The Rothman Scandal (47 page)

Her seventh-grade classmates tolerated her friendship with Annie Merritt. After all, they had all started school together, and Annie was still considered somehow one of them. But, for some reason, the eighth-graders resented the friendship. The eighth-graders were an arrogant, insolent lot, secure in their superiority and knowledge that they would soon graduate and move on next year to that huge fortress out on the four-lane that was known as Clay County Regional High School.

There were eleven students in the eighth grade that year, four boys and seven girls, and one boy, Dale Smith, was something of a leader. Dale Smith had repeated two grades and so, though he was still in the eighth grade, he was sixteen, bigger and better developed than his male classmates. It was whispered that when Dale Smith took a girl in his arms, she was powerless to resist his resonant sexuality. One afternoon Dale Smith blocked Alex's path on the playground and wanted to know, “How come you always hang around with Annie Moron, smart-ass?”

The other eighth-graders quickly gathered around.

“Yeah, how come?” a girl named Maybelle Klotter demanded.

“Think you're hot stuff, don'tcha?”

“Think you're the bee's knees, don'tcha?”

“Think you're hell on wheels!”

“Fancy clothes!”

“Stuck-up snot!”

“Weirdo!”

“Pinko-Commie!”

“Whore's daughter!”

“Who knocked up Annie Moron, smart-ass?”

“I bet she's not even a girl,” she heard Dale Smith say. “I bet she's a boy. I bet she's got a boy's pee-pee under them stuck-up dresses.”

“Let's hog-pile her!”

Alex knew what this meant, and she tried to run, but Dale Smith was too big and too fast for her. She wore her reddish-brown hair in pigtails in those days, and Dale Smith grabbed her by the pigtails and threw her to the ground. The other children all threw themselves on top of her, while she struggled and screamed.

“Let's find out if she's a girl or not!” she heard Dale Smith say.

“Yeah!”

And she felt her skirts being pulled up by many hands, and her panties being pulled down around her knees.

“Aw, she's a girl,” she heard Maybelle Klotter say disgustedly. “Let 'er go.”

She sometimes wondered what the outcome of this episode might have been if the eighth-grade boys had not been outnumbered by the girls.

That afternoon, when she arrived home bruised and disheveled, and her mother wanted to know what had happened to her, she simply said, “Some big kids picked on me.” After ascertaining that she was not seriously hurt, her mother simply shook her head and said, “Well, what can you expect from these farm people?” And returned to her typewriter.

Later, Alex walked across the field of cut corn to Annie Merritt's house. As they inserted a fold of cotton cloth into the presser-foot of the sewing machine, they said nothing. Annie Merritt knew what had happened on the playground. The whole school knew, except, of course, the teachers. Annie Merritt knew that she had been the cause of it, and Alex could read that knowledge in Annie's eyes. But there was no need to talk about it.

All at once, Annie put her work aside and reached into the drawer of her mother's sewing table. She withdrew an eight-inch-long old-fashioned hatpin and handed it wordlessly to Alex.

Alex knew immediately what she meant. Annie's eloquent eyes said everything. The boy who had got her pregnant was Dale Smith.

The next day she approached him on the playground, the long hatpin in her right hand.

“Get away from me!” he yelled.

“No.” She pressed the hatpin into his chest, just hard enough so that a spot of blood appeared on the front of his white T-shirt. “Don't ever call my friend Annie Moron again,” she said.

“Don't hurt me!” he sobbed. And then, “Help!” But his classmates kept their distance, their eyes downcast, their feet shuffling in the sandy soil, watching without watching, waiting.

She pricked him once more, and a second tiny spot of blood appeared. “Get down on your knees,” she said.

He flung himself to his knees, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. The hatpin was now poised in front of his left eye.

“Raise your right hand,” she said. He obeyed her, and she said, “Now repeat after me. ‘I swear to God—I swear to God that I will never call Annie Merritt Annie Moron again.'”

“I swear to God …” he repeated, and when he had finished she turned and walked away, leaving him kneeling and weeping on the sandy playground.

After that, she was not exactly popular, but then neither was Dale Smith.

A few weeks later, when Annie Merritt's condition could no longer be concealed, the entire Merritt family simply left town, trailing their silver Airstream behind them. They never returned, their farm was sold, and the town adjusted to that situation, too, and Alex never saw her friend again.

But she kept the hatpin.

Always follow a single row. Every whispering row in a cornfield had to end and come out somewhere
.

There were other lessons to be learned in Paradise. There was the terror she had seen in her mother's eyes that muggy afternoon in 1955 when she had been hurried out of Mr. Standish's store without her double chocolate chip ice-cream cone. That terror had appeared in the form of a tall, fair-haired man who suddenly stepped toward them with a concerned, questioning look in his blue eyes. For years afterward, she would periodically dream of this man—the quick step forward, the eyes wide and startled as though he had seen a ghost, the word
Lois
half-formed on his lips.

It was not until a number of years later that she learned that that man had been her real father, and that the man she had always called Father was not her father at all.

That was the real reason why her family had moved to Paradise from Kansas City. She knew then that her mother had always lied to her—lied to her ever since that day in Mr. Standish's store when that fair-haired man had started to approach them, the man her mother had insisted wasn't even there.

“Mr. Henry Coker would like you to call him,” Gregory said when she returned from her lunch with Rodney McCulloch.

“Good,” she said. “See if you can get him now.”

“I had a reasonably pleasant meeting with the Waxman, Holloway attorneys this morning,” he said when she got him on the phone. “I explained that we intend to stick to the letter of your Rothman contract, under which you are
Mode
's editor-in-chief until December thirty-first, nineteen ninety-two, and which makes no mention of shared responsibilities with a co-editor. In fact, the contract specifically rules it out. Your contract states, ‘Alexandra Lane Rothman, and no other person, shall be et cetera, et cetera.' I'm treating the whole thing as though it was an unfortunate misunderstanding on Herbert Rothman's part, and I added that you and I both very much hoped it would not be necessary to institute breach of contract litigation over this matter. I think it's best to proceed politely at this point, and not bring out our big guns until we feel we really need to.”

“I agree,” Alex said.

“They're going to be back in touch with me, and I'll call you as soon as I hear anything. Now, as to the other matters we discussed …”

“Yes.”

“I spoke with our financial department about your assets, and currently your equities, at today's market—stocks and bonds—total about half a million dollars, give or take a couple of thousand. Nice little nest egg, I thought.”

“But not much by Rothman standards, is it?”

“No, but a nice little nest egg, in case you should be thinking about retiring.”

“Which I'm not,” she said.

“Of course not,” he said quickly. “But now there is the rather puzzling matter of the so-called Steven Rothman Trust. The people at Waxman, Holloway agree that such a trust exists. At least they have heard of it. But no one there has actually seen a copy of the trust instrument, so it's hard to know what its provisions are. You see, it's all because of the rather special way Ho Rothman ran his business. So much of his business was in his own head.”

“You think that's where the trust is, too?”

“I just don't know. I'm going to keep working on it. But I did learn who the two trustees are.”

“Oh? Who are they?”

“One is Ho Rothman himself. The other is Steven Rothman's father, Herbert Rothman.”

“I see,” she said. “One is a man nobody can see anymore, and the other is—”

“—the man you may end up suing,” he said. “That does impose some difficulties, Alex.”

She said nothing.

“And lastly,” he said, “I'm afraid I have a bit of bad news for you.”

“There's more?” she said.

“Your apartment at Grade Square. The apartment is owned by the Rothman Communications Company, Inc.”

“
What?
But I've been paying—”

“That was the arrangement entered into by your late husband and the company. The tenant would pay the maintenance. But the actual shares of the cooperative apartment are owned by Rothman Communications. No one ever made that clear to you?”

“No.”

“Most unfortunate,” he said.

“In other words, they could kick me out whenever they feel like it.”

“Well, technically, yes. But of course they wouldn't, unless—”

“Unless they happened to feel like it,” she said.

“Well … yes,” he said.

Now she picked up her private line and called Aunt Lily. “Lily,” she said, “is there any way I could get to see Ho?”

“What? Oh, absolutely not, Alex. He can't see anyone. Doctor's orders. No visitors—no visitors at all. His blood pressure, you see.”

“He's really that sick?”

“Oh, yes. And worse this week, it seems to me, than last. In fact”—and there was a little sob in her voice—“I'm terribly afraid we may be losing him, Alex. He just lies there, a vegetable, almost in a coma. But I know what you're worried about, Alex, so just remember what I told you.
Don't resign
. If Herbie thinks he's going to have to fire you to get rid of you, he won't be able to, because he won't be able to afford that. Not at this point, anyway. And, in the meantime, I'm working on a little plan.…”

Alex replaced the receiver with a small sigh.

24

Vladimir enters from stage left, and sees Natasha cowering on the Récamier loveseat, clutching her rosary. Vladimir holds the letter.

“Vladimir: ‘What does this mean, Natasha?'

“Natasha (visibly shaken): ‘It means that Dmitri and I were lovers!'”

Alex's mother was reading to her father from her play-in-progress, and their voices floated from the living room through Alex's closed bedroom door.

“Vladimir: ‘I forgive you, Natasha. I shall always forgive you. My forgiveness shall be your retribution!'

“Natasha: ‘Nay! My retribution shall be that I shall always love the man I killed!' (Coyly.) ‘Will you still present me to the dowager empress tomorrow?'

“Vladimir: ‘Ods bodkins, it shall be done, Natasha! You have my solemn word upon it!'

“He takes her in his arms, and she smiles mysteriously as the curtain slowly descends.”

After a moment, she heard her mother say, “Well, what do you think? I want to get Katharine Cornell for Natasha. This will be the vehicle that brings her out of retirement.”

“Hmm,” he said at last. “But—‘ods bodkins.' That seems a funny expression for him to use.”

“Nonsense!” she said sharply. “That's the way they talked in the Imperial court.”

“And are you sure that there really
was
a dowager empress at the time of Nicholas and Alexandra? It seems to me—”

“What difference does it make? I need the dowager empress because she's the only one who knows the secret.”

“But if it's supposed to be historical—”

“You know nothing about dramatic values, do you!”

He changed the subject. “Where's
our
Alexandra?”

“How should I know? I've been working in my studio all afternoon.” Her mother had not even heard her come home an hour ago.

“Do you
ever
pay any attention to that child anymore?”

“She's not a child. She's sixteen, and can take care of herself.”

And they were quarreling again.

In the two years since Annie Merritt's departure, a number of things had changed. For one thing, there was no longer a Singer sewing machine available. For another, the family's financial picture appeared to have changed. Things were not going well, she gathered, at her father's accounting firm in the city, and there was no longer any talk of sending her to a fine boarding school in the East, and Alex was now a sophomore at Clay County Regional High School. Her mother no longer tended her perennial borders, which now grew tall with weeds, though her father continued to clip and manicure, edge and cultivate his precious zoysia lawn. Her father complained about her mother's housekeeping. “This place is a mess!” she would hear him roar. “Those dishes in the sink are from Thursday night's supper! And I'm tired of going to sleep in an unmade bed.”

“I've been working on my
play!
” she cried. Everything, their entire future, now seemed to depend on the play. “The thing is, I've got to find an agent. It's hopeless to try to get anything on Broadway without an agent—everybody knows that!”

“What about getting somebody to clean up this pigsty of a house?”

“You know we can't afford a housekeeper! But when my play is produced—and if we can get Cornell—and it's a hit—or what do you think about Helen Hayes? Or is she too short?”

“Look at this table. A week ago, I took the tip of my finger and wrote the date in the dust. Look—it's still here! The date—in the dust!”