The Rothman Scandal (20 page)

Sometimes, in the old days at “Rothmere,” when he was in a mellow mood, Ho Rothman would sit after dinner with a brandy and a cigar, and recall his scattered memories of the Old Country.

He was called Itzhak in those days, and if the family used any special surname, he had forgotten what it was. But he remembered that it was as Itzhak that he was told, when he was eight years old, with much weeping, that the family had grown too large for the little house—there seemed to be a new baby born every year—and that he must be sent somewhere else to live. Where did the babies come from? he used to wonder. “From the river,” his new mother would tell him. Periodically, it seemed, she would go down to the river and scoop out a new baby. He remembered asking her why, if there were too many babies, “too many mouths to feed,” as she put it, she kept going down to the river to add to the oversupply. Later, he would wonder how, in that crowded household where everyone slept in the same room, and many to a bed, this pair ever found moments intimate enough in which to conceive a child. Perhaps, at night, when all the children were asleep, they slipped off to the riverbank and found a place to couple under the willow trees.

He was told that his new home was to be in London, where some distant cousins had agreed to take him in. Of the long trip across the face of Europe, which involved many changes of trains in crowded stations, crossing borders, and paying bribes to border guards at each, he remembered very little. He was too frightened of the unknown world that lay ahead to do more than show his ticket, which was pinned to his overcoat, and to be pointed in one direction or another. In his memory, there were soldiers everywhere, soldiers with machine guns pointed at the crowds, and everywhere there was talk of war—war, terrorism, riots, strikes, killings, bloodshed, and the “Black Hundreds,” whose mission was solely to kill Jews. Somehow, though, he made it to Dieppe, where he crossed on a Channel ferry, and found his way to the cousins' flat in Whitechapel.

The cousins were named Belsky, and for the next two years he used the name Itzhak Belsky. The Belskys' neighborhood was almost entirely Yiddish-speaking, but it was in London that the future Ho Rothman learned to read and speak rudimentary English.

It was likely that he had already become a difficult, willful child, hard to manage or control. There were signs that this may have been the case. Certainly no one seemed to want to hold on to him for long. In just two years the Belskys told him, again, that there were too many mouths to feed, and that he must move on. Even more distant cousins had been found, he was told, in America, and his next home would be in a place the Belskys called Manhattan Island City. How these long-distance custody arrangements—which must have involved months of letter-writing back and forth across the Atlantic—were made, Ho Rothman never knew. But, trying to put the best face on things, the Belskys told him that in Manhattan Island City the streets were paved with gold. Practically all one had to do, they assured him, was reach down and pick up the gold that lay in the cracks of sidewalks; the riches were strewn about everywhere. “Soon you'll be wearing a red coat and a purple feather in your cap,” he remembered Mrs. Belsky telling him. The Belskys were apparently kindly, generous folk. In addition to his steerage ticket from Southampton, they gave him a five-pound note, which seemed to him a huge fortune at the time. They also reminded him that, since he owned only one pair of shoes, he must take special care of those shoes because, when he got to America, he would have to go to work as a foot-peddler, as everyone else did at first, before the riches started to come in. As a result of this injunction, Ho Rothman crossed the Atlantic barefoot, with his only pair of shoes tied together by their laces and slung across his shoulders.

When he told this story to visitors at “Rothmere” years later, as he often did, he usually rose at this point in the rendition of it, and offered to show his guest the famous shoes. They would then mount the curved marble double staircase with its burgundy carpet and velvet-swagged handrails to the landing, where a bronze casting of Rodin's “Thinker” stood, and where the staircase branched again, and on up to the second floor of the house, where Ho and Lily had connecting apartments. Ho would then lead his visitor into his walnut-paneled dressing room, and begin opening the mirrored doors of closets. The closets displayed, on row after row of brass hanging bars and tier after tier of glass shelves, his collection of bespoke suits from Savile Row, his collection of overcoats, hats, gloves, and walking sticks, the soft piles of custom-made shirts from Jermyn Street, his socks, handkerchiefs, underwear, pajamas, and robes. He flung open door after door until he finally came to the shoe closet, where hundreds of pairs of gleaming shoes were displayed on trees in shiny brass racks. There he kept the shoes he came to America with. Ho's feet were small, size-fives, but in comparison those first shoes seemed tiny—more like a child's pair of black lace-up booties. His valet, he explained, polished these little shoes daily, just as he did every other pair.

His new parents, those exceedingly distant cousins, were named Sam and Sadye Rothman, and they lived in a third-floor walk-up at 45 Henry Street. The Rothmans were far from rich, but they were not exactly poor, either, though Sadye Rothman complained about what was happening to the neighborhood, which, she claimed, was “filling up with Chinamen.” Chinamen lived on the floor above, and on the floor below. The food the Chinamen cooked gave the building its exotic, gingery odor. Still, the Rothmans were, as Sadye often pointed out, much better off than their neighbors, and their two-bedroom railroad flat with its huge cast-iron bathtub in the center of the kitchen and a semiprivate toilet down the hall, which they shared with only one other family, seemed absolutely spacious to the ten-year-old Ho. Also, the Rothmans had no children of their own, which meant that for the first time in his life the little boy had a room of his own, the room Sadye Rothman rather grandly called “the guest room.” The reason for the Rothmans' relative prosperity was that Sadye Rothman was an independent businesswoman. Downstairs, on the ground floor of 45 Henry Street, she had a little store, where she sold candy, cigars and cigarettes, the Yiddish newspapers, and what she called “my special line,” items of costume jewelry in a glass display case lighted with a small electric light. Ho used to study those rings and necklaces and bracelets, pasted with bits of colored glass, and suppose that these were emeralds and diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls.

Sometimes Sadye's husband helped her in the store, when he was not upstairs studying the holy texts, scribbling petulant questions in the margins of the Talmud in his tiny, pointed European hand, busy, as his wife sneeringly put it, “arguing with God.”

Sadye's other specialty was giving enemas, which she did with great proficiency and dispatch. Her word for enemas was “constitutionals,” and she administered a constitutional for the slightest of reasons—a cough, the hiccups, a runny nose, or what she called “the mullygrubs,” when anyone's facial expression didn't look to her quite right. She gave frequent enemas to her husband, to herself, and presently she was giving them to Ho. Ho often told of the threatening sight of Sadye Rothman looming around the corner with her enema bag in her hand.

The name Itzhak Belsky, the boy was told, was not a “good” name. It was not “American” enough. In America, his new guardian explained to him, there were good names and bad names, and Itzhak Belsky happened to be of the latter variety. The importance of a good name was that it helped you obtain something called “credit,” and Sadye Rothman's lectures on the value of credit were his first lessons on how the American capitalist system worked. Credit was to free enterprise what enemas were to a healthy body. If you wanted to “make a name for yourself” in America, you had to establish credit, and this notion left Ho with the distinct impression that the phrase “making a name for yourself” meant that you could go by whatever name you chose—an idea that would stand him in good stead later on.

His new American name, it was decided, would be Herbert Oscar Rothman. Where the Herbert came from, Ho Rothman never knew, but he was fairly sure where Sadye had got the Oscar. Sadye considered herself vaguely “musical,” and, on periodic trips uptown on Sundays on the streetcar, she was always careful to point out to her young charge the magnificent Harlem Opera House that the great theatrical impresario Oscar Hammerstein had built on 125th Street. He also learned that, thanks to the Rothmans' comparative affluence, he would not, after all, have to go to work as a foot-peddler, as other boys did. Instead, Herbert Oscar Rothman was enrolled at a school on Rivington Street, in the first grade, where he was several years older, though not much bigger, than most of his classmates.

As the boy entered his teens, he grew increasingly restless and impatient, increasingly independent-minded and difficult for Sam and Sadye to handle. Already he seemed determined to lead his life on a broader landscape than the narrow one defined by Rivington and Henry streets. He began refusing his enemas. Also, Sadye began noticing shortages in her cash box—nothing much, but ten cents one day, and a quarter the next—and Sadye began to have her suspicions. One day a zircon ring was missing from her little display case. Ho was supposed to come home directly after school, but he often tarried and found himself involved in other pleasures and pastimes. He was fourteen years old when a green-eyed, red-haired girl named Rachel winked at him and beckoned him to follow her into a shadowy alley that led between two Rivington Street buildings. The alley took a right-hand turn, and ended in a cul-de-sac, and here, across a bed of barrel staves, lay someone's discarded mattress. Rachel tossed herself down on this, hiked up her skirts to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath, and proceeded to instruct her neophyte lover, step by exciting step, on what must happen next, guiding him with experienced hands and covering his mouth with kisses as she did so. Unquestionably, he enjoyed this initial encounter, and soon there were almost daily afternoon sessions in the alley where the old mattress had been so obligingly tossed. Soon, also, Ho Rothman was rewarding Rachel for the pleasures she afforded him with candy bars and other items filched from Sadye Rothman's store.

Then, one afternoon in the early spring of 1910, Rachel greeted him with a smug and knowing expression on her face. “Guess what? I'm pregnant,” she informed him. “What does that mean?” her bewildered lover, who still somewhat vaguely believed that babies were fetched out of a river, wanted to know. “It means there's gonna be a Blessed Event,” she told him saucily, “and that you're the father of it. It means you're gonna have to marry me.” “But I can't,” he protested. “I've got to finish school.” “You got to,” she said. “There's no two ways. You gimme this Tiffany diamond ring, din'tcha? That means we're engaged, in case you didn't know it, greenhorn. If you don't marry me, then I'll tell your folks you got me in a family way,” she said with a toss of her red hair. “Then they'll make you marry me 'cause I got the proof, and I know your folks are rich.”

It was the young man's first lesson in the cold connivingness and duplicity of women, and one he never forgot. It never occurred to Ho Rothman that the scheming girl routinely offered her favors, and the convenience of her secret mattress, to dozens of other partners, and usually in return for more than purloined candy bars or zircon rings, or that she had chosen him to be her victim simply because of the supposedly elevated financial status of his foster parents. Thoroughly frightened, he promised to meet her at the usual place the following afternoon, to take her to City Hall, where she told him they would find a justice of the peace to marry them.

That very night, Sadye Rothman had decided to confront the boy about the missing ring. But she never got the chance. That night, after waiting until Sadye had closed her store so he could empty her cash box, he ran away from home.

He never saw Sam and Sadye Rothman again, nor did he know what became of them. Nor did he know what became of the calculating girl called Rachel, or of his child by her—if indeed it was his child, or whether there was actually to be any child at all. Needless to say, the Rachel episode was not a part of Ho Rothman's usual repertoire of tales of his early days in New York, nor was how pivotal this episode would become included in the story of how he founded Rothman Communications, Inc.—the stories he liked to tell around the family dinner table while August, the butler, in white gloves, poured the claret into Cristofle goblets. But at times, after long evenings of gin rummy with his male cronies—Jake Auerbach, Adolph Meyerson, and the rest—he told the tale, omitting the cash box part, and it always produced roars of raucous laughter. “If wasn't for that
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, I not be here today!” he would shout, pounding on the card table with his fist, shuddering the brandy snifters. “If wasn't for that little piece of dreck, I never get to Newark!”

Oh, Rachel, Rachel, wherever you may be in one of life's dark alleyways of perfidy, if you read of yourself here, think how different it might have been for you if you had been able to play your hand just a bit more cleverly.

11

Go West, young man! Of course those weren't Horace Greeley's exact words. What he actually said to Aspiring Young Men was, “Turn your face to the great west, and there build up a home and fortune.” But young Ho Rothman had heard of Greeley's advice, and it was westward that he headed that night—west across the Hudson on the ferry to Newark, figuring, sensibly enough, that crossing a state line would place him handily out of Rachel's reach. He spent that first night on a bench in the ferry terminal, as what a later generation would call a homeless person, alternately sleeping and trying to figure out what to do next. His only experience, he decided, was in the jewelry business, and he guessed he might be able to pass himself off as having been previously employed by the Sadye Rothman Jewelry Store in Manhattan. In the morning he bought a newspaper, and studied the Help Wanted ads. He was in luck! A jewelry store on Passaic Avenue was advertising for a delivery boy.