia and Harry, a surgeon, brought with them their blended family: Michael, Amelia’s eleven-year-old son from a first marriage; George, Harry’s ten-year-old son from his first marriage; and one-year-old Kay, their baby daughter. Because she was so much younger than her half brothers, Kay essentially grew up as an only child in a four-story estate.

The Columns, Old Westbury, New York
(Courtesy of Neshama Abraham)

“To give you an idea of how big this house was,” she says, “there was an entire large room dedicated to my Barbie collection. There were houses for all the dolls, their own mini mansions. It was really quite elaborate.”

The Columns stood as the stately centerpiece of ten lush acres. Upper and lower gardens bloomed throughout the year, their vivid beauty enhanced by the soothing sound of babbling formal fountains. Travelers along the lengthy, winding driveway gazed across a vast lawn featuring a triangle of copper beech trees that flashed their showy hue each autumn. The property had ample room for an Olympic-sized pool, an innovative Har-Tru tennis court, and a stable occupied by a pony named Clover, a gift to Dr. Abrahams from a grateful patient.

“My dad saved the life of a man who owned harness-race horses at the Roosevelt Raceway,” Kay recalls. “It was a very complicated operation so he gave us a beagle and a Shetland pony as an additional thank-you.”

The mansion’s interior measured ten thousand square feet, liberally apportioned into twenty-five rooms.

Formal entrance, the Columns
(Courtesy of Neshama Abraham)

The marble floor in the formal entryway led to four levels of seemingly endless spaces, each with its own generous porch. Elegances from the original owners remained, like hand-painted wallpaper imported from France by the famous American interior designer Lady Mendl, whose wealthy clients in the early 1900s ranged from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Anne Vanderbilt. Chandeliers, also brought in from Europe by Lady Mendl, hung from high ceilings throughout the house. Off the kitchen and main dining area was a sunny breakfast room decorated with blue leather seats and large mirrors featuring the French technique of
verre églomisé
, a reverse painting on the mirror’s glass; in this case, the artist depicted a woman’s dressing room complete with masks from a masquerade ball and chests of drawers overflowing with pearls and jewels. Four to six servants were on duty full-time to manage the massive home and property.

What the house was missing, quite often, were the owners. Kay’s dad worked long hours serving as chief of surgery at a large Long Island hospital and also as the Nassau County medical examiner. Her mom was also extremely busy as chief executive officer of the successful and growing public relations firm she founded and ran.

“As a little kid I felt neglected and lonely,” says Kay. “My mom was so successful, so busy, so driven. She’d come home exhausted; she had very little left to give to a young daughter. We always had dinner together at seven o’clock. A chauffeur would drive her home from her office in Manhattan to Long Island and she’d be working in the back with the partition closed most of the time. My dad was handy and made a beautiful wooden desk for the back of the sky-blue limousine. She had a Dictaphone and a typewriter. My grandmother knitted her warm afghan blankets that she’d wrap around herself during drives to and from Manhattan on cold days.”

Kay treasured the nights when her mother had enough energy left to spin stories for her about a chipmunk Amelia called Chippy. Quality time with her mother always ended too soon.

“We had this one closet off the formal entrance that was dedicated primarily to my mom’s fur coats. When she left in the morning, I would take all the coats off their hangers and lay them down to create a furry little cave. I would lie down and smell them because they smelled like her perfume,” she says. “It might sound strange, but cuddling with her furs was one of the only ways I could feel close to her because she was gone so much.”

Older by nine and ten years, George and Michael were not ideal playmates for Kay. Plus, very large properties put great distance between neighbors in Old Westbury; no one stopped by or played in the street. Kay further isolated herself, too self-conscious about the family’s wealth to invite over friends from school. Even hide-and-seek, typically enjoyable, was for Kay a confirmation that she was invisible, a ghost hiding but not missed behind heavy formal curtains.

“When my parents were around and I decided to hide, I thought,
Is anyone going to notice?
The problem was that my mom was so work focused; she just wasn’t mother oriented. She had people dedicated to keeping the house clean, and taking care of the gardens, the laundry and cooking, and the cars—all the tasks of running the estate—but there wasn’t a nanny. There wasn’t a person to take care of me or watch out for me when I came home from school. My mother just didn’t think I needed a caretaker, even though the formal gardens did. I guess she assumed with all these people around I’d be fine, but they were focused on the household tasks, not a child who needed attention.”

Kay’s maternal grandmother, Florence, visited several days a week. She taught her granddaughter about the Ten Commandments, and together they colored, cut out paper dolls, and worked on needlepoint. Her beloved Grandma Freitag was one of the only people who entered into the bubble of loneliness and entitlement that was Kay’s life. When he was seventeen, her oldest half brother warned Kay about the pitfalls of privilege.

“Right before he left for college, Michael and I had a heart-to-heart talk. He said, ‘Kay, you are becoming a JAP [Jewish American Princess]. You’re getting really spoiled.’ He painted a picture of who I could become if I kept on that path. I was only seven but I got it. I said, ‘Okay. Thank you.’ I made a mental decision that I was not going to be obnoxious, spoiled, haughty, or demanding. I am very critical and demanding, but primarily of myself. I’m a perfectionist in many areas, but I wasn’t going to be spoiled or materialistic. I didn’t choose that path, even though there was plenty of wealth.”

Any free time for the family was filled with weekend ski trips to Vermont’s Bromley Mountain and the private Windham Mountain Club in the northern Catskills. Kay became an accomplished skier and also tapped into her parents’ love of tennis. Their pristine home court featured a special soft surface, and the sport became a way for Kay and her dad to spend time together.

“I would often get up with him very early—even in pajamas sometimes—and we’d play tennis before he’d go to the hospital.”

She also joined in the Thursday afternoon “doctors’ game” of tennis that her father hosted for fellow physicians. By the time she was twelve, Kay was training at the prestigious Port Washington Tennis Academy in Long Island with the likes of John McEnroe and Mary Carillo.

“Whenever I’d see Mary she’d say, ‘Hey, Kay, what do you say?’ She has a great sense of humor. John didn’t have the best tennis etiquette. He’d throw his racquet, and you’d see it sailing through the air and then landing one inch from your head. That’s who he was back then.”

Kay was so skilled by the time she entered high school in 1974 that she opted out of the girls’ tennis team and played on the more competitive boys’ team for four years, serving in her senior year as team captain. She also traveled to Europe during high school to play in competitive tennis tournaments hosted by the US State Department.

When it came time to choose a college, Kay says she and her parents focused on academics and never considered that she would continue playing tennis. But following an interview in the admissions office at Rice University, Kay decided to walk over to the tennis courts. She had a chance meeting with the men’s tennis coach, and when Kay told him she held a top-ten ranking in the United States Tennis Association Eastern Section, he asked her if she’d consider a full tennis scholarship to Rice. Title IX legislation that offered increased athletic opportunities for women prompted universities like Rice to reexamine their athletics programs. The men’s coach told Kay they were hiring a new women’s coach and that she could be the team’s number one player and provide a solid foundation for the building of a competitive program. Kay accepted the offer.

In August 1978, she was off to Rice University in Houston, her first foray into the world beyond her worry-free childhood. Reality hit even before she left home.

“It was the night before college and I had never done my own laundry. I realized,
Oh my gosh! How the heck am I going to manage?
”

She asked the housekeeper who handled the laundry for guidance.

“That night, I did my first load of laundry; she showed me how to sew on a button, how to repair a basic tear. I didn’t know how to cook anything either. It was so embarrassing; I didn’t know how to boil an egg, I didn’t even know how to make oatmeal,” she admits. “I could put cereal in a bowl and pour milk on it and I could make toast, but that was about it.”

College for Kay was invigorating and, as a student athlete, extremely busy. The mental and physical demands were constant.

“When I took finals at Rice, a lot of them I took on the road in a hotel room. I would say to my teammates, ‘I’m going to be doing my sociology final starting now, so please don’t bother me for two hours.’ I’d sign the honor code at the beginning:
Here’s when I started. Here’s when I ended
.
I have neither given nor received aid on this exam
. That’s what you do as an athlete. You’re very visible, too. Everyone watches your matches. There was pressure as the number one player. I felt responsible to help Rice build a team, so I needed to win my matches so we could recruit even better players for our team.”

But why work so hard? Kay could have simply lounged in the hammock of her financial net. Instead, she pushed herself, driven by the feeling that she wasn’t good enough in her parents’ eyes. Kay says her mom and dad didn’t openly acknowledge that they were proud of her, so she overachieved in an effort to “earn” her parents’ love and respect.

“My mother was so high achieving, and I think she felt that’s just who you are in the world; there’s nothing less than excellence and you must give your all,” Kay explains. “She worked all the time, including while she sat by the pool on weekends. She taught me the value of being productive, to fill your time by always getting things done. Her thought was,
What’s a life worth living unless you do your best?
”