The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

He looks at her narrowly. “Georgette,” he says, “do I need to remind you that the collection belongs to me?”

  “But it was to be for my—”

  “You want to get into it with me again, Georgette? Is that what you want? If you want to get into it with me again, Georgette, I’m ready.”

  She bites her lip. “Well, maybe we could offer them part of the collection,” she says.

  “Okay. Call her and tell her that.”

  “What if I told her we’re just thinking of making a gift?”

  “That’s okay, too. String ’em along. Get ’em excited. The more excited they get, the higher the appraisal they’ll put on whatever I decide to give ’em. Remember, it’s whatever I decide. So call Carol Liebling and tell her I’ll be discussing the terms of the gift with my lawyers in the morning.”

  “Of the possible gift.”

  “Okay. Call her.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Carol, darling, it’s Georgette.”

  “Yes, Georgette …”

  “I just wanted to let you know, darling, that Truck and I are thinking of perhaps giving some of our porcelain collection to the Met. Truck wants to talk to his lawyers about it.”

  “Georgette, how wonderful!”

  “Just thinking of perhaps giving some of it, you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “But meanwhile, Truck is absolutely wild about the idea of us giving a coming-out party for Linda, and whatsername, your daughter.”

  “Anne.”

  “Right. I’ve never seen him so mad for an idea as he is about this one, darling. When I mentioned it, he went absolutely ape! So we’ve got to move ahead with our plans as fast as we can, darling. If there’s the slightest glitch in our plans, Truck will be furious.…”

  “Cory?” Carol says. “It’s Carol. Guess what? The Van Degans are now considering giving at least part of their Oriental collection to the museum. Mr. Van Degan and his lawyers are going to meet to work out terms for a gift proposal. I should have those terms to present at our next meeting. What do you think of that?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll be God-damned.”

  “Yes—me, of all people. Did I get further than Mrs. Astor?”

  Carol never knew Noah’s father, who died not long after Carol and Noah met, but she will never forget the afternoon Noah took her to meet his mother. The year was 1975, and they had been secretly married, that morning, at City Hall. That was how much in love they’d been. That was how young they were. Holding hands, they ran out into Chambers Street in the rain, shouting, “We did it! We did it! Hallelujah, and praise the Lord!”

  But now, less than an hour later, they were both very nervous.

  Carol had been overwhelmed by the vast apartment at 1000 Park Avenue, two full floors at the top of the building—the black and white marble entrance foyer, the double staircase curving upward with its banisters upholstered in red damask (this was before the apartment was divided horizontally in half to accommodate Cyril), the pleated rosewood paneling, the portrait, by John Singer Sargent, of Noah’s grandfather, Dr. Marcus Sachs, gazing austerely from the library wall above the fireplace. On the entrance floor there was a ballroom, seldom used nowadays, Noah explained, that was two stories high with a stained glass ceiling that depicted Orion in pursuit of the Pleiades, with its chandelier in a dust bag and little gilt chairs lining the walls. The entrance to the ballroom was flanked by a ladies’ cloakroom and a gentlemen’s cloakroom and a smoking room. In the room called the Music Room, two Steinway concert grand pianos stood back to back in a bay window with a view of Central Park, while a golden harp stood in one corner. The lighted picture frames in this room, Noah told her, contained original Mozart manuscript scores in the composer’s own hand. In illuminated glass cases were a quartet of stringed instruments—two violins, a viola, and a cello—signed by Stradivarius, and the cello was the last one the master had made, in 1725, known as La Belle Blonde. There was even a room called the Telephone Room, with nothing in it but a chair, a table, a pink pad of crested paper for making notes, and a silver bowl filled with freshly sharpened pencils. And, of course, a telephone.

  And then there was the major domo in his swallowtail coat trimmed with gold braid—the initial L embroidered at the cuffs—who addressed Carol’s new husband as “Master Noah,” and backed out of the room, saying, “I will notify Madame that you are here.” He was not to be called a butler, Noah whispered, because he supervised two footmen, along with the housekeeping and kitchen staff. And there were the little uniformed maids, in white lace caps and lace-trimmed aprons, who appeared across long vistas of open doorways, scurrying about unnecessarily wielding feather dusters against nonexistent cobwebs, and needlessly plumping up fat cushions in chairs that looked as though no one ever sat in them. To Carol, the whole apartment looked like a Donald Oenslager film set. And then, suddenly, Noah’s mother appeared in one of the doorways—an immense woman, or so she seemed to Carol, dressed in black, with three strands of large Oriental pearls across her bosom.

  “Mom, I want you to meet my wife,” Noah said.

  “Well!” she said, standing there, looking Carol up and down.

  Carol waited for Hannah Liebling to say more, but when she didn’t, Carol stepped toward her and held out her hand. “I’m so happy to meet you, Mrs. Liebling,” Carol said.

  Noah’s mother’s hand brushed against hers. “So,” she said, turning to Noah, “I am being presented with a fait accompli. What happened—did you get her pregnant?”

  Noah’s face flushed. “Mom,” he said, “when you get to know Carol, when you see how bright and sweet she is, you’re going to love her every bit as much as I do.”

  “That,” she said, “would be patently impossible, since you are a man and I am a woman. Unless you take me for a lesbian. I dislike surprises.”

  “Mom, we’re just so very much in love. We—”

  She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. She turned to Carol and, speaking to her for the first time, said, “My son is a very stubborn young man. He was stubborn as a child, and he continues to have a very stubborn nature. He is also impetuous, headstrong, impulsive. If you stay married to him, you will learn all these things about him. I hope it works out, for your sake, and if it does, perhaps you can do something to curb this stubborn, willful nature of his. Do you think you can make him grow up, young woman? I wish you luck. Dine with me tonight at eight o’clock. Just the two of us. You and I have matters to discuss.” Then she was gone.

  “She likes you,” he whispered to her as they left the apartment.

  “She does? I got the impression she hated me.”

  “She wants you for dinner,” he said. “That’s an important sign.”

  Later, Carol would joke that she’d spent her wedding night with her new husband’s mother. Hannah Liebling’s dining room walls were covered with pale blue watered silk, and the long table was lighted with as many as forty candles. At one end of the room hung a portrait of Hannah Liebling as a younger woman, much slenderer and looking almost pretty with wide blue eyes, and at the other end hung Jules’s portrait, older, with a down-drooping mustache, with one hand inserted partway into the pocket of a double-breasted vest. The two footmen served them, removing service plates between each course and placing each new course in front of both women simultaneously while, standing just to the left of the kitchen door, the majordomo, whose name was Albert, announced the courses in French. “Ris de veau à la mode de Calais,” he said as the footmen, each carrying a single plate, made their entrance from the pantry. With each course, Carol noted, the china pattern changed. “Pêche flambée au rhum.”

  Hannah Liebling did most of the talking, seemingly heedless of the servants who padded about the room on slippered feet.

  “Did you marry my son for his money?” she asked Carol.

  “No,” Carol said.

  “Good, because he hasn’t any,” Hannah said. “Someday he will, of c
ourse. Someday he will control this whole company, but that day will not necessarily come soon. At the moment he is just one of our salaried employees. He owns no stock in us at all. The two of you will be living on a fixed income.”

  “I understand all that,” Carol said. “Noah has explained his situation to me.”

  “If you didn’t marry him for his money, what did you marry him for?”

  “Because we happen to be very much in love!”

  “Love,” Hannah said. “I was in love once, or thought I was. I found love to be not a very useful experience, even though the young man was—very attractive, and even rather famous at the time. Fortunately for me, there were wiser heads around me who were able to explain to me the unwisdom of my ways. Why did you choose to get married in this fashion? By running off and getting married without telling anyone?”

  “Frankly, it was because my mother disapproves of Noah—on religious grounds.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “My mother is a very devout Catholic. In some ways, almost too devout.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father—disappeared when I was a little girl. I don’t really remember him at all. I was an only child, brought up by my mother with the help of a parish priest. My mother has always worked.”

  “I work, too, you know.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Liebling.”

  “And I suppose you thought—I suppose you both thought—that I might disapprove of you.”

  “That thought crossed our minds,” Carol said.

  “Of course it did. It was right to cross your minds. So that’s why you ran off and got married like this.”

  “We decided to get married first. And to face any disapproval on our parents’ part later, when it was too late for anybody to try to stop us.”

  “Of course. You decided to present me with a fait accompli. I can understand that. Years ago, I considered that possibility, too, though, as I say, wiser heads prevailed. Let me say that I don’t disapprove of you personally. But I do disapprove of mixed marriages. I have seen too many of them that did not work out. My own was to have been a mixed marriage. I know now that it would have not worked out. Of course, I was much younger than you at the time.”

  “Noah and I discussed all this. We decided from the beginning that things like this would never matter to us.”

  “Because you were so much … in love. Tell me, do you think that with great wealth comes great social position?”

  “Frankly, I never thought that much about it,” Carol said.

  “Then let me tell you that it does not. We are very rich. We have been called the richest Jewish family in America, and perhaps we even are. And yet, socially, the Lieblings are riffraff. That is a fact of life you will have to face now that you are married to my son. My husband made a fortune, but he made it in booze. Don’t give me that skeptical look—I’m telling you the truth! The polite term is ‘the distilled spirits industry.’ My husband disliked polite terms. He called an undertaker an undertaker, not a funeral director. He called a garbage man a garbage man, not a sanitation engineer. His money was made in booze. This is not a glamorous business, or even a respectable one. It is not like banking, insurance, or the law. My husband was called, first, a bootlegger, and then he was called an ex-bootlegger, even though he never was either of those things. It’s been said that my husband had people killed. Well, plenty of people were killed in this business, but my husband never killed anyone. It’s been said, too, that my husband had connections with the Mob. Well, while my husband was manufacturing booze in Canada, Meyer Lansky and Al Capone were the people you had to deal with if you were going to supply the American demand for booze on the other side of Lake Erie, and I personally found both Mr. Lansky and Mr. Capone to be perfect gentlemen. Mr. Lansky, in particular, is a gentleman of the old school. He still sends me cards at Christmas and on my birthday. But all those things are held against the Lieblings here in New York. As far as New York society is concerned, the Lieblings don’t rank much higher than the garbage man. I hope you realize all this, and don’t think that because you’re married to Noah Liebling you’re going to be asked to Mrs. Astor’s house to tea. Because you won’t be.”

  “Noah has explained all this to me,” Carol said.

  “Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy you social acceptance—not in a city like New York, or anywhere else, for that matter. In New York, you’ll discover that you’ve married into a disreputable family, and that’s that. And then there’s the fact that we’re Jewish. We’re secular Jews, as it happens, but in the outside world nobody knows what that means. We’re still Jews. You’ll hear it said that there’s no anti-Semitism in this city. Baloney. It’s there, all right. It’s just not polite to talk about it. It’s not just all the clubs that won’t take in Jews. There are law firms that don’t want Jewish partners. There are banks that don’t want Jewish officers. There are insurance companies that won’t promote Jews to anything higher than a clerk. There are schools that only want a certain number of Jewish children. There are apartment houses that don’t want Jewish tenants. This building used to be one of them. When my husband and I bought this apartment, there was at least one Christian family here that was particularly unhappy about it. They made a point of moving out the same day we moved in. Their moving vans pulled up to the curb just when ours did. It was not very considerate of them, of course, because it caused a traffic jam for blocks in all directions, but considerateness was not on their minds. They had a point to make, and the point was that they would not tolerate a Jewish family living, even for a minute, under the same leaky roof. Later, I overheard someone saying that this building had ‘gone Jewish.’

  “You’ll hear that there’s no anti-Semitism here because this city needs its Jews too much. They say that without the Jews there’d be no culture in New York because the Jews support the theater, the opera, the symphony, the ballet, and the museums and so forth. This may be true, but it’s not necessarily a good sign for the Jews, and I’ll tell you why. You see, the Christian community regards us as a kind of service class. They’ll go to a Jewish doctor, use a Jewish stockbroker, shop from a Jewish merchant, hire a Jewish lawyer—particularly if it’s for something that could be ugly and expensive, like a messy divorce. My husband used to say that the Christians used the Jews to clean up their messes for them, and he had a point.

  “You’ll hear it said that Hitler was a fluke, and there could never be another Holocaust. I don’t believe it. Have people forgotten about the czarist pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, the destruction of the First Temple? Throughout history the Jews have tended to become too important, to become too needed by the Christian community, too necessary. They’ve seemed to get too big for their britches. When that happens, there’s resentment, there’s anger, there’s jealousy. A reaction sets in, and Jews are accused of poisoning the wells. Then all you need is someone who can organize that reaction, and you have another Adolf Hitler. Sometimes when I hear people say how much New York needs its big Jewish population, I think—thank God they don’t need us even more! Don’t laugh! I am not being funny!

  “And what do they need the Lieblings for? They need us for booze. Christians have a lot of guilt about booze, though Lord knows they knock back enough of the stuff. They don’t like to admit that they need us to get them plastered at the country club. And so they blame us for drunk drivers, for the Bowery bums, and for all the winos on skid row. My husband had a theory. He used to say that Christians secretly believed that booze ought to be free, that it was part of their birthright, and that if drink and drugs were free there’d be no more crime, and poor people would stay home where they belonged and not go out causing trouble for the rest of us. Lord knows, at least once a week I get a call from some Christian charity asking if we’ll give them free booze for some party. When I say no, they accuse us of being greedy. Then they ask if we’ll give them liquor at cost. When I say no to that, they think it’s because we don’t
want them to find out how little the real cost is, and how enormous our markup is. In this business, there’s no way to win.

  “A few years ago, our company ran an ad at Christmastime, urging drinkers not to overindulge in booze during the holiday season. That ad created a big stir, and we’ve repeated it every year since. The ad wasn’t even my husband’s idea, but he got all the credit for it, and for a while it even began to seem as though the Lieblings might be beginning to be accepted as respectable members of the New York business community. For a while. It didn’t last. The stigma of the booze business was too great. There’s just no way to overcome it, and my husband and I gave up trying.

  “Meanwhile, there’s a group of fine old German-Jewish families in this city. At least they think they’re a group of fine old families. But the Lieblings will never be accepted by that crowd. My family, the Sachses, were a part of that. I’m sure Noah has told you about my father. He was Dr. Marcus Sachs, a famous educator—part of the service class, of course. He had his own school, the Sachs Collegiate Institute, and he turned out boys who were ready for Harvard by age fourteen. Discipline was his secret. That’s Father’s portrait over the mantel in the library. He was widely admired and respected, and he and Mama had dinner at the White House. But I lost all that status when I married Jules Liebling. Even my Sachs relatives look down their noses at me now, because I was forced to marry so far below my station in life.”

  “Forced to marry, Mrs. Liebling?”

  “Chose to marry, then. Or, let’s say that at the time I had no other choices. I’m sure you’ve heard it said that the Jews have always had to live in two communities. But with the Lieblings it is a little different. Outside, we have the Christian community. Then we have the Jewish community. Then we have just ourselves, this small family, isolated from both communities, not a part of either one. Just us. That’s why I care so much about who marries into this family. As Lieblings, people come to us for money but nothing else. When Noah takes over the company, as he will someday, people will come to you for money, but for absolutely nothing else. You will probably find it a rather lonely feeling, being Mrs. Noah Liebling. But if you are going to stay married to Noah Liebling, you will have to get used to it. I am telling you all this because these are what I call the Liebling facts of life. I understand you are from a small town in New Hampshire, where you certainly cannot have experienced anything like what you will experience as Mrs. Noah Liebling. In a way I feel sorry for you. I hope you’re up to it. There are other small problems that go with it. Noah’s brother is a pansy. His sister tried to work in films, and then began marrying unsuitable men. No, being Mrs. Noah Liebling will be no bed of roses for you. It won’t be easy. That’s why I feel it’s necessary to warn you of all the problems you will have to face. I hope you understand.”