Raw Horse Meat Saved Her from a Botched Abortion
The very few times my mother talked about the illegal abortion she experienced, one thing always stuck in my memory: how she was nursed back from near-death by eating raw horse meat.
It’s a horrific small detail in an otherwise completely horrific story.
With all the talk about abortion recently again in the world, I posted a few paragraphs of my mom’s story on Facebook, and received a lot of response asking to know more. Only that week, I received a box full of digitized tapes, photos and videos of our family so I spent the last week listening to my mom, my uncle, my aunts, all telling stories on cassette tapes that I recorded nearly three decades ago. It’s sad, because they are all gone now.
I pieced together as much as I could of this very dark moment in my mom’s history — a story that she never even told my father.
I located the village in France where my mom was sent to the Butcher and his wife to have the procedure. He really was the local butcher — and also the local veterinarian — in a town with only a few hundred houses, as it is today. I won’t name the town, but during that time in the 1950s it was widely known that the Butcher and his wife would have young women visit frequently from Paris and other parts of Europe. And, if they were pregnant on their way in, they were not when they left.
Rosamunde de Mos won a contest in Den Haag for looking like her favorite actress Ingrid Bergman, and her photos appeared in newspapers and magazines. Soft features with auburn hair and a wistful smile, she was a looker, but not as experienced with men as her older half-sister, Lisette, who was also her best friend. Tall and gangly with long skinny legs and glasses, Lisette somehow always attracted more boyfriends than Rose.
“I always loved the English word, ‘floozy’,” Lisette said laughing. “I was a proud floozy in my youth. And Rosje, she was simply naïve.”
Their father, Jan DeMos, wanted the best for his children — the three boys and two girls (whom he knew about) — that he had in Holland with his two past wives. And, during the war, he brought in his latest girlfriend to live with Rose’s mother when their apartment was bombed.
Jan especially wanted the best for his two girls. Lisette’s passion forever pointed toward art, and for Rose he wanted strong academics, and maybe college to become a lawyer. Rose learned five languages, Dutch, English and German were required in school, and because her younger brother Culinares, or “Cu,” moved to France, she learned French, and then Italian because she always fantasized about living there.
“My dream wasn’t to become a career girl, like my father wanted, or an advocate or lawyer, but simply to be a good mother,” Rose recalled. “My goal was that I wanted to marry a rich American to take me away.”
To help her reach her goal, Lisette encouraged her half-sister to get a job at the American Embassy. Quickly, Rose found herself with a lot of boyfriends, but none of them the rich American she had hoped for.
“I was a teenager in the war, and my mother never told me about the facts of life or how to deal with men,” Rose said. “I thought that if a man bought you dinner you had to sleep with him.”
Her boss at the Embassy was a nervous, swarthy American named Iggy, whose parents fled to Ellis Island from Poland after the first World War and gave birth to him in a brownstone they bought in Brooklyn. Iggy was married to an Olympic swimmer medalist from Germany who thought nothing about berating him in front of everyone when she stormed into his accounting office at the Embassy. He hired Rose as one of his secretaries, and he would stand in the middle of the office pointing at his wristwatch as she ran in late to work almost every day, or when she took too much time for lunch.
After half a year, Iggy fired Rose. She heard he transferred out of Holland, and she never said good-bye.
Without many job prospects in Holland, Rose visited her brother in Fontainebleau, about an hour by train from Paris, where he ran a successful café. Cu became “Johnny” because “cul” means “ass” in French, and Johnny wanted to leave as much of his Dutch world behind him as possible. Johnny’s Café became a happening hot spot for the American military personnel in the area.
“I love the Americans, they are always loud, and big, and they like to spend money,” Johnny said. “I taught myself English, I taught myself French, I never learned it in school like my very intelligent sister. I took over this café from a friend who financed it for me, but it quickly became known as Johnny’s place and everyone thought I owned it. I treated everyone like family.”
Rose came to Fontainebleau to meet the girl Johnny planned to marry, Madeleine. She didn’t look it, but she was 16 years older than Johnny, and she lived most of her life in an orphanage run by very strict nuns. She worked at the Grand Café in the hotel next to Johnny’s place and didn’t speak a word of English or Dutch, but Johnny quickly learned French and they fell in love.
Madeleine and Rose seemed uncomfortable with each other at first. Madeleine thought Rose was too smart and world-wise. Rose thought her future sister-in-law was too reserved and religious. But, they soon found out they could have fun together, and they spent many evenings at Johnny’s Café, hobnobbing with the Americans.
Madeleine noticed the sparks that seemed to ignite when Rose spotted Iggy walking into Johnny’s Café. Rose ran up and kissed him awkwardly, and they both said at the same time, “What are you doing here?”
Iggy transferred to Fontainebleau, and Johnny’s Café became a regular place for him to escape to, but he had no idea of Johnny’s connection to his former secretary.
Was he still married? Rose asked him outright.
“Sort of,” was the noncommittal answer. But more than anything, Iggy needed a secretary again, and asked her to work for him.
“Maybe, OK,” Rose said. “But one condition, no more of this!”
She mocked his pose with his arm up, tapping his wristwatch, like he did when she was always late to work.
For a few months, Rose stayed with Madeleine and her brother after they got married. Then, Rose got her own apartment not far from the Chateau of Fontainebleau where she could take picnic lunches and pretend she was royalty and that she owned the whole place.
Iggy got more nervous and sweaty at his new location. He gained some weight, drank more beer, and spoke less of his wife. She didn’t want children. Rose told him that seemed a shame because she thought he would make a great father.
Iggy’s skittishness also came from his demanding boss, the Colonel, who had an obsessively obedient wife and two sons that he trotted out like his own miniature army. The Colonel always found a reason to walk over to Iggy’s office to make him nervous. But, most often of the time it was merely for the Colonel to linger around Rose’s desk, and sometimes slap her bottom while uttering some sort of crude remark.
Iggy’s marriage fell apart. Rose found out when she opened some of his mail and saw divorce papers inside. One night after work, Iggy stopped by Rose’s place to drown his sorrows, and Rose started seeing a more sensitive side to her usually stiff boss.
That sensitive side spilled over when a few months later Iggy found out that his Olympic swimmer wife was found dead in her swimming pool. She apparently fell in while drunk, and drowned. Rose became a comfort for Iggy, but they kept their budding relationship a secret.
Then, Rose started feeling ill. She first noticed it because Madeleine was having the same symptoms of sudden nausea, mood swings, and swollen breasts. Madeleine found out she was pregnant.
“Maybe you are pregnant, too?” Madeleine teased Rose.
No, no, she and Iggy — although they had been seeing a lot of each other — were not sexually intimate, not yet.
Pregnancy seemed impossible.
But then, as weeks rolled on, Madeleine spoke the obvious. “Sister, you are pregnant, just like me. Are you saying that is not with Iggy?”
No, it wasn’t. Actually, Rose could easily pinpoint the weekend that Iggy was out of town, probably dealing with his late wife’s estate. The Colonel had a party that she went to, and he cornered her in a side room.
“No girl should ever have to almost die from an abortion and then be nursed back to health on raw horse meat. Not ever.”
The Colonel coaxed Rose to stay the weekend, because his family was away, and he needed someone to help him clean up the mess. She pushed away his advances, but she felt almost obligated to give in. That weekend started something between them that ended up with her being at his beck-and-call.
When Rose told the Colonel that she was pregnant, he ignored her at first, and said it must be someone else’s responsibility.
A week later, on her desk, she received a bouquet of roses, and inside an envelope was an address to a tiny village south of Fontainebleau with the instructions: “Go here and find the Butcher, all is taken care of, ask Iggy for four days off. Good luck.”
Rose talked to Madeleine, who was shocked that Rose would even consider an abortion. Only about a decade before, a woman in France was guillotined for performing abortions in the north of France. Madeleine, although raised by nuns, eschewed most of the Catholic dogma, but abortion seemed completely out of the question.
Madeleine arranged that Rose could have her child and bring it to the orphanage where she grew up. The nuns were prepared to take her in.
Rose worried that her life was going to change forever. She sneaked in to Iggy’s office and made a long-distance call to her half-sister Lisette.
“That’s silly, of course Madeleine is going to tell you to go to the nuns, she knows no better,” Lisette argued. “You have always wanted a child, why not have one on your own?”
Little did Lisette know, that she would soon be in the same situation, and become a single mother — and it happened a few more times after that.
“My life would change,” Rose said. “I would no longer have a career, I would lose Iggy for sure. I didn’t know what to do.”
Rose wondered how she could live all her life knowing that she abandoned a child at an orphanage. She also lamented about keeping a child of a powerful father who didn’t want her to carry it. She found that the option of ending its life an even more terrible option.
The next morning, Rose confronted the Colonel, saying she couldn’t go to the Butcher. He pulled her inside his office and warned her, “You have to do this, and you have to do it now, soon! I have made all the arrangements. They are waiting for you. You will be back to work, and everything will be fine and we will never talk about this again.”
Rose started sobbing and said, “I can’t.”
“If you don’t then don’t bother coming back to work,” the Colonel threatened. “There will be no job here for you. And Iggy will be gone, too.”
What? The Colonel obviously knew about the blossoming relationship that was going on among his staff, and she worried that he would somehow tell Iggy about it all. She went to her brother, and Johnny passed a hat around the bar to ask for money to send his sister back home to Holland to attend their father’s funeral.
Johnny made up the excuse for the collection, but six months later, Rose’s father really did die. Both Iggy and Johnny again passed the hat around for money for Rose to attend her father’s funeral.
“The last time was a dry run,” Johnny joked with the friends who pitched in previously. Johnny never did attend his father’s funeral.
Without letting anyone know except her brother Johnny, Rose took off for the village, taking the train and bus as far as she could, until she hitchhiked in a hay truck with a young farmer.
“You going to the Butcher?” the young farmer asked. “They’ve been busy lately.”
Rose knocked at the door of the farmhouse and a big burly man answered the door, looked at her and grunted. A hefty woman came up behind him and said, “Oh Rose, the Dutch girl, so glad to see you, finally. Come and sit down. Oh my, are you far along, are you?”
The Butcher’s wife explained that she could have no children, and that she was a product of an unwanted pregnancy and knew what it was like to be brought up by a mother who didn’t know how to care for her children. The husband and wife team helped young women who would be divorced, turned out, beaten, ostracized and condemned if they carried a child to term. Rose thought of them as a team of terrible angels, trying to do good in the worst of circumstances.
After chatting for a while, the Butcher’s wife told Rose to go outside to the garden as they prepared a room. They asked her to drink a half of bottle of ginever, slowly, and some chamomile tea.
“The Colonel should have an account with us!” the Butcher’s wife tried to joke.
“This is not his first time he has sent a girl to you?” Rose asked.
“No, not at all, not at all.”
Rose walked outside and picked some of the delicate poppies and saw a beautiful red horse that she went over to pet. He had a reddish tone like her hair, and he stumbled as he pulled away from her when she approached.
“That’s Danke, he’s gone lame, he will have to be put down,” the Butcher’s wife said.
Rose thought back to a beautiful St. Bernard that her family owned and called “Danke” when they were children in the coastal Dutch town of Scheveningen.
“That was such a beautiful animal, he would hold us back from traffic when we were crossing the street, and then take us across when it was safe,” Rose said. “Danke growled at the German soldiers when they came. We were heartbroken when my father had to get rid of Danke during the war. We just couldn’t feed him anymore.”
The Butcher’s wife forced a big smile and waved to Rose. “Your room is ready, pas de regrets.”
Rose remembers going into a stark room without windows, and looking around at tools and devices that looked old and rusted. Not much was left even in the small villages after the Germans swept through and took most tools and metal after they invaded. She saw the burly Butcher walk in, grunt at her again, and the Butcher’s wife stroked her hair while offering her another swig of alcohol and settling her with pillows on a sofa covered with multiple layers of sheets.
Rose remembers passing out from the pain.
She awoke being forced watery soup and then fed chunks of meat by the Butcher’s wife. She found out she was unconscious for two days, and that she lost a lot of blood.
“You have been brought back to life by eating raw horse meat,” the Butcher’s wife said. “Danke came in handy after all.”
Rose looked out the window into the garden and no longer saw the red horse.
“Some things went wrong, and it may be possible that you will never have children again,” the Butcher’s wife said. “That may be a blessing, it is for some young women.”
Rose only ever wanted to have children. She found the news devastating. She sobbed for days. She also found out that the child she would have had was a boy. She named him “Mark.”
Years later, Madeleine would have a second child and named him Mark, who became one of Rose’s favorite nephews.
“My only purpose in life was to have children, and here I made a decision that almost cost me that,” Rose recalls. “I don’t know if I would ever do it again, but I know it wasn’t an easy decision, and I know it stays with me every day.”
When Rose returned to work, the Colonel barely spoke to her. Months later, he transferred with his family to Texas. Years later, both of his sons were killed in Vietnam.
A year after her visit to the Butcher, Rose married Iggy.
Two years after that, she had a son, Michael, after being told it was practically impossible by many doctors in both Europe and the States. Madeleine told her to pray to St. Jude, the saint of hopeless causes.
And, another two years after that, she had a daughter, Michele, another miracle.
Rose would tell her story to countless friends of hers, and also to her children’s friends, some of them who found themselves making similar decisions. She also told the story to men who think that it’s OK to make decisions about what happens to women and their bodies.
“It is important that you make the decision yourself, and that you have a safe, clean space to have it done, if you have to go through with that tough decision,” Rose said. “No more butchers. No more veterinarians.”
She mused, “I never knew what it meant when they talk about back-alley abortions, but I think this is something like what I went through, isn’t it?”
She sighed, “I hope no girl ever has to go through something like this again. No girl should ever have to almost die from an abortion and then be nursed back to health on raw horse meat. Not ever.”
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