The Rothman Scandal (3 page)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what is in the eye that the beholder beholds? That was the trouble. Alexandra Rothman could never really see herself from those wide, unblinking albuminous tempera eyes. What had Bouché said when she asked him if she really looked like that? “Mirrors lie. My portraits don't.” Alex had never thought of herself as beautiful, had never permitted herself to think of herself as beautiful. The woman who thinks she is beautiful is in deep trouble. The woman who believes she is beautiful is a real danger to herself because she begins to think of herself as God, whereas the man who thinks he's handsome is just a pain in the neck. Oh, yes.

Still, as she looked at the portrait now she decided it was probably an honest one—at least as honest as could be expected from such a romantically inclined artist as Bouché. At least Steven had told her she was beautiful. At least he had admired the portrait, which was why she had hung it here, in the library, his favorite room in the house. At least that was the way I looked to Steven, she thought. At least that was how young I was. And Bouché had not tried to play down her face's flaws. Her nose was long and straight and thin—“aristocratic,” Bouché called it—though Alex herself had always thought it was too long and thin, since it tended to cheat her out of a certain amount of upper lip. Her chin was small and a bit too pointed—“My horrible, pointy chin,” she often muttered to herself when she put on her makeup in front of her mirror.

But the dispassionate observer might have insisted that these were minor imperfections. He had certainly captured her best features—the eyes which were large, widely spaced, and luminous, and of an odd shade that seemed blue-green in some lights and hazel in others—her “tricolor eyes,” the Frenchman had called them—and the thin, delicately arched eyebrows, slightly raised as though she was about to ask a question.

The expression on her face? “Too serious,” some friends had told her, since Alexandra Rothman was famous for her throaty laugh. Others said that she looked haughty, and still others said that she looked sulky, remonstrative—even fierce, feral, almost angry. Her friend Lenny Liebling once told her that her expression was one of not-quite-amused skepticism, as though someone had just told her a story, or offered her a flimsy excuse, that she could not quite believe, or told her an off-color joke that she hadn't found funny. “You look the way you look every time Herb Rothman tells us we should get out there and try to sell more ad pages,” he said.

And not a few people had commented that in this portrait she looked sad. Alex herself said she thought she looked as though she had a lot on her mind, which she certainly did that first year after Joel's birth—a lot on her mind, and very little in her pocketbook.

Still, Bouché had chosen an antique silk chiffon dress by Poiret for her to wear—pale pumpkin-colored, with thin spaghetti straps—borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum's costume collection. He had had to use safety pins at the back of the bodice to make it fit—Poiret must have, designed it for a woman with a more ample figure than Alex's—but what would the museum have said if it had known that its precious dress was being pierced with pins! Alex could still feel the icy pressure of those pins against her skin. Then he had arranged a fichu, of a slightly darker pumpkin shade, over her bare shoulders. The colors, he explained, were subtly planned to draw the beholder's eye upward to the subject's crown of fluffy, feather-cut, reddish-blonde hair with its triangular widow's peak at the hairline, and of course the folds of the fichu fell in other loose, lazy triangles, into the folds of the Poiret as they fell to the floor about her feet.

“I want you to look like a duchess,” he said.

“Ha—the Duchess of Paradise.”

“Paradise?”

“Paradise, Missouri, the town where I was born. We called it Paradise, Misery.”

“Ah,
ma petite zuzu
.…”

He had even suggested a tiara—another triangle—but she had drawn the line at that. “Me—Miss Hick—in a
tiara?
” she had laughed. (“Heek? What is heek?” he wanted to know.)

Studying the portrait now, she wondered whether she should have let him paint in a tiara. Perhaps, seventeen years later, I have earned my little crown, she thought.

But instead she had worn the triple strand of twelve-millimeter pearls that Steven gave her when they became engaged in 1967. She was wearing these tonight, for the pearls had become something of a personal signature for her. In her ears—there on the wall, and here in the room—were the pearl earclips he had given her on their first anniversary. And on the third finger of her left hand, the hand that grazed her cheek in the painting, was the Kashmiri sapphire with its narrow girdle of diamonds, his engagement ring which, of course, she still wore. But there were few other reminders that the wary woman in the portrait, and the triumphant woman of tonight, were the same person.

“Did you love him?” Lulu had asked tonight.

“Do you love him?” Lulu had asked her in 1967, when she first showed her the ring.

“We're quite crazy about each other,” she said.

“But are you truly, deeply in love with him? Or is it just the money and the power that attracts you to him? There's nothing wrong with wanting money and power. I
love
money, and I
love
power, honey, as much as the next one. But that's not the same as falling deeply in love with someone, and remember you heard it here.”

“We know what we're doing, Lulu.”

“Do you? Sometimes you seem so young, honey.”

“I'm twenty-three.”

“Marrying a rich dude isn't always as easy as it sounds. And the Rothmans? They have a reputation for being tough customers, I guess you know that.”

“He's taking me to meet his parents next week.”

Lucille Withers's look was dubious. “I just wish I could make this sound like a love story, Lexy. Do you really know what it's like to be in love?”

“Of course I do! Do you?”

The dark-haired hawk-shaped head inclined slightly, and her smile was wan. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“Then why didn't you ever marry? Why didn't you have children? That's one of the first things we want to do—have children.”

“Children. To feed the dynasty. Bullets.”

“No! Children to raise and love. Didn't you ever want to have children to raise and love?”

Her smile was still wan, and the look on her face was faraway. “I'm like Mr. Chips,” she said at last. “Running this agency, I've had hundreds of children. And all of them girls.”

Later, Alex would wonder whether, perhaps, very discreetly, Lucille Withers was a Lesbian.

Lulu always wanted to talk about love. But no one knew better than Alex, even then, that if you fell too deeply in love, or even very much in love, or even if you fell in love at all, you risked losing all your happiness and peace of mind forever, and was it worth that precious candle? When love ended, you were left with nothing but a tiny splinter of ice in your heart. That was the only way love penetrated the dominion of the heart: when it ended, as a splinter of ice. But it was that icy shard that gave you strength, the ice-cold strength to survive in a business as reef-strewn and treacherous as this one, and in a family such as the House of Rothman. And remember, you heard that here. Alex learned that long ago.

She turned away from the portrait, which was beginning to have a hypnotic effect on her.

Here, right in this room, right on these library shelves, was the truest measure of her accomplishment, her success. Here, in a special section in the center of the book-lined walls, bound in lipstick-red morocco and embossed in gold lettering, were issues of
Mode
since it had become hers and hers alone—seventeen volumes, one volume for each year. That translated into more than two hundred individual issues, and it was impossible not to notice how the volumes grew fatter as the years went by—fatter, more prosperous and healthy, like a growing child. Partly, this was an indication of her advertisers' growing faith in her. But, even more, it was an indication of her readers' growing faith in her magazine, because a magazine's advertising pages—and revenues—do not increase unless readership grows first. But at the same time, a careful balance must be struck between editorial content, which draws the readers, and advertising pages, which make the money. A magazine editor cannot let her book become overwhelmed with advertising, tempting though that notion often is. There is no exact science involved here, no set formula for how to strike that delicate, perfect balance, though each editor may adopt a loose formula of her own. No amount of market research will tell you what makes a magazine appeal to readers. Only an editor's instinct can be counted on to provide that answer, issue by issue.
Taste
and
judgment
are words you often hear used to account for editorial success, but it is more like instinct, hunch, blind guesswork, and a gambler's idiot willingness to take the big plunge and throw all the chips on double-zero. Each new issue of a magazine goes out to face a public firing squad, with its editor saying the hell with the blindfold. Each issue of a magazine is a fragile, perishable vessel, as fragile and perishable as a human life. In those red-bound volumes on Alexandra Rothman's bookshelves were arrayed exactly two hundred and four separate lives. Rather like children, she often thought.

Years ago, in another library—at the house in Tarrytown—there had been a family meeting, a council of war, after Steven died. The mood was electric, tense. His will had just been read, in which he requested—not bequeathed, but requested, since the magazine was not his to bequeath—that Alex be given full editorial control of
Mode
“because she loves it so.”

“What the hell makes you think you can run a magazine?” Ho Rothman, Steven's grandfather, the family patriarch and the head of everything, had asked her.

“Because I've been helping Steven run it for the last six years, in case you haven't noticed!”

“What's in it for us? The sheet's a loser. We're not in this business for charity, you know.”

“I'm going to make it a winner.”

“How? Tell me how.”

“By doing more of what I've already started doing. By turning it into a magazine that isn't just about what women
wear
—but about what women
think
, or what they should be thinking. And about what women do, or could be doing!” She had never spoken to the great Ho Rothman so sharply before.

He stared at her, unblinking. Ho Rothman was a small man, but in that brocaded, high-backed antique Spanish chair that served him almost as a throne, he looked enormous, all the Rothman millions and the power that went with them contained compactly in that small frame in the big chair. Then he shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Hell, I suppose any damn fool can run a silly little fashion sheet like
Mode
,” he said.

“But I'll show you I'm not any damn fool, and
Mode
isn't going to be a silly little fashion sheet,” she shot back at him.

He pointed a skinny finger at her. “Tell you what I'll do,” he said. “I'll give you a year. No, I take that back. You just heard Ho Rothman take something back. I'll give you
six months
. If the
meshugge
sheet isn't showing me black ink in six months' time, out you go and you don't come back.”

“It's a deal, Ho!”

“Don't do it, Pop,” Herbert Rothman, Steven's father, cried. “She'll fail! She'll fail!”

“Shut up, Herbert,” the old man said. “I've made my decision.”

Later, in an upstairs hallway, Herb Rothman accosted her, seizing her by the front of her blouse. “You humiliated me,” he said. “You humiliated me in front of my wife, in front of my brother, in front of my entire family. You knew I'd promised the magazine to Mona Potter. You've humiliated me in front of Mona. I'll never forgive you for this, Alex. You'll fail. I'm going to watch you fail. I'm going to see to it that you fail. You've humiliated me once too often, Alex.”

She pushed his hand roughly away.
“Don't touch me!”
she said. That night she packed and moved back into the New York apartment, even though she knew she would be confronted by Steven's ghost there, at every turn, in every room, and never spent another night under her in-laws' roof again.

But, you see, I didn't fail, she told herself now. I didn't fail, did I, Herbert. In fact, I succeeded beyond everybody's wildest dreams.

It didn't take six months for the black ink to begin to appear. It took only four, and from that point onward, Ho Rothman was her ally, her mainstay in the company, her trump card in this disputatious family. In any equation within the company, or within the family—and of course the company and the family were one and the same—the Ho Factor tipped the scales her way, balanced the solution in her favor. At least when it came to editing
Mode
.

She turned once more to the portrait above the mantel. Yes, she thought, Lulu was quite right. You
have
come a long way, baby. A mighty distance separated that frightened young woman on the wall, who knew from the beginning that she was facing an uphill battle in the company, doomed to fight her late husband's father every step of the way, and the woman of forty-six tonight who was celebrating her magazine's biggest milestone yet. You can never touch me now, Herb Rothman, she whispered to herself. You can never threaten to hurt me again. Our long and bitter sparring match is over, and look who's in the winner's corner. Me. She lifted her champagne glass in a little toast to the woman in the oval frame. “Here's to me,” she said aloud, and winked at the young woman with the white poodle.

“Boo!” a man's voice said behind her, and she turned, startled, to see Lenny Liebling standing in the doorway.