The Secret (3 page)

What happened is difficult to understand. It was difficult for me to understand, and I lived it. The French are different from us. They have their ways.

Under the French law of inheritance, seventy-five percent of the stock in Plescassier would go to the government if Jean Pierre Martin did not father an heir. When his father died, that made the matter absolutely urgent.

Jean Pierre solved his problem in a very direct, very French style. He married Giselle. That I loved her made no great difference. That she loved me made no difference at all. It was business. We would enter into a highly practicable, reasonable arrangement that would satisfy everybody.

It would all be very cozy. She would continue to love me. Jean Pierre would continue to love his boyfriend, Jack. And we would be four good friends.

It was okay if you were French, I suppose. It was not okay with me. We didn’t have a screaming confrontation. I was not so much angry as sad. I left France, settled in the United States, and tried to introduce Plescassier water on the American market—with the difficulties I have already mentioned.

Which is where things stood when the Carlinos funded dear Uncle Harry in buying Plescassier America.

About a month passed after Frank Costello’s comment that he’d have to pass along the word about the Frog fairy, during which time I didn’t think about it much. Then word came from Paul Renard in Paris. Jean Pierre Martin was dead!

The news came in the form of a wire from Turin. It read—

JPM EST MORT. IMPORTANTE! NE VENISSEZ PAS VOUS À FRANCE. J’APPORTEREZ G ET LES ENFANTS À NEW YORK. RESTEZ VOUS LÀ. PAUL.

It meant: Jean Pierre Martin is dead. Important! Do not come to France. I will bring Giselle and the children to New York. Stay there. Paul.

I didn’t see that I had any alternative.

5

LEN

I went from the Lodge School to Amherst, remaining always a dormitory student. I met more than a few guys who didn’t know who their fathers were. I was odd, in that I always knew full well who my father was—indeed, as in the matter of Brad, well enough to use his name as a threat—but I never had the remotest idea what my father did for a living.

I did not press the question. My father was to me too formidable a figure to be questioned. When I had asked my mother, she told me my father was an honest man in an honest business—and when he wanted me to know more, he’d tell me.

My first memory of a home was a brick house in Scarsdale, in Westchester County, some fifteen miles out of New York City. Five of us lived there—father and mother, my half-sister Jacqueline, and half-sister Jeanne. The girls were three and two years older than I was. They were the daughters of Jean Pierre Martin, mother’s first husband. When he died suddenly, not having reached his sixtieth year, my mother and father married, and my birth followed a year or so later.

I was not easy for my mother. She was nearly forty when I was born. The ordeal was so dangerous that she and my father decided I would be their only child.

I remember her as a stunning beauty. Everyone who knew her remembered her as a stunning beauty. In spite of the sudden, tragic death of her first husband, she was a bright, optimistic personality. And a loving mother.

She loved me, and I never doubted it for an instant. But she loved Jacqueline and Jeanne, too. Embraces and caresses were a big part of our lives. People wondered about us, always embracing and kissing one another. I don’t know if that was a French characteristic or just a family characteristic. My father probably would have called it French, since to him “the French they are a funny race.”

He had grown up in a Jewish family in New York City, but their ways of expressing their love were not as exuberant as my mother’s.

My father never spoke much about his parents. They were killed in an automobile accident when he was in high school. He talked a little about his Uncle Harry, who was apparently a cheap little crook who stole everything he could lay hands on, including my father’s modest inheritance.

“One thing I learned from Uncle Harry,” he said more than once. “It’s always better to be the fuck
er
than the fuck
ee.
”

He struggled not to show me more affection than he showed M. Martin’s daughters, but he not could help favoring me. Even with me, though, something was always held in reserve. He was more likely to shake hands than hug, and remains that way to this day. I had to study him for a while before I came to understand that he had loved me as much as my mother did but had a different way of expressing it. I suppose I was in college, or maybe out of college, before I got that straight in my head.

French was my first language. The Martin girls spoke French almost exclusively. They had begun their English studies, but they struggled to say anything more than “No, thank you,” or “Well, maybe a bit more.”

When they were eight and seven, the decision was made to send them back to France for their education. The extended Martin family accepted that with enthusiasm. I have to wonder if the two girls did not leave the States with a sense of relief. I have rarely seen them since.

Mother wanted me to continue to speak French. I worked with her on it. I do speak French.

With only three of us now, my father sold the house in Scarsdale and we moved into an apartment on East Seventy-second Street. The apartment was comfortable. It was, in fact, luxurious.

*   *   *

“Seet down here, Lennie, on the edge of the bed.” She took my hand in hers. “Now your daddy is going to go on with what he was doing. You will see it does not hurt me. It is how your father shows me he loves me.”

When I was old enough, I was enrolled in The Friends School, which was a distinguished secondary school, one of the best in New York, if not
the
best.

I was an urban child. I knew the streets, though they were very different streets from the ones my father had known. There was another lesson I had to learn. When I was at Friends, I didn’t know the meaning of the term “mean streets,” and I never guessed that my father had grown up on them.

My father—Let’s start with this: When the time came to send me to a boarding school, my father adamantly rejected the New England prep schools, though my mother thought they would be good for me. He consented to a boarding school, not to a prep school. Why? He grew up on the streets. To him, preppies were nauseating snobs. I think if he’d had his way absolutely, he would have wanted me to serve an apprenticeship with him and learn life as he had learned it. He had a sense that he knew more of life than one could ever learn in any school.

My mother said
school.
And a good school.

Hey! I don’t speak of my father in the past tense. He’s very much alive. He’s one shrewd, tough son of a …

The more I know of him, the more I respect him.

It’s been my ambition to be a son he can respect.

I wonder if my mother would not have demanded of me a better ambition.

6

I could write memoirs about the people I saw in our apartment in those all-too-few years before I went off to boarding school. They were lessons in life.

To begin with, there was a black guy named Buddy. If he has a last name, I never heard it. His wife was named Ulla, and she was Norwegian.

Buddy may be my father’s best friend. They go back a long way. Buddy’s weapon of choice was a razor, and he taught my father to use one, though I don’t believe my father ever did. Buddy might have done a lot of things with his life, but he chose to stay close to his roots in Harlem, where he was a bookmaker, a numbers book, and so on. He was a skilled player of the main chance who knew the streets as well as any man ever did. He was also smoothly handsome and appealing to women. In certain senses he was my father’s mentor.

I was wholly unable to understand the relationship between my father and Buddy. Two men could hardly have been more different. But something between them drew them close. Some secret I would work to penetrate for a long time.

I remember being introduced to other visitors, the meaning of whose names I would learn later.

“Len, say hello to the Prime Minister.” It was, of course, Frank Costello. In Cosa Nostra he was known as “the prime minister,” meaning he used brains, not muscle and smoothly accomplished what others failed to accomplish. Remembering him later, I was surprised to know that my father had a friend in Frank Costello.

“Len, say hello to the Little Man.” Meyer Lansky, known as “Little Man” and “Chairman of the Board,” was the mob’s banker and strategist. I remember an appealing, even charismatic man who always had time to say a cordial hello to a little boy and sometimes produced a paper bag of candies from his overcoat pocket.

“Len, say hello to Mr. Hoffa.” Costello and Lansky had manners and pretended for a moment to take an interest in a little boy. But even as a child I detected in Jimmy Hoffa a crude bully, a menacing man I hoped I would not meet again.

I knew nothing of these men but those impressions I gathered. It would be years before I identified them and began to wonder what connection they had with my father.

I didn’t worry about it much. I relied on my mother’s assurance that my father was an honest man in an honest business. Her word was all I needed to settle any unease I later felt about my father’s association with these men. And I must say, even now, that not everyone who befriended men like Costello and Lansky were criminals.

When I was nine and home from school for summer vacation, my mother’s family came to visit. Her father was old, fragile, and very French. When he sat down, his suit only reluctantly sat down with him. It was of stiff fabric and seemed to have been built around him like a cardboard box, to pack him in.

He was my grandfather. I have almost no memory of my French grandmother. I do remember my Aunt Therèse, because my father confided in me about her.

“You’re old enough to know this,” he said. “But don’t tell your mother I told you. Therèse, who is your mother’s elder sister, lived with a German officer during the war. She was what we call a collaborator. When the Germans were driven out of Lyon, the people of the
Resistance
stripped her naked, shaved her head, and marched her through the streets—she and half a dozen or so others. And … well, let me tell you for sure, your mother never did anything of the kind and was never treated that way. Your mother had no relationship whatever with any German, of any kind. She did not betray her country. I don’t judge Therèse. But that’s in her history.”

Whenever I looked at Aunt Therèse during the remaining few days the family visited, the image came to my mind of her bald and naked, and that image made my little dick stiffen and stand. Aunt Therèse gave me the first erections I ever had.

I would see Therèse again. One evening over chocolate and cognac she talked to me about her punishment—

“Eet ees
relief,
you must understand. We are afraid they are going to
shoot
us. We are afraid they are going to flog us. In some town, like in Corsica, they streeped girls naked, shaved them, and drove them out of the town, throwing rocks at them as they ran along the road. We feared
zees,
and when all they did was march us through the street and let us go home, we shook and cried because we have
escape
such thing.”

“And how did you live in Lyon after that?” I asked.

“Weeth
scorn.
Weeth some hate. But alive and let to leef in our house.”

“My mother…”

“She has nothing to do with thees. She never deed what I deed. But … she ate the sugar and drank the coffee my
Boche
brought. And so deed my family. I performed a service for zem.”

7

When my father arrived at the Lodge School, I was still in the VIP suite being cosseted as the poor boy who had lost his mother. I was, in fact, a poor boy. I was in shock. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without my mother. She had been my stabilizing influence, and I had loved her deeply.

I loved my father, too. But that had been different. He was a giant figure, to be respected—actually even to be feared—and he had been absent much of the time. When he talked to me, usually it was to give me words of advice, which he expected me to remember. I respected him, but my mother had stood as a buffer between us, and I had to wonder how it would go between us without her.

He had begun to treat me like a man before I was old enough to be treated like a man. He did it because he didn’t know how to deal with a little boy. When he told me about Aunt Therèse, for example, he told me something a boy of nine didn’t need to know.

He had the good sense not to tell me certain other things I definitely didn’t need to know.

He told me a funeral was a burdensome thing, and that my mother had left specific instructions that she was not to have one. He’d had her buried in France according to Jewish custom, though she wasn’t a Jew, so by the time he arrived at Lodge she was in the ground. That was how he operated—decisively, abruptly. He decided I did not need to see my mother’s body—in which he was absolutely right.

He took me to dinner and saw to it that I drank wine. He talked to me about women.

“Do you understand why I loved your mother so very much?” he asked me.

“I loved her, too.”

“Yes, but … the love between a man and woman, a husband and wife … is not the same. How much do you know about what men and women do?”

“I know what they do.”

“I’ll arrange for you to have an experience,” he said. “What you boys do in dorms is not the kind of experience I want you to have. I want you to have the kind of experience your mother and I shared, though for the first time you may have to share it without the love she and I felt for each other.”

“Then is it any good?” I asked him. “If it’s just … physical, is it any good? Have you done it with a woman you didn’t love?”

“Yes. And so will you.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“I don’t want you to imagine that what boys do in dorms in boarding schools is—”