The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  Enough for tonight:

  It was one of those dreams which she knew was a dream and, knowing that she was dreaming, she knew she could rouse herself from it if she wanted to and yet, for some queer reason, she chose not to, and made the dreaming, conscious choice to let the dream spin itself out. In the dream, she was leaning over the parapet of her terrace, staring down at the dark river below, and at the little boat, spinning crazily, being sucked into the tidal bore. There were cries from the boat, and the woman’s voice was familiar. Murderer! she was crying. This is my life you are taking, and this is my blood in the water. And down there in the darkness, she was able to make out the woman’s upturned face as one she knew. The eyes blazed up at her with terrible accusation, and it was her own frightened face from the Bouché portrait. The woman held up the little white dog, as if offering it for sacrifice, as if to say, If you won’t spare me, at least spare this helpless animal, but her open mouth kept screaming the word Murderer! Murderer!

  She forced herself awake, and out of the dream, and, groping for a cool corner of her pillow, tried to sleep again.

  Two

  THE HO FACTOR

  10

  ROTHMAN DYNASTY COULD OWE

  $900,000,000 IN UNPAID TAXES,

  IRS CLAIMS

  With Penalties, Interest,

  Figure Could Top $1 Billion

  —The New York Times, May 1, 1990

  To alex rothman, there was something almost surrealistic about figures like these. It was impossible to take them seriously. At that level, it all became Monopoly money. She had been in Ho Rothman’s office, in fact, the day his lawyers had telephoned him with the bad news that a major Treasury Department audit was under way. He had uttered just one word: “Momzers!” Then he seized the telephone cord, ripped it from the wall, and flung the instrument against his map of the United States, where it dislodged several gold stars from the tip of the state of Florida before crashing to the floor in several pieces. So much, he seemed to imply, for that.

  Later, she was reassured that there was nothing to worry about. The Rothman lawyers had the situation well in hand. The IRS, she was told, often zeroed in on prominent taxpayers just to reassure the general public that the agency was doing its job, going after the fat cats. In due course, the case would be settled for a tiny fraction of the amount claimed. It was nothing but bluster, nothing but stagecraft, on the part of the feds. It was all part of George Bush’s promise not to raise taxes. His administration would show that it had other ways of balancing the budget. And, a week later, when a telegram arrived from the White House on Ho’s ninety-fourth birthday, reading BIRTHDAY FELICITATIONS FROM GEORGE AND BARBARA, Ho waved the telegram triumphantly in front of his staff. “See?” he cried. “He is wishing me Happy Birthday, while his pipple are saying they’re going to kill me!”

  At the same time, it amused Alex whenever the newspapers referred to the Rothman clan as a “dynasty,” as though they were of the same ilk as the Rothschilds, or the Hapsburgs, or the great Imperial families of China, when in fact it had all started as recently as 1910, in Newark, New Jersey, when Ho Rothman was an ill-educated immigrant lad of fourteen who could not even remember his original name.

  The man who became Herbert Oscar Rothman had only the vaguest memories of his parents, who died when he was five years old. There was a woman who used to sing to him. Could that have been his mother? Perhaps. His most vivid childhood memory was of being carried away from a burning house, of flames filling all the windows and doorways and bursting through the rooftop with the sound of thunder and towering into the sky. Of course the flames could not have been that towering, for it could not have been that much of a house, but to a child’s eye the flames seemed to vault for miles up into the night sky. He was told that this had happened on a Christmas Eve, when the Russian soldiers were given extra rations of vodka, and were encouraged to run loose in the Jewish quarter of wherever it was. He assumed that his parents perished together in that fire. Were there other children, brothers and sisters? He never knew. Was the house torched as part of a pogrom, or was it an isolated incident? He never knew that, either.

  For the next year or so he was cared for by a couple who must have been relatives, for he was told that he could call them “Mother” and “Father.” They lived in a village called Volnitskya, or at least that was the way it was pronounced—he never saw it spelled out—which no longer appears on any map of Poland, for apparently it disappeared during the Revolution. He could remember a muddy river, and a muddy road that ran down to it, where women did their washing and where he and other children launched sailboats made of leaves and twigs and swam naked in the summer. It was here that he first noticed that little girls had no little putz, but when he asked his new mother why, she slapped his face and sent him to bed without his supper. He remembered their little house, with walls of brick that seemed to have been fashioned from the same river mud, and that, in winter, he could reach out and touch the wall beside his bed, and that the wall was covered with a thin layer of ice. He remembered drawing frost-pictures on the icy walls.

  He remembered the woman he was told to call Mother, though she was not his mother, sitting at a spinning wheel by candlelight. He remembered her telling stories of her ancestors, who were huge, fierce men who lived in the mountains and wrestled lions singlehanded, and of whom even the Cossack soldiers were terrified. “They bit the heads off live chickens, my people,” she told him proudly. He remembered the dirt floor of the little house, and a rug in a pattern of bright flowers laid down carefully in the center of the floor. The woman he was told to call Mother was inordinately proud of this little rug. It had great value, he was given to understand. It was a rug worthy of the czars themselves, and the children—how many were there?—were not permitted to walk on it, but had to step carefully around it. His new mother always rolled this rug up and hid it under a mattress whenever a stranger knocked at the door. Other treasures were hidden under this lumpy mattress: a menorah, a silver teapot, six silver spoons, and a chuppa that was being saved for a daughter’s wedding, but the rug was the most precious possession of them all. Ho Rothman used to dream of one day going back to Poland to search for the lost village of Volnitskya, where he would try to retrieve this special rug. Of course, he never did.

  Sometimes, in the old days at “Rothmere,” when he was in a mellow mood, Ho Rothman would sit after dinner with a brandy and a cigar, and recall his scattered memories of the Old Country.

  He was called Itzhak in those days, and if the family used any special surname, he had forgotten what it was. But he remembered that it was as Itzhak that he was told, when he was eight years old, with much weeping, that the family had grown too large for the little house—there seemed to be a new baby born every year—and that he must be sent somewhere else to live. Where did the babies come from? he used to wonder. “From the river,” his new mother would tell him. Periodically, it seemed, she would go down to the river and scoop out a new baby. He remembered asking her why, if there were too many babies, “too many mouths to feed,” as she put it, she kept going down to the river to add to the oversupply. Later, he would wonder how, in that crowded household where everyone slept in the same room, and many to a bed, this pair ever found moments intimate enough in which to conceive a child. Perhaps, at night, when all the children were asleep, they slipped off to the riverbank and found a place to couple under the willow trees.

  He was told that his new home was to be in London, where some distant cousins had agreed to take him in. Of the long trip across the face of Europe, which involved many changes of trains in crowded stations, crossing borders, and paying bribes to border guards at each, he remembered very little. He was too frightened of the unknown world that lay ahead to do more than show his ticket, which was pinned to his overcoat, and to be pointed in one direction or another. In his memory, there were soldiers everywhere, soldiers with machine guns pointed at the crowds, and everywhere there was talk of war—war, terrorism, rio
ts, strikes, killings, bloodshed, and the “Black Hundreds,” whose mission was solely to kill Jews. Somehow, though, he made it to Dieppe, where he crossed on a Channel ferry, and found his way to the cousins’ flat in Whitechapel.

  The cousins were named Belsky, and for the next two years he used the name Itzhak Belsky. The Belskys’ neighborhood was almost entirely Yiddish-speaking, but it was in London that the future Ho Rothman learned to read and speak rudimentary English.

  It was likely that he had already become a difficult, willful child, hard to manage or control. There were signs that this may have been the case. Certainly no one seemed to want to hold on to him for long. In just two years the Belskys told him, again, that there were too many mouths to feed, and that he must move on. Even more distant cousins had been found, he was told, in America, and his next home would be in a place the Belskys called Manhattan Island City. How these long-distance custody arrangements—which must have involved months of letter-writing back and forth across the Atlantic—were made, Ho Rothman never knew. But, trying to put the best face on things, the Belskys told him that in Manhattan Island City the streets were paved with gold. Practically all one had to do, they assured him, was reach down and pick up the gold that lay in the cracks of sidewalks; the riches were strewn about everywhere. “Soon you’ll be wearing a red coat and a purple feather in your cap,” he remembered Mrs. Belsky telling him. The Belskys were apparently kindly, generous folk. In addition to his steerage ticket from Southampton, they gave him a five-pound note, which seemed to him a huge fortune at the time. They also reminded him that, since he owned only one pair of shoes, he must take special care of those shoes because, when he got to America, he would have to go to work as a foot-peddler, as everyone else did at first, before the riches started to come in. As a result of this injunction, Ho Rothman crossed the Atlantic barefoot, with his only pair of shoes tied together by their laces and slung across his shoulders.

  When he told this story to visitors at “Rothmere” years later, as he often did, he usually rose at this point in the rendition of it, and offered to show his guest the famous shoes. They would then mount the curved marble double staircase with its burgundy carpet and velvet-swagged handrails to the landing, where a bronze casting of Rodin’s “Thinker” stood, and where the staircase branched again, and on up to the second floor of the house, where Ho and Lily had connecting apartments. Ho would then lead his visitor into his walnut-paneled dressing room, and begin opening the mirrored doors of closets. The closets displayed, on row after row of brass hanging bars and tier after tier of glass shelves, his collection of bespoke suits from Savile Row, his collection of overcoats, hats, gloves, and walking sticks, the soft piles of custom-made shirts from Jermyn Street, his socks, handkerchiefs, underwear, pajamas, and robes. He flung open door after door until he finally came to the shoe closet, where hundreds of pairs of gleaming shoes were displayed on trees in shiny brass racks. There he kept the shoes he came to America with. Ho’s feet were small, size-fives, but in comparison those first shoes seemed tiny—more like a child’s pair of black lace-up booties. His valet, he explained, polished these little shoes daily, just as he did every other pair.

  His new parents, those exceedingly distant cousins, were named Sam and Sadye Rothman, and they lived in a third-floor walk-up at 45 Henry Street. The Rothmans were far from rich, but they were not exactly poor, either, though Sadye Rothman complained about what was happening to the neighborhood, which, she claimed, was “filling up with Chinamen.” Chinamen lived on the floor above, and on the floor below. The food the Chinamen cooked gave the building its exotic, gingery odor. Still, the Rothmans were, as Sadye often pointed out, much better off than their neighbors, and their two-bedroom railroad flat with its huge cast-iron bathtub in the center of the kitchen and a semiprivate toilet down the hall, which they shared with only one other family, seemed absolutely spacious to the ten-year-old Ho. Also, the Rothmans had no children of their own, which meant that for the first time in his life the little boy had a room of his own, the room Sadye Rothman rather grandly called “the guest room.” The reason for the Rothmans’ relative prosperity was that Sadye Rothman was an independent businesswoman. Downstairs, on the ground floor of 45 Henry Street, she had a little store, where she sold candy, cigars and cigarettes, the Yiddish newspapers, and what she called “my special line,” items of costume jewelry in a glass display case lighted with a small electric light. Ho used to study those rings and necklaces and bracelets, pasted with bits of colored glass, and suppose that these were emeralds and diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls.

  Sometimes Sadye’s husband helped her in the store, when he was not upstairs studying the holy texts, scribbling petulant questions in the margins of the Talmud in his tiny, pointed European hand, busy, as his wife sneeringly put it, “arguing with God.”

  Sadye’s other specialty was giving enemas, which she did with great proficiency and dispatch. Her word for enemas was “constitutionals,” and she administered a constitutional for the slightest of reasons—a cough, the hiccups, a runny nose, or what she called “the mullygrubs,” when anyone’s facial expression didn’t look to her quite right. She gave frequent enemas to her husband, to herself, and presently she was giving them to Ho. Ho often told of the threatening sight of Sadye Rothman looming around the corner with her enema bag in her hand.

  The name Itzhak Belsky, the boy was told, was not a “good” name. It was not “American” enough. In America, his new guardian explained to him, there were good names and bad names, and Itzhak Belsky happened to be of the latter variety. The importance of a good name was that it helped you obtain something called “credit,” and Sadye Rothman’s lectures on the value of credit were his first lessons on how the American capitalist system worked. Credit was to free enterprise what enemas were to a healthy body. If you wanted to “make a name for yourself” in America, you had to establish credit, and this notion left Ho with the distinct impression that the phrase “making a name for yourself” meant that you could go by whatever name you chose—an idea that would stand him in good stead later on.

  His new American name, it was decided, would be Herbert Oscar Rothman. Where the Herbert came from, Ho Rothman never knew, but he was fairly sure where Sadye had got the Oscar. Sadye considered herself vaguely “musical,” and, on periodic trips uptown on Sundays on the streetcar, she was always careful to point out to her young charge the magnificent Harlem Opera House that the great theatrical impresario Oscar Hammerstein had built on 125th Street. He also learned that, thanks to the Rothmans’ comparative affluence, he would not, after all, have to go to work as a foot-peddler, as other boys did. Instead, Herbert Oscar Rothman was enrolled at a school on Rivington Street, in the first grade, where he was several years older, though not much bigger, than most of his classmates.

  As the boy entered his teens, he grew increasingly restless and impatient, increasingly independent-minded and difficult for Sam and Sadye to handle. Already he seemed determined to lead his life on a broader landscape than the narrow one defined by Rivington and Henry streets. He began refusing his enemas. Also, Sadye began noticing shortages in her cash box—nothing much, but ten cents one day, and a quarter the next—and Sadye began to have her suspicions. One day a zircon ring was missing from her little display case. Ho was supposed to come home directly after school, but he often tarried and found himself involved in other pleasures and pastimes. He was fourteen years old when a green-eyed, red-haired girl named Rachel winked at him and beckoned him to follow her into a shadowy alley that led between two Rivington Street buildings. The alley took a right-hand turn, and ended in a cul-de-sac, and here, across a bed of barrel staves, lay someone’s discarded mattress. Rachel tossed herself down on this, hiked up her skirts to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath, and proceeded to instruct her neophyte lover, step by exciting step, on what must happen next, guiding him with experienced hands and covering his mouth with kisses as she did so. Unquestionably, he enjo
yed this initial encounter, and soon there were almost daily afternoon sessions in the alley where the old mattress had been so obligingly tossed. Soon, also, Ho Rothman was rewarding Rachel for the pleasures she afforded him with candy bars and other items filched from Sadye Rothman’s store.