The End of Normal

by Stephanie Madoff Mack

  “You’re crazy, just enjoy it!” I urged Mark. I hated the way he punished himself for what his father had done, caving in so readily to the popular sentiment that if you were a Madoff, you had no right to relax, or have fun, or feel anything but shame and remorse.

  “If I want to go fishing, I’ll just go with my friend Mike,” Mark replied.

  Every morning, he would drive down to the gas station/tackle shop and buy a bucketful of live eels to use as bait for the day. Standing on the beach in his cargo shorts and T-shirt, he would cast for sharks, striped bass, and bluefish. He would proudly grill his catch, eating even the bluefish, which I found disgusting. He became something of a local attraction for other beachgoers when he would reel in the four-to-five-foot young brown sharks, or duskies. People would come running to snap pictures before he threw them back, still thrashing. Even he had to laugh: Now we had beach paparazzi. None of them had any idea who Mark was. Once they’d seen his catch, though, the summer renters would never go back in the water.

  As much as he loved New York, Mark just seemed to fare better out of the city after his father became Villain of the Year. I had noticed it early on, when I forced him to go with me to New Jersey to see a Dancing with the Stars stage show. Mark was a devoted lover of serious theater who had been courted to be on the boards of the Lincoln Center and Public theaters; I was an unabashed fan of anything campy. We had come to a reasonable compromise: I would suffer through his six-hour Shakespeare productions if he would go to Cher and Madonna concerts with me. (He drew the line at Justin Timberlake.) When the Dancing with the Stars tour came our way a few weeks after Bernie’s arrest, I ordered tickets for the nearest venue—an arena in Newark—and made plans for a big date night. It was hysterical. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. We got lost driving through the wilds of New Jersey and spent most of the evening just laughing. It was sweet and delicious, like gulping fresh air into your lungs after escaping a big wildfire. Mark swore me to secrecy: “You can never tell anyone I agreed to go to that.” We laughed even harder.

  Nantucket wasn’t a complete escape from notoriety, though. One morning after we first arrived, I woke up and headed out for a run. In the neighborhood, it’s local custom for people to paint their family name on a large boulder at the foot of their gravel driveways. At the end of our driveway that day, I noticed that someone had vandalized our boulder with a pen, so it now read Made off w/ everyone’s $. I was pissed and I was scared, remembering the death threats around Christmastime. I decided to paint it over with a meaningful message of my own.

  “Wait! Don’t look, don’t look yet!” I called to Mark as I got to work. I knew he was worried that I was painting FUCK YOU in big block letters—a message he himself seriously contemplated having tattooed across his back. I’ve always been big on showy threats but weak on follow-through. Mark hovered warily. Finally I was done, and revealed my masterpiece: I had painted the boulder white and then used black paint to re-create the tattoo I had recently gotten on my forearm. It was the Chinese symbol for courage, copied off a leather-strapped bracelet Mark had given me that spring. Mark agreed that my Courage boulder was cool. I made the mistake of sending a photo to my stepdad.

  “Get rid of that rock! What are you doing?” Marty shot back. He was worried that I was just going to draw more attention to the house, and I realized he had a point. But it had felt good, for that one afternoon, to push back against the nameless, faceless haters.

  Out on my surfboard, no one knew or cared who I was. There was a fun camaraderie among surfers, and I reveled in the anonymity as I bantered with the college kids recounting their drinking escapades the night before. I would wait for a wave to surge beneath me, to feel the way it tugged backward ever so slightly, my signal to scramble to my feet, the nearby instructors shouting encouragement: “Pop up, pop up, pop up!” Getting up was always harder than staying up, but once I was standing, the wave was mine. Giddy and proud, I would ride it to shore, where my husband hung back, applauding my bravado.

  It seemed like we were always in different places that summer, drifting apart then briefly coming back together, only to drift again. The tension would sometimes whip between us like a live wire. I was still intent on moving, and loved to browse real-estate sites and tour houses for sale online, imagining us snug and happy in the professionally staged family room photos, playing with the dog and grilling burgers in the pretty backyards, tucking the kids in at night in bedrooms where other children had wished the moon good night and then grown up. Our Mercer Street apartment had too many soured memories now.

  “I’m sick of this. I can’t live like this anymore,” I screamed at Mark during one fight there. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m over it!”

  I thought my suggestion of moving to Greenwich would please him, and I had dragged him out one weekend when we were there to just drive by a house near the one we owned. I wanted to sell the old house for someplace that would belong to the new Mark and Stephanie, with no family history or Madoff ghosts attached. I was trying to show Mark that I wanted a life, and I wanted a life with him. I prattled on about how we would save money by not having to put our kids in private school, and how we would move back to the city once they were in college. I wasn’t just looking to the immediate future; I was fast-forwarding eighteen years.

  Mark angrily accused me of being passive-aggressive. I was getting tired of walking on eggshells with him. I never blamed him for the mess we were in, but it still pained him to see me get upset about it, and I could never bring up anything about the case. If he introduced the topic, I could respond, but I had to read his mood carefully and know when to retreat. When I could no longer bottle in my frustration or anger, and blew, Mark would react defensively.

  “Well, how do you think I feel?” he would snarl. “I’ve lost my parents. I’ve lost my life. I’ve lost my job and I’ll never get another one. You think you’ve got it bad?” He understood that I, too, had a right to be upset, but he always insisted that he had a right to be more upset. That was the saddest part to me, that we had somehow become two separate refugees in this disaster zone. Even in our worst moments, though, I didn’t want to leave Mark. I wanted to find him, reclaim him, and restore us. What we had in each other was too valuable to forfeit.

  I know Mark was frightened, because he was seeing an assertive, fiercer side of me he had never seen until that summer. I was beginning to stand up for myself and express my frustrations and anger more clearly, instead of just whining or complaining. Both Mark and I had been seeing therapists for several months by then, and I could feel myself shedding the put-up-with-it-and-shut-up girlfriend persona I had been stuck in for so long. Mark’s therapist was more of a life coach, and Mark used his sessions to strategize about finding a new career for himself. In my therapist’s office, the focus at first was all about Bernie. I wanted to know what made him tick, and how he had fooled us all for so long. Was he mentally ill? A narcissist? A sociopath? My therapist finally theorized that he showed signs of vertical split personality, meaning he could essentially live a double life, disavowing the repugnant one in much the same way as a sexual pervert or binge eater might. I realized that I had some unfinished business with Bernie.

  “I’m going to write him a letter,” I told Mark as we unpacked groceries one day in our Nantucket kitchen. I was deeply, morbidly, curious about jail, and wanted to know Bernie was suffering. I wanted details. I wanted to know how cold and uncomfortable the cot was after a lifetime of 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton linens and European goosedown comforters. I wondered what he woke up thinking. I wanted to hear how isolated and lonely he felt, how bored he was, how grim the rest of his life would be. And most of all, I wanted to make Bernie Madoff suffer some more.

  “If you do this, this is your decision. I don’t want anything to do with it,” Mark said. Glued to his computer again, he had come across a jailhouse interview Bernie had given some lawyers re
cently. “I don’t give a shit about my sons,” they had quoted him as saying.

  While the kids were napping one sunny afternoon, I went up to my room, closed the door, and took out a notepad. I wanted us to be in Bernie’s mind, in full Technicolor, because I thought it would be painful to sit in his jail cell and think about the life he had thrown away, to hear about everything he was missing out on. I carefully crafted a letter full of news about the beautiful summer we were having in Nantucket, describing Mark fishing on the beach and Audrey building her sand castles. I noted how fast the grandson he had never met—and never would—was growing. I tucked it in an envelope along with a drawing of a spider that Audrey had done, thinking the picture would tug at his heartstrings. I mailed it off, feeling gratifyingly vindictive.

  Within a few days, a three-page reply came back in Bernie’s loopy backhand. He was delighted to hear from me. He compared prison to a college campus, with “lovely lawns and trees.” He lived in a dorm with twenty-four other inmates who all treated him with respect and admiration, calling him “Uncle Bernie” or “Mr. Madoff.”

  “I am quite the celebrity and treated like a Mafia Don,” he boasted. He had “loads of friends,” and the staff was sweet and considerate. There was never any violence or fighting, and prison was actually “much safer than walking the streets of New York.” He was pumping iron, and had plenty of recreational classes and activities to choose from. Ruth had come for a four-hour visit, and they spoke by phone daily.

  My plan had backfired.

  Over the next eighteen months, though, I was oddly compelled to sporadically keep up this bizarre correspondence. I had become trapped in my own mind game. Even if Bernie couldn’t see through me, I enjoyed my own cruelty. When a self-proclaimed mistress of Bernie’s published a tell-all memoir, I taunted him about it. He denied the affair, describing the supposed paramour as a business acquaintance who had propositioned him and turned stalker after he shunned her advances. “Ruth believes me,” Bernie asserted. That much I could easily accept as the truth: Bernie Madoff had swindled thousands of people out of billions of dollars, but surely Ruth had been his biggest sucker of all. The others made the mistake of giving him their money; she had given him her life.

  The purported affair was one of the few Bernie-related topics Mark and I could safely discuss over a glass of wine without Mark getting upset or shutting down. When the book had surfaced, we followed the gossip and ultimately concluded it was a hoax. For one thing, we couldn’t see when Bernie would have had any window of opportunity to cheat, if he had been so inclined. He and Ruth had always been joined at the hip, save for a single trip Ruth took to South Africa to go on safari with friends. Bernie had refused to go, saying it was because he wouldn’t be able to get reliable cell phone reception there. He preferred vacations on the French Riviera. For a man with gorgeous yachts, a private jet, and unlimited funds, Bernie had very little curiosity about the world. His lack of culture was rather startling. He could be sitting in a Michelin-starred restaurant featuring the finest cuisine, and Ruth would be anxiously scanning the menu for him, fretting loudly, “What can Bernie eat, is there anything Bernie will eat?” World-class kitchens would have to whip up a pizza margherita, pasta with a simple meat sauce, or a steak without a potato. (Ruth’s disapproval of carbs often extended to the ones on Bernie’s plate.) Prison fare no doubt suited him perfectly.

  That August, Bernie’s chief lieutenant and longtime protégé, Frank DiPascali, pleaded guilty to ten criminal counts in connection with the Ponzi scheme. He was looking at 125 years in prison. The news unleashed fresh media speculation about indictments and arrests yet to come; as usual, Mark and Andy were dragged through the mud, even though both had cooperated fully with the investigation and nothing linked them to their father’s criminal enterprise. Mark went into another tailspin and called my stepdad in a panic. Every time the feds arrested an accomplice of Bernie’s, there was a chance he or she would attempt to barter for a reduced sentence by falsely implicating Mark and Andy. Intellectually, Mark understood Marty’s repeated assurances that it takes more than a pointed finger to lock a cell door. There had to be corroborative evidence, which there wasn’t, so Mark should stop worrying. Besides, all the people arrested were seventeenth-floor employees who had never worked with Mark (he and Andy ran their business from the nineteenth floor). That said, the anti-Madoff hysteria was tremendous, and public pressure on the authorities investigating the fraud had to be intense. The fear of being unjustly accused was always in Mark’s gut. It tortured him.

  Frank DiPascali was the prize catch in the government’s net that summer, and reports that he was cooperating with investigators—unlike Bernie, who had clammed up after confessing—fueled the media speculation that he had something big to offer. Bernie and his accomplices had spent years masterfully deceiving rational, intelligent people. They were convincing liars. What if one of them decided to concoct damning stories about Mark in exchange for leniency? The speculation and Mark’s paranoid nightmare both proved for naught: There was never any indication that DiPascali had anything bad to say about Mark or his brother.

  Mark, Andy, and their uncle Peter were all named in a suit the court-appointed trustee had filed, alleging they should have detected the fraud and accusing them of living large off the fortune Bernie stole.

  By the time we were packing up to leave Nantucket and head home to Mercer Street at the end of August, Mark’s mood had shifted yet again. He had been contemplating ways to get back to work all summer, and he had hatched a plan he was eager to put into action: He was going to put his Internet obsession to good use and compile a daily insider newsletter about the real-estate industry. He had discussed the proposal with friends and potential clients, and felt confident that it would be well received. He would be able to put his expertise to use and bring in a small income. I was excited about my career, too: I had been accepted to graduate school and was taking two courses in the Child Life program at Bank Street College of Education starting in the fall. We arrived back in Manhattan with high hopes. We had barely unpacked before the mudslide hit us full force again.

  Mark and I went out one afternoon to take Nicholas and Grouper for a walk. Mark was pushing Nick in his stroller when a strange woman rushed him with a video camera pointed in his face.

  “Mr. Madoff! Mr. Madoff!” she screeched. “Are you scared you’re going to lose your home?”

  I spun around and covered her camera lens with my right hand and shoved her away with my left. She backed into a brick wall and started screaming at me. “Ma’am, this is my personal property! You have no right to touch my personal property!” Mark was already running away, crossing Broadway, and leaving me behind with the baby and the dog. I hurried back up the street, my hand throbbing, my temper smoking. I left the baby and Grouper with our doorman and tore back out again. I was going to go after that hideous bitch. I would hunt her down. Maybe all those boxing lessons I took to lose my baby weight hadn’t been such a good idea after all, because I was ready to start swinging. As soon as I got outside, I spotted the camerawoman across the street, thanking the attendant in the garage where we parked our car. She obviously had paid him to tip her off about when we returned from Nantucket. I marched up and got right in her face.

  “What a pathetic job you have, chasing after a family walking a baby! Is this what you like to do? Do you enjoy this? Do you find satisfaction from this job?”

  She blanched, then threatened to sue me.

  “Yeah, well, get in line,” I replied before turning away, knowing that if I stayed, I just might punch her. Her freelance footage of me pushing the camera away later turned up on CBS.

  Back home, Mark was waiting, chagrined.

  “Why’d you leave me there?” I demanded.

  “Because they want me, not you,” he said. He thought she would chase after him if he ran; he hadn’t counted on me going all Rambo.

&n
bsp; That fall, our marriage was also engulfed by the scandal. Mark and his legal team wanted me to hire a matrimonial attorney to protect my marital assets when scores of devastated victims who were wiped out by Bernie began filing civil suits to try to recover some of their losses, often naming Mark and Andy as defendants along with their disgraced father. I asked a friend for a referral, and she sent me to Nancy Chemtob, a stylish and wickedly funny blonde who was considered tops in her field. Mark was standing in the kitchen when I placed the call late one afternoon. The watchdog receptionist didn’t put me through, of course, but took my name. Fifteen seconds later, Nancy rang back. Mark and I both laughed at how quickly the Madoff name made lawyers jump these days. We met a couple of days later.

  “Stephanie,” she began with typical bluntness, “what percent of you wants to get a divorce?” I didn’t hesitate.

  “Zero percent.” I just needed Nancy to help me hold on to what was rightfully mine. But the presence of a divorce lawyer for any reason spells trouble, and while it may have been the right legal strategy, it was painful for Mark and me. Nancy met with Mark as well, and twice she told him that I had no desire or plans to divorce him.

  “You hired a divorce lawyer!” he would rail.

  “Because your lawyers told me to!” I reminded him.