The Rothman Scandal (30 page)

“But that is Joel's destiny. There's nothing he can do about it. That is what Joel Rothman has, always been for.”

“That is not what Joel's
for
. People aren't
for
anything.”

“Which brings me to another point,” he said. “Joel is the only male Rothman heir. The company will one day be his. He must have protection. His life has been threatened. And yet I gather that you have taken it upon yourself to dismiss Lieutenant Otto Forsthoefel this morning.”

“You're damn right I did!”

“Lieutenant Forsthoefel was hired for Joel's protection. He was hired by me. I pay his salary. It is not up to you, Alex, to dismiss one of my salaried employees.”

“Well, I don't care who pays his salary,” she said. “Joel is
my son
. And Otto is not going to follow
my son
around any longer, and he's not hanging around
my house
any longer, and that's that.”

“Well, we'll see,” he said. “But you admit you had no authority to dismiss Lieutenant Forsthoefel. That's the third mistake you've admitted to this afternoon, Alex.” He counted on his fingertips. “First, the objectionable June cover. Second, unauthorized advertising expenditure. Third, unauthorized dismissal of a Rothman corporate employee. You see, that's what worries me. You've been making these mistakes with increasing regularity, one after another. You're losing your grip, Alex.”

That was it, she thought. That did it. There went her pressure valve. Now she could see why his wife no longer spoke to him, though why Pegeen stayed with him she could not imagine, unless it was for the money, which of course it was. If I had let you fuck me years ago, she thought, the way you wanted to, would it have been any different? She started to ask him this, but didn't. If I had had a secret son by you (“I've demonstrated that I can father male heirs, Alex”), would that have satisfied your stupid ego? She started to say this, too, but didn't. Because of course it wouldn't have been any different, it wouldn't have been any different at all. She jumped to her feet. “Now listen to me, you bastard,” she said. “You're not going to get away with this. I have a contract with this company that calls for me to be editor-in-chief of this magazine. It does not call for me to be co-editor-in-chief, or anything else, and my contract has two more years to run, you bastard, and the next thing you hear from me will be from my lawyer, whose name is Henry Coker, you bastard!”

Now he too rose. Like his father's, Herbert Rothman's desk and chair were on a raised platform, and now, from his platform, even this small man towered over her. “You mean you intend to challenge me?” he said in a voice that was more like a snarl.

“You're damn right I do!”

“I warn you! Don't try it!”

“I damn well will try it! You've been busting for this fight for a long time, haven't you, Herbert? Well, now you're going to have it, darlin'!”

“Challenge me, and I'll ruin you, Alex Rothman!”

“You can't ruin me! Even if you fire me, you'll still have to pay me the balance of my contract—plus profit sharing. How will that sit with your IRS boys? How will that sit with your cost-cutting ladyfriend?”

“I'll also see to it that you never work in New York again.”

“Nonsense. There isn't a publisher in town who wouldn't snap me up. In fact, there's one who's trying to already.”

His eyes narrowed. “Tarrytown. What about Tarrytown?” he said.

“What about it? Everybody knows what happened there. Tarrytown was a closed book years ago.”

“There is no statute of limitations on a murder case, Alex. That case could be reopened at any time.”

“But there wasn't any murder. So to hell with your threats!”

“Oh,
wasn't
there?” His eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. “What if there were some new—evidence, Alex?”

“What sort of new evidence?”

“You'll see.”

“Ha! You're bluffing, of course. There is no new evidence. If there were any new evidence, you'd be using it against me right now. I know you, Herb. You've always hated me. You've wanted me out of the magazine from the beginning, and if there'd been any legal way to do it—if there'd been any way you could overrule Ho—you'd have done it long before this. But now that Ho is old and sick, you think you can force me to resign with threats and bluffs and innuendoes, and garbage about new evidence. Well, it ain't gonna work, baby!”

“Watch what you say very carefully, Alex. Remember, this conversation is being recorded.”

“Well, you can turn your damned recorder off, because this conversation is over.” She started toward the door.

“I'm warning you, Alex,” he said. “If you try to challenge me, you'll find yourself back in that miserable little pissant town you came from—what was it called? Paradise, Missouri! You'll find yourself back in Paradise, Missouri, so fast you won't know what the hell hit you! You'll find yourself headed back to Paradise, Missouri, in the back of a Greyhound bus! And without a pot to piss in!”

“And with Joel with me!”

“
Without
Joel! Joel belongs to us!”

“Fuck you!” And she was out the door, resisting the urge to slam it—hard, in his face—as she left.

Except for that last expletive, she was proud of herself—proud, exhilarated, happy even, although her heart was pounding wildly and her mouth was dry, and her hands were shaking and, as the elevator doors closed, she gasped for breath. Look—no tears! Years of frustration with that man, years of trying to remember that he was her husband's father, had been sloughed away, like loose and flaking skin, like unwanted weight, and she felt eighteen years old again—the way she had felt when she was first in love. Oh, wonderful, wonderful! On the fourteenth floor, the
Mode
offices were silent, wonderfully, emptily, peacefully silent, blessedly deserted and hers alone, for nearly all the staff had left for the weekend. Distantly there was the click of a copywriter's typewriter—working on a picture caption, perhaps, or perhaps moonlighting or using his machine to write a great romantic novel of passion and pursuit and heroism and betrayal. Most were gone, except for Gregory, who never left before his boss. Outside the anteroom to her office where Gregory would be waiting were a cleaning lady's squeegee mop and pail—so homey, so normal, with the healing, disinfectant smell of hot suds. She sent a message to her moonlighting copywriter: Put the cleaning lady's mop and pail into your novel as a signal of the basic orderliness of things. Take that simple signal with my blessing, and my love.

The expression on Gregory's too-handsome face was still anxious. Her meetings with the publisher seldom lasted for more than a minute or two. This one had lasted more than half an hour. Yes, Gregory's face was too handsome, handsomer than any young man's face had any right to be. And yet, behind that too-perfect face, behind those double-lashed dark eyes, weren't there deep glimmerings of intelligence and courage and kindness and love that had yet to be—were still waiting to be—expressed? She saw all this as their eyes briefly locked, and she knew he knew exactly what she was feeling then. Dear Gregory. “Oh, Gregory,” she said suddenly, “you're such a nice guy. You really are.”

The dark lashes lowered, and the eyes withdrew.

“If you can still reach him,” she said, “I'll speak to Mr. Rodney McCulloch now.”

She kicked off her shoes and sat down at her desk.

16

In their apartment at the Gainsborough Studios on Central Park South, Lenny Liebling and his old friend Charlie Boxer were preparing for a quiet Friday evening at home. Friday and Saturday nights are not social nights in New York; everyone goes to the country. As a result, weekends are peaceful times in the city, and the peace begins to settle in as the Friday sun begins to set. This hush had already begun to fall as the first lights began to twinkle on in the park below. Charlie, who did most of the cooking, had prepared a ratatouille and that, with a bottle of nouveau Beaujolais, would be their dinner.

Both Charlie and Lenny watched their weight, but Lenny was more successful at it than Charlie was. This, Lenny suspected, was because Charlie snacked from the refrigerator during the day while Lenny was at the office. How else did one account for the steadily diminishing size of the Zabar's cheesecake? How else did one explain the empty peanut butter jars and Ritz cracker boxes in the garbage can? But Lenny had long ago stopped mentioning these matters to his friend. They had reached that point in their relationship where each accepted the other at face value, and where neither expected the other ever to change. Long ago, they had simultaneously made the unspoken discovery that people never really change. What you see is what you get. If psychiatrists admitted this, they would be out of business.

Charlie was a few years younger than Lenny—a few, not many—and Charlie was as short and round and plump as Lenny was tall and angular and elegant.
Cherubic
was a word that was sometimes used to describe Charlie. He was nearly bald—just a few wisps of fine hair brushed across his pink scalp—while Lenny, of course, had that magnificent head of wavy, champagne-colored hair, Danny Kaye hair. They had been called Mutt and Jeff, though naturally never to their faces. They had also been called Jack Sprat and his Wife, with Charlie being the wife. There were also some people who referred to them as the Sunshine Boys.

Charlie had had some money once. An ancient aunt in Boston had left him $200,000, which seemed like a fortune at the time, and so Charlie had never seen the need to work. The money was all gone now, of course, spent on this and that, not very wisely for the most part, and now Lenny supported Charlie—for the most part without rancor or recrimination. After all, to a man who has never worked, the whole idea of work is incomprehensible, and what could Charlie really do? And, also, Lenny had certainly helped Charlie spend the $200,000. Charlie was very skillful at stuffing the centers of pitted olives with cream cheese, and he had prepared a plate of these for their hors d'oeuvres. He popped one of these into his mouth now, as they sipped their wine.

Their apartment in the grand old pre–World War I building was full of comfortable clutter, which was the way they liked it, clutter that had been collected over years of poking about in antique and secondhand stores, here and abroad, and in obscure little pawn shops in unlikely reaches of the city. Nothing in the apartment was really very good, which was perhaps part of its charm, why it all came together in a haphazard, homey sort of way. A Donald Duck cream pitcher held some sprigs of dried baby's-breath, and stood next to some plated-brass candlesticks on a coffee table that also held an antique beaded purse, a threadbare teddy bear wearing a bib, a pair of opera glasses from the Rastro in Madrid, a toast rack from the Portobello Road, an ashtray pinched from the Paris Ritz and another designed to commemorate the coronation, which never came off, of Edward VIII (the Duchess had roared over that), the very first issue of
Flair
(with the hole in its cover), several snuffboxes, a cigar that had been presented to Lenny by Winston Churchill (or so he said), an old Baccarat inkwell that would have been quite nice if it hadn't been badly chipped, a
millefleur
paperweight that was not by Baccarat, a chambered nautilis shell from some Florida beach, a huge and battered-looking door key that Lenny's mother always claimed opened the door of
der alte Heim
, where she had been born in nineteenth-century Germany and, incredibly or not, a great many other objects, precious only to their owners.

In one corner of the apartment next to Bridget's cage sat a parlor grand piano draped in a comfortably motheaten cashmere Paisley shawl that Lenny often claimed “belonged to my great-grandmother, the Archduchess Louisa of Saxe-Coburg.” Actually, he and Charlie had bought it on Second Avenue for fourteen dollars. Lenny often falsified and fancified his family's past. He often spoke of his late mother's “priceless collection of antiques,” but how could the postmistress of Onward, Mississippi, have amassed a priceless antiques collection? He once remarked to Maria Callas, “My late, sainted mother had a pair of emerald earrings almost exactly like the ones you're wearing.” But how could this same postmistress have afforded emeralds? Still, since nobody really believed any of Lenny's stories anyway, it didn't matter whether they were true or not. Charlie Boxer's lineage, meanwhile, was genteel. There had been Boxers in the Boston Social Register. But when, several years ago, the Social Registers of all U.S. cities were combined in one big volume, Charlie's name was inexplicably omitted. Try as he might, Charlie had never been able to get himself reinstated. He could only conclude that he had enemies on the Register's selection committee.

Arranged on top of the shawl, in plated-silver frames that could have stood polishing, were arrayed dozens of autographed photographs of some of Lenny's and Charlie's celebrated friends, many of them, alas, no longer living—Gloria Swanson, Garbo, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Hedy Lamar, Clare Boothe Luce, Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Reagan, Greg and Veronique Peck, Bob and Dolores Hope, Edith Piaf, Bricktop, Duke Ellington, Larry Olivier as Richard III, Helen Hayes, Lily Pons, Barbara Hutton, the Duke and Duchess, Tony Snowdon, Gloria Guinness, Hermione Gingold, Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Oona O'Neill, Monty Clift, Bianca Jagger, and on and on. Nearly all bore affectionate inscriptions to Lenny and Charlie.

On a long Spanish refectory table against the opposite wall was arranged what their friends referred to as The Shrine. It was a shrine to their late friend Adam Amado, and it was a shrine, in a very real sense, to failure, although Lenny and Charlie didn't choose to look at it that way. To them, Adam Amado would always be a great star whose time had never come.