The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  The house had other peculiarities. It had an attached two-car garage, which none of the farmhouses had. Behind it, it had a patio, a foreign word in Paradise. The house was surrounded by hedges of ilex and yew, and Alex’s mother had laid out perennial borders of iris, peonies, phlox, and chrysanthemums. No one else had perennial borders. There was also a carefully manicured lawn of zoysia grass, of which Alex’s father was particularly proud. When Jeffrey Lane spoke of his zoysia grass, his neighbors and fellow townspeople looked puzzled. Zoysia was a crop that no one in Paradise had ever cultivated. “Looks just like plain old grass to me,” they said.

  “Zoysia is often used on putting greens,” Jeffrey Lane explained. The neighbors scratched their heads. The Lanes, they said, gave themselves airs.

  In those days, all the girls in the Paradise-Smithville Regional Elementary School had names like Mary, Jean, Betty, and Anne. There were also a few double names—Mary Lou, Betty Ann, Bobby Sue. There were fashions in girls’ names, just as there were fashions in breeds of dogs. Later would come biblical names—Ruth, Naomi, Sarah, Hannah, and Deborah. And still later would come the fad for last names—Kimberley, Tiffany, Kelley, Kirby, Shelby, Ashley, and so on. But nobody at Paradise-Smithville R.E.S. had ever been named Alexandra, nor, most likely, had there been an Alexandra since.

  “Where’d you get your funny name?” they asked her.

  “I’m named after the last empress of Russia,” she explained.

  “Are you Russian?”

  There were other differences that set the Lanes apart from their neighbors in Paradise. Alex’s father did not go to work in coveralls, for instance, but in a pinstriped dark blue Brooks Brothers suit, white shirt, and tie, driving thirty miles each day to Kansas City, where he was a partner in an accounting firm, in his 1953 Oldsmobile Super “88.” Alex’s mother shopped for her good clothes and Alex’s school clothes in faraway Kansas City, too, while the women from the neighboring farms still shopped from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. “You dress different,” her schoolmates used to say. When Alex asked them what they meant, their answers were evasive. “You don’t dress from here,” they said. “You dress from away.” And when Alex asked her mother what they meant by this, her mother’s airy reply was, “It means they’re ignorant.”

  Alex would have done anything, during those preteen years, not to be considered “different.”

  Behind every Paradise farmhouse, or so it seemed, was a silver Airstream house trailer, not yet known as a mobile home. Each winter the Airstream was tow-hitched to a pickup truck, and the farmer and his family took off for a couple of weeks in Florida or on the Gulf coast of Texas. In summer, after spring planting was done, similar excursions might be undertaken to the Ozarks, or to Sunrise Beach on the lake. The Lanes owned no house trailer, and to the young Alex this seemed a humiliating hardship. All her friends’ families had Airstreams. To the little girl, ownership of an Airstream seemed the ultimate luxury. Her friends had shown her the interiors of their parents’ trailers—the narrow little bunk beds that folded out of the walls, the little sofas that opened to become more beds, the tiny kitchens with their miniature appliances, the chemical toilets. The trailers seemed to her like dollhouses on wheels. Why, she begged her father, couldn’t they own a beautiful silver Airstream the way everyone else did? When she talked this way, her father merely made a face and rolled his eyes.

  But why, she often asked herself, had her parents chosen Paradise, Missouri, to live and build their home and raise their only child—a place they clearly viewed as inferior, surrounded as they were by ignorant neighbors, and by dangerous fields of tall corn that sucked unsuspecting children into their labyrinthine rows, where they might never be found until corn-cutting time? That was always something of a mystery to her. Most of her parents’ interests—the museums, the symphony, the theater, the ballet, the library, the shopping—were focused on the big city to the south. “Of course we can’t find that here,” she would hear her mother say disparagingly. “We’ll have to go to Kansas City for that.” Then why did they live in such an insufficient place? Why had they carved out a small corner of suburbia in the cornfields? It had something to do, Alex was given to understand, with “good, clean country air,” and it was true that, at the time, much of Kansas City was still shrouded by the stench of the stockyards.

  Later, she realized that there were other reasons why the family had settled in Paradise. One of them was surely money, or the lack of it. Jeffrey Lane could never have afforded to build his house in one of the smart Kansas City suburbs such as Shawnee Mission or the Country Club district. There was an irony here. Their neighbors considered the Lanes not only snooty, but “rich folks.” In fact, many of the neighboring farmers were far richer than the Lanes. A summer season’s corn crop could be worth as much as a hundred thousand dollars.

  But there was another reason why the Lanes had chosen Paradise. Alex’s mother was trying to escape from an unhappy secret that she had tried to leave behind in Kansas City.

  In the back of Alex’s mind, from the time she was a little girl, grew the conviction that someday, somehow, she was going to get out of Paradise.

  Her mother’s attitude toward her farming neighbors, during Alex’s growing-up years, was unrepentantly superior and condescending. “These farm people,” she would hear her mother say. “Such hicks and hayseeds. The women’s faces all look like apple pies.”

  As a little girl, Alex considered her mother the prettiest, most glamorous woman in the world. But she soon learned that, to the townsfolk of Paradise, her mother was thought to be almost dangerously unconventional. Instead of having her hair neatly permed or twisted into a bun in a hairnet, Lois let her long, straight, and shiny light brown hair hang straight down her back, where it nearly touched the base of her spine. Sometimes she ironed her long hair. At other times she caught it up with a ribbon into a ponytail, or plaited into a single long pigtail—hairstyles which, to Paradise, seemed unorthodoxy that bordered on heresy. Instead of wraparound house dresses, aprons, and smocks that the farm wives wore, Lois often wore tight jeans that flattered her slim figure and outlined the curve of her buttocks—or, in summer, short cutoffs with bare-shouldered, bare-midriffed halter tops—attire that was not considered entirely “proper” on the prairie. Often, at home, she went around the house barefoot, and was even known to drive her car barefoot—had even been seen going downstreet and walking into Mr. Standish’s store in her bare feet, bold as brass. “Get chiggers that way, Miz Lane,” Mr. Standish had warned her, but she had just roared with laughter.

  She chain-smoked many cork-tipped Herbert Tareyton cigarettes.

  She had been seen, on the breezeway of her house, sitting in her cutoff jeans and halter top, barefoot, waiting for her husband to come home from work, with two martini cocktails and a shaker on a silver tray. “We voted Clay County dry for a reason,” Alex had heard one woman say, “but that Lane woman drinks hard liquor right out in her front yard for the world to see!”

  Her mother was “That Lane Woman.”

  She subscribed to The New Yorker, Mode, and a French magazine called Mon Plaisir that featured both male and female nudes. (This news came from Eulalia Staples, the postmistress of Paradise, who read all the postcards and flipped through all the magazines before putting them out for delivery.)

  She walked her big dog on a long leash. People in Paradise let their dogs run free. “What’d you say the name of that breed of dog is again?” people would ask her.

  “She’s a borzoi bitch,” Lois would say, and people would just shake their heads. The word bitch was bad enough, but all those words ending in vowels—borzoi, zoysia, patio, martini—branded the Lanes as foreign-speaking aliens. The dog was named Anna Karenina.

  Needless to say, the family had not joined either of the two local churches, explaining that Lois and her husband were atheists.

  There were some people in town who whispered that Lois was “a little fast,” and they added, “Nobody knows
what her real background is.” In her bare feet, it was impossible not to notice Lois’s brightly painted toenails. She also brewed strange, herbal teas. By the time she reached sixth grade, Alex had heard her mother described as “a weirdo.”

  Still, the little town had done its best—in the beginning, at least—to accommodate itself to the oddball Lanes, though Lois had made some initial political mistakes. Upon moving to Paradise, for instance, Lois had been invited to join the Paradise Ladies’ Benevolent Society. The Ladies’ Benevolent Society was essentially a sewing circle of women who met, weekly, at one another’s homes to hemstitch sheets and pillowslips for the Clay County Regional Hospital. Lois had politely declined the invitation. “These farm people,” she said to her husband that night at the dinner table, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “That’s all they care about—sewing, cooking, going to church, and having babies.”

  She had not realized that the Ladies’ Benevolent Society had been founded, in 1862, by the unforgettable Mrs. A. Clement Mosby, after whom the whole town of Mosby—including Mosby Park, Mosby High School, and the Mathilda Belcher Mosby Memorial Library—had been named, and that to be invited to join the society was deemed a great honor, and that to turn the invitation down amounted to a slap in the face of Western Missouri History and Tradition.

  Lois announced herself more interested in education. She often spoke scathingly of the local school system, including Paradise-Smithville Regional Elementary, which her daughter attended. “It’s a school good enough for these farm people, I suppose,” she said. But she made it very clear that, when the time came, Alex would be sent to a fine boarding school “in the East,” and then on to an eastern college. “Not like these farm people, who quit school at sixteen.”

  In her one sally into local politics, Lois had run for election to the local school board under the campaign slogan of “Finer Schools for Paradise.” She had been roundly defeated. Later, it turned out that Lois had lost the election in large part because of a whispering campaign that someone in the town had started to the effect that the Lanes were Communists. Somehow, from Lois’s assertions that they were atheists, from their Russian wolfhound dog, and from their Russian-named daughter, the town had got the notion that they were Reds. It was proof, Lois said bitterly when she heard about these rumors, of how ignorant the townspeople were—if proof were needed.

  Now Lois wrote plays, and later Alex would wonder whether Lois Lane, the playwright, as she oftened introduced herself, realized that she had the same name as Superman’s girlfriend, and whether that knowledge would have deterred her mother from what would become an obsession: seeing her name in lights on Broadway. Again, none of Alex’s schoolmates’ mothers were playwrights. While the other mothers toiled in their kitchens preparing meals for their families, or sat in their sewing circles hemstitching sheets and pillowslips, Alex’s mother sat at her Royal Standard typewriter in her “studio”—another foreign-sounding, vowel-ending word—which was what the spare bedroom was now called, and wrote her plays.

  Oh, Mother, Mother, Alex sometimes thought, why didn’t I have the wisdom or the sensitivity to see that you were going mad, and that Paradise was driving you mad? Or perhaps, by then, we were all going a little mad, Mother, Father, and me, in Paradise.

  All the signs were there. When people spoke of her mother now, they tapped their fingers on their temples knowingly.

  Perhaps her mother’s plays were ever-revised versions of the same play. Alex was never sure. Sometimes, in the evenings, she would hear her mother reading scenes from her plays, or play, aloud to her father after dinner, over coffee. At least one of the plays was set in Imperial Russia, during the last days of the czars, and she could remember her mother’s voice changing as she read the various characters’ lines—characters that had names like Oleg and Alexis, Ivanov, Pavel, Dmitri, Anya, Natasha, Georgi, and Katia. “Katia,” she could hear her mother’s voice reading, “we must not think of our own love now. We must think of Mother Russia!”

  So that her mother would not have to cook dinner for them, and could spend more time getting her plays in shape for the producers they would never find, her bewildered-seeming father brought home pizzas and Chinese food from Kansas City. That was another thing that was different about being the Lanes of Paradise, Missouri. They ate their dinners out of cardboard containers.

  “Alexei, my heart is breaking!”

  Meanwhile, as she entered her teens, Alex herself had become lost in a dream of her own. She had long since left Paradise, Missouri, and had gone off to New York, Paris, Madrid, and Rome, where she had become an internationally acclaimed designer of haute couture, along the lines of Gabrielle Chanel and Cristobal Balenciaga, who, at the time, she had no idea was a man.

  “Cristobal, that dress you’re wearing is divine,” she said.

  “It nowhere near matches the exquisiteness of your design, Alexandra,” replied Cristobal.

  She studied the fashions in her mother’s magazines and, with pencils and sketchpads, she designed her clothes. Back in the first grade, her best friend had become a girl named Annie Merritt, whose family lived on a nearby farm. The girls caught the school bus at the same crossroads and, it turned out, Annie Merritt had become skillful at operating her mother’s Singer electric sewing machine. Alex’s mother had a low opinion of Annie Merritt and, indeed, of the entire Merritt family, whom she considered white trash. But, now that Lois Lane had become a playwright, she no longer paid much attention to her daughter’s friendships, and the friendship lasted.

  Together, using whatever fabrics could be salvaged from attic trunks, the two girls began running up some of Alex’s designs and, in the process, Alex also learned how to operate the Singer. One day, Alex showed up at school in a black velvet bolero jacket and a black taffeta ballerina skirt of her own design, and of their joint manufacture. Looking back, Alex thought with a smile that she must have looked like a gypsy dancer. “What a weirdo get-up!” one of her classmates jeered and, pointing her index finger at her temple, drew circles in the air.

  “You wouldn’t know high fashion if you sat on it,” Alex shot back.

  By now, she knew she wasn’t popular, and, by now, she didn’t care.

  She continued to bring home straight A’s on her report card—which did nothing to add to her popularity—while the children of the farm people were for the most part content to coast along with C’s and D’s. All, that is, except for Annie Merritt. Annie Merritt, it seemed, was retarded. The kind word in Paradise for Annie Merritt was simple. The unkind word was backward. In Paradise, the word backward was always silently mouthed, not spoken, along with words like cancer, Jewish, fairy, and Communist. Annie had a sad little habit of reaching up and touching the back of her head, and Alex knew what this meant. Having heard people say that she was backward and, unable to see the back of her head in a mirror, she touched her head to see whether another face was growing there.

  But, to Alex at least, her friend had a certain wisdom and understanding of the human condition that she was able to express, not so much in words, but through looks in her deep and expressive eyes. Sometimes, in those long looks at her friend, Annie could convey whole sentences and paragraphs of meaning and intensity that only Alex could comprehend. To Alex, Annie Merritt was a kind of genius.

  Meanwhile, the town, and the school, grew used to the idea of Annie Merritt as a perennial first-grader, while the school waited patiently until Annie reached the age when the state of Missouri was no longer obligated to try to educate her. Year after year, Annie remained in first grade, struggling to memorize the English alphabet while Alex tried to coach her.

  “Why am I backward?” Annie often asked her.

  Alex composed a little rhyme for Annie to remember.

  If your nose and your navel are on the same side,

  You’ll know you’re not backward, and won’t need to hide.

  Annie Merritt’s only visible talent remained her ability to operate a sewing machine. As the y
ears went by, the first-grader’s height and bulk increased, and presently she developed large and pendulous breasts. The town was even tolerant when Annie Merritt became the first pregnant first-grader in Clay County history. After all, Annie’s mother was a member in good standing of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society.

  This happened when Alex was in the seventh grade, and, though she knew Annie faced some sort of ordeal, she remained loyal to her old friend who, by then, was known in the school as Annie Moron. As Annie’s size increased, Alex tried to fit Annie out in styles that would be most flattering to her expanding girth. Sometimes, when they worked together, Annie would reach out and seize a piece of fabric from their worktable. “Oh, I just love the feel of cotton cloth!” she would cry, rubbing it between her fingers. And then, pressing it against her nose, “And oh, I just love the smell of cotton cloth!” And, pressing the cloth against Alex’s nose, she would say, “Don’t you just love the smell of cotton cloth? Don’t you just love everything about a piece of cotton cloth?” And Alex would admit that, yes, there was something wonderful about the smell and feel of cotton cloth. But their most communicative moments came when their heads were bent silently together over Annie’s mother’s machine. In Paradise, they had become two exotics, two weirdos who would never quite fit in.

  Her seventh-grade classmates tolerated her friendship with Annie Merritt. After all, they had all started school together, and Annie was still considered somehow one of them. But, for some reason, the eighth-graders resented the friendship. The eighth-graders were an arrogant, insolent lot, secure in their superiority and knowledge that they would soon graduate and move on next year to that huge fortress out on the four-lane that was known as Clay County Regional High School.

  There were eleven students in the eighth grade that year, four boys and seven girls, and one boy, Dale Smith, was something of a leader. Dale Smith had repeated two grades and so, though he was still in the eighth grade, he was sixteen, bigger and better developed than his male classmates. It was whispered that when Dale Smith took a girl in his arms, she was powerless to resist his resonant sexuality. One afternoon Dale Smith blocked Alex’s path on the playground and wanted to know, “How come you always hang around with Annie Moron, smart-ass?”