Greedy Heart, page 2
“Yep.”
“Big time.”
“Yeah.”
“Delia . . .” Bert’s accent, rich and dense as a slice of New York cheesecake, transformed Delia into Deel-yer. The sound reminded me of Aunt Kathleen, who was both my aunt and my nanny. When I was born, Aunt Kathleen had just left the convent. Mom was struggling to adapt to her role as a wealthy socialite and new mother. She was overwhelmed by the troops of British nannies on offer. With her sister conveniently available, Mom pounced on the opportunity. Aunt Kathleen arrived, quickly becoming not only my nanny, but an indispensable support for Mom, Dad and even Grandmother.
“Those finance guys are real dicks,” Bert continued. “Excuse my French. Better watch yourself.”
“I can deal with them, Bert.”
“Strong like your mother.” He smiled at me. “Almost as pretty too.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t remind Bert that Mom wasn’t very strong. Nor did I take offense at his almost as pretty. Any woman would have given her eye teeth to be almost as pretty as Mom on her worst day.
“Some guy’ll be lucky,” Bert said fondly. Bert saw qualities in me I left behind years ago.
Sure, I could have grown up differently, if my world hadn’t been blown to bits; if there were still money; if Aunt Kathleen and Dad were alive; if, after losing it all, Mom hadn’t had a nervous breakdown. But that whole fleet of ships sailed a long time ago.
“I heard fromma buddy whose son says these Wall Street guys are nuts in interviews.” Bert cornered his Jeep down a cul-de-sac with the skill of a guy trained for high-speed chases. “They say some’m like, ‘spell diverticulitis.’ If you can’t, it’s out on your keester.”
I knew the stories. One guy wrote on his blog he stepped into an office and had a crystal paperweight hurled at his head. He ended up in the trauma ward at Bellevue.
Bert parked the truck in front of Mom’s residence—a 1970s’ split-level with a roof low and overhanging as a Neanderthal’s brow. Mom acidly described her domicile as “a ranch on a slab,” even in front of Bert, even though the house belonged to him.
“Here we are.” Bert heaved a contented sigh. Bert gave Mom the house in her hour of need and bought another place a block down. I didn’t know what she paid to live in Bert’s house, if anything. Bert’s pension didn’t seem as if it would stretch to cover two houses and Mom’s expensive tastes. Worrying about Mom and Bert, however, was not my job.
“Thanks, Bert.” I approached the house. Mom didn’t look out the window.
“Your mom can’t hardly wait to see you.”
*
Mom’s front door opened to a small plateau. My mother compared this foyer to the state of limbo where unbaptized babies go—neither here nor there, but hellish nonetheless. A fussy white iron railing proceeded up to the bedrooms and down to the sunken living room.
In the living room, surrounded by cheap aluminum windows, my mother sat amidst my grandmother’s furniture and art. All the pieces that did not go to Christie’s for auction after The Great Family Financial Disaster of 1986 because they “fell off the moving truck.” In those final days, Mom stole furniture, jewelry, clothes—anything she could fit in a suitcase or on a U-Haul. It was a sign of Mom’s unraveling. Over about a year, Mom morphed from an effervescent socialite into a mash-up of Gollum and Miss Havisham.
An escritoire with legs fragile as an Italian Greyhound’s, Queen Anne chairs, Chippendale sideboards, a French mahogany dining table—it was all here in Centerville. The tables stood ankles deep in the shag carpeting and supported Ming vases, Staffordshire figurines, and Waterford candy dishes, while Hudson River Valley paintings graced the cheesy 1970s-style wood paneling.
My face hung over the faux-stone fireplace. It was a copy of a portrait painted of me when I was eight. According to my grandmother’s wishes, all family portraits remained behind, in the gallery of the Fifth Avenue mansion after the house was sold to become the Greek embassy. I think Grandmother was trying to console Mom by giving her the facsimile, unaware Mom had absconded with so much else.
The quality of the duplicate was pretty good. It captured the expression of the original. I was impish and sparkly-eyed, beaming down with hope and purpose. For Mom, though, it was the ultimate booby prize. To a woman obsessed with appraisal values, what could be worse than having a picture of a daughter from whom she was estranged that was worthless to boot?
My mother, still the same 123 pounds she’d been at twenty-five sat straight-backed and perfectly coiffed on a velvet settee, needlepointing. The custom pattern ($450), executed with hand-dyed yarns ($175) was of sandpipers with tiny cross-hatched feet.
“Thank you, Bert,” Mom said, finishing the stitch she’d begun.
I watched my mother’s inclined head. Her beauty was startling. Even at sixty-eight. Even to me. She was Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Ingrid Bergman all rolled into one. Add to that the charisma of Zsa Zsa Gabor, which she preserved, despite her eccentric state. It affected not only Bert, obedient after fifty years to her smallest whim, but also all tradesmen, meter readers and bill collectors. Years ago, as her world was collapsing, she even attracted the attention of a Greek shipping magnate. The end of that relationship was the last straw in a haystack of last straws.
Her stitch safely accomplished, Mom rose, took off her glasses and looked me up and down. “I hope you’ll do something with your hair before tomorrow.”
That was another thing. After her world disintegrated, Mom gave up on tact, especially toward me. We shared a painful past; I was the only one left to remind her of it; and she took it out on me. I didn’t mind Mom’s sharp tongue. In a way, I admired her authenticity. Because bottom line, I despise a hypocrite—someone who is secretly not what you think they are. That’s the thing that rips you up.
Like Aunt Kathleen, who began as a mannish Mary Poppins from Queens, holding a Schlitz in place of an umbrella, carrying a carpet bag full of love for me. She was the center of our family, the gravitational force that grounded everyone. Even when things were at their worst, I always had stalwart Aunt Kathleen. As my world was dissolving in front of my eyes, and my mother seemed as if she might crack at any moment, Aunt Kathleen assured me, “We’ll get through this together. Somehow, pal, we will. You will have a future.” And then—she was gone. As is the wont of magical nannies, she sailed into the sky one day without warning.
“Your only hope is to tie it back,” Mom said. My hair was red and Celticly wild, just like hers. The frizz offended her sensibilities. Too working-class.
To this day, Mom went to a Madison-Avenue stylist at $475 a visit to master her own tresses, now a regal, silvery white. It was hard to tell if Mom was delusional, determined to live as she once had despite financial realities. Or if she was simply too stubborn to change her ways. I suspected it was probably both and wondered what financial alchemy, including Bert and the furniture sales, paid for it all.
My wild curls were like catnip to men, so I kept them that way. Tomorrow, on the other hand, was a Wall Street interview. “I probably should do something about it,” I mused.
“You’ll notice the River Valley oil is gone,” Mom said on her way to her avocado-colored kitchen. Bit by bit Mom was selling my grandmother’s things to make ends meet.
“Did you get what you wanted for it?” I called into the kitchen, trying to sound nonchalant. Mom emerged carrying a Spode teapot surrounded by chip-less sixty-year-old cups. The china had tracery crackling on its surface and was covered with birds. Birds were my family’s coat of arms, as it were, and all our china had been made by Tiffany in a custom Audubon pattern.
“Mmmm,” she said. It was déclassé to talk about money. I wondered if Mom would outlast the art and furniture or if it would outlast Mom. I pictured her, in her nineties, confined to one small corner of her house, sitting in a final remaining chair, drinking from a penultimate teacup.
Aside from Bert and art sales, Mom had one other ace in the hole to rescue her from penury: if she could cash in on a lease she still held to a rent-controlled apartment. She took the apartment in 1969. Later, Aunt Kathleen moved into it and her name was added to the lease. When her sister died, Mom retained the lease, and kept it all these years.
Rent-controlled leases were worth their weight in gold because they gave the leaseholder a lifetime right to their apartment. Landlords, eager to redevelop their properties, paid huge sums, six figures or more, to get tenants like Mom out. They converted their buildings to luxury apartments or, even better, ripped them down and put up huge towers if zoning laws allowed. Mom bribed the super to say she spent the required 183 days there. Mom didn’t set foot in the place because Aunt Kathleen had jumped from the building’s roof.
“Is your art dealer that lady you used to know?”
“Judith. Yes, she’s still at the Grandhope.”
What an Old New York phenomenon the Grandhope was! A hotel where people real-life lived. It conjured up Eloise at the Plaza, Elaine Stritch at the Carlyle, Sylvia Plath at the Barbizon. Nowadays, these old hotels were being turned into co-ops. “I don’t know how long it’ll last. Judith’s nearly ninety and going blind you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I hear Angela is in the neighborhood, too.” Angela was my childhood “best friend” (quotes stet). “I don’t say hello.” Mom never really liked Angela, though Angela worshipped Mom. Mom called Angela a climber. Pot, meet kettle. Please discuss amongst yourselves. “Do you have any plans about where you’ll live when you get this job?” Mom’s when was subtle, but I heard it. No matter how estranged we became, Mom never doubted my capacity.
She didn’t offer me her rent-controlled apartment, nor did I ask about it. The rule with Mom was her stuff was hers. Given city housing laws, a daughter could claim the right to a rent-control lease if she lived there. Mom didn’t have to worry, though. Years ago, when she retreated into her pain and left me to mine, I decided I didn’t want anything from her. Not that she would have given me anything if I asked. Now, I would rather die than accept a single teacup.
“I was thinking I’d buy my own place.” Just saying those words gave me a thrill, as if uttering some incantation with the power to restore a lost life.
“You might want to read this.” Mom passed me several ink-jet pages. “It’s from the Vanity Fair.” Bert had set her up with the internet and email. She kept the computer, which she considered aesthetically objectionable, in the laundry room. Mom was surprisingly adept on the thing, using it to track the art market.
The title on the printout said “Hedge Fund Rivals.” Underneath was a photo of two men back to back, both good-looking, fortyish, in the immaculate suit-jacket-no-tie-gold-cuff link uniform that screeched, “high finance.” The caption read: “Arch competitors Peter Priest of Odyssey Capital and Robert Goodman of Hermes Fund.” Mom pointed to the second man, the one called Goodman.
“You think it’s the same guy?” I asked. “There could be a hundred Robert Goodmans.”
“It’s the same,” Mom said.
“How can you be sure?”
“I read the internet, darling.” She looked over her glasses at me.
“He’s your landlord these days, right?” The Goodman family owned Mom’s rent-controlled building. If it was the same Robert Goodman, he inherited the building from his father.
“Yes.” Boy, New York was a small world, everyone cramming together with the density of iridium. “Good-looking fellow.” Mom examined the two men on the printout. “The other one is kind of dark.” Mom’s taste for Mediterraneans soured after the incident with the Greek shipping baron. “Delia, if you should ever run into Robert Goodman, you won’t mention your connection with me?”
There was a plaintive quality under the steeliness of Mom’s tone. Perhaps a note only a daughter could pick up. It was Mom’s paranoia about her lease—the possibility, however remote, I might try to claim to it, or spill the beans she didn’t live there. Mom thought everyone, except Bert, was out to take what little she had left.
“My interview’s not with that one. He’s Hermes Fund. It’s with the competitor, Peter Priest of Odyssey Capital. In any case, no. I wouldn’t ever mention it.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m just another name on a lease to Robert Goodman. It still has my maiden name.” She really was staying off the radar.
Mom was welcome to keep everything to herself. I didn’t want any of it. Besides, I was about to make a fortune of my own.
Chapter Three
The king was in the counting-house
Counting out his money.
—Mother Goose, “Sing a Song of Sixpence”
The windows of the LIRR train into Manhattan were scratched and foggy as a pawnbroker’s. The train shrieked and heeled on its track as stands of sumac trees bent in its wake. Gradually the skyline came into view, a vista powerful as myth. New York was a fairy-tale kingdom, a glittering citadel of towers and turrets, with heroic bridges and leaping trestlework bracing the island like flying buttresses.
My lost castle was at the center of this kingdom, one of the greatest mansions on Fifth Avenue. A grand white wedding cake of a house, it presided over the corner of 80th Street and Fifth. Once upon a time, the mansion housed one of the city’s First Families. Mine. I was the scion of this family, a modern-day princess, with roots extending back generations, into the literal fabric of the city. The mansion was a place of great wealth, of course; but for me it also held love and the promise of my future. This kingdom and that castle were my birthright. I was here to storm the shores.
My suit of armor was blue and from Brooks Brothers. I wore virtually no makeup and tied my hair back into a tight incognito knot. If you were a woman who wanted to be taken seriously as a quant in the extreme-bro culture on Wall Street, it was better to be homely, acne-riddled or—if you could possibly manage it—Asian. I unfolded Mom’s ink-jet pages and began to read.
It was too boring and complicated to cover what hedge funds actually did, so this article focused on the testosterone-fueled rivalry between the two media-genic billionaires, Peter Priest and Robert Goodman. According to Vanity Fair, Priest and Goodman were opposite “to a Shakespearean degree.” Goodman was handsome, tousled-haired, and towheaded with a chip-toothed smile. A hail-fellow-well-met media darling who always dressed the part—gemmed cuff links, brightly colored handmade silk ties, and Italian shoes—Goodman drove a Lotus that he self-deprecatingly joked was evidence of an early midlife crisis. He was constantly photographed with high-profile women of international pedigree. He was “a man seeking princesses to complement his kingly fortune.” Goodman was famous for owning a quirky rent-controlled building—Mom’s. The article portrayed him as a benevolent landlord, who left the building alone, despite the prime location. “Why touch it? It’s filled with great New York characters. And I have enough money.” Too bad for Mom and her longed-for payout.
Peter Priest, Odyssey’s founder and the man to whom the LIRR train transported me, was mysterious and press-shy with the demeanor of an “Eastern-bloc diplomat.” In contrast to the charismatic MBA and deal-maker Goodman, Peter Priest was an academic and a mathematician. Famously, he shunned the media and would not agree to pose for the article. A subtitle said the piece’s cover had been Photoshopped using a file image of Priest from a recent Capitol Hill banking hearing. Priest did not own an apartment and was instead living in a high-end hotel. There, the fee for things like doormen, fresh flowers, and maid service was forty grand a month—or twelve new BMWs a year.
Neither man was ever quoted on the record about their falling-out. In 2001, Rob Goodman left Odyssey, the fund Peter Priest had started, and went on to found his own firm. The article cited all the current rumors: a disagreement over strategy; a disagreement over money; a disagreement over a woman. I put down the printout.
On the horizon, the buildings of the New York skyline shifted with the movement of the train, like chess pieces arranging themselves for the biggest game in the world.
*
I wended my way through the greenly lit rabbit warren of Penn Station. Is there a train station on earth where the fluorescent lighting is more fluorescent, or the linoleum more linoleum-er? I descended to the subway. On the Number-1 platform, an Asian man played a wobbling version of “Ave Maria” on a zither. It was the closest I’d been to anything religious in years.
I began toying with atheism when I was seven and preparing for my first holy communion. It was my first real exposure to religious studies, and I quickly pegged Jesus as a Big Red Socialist. It was clear to me Christianity was a religion of the poor, by the poor and for the poor. Throw a dart into any of the Gospels and you’d hit something about how great it was to be poor. Blessed were the poor. They stood to inherit the Kingdom of God. Woe was coming unto the rich, not least because they were going to be squeezed through eyes of needles. Homilies attempted to soften the severe pro-poverty doctrine of Christianity. But it was obvious that adults were doing what adults always did when the facts didn’t suit them. They lied.
I knew spin when I heard it, even at seven. I was rich and liked it. So that was the end of the Jesus nonsense. I panicked my parents by informing them I would not be going through with communion. Aunt Kathleen, former nun that she was, handled things. She shrugged off my anti-Jesus stance saying, “Religion is like language. You speak the one you’re born into,” and marched me to first communion. She then took charge of my religious instruction, teaching me my prayers and reading me the lives of the saints. I went along with it, because I loved her.
Turns out, I was just ahead of my time in the matter of religion. Hardly anyone believed in God anymore. His branding had been tarnished by frauds, zealots, and maniacs. The Catholic Church itself was on the skids, like a home team that hadn’t won a pennant in decades. Even redoubtable Aunt Kathleen joined the apostasy with her spectacular leap off a roof. That was the moment I decisively gave up on God.
