Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  He pursed his lips. “More or less.”

  “You bastard.” I was so angry I could barely keep from screaming at him.

  Mitch shrugged. “Here or a therapist’s office. We figured this’d be more efficient.”

  “I didn’t know Bishop Hollander was invited to this meeting.”

  He merely chuckled and lifted his arm, settling it around my shoulders and pulling me into his side. And, angry as I was, I reluctantly took comfort from his strong body, his warmth. I leaned my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes for a second to breathe in Mitch’s scent.

  “Talk,” Nigel murmured, but it wasn’t directed at me. I had nothing to say.

  “I...” Gordon cleared his throat. Took a deep breath. Looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. Clearly. Decisively. “Yes. I really do want your forgiveness.”

  My heart pounded in my throat so hard I couldn’t ignore it. This was something I had never, in my wildest dreams, thought would happen, his willingness to come clean. Our daughters stared between us, their faces betraying some...fear?...of whatever Gordon had to say.

  “Gordon, no. Don’t—”

  Nigel glared at me. “Be. Quiet.”

  I shut my mouth.

  “Cassie, my first mistake was marrying you.”

  The girls gasped, but I only nodded.

  “My second was teaching the girls to be contemptuous of you, taking my anger with my father, the situation, out on you. No matter what else I did to you, that was the worst.”

  My mouth tightened, and I looked down at the table, unable to breathe because I didn’t think he’d ever realize that.

  “You,” he said, his voice going around the table. “Helene, Olivia, Paige. Clarissa.” She was terrified, and I reveled in the moment. Quite clearly, she had never thought Gordon would express any overt displeasure with her. Olivia sniffled and Paige bit her lip. Helene simply stared up over our heads. “I don’t even know what to say.”

  “It’s not important,” I murmured, now that I had gotten what I wanted, never having wanted it at all. “Gordon, I just wanted to know you’d do it, so— Leave it alone now. It’s okay.”

  He looked relieved and I knew he would’ve left it, but Helene finally spoke.

  “It’s not okay,” she whispered, her face as pale as Clarissa’s, looking down at her lap, twisting her napkin. She raised her eyes to me, then, her mouth trembling. “It is important. I need to know, even if nobody else does. Somebody is lying. Please, Mom.”

  The silence descended because I had no intention of dragging out inconsequential skeletons.

  “I never had any money,” Gordon finally said, throwing his napkin at the table and sitting up, planting his elbows on the table and lacing his fingers together in front of his mouth. “The house was never mine. It was St. James’s and he gave it to Cassie free and clear in reparation.” He paused. “I would’ve had nothing without your mother, and I punished her for it.”

  He had the entire table’s attention now. “I refused to look in a mirror and see who I was. My father knew. Everybody knew I was gay. Except me. And he didn’t want a confirmed bachelor running around, just waiting to discover his sexuality. He threatened to cut me off if I didn’t marry this...pretty little girl...with stars in her eyes.”

  I swallowed.

  “But if I did, I’d have unlimited cash flow. Of course I took the deal, but he’d lied to me and swindled your Grandfather St. James. All the money we had was your mother’s, but she was smart—brilliant. And you know how frugal your grandparents are. Well, she knew how to make money and save money—even then.

  “But I didn’t. Oh, was I pissed. Because not only did my father cut me off anyway, then it turned out my barely legal new wife was as tightfisted as her parents—and here I was, almost thirty years old, begging for money from a teenage girl I didn’t love and didn’t want, who had full and sole control over her trust, who wouldn’t give me any of it.

  “So I forged her signature and dug into her trust. And then I started getting loans in her name, mortgaging her property. She was millions of dollars in debt before she was twenty-five, and she didn’t even know it. And now I’m as broke as I ever was. But your mother isn’t.”

  I swallowed even as Clarissa stared at me as if she had never met me. “So...the house? Our trusts, school...” I looked away, unable to bear the look of devastation on her face. “Everything?” she whispered and looked back at Gordon. “But how—”

  “She gives me money to give to you,” Gordon said flatly. “She buys your birthday and Christmas presents and says they’re from me, because I don’t know you like she does, what you’ll really like. She’s always done it, from the time you were little. I bought you things, but it was what you pointed out to me. I was always with you when I bought you things, and I never paid attention to what meant most to you. Or I gave you the money to get what you wanted. She pays your tuition and school fees, funds your trusts, and lets you think I did. She pays for everything.”

  Olivia slowly buried her face in Paige’s shoulder, and Paige’s head was bowed. Helene wiped tears off her cheeks.

  Gordon looked at me, silently begging me for forgiveness and I nodded. “Why?” he asked softly. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I was exhausted,” I said, staring down into the chili I had no appetite for, clutching Mitch’s hand. “Exhausted from telling you—and them—no. Exhausted from fighting you. Exhausted from hearing the constant ‘I want’s, listening to the tantrums. Then having to listen to you bitch at me because no matter what I gave, it wasn’t enough. Five against one. So I gave up. Finally. When I had the money. You got what you wanted and I didn’t have to listen to it anymore. All I had to do was throw money at you every so often. The girls were perfectly satisfied with whatever they got as long as it came from you. So...whatever resentment you all have is...worth it. It’s worth any amount of money not to be constantly hounded for anything and everything that never pleased anybody anyway.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at my family, but I did glance up at Nigel. He’d never figured it out, and he looked back at me, abashed. The remonstrations, the lectures— I kept waiting for him to make the connection...

  “All those years,” Helene whispered. “You sewed our clothes and gardened and canned, made bread and fixed ‘poor people food,’ made our birthday presents, and we made fun of you, wouldn’t wear what you made, wouldn’t eat what you fixed—” I tensed. “We really didn’t have any money, did we?”

  I didn’t answer that.

  “Why not?” Clarissa demanded.

  “Because I spent it all,” Gordon snapped, and Clarissa shrank into herself. “Aren’t you listening? I spent every dime I made, every dime your mother had and millions she didn’t.”

  “But—” Clearly Clarissa couldn’t process this. “Where did it go?”

  He stabbed his temple with his finger. “Think about it, Clarissa. European vacations. Cruises in the Orient. Skiing in the Alps. Personal shoppers. Private schools. French and Spanish lessons. Piano lessons. Dance lessons. Being wealthy takes work, Clarissa. Acting wealthy is expensive.” He barked a humorless laugh. “You don’t remember your mother coming along on those trips, do you? No. She was trying to save money in the only way she could. She couldn’t keep up with me. You. Us. She was drowning. I left her to it, and I left her with you four as ballast. She didn’t steal my life. I stole hers.”

  My heart hurt. I had never wanted them to know this, how close we had come to destitution and that it was all Gordon’s fault.

  He cleared his throat. “The reasons I went to prison— They were true. Every last charge.”

  Paige, Olivia, Helene nearly collapsed, but Clarissa’s face reddened. “Not—”

  Gordon looked her in the face. “Yes. Even that one.”

  “Don’t blame your father,” I said hastily. “That was an aberration. Other than that, he never—”

  “Why?” Helene growled, staring at her father, her face betraying
anger I’d never suspect her of. “What did she do that would warrant...that?”

  He blanched. Looked down at the table. “She made me confront the fact that I was gay,” he mumbled. “She knew. All she wanted was for me to acknowledge it somehow. Get a nice, quiet divorce. Share custody and be at peace—as much as we could’ve been. Or stay together for you girls, and I could take a lover. So between the money and that— It...hit me where I lived and I wanted to hurt her, to break her. So I tried.”

  I could see Helene’s rage, feel it vibrating the air. She burst out of her chair, Gordon her target, but Trevor was faster, and caught her around the waist. She didn’t fight him, but my quiet, observant daughter had been pushed beyond her limits, and her chest heaved.

  I went to her. “Helene,” I murmured. I touched her, took her from Trevor, turned her to face me, away from Gordon. “Helene. Look at me, love.” She focused. Finally. “Listen to me very carefully. If he had not done that,” I said slowly to make sure she understood, “I could never have gotten out of a very bad situation. It was awful. It hurt. I was terrified and I fought, but even while it was happening, I knew it was the key to a better future for all of us. Can you understand that?” She blinked.

  “Your father was Rivington’s pawn, just like I was. He had nowhere to turn, no one to talk to. I do not blame him for that. Any of it. He gave me the only thing I could use as a weapon to get out from under your grandfather’s thumb.

  “And don’t you forget— No matter what, your father has always adored you, wanted to make you happy, and he does. He always has. Everything turned out fine.”

  “Helene,” Gordon said gently. “Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve told you that before. Now you know why.”

  “It’s done. Past. It was a good thing. Let it go.”

  I could feel the tension in the room fade as Helene’s faded, and she plopped back into her chair, helpless. She pushed her food away, laid her arms on the table and put her head down. There was nothing more I could do, so I returned to my seat, at Mitch’s side, glad to have his solid body against mine.

  Then I noticed Clarissa’s dead-on stare. “But prostitution?”

  I shrugged and looked away.

  “You have an MBA!”

  “Think about that a minute, Clarissa! I could only get my MBA afterwards, when I had the money and time to do it. Otherwise, I had no marketable skills and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I could market that one, either. I wanted to be home for you,” I said, only now willing to admit to myself how deeply I resented that Gordon had the life I’d wanted. “I didn’t want to be like the other mothers—the ones who hated me, by the way—who went off and left their children with nannies.” I paused. “I guess nannies would’ve done a better job raising you.”

  “No!” she yelled and pounded the table as she stood. “There’s got to be another reason.” She pointed at me. “You can’t tell me you did it because you were bored and you can’t tell me you did it for the money and you can’t tell me you did it because you wanted to be home with us or because Dad—Gordon—raped you. Those might be true, but that’s not all of it. Why?”

  * * * * *

  Hadassah

  I looked Clarissa in the eye, and stared at her until she sat back down, slowly, hypnotized. Of all of my girls, she would be the only one who could suss out the inconsistencies and discern something deeper.

  “I was turned into a whore the minute Rivington figured out I had a crush on your father,” I said flatly. “I was fifteen. Then I was sold just after my eighteenth birthday, and your grandfathers were my pimps. It took me years to realize that.”

  Gordon slid down in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Nigel patted his shoulder.

  “So you did do it for the money?” Paige asked, more fascinated than horrified.

  “No. My father bankrupted himself trying to get me out of that mess. Nigel bailed me the rest of the way out and kept me afloat until I could earn some real money—and I paid every bit of my own debt back to him.”

  “Then why?!” Clarissa cried.

  Then silence descended and became complete. Mitch still held my hand, tightened his grip when I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t bear to look up at all of these people looking at me as if I were some pathetic specimen in a high school science lab. I’d made my choices deliberately. Explaining why I’d made them didn’t make them any more valid; in fact, it cheapened them. It made me look like a victim and I wasn’t that.

  But I would tell them, because I had no other way out of this knot than to slice it clean through. I took a deep breath.

  “To make it official. To command my own price. To be in the power position. To have some way to exact my revenge.”

  Their expressions let me know they would never understand unless I spelled it out.

  “You know,” I said conversationally, “the women’s studies courses I had to take in college were very useful, although my professors would be the first to condemn me for what I did with all that rhetoric. You know what I learned? I learned that concubines, courtesans, mistresses—” I speared Clarissa with a look, and she gulped, but wouldn’t look away. “The smart ones, anyway. The elite, expensive ones. They’re the only women throughout history who ever had real power.

  “You all took comparative religion, right? Bible as literature? Something like that? Notice: Half the women in the Old Testament traded sex for retribution and restitution. Power. You know the story of Esther, Queen of Jews, don’t you? Saved her people from extermination?”

  The girls nodded vaguely.

  “Do you think she saved her people because she was a pretty piece of art and a clever conversationalist at dinner parties? No. She saved them by fucking the king so well he couldn’t get out of bed, much less think straight. She whispered things in his ear and she pulled his strings and she pressed his buttons just right. Voilà. She got him to do what she needed done. She got a man executed. She wasn’t powerless by a long shot.

  “But I was. Money alone caged me. I didn’t have the education to work my way up somewhere because I wasn’t allowed to get an education when I was young. I sat through those classes—ten years older than all the other students—and realized that the name of the thing I didn’t have, what I needed, was ‘power.’ And if I wanted any, I’d have to get it the way it’s been gotten for centuries—through sex. Paid sex.”

  Clarissa flinched.

  “I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t like it,” I continued calmly, looking around the table. The only people who looked away were my family members, not Mitch’s. Indeed, Mitch’s children were paying rapt attention. They’d probably never thought of Queen Esther that way, either. No church in its right mind would teach the story with such a spin, especially since the text was short on editorial comment.

  “Or that I regret it. I don’t. I enjoyed myself for the most part. I had good sex. I made lots of money doing something I liked and I was good at. I made a friend or two. I gave you good educations and made sure you had the money and freedom to leave me and go conquer the world if you wanted to. And I kept you all in the high style to which you would have refused to become unaccustomed. I got the power and education I needed.

  “Only then could I get the kind of job I always knew I’d love, given the chance. But that job alone still wouldn’t give me as much power as fucking powerful men gave me.

  “You want to know how I broke Rivington? I’ll tell you. I made sure to acquire a client, a man he had wronged, and I played that man mercilessly until he did what I wanted him to do—and he never knew. Because he was too stupid to know I was manipulating him. He’s not the only one I did it to, either. I cut a swath through both sides of Central Park, any man or woman who stood in my way after the night your father raped me— They were going to answer for it.

  “If they testified against me in divorce court. If they spread rumors about what a bitch I was to your father. If I overheard them say that I deserved what I got. If
they told the police they thought I was lying about everything, the rape, the fraud. Anyone who made it more difficult for me to get out of my situation— I took them all down. I’m one of the most powerful women in America because I know where the bodies are buried and people fear me. That is precisely why I can have the kind of job I love. So if any of you have any inclination to pity me, don’t.”

  “Mom,” Olivia whined.

  “No, Olivia,” I snapped. “I won’t have it. I set out with a specific goal in mind and that was the way I chose to accomplish it. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us this?” Helene asked from the shelter of her arms, her voice muffled.

  I stared at her, hurt for her and with her, for what I’d done to her by keeping her in the dark. And all my righteous indignation fled.

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” I said softly. “All I wanted to do was marry your father and have his babies and be your mommy, and then when— After that, all I wanted was for you to have two parents who loved you and took care of you, which we tried to do.”

  “Why did you stay with him so long then?”

  “She didn’t have a choice,” Gordon muttered. “Her parents, my father—I—didn’t give her a choice. She was bound and gagged—” He paused. “Raped. And she did better than anybody else in that position could’ve done. Should’ve been able to do.”

  Gordon was miserable, looking to the girls for forgiveness or at least the hope of it in the future, but they wouldn’t—couldn’t—look at him. He’d lost them. It was my final revenge, one I had deliberately never taken.

  I knew it would be too bitter for them all to swallow.

  I had to speak, although I didn’t know what to say. “I— You love your father, and he loves you so much. I couldn’t take that away from you, from him. I can bear your contempt. He can’t, and he does not deserve it. Please don’t let this—”

  In a flurry of motion, I found my lap filled with a twenty-four-year-old girl who’d wrapped herself around me and was, at that moment, sobbing into my neck. “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Mama...”