30

Now it is six o’clock on Monday evening, her secretary has left for the night, and Mimi sits alone in her office, reading her grandfather’s diaries. In some ways, as she reads, she recognizes the stern old man she remembers from years ago, but in other ways he emerges as a stranger. For example:

January 7, 1940

Problem with Edwin at his school in Florida. Man named Collier—a whole string of young schoolboys Edwin’s age! Worse than Fagin in Oliver Twist! Why do they not arrest this man Collier? No solid Evidence, they say. Edwin much too young to understand this sort of thing. School has him safely back, will keep an eye on him.

January 18, 1940

Edwin run away from school again! Authorities found him with Collier again. What does this scum of the earth do to keep himself out of prison? Corrupt Florida police, I know. Thank God no publicity. Edwin still a minor, but publicity of this nature could ruin Edwin’s Presidential chances later on. Was Edwin too young to send away to boarding school? Have found new school for him in Massachusetts. Closer to home, away from Collier influences. Damn Collier! If I were there I’d strangle the scum with my bare hands.…

January 23, 1940

Have straightened out Naomi’s problem with Bloomingdale’s. Store satisfied, store security people satisfied. No publicity. Naomi’s Dr. says she only does these things when she finds herself in stressful circumstances. Blames Naomi’s recent sudden marriage, and even more recent sudden divorce. Damn it, if Naomi would just marry a decent husband, and stay married to him, and start giving me grandsons I need to carry on, there wouldn’t be any “stressful circumstances”!

January 26, 1940

More trouble with Edwin at his new school in Mass. Ran away, took bus to Florida. Found with Collier again! Would start legal proceedings against Collier, but what about publicity? Oh, Edwin, what is wrong with you? I begin to despair. Edwin being returned to N.Y. on train tonight. Must find new school for him with greater discipline. School in Mass, doesn’t want him back—disruptive influence. Had words with Flo last night. Blame her for making him a “Mama’s boy.”

Also, beginning in the late 1930s, Mimi has found entries referring to certain shadowy figures, working either within or outside the company, who seemed to have been engaged, without her grandfather’s approval, by his younger brother. In the diaries, these people are semi-cryptically identified as “Leo’s friends,” and the diaries become increasingly peppered with the phrase “GET LEO OUT,” or “LEO MUST GO,” as in the following series of entries over a two-and-a-half-year period:

February 5, 1939

Damned Leo! Had him on the carpet today about friends he is still using to “help” our business. Leo just laughed in my face and said this is all part of the normal cost of doing business. Everybody does it. The fool! These people are nothing but animals, no respect for human life. These friends of his could ruin us if any of this got out. Must begin working out careful plan to get Leo OUT—and his friends.

May 27, 1939

Guess what! Leo came in today to ask for promotion for his son Nate! Wants Nate promoted over Henry, because Nate is a few years older. Told Leo to go to hell. Leo is a schmuck, but Nate is a worse schmuck. Leo said, “Where would you be if I hadn’t added quick-drying chemical to paint?” I said, “Where would you be if I hadn’t figured out a way to sell it? You wanted to throw it all out—schmuck!” Work on ways to get Leo out.

September 12, 1940

Now it’s Alice who’s telling me how to run my business! Damn Alice! She came in to see me today, drunk of course. She tells me all the things I know already about Leo and his friends. Is Henry a fool? He was a fool to tell Alice about any of this, because when Alice is drunk she runs off at the mouth. A woman has no business interfering with her husband’s business. Told her that. A woman has no business coming to her husband’s place of business and demanding this & that. Why doesn’t Alice stay home and take care of her baby? Told her all this. Told her she is nothing but a yenta and a troublemaker. I told Henry when he married her that I saw nothing but trouble ahead with her, and I was right. Told her to get out. Told her I never wanted to lay eyes on her again. Too harsh? Henry didn’t seem to think so when I told him what had happened. Just looked sheepish.… Alice puts him through holy hell, I know.…

October 2, 1940

Started work today on a plan to GET LEO OUT. It must be very careful, very detailed, and foolproof because even though Leo is stupid he can be a tough cookie.…

November 27, 1940

PLAN TO GET LEO OUT

Step 1: Stop office memos coming to him. Let time pass to let it sink in to Leo what is happening.

Step 2: Disconnect all Leo phone lines but one. Ditto about letting time pass. Tell switchboard to direct all his calls to me.

Step 3: Get his office repainted some ugly color while he’s out of it. “Vomit green.” Ditto re time.

Step 4: Remove nameplate from his door. Hide it. Make door of steel so he can’t screw new one on. Ditto re time, but time gets shorter now between Steps.

Step 5: Fire his secretary. Disconnect final phone line same day. Instruct switchboard to say, “Mr. Leopold Myerson is no longer with us.”

Step 6: Have him painted out of “Founders Portrait.”

Start date for plan: January 2, 1941.

Read plan to Flo last night before dinner. She likes it. Added a few touches of her own (nameplate, e.g.).

There follow entries for the dates that each step of the plan was carried out.

January 7, 1941

Took Leo a week to figure out something’s going on, why he’s getting no interoffice memos, he’s so stupid. Now he runs up and down office corridors after mailroom boys, trying to snatch memos from their stacks! Told Flo about this last night. She laughed and laughed.…

March 1, 1941

All Leo’s extra phone lines cut off today. Took him most of the day to realize it. He’s hopping mad! Tried to get in to see me, but Jonesy won’t let him. Using private elevator direct to car to avoid him. Others in the office now realize something’s going on, and they’re getting a big kick out of it because all of them hate Leo, too. I think Henry knows something’s going on, too, though I haven’t told him about my Plan. Henry’s in a much better mood these days, cheerier, more compliant. Think maybe my tough talk with Alice has paid off. Maybe she’s nagging and hen-pecking him less.… Thank God for Henry! I despair of the other one.…

April 4, 1941

Step 3 carried out last night, after hours! Had his office repainted last night, ugliest puke color I could find. For good measure, had his carpet torn up and one large sofa removed, and had Clorox poured into the pots of all his precious plants! It will be fun when they begin to die! Painters still at work when he came in this morning. Leo started screaming like a banshee, yelling, “Who ordered this?” Painters just said, “Company orders, sir,” and went on painting. Now he is running up and down the corridors, screaming and yelling at everybody, making everybody crazy, but everybody really getting a big kick out of what is going on. He keeps trying to get me on the phone or get into my office, but can’t. Ha, ha, ha.

April 9, 1941

Leo wailing and kvetching, “What’s the matter with my plants?” Making his secretary crazy. Hope I can get to Step 5 before she quits on him, he’s making her so crazy.… He runs around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to get in to see me. Not yet!

May 5, 1941

Had his office door replaced with steel one yesterday. “Fire regulations,” he was told. His nameplate “lost” in process. He went out and ordered a new one, and spent an hour this morning trying to hammer his new nameplate onto the steel door, while nails kept bending and Leo cursing and screaming and banging his thumb with hammer. Wish I could have been there to see this! What a schmuck!

May 17, 1941

Had Personnel Dept. give Miss Applegate, his secretary, her walking papers last night. They say she cried a lot, but then she said she was thinking of quitting anyway, he was making her so crazy. Also had his last phone line disconnected. Leo strangely silent today. Not a peep from him all day long. They say he just sits in his office, staring into space. Is he planning something? Or have I finally “broken the camel’s back”? I hope so. Anyway, I think I’ll hold off my final move for a while, and let him settle into this silent state of his before I deliver the “coupé de grace”!

Now, as Mimi turns the pages of the daybook for the year 1941, she encounters an entry that is not an entry at all, but a yellowed clipping from the New York Times, dated June 4, 1941, and affixed to the pages of the diary with dried and crumbling Scotch tape.

HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER KILLS PEDESTRIAN ON FIFTH AVE.

Early afternoon shoppers on Fifth Avenue looked on in horror yesterday as an automobile, ignoring a red light, tore across the intersection of 54th Street, striking a male pedestrian who was crossing the Avenue from west to east and injuring several others. The victim, whose identity is not yet known, was pronounced dead upon arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. While bystanders rushed to the victim’s assistance, the driver of the vehicle, which did not stop at the time of the accident, sped northward and was quickly lost in uptown traffic.

Several other pedestrians received bruises and minor injuries as they rushed, or were pushed, out of the path of the speeding car.

Though there were literally scores of witnesses to the accident, it was difficult for police to get consistent descriptions of either the car or its driver. Most, however, maintained that the automobile was a black Lincoln Zephyr sedan, of the year model 1939 or 1940. Others, however, claimed that the car was dark blue or dark green. There appeared to be a consensus among witnesses that the driver of the car was a young woman between the ages of 25 and 30, wearing a white sailor-type hat. Others claimed to have seen a small child in the front seat beside her.

Several bystanders attempted to note the license number of the car. According to one witness, the license number was KLG-130, while another claimed to remember it as HJG-030. Still others claimed that the automobile was moving too fast to note the license. All agreed that the car bore New York plates.

“What we’re looking for,” said Police Chief Walter O’Malley, “is a dark Lincoln Zephyr sedan, 1939 or 1940 model, with a license plate containing at least one G as its third letter, and one three, and at least one zero. This will narrow our search considerably.”

The accident occurred at approximately 2:45 P.M. yesterday. A four square block area immediately surrounding the scene was cordoned off by police for about one hour to allow access to ambulance and other emergency equipment.

The next day’s entry was a second clipping, from the Times of the following day:

HIT-AND-RUN VICTIM’S IDENTITY LEARNED

The identity of the pedestrian killed on Fifth Avenue Tuesday afternoon by a hit-and-run driver was revealed by police today. He was Larry J. Elkins, 39, of Utica, N.Y. Mr. Elkins, a teacher in the Utica public school system, was vacationing in New York with his wife. Mrs. Elkins, who was not with her husband at the time of the accident, was waiting for him to return from a short shopping errand in the couple’s room at the Gotham Hotel. The Elkinses have two children, aged 13 and 9. Mrs. Elkins returned to Utica with her husband’s body today.

No arrest has yet been made in the case. However, according to Police Chief Walter O’Malley, “We have narrowed this down and have several very strong leads that we’re pursuing. We are confident that an arrest will be made in the very near future.”

The driver of the car that fled the scene of the accident at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street has been described as a young woman in her mid-twenties or early thirties, wearing a white hat and driving a dark (black, dark green, or dark blue, according to various witnesses) 1939 or 1940 model Lincoln Zephyr sedan, with New York license plates.

The entry for the following day was once again in her grandfather’s hand, and his words were especially terse.

June 6, 1941

My suspicions confirmed. Henry came into my office this morning. Told him I will handle everything. Alice leaves for Bar Harbor immediately. Servants there have their instructions. Everything else to be taken care of. Alice! She is Henry’s nemesis, his bane, his curse, his bad penny. Told Henry that. Also told him that this is the last time we will be using his uncle Leo’s friends. For ANYTHING.

What had her grandmother said that night at the dinner table? “She killed a man once, you know. It was all in Adolph’s diary.” With a feeling of despair, Mimi thinks: This was the man she killed, the man Granny meant, not Daddy. Oh, Mother, Mother, she thinks—was that you? The pretty lady in the big white hat? Was the white hat ever a part of her dream? She cannot remember, but this man was the dark shape flying across the windshield of the car, and those screams were perhaps not her mother’s screams but his screams, or the screams of the onlookers standing at the intersection or trying to cross the street. Slowly, all the pieces of the puzzle now are tumbling into place: Why she could never tell her grandparents about her scholarship, why there was never enough money, why her mother and father exchanged those dark, secret looks, why her parents fought all the time, why there was always the hidden threat of tension and misery in the air on 97th Street. Why her mother drank. As Granny Flo said, it was all in Adolph’s diary.

She turns the page to find another clipping from the Times.

5TH AVE. HIT-AND-RUN VEHICLE BELIEVED FOUND

June 8. The automobile involved in the vehicular homicide which occurred on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street Tuesday afternoon has been found, police officials say. The accident, from which car and driver fled the scene, left one man dead and others slightly injured, while creating pandemonium and disrupting midtown traffic for nearly an hour.

The automobile, a black 1940 Lincoln Zephyr sedan, was found abandoned on the street in the docks area at the foot of West 23rd Street. The car matched eyewitnesses’ descriptions of the death vehicle. Its hood and right front fender were deeply dented, police say, and tests showed that spatters of dried blood on the hood and windshield matched the blood type of the victim, Larry J. Elkins, 39, a schoolteacher from Utica, N.Y.

The car bore painted-over license plates with the numbers HLG-031, which also closely correspond with eyewitness accounts. This license number, however, corresponds with no known owner of record in New York State. Under the painted-over plates, police were able to identify the luxury vehicle as one reported stolen from a Brooklyn garage in April of this year. Tests of the car’s interior revealed no fingerprints.

“The fact that the vehicle was stolen hamstrings our investigations somewhat,” Police Chief Walter O’Malley told the Times today. “But we are determined to find the perpetrator of this homicide and are actively pursuing various leads.”

Now Mimi is puzzled. Would her mother have been driving a stolen car with painted-over plates? It makes no sense. The driver must have been an entirely different person. And yet why would her grandfather have devoted so much space and attention to this accident in his diary? She turns the pages slowly now but finds no more reference to the accident in the weeks that follow. Then, under the date of August 9, she finds the following:

Executed final phase of Step 6 today. Summoned Leo to my office. Have refused to see or speak to him since Step 1. Jonesy, all smiles, showed him in (she knows what’s up!). Leo looked thinner, paler. Held out his hand to shake mine, then noticed portrait of “Our Founders,” which has been significantly altered. Portrait now titled “Our Founder.” They say, “I hate to see a grown man cry.” I didn’t. I liked it. Leo blubbered like a baby, said, “How can you treat your own brother this way?” I said, or in words to this effect, “Face it, Leo, you’re through in this company. I have no further use for you. This company has no further use for you. You’ve had it, you’re finished, you’re through, you’re out. Now go back to your office, clean out your desk, get out of here and never come back. I have the goods on you, you know. I know all about your dealings with those friends of yours. It’s all on record, it’s all written down. Now get out.” After he left, Jonesy stepped in and gave me a saucy little wink. She’s kind of cute. Tonight, Flo and I to celebrate with dinner at “21.”

But then, a week later, on August 15, he still seemed to be worried about Leo.

Could Leo sneak back and find these diaries? Too dangerous. Ordered locks changed on all doors—closets, too. Consider ordering wall safe with combination lock to keep these in.

And then, on August 27, she finds another entry that seems to allude to the accident, and to the fact that, even though Leo was now out of the company, her grandfather still feared him and his mysterious friends, and that Leo still wielded some ominous power over the family.

Leo has put 2&2 together re Alice—or thinks he has. Has approached Henry with threat. Wouldn’t dare approach me! Henry in to see me this morning, very frightened. Wrote Henry cheque for $100,000, which is what Leo wants. Worth it, I guess, to shut Leo up. But told Henry this is the end of it. No more where this came from! Besides, Leo has no evidence, only guesswork. Police have closed case. End of this.

There are only one or two other entries of interest.

September 20, 1941

Ordered combination wall safe today. Mosler people here to measure. Delivery: one month.

Then she has come, again, to the final entry of all, the one dated October 10, about her father borrowing money from his mother. But now, as she flips absently through the blank pages, she discovers a loose piece of paper placed between two of these. It is a letter, and she removes it and reads it. It is typed on a letterhead that rings only a faint bell in her memory.

THE KETTERING PLAY SCHOOL

24 East 39th Street

New York 16, N.Y.

Nathan Myerson, Esq. June 20, 1941

I West 72nd Street

New York 23, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Myerson:

Thank you for your interest in the attendance record of your niece, Mireille, at our School. Our records show that little Mireille spent a normal, happy day at School on June 3, and was collected promptly by her mother at 2:30 P.M. to be driven home.

Sincerely,

Edith Kettering

Headmistress

June third, of course, was the date of the accident, which had occurred at 2:45 P.M.

Suddenly Mimi realizes she is not alone in the room, and she looks up, startled.

“Hi, kiddo,” he says.

“How did you get in?” she cries.

“Just walked in off the elevator,” he says. “Nobody’s here but you, but the place is wide open. I guess they were counting on you to lock up the store.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Walking down the street and saw the lights on in your corner office. Figured you might be here, reading the diaries.”

“How very strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“Brad’s girlfriend has been watching our building from across the street, and now you’re watching my office.”

“Not watching, really. Just glanced up and saw lights on. I’m not as bad as our friend Mrs. Robinson, kiddo.”

“Is that her name?”

“Rita Robinson. Just like the song. ‘God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson, heaven holds a place for those who pray, ay-ay-ay.’”

“She’s married, then.”

“Separated. I gather she thinks she can land a bigger fish with Mr. Bradford Moore. Mind if I sit down?” He flops in her sofa without waiting for a reply, kicks off his Gucci loafers, and, lying back, stretches out on the sofa, his stockinged feet up on the arm. He glances at the stack of diaries on her desk. “Well, what did you think? Did you get through all of it?”

“Yes.”

“I warned you that there’d be some unpleasant things there, but you insisted.”

“But I don’t understand it all, Michael. For instance, what was Nate Myerson’s role?”

“Can’t you fit the pieces together, Mimi? Nate was Leo’s son. Both of them, père et fils, were probably pretty bitter about the way your grandfather was treating Leo. But Leo wasn’t the real blackmailer. The real villain of this story was Nate.”

“But what did Nate know?”

“Look,” he says, staring up at the ceiling from his sprawled position on the sofa, “this is what I figure must have happened. Your mother drove a black nineteen forty Lincoln Zephyr in those days, with a license number pretty close to the one those witnesses remembered. She picked you up at your nursery school that day. You were—how old? Three? Would you remember any of this? Probably not.”

“There’s a dream I sometimes have. It involves a car, my mother screaming, a dark shape across the windshield.”

“She picked you up at that school, headed uptown, and had the accident. Maybe she was drunk. Anyway, she left the scene, which is a bad no-no. I figure the first one to put two and two together was your father—with the license plate. And one look at the condition of his car would have told him something bad had happened. Maybe he confronted your mother, and she confessed and begged him to help her. Maybe the police had already called them for questioning. Anyway, your father was pretty scared and went to see his father the following day. The diary says he did.”

“Yes.”

“Your grandfather came to your mother’s rescue, in the only way he knew how: using those people he refers to as ‘Leo’s friends.’ A plan was worked out. Your mother was shipped off to Bar Harbor, where the servants were instructed to say that she’d been there for several days, maybe weeks, and was hundreds of miles away from New York at the time of the accident. Meanwhile, those friends of Leo’s went to work for your grandfather. A new pair of painted-over plates was slapped on the car, taken from a similar Lincoln that had been stolen in Brooklyn. The car was then driven to the West Side and abandoned, for the police to find it.”

“But how did Nate get involved in all of this?”

“I figure the second person to put two and two together was Nate. Nate and Leo then put their little heads together. Both Nate and Leo would have known what kind of car your parents drove, and either one of them, or both of them, could have recognized the license plate. The first one to put the screws on your father was Leo. He got his hundred thousand. But Nate had the foresight to write a letter to your nursery school and got exactly what he wanted: proof that your mother was in New York that day, and in fact had been just a handful of blocks away fifteen minutes before the accident happened. Using that letter, Nate was able to bleed your father for the next twenty years.”

She shivers. “And I was a part of it, too, wasn’t I? I, or at least my nursery school, was part of a scheme to destroy my father. They used me, too. And—oh, my God, I’ve just remembered something else.”

“What’s that?”

“How old was I then? A little over three? And yet I can remember someone—one of Granny’s servants, perhaps, someone who was taking care of me—saying to me, over and over again, ‘If anyone asks you how long you’ve been in Maine, you’re to say, “Mama and I have been here since my birthday party.”’ I remember being made to repeat those words again and again, ‘Mama and I have been here at Granny’s house ever since my birthday party.’ My birthday is May twenty-fourth. It must have been that summer, and it must have been to help her establish—”

“Her alibi.”

“Yes. So I was part of the cover-up, too!”

“So it seems. Did anyone ask you how long you’d been in Maine?”

“I don’t remember. I just remember being made to memorize that line. But if anyone had asked me, I know I’d have said what I was told to say. I was always the sort of little girl who did what she was told. Oh, Michael, this is all so awful.”

“Well, I warned you,” he says.

“But how could Nate go on doing this? It said the case was closed. Isn’t there something called the statute of limitations?”

“There is no statute of limitations in a criminal manslaughter case, Mimi. That case could have been reopened at any time. Nate knew this, and he must have made it very clear to your father.”

“You mean the case could be reopened … even now?”

Still staring at the ceiling, he says, “Even now. Forty-six years later.”

“Oh, God,” she says.

He glances in her direction. “Look,” he says, “I don’t think it’s very likely. The prosecutor’s office would have a hard time rounding up any witnesses after all these years. Most of the original witnesses are probably dead by now, or disappeared. But, technically, it could be reopened—the whole can of worms.”

“My mother could never be put through such a thing. Not at this point, Michael.”

“Meanwhile, Nate or Leo, or the-two of them, got hold of your grandfather’s diaries, with all the other very incriminating stuff in them—the date of your mother’s departure for Bar Harbor, and all. The diaries turned up in Nate’s daughter’s house.”

“How did they get hold of them?”

“That I don’t know. But they obviously got them in the fall of nineteen forty-one. There are lots of ways they could have got them: bribed a security guard, bribed one of the building’s cleaning staff. There are lots of ways to burglarize an office building. Look at Watergate.”

“Has Louise Bernhardt ever read these, do you think?”

“That I don’t know, either. But I do think one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That your father had her father killed.”

“What?”

“Remember that day in nineteen sixty-one—the day we drove to East Orange to see my new house? The day I’d been to see your father at his office, to see if there was some way I could help him save the company? I didn’t tell you the complete truth of what happened in your father’s office that day. He asked me if, through the building trades, I had any contacts with the Mafia. There was a man he wanted killed, he said. The man’s name was Nathan Myerson. Your father was very serious—desperate, in fact. I told him there was nothing I could do to help him. But I think by nineteen sixty-two, when Nate’s body was found in the Saw Mill River, he’d found somebody willing to do it for him.”

“Oh, my God,” she says.

“And then less than one week after Nate was murdered, your father shot himself.”

“Do you think there was a connection?”

“Probably, yes.”

“But why? Oh, it just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it? But still—why? Even if he’d just had that horrible thing done, that desperate thing done, why would he then kill himself? Why would he come home to that empty apartment, lie down in a bathtub, and put a bullet through his head?”

“Who knows how he felt? Guilty conscience, perhaps. His cousin’s blood was on his hands, and maybe he couldn’t live with that. Maybe it was that, and a combination of other pressures. You have to admit he was under a lot of different pressures. Probably only your mother knows the real reasons now.”

“My mother was out of town when it happened. She said she had to get away, to find some peace.”

“Yes, I imagine she’d have been looking for a little peace at that point. At least, when your grandfather was alive, he did what he could to try to help her—even though, as you can tell, his opinion of her wasn’t the highest. When the chips were down, the old man did what he could to help his family. That’s when I began to revise my opinion of him. He wasn’t all bad. He had a side that cared about all of you.”

She is silent for a moment. Then she says, “But a lot of this that you’ve just told me—it’s just conjecture, isn’t it? We don’t really know—”

“Well, this much isn’t conjecture,” he says. “Just to be sure, I had one of my guys go down to the Motor Vehicle Department and look up the old records. In the year nineteen forty-one, a nineteen forty Lincoln Zephyr sedan, color black, was registered in the name of Alice Myerson, Eleven East Sixty-sixth Street. License number: KIG-013—awfully close to the plates the witnesses remembered. So it’s a good shot to guess that the police were close to an arrest before you and she left for Maine. And here’s another thing we found. Later that summer, she registered another Lincoln Zephyr in New York. It had been previously registered in the state of Maine. Your grandfather went to a lot of trouble, and must have spent a lot of money, to save your mother’s skin and cover her tracks. The only thing he hadn’t foreseen was Nate.”

“But that’s not the worst part, is it? The worst part is Mother and Daddy, and what they did to each other. I used to think it was all my grandparents’ fault—that they were to blame for everything, that they destroyed my father and my mother. But now … it’s clear, isn’t it? Mother and Daddy destroyed each other. When I was old enough to know, couldn’t one of them have told me? I might have done something to help. Just sharing what happened with me might have helped them. Now it’s all too late.”

“We turned up one other thing,” he says. “And this may make you feel a little better.” He reaches in his pocket and hands her a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. “It’s from the Utica Gazette, dated October fifteenth, nineteen forty-one.”

She reads:

ANONYMOUS BENEFACTOR REMEMBERS WIDOW, KIDS

Betty Lee Elkins of 37 Oak Street, Utica, received a Postal Money Order in the amount of $50,000 today from an anonymous benefactor in New York City. Mrs. Elkins is the widow of Larry J. Elkins, the popular Utica High School math teacher who was slain June 3 by a hit-and-run driver on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and the mother of the couple’s two children, Mark, 13, and Justin, 9.

In a letter accompanying the gift, the donor said, “I have read of your recent, terrible bereavement, and wish to extend my sympathy. As a parent myself, and aware of the cost of educating children, I have calculated the size of this gift to provide a college education for your two little boys. You, of course, are free to use this money in any way you see fit.” The letter, which bore a Manhattan postmark, was unsigned.

“I’m absolutely overwhelmed,” Mrs. Elkins told the Gazette today. “Everyone in town has been so wonderful—with cards, condolence letters, gifts and flowers. I can’t express my gratitude. But this, coming out of the blue—so unexpected—words simply fail me at this point.”

Mrs. Elkins told the Gazette that she plans to place the funds in a special savings account in her sons’ names, to be used for the purpose requested by her mystery benefactor: their college educations.

“I’m sure that the benefactor was your father,” Michael says, “and the sum matches the amount he borrowed from your grandmother that month. He did what he could to try to make it right.”

“Well,” she says quietly. “What to do now? Destroy all these books, I suppose. I know I can never confront my mother with any of this.”

“Do now?” he says, still stretched on his back on her sofa. “Well, I have one suggestion. First of all, you’ve got an important party to get through on Thursday night. Still want me to come? Because I’m planning to be there. Then, on Friday, we’ll fly to Palm Beach. Don’t start shaking your head, kiddo; listen to me. We’ll fly down on my jet for the weekend. Have you ever been in Palm Beach in September? It’s the best time, absolutely the best. The season hasn’t started yet; we’d have the place to ourselves. You won’t believe how peaceful it is there right now, before the usual zoo arrives after Christmas. That’s what you need right now: peace, and quiet, and nothing to do but slather suntan oil on each other and lie in the sun. I’ll take you sailing on the lake. We can water-ski. Or we can just sit on the terrace and listen to the palm trees rustle and smell the jasmine flowers. You need to get away from all this, Mimi. You’ve had too much shit thrown at you recently. What have you got here? A husband who’s been cheating on you, and you sure as hell don’t think that this is the first time he’s done it, do you? Or that it will be the last time? I’ll tell you one thing, if you’d marry me I’d never cheat on you.”

“Are you suggesting that I divorce Brad and marry you?”

“He’s offered you a divorce, hasn’t he? I want you, Mimi. You see, I have everything in the world I’ve ever wanted—except you. I told you I wanted to be the richest guy in New York, and now people say I am. Who knows? But the one thing I always wanted was you.”

She studies him thoughtfully. “There was a time, years ago, when I was ready to say yes,” she says. “Do you remember that day in East Orange? You hurt me terribly then. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hurt, so rejected, as I did that afternoon. Can you ever expect me to forget that kind of hurt? Every time I look at you, I remember that hurt.”

“It was all different then,” he says. “Everything was against us then—your family, your father’s situation. Now that’s all changed. We’re two different people now. We’re rich. We’re independent. We’re free, and we still love each other. You needed Brad then, and you don’t now. So come to Palm Beach with me, Mimi. Just for a few days. The main thing is, we could get to know each other again—get to know these two new people we now are. That’s the main thing. Letting ourselves feel together again. There’s a lot we can talk about. There are lots of things, secret things, that we share, that no one else knows about. Do you remember how I said I wanted you to have towers—towers, and mosques, and minarets, and waterfalls? Well, my house in Palm Beach has towers, and minarets, and even a waterfall. Come to Palm Beach, and I’ll place you in a fairy tower, and every night I’ll climb up a golden stair to see you.” He smiles. “Or we can even talk a little business, if we feel like it—family business, like Badger’s plan to take your company private again.”

“What?” she cries. “How do you know about that?”

“I’ve said this before, Mimi. New York is a village. People talk.”

“Do you know everything about me?”

“I sort of make it a point to,” he says.

“Now wait a minute,” she says angrily. “Now I see. Now I see what this is all about. You’re planning to use these diaries and that letter against me, aren’t you? You’ve probably got all this Xeroxed! You’d even use my mother, my poor seventy-year-old mother, who’s going through the most difficult period of her entire life right now—use her, to blackmail me, in order to get what you want. That’s it, isn’t it? I should have guessed this all along! Of course! You’d stop at nothing—and to think I was about to say yes, I’d go to Palm Beach with you!”

He sits up, a little wearily, swings his long legs over the side of the sofa, and plants his stockinged feet on the floor. “Oh, Mimi, Mimi,” he says. “Look at what this has done to you. Listen to what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t trust anybody. You’re saying everybody in the world is gunning for you. You can’t go through life like this, Mimi. Everybody in this life has to have somebody he can trust. What’s happened to you, Mimi? What’s happened to the little girl with the broken skate lace? Has this business turned you into some kind of monster?”

She says nothing, but stares at him defiantly from behind her desk.

He pats the seat of the sofa beside him. “Come,” he says. “Come sit beside me for a minute. Let’s see a little of the old Mimi with the polished-silver eyes. The lady executive is done for the day, isn’t she? Come on, Mimi. I won’t hurt you. Come. Come sit by Papa, and let me tell you my plan.”

Reluctantly, she rises and moves to the long sofa and takes a seat a little distance from him. “I’m very tired,” she says.

“Of course you are. But this is better, isn’t it? Maybe I’m a chauvinist, but I can never talk seriously to a woman when there’s a desk between us. Now let me tell you what we’re going to do. There are monsters in those diaries there. There are demons that have got to be exorcised, and there’s only one way to be rid of them. We’re going to destroy those little devils. We’re going to carry those books out of here and place them, one by one, in the incinerator. This building has an incinerator, doesn’t it? Most buildings do. It’s usually in a closet near the elevator bank, and that will be the end of the demons. Exorcism by fire. But first—”

“First?”

“Give me your hand.” She extends her hand. “No, the other one,” he says. “First, we’re going to turn back the clock, back to a time when we didn’t know about the demons. Remember how they used to do it in the movies? The calendar pages flipping backward across the screen, leaves falling, then snow blowing, back to the humble little cottage where it all began.” Slowly, he begins twisting the rings from her ring finger.

“Please don’t,” she says, trying to withdraw her hand.

“Just for a little while,” he says, and gently but firmly he removes the rings—the emerald-cut ruby engagement ring, the ruby-and-diamond wedding band, and the two smaller ruby-and-diamond guard rings—and places them on the coffee table in front of him. “Now you’re naked,” he says. “If I had your real engagement ring, I’d put it on your finger now. Where is it, Mimi?”

“At home … in my jewelry case.”

“Then this will have to do instead,” he says, and he lifts her bare finger to his lips and kisses it. “Oh, my God, Mimi,” he says, “I love you so. I’ve tried so hard to forget you. Nothing works.”

“We mustn’t—” she begins.

“We must.”

“No, no,” she repeats, even as she feels the room around her seem to turn into a kind of sea, and herself caught in an undertow, a warm, dark tide of loneliness and desire. His lips find her mouth now, and then the hollow between her breasts, and his hands move expertly in all the tender, special places. “Michael!” she suddenly cries out because, with no more than that, she has felt the first wild burst of orgasm.

“Oh, my,” he says. “You see? It was meant to be this way from the beginning.” And then, “No, don’t turn out the light yet. First, I want to see all of you, all over. I want to look at all of you. Oh, my, this is going to be so fine … so fine.”

When it is over, he says, “White stars.”

“White … stars. Whave have we done, Michael?”

“Done? Just exactly what we should have been doing all these years, that’s all. Did you see them, too?”

“See them?”

“The white stars flashing? Was it just as wonderful for you as it always was?”

“Mm,” she says drowsily. “Mm.”

“Is that a yes ‘Mm,’ or a no ‘Mm’?”

“Mm,” she says again, and she thinks, wonderful, wonderful. As it always was, as it always will be, always. Her mind and her body were provided with wings, and they were stretched and arched and flying. There. For a moment she was there. But now the wings have begun to fold, and she is here again, back in this room, and her rings are in a little row on the coffee table.

“Let me hear you say it.”

But how can she tell him that it was not the same, not really, because how can anything ever seem as wonderful as it once did? Nothing is ever quite the same, nor is anything ever quite so wonderful, even if one could turn back the clock, after the years have reaped their haphazard harvest. “Brad knows about us,” she says.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“That will make it easier when you tell him you’re leaving him to marry me.”

“Is that what I’m going to do?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Michael—”

“Of course. All the obstacles that stood in our way are gone now.”

“Obstacles …”

“First your grandfather. Then your parents’ problems. Then the man you married. They’re all gone.”

“Brad is … gone?”

“He’s got another ladyfriend, hasn’t he? He has no more claim on you. Now we’re free to do what we’ve always wanted to do. Which is just this.” He is gently stroking her nipples, and, against her thigh, she feels his erection swelling again. “Oh, my, so much catching up to do,” he says, and enters her smoothly and easily again. “Tell me,” he whispers, pushing himself more deeply and with greater urgency into her, “did he ever make you feel this way? Was it ever like this with him? Did he ever make you feel as good as this? Tell me … tell me, Mimi. Tell me what I’ve always wanted to hear you say. Say the words I’ve waited half my life to hear. Tell me you never loved him, Mimi. You never loved him! Let me hear you say it! Say it! Tell me!”

But all at once tears come, and she sobs against the body pressed so insistently against her own. “I can’t,” she sobs. “Please don’t make me say that, Michael! I can’t say that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

Or at least that is what I imagine must have happened that night when he let himself into her office. How else to explain the four jeweled rings that were still on her coffee table the next morning, and her flustered look when she saw them there and hastily scooped them up and replaced them on the third finger of her left hand?

And the guilty look when she glanced at the photographs in the silver frames on her desk: Brad in his Bachrach portrait and Badger in tennis whites, looking as though he had just aced a serve.

That same night, I learned later, Granny Flo Myerson was busy on the telephone. “Alice?” she said to her startled daughter-in-law, who, in the twenty-five years since Henry’s death, had not had a telephone call from Granny Flo more than once a year, on Henry’s birthday, to remind her to decorate Henry’s grave at Salem Fields. “Alice?”

“Yes, Flo. What can I do for you?”

“Alice, I think it’s high time you and I buried the hatchet, and I’ll tell you why. There’s two reasons, and they’ve both got to do with Mimi. We’ve got to stand behind her, Alice, the both of us, and here’s why. That nice Mr. Greenway, you know, he tells me things, and so I know more than meets the eye, even if I happen to be blind. We talk about the stock market. I don’t like the boom that’s going on in the stock market. It doesn’t smell right, and I don’t think it’s going to last. I think there’s going to be a big crash, like ’twenty-nine, and I think it could happen within four or five weeks. That soon. By the middle of October, and Mr. Greenway thinks I might be right. Now the reason why that’s important is that Mimi has this plan. She calls it taking the company private, and I think we should stand behind her. If we stay a public company, we could all be hurt when this crash comes. But if we go private, the way Mimi wants, we’d hardly feel it. We’d be out of the stock market. We’d be off the Big Board, or whatever they call it. But we’ve got to be fast. We’ve got to all vote the way Mimi wants us to, for going private. Mimi doesn’t know it, but I know the names of all the Leo cousins, and I’m going to call them all and tell them the same thing. Mr. Greenway thinks I’m right, and Mr. Greenway ought to know. He works for Fortune, which is all about money and the stock market.

“That’s the first thing I called to tell you. The second is more personal. There’s another man in Mimi’s life. How do I know? Let’s just say I smell another man. Since I’ve lost my eyesight, I can smell things better, and I can also smell situations, not just things. I smell another man in her life right now. In fact, there’s always been another man, but now he’s come back, and he’s sniffing around her again. I can smell this happening right now as I talk to you, it’s as plain as the nose on my face. She’s going to have to make a choice, and you and I are going to have to stand behind her and make sure she makes the right one. After all, she’s your flesh and blood, and she’s mine, too. So we’ve got to put up a united front, and see that she makes the right choice. United we stand, divided we fall—right? So let’s you and I bury the hatchet, Alice, and make sure Mimi chooses right. A family should stick together. What holds a family together is its blood, not flour-and-water paste.…”

Now it is Tuesday morning, and the office is hectic with last-minute details and preparations for Thursday night’s launch party, and everyone, right down to the boys in the mailroom, is feverish with excitement. People dash in and out of Mimi’s office, each person presenting some tiny new crisis.

“Here’s a sample of the roses. Are they the right color?”

“The caterer can’t find wild strawberries. Will you settle for California jumbos?”

“I told the banquet manager you wanted gold bunting on the ceiling! They’re tacking up silver!”

“It’s Liz Taylor’s agent! She has a temperature of a hundred and two!”

“Your grandmother’s on the phone! Line three!”

“My grandmother?” Mimi picks up the phone. “Yes, Granny Flo?” she says.

“Look,” her grandmother says, “you’re probably pretty busy, what with getting ready for your party and all, but this is pretty important, and I thought I ought to talk to you.”

“Yes, Granny.”

“I understand that you and Bradley are having your little difficulties,” she says.

“Why, Granny, whatever gave you that idea?”

“Let’s just say a little bird told me,” Granny Flo says. “And the same little bird told me that Bradger has been cheating on you. That won’t do, Mimi.”

“Granny, right now I have a—”

“Now wait a minute. Hear me out. A woman can’t put up with a husband who cheats on her. I never would have done, and you can’t, either. It’s just too embarrassing to a woman, Mimi, to have a husband who cheats on her. So if you’ll take my advice, Mimi, dump him. Take an old woman’s advice and dump him. Don’t tell me you always trusted him. He couldn’t cheat on you if you didn’t trust him! Dump him is the only thing you can do to save your face. Dump that Bradger, Mimi; he’s just plain no good. He’s certainly not good enough for you, a man who cheats. My Adolph would never have dared to cheat on me, because he knew I’d have dumped him faster than you can shake a stick at if he tried. And he couldn’t afford to have me dump him, because he needed my money. But you don’t need this Bradley’s money, Mimi. So dump him, and go out and look for Mr. Right. And I also have a suggestion for a Mr. Right who’d be just right for you. Remember that Horowitz fellow you were so in love with him? Marry him! He’s never married … and he’s rich! I guess you knew he’s bought my old Palm Beach place, and if he can keep up a place like that, he’s got to be rich! Why not marry him? He’d snap you up in a second, I bet. Besides, I think he’s awfully cute-looking—those dimples and that smile. At least, I used to think he was cute-looking when I still had my eyesight, and he can’t have changed that much. So dump that cheating Bradley and snap up Horowitz. He’s the best around, Mimi, and you deserve the best. That Horowitz—why, he’s like champagne! Why should you settle for vin ordinaire, like that cheat Bradger? Well, at least I’ve given you something to think about, haven’t I?”

“Why, Flo, I’m actually shocked at you,” Rose Perlman says when Granny Flo reports this conversation to her friend. “Telling Mimi to dump that nice husband of hers they say is being considered to run for Senator Miller’s unexpired term! Yes, I’m shocked at you!”

“And I’m shocked at you, Rose,” Granny Flo says. “You—with a high school education, and all that! Didn’t they ever teach you anything about human nature? What I’m talking about is human nature. Don’t you know what happens when a woman tells another woman what to do? Especially a woman like me telling a woman like Mimi what to do? Nine times out of ten, she’ll do just the opposite of what she’s told to do. That’s just human nature,”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” Rose Perlman says, sounding unconvinced.

“Of course I’m right. Mimi thinks I’m gaga. But there are times when it pays to let people think you’re gaga.”