“What do you mean by that?” I said.
“We want to present the new Mr. Silas Tarkington as a man of sterling character,” he said. “And that sterling character should also apply to the members of his immediate family. Is there possibly any scandal in your family’s background that could come back to haunt you and your family later on?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Think hard,” he said. “The State of New York wants to present Silas Tarkington as a man whose background is simon-pure. Is your own background also simon-pure? This is highly important, Mrs. Belsky.”
“Well, I suppose no one’s background is simon-pure,” I told him, “but I’ve always tried to be a decent person.” He was making me very nervous.
“No hint of a family scandal?”
“No—unless you count Sol.”
“Silas,” he said. “Sol is Silas now, remember. But this particular scandal involves you, not your brother, Mrs. Belsky.”
“What is it?” I cried. He was really frightening me now.
“The State of New York,” he said, “in implementing this prisoner rehabilitation program, does a very thorough background check on each candidate. Not only on the candidate’s background but on the background of each member of his immediate family. In your case—well, let me put it to you this way. Does the name of Dr. Sidney Weiss mean anything to you?”
“Certainly. The Weisses are old friends of my parents. Dr. Weiss is our dentist.”
“You have bright red hair, Mrs. Belsky,” he said. “Dr. Weiss also has bright red hair. Has there ever been any question of your real paternity? Has it ever occurred to you that you may be Dr. Weiss’s illegitimate daughter, the product of an illicit union between him and your mother? There have been rumors to this effect.”
I knew immediately what he was talking about. In school, my nickname was Carrot Top. I really did have bright red hair in those days. There’s a type of redhead whose hair is dark and lustrous, almost the color of mahogany. But I wasn’t so lucky. My hair was orange, really a carrot color, and I hated that nickname. Dr. Weiss’s hair was the same color as mine, and the other kids used to tease me about it. Kids can be so cruel. They’d say, “Are you sure that when Dr. Weiss told your mother to lie back and relax in his dentist’s chair, all he opened was her mouth?” They’d tease me until I’d cry. If I’m giving you the impression that I had a miserable childhood, it’s true; I did. Naturally, I never told my mother about any of this. And I never told my husband.
“Where did you hear these rumors?” I asked him.
“From former neighbors, people in the neighborhood.” He patted his briefcase. “It’s all in your brother’s file.”
“You keep these sorts of things in his file? Personal things—about me and my mother?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Absolutely,” he said, and he patted his briefcase again. “It’s all a matter of public record, as we say up in Albany. We run a very efficient state, Mrs. Belsky.”
I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t just my own reputation I was worried about. What about my mother’s? My father at least, thank God, was dead at that point. But what about Dr. and Mrs. Weiss—and their children? What would this sort of thing do to them? And there were my own children. How would they feel if they learned that there was even a possibility that their mother was illegitimate? What would this do to their lives? Then there was Leo, and his parents, and his brother and sisters. Those people thought little enough of me as it was! If this suspicion came out, Leo’s entire family could turn against me, and what would this do to our marriage? All of a sudden there were at least a dozen other people whose lives could be torn apart by this story. I thought to myself, Haven’t I caused enough grief and misery in this family already?
I decided to present this to my husband as my decision, not as if I was asking his opinion of it. This took some doing in itself. Needless to say, he was vehemently opposed to the whole idea. “Why are you doing this for that no-good brother of yours?” Leo wanted to know. “He’s never done a damn thing for you!”
“I have my reasons,” I said. “Besides, I feel it’s my duty and obligation to the family to help him out.”
“You’d sacrifice your own children’s future for this bum?” he said.
“I don’t look at it that way, Leo,” I said. “This money came to me from Papa. I feel this is what Papa would have wanted me to do.”
“That’s nonsense,” he said. “Your father had no use for Sol at the end.”
“But if he’d lived to see Sol rehabilitated, he would have,” I said.
“Huh! What makes you think so?”
“I just know Papa would have believed in giving Sol a second chance.”
“Rehabilitated! That’ll be the day!” he said.
“It’s my money, Leo,” I reminded him.
“It’s our money,” he said. “And you’re talking about throwing it out the window!”
“No,” I said. “That money was left to me, free and clear. And Mr. Minskoff said—”
“Who is this guy Minskoff? I want to meet this guy Minskoff. I don’t trust him.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “Mr. Minskoff has promised me nine percent interest on my investment.”
“Nine percent? That’s crazy, Simma! Nothing is paying nine percent interest these days!”
“This is guaranteed by the State of New York. It’s a brand-new program. There’s never been anything like it before.”
“The State of New York? What kind of guarantee is that? If we get a new governor in the next election, and a new legislature comes into Albany, they could throw the whole program out. And then where will you be, Simma? Then what’re you going to do, sue the State of New York? Well you can’t do that. You can’t sue the government of a sovereign state!”
“I’m not talking suing,” I told him. “I’m talking about getting three percent of the shares of stock in the new company.”
“Just do me one favor,” he said to me. “Just show me you’ve still got a head on your shoulders. Ask him for a bigger percentage. Ask him for twelve percent of the shares. Hold out for that. At least hold out for more shares.”
So I reported this part of the conversation to Mr. Minskoff the next day, and he agreed. For my hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar investment, he agreed to give me twelve percent of the shares.
“Are you happy now, Leo?” I asked him.
“Happy? I still think it’s craziness,” he said. “And mark my words, Simma. You’re never going to get a penny back on this so-called investment of yours. You’re just throwing that money out the window.”
Well, after a few years it began to look as though Leo was right. The store opened, it was supposed to be a big success, but none of us were getting any dividends from the stock we’d bought. We had a little family meeting about the situation around my kitchen table in Kew Gardens—my mother, Leo, and me. My mother turned on Leo. “You’re supposed to be this big-shot accountant. Shouldn’t you have taken care of Simma’s money better?”
I looked at him. “Leo,” I said, “would you mind leaving Mama and me alone for a minute? There’s something private I have to ask her.”
Well, Leo looked as though he did mind, but he got up and went out of the kitchen, and a minute or so later I heard him start up the power lawn mower, so I knew he wouldn’t be hearing the conversation between my mother and me.
“What’s up?” my mother asked.
There was no point in beating around the bush. I said, “Mama, is Sidney Weiss my real father?”
Her face went white, and I thought she was going to faint and fall off the chair. And right away I knew the answer.
“What did you say?” she gasped.
“I think you heard me, Mama,” I said.
“Who told you that?” she said.
“Mr. Minskoff. It was in Solly’s file.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and she kept repeating it. “Oh,
my God … oh, my God.…”
It was the strangest feeling, having the rumor confirmed like that. I felt as though a whole half of my life had been stripped away. The father I’d loved wasn’t my father after all. I started to cry. It had been so much better, not knowing.
“Does Leo know?” she asked me.
“No.…”
“Your children—oh, my God, your children! Do they know?”
“No. No one knows, Mama, but you and me.”
“And Mr. Minskoff! If it’s in Solly’s file, the whole State of New York could know by now!”
“All he knows are the rumors,” I sobbed. “That’s why I gave him the money, if he’d promise to take those rumors out of Solly’s file.”
“Rumors.” Now she was crying too.
“Mama,” I said to her, “how could you?”
“Simma,” she said, “I swear to you it only happened once! I know it was wrong. But your father—my Abe—was so busy with the business, and I was so lonely, and one night I just got carried away! I shouldn’t have, but I did. I just got carried away, that was all. I swear to you, Simma, that was the only time—the only time I was ever unfaithful to my husband!”
I stuck my fingers in my ears. “I don’t want to hear any more!” I cried. I could feel one of my allergic migraines coming on.
“Will you ever forgive me, Simma?” she said.
Any emotional stress like that tends to bring on an allergic reaction in me. I’d like to read you a report my psychiatrist sent to my allergist the other day. It will give you some insights into the kind of narrow line I’ve always had to walk in this family.
“Mrs. Belsky’s allergies certainly present a problem in terms of her being able to deal with problems in her family. However, she is not physiologically suffering from allergies per se. Instead, her problem is emotional, the result of a truncated psychosocial development. Being the child of parents who were emotionally preoccupied, if not absent, she saw her mother as involved with bringing profits to the family business and her father as a man who was at best marginally suited to provide emotional support. She was to bypass critical sexual developmental stages, e.g., anal development was relegated to obsessive cleanliness. Patient’s earliest memories involve scenes of her mother boiling her diapers on the kitchen stove. And as for oral gratification, there was never any suckling at breast, unusual at that point in time. Genital stage development was a particularly difficult issue, in that patient’s parents weren’t engaged in any display of affection. From what patient remembers, parents usually related through issues of money, whether Mother was earning sufficient to provide for family, or how well Father was.
“Money matters became the focus of her life. When excessive anxiety about lack of money surfaced, namely arguments between parents, patient’s only recourse was to somatize, since the joys of masturbation, bowel movements, and eating were beyond her grasp. A refuge in physical symptomology was her only outlet.
“Might I add, her marriage is only a further continuation of the repetition compulsion: husband represents the withholding parent who induces guilt readily by declaring a problem in terms of dollars and cents. Wife either capitulates to his whims or suffers an asthma attack. Which is preferable? As you know, ‘getting sick’ is no panacea, but until she is able developmentally to acquiesce to the transference and work through the debilitating effects of parental influences which have bound her to guilt and shame, she has no chance of ridding herself of the physical symptoms.
“The above is the present focus of psychotherapy.”
Isn’t that insightful? I think that tells you more about me than I could ever tell you about myself.
Anyway, for a long time I didn’t think I could ever really forgive my mother for keeping a secret like that from me. But now I don’t see what else she could have done. I was born in 1929. There were no such things as legal abortions then, and the illegal ones were expensive and dangerous. I’ve never asked whether she considered aborting me. I guess I don’t want to know. Anyway, I wasn’t, so what else could she have done? She was married; Sidney Weiss was married. If she’d told the truth, she would certainly have wrecked two homes. And thanks to Rita Fiori, my psychiatrist, I’ve been able to work it out in my own mind, and I can live with it now, though Rita feels that my conflicted feelings on the whole subject are also responsible for my allergies.
So now you’re the fourth person to know the whole truth—Mama, me, Rita, and now you. Sidney and Sylvia Weiss are both dead now, and, as I say, my children are all grown, old enough to live with it if they were told. And Leo? Yes, I think Leo could live with it too; I don’t think it would matter all that much if I were to tell him the whole story. I just never have. Leo wanted to move down here for the fishing and the golf, and those are really the only two things that interest him now, God bless him, not me and my problems.
Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m telling you about the skeleton in my family’s closet for this book you want to write. I’ll tell you why. It’s because I want Leo’s brother and two sisters to know the truth. They’ve never forgiven Leo for marrying me. They talk about my criminal brother. They call me peculiar. They’ve stayed very distant from Leo over the years, and though he never talks about it I know that’s hurt him deeply. They say there had to be something wrong with Leo for marrying me. But there’s nothing wrong with Leo. Leo is a saint. He has a beautiful character, and he’s stuck with me through thick and thin. But there was something wrong with my mother, for all her talk of coming from a better family and a better background. She was unfaithful to her husband, and with a man who was his best friend, and if you think I believe I’m the result of one time when she just got “carried away,” you must think I believe in the tooth fairy. She’s the blot on the escutcheon, not my brother, and I want Leo’s family to know this once and for all. I want them to stop blaming Leo and put the blame where it belongs, on her, for what she did to my father and my brother and the whole family. As Rita says, once you get the blame placed right, the guilt and pain can begin to go away.
But just do me one favor. If you put all this in your story, don’t publish until after Mama dies. She’s an old lady now, and I don’t want her to suffer any more than she has already. She may deserve the blame, but nobody deserves to suffer. But after you’re dead? After you’re dead, you don’t suffer. So will you promise me that? And me? Well, I think I’ve learned to live with who I am. Almost. At least I keep trying. Forgive me.… Do you mind stopping your tape for a minute until I—?
Yes, I’m all right now. Rita says it’s good for me to let out my feelings now and then, not keep everything bottled up inside, the way I tend to do. Sometimes it’s healthy to have a good cry. And you can’t undo the past, can you? You just have to live with it, like a curse.
And now, out of the blue, just the other day comes an offer to buy my Tarkington’s stock—from a man named Albert Martindale of Continental Stores, and guess who’s acting as his agent? None other than Mr. Moses Minskoff! Isn’t that a coincidence? Mr. Minskoff no longer works for New York State. He couldn’t stand the bureaucracy, he says, and—just like Leo predicted, I give Leo full credit—the state’s rehabilitation program that was helping Solly was phased out a couple of years afterward. Anyway, Mr. Minskoff now has his own company, specializing in mergers and acquisitions, and he’s brokering Continental’s buyout of Tarkington’s. Mr. Minskoff says this is going to be the deal of a lifetime for me, and I’ll get all my original investment back plus a good deal more. Leo says I should hold out and see if we can get a better offer than sixty dollars a share. But I haven’t decided what to do. I’m conflicted about that too. I have these feelings of guilt about taking money for shares in my brother’s store now that he’s dead. Rita and I have been trying to work on that in our last couple of sessions. Sometimes, when I feel conflicted like this, I can’t seem to move in any direction, and then I’ll get an asthma attack, or a migraine, or break out in one of these terrible rashes. Why do I fe
el that, if he didn’t want to give me any money while he was living, I shouldn’t accept any money now that he’s dead?
Yes, I was sad when I heard my brother had died. It was kind of an abstract sadness, of course, because it was so long since I’d seen him. And there was guilt, too, thinking that perhaps I should have made more of an effort. I no longer had any mental picture of what he looked like, and that was a terrible feeling.
I knew he’d had two children that I’d never met. I never hear much about the son. But the daughter, Miranda—I see her picture from time to time, in magazines like Vanity Fair and Town & Country. She’s an awfully pretty girl, isn’t she? From her pictures, she seems really movie-star pretty.
Any looks in the family come from my mother’s side. When my mother was young, she was really beautiful. And that’s another thing I’ll never understand. If Mama was going to cheat on her husband, why did she do it with a man like Sidney Weiss, who was just about the ugliest-looking man you’ve ever seen? If she was going to make me a bastard, why did she have to make me an ugly one, with horrible orange hair?
“And so,” Peter Turner says to Miranda, turning off the recorder, “that’s your Aunt Simma. That’s your father’s sister.” They are sitting in her apartment at 11 East 66th Street, and she is curled in a chair, looking pensive, her chin in her hand.
“Goodness,” she says at last, “what an unhappy woman!” Then she jumps to her feet. “I’m going down there to see her!” she says.
24
“Miranda Tarkington!” Simma is saying. “Solly’s little girl! I can’t believe you’re sitting here in this room with me. When you called from New York, saying you wanted to come to Florida to see me, I couldn’t believe my ears.”
“I just felt it was high time you and I met, Aunt Simma,” Miranda says.
“Aunt Simma! That sounds so strange to me. Nobody’s ever called me that before. I’m just Ma to my children and Grandma to my grandchildren. How old are you now, dear?”
Carriage Trade Page 36
