The Rothman Scandal (45 page)

“Is that
all?
”

“Could you help her? Is it too much to ask? Me, I don't give a shit. I know I'm no gent. But Maudie is a real
lady
. Like you. And I really love my Maudie.”

Her smile was a little wistful now, thinking of the touching innocence and fatuity of Maudie's ambitions, and of her husband's sweet eagerness to help her fulfill them. And knowing that one of the great disillusioning disappointments of such aspirations was always the ridiculous ease with which they could be achieved.

“Lenny Liebling,” she said slowly. “He could do it even more quickly and easily than I could. He knows all sorts of interesting people.”

“But he couldn't do it and still work for Rothman, could he? If Herb Rothman knew Liebling was doing me favors, he'd can him just like that. Liebling's an old pansy. He needs the Rothmans. You don't.”

“Yes, I suppose you're right.”

“The ferret wouldn't stand for you working for me
and
him, either. So, you see, my two propositions to you sort of hinge on one another, don't they? That's the beauty of it.”

“Well, let me think about all of this,” Alex said at last. “You've got to admit you've given me a lot to think about.”

“Do me one favor,” he said. “Come by for a drink tomorrow night and meet Maudie. Get to know her a little bit. Then you can tell us what can be done with her.”

“That would be very nice. I'd like that.”

“Okay,” he said gruffly, avoiding her eyes. “Six o'clock. We live at the Lombardy. And take your time thinking about my other proposition. I guess I didn't expect a yes-or-no answer today at lunch. But don't take too much time. Timing is everything in this business.”

“There's just one thing I'm not too happy about,” she said.

“Eh? What's that?”

“Your comparing my editing of
Mode
to driving a used car!”

“That's what it is, dammit! That book's been around the block more than a few times. It's sat on a lot of lots. It's had a lot of different people in the driver's seat, and they weren't just little old ladies who took it out once a week to go to church! It's had its odometer turned back more than once. Hell, you didn't
create Mode
. You inherited it from your husband. You took it over because your husband didn't know how to run it. He couldn't keep up the payments!”

“Correction. Steven edited
Mode
very well, but he just wasn't happy doing it. I was. Steven felt uncomfortable editing a woman's magazine, but his father—”

“What the hell. It was only a figure of speech. I'm giving you a chance to create something brand new, something nobody's ever seen before, something with your personal signature on it—yours and mine. Newness is everything in this game, lady. Wanna know how I made my first million? It was babies' pacifiers, yeah, and pacifiers had been around a long time, but my pacifiers had a difference. They had
flavors
. McCulloch's Yummies came in orange, strawberry, raspberry, apple, chocolate, marshmallow, and vanilla. Wild cherry and plum didn't sell, for some damn reason. But McCulloch's Yummies were
new
, and I knew they'd be a hit because I tested 'em on my own kiddies and my kiddies
loved
'em. I paid that guy ten thousand for his patent, and made forty million! So let's send old
Mode
out to the used-car graveyard.”

The image was so grotesque that she had to laugh. “All right,” she said. “As I said, I'll think about all this.”

“Take your time, but not too much time, and meanwhile give my regards to the ferret. Ha-ha-ha. And Maudie and me will see you tomorrow night.”

Now he attacked what remained on his plate, managing a quick glance at the big gold Rolex watch on his wrist in the same motion. Rodney McCulloch's business-of-the-moment was completed. There was nothing left to do with the lunch now except to finish it. Now the fabled cuisine of Gilbert Coze, Le Barnardin's legendary chef, was just something to be packed away as quickly and efficiently as possible between now and his next appointment. For all the enjoyment he seemed to be getting from this meal, Alex thought, they could just as well have been eating at McDonald's.

“The tuna carpaccio was delicious,” she said.

“Yeah, it was okay,” he said with a shrug. “For fish.”

She decided that Rodney McCulloch was one of the most extraordinary men she had ever met.

“Waiter!” he bellowed. “Lah-dee-shawn, see voo play!”

She also thought: I must find some way to get to Ho Rothman!

23

“What's the matter?” Alexandra asked her mother. “What's wrong?”

“It's nothing … nothing.” They had been about to order ice-cream cones at Mr. Standish's store on what was somewhat grandly called Main Street in Paradise. It was the only street in town and when residents of Paradise referred to Main Street it was always called “downstreet.” “I'm going downstreet to the store,” they would say when they needed something from Mr. Standish's, or “I'm going downstreet to the post office” when they needed to mail a letter. And, believe it or not, Mr. Standish's first name was Miles. “How was your trip on the
Mayflower
, Miles Standish?” her mother would sometimes joke with him. “Pretty rough, Mrs. Lane,” he would answer. “Nothing but a buncha seasick Pilgrims.”

That particular muggy afternoon in August, when Alex was eleven, her mother had said, “Let's go downstreet and get ourselves some ice-cream cones,” and they had got into the black 1949 Plymouth coupe that her mother drove in those days, and headed for the little village, and Mr. Standish's. Alex had already decided on the flavor she wanted—a double scoop of chocolate chip—and they were standing at Mr. Standish's counter, waiting to be served, when suddenly a strange man, tall, with blond hair, turned from the magazine rack where he had been looking at paperbacks, and gave Alex and her mother a startled, questioning look. Then he started to move toward them, and the word
Lois
seemed to be forming on his lips. Alex could still remember the wide, appraising look in his blue eyes.

Her mother had immediately seized her elbow and whispered, “Quick! We've got to go!” Still clutching Alex's elbow, she had hurried Alex toward the door of the store, then out the door and down the steps and into the Plymouth.

“What's the matter, Mother? What's wrong?”

“Nothing … nothing.”

She turned the key in the ignition, and they had sped away from Mr. Standish's, kicking up a fine spray of gravel behind them as they turned out of the parking space into Main Street.

“But what about my
ice cream?
” Alex had wailed.

“Never mind. Not now. We'll get that later. Or somewhere else.” And she kept glancing in the rearview mirror, as though the strange blond man might be following them.

But there was no place else in town to buy ice-cream cones—no place between here and Kansas City, except for Mr. Standish's, and Alex knew that as well as her mother must have known it.

“It was that man, wasn't it? He acted like he knew us. He wanted to speak to us.”

“What man?” her mother said. “I didn't see any man. I don't know what you're talking about.” But her mother's face was pale, and her knuckles, gripping the steering wheel, were white, and they were driving toward home down the narrow country road, bouncing over potholes, much faster than her mother ever drove before.

“That man in the
store,
” Alex said.

“Never mind. Never mind.”

“Mother, who was that
man?
” What did he
want?
”

“Mind your own business!” her mother had snapped. “Besides, there wasn't any man.”

But of course there had been, and now, inexplicably, her mother was angry with her. They drove homeward in silence.

It was a strange experience, Alex often thought, growing up in the little town of Paradise, Missouri. She and Lenny often laughed about it, because the small-town background was something they had in common—she, with her memories of Paradise, and he, from farther south, really the Deep South, with his tales of childhood in Onward, Mississippi.

“Onward was
worse
,” he insisted.

“No. Nothing could have been worse than Paradise.”

“We were the only Jewish family in town. We were considered
very
peculiar.”

“We considered ourselves intellectuals. That made us even
more
peculiar.”

Paradise—to the nineteenth-century settlers who founded the place, on a slight rise just east of the flood level of the Platte River, it may have seemed just that. In fact, it wasn't all that bad. Tall stands of sycamore and willow trees lined the riverbank. The river, as its name implied, flowed flat and smooth and pewter-colored in a graceful series of oxbow bends. Beyond the river, the land extended flat for as far as the eye could see, an infinite horizon. Widely spaced and neatly kept farmhouses, mostly of white-painted clapboard with dark green shutters, each flanked by its sturdy barn, stocky silo, and cluster of domed corncribs, dotted this endless prairie landscape, each farm seeming to comprise a little duchy of its own.

Here farmers raised principally feed corn, and by mid-July the cornfields became dangerous places for children to enter. Alex's mother had warned her never to walk into a field of tall corn, because a child could easily become lost between the rows, where there were no sights and sounds to guide you out, only the rustle of cornstalks whispering in the wind. The bodies of children lost in a cornfield were often not found until harvest-time. Later, Alex learned the rule: always follow a single row; every row of corn ended somewhere.

Other farmers raised oats and wheat and sorghum and soybeans and barley and tobacco. Still other farmers raised beef and dairy cattle, sheep and hogs and—at the bottom of the unwritten status scale—poultry. Deep beneath the fields of a few lucky farmers, another cash commodity had been discovered—natural gas.

But Alex's family house, out on Old State Road 27, was not like the others. It was not a farm, and it had no barn, silo, or corncribs. It stood on a mere acre and a half, surrounded on three sides by hundreds of acres of neighbors' cornfields. It was not built of white-painted clapboard, but of locally quarried stone. The Lanes, with the help of a G.I. loan, had built the house themselves in a style that would soon become known as California Ranch. The house looked out of place, and neighbors used it in giving directions: “You'll come to a funny-looking
modern
house on your left, and we're a mile and three-tenths after that, on the right.”

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.