The Secret (13 page)

She gently lifted my scrotum and licked it vigorously. She was right. I wouldn’t have come from that, but it did raise me to a height of readiness.

Then—

“Okay, Sue Ellen, he’s all yours. When he comes, make sure it’s inside your mouth. And don’t go spitting when he’s squirting. Swallow it! Swallow it!”

Sue Ellen was reluctant. She was an adventurous lover, but she did this hesitantly at first, her face flushed, tears glistening around her eyes. Once she gagged. But she made a rhythm and was soon working at least as well as Mollie.

She was wetter than Mollie. My parts were wet with her saliva.

Mollie might be her teacher, and Sue Ellen might work with less skill, but she was for me a far more satisfying oral lover. That she was doing what she didn’t really want to do made it more exciting. As I approached my climax, I felt that I might actually rupture. Also, Sue Ellen warmed to it and shortly was at me with actual zest—whether to get it over with sooner or because she was learning to like it, I couldn’t be sure.

*   *   *

Mollie taught Sue Ellen to give a professional blow job. Sue Ellen gradually weaned Mollie off prostitution. At first Mollie would just make excuses to Betty Logan—she was having her period, she didn’t feel well, she had to go home to Greenwich to visit her sick mother, her confessor was giving her a hard time.…

The last was absolutely true. Mollie was Catholic and confessed regularly to a New Haven priest. Sue Ellen asked for the name of that priest and went to see him. The priest would not discuss anything Mollie had told him—the sanctity of the confessional—but he agreed to cooperate with Sue Ellen to do what was appropriate for the good of Mollie’s soul. Between the pressure applied by the priest and that from Sue Ellen, Mollie determined to abandon the life and live straight.

She so told Betty Logan, who went into a screeching, foot-stamping hysteria.

A week or so later, I got a telephone call. It was from a wise guy. He said his boss would like to buy me lunch and named an Italian restaurant and a day. I agreed to the lunch and immediately called my father. He said he would come to New Haven and join me for the lunch.

The wise guy’s boss was Alberto Patrioto. The don joined us after a few minutes.

Fifteen years had passed since my father and Patrioto had met and disagreed about the New Haven Cheeks store, and Patrioto—as my father told me after the meeting—had aged more than fifteen years. Maybe his years in prison had done it. Even so, he had the style of a
capo de tutti capi:
still the camel coat, still the gray homburg, still the paisley handkerchief carefully folded in his jacket pocket, still the cigar.

“It’s a real pleasure to meet you again, Don Patrioto,” my father said.

I have to say, my father and Patrioto were of an age, a passing age. My father was sixty-one that year. He showed little gray. He was a trim, muscular man who dressed well but did not wear clothes conspicuously well tailored.

Patrioto grinned. “‘Don’ Patrioto,” he chuckled. “You do me more honor than I own, Mr. Cooper. I am just a struggling businessman, as you are.”

The conversation went on for some time, with nothing in particular being said. Patrioto recommended the veal, which he said was the best available in New Haven. We ordered it. He ordered the wine, a heavy, dark red of a type I had never tasted before.

Finally, we got down to business.

“Mr. Cooper, Junior,” said Patrioto, “is it your plan to reform all Mrs. Logan’s girls, or just this one?”

I glanced at my father, whose face was bland and seemed just as interested as was Patrioto in hearing what I would say.

“Mr. Patrioto,” I said cautiously, “this girl has become my wife’s best friend. They are students together—students of Chinese. My wife has, in fact, discouraged this one girl from—”

“From earning a tidy profit for my friends.”

“She is a devout Catholic. Her priest—”

“What priest?”

“Father Benedict. At Holy Mother.”

Patrioto turned down the corners of his mouth and nodded thoughtfully. “Ahh…”

“How much was she earning for you?” my father asked.

Patrioto shook his head. “No, Mr. Cooper. That will not be necessary. I would like your son’s assurance that he and his wife do not mean to become moral crusaders here in New Haven.”

“You have it,” said my father quickly.

“From
him.”

“I so assure you, Mr. Patrioto,” I said.

“Well, then…” said Patrioto with a faint smile, lifting his wine glass to toast the assurance. “I know your father, so I know your assurance is good.”

*   *   *

That night at home I had to grab Sue Ellen by her dog collar and demand she join my assurance. That may have been the beginning of the end of our marriage. Two principles clashed: hers of high morals and pride, mine of being practical as I knew my father was, of fighting battles worth winning when I believed I could win them.

She was the daughter of Hale & Dorr. I was the son of Jerry Cooper. Like oil and water, we could never mix.

25

JERRY

Giselle and I rarely disagreed, but when she decided our son should be educated in a prep school, I balked. She had even chosen the school, a place in Connecticut called Choate Rosemary Hall.

Now, this was not about to happen. Rosemary Hall, for Christ’s sake!
My son
would go to a school called
Rosemary Hall?
What kind of guy would he turn out to be, going to a school called—I said no, emphatically. I believe in education. I wish I’d had a whole lot more than I’ve got. But I also believe in street smarts. I wanted my boy to have both, an education and street smarts. He sure wasn’t going to get any of the latter at a school called Rosemary Hall.

The years when we had to choose a school for Len were years when the schools of New York City, and a lot of other places, were being torn apart by racial hate. I myself—me, a Jew with a black best friend—was called “honky” on the street one day. I was waiting for a light, and this coffee-with-cream-colored smart-ass sneered at me and hissed. “Honky!” I felt like decking him, but it would only have caused him to go back to his street and tell everybody that a honky had busted his nose, for no reason at all.

Anyway, Giselle set her foot down flat against his going into the city’s public schools. “Okay,” I said, “we move back to Scarsdale or some place like that. I mean, we can live in the suburbs, where things are peaceful—and boring.”

“I will not risk his being cut with a knife, or beaten senseless, over something he has nothing to do with.”

I talked to Buddy.

“You’re askin’ for what the world ain’t got, man,” he said. “You move out to Westchester or up in Connecticut, who’s he goin’ to be in school with? Sons and daughters of real-estate guys, insurance guys, stockbrokers who commute … and so on. You send him to P.S. Whatever here in town, who’s he goin’ to be in school with? Not the sons and daughters of those guys I just mentioned, ’cause they all got sent to private schools some place or other.”

“I want the kid to be smart, Buddy. Educated, sure. That’s one thing. But also smart.”

“Educated you can get to be. Smart has got to be bora in ya. The kids I’ve had with Ulla are smart. They better be—half nigger, half Norwegian. Len’s got smarts from both sides. He’ll do okay. Send him to a prep school, if that’s what Giselle wants.”

In France I had learned the British word “toff.” I didn’t want my son to become a toff. I didn’t want him to become a white version of Buddy, either. Buddy had taught me to cut, and I always carried a folded straight razor in my right-hand pants pocket, usually inside a roll of bills. I didn’t want Len to learn that.

I couldn’t send my son into a nest of pretty little boys from pretty little families in pretty little towns—which is what I thought a prep school was. So we compromised on a boarding school. We
thought
we’d compromised. Giselle looked at several. I guess we were taken in by some bullshit in the Lodge catalog that said, “Boys from every walk of life live together, work together, and share the values they bring from disparate backgrounds.” I had to look up the word “disparate.”

I never met any of the fathers of Len’s Lodge friends. Maybe I figured they’d sneer at me—behind my back. When he went away to Lodge, I lost him, lost a lot of him, that is. Hell, I lost something of him when we sent him to Friends. From
that
point he was going to be different from me. Which is what I wanted, up to a point. He turned into someone I didn’t know.

Temporarily.

I suppose I must admit I wasn’t the world’s greatest father. I rationalized the way too many other fathers do, by saying that the demands of building my business and earning the living that would allow my family to live the way I wanted them to live were too great and left me too little time.

Besides that, I had problems. Among them was that I had to face threats.

*   *   *

I despised Jimmy Hoffa. If he had not gone to prison in 1971, he might have been a big problem for us.

Anyone whose business involved a lot of shipping sooner or later came into a confrontation with the Teamsters. Anyone who came into confrontation with the Teamsters sooner or later was confronted with their swaggering arrogance. They cared nothing about the law. They did things their way, with muscle or the threat of muscle.

I knew a man who went into a business I knew something about: selling seltzer and soda. He did well and soon was running about a hundred trucks. One day two guys from Teamsters came in his office and told him that from then on their union would represent his drivers. The man said, okay, get your signatures on the NLRA cards, and we’ll have a sanctioned election. Their answer?

“Don’t talk to us about bullshit NLRA elections.
We represent your drivers.
You’ll take our dues from their paychecks, and we’ll write their contracts. That’s how it is, buddy. You wanta argue? We don’t usually argue. We get our way, sooner or later.”

Hoffa took pride in being a scrappy little man who would bounce around on the balls of his feet and shoot punches at people. He had been a playground bully, I imagine. Usually he was just playing juvenile games, but sometimes he hit. He broke noses, knocked out teeth, fractured ribs.

Some of the men he hit could have cold-cocked him, easily, but he always had a thug or two with him to protect him. Like all bullies, he was also a coward.

He called a meeting. To put the matter more accurately, he
summoned
a group of us to meet with him. All of us were in businesses more or less dependent on truck transportation. We met in a suite in the Waldorf.

I was there. A man was there from a laundry company, one from a magazine distributor, and so on. Hoffa was blunt. He was going to represent our drivers—in my case, it was the drivers for the express company we chiefly used—and he would give us our terms. He hadn’t called us to negotiate; he had called us to tell us how things were going to be—that is, the way he wanted them to be.

Knowing Hoffa would be backed by thugs, I had asked Buddy to come with me. Buddy loved to be menacing. And he was not easily intimidated.

Hoffa, in an out-of-style double-breasted black suit with a bow tie, bounced around the room, grinning, swaggering, dictating terms to our half a dozen companies.

“Okay, fellas,” he said. “That’s it. That’s how it’s gonna be. Anybody got any questions?”

“I have one,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Which is…?”

“Which is … who the hell do you think you are?”

He didn’t offer to answer. He lurched toward me and shot out a left jab that would have hurt had it landed. But he never had a chance of landing it. I was as much a street tough as he was, and I was bigger. I sidestepped his punch and caught it on my right fist. I could have slugged him with no trouble and flattened his nose—which had already been flattened more than once.

But Buddy didn’t like what Jimmy Hoffa had done. He moved between me and Hoffa with the sleek grace of the born street fighter, and he slammed a hard punch into Hoffa’s solar plexus.

Hoffa bent over and began to vomit.

His thugs pulled guns.

Buddy had expected that. By the time their guns were in their hands, he had a left arm around Hoffa’s upper body, and his right hand pressed the gleaming blade of a razor against his throat.

“Tell your boys to wait in the lobby,” Buddy said.

Hoffa grunted and pointed.

It could have been an interesting battle, I always thought—the cocky little union gangster with his thousand thugs against the slick, black, street-smart slasher whose guys could come out of a thousand doorways on any street, from between the cars in any parking lot.

The battle was never fought. Hoffa went to the slammer to wait for his close friend President Nixon to give him executive clemency. For a while the world had things other than Jimmy Hoffa to think about.

26

When his good friend the President commuted his sentence, Jimmy Hoffa showed up again. It was a condition of his commutation that he could not try to recover the presidency of the Teamsters. He expected Nixon to cancel the ban in time. Even after Nixon resigned, Jimmy confidently expected President Ford would remove the condition.

In the meantime, he drew a pension from the union of one and a half million dollars a year. The money was burning holes in his pockets, and he set out to look for investments.

Coal mining was one of his ideas, and he did ultimately manage to buy into a mining operation. But he was looking around, looking for something to raid, and to our bad fortune his cold, snakelike eyes fell on Cheeks.

I don’t know if it was because he remembered and resented what Buddy had done to defend me—which, incidentally, Buddy remembered very well—or if someone had pointed us out to him as a growing company that could be raided without an immense amount of capital. All I know is that Jimmy Hoffa began looking for ways to acquire my company.

He couldn’t buy stock. The sole stockholders were myself, Giselle, and Sal Nero. He couldn’t push us through our creditors. We were by no means overextended. His connections were no better than ours. Through Sal we had a good relationship with the Carlinos.