Bitter Bronx (9 page)

Daddy had made quite a stir on Wall Street when he bet against the dollar and sank all the money of Silk & Silk into deutschmarks. For one or two days he must have owned half the deutschmarks in the world; and then Daddy dumped the whole lot. Marla was notorious after that at her own high school.

She had the SATs of a rocket scientist. Marla picked Columbia, because she couldn't leave her mom all alone. Mother was like a sleepwalker at Saks, and she got high on ice cream sodas every afternoon at Rumpelmayer's. Marla would join her when she could, while Mother wept in a mad fever. Her name was Lollie. She'd been Mortimer's campus sweetheart at Ohio State. Lollie was a Lutheran from Kansas.

“Your mother was willowy.” That's how Mortimer had described her. “No one could keep his eyes off her for very long. She had the longest legs in the world. Lollie was born too late. She should have been with the Ziegfeld Follies. Manhattan overwhelms her. That's what she says.”

Marla did her own bit of penance and sat on one of the stools at Rumpelmayer's. She'd rather have suffered through a whiskey sour, but Marla was only seventeen at the time, surrounded by nurses and nannies with their aristocratic charges and by dowagers who never missed a lunch at Rumpelmayer's. Lollie painted her face white while she was in that pink world, with teddy bears in the window. Mother was still in her thirties, and it was as if she had been fossilized and remained the campus queen—with a white, white face. She shouldn't have married Daddy, a brooder from the Bronx. He'd grown up along the Grand Concourse, among a hoard of Marrano merchants. Had Mother married some king of extracurricular activities at Ohio State, she might have been better off.

And now she was locked into endless lunches and teas at Rumpelmayer's. The waiters knew her, and so did the manager and the concierge at the St. Moritz. She was their local celebrity—Mortimer Silk's wife. But Marla couldn't bear to see Lollie sit in her white mask.

“Mummy,” Marla would say, dizzy from the aroma of Rumpelmayer's dark chocolate. “You can't sit here forever.”

“Why not? I might meet a nice man—a guest at the St. Moritz. An uncomplicated cattle rancher, or someone like that.”

Rumpelmayer's did belong to the St. Moritz, so Mother's mind was intact, even if there was a bit of folly in what she said.

“Mother, you already have a man. And what would a cattle rancher be doing at the St. Moritz?”

“Looking for what's precious . . . like the grazing rights to Central Park. Now scram! I don't need to be plagued by my own daughter.”

“Yes, you do,” Marla said. But she couldn't have a battle royal with her own mother at Rumpelmayer's. She had to let her list all her grievances against Daddy and wait for that brush fire to burn out. And then they'd walk home together along the park.

M
arla graduated summa cum laude and went on to Columbia Law. And after passing her bar exams, she became an in-house lawyer at Silk & Silk. She had no ambition to work anywhere else. “Silks have to serve Silks” was Mortimer's motto. Meanwhile, Marla had married her high school beau, Raphael, who also went to work for the Silks. She had two lovely daughters with Rafe—Candice and Lollie Jr.

Marla realized that Lollie Jr. wasn't a proper name for a girl. Lollie Jr. loved her name. She was as willful and enterprising as Marla, and talked about building empires by the time she was ten.

But Lollie Sr. grew worse and worse. Marla no longer had the time to rescue her from Rumpelmayer's. She and Rafe lived in the very same palace as Daddy, but on a lesser floor. Mother had to have a full-time nurse. She sank into a profound melancholy, and neither Marla nor Lollie Jr. could bring her out. Still, her own decline wasn't as steep as Mortimer's.

Suddenly there were auditors and bloodhounds all over the place, and Silk & Silk was padlocked for a week. Daddy was indicted. You could watch him on the evening news as he was whisked out of his apartment-palace in handcuffs. He could have been an axe murderer in a velvet coat. That's how crazed he looked. The witch right behind him was Marla, who didn't even have a minute to comb her hair. Daddy was arraigned and released on bail. He returned to his castle like some woebegone man. “I'll kill myself,” he told Marla. The government had stool pigeons inside Silk & Silk and witnesses against Mortimer at rival arbitrage houses.

He'd swindled when he had to swindle, had walked a very thin line between what was legal and what was not. And now Daddy faced twenty years at some government facility in Kansas. He would have to sit and groan with other white-collar criminals. His handsome mane was on the cover of the
Post
. He was called “Silk, the Confidence Man.”

Daddy sulked and sat with egg stains on his satin robe. He was fifty-seven and his face was whiter than Lollie's had ever been. One of his hands seemed palsied. He couldn't even navigate his own spoon.

Marla met in secret with a couple of high-priced fixers, known as shadow men in that netherworld of theirs, and she did what a daughter had to do. All the government witnesses “vaporized,” as the shadow men had predicted. The case was dropped. But Daddy had a stroke.

Marla shut down Silk & Silk and sold whatever assets the company had. Her husband left her.

“Marla,” he scribbled in a short note, “you let me dangle in the wind.”

It wasn't as simple as that. She'd kept him in the dark because she didn't want Candice and Lollie Jr. to be the daughters of a jailbird. But Rafe hadn't been wrong. He wasn't a Silk, and she couldn't entrust her father's secrets to him. Rafe ran off with his own secretary, a cousin of Marla's. And she put Mortimer's thirty-room apartment on the market. Marla had to move Mortimer and Lollie into her own fifteen-room affair.

After having rescued her father from a court battle, where all the Silks would have been sullied, Marla was hired as the in-house lawyer at an arbitrage firm almost as grandiose as Silk & Silk had once been. She was thirty-seven now, and she began to paint her face white, like some Egyptian queen.

She couldn't even talk to her own girls, who would Twitter or tweet at the kitchen table and seemed part of some arcane universe where anyone over the age of fifteen had no right to exist. She was lonely. She had love affairs. None of the lawyers or brokers she met made much of an impression. She kept a room at the St. Regis under Mortimer's name, and that's where she had her “twitters and tweets,” as she liked to call her little liaisons.

But Marla had problems at home. Mother was bereft without Rumpelmayer's, which had locked its doors forever, and Daddy wandered around in a tattered robe from his student years, one side of his face disfigured from the stroke.

Once every two or three months, Lollie would get lost in Central Park. It wasn't serious unless she was trapped in the middle of a snowstorm. Mother had her own nurse, but Marla wouldn't trust a paid companion to extricate Lollie from the snow. So she put on her galoshes and fur hat, left her midtown office in the middle of a meeting, and plunged into the park.

Mother didn't have a favorite bridge or tree, and Marla had to travel by instinct. She worried that Mother might fall and lie buried in the snow. But Marla always found her, as if she had some hidden radar. It was silence that was her real accomplice, the silence of the snow; it was as if she could hear the whole planet breathe while she traversed the park.

And there was Mother, sitting on a bench beside Belvedere Castle, with snow in her lap. Whipped by the wind, the huge snowflakes had begun to sting Marla's face.

“It's a pity,” Mother said, playing with her mittens.

“Mummy,” Marla said with a touch of bitterness, “if you keep talking, you'll get snow in your mouth—and I'll have to call an ambulance.”

“It's a pity,” Mother said, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. “If I had Rumpelmayer's, I wouldn't be on a park bench. Rumpelmayer's might have consoled me.”

“Console you for what?”

“For having a daughter who's a whore.”

Marla considered strangling Lollie and leaving her to drift in the snow.

“Constance Bengelman saw you at the King Cole Bar. The barman told her that you have a room at the St. Regis, and that you flirt with every sort of man who wears pants.”

“And suppose I do?”

Marla was bewildered. Did Lollie have her own network of spies? Constance Bengelman must have been one of her former soul mates from Rumpelmayer's. “And suppose I do?”

“Then you're cheap, and I raised a daughter who's a common harlot.”

“But you never raised me—Daddy did. And both of us raised you.”

“That's unfair,” Lollie said. “That's brutal. I'm a Kansas girl . . .”

“Just like Dorothy,” Marla said. “In your favorite film. But I have no Cowardly Lion to lend you.”

Lollie preened on her bench. “You shouldn't make fun of a widow.”

And Marla realized she could never win—Mother knew how to wound with her melancholy.

“Your father's been dead to me for years. Even before his
accident
. I suppose he had his own little chippie at the St. Moritz. I shouldn't have married. My father warned me about becoming a Jewess.”

It was the same old mad tale. “Mother, you've never been inside a synagogue in your life. And neither have I.”

But Marla sensed that shrewdness in her mother's eyes, even behind a shield of snow.

“Didn't your father join Temple Emanu-El?”

“Did he have a choice? Half his clients were members of Emanu-El.”

And Marla heard that purring voice out of the snow.

“Wasn't he going to give you a bas mitzvah . . . and cater it at the Pierre?”

Marla ruffled her nose. “Bas mitzvah? Isn't that where the rabbi cuts your clit?”

Both of them started to giggle among the falling flakes like a couple of schoolgirls. Mother was roaring with energy now, as if someone had stuffed her with celestial chimes. She began to march in the snow. Marla had the devil of a time keeping up with her.

S
he continued to haunt the St. Regis. Marla sat at the King Cole Bar with her glass of pinot noir, right under the Maxfield Parrish; Old King Cole looked like an idiot, surrounded by his own simpletons, his spectacles askew. Marla wondered if the king was half-blind; but the reds and browns in the mural, and the king's gold hat, seemed to warm Marla's bones on winter nights. She wasn't in the mood to rut with a man. And that's when she saw him. He was a few years younger than Marla; he had flecks of gray in his hair and a tiny scar near his mouth that she would have loved to lick. She couldn't even say why that scar had aroused her so. She'd seen him before, not at the St. Regis. He could have been a Yalie, since he was wearing a tie with the college seal
. It was at Silk &
Silk
, that's where she had seen him. He'd worked for Daddy once upon a time.

He sat down next to Marla with all the confidence of King Cole. She liked that.

“I can have you arrested,” she whispered in his ear.

He laughed. That scar near his mouth moved. “Would you handcuff me, Miss Marla?”

“I didn't give you the right to mention my name.”

“Then what should I call you?”

“I forgot to bring my handcuffs,” she hissed with a kind of soft venom. “You're not a Yalie, are you?”

“I went to Fordham,” he said. “But Fordham doesn't leave much of an echo. It wouldn't get me near enough to smell your perfume.”

“But you could have lied.”

“I think you've had enough Yalies in your life. . . . What should I call you?”

“Miss Marla,” she said.

They went up to her room. He was tender with her . . . and brutal, pretending to handcuff himself while he pinned her to the bed. She couldn't stop running her fingers through his scalp. She was the idiot now, Old Queen Cole, who fell in love with some high-class gigolo, because it was love, and nothing less than that.