Bitter Bronx (12 page)

M
arla was caught in a maelstrom and a widening mesh. She dreamt of wolf-dogs in Central Park. Winter came, and she would wander about after every snowfall, sometimes in the midst of a storm. But she didn't neglect her court cases. She had a wolf's silver eyes in court. Lawyers were frightened to sue her firm. Marla would tear witnesses apart, Marla went for the throat. But she wouldn't visit Little Sister again, wouldn't make those excursions across the Henry Hudson Bridge. The Bronx fell out of her dreams.

Then she had a visitor at her office on Lexington Avenue—two visitors. They had come uninvited. But Marla couldn't send her own sister away. Bunny was wearing a coat of Siberian fur. The man with her was in some kind of uniform. Marla had seen him before. He was the gardener at Rhineland Manor.

Marla didn't know how to behave. She'd never had Little Sister in her office, and with a male gardener. She summoned her male secretary from his cubicle and had him fetch cups of coffee and little cakes from the firm's own kitchen. She had Bunny and the gardener sit on the black leather couch beside her own desk. Bunny wouldn't take off her coat.

“Sis,” she said, “we're getting married.”

Marla felt a tug in her throat. This gardener hadn't made much of an impression. His hair wasn't combed. He couldn't even shave correctly. He had the beginnings of a mustache. And he was much younger than the heiress of Rhineland Manor.

“Bunny, aren't you going to introduce me to your fiancé?”

“Sis, meet Roger Blunt. He was one of my tutors.”

Marla shuddered at the sound of that name.
Roger Blunt
. But he had the bluest eyes in all of Manhattan . . . and the Bronx. That was a conniver's color—no, it was the camouflage of a seducer.

“I was hopeless without Roger, Sis, couldn't even have a conversation. He calmed me down, taught me how to converse with other human beings.”

Marla had to be careful around this Roger Blunt. “Bunny,” she said, “gardeners at convalescent homes don't often become tutors.”

Little Sister was growing agitated; that pulse between her eyes reappeared.

“Rog's no gardener. That's temporary. Mrs. Mahler had him sent over from Fordham. He was a divinity student. That's what attracted me. He was close to God.”

Marla couldn't suppress her lawyer's instincts. “Why isn't he a divinity student now?”

She knew she was playing with fire. Roger Blunt didn't have to come here in a gardener's uniform. He wanted to provoke Marla, frighten her even. Little Sister slumped in her seat and began to whimper.

“Bunny,” Marla said, “I . . .”

The gardener's malicious smile cut her off.

“Mrs. Silk,” he said, in his own silken voice. “Bunny's what the staff and the other patients decided to call Irene, to keep her a child. But she's thirty-seven years old. She has the right to be Irene.”

“I'm sorry,” Marla said.

The gardener must have studied up on state law. Little Sister hadn't been written out of Daddy's will. Daddy just wanted to keep her hidden. And so this secret sister stood to inherit half of whatever Marla had inherited. And Roger Blunt pounced on Marla with his blue eyes.

“I dropped out of divinity school. And the home was kind enough to hire me. I'd been a gardener before.”

“Roger,” Marla said, mustering as much silk as she could. “How much will you need?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

Marla laughed to herself. Roger Blunt wasn't even trying to burgle Daddy's will. He just wanted little pieces of Marla's flesh. She had a mad urge to write a check and get rid of him. He'd cash it and run away to some other badland. And Little Sister would mourn him the rest of her life.

“And where will both of you live?”

“In the Bronx. Moving somewhere else would unsettle Irene. She knows every squirrel in Bronx Park. I have a room in the attic. Mrs. Mahler has agreed to let me live there—until we're married.”

“And is the hundred thousand for a wedding party?”

Little Sister started to guffaw. “We had the party, Sis. At Rhineland . . . it would have been a lot less fun
after
the wedding.”

“That money is to pay my bills,” said Roger Blunt. “I owe Fordham a ton.”

Marla tapped a button on her phone: it was a signal to her secretary, who knocked, and entered. “You're wanted in the conference room, Mrs. Silk.”

“Irene, I'll be right back.”

She dialed Mrs. Mahler from another office and was quite severe once the directress came to the phone.

“Mrs. Mahler, what the hell is going on? Are you in the habit of hiring charlatans and gigolos as your gardener?”

There was complete silence, and Marla assumed she had lost the connection. Then Mrs. Mahler's voice broke through that silence.

“He is a charlatan. But Rog brought Bunny back from the dead.”

Marla raged. Her shoulders puffed out. She began plotting strategies to shut the convalescent home.

“Mahler, do we have to bring melodrama to the table? If my sister was so ill, why didn't you inform me?”

“You forget, Mrs. Silk. I'm forbidden to call any member of the family. That was in our covenant with your father. Oh, we did have a doctor from Bronx-Lebanon. He gave her some vitamin B shots. But she still couldn't get out of bed. And then Rog started reading poems to her. He chanted them, really. He'd been her tutor.”

“What kind of poems?” Marla asked, like some special prosecutor.

“I can't remember. I wouldn't listen in. But they were poems you might have in a high school curriculum. Joyce Kilmer and George Pope Morris—you know, ‘Woodman, spare that tree.' She adored poems about trees.”

Marla returned to her office and wrote a check for a hundred thousand dollars. She didn't touch the fiduciary fund from her father's estate. Marla tapped into her own private account. She disliked the smell of victory that seemed to waft right from the gardener's stale clothes. She didn't care. The gardener could go to hell. Little Sister rose up from the couch and kissed Marla on the cheek.

“Now you're looking after me, Sis. Tell me what Uncle Mort said every time he had to leave—
tell me!
”

Marla didn't even have to guess. “Goodnight, Irene.”

S
he'd landed in the middle of a plague. She dreamt of this gardener with his slick blue eyes. None of her lovers could satisfy her now; even when they licked the life out of her, she kept seeing those blue eyes. She was miserable. She thought of hiring her two shadow men, those fixers who had kept Mortimer out of jail after he'd been indicted for tax evasion. These shadow men had managed to scatter all the government's witnesses. But what could they do about Roger Blunt? Little Sister's life seemed to depend on him.

There were no more demands for money, no more visits from the lovebirds.

She thought about visiting them, planned her voyage in the company car, even imagined crossing Spuyten Duyvil Creek on the Henry Hudson, seeing that narrow woodland at the very edge of Inwood Hill Park. But she couldn't seem to manage the trip, consumed as she was by some dread that made her shiver half the night.

Then she got a call from the convalescent home. She sailed across Spuyten Duyvil Creek in the company car, rushed through the gate at Rhineland Manor. Mrs. Mahler met her on the front porch.

“Did that charlatan abscond with the money?” she asked. “Mahler, it doesn't matter. I'll lure him back with an even bigger net. My sister won't have to suffer.”

“My dear,” Mrs. Mahler said, “the problem is much more serious than that. It seems our charlatan already has a wife—and two toddlers. And he's moved with them to Montana, or Delaware. I'm not certain.”

Marla leapt upstairs to her sister's room. She'd never seen Rhineland's inner sanctum. Sister's bedroom was quite small, with very simple furniture, but the rear wall was cluttered with photographs, and Marla was wounded by the sight of them. Her whole damn history was on that wall: snapshots of Sister when she was one and Marla was two; shots of them a few years later, Sister hovering over Marla, like a little giant with a look of rampant rage; shots of Sister with the guardian Daddy had hired for her; shots of Sister in Central Park; but nothing of Sister after that. The rest of the wall was devoted to Marla and Marla's two daughters: Marla in her graduation gown, Marla on a trip to Tunis with her husband, Marla touring Lisbon as she looked for her father's Marrano ancestors, Marla at Silk & Silk, Marla at her new firm—Marla, Marla everywhere. And hidden among this tapestry was an old, tattered picture of Mortimer's Siberian wolf-dog; Princess's face was obscured, but not her white coat and one diamond-pure eye.

Marla couldn't keep from sobbing. She sat down on Sister's bed. Irene had lost her hulking look. Her eyes were full of fever. Her shoulders were as narrow and delicate as a little girl's.

“Irene,” she whispered, “I'll find Roger Blunt. I'll send his wife and two kids to China.”

“I'm sorry I tricked you, Sis. That money was never for us. I knew about Rog's wife. They were in trouble. He didn't have enough to feed his family.”

“Then you weren't in love with the gardener?”

“I was. A little. We kissed and played around. And he sang songs to me.”

“ ‘Goodnight, Irene.' ”

“No,” she said. “That was between Uncle Mort and me.”

“But why did Daddy give you all those pictures to decorate your wall?”

Sister stared at Marla with her fevered eyes. “Because I wanted them. I begged. I had tantrums.”

Marla touched her sister's face for the first time. And she was the one who needed comfort now; she'd been Daddy's accomplice when she should have screamed and screamed and gotten her sister back.

It was Marla's fault. Never mind a phantom wolf-dog. Marla had sucked up all the air around her. Daddy wasn't protecting Marla from Irene. He was preserving Little Sister from Marla's rapaciousness, hiding Sister in their Bronx retreat.

Little Sister started to cough. Marla wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. But something scratched at Marla.

“Sister, why did you pretend not to know me when I came here that first time?”

“I was scared. I kept looking at you and your kids on my wall. I ripped off their shoulders in my dreams.”

“Good,” Marla said. “Then you won't have to rip off their shoulders when you all meet.”

Little Sister laughed. A doctor arrived from Bronx-Lebanon with an ambulance attendant. The doctor wore a turban. He might have been a Sikh. They must have come in a great hurry. They'd forgotten to bring a stretcher. So they carried Little Sister down the stairs in her own camp bed while Marla held her hand.

“I'll stay with you in the hospital, I swear,” Marla shouted into the woodwork. “We'll live in the same room.”

Little Sister coughed and breathed in great little gasps when they arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Sis,” she said, shutting her eyes, “see you in my dreams.”

And Marla whispered “Goodnight, goodnight, Irene,” while the doctor and the attendant carried Little Sister out the door and into the ambulance.

MARLA

1.

L
ollie blinked when Marla brought Little Sister home from Rhineland Manor.

She devoured Irene with a murderous glare. “Who is this stranger?”

“Mother,” Marla said, “be quiet.”

She could handle Lollie—bribe her if she had to—but she was less certain about her own teenage daughters, Candice and Lollie Jr. Could they cope with a
stranger
in the house, an aunt they had never even heard of? There was plenty of space for Irene. The Silks lived in fifteen rooms on Central Park West. Marla had just moved to a larger law firm—Bregman, Bourne, soon to be Bregman, Bourne & Silk.

But Marla needn't have worried about Candice and Lollie Jr.—they adopted Irene, like some pet snake.

“Awesome,” they said. “We have a new aunt.”

Candice and Lollie Jr. bragged about Irene, brought her up to their school in Riverdale, had her pose half-naked in their art classes. Marla knew the girls would tire of Irene, but she could only deal with one crisis at a time. She worked sixteen-hour days at Bregman, Bourne & Silk. Prosecutors in all five boroughs were reluctant to meet Marla in open court—she massacred their most reliable witnesses. Whatever case they built, Marla tore it down. She had the finest investigators in the business, a pair of shadow men who had kept her father out of jail. They had a military background and must have graduated from some super-secret agency.

When they appeared at Bregman, Bourne & Silk, the senior partners shut their doors. There was nothing salacious or shifty about these shadow men. They wore identical suits from Brooks Brothers—charcoal gray with a hint of green—and identical ties. Their shoes were made of Spanish leather. No one knew where they'd come from. They might have been cousins or brothers. Their faces had a slight bluish cast, as if they were once fond of wearing war paint. They were known as Marla's Indians.