The Ivy Chronicles

by Karen Quinn

  Sincerely,

  Lorna Reed

  “You have got to be kidding me, Mr. McCall,” I said. “This’ll cost you a bloody fortune. How can it possibly be worth it you?” It was certainly tempting, however.

  “Ms. Ames, I have more money than I can spend in fifty lifetimes. This is pocket change for me. I have one grandson. I would do anything to keep him from becoming more Jewish than he already is. I’m eternally grateful to you for being an instrument in preventing that from happening. And I want to show my appreciation.”

  Suddenly the bodyguard-chauffeur whipped open the car door, causing my heart to beat so fast that I popped a baby aspirin, just to be safe. Why must he always do that?

  “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Ms. Ames,” I heard Mr. McCall say as I walked away. Yeah, a real pleasure, I thought.

  10. Shocking News

  Monday I dropped the girls at school. For some reason, I was missing my mother more than usual. If only she were here. I could tell her everything that had happened and she would give me one of those lectures that I used to ignore when she was alive. Only this time I’d listen. C’mon, Mom, tell me what to do. At least give me a sign or something. I headed over to the Korean nail salon at Houston and Avenue A for a manicure, thinking it might lift my spirits.

  Just as I placed my freshly painted nails under the blow-dryer, my cell phone rang. Awkwardly, I balanced the receiver between my ear and shoulder and answered without messing up the polish. It was Omar. Oh boy. This was one client I didn’t want to disappoint. “Ivy, you’ll never guess where I am,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “No, guess, really.”

  “You’re in Luckenbach, Texas?”

  “Where the hell is that? No, I’m in Las Vegas. Sassy and I just eloped.”

  “What!” I exclaimed. “You’ve known each other, like, a month! I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, believe it. And it’s all because of you. I’m indebted to you for life for introducing me to my widdew pookie wookie.”

  Euuugh. Baby talk from a mob boss.

  “Omar, would you put Sassy on? I want to congratulate her.”

  “Can you believe it?” Sassy said. “I married this biddy widdy teddy beaw.” I heard what sounded like kissing noises, which I thought was rude. “Oooooh, baby, lick me here, ooooooh yes, you nasty little horny toad,” she moaned.

  Too much information . . . too much information . . .

  “Sassy. SASSY. SASSY!!” I yelled into the phone. “What about Philip? I thought you were going to marry him.”

  “Would you give him my regrets?” she asked. “When I met Omy Womy, I knew he was the one. He’s my widdew wuv-biwd.”

  I thought I was going to blow chunks right there and then.

  “What about your new business?” I asked.

  “Omy Womy doesn’t want Pookie Wookie to decowate for anyone but he-yum. Omy Womy pwomised Pookie Wookie she would nevew have to wook anymore, evew.”

  “Sassy, let me give you one small but crucial piece of advice. Don’t ever two-time this man. If you do, you might not live to regret it.”

  11. Private School Ugly

  After hearing the news about Omar and Sassy, I was useless. Sassy and Omar? I looked up at Heaven. Okay, Drayton, I warned her. If she dies, it’s her own damn fault. Release me from my obligation. She has Omy Womy to take care of her. I wandered through SoHo, browsing in the stores, stopping at a Starbucks for a caramel macchiato with whipped cream. SoHo used to be the center of the downtown art scene. Not anymore. Now it has some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Shops like Chanel and Yves St. Laurent have moved in. And recently, Bloomingdales opened. Bloomingdales! It was a travesty. Where have all the artists gone . . . long time pa-a-sing. Ooooh, nice purse. Come to Mama, I thought, stepping inside Prada.

  The rest of the day was spent in a nonproductive “No thanks, I’m just looking” haze. I retrieved the girls at 3:00, stopping only for a few minutes to discuss PTA book-committee business with Plus-Sized Mama. “I need a snack, Mom,” Skyler said.

  “Me, too,” Kate piped.

  “Fine, but make it healthy,” I said.

  “Aaaaw, Mom, I had a tough day. Let us have junk, please?” Skyler begged.

  “Tell you what: We’ll compromise and go to Kratt’s.”

  “Yay!” Kate shouted.

  At the corner, I grabbed the New York Times. Then the three of us slipped into my favorite booth. Skyler was exhausted from having taken a really hard spelling test. She rested her head on the table. Michael came over to take our orders.

  “I’ll have a brownie sundae,” Kate said.

  With Herculean effort, Skyler lifted her head. “Me, too, but make mine a double.”

  “No, just a single for Skyler. And I’ll have a fruit plate with chocolate sauce on the side,” I said, nudging my daughter to sit up straight.

  “Coming right up,” Michael said. He gave Skyler a meaningful wink.

  I picked up the paper and scanned the front page. Nothing but distressing news from the Middle East. As I pulled out the “Metro” section, my eyes widened. “Holy Christmas,” I said.

  “What?” Kate asked.

  “Wait, let me read the story.”

  A few minutes later, Michael arrived with our food. He scooted into the booth to join us.

  “You brought them both doubles, didn’t you?” I said, glancing up from the newspaper.

  “Me? No. That’s our smallest sundae,” he said. “And besides, the ice cream’s soy based—very healthy.” Both girls started giggling.

  I shook my head. What could I do? “There’s a very upsetting piece in the paper.”

  “About what?” Michael asked.

  “Yeah, what?” Skyler said.

  “Last Friday night, during a basketball game between Hartley and Harvard Day, Hartley fans chanted anti-Semitic slurs at a Jewish Harvard Day player. Four kids kept shouting ‘Jewboy’ at him,” I said.

  “And that surprises you?” Michael asked quietly, reaching for the front page.

  “In this day and age, yeah. Those are two of the city’s most elite schools. Kids who go to Hartley come from the finest, most educated families. I guess I can believe they might be anti-Semitic, but I can’t imagine they felt it was acceptable to go public with it. Don’t they teach them anything in those schools?” I shook my head in disgust as I took a large spoonful of Kate’s ice cream and dumped it on top of my fruit. Then I poured the rest of my chocolate sauce over the whole thing.

  “What does ‘anti-Semitic’ mean?” Kate asked.

  “It means people who hate Jews,” Michael explained.

  “I’m Jewish,” Kate said, looking worried.

  “I know you are,” he said, patting her hand.

  “There are people who hate me because I’m Jewish?” Kate asked.

  “People who don’t know any better, yes. But you know what? I’m Jewish, too. And I won’t let anyone say mean things to you about your religion,” Michael said.

  “Thanks, Michael,” Kate said.

  “That’s the worst part about what happened here,” I added. “There were, like, thirty students and a bunch of Hartley parents sitting with the boys who were taunting this player, but no one did anything to stop them.”

  “The parents let them say those things?” Skyler asked.

  “Yeah. They just sat there. Poor kid. Something like that happened to me when I was a girl. It was awful,” I said, remembering that day when Ondrea de Campo and her friends humiliated me at her Valentine’s party. “When people around you make racist remarks, you can’t stay silent. If you’re silent, that means you accept what they’re saying. Let that be a lesson to you, girls.”

  “Mom, if you’d been there, you would’ve bawled those kids out, right?”

  “Your mother?” Michael said. “Are you kidding? Your mom would never tolerate that kind of behavior. There’s not a timid bone in her body.” Michael smiled at me.

&
nbsp; “Duh-uh,” Skyler agreed. “I can’t believe you’d even ask a question like that, Kate.”

  “Well, I would have said something, too,” Kate said.

  Oh, God, I thought, ashamed that they had me so wrong, I am a spineless, lily-livered, good-for-nothing hypocrite. Just call me “Schmuck” for short. I’d done the same thing every time Buck McCall spewed his vitriol about Jews. By keeping my mouth shut, I was complicit in his anti-Semitism. Even worse, I’d helped him in his crusade against his grandson’s Jewishness. And I’d betrayed Greg and Dee Dee for the same despicable cause.

  The jig was up. There would be no more lies, no more winning-at-any-cost, no more selling out for cold, hard cash. This time, I didn’t ask what Ivana or Mother Teresa would do. I knew what Ivy Ames had to do.

  12. To Tell the Truth, Part 2

  Entering the brownstone where Shalom Day School was located, I could see why Dee Dee felt it was right for Moses. The children were neatly dressed. The boys wore yarmulkes. They were singing Hebrew songs, dancing, laughing. The walls were covered with the strained efforts of kindergartners writing their first paragraphs on the subject of “family.” The trophy case was filled with awards for Shalom Day’s baseball, basketball, and hockey teams. And people say Jews aren’t athletic.

  “Ms. Ames, Rabbi Jacobson will see you now,” the secretary said.

  I walked into Rabbi Jacobson’s office and shook her hand. She seemed too young to hold such an important position, but then again, everyone does these days. “How can I help you?” she asked after I was seated.

  “Rabbi Jacobson, what I’ve come to tell you today is embarrassing, but I need to make this confession to you so that maybe I can remedy a terrible wrong that has been done.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m a private-school-admissions counselor. I was helping Greg McCall and Dee Dee Epstein apply their son, Moses, to schools.”

  “I know who they are.”

  “I’m sure you must. Anyway, the thing is, Greg and Dee Dee wanted this school more than any other. But Greg’s father wanted Moses in a secular school. He didn’t want him to grow up so Jewish. Behind Greg’s back, he offered me a million dollars and promised to pay my children’s tuition to private school if I would get Moses into a good non-Jewish school. I was torn about what to do. I’m a single mother and the money would have changed my life. But I’m also Jewish. I’m ashamed to say that I was willing to take Mr. McCall’s bribe. Greg and Dee Dee asked me to send your school their first-choice letter. But I wrote that awful note instead. I was pretty sure you would never take Moses after getting that letter. I came to ask you if you would throw it away and make your decision about Moses knowing that Shalom Day is his parents’ first choice and that there are no strings attached.”

  Rabbi Jacobson’s eyes widened. “That’s quite a tale, Ms. Ames. Tell me, do you think Greg’s father intends to pay you the money if you do what he asked?”

  “I’ll never know, Rabbi. My guess is he would, but maybe I’m naïve. I suppose he could cheat me. There’d be nothing I could do about it. I mean, I don’t think you can sue someone to collect on a bribe, can you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, if he didn’t pay, it would serve me right. Frankly, I think you should string me up in the sanctuary and beat me with a menorah.”

  Rabbi Jacobson laughed. “Ms. Ames, you were tempted by evil and you almost succumbed. But in the end, you made the moral choice. What you’ve done today is admirable. Not many people would walk away from a million dollars and a free private-school education for their children.”

  As she said that, my stomach sank. I was doing the right thing, so why did I feel like such a chump?

  “Plus, I want to tell you that we had planned to accept Moses. But after receiving that letter, well, we couldn’t. Now that you’ve explained it, I’m going to make sure that he’s offered a space,” she said kindly.

  “Thank you, rabbi. I don’t deserve your forgiveness,” I said.

  The rabbi smiled. “Ms. Ames, don’t you know that to forgive is divine?”

  “I’ve heard that, yes. Anyway, you don’t have to worry. You’ll never get a first-choice letter like that again. I’m getting out of the business.”

  “Is it really so bad? If you were an honorable adviser, you could make a tremendous difference in people’s lives.”

  “That’s what I thought when I started. But I realized that the admissions world is just as cutthroat as the corporate one. And the business brought out the worst in me. I lied, I cheated, I betrayed clients—for what? I don’t like the person I became doing this job. But I’m determined to change.”

  The rabbi smiled. “Ms. Ames, by doing what you did today, you’ve already changed.”

  13. Stu Has a Bad Hair Day

  Stu was calling every hour on the hour. With a week to go, he was freaking out about his daughter’s prospects. His nursery-school head tried to reach the directors of ongoing schools to get a read on who might want Veronica, but they weren’t talking.

  The traditional two-week period when nursery-school directors horse-traded for spaces with private-school-admissions directors had come to a screeching halt. NYPHO had set a new policy forbidding it. Headmasters discreetly told admissions directors to turn down applications from any family that had tried to influence them in even the slightest way earlier in the season.

  Nobody knew anything.

  Nursery-school directors couldn’t clue parents in to where their child would get in if they sent a first-choice letter. There were no more of the hints, leaks, or confidential conversations that had become instrumental to the smooth operation of the admissions machine. The system was in chaos. No one was steering the ship. Admissions directors, normally at the height of their powers this time of year, found themselves ignored by the pillars of society, who were scared shitless of being dragged into this ugly scandal. Home sales in Rye and Greenwich hit an all-time high as families secured their backups.

  Directors were floundering, forced to make admissions decisions based on official criteria like test scores, interviews, nursery-school reports, and essays. These ingredients just didn’t provide enough of that nuanced, richly textured information that the decision-makers needed to suggest who would be right for their particular communities and who wouldn’t.

  I sat in my usual booth at Kratt’s in early February, pondering what, if anything, I could do to help my clients in these radically changed times. A sun-deprived man with hair as green as asparagus walked in. He looked around. It was Stu. I stuck my face behind the menu and pretended to study it. Too late. He saw me and walked over.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mizzzzz Ames. What a coincidence meeting you here. No, wait. Not such a coincidence, I suppose, considering this is where you live,” he accused.

  “Yeah, I live here. You have a problem with that, Stu?”

  “When I hired you, I was under the impression that you were from Fifth Avenue. Had I known you lived in a tenement, I wouldn’t have entrusted my daughter’s education to you. You are one disappointment after another, missy.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So, I’m fired again?”

  “Oh, what’s the point?” Stu said, sinking into the other side of the booth, pushing my purse aside. “The game’s over. Where should I send my first-choice letter? That’s all I want to know.” He looked dejected, and for a fleeting moment I felt sorry for him.

  “You uncovered my secret lair just to ask me that?”

  “I wanted to see you in person.”

  “Stu, I have to ask. What happened to your hair? Isn’t it usually red?”

  “I was trying to dye it myself and the color got all messed up. Patsy used to do it for me, but now she’s gone.” He looked pathetic sitting there with green hair.

  “Oh, Stu, you should never try to color your own hair. Everyone knows that.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Ivy. I’m getting it redone this afternoon.” He pulled a framed picture of
Veronica out of his briefcase and set it on the table. With tears in his eyes, he spoke. “I love this little girl. I expect you to do right by her. Now, which school should get the Needleman first-choice letter?”

  “That depends. Which school is your first choice?”

  “Balmoral. And if you don’t think Balmoral’s likely, then my first choice is the school where we have the best chance.”

  “Did your director get any feedback from Balmoral on Veronica’s visit there?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they said her résumé was thin, her pencil grasp was immature, she chose Moo, Baa, La, La, La! over Where the Wild Things Are and then her comments weren’t insightful. Also, she spilled her juice at snack.”

  “What? Veronica spilled her juice and you’re telling me now! At a social school like Balmoral . . . well, Stu, that’s gonna hurt,” I said. “I wish you’d told me before. We could have defused the incident in your thank-you letter.” I waited for Stu to blame me for Veronica’s accident. He was silent.

  “Which school is Patsy’s first choice?” I asked.

  “How am I supposed to know? Thanks to you, she refuses to take my calls.”

  There wasn’t much to say. I tried bringing some levity to the moment. “Well, under the circumstances, let’s decide by doing ‘rock, paper, scissors.’ ” I held out my fists.

  Oops. Stu was in no mood for humor. He made his own fist and held it up like he intended to use it. “You think this is some kind of joke, Ivy?” I have to admit I was slightly scared he was going to punch me. But at the same time, it was hard to take him seriously with that hair.

  Before I had a chance to respond, Michael Kratt appeared out of nowhere. “Do you have a problem, sir?”

  “Yeah, I have a problem. With her.” Stu shook his fist in my face.