The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Ha!” she said. “Herb’s new chippie, you mean? That’s what she is, isn’t it—his new chippie? You see, Herbie thinks that now his father’s a vegetable he can take over the company. But I’m not going to let him. He thinks he can force Alex to quit, without having to fire her, and give the job to this new chippie. That’s what he’s trying to do—force her to walk out of her contract.”

  “He’s certainly making life very unpleasant for her right now.”

  “But I’m not going to let him do that, either.”

  “You’ve always been very fond of Alex, haven’t you, Lily.”

  “She’s made a lot of money for us. If you’ve got a winning team, you don’t get rid of your star player. You don’t kill the goose that keeps laying golden eggs, and I’m not going to let him.”

  “I warn you, Lily, Herb’s playing hardball now.”

  “I can play hardball, too!” She rose now to her full height of five-feet-two and faced him. “That’s the second beauty part of these stock certificates you’re going to have printed up for me. Look at the percentages.” She tapped her slip of paper with a fingertip. “Once we get certificates showing who owns what, we’ll have a stockholders’ meeting on the subject of this chippie. The lawyers have made me Ho’s conservator, which means I can vote Ho’s shares. That means that Ho and I and Alex and Joel will own sixty percent of the company, and Herb will be voted down—all perfectly businesslike and legal! Why, even if Arthur and Pegeen voted on Herb’s side—which I’m damn sure they wouldn’t do—he’d still be voted down! See? See what I mean? It’s called killing two birds with one stone.”

  Lenny also rose. “You are—remarkable, Aunt Lily,” he said, a trifle wearily.

  “Damn right I am. Perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect size six, all my own teeth, my natural hair color—and all my marbles, Lenny. That’s the best beauty part of me. I may be eighty-five years old, but I’ve got all my marbles!”

  “Just one thing,” he said. “How much does Herb know about Tarrytown?”

  “Nothing! Zip!”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Well, then—” His eyes traveled slowly around the room. “I’ve always loved this room,” he said. “Your gold-and-red room. It’s so very you, Lily, and this lovely rug sets everything off so perfectly. Beautiful rug.”

  “Damn right it is. It’s an Isfahan. Sixteen thirty-nine.”

  “Well, perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t,” he murmured. “When I was antiques editor, I became something of an expert, and—”

  “Of course it is. I’ve got its papers. I’ve got its whatchamacallit, its pedigree from Sotheby’s.”

  “Well, even Sotheby’s—I mean, even Shakespeare nodded. But I couldn’t help noticing as we were sitting here that it needs cleaning, Lily. You really should send it out to have it cleaned professionally.”

  “It looks clean to me.”

  “But look, there’s a spot—there.” He pointed. “And another over there.” He considered mentioning, too, that the legs of the two Boulle commodes were badly scuffed, from where her stupid maids had banged them with their vacuum cleaners. But he decided to let that wait for a later date. First things first.

  “I don’t see any spot.”

  “Right there, Lily dear.”

  “That’s part of the pattern.”

  “No, Lily dear. It looks like coffee, or perhaps red wine. You see, remarkable though you are, one of the sad things that happen to people when they get older is that they let things slide a bit. In terms of maintaining their possessions. My own dear mother, in her later years, took to covering up her priceless antiques with sheets of plastic, rather than having them recovered. So sad. I’d hate to see you show any of those little signs of—aging, Lily dear.”

  “I still don’t see any spots.” She moved about the room, peering down at the rug.

  “And this one here. I expect that was where your little Fluff may have had a little accident. Remember your little Fluff? I do. What an adorable little creature she was! Well, she gave you fifteen wonderful years of companionship.”

  “Well, perhaps that was from Fluff. I guess it could have been.”

  “You were so wise not to replace her. There never could have been another Fluff. Look,” he said brightly, “I have a wonderul little man in TriBeCa who does wonders with orientals. He does work for the Metropolitan Museum. Let me send him around to you first thing Monday morning, and have him take this up and clean it for you.”

  “Will it take long? I hate bare floors.”

  “Just a few days. And it will come back to you looking like a brand-new rug, I promise you!”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Have you ever had it cleaned?”

  “I guess not.”

  “See? So let me send my little man around.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “But meanwhile you’ve got a much more important job to do.”

  In her husband’s room, after Lenny had gone, Aunt Lily Rothman said to the new eight-to-four who had replaced Agnes O’Sullivan, and who had been on the job for only a few hours, “Nurse, why don’t you run down to the kitchen and fix yourself a cup of coffee? I’ll sit with Mr. Rothman for a while.”

  When the nurse had gone, Ho pushed himself on his elbows and said, “Well, what did the schnorrer say? He gonna do it?”

  “Of course,” Aunt Lily said. “Lenny knows what side his bread is buttered on.”

  “Good,” he said. He adjusted the pillows behind his back. “Goddammit to hell, Lily, I getting sick of these Goddamn nurses. Thieving pipple! Got to watch them like Hawkeye, Goddamn to hell.”

  “Now, now,” she said. “You know it’s just till we establish that you’re too far gone to testify. You know what the lawyers said about perjury. Perjury’s a felony charge, and we can’t have them slapping us with a felony charge on top of everything else now, can we?”

  “Goddamn bed,” he said, pounding the mattress with his fist. “Hate this Goddamn bed. Bed with bars, like baby’s crib. Want to get back into my own bed.” He winked at her. “With you.”

  She patted his hand. “Now, now,” she said. “As soon as the IRS calls off its dogs, you’re going to have a miraculous recovery. And it’s going to happen sooner than you think.”

  His eyes were bright. “My darling Lilykins,” he said. “Have I ever told you what a wonderful wife you’ve been to me? How could I ever have lived all these years without you, Lilykins? Do you know that there are still some pipple who think I can’t say people?”

  “I know, I know,” she said.

  In the kitchen, the new eight-to-four, whose name was Irene Zabriskie, was staring into the open refrigerator under the baleful gaze of Richardetta, Lily Rothman’s black cook. This was Richardetta’s kitchen, and this was Richardetta’s refrigerator, and this large white woman in her large starched white uniform had no business being there, poking around in the refrigerator’s contents, opening jars and plastic containers, unwrapping Saran- and foil-wrapped packages, peering and sniffing at what was inside them.

  “What’s for my lunch?” Irene Zabriskie said.

  “Miz Rothman, she be having half an alligator pear. That be all she ever have for lunch,” Richardetta said.

  “That won’t be enough for me. Got any tuna?”

  “Nope!”

  “Got any crabmeat?”

  “Nope!”

  “You’ve got to give me lunch, you know. It’s in my contract.”

  “For you I got fried chicken.”

  “I can’t eat that. I’m allergic to chicken.”

  “Fried chicken be all I got.”

  “Got a little strip sirloin? You could pan-fry it in polyunsaturated vegetable oil.”

  “Nope!”

  “What’s this?” Mrs. Zabriskie said, unscrewing the lid of a Mason jar.”

  “That be Miz Rothman’s martinis.”

  “She a drinking woman? They di
dn’t tell me at the agency I’d be working for a drinking woman.”

  “They be her martinis. She like ’em well chilled.”

  Mrs. Zabriskie replaced the cap. “Wait a minute,” she said, removing a Saran-wrapped plate. “What’s this?”

  “That be Mr. Rothman’s lunch.”

  “What is it?”

  “That be lox and potato salad.”

  “Hm! I’ll take that.”

  “I tol’ you that be Mr. Rothman’s lunch! And that’s the last of the lox.”

  “Hm! Last adv Alz case I had would only eat mushy peas. Had to spoon ’em into him like a baby. Choked on ’em in the end, but it wasn’t on my shift.” She sounded vaguely disappointed.

  “Never heard of no mushy peas.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “I could fry a couple eggs.”

  “Can’t eat that. I’ve got high cholesterol. What’s this?”

  “That be lamb chops from last night. That be my lunch.”

  “Can’t eat that, either. What else have you got?”

  “For you I got fried chicken.…”

  14

  The first thing that the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Ho Rothman decided as he walked through his new property—the empty office building and the silent printing plant with its gleaming, unpaid-for new equipment that now belonged to him, unencumbered—was that, if he was going to run a newspaper, he was going to have to do it all by himself. This, he felt—with that wonderful self-confidence of youth—he knew enough about newspapering to do. He would have to write all the stories, set them in type, sell all the subscriptions, all the advertising, and deliver the papers personally to the subscribers’ doors, for a nickel a copy. It would not be an easy job, but the few hundred dollars that remained from his bank-fleecing operation ruled out the hiring of any employees. His would be a one-man operation.

  And he could do it all by himself, he decided, if he made his paper a weekly instead of a daily. He also decided that, since the now-defunct Times-Union had a bland and stodgy reputation, he would give his new weekly enterprise a new name. He decided to call it the Newark Explorer. The word Explorer had all sorts of exciting, adventurous connotations in Ho’s mind. It suggested exploration into new worlds, a new journalistic universe. It suggested the Beyond, the Great Unknown, vast uncharted seas, unanswered questions, mysteries, fantastic happenings. Ho Rothman had read the popular fantasy-tales of H. G. Wells—The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and so on—and why, he asked himself, should a newspaper like his new Explorer refrain from exploring the possibility that there were men on the moon, that the Loch Ness Monster existed, that Abominable Snowmen patrolled the Himalayas, that Sasquatch and Bigfoot lived in the Wild West, and that the dead came back to haunt the living? He would, in other words, put out a newspaper like no other at the time, a newspaper that not only reported facts but also might-be facts and could-be facts. His newspaper would carry his readers far beyond the dreary confines of the city of Newark, New Jersey.

  On the shelves of the Newark Public Library, Ho had discovered a volume called Tales of Monsters and Madness, by the little-known nineteenth-century author C. E. Lahniers. Some of the “tales” were loosely based on factual evidence. Others were based on legend or hearsay, and still others seemed patently fictitious, such as an English widow’s nightmarish account of how she had been transported, by way of a cave in Tunbridge Wells, to Hell, where she had been sexually assaulted by the Devil himself, whose sexual instrument “was the size of an eighteen-pound halibut, and covered with scales.” With glee, Ho noticed that Tales was no longer in copyright. Each issue of his weekly, he decided, would contain at least one tale of monsters or madness, which he could lift, virtually intact, from the Lahniers work, and he would splash that tale in a giant headline across the front page.

  Thus, as he planned and laid out his issues, he came up with headlines such as this:

  MOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO

  THREE-HEADED BABY!

  Then Sells It to Circus

  for One Dollar

  Readers of this tale were not deceived, exactly. They were told, in copy that was cleverly tucked well inside the paper, that the freakish birth took place in Rumania in 1801. But there was no doubt that headlines like these were eye-catching and, from its first issue, which appeared in March 1912, the Explorer did well at newsstands, and presently Ho was pleased to see orders for subscriptions begin trickling in.

  Sex was one of the staples of the Explorer’s content during those early days, as evidenced by the following front-page screamer headlines:

  GIRL, 14, IS PREGNANT

  BY APE IN ZOO!

  FATHER BOILS ILLEGITIMATE

  SON IN OIL!

  ARCHBISHOP ADMITS HE IS

  WHITE SLAVER!

  So was religion:

  BALLOONIST SEES GOD!

  TALKS TO HIM!

  And so on. Most of these stories were picked up, word for word, from Tales of Monsters and Madness.

  But, with Ho’s fondness for H. G. Wells, there was also some pseudoscientific material, such as:

  SCIENTISTS DESCRIBE

  MARTIAN MEN!

  If there are men on Mars, leading scientists told the EXPLORER today, their bodies will consist almost entirely of a pair of lungs, due to the thinness of the red planet’s atmosphere.…

  Needless to say, the “leading scientists” were Ho Rothman himself. And it should be noted that, though Ho’s spoken English was in those days still actually a bit rough and heavily Russian-accented, he nonetheless wrote serviceable journalistic prose, with hardly any syntactical lapses.

  He was also adept at taking small, relatively insignificant items that had appeared in other newspapers, and blowing them up into front-page stories for his weekly tabloid. The death of an elderly resident of Des Moines, who had apparently choked on his shaving cream, became, on the Explorer’s front page:

  SHAVING-CREAM DROWNING

  BAFFLES POLICE!

  He was even able to get a follow-up story out of this event for the front page of his next week’s issue:

  MEDICAL EXPERTS DESCRIBE HORRORS

  OF SHAVING-CREAM DROWNING!

  Once again, the “medical experts” were none other than the youthful editor.

  And, when no tale that seemed lurid enough for his front page presented itself, Ho Rothman was not above making something up. Thus he was able to use the headline he had imagined in his boardinghouse cell, about mad dogs disemboweling schoolchildren. By changing the venue of this fictitious event to a nonexistent hamlet in faraway California, “high in the wild ranges of the Sierra Madre,” and the dogs to coyotes, he was able to come up with:

  CHILDREN DEVOURED BY

  RABID COYOTE PACK!

  But, to give him credit, he also gradually began adding elements to the Explorer’s pages that were both innovative and helpful. He had begun to think of a newspaper that not only reported news events, but that also provided a “service” to its readers. Up to that point, American newspapers were considered a male medium. They were largely written by men, for male readers. The typical reader, American publishers assumed, was the man of the house who read his paper while his wife cooked and served his breakfast, and who then took the paper with him to read further on the train or streetcar that bore him to his place of business. Except for the inevitable advice-to-the-lovelorn column, or perhaps the church calendar, nothing in American newspapers of the day was designed to appeal to women readers. Women readers were expected to be served by the relatively small handful of ladies’ magazines, including a venerable fashion magazine called Mode.

  Ho Rothman had begun seeing, with some regularity, a pretty young lady of his own age named Sophie Litsky. Sophie was a far cry from the perfidious Rachel. A rabbi’s daughter, Sophie Litsky had been gently bred and gently raised. Sophie’s mother, Bella Litsky, had taken a liking to young Ho and, since he appeared to have no family, often invited him to the Litskys’ table for dinner, a gesture
that was much appreciated. Sophie’s mother, he soon learned, had a well-deserved reputation in her neighborhood as a cook and Bella Litsky once boasted that she could go into anyone’s icebox or larder and, with whatever ingredients she happened to find there, could come up with a tasty and hearty dish. To tease her, more than anything else, Ho dared her to do this. With the cooperation of an agreeable neighbor, Bella Litsky said she would take him up on the challenge. Bella marched into her neighbor’s kitchen, where she found a couple of onions, a carrot, two tomatoes, a potato, a gill of sour cream, a bit of cheese, and half a roasted chicken, and proceeded to create—to Ho’s taste, at least—a simply ambrosial casserole. Bella even gave it a clever name: Hopalong Casserole.

  Ho decided to make use of Mrs. Litsky’s cooking talents for the Explorer, and presently a recipe column called “From Mrs. L’s Kitchen” became a regular weekly feature. Circulation jumped—from women readers who mailed in their subscription money. Quickly retitled “Exploring Mrs. L’s Kitchen,” and expanded to include not only recipes but also housekeeping, shopping, and budgeting hints, and given a full page in the paper, the “Mrs. L Page,” seemed to be drawing more readers than any other. And Ho Rothman was hinting that he might make Bella Litsky his first paid outside contributor. But he was not quite ready to take such a drastic step, and for the time being Bella Litsky was satisfied with her photograph in the upper left-hand corner of the page, and a certain amount of local celebrity.

  Today, of course, nearly every American newspaper has its so-called Women’s Page. But Ho Rothman’s paper was the very first to have one.

  The only part of the paper to bear Ho Rothman’s name was the editorial page, which appeared under the general banner:.

  EXPLORING THE ISSUES!

  by

  H. O. Rothman

  EDITOR & PUBLISHER

  The general tone of the editorial page was one of indignation, though here Ho had to walk a thin and careful line. The people involved in the issues that the Explorer explored were actual, living human beings, and Ho was aware of American libel laws. He could, however, with reasonable impunity, question the propriety of a building contract for a new city hospital that was awarded to the mayor’s brother-in-law. He could safely inveigh against the United States Congress for shortening the working day of all government employees to eight hours while, in private industry, most workers still labored ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.