SoHo Sins (38 page)

Under my watchful eye, Melissa flourished. Once Angela’s arrest was reported, my art world friends, appalled by the travesty of motherhood, grew immediately sympathetic to Missy, holding the girl in a kind of sacred awe. The fact that she was “brilliant”—the term her tutors invariably used—certainly helped, but it wasn’t the only winning factor.

My ward was utterly gracious. Even Missy’s nannies adored her. Unfailingly polite and obedient to them, she was like a model prisoner currying favor with her indulgent guards. (The same could not be said of Angela, who regarded her life sentence as a license to make each day hell for everyone else—especially her penitentiary mates and her low-wage, undereducated keepers.) The fortunate Melissa, unlike her mother, knew exactly when her freedom would come.

Being the child of a murderer might have caused Missy some problems at the Bradford School. Instead, her familial calamity impressed her classmates and cowed the trustees. After a single emergency meeting, Mrs. Dorfman announced the board’s unanimous decision: “Surely this poor girl cannot be held in any way responsible for the crimes of her mother. The Bradford School will continue to welcome her.”

It was all very uptown and enlightened. Hogan’s much-thumbed Bible may have something rather different to say on that score—the phrase “unto the third and fourth generation” sticks in my mind—but I concede that Old Testament interpretation is not my strong suit. Making large donations to educational institutions, however, is.

New York University concurred with Bradford’s judgment. After Melissa earned her undergraduate degree—attending classes that were never more than a short walk away from the Wooster Street loft—she was swiftly admitted to the school’s Institute of Fine Arts up on 78th and Fifth. I was touched that she chose to study art history at my alma mater. Missy wanted, she said, “to find out how we got where we are culturally.”

“And where are we, anyhow?” I prodded her.

“You should know, Uncle Jack. You live it every day.”

“That’s not the same as understanding it.”

“But you do understand. And so do I.”

“Do you? You know what art is for these days and what it means?”

“Of course. It’s for the rich, and it doesn’t mean anything.” She laughed. “All my teachers are impressed by my insights now. Because you taught me so well when I was young.”

As you can see, my position as godfather and legal guardian is something I take very seriously. Over the years, it has made me attentive, in ways I had never dreamed possible, as Missy slowly evolved from a surrogate daughter to my regular “plus one” at openings and receptions to the indispensable hostess at my Wooster Street parties.

There were a few difficulties along the way, of course. The cyber-economy went bust and the value of O-Tech stock plummeted, costing Andrews and his top executives—the ones who hadn’t already been booted due to the porn distribution scheme—their plush jobs in a shareholders’ coup. But over the years before Melissa turned twenty-one, the company recovered and the Oliver fortune grew again.

Amanda’s family, as Angela had anticipated, did indeed put up a fierce fight to keep the bulk of Philip’s wealth from going to Missy—the daughter of the woman who had murdered their loved one. The Wingates had a superb team of lawyers and a rather compelling case, but not one that could stand up to Bernstein and his associates. The transfer of assets took place on schedule, the same year my lovely ward completed her undergraduate studies.

Melissa hardly seemed to notice. Apparently, it had never occurred to the girl—a sleekly curved young woman by then—that she might not get what she wanted.

I, on the other hand, made quite a fuss over Melissa’s landmark birthday. The two of us had a long, elaborate celebration that evening. Afterwards, I took her to dinner at Daniel and later for drinks—completely legal at last—at a sedate ninth-floor lounge with a glass wall overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park. As we sipped our Armagnac and tried to identify the spot, near the Sherman Monument, where Paul Morse had once photographed her in a school uniform, I asked Melissa how it felt to be a woman finally, and a rich one. She looked at me, then out over the streams of red taillights, the vast rolling park, the tall sentinel buildings lining its edges, guarding the city’s dark heart.

“It feels like justice,” she said.

I suppose we might have feared for Paul’s eventual return, but by then he had already been killed in prison, as Hogan half-foretold. Grown pudgy and considerably less handsome, he bled out in a laundry room corner, still protesting (according to the guards who arrived a few foot-dragging steps too late to aid him) that he had never forced or harmed anyone, child or adult. Meanwhile, Sammy—never the made man he wished to be—resigned himself to serving one long prison sentence after another, without hope of parole.

And just as quietly, for years, I have watched the young men come and go downstairs, even while continuing to visit Missy from time to time myself—the good landlord, the kind uncle. That is the role that has fallen to me, or that I have fallen to. During her college days, when Melissa shared the space with friends—she was always “the girl with the awesome loft, the tech heiress”—we remained regular dinner partners and traveling companions.

Angela, resentful, raged at me in letters from a succession of prisons, each one more high-security than the last. My life with Missy, in this vigilant mother’s view, was an offense against nature. She harangued her daughter, but the girl, even after becoming financially free, ignored the frantic protests and stayed on.

Yet I have paid a price for my minor triumph. Melissa still lives downstairs, but with a young husband these days—a nice, sandy-haired Wall Street junior analyst who has not yet learned how to wear his Brooks Brothers suits. The young couple has been married for two banal years.

When she introduced us, I felt as though I might have seen her spouse somewhere once long ago, in a dark after-hours bar, with his tie flipped back over his shoulder—a young Goldman Sachs bull.

Ever the proper guardian, I gave Missy away at their wedding, leading her down the aisle on my good arm one furiously bright May afternoon at a Presbyterian church on Park Avenue. What else could I do? Marriage is a mistake nearly everyone makes at some point in life. Melissa, too, must take her grueling turn and grow wise.

The ceremony was the kind of civilized ritual that her Aunt Mandy would have approved. As the organ played, Howard received his dream girl like an untarnished prize. Still, he never seems quite comfortable around me—perhaps because, as Melissa said when we first met in the elevator, he feels embarrassed by my needless rent-charity and prefers “to work for a so-called living.”

This prideful Howard, for some reason, seems to distrust me and the whole Wooster Street arrangement. Probably he is wary of any deal that is out of line with the market, and he is prudent to be. SoHo has pitfalls that even the boardrooms of Wall Street can’t match.

Soon enough, I’m sure, this stalwart fellow will haul his bride off to a safe little town on the Metro North line. Yes, the day is inevitably coming for Melissa to think about good schools and top soccer leagues, not for herself this time.

Last fall I noticed a swelling of her midriff, and she said, with a blush, that things would be changing around here very soon. In a few months, I could expect to find a stroller on the landing; maybe I would even learn to change diapers.

When she told me, she pressed against my torso for a kiss, her body momentarily brushing my left arm. Her husband, shifting his weight, stood by with his eyes averted toward the doorjamb.

“The child is quite a surprise,” Howard said. “We hadn’t been planning this yet.”

“I know,” I replied.

Why do we do these things to each other? For all my time spent with Hogan, I still wonder where crime begins. Does it creep upon us through circumstance? Is it purely our own doing? Or does it spring from some inborn evil for which we are, though roundly punished, paradoxically blameless?

No, forget that. The idea of original sin lets us off the hook too easily—as I once let Melissa off.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” she said to me a few days after the joyful announcement, once her Howard had gone off to work one bright September morning.

“It’s fine,” I replied. “Wonderful.”

Missy touched her belly. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.” I looked around at my paintings, my closets, my loft, my elegant home. “I’m very happy. And your mother will be thrilled.”

“I can’t stand this.”

I remained still, devoid of words.

“Can’t you say something, Jack? Can’t you hold me?”

“You’ve got your husband for that now.”

“That’s right, thank God.” She drew back slightly. “And the baby? You don’t even want to know?”

“Would it make any difference?”

“I suppose not,” she said. Then, after a moment, shaking her head: “No, it definitely wouldn’t.”

“So there we are, Missy. All of us where we belong.”

“It’s too sad, really. You know there were times when I truly cared for you over the years. A lot of times.”

“I do know. You mentioned it once or twice, although I was a bit distracted, back in your college days, by the blow jobs.”

“Please, Jack. Don’t. Please.” She drew a long breath. “Not everything is a joke.”

“What is it, then?”

“Can’t you please be real—just this once?”

“I tried reality, Missy. It didn’t work out.”

“Stop, please.”

“Nathalie in her hospital bed was as real as anything gets. How’s that for you?”

Melissa was crying quietly, her face lowered. I wanted to feel something, the way I did a long time ago. Just about anything would have done, I think. Love or jealousy or rage. Anything. But wishes don’t always come true.

When Missy looked up, her face seemed to have broken into a thousand pieces, like a shattered doll’s head.

“I have to leave here,” she said. “All of it—you, SoHo, this sickness.”

“Why?”

Her eyes flashed at me. I had not seen such an expression since that distant day at the Darger show, when I asked her once more about Amanda’s laptop. She said now, standing pregnant in the Wooster Street loft, what she must have thought then: “For Christ’s sake, Jack, don’t be entirely dense.”

But I was. I couldn’t help but be. Then one day, weeks later, when Melissa was in her second trimester, yet another letter came from her mother.

I kept the unopened envelope on my table for a day or two, glancing at the return address when I passed. Melissa, too, ignored it, uninterested. Finally, one night after she left to go downstairs for the evening, I slit the letter open. The message was in black ink on three plain white sheets of paper, scrawled at great speed.

Dear Jack
,

I know you hate me. That scarcely matters now, since I rather hate myself, too—for what I did to Philip and you. What matters is the truth.

Beware of Melissa. This newest game with her—the marriage, the three of you housed together, the duplicity—it just can’t go on. I forbid it. You have to put an end to all this genteel depravity, Jack. If you know what’s bloody good for you.

Some things are just too vile. You can see that, can’t you? Or you will when I tell you.

Melissa is a killer. A murderer—even though she’ll never admit what she’s done. Yes, your dear, sweet little girl.

That day riding home in the car, with the rain falling, she was simply blank. “Mandy is dead now” is all she would say. “Mandy is dead now. I killed her.” It had no meaning to her. It was a statement, not a reality. I couldn’t get her to tell me why. I had to beg the details out of her, over weeks, just to be able to cover up properly.

You probably don’t believe me even now. You heard me confess to everything after the police came. But you knew, you should have known, what was really happening: I was saving my child. I did what I had to do—I lied, I accused myself—to give her a free life. I did it without a second thought, as mothers do. She never thanked me, and she never will. Not Melissa. So much for your “one true and loving heart.”

Can you imagine my own life since then? I’ve had to think of you—the pair of you—all these years. Living in SoHo, steeped in sin and arrogance, while I pace here and scream.

Fortunately there were compensations over the years: Melissa’s progress at school, her boyfriends, her inheritance, her husband.

But now this. This abomination. It’s too much.

That’s why I’m telling you, Jack. Go and look. Missy pried a floorboard loose in her bedroom. She told me once, when she came for one of her rare visits—in a whisper, so the guards couldn’t hear. You know what she hid there? A gift from your friend Hogan: a copy of the security tape, the one from the boutique. The one that shows her leaving the car, going in, coming out with Mandy’s laptop.

I had no idea. I thought she was just picking up the computer for some school project. I sat in the car, double parked, clueless, while she shot her stepmother twice in the head.

Hogan described the whole sequence to me, frame by frame. It was the first thing he did when he took me into Melissa’s room that morning. He had me picture Paul Morse arriving at eleven in the morning and leaving an hour later. Amanda coming out for a brief shopping trip afterwards, returning with a Morgane Le Fay bag.

Then he made me sit on the bed, where I could see all the clutter. He told me to look carefully at every item—Melissa’s clothes, her CDs, her jewelry, her shoes, her brushes and combs, her books. He asked me to imagine her life without them, locked in a prison cell one third the size of her bedroom, my beautiful young daughter with no one to talk to or meet, except dyke thieves and arsonists and killers, all of them strung out on smuggled-in drugs. What would years of that do to my baby?

There was no doubt, he said. With the premeditation, then the attempt to pin the murder on Paul—the prosecutor would be sure to try her as an adult. “If Melissa is not a mental adult, then we’re all minors,” he said. “All lost and dangerous children, every one of us.”