The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Joan went north and moved into her mother’s place, a one-bedroom apartment. She slept on a cot in the living room, and tried to think of what to do next. Maybe she’d go back to school. Maybe she’d get a job. But she and her mother, living right on top of each other that way, began quarreling constantly, and she missed Sol, and after three days she went down to Augusta, where he was taking basic training, and moved into a rooming house. She had to share her bedroom with another Army wife. And she had to share the bathroom with other roomers. But she didn’t hate it. She went to the post every weekend, and Sol would come out and talk to her through the gates.

  When he finished basic training, they took a little two-bedroom house right outside the post. And then she got pregnant and had her first baby, Lauren, a plump little girl with blue eyes. She was scared of the baby. She had been an only child. She’d never been around infants before. When Lauren cried, she was terrified that something dreadful had happened. But the other women on the post—some of them had had four, five, even six babies—took her in hand, showed her what to do, calmed and cuddled her, just as she calmed and cuddled the baby.

  She loved the Army post. The wisdom of the women. The sandy earth. The scrubby pines. At night, she and Sol would go for walks beneath the trees, the baby in her carriage, all wrapped in thick netting to keep away spiders. Or they’d go to the drive-in movie, sit in the warm darkness with the baby in her basket in the back of the car and James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis and James Stewart moving against the sky like giant, glowing gods. They had no troubles, no worries, no concerns. She wanted them to stay there forever.

  CHAPTER 2

  TO LIVE IN GREAT NECK IN THE EARLY 1950S WAS TO inhabit a world in which it seemed that nothing unpleasant could ever happen. The roads were uncrowded, the streets were quiet, and everywhere the eye lit there were parklike lawns and sumptuous homes—rambling colonial cottages, spacious Spanish haciendas, stately English Tudor great houses. Great Neck was where life was sweet, especially for the women, who had maids, cooks, chauffeurs, and so much time for beautician’s visits and massages and tennis games that, in those days before it was understood that women wanted more from life than just leisure, a popular joke was, “Lord, when I die, let me be resurrected as a Great Neck housewife.”

  Bibbs Wolosoff’s wife, Sylvia, seemed to many of her neighbors the personification of the privileged, happy Great Neck housewife. She was long-limbed, lean, and blond, with smooth tanned skin and a measured smile, had two young sons, James and Van Warren, and a tall, distinguished-looking husband with Prussian blue eyes and a full head of thick, just-graying hair. What’s more, he had built her a mansion.

  The house, which was in the Kings Point section of the town, was a low-slung, glassy creation that awed the neighbors by its audacity and art. It had more than eight thousand square feet of floor space, much of it expended on a mammoth open living room and an atrium in which there flourished, nurtured by a sprinkler system and Japanese gardeners, a veritable forest of plants and a verdant tree that soared right through the roof. Upstairs was Bibbs’s den, which was another large room, as well as a few small bedrooms and a master bedroom appointed with two separate bathrooms and a dressing area that contained hundreds of feet of closets. But it was the amenities and grounds outside the house that were truly spectacular. There was a big pool, a hot tub, a sauna, and a roomy boat dock, all offering views of the glittering Long Island Sound, as well as a long winding driveway that secured the estate’s privacy as it twisted upward from the road past gardens, shade trees, and a velvety one-hole golf course.

  At night there were frequent parties at that mansion, parties to which the Wolosoff boys and their friends were not invited. “I don’t want you guys hanging around the house,” Bibbs would tell them. “Go downstairs to the basement, or go outside, go play by the dock.” The kids did as they were told, but sometimes they’d creep back into the house and tiptoe down the hallway and listen outside Bibbs’s den.

  “You hear that?” a boy named Dick Simons said once to Van Wolosoff. “You hear how they’re laughing?” From behind the door came sounds of raucous giggles and giddy banter.

  “Jeez! They’re drunk,” another boy said. Glasses were tinkling, ice was rattling.

  The drinking noises, Dick Simons would one day say, were the prelude to change, to domestic disruption, the sounds of adults getting ready to explore new directions. In 1960 the marriage of Bibbs and Sylvia broke up. She married a neighbor, Sol Weinsier. Weinsier’s wife married a man named Gordon. Gordon’s wife married someone else’s husband. And Bibbs married a statuesque woman named Jeanette, whom he’d met in the course of pursuing a real-estate deal in Newark.

  She was Joy Fererh’s mother.

  Jeanette had had a hard time after her relationship with Fererh broke up. She’d had to work to support her little daughter—Jeanette would later tell others that not only didn’t Fererh contribute financially to the household, but there were times when she had to help him out with money—and she’d become a secretary in Newark, New Jersey. In addition, she’d had a long series of affairs, some of which had been downright humiliating, and none of which had taken her where she wanted to go—namely into a decent marriage with a man rich enough to afford her cultivated tastes. Once, when she was having an affair with a married doctor of her acquaintance, his wife had come home right when she and the doctor were in his bedroom, and she’d had to hide in the closet like a thief until the coast was clear. But to her relief, after a while she’d succeeded in getting married for the second time. She’d become the wife of a prosperous Long Island builder, a French Jew named Germont.

  Germont had installed Jeanette in a pleasant if not luxurious house in Sands Point, a fashionable section of Port Washington, a suburban town just east of Great Neck. He’d bought her expensive jewelry and clothes. And he’d given her another child, a boy they named Bruce. Bruce was six years younger than her little girl, Joy.

  Jeanette had been happy with her new husband, but he had leukemia and died prematurely. She inherited the house and some money. But not enough. She could barely meet the mortgage payments. And, strapped for cash, she’d gone back to work. Not as a secretary. She didn’t do secretarial work anymore. Rather, working on a contractual basis, she did public relations for the city of Newark. She ran parties, hiring the caterers, supervising the guest lists, and acting as hostess. She was a wonderful hostess—enthusiastic, concerned, chatty. She’d learned that she could talk to anyone—all it took was reading the Enquirer, so as to be up on the latest scandal, and following the astrology columns in the women’s magazines, so she could amuse people by predicting their futures.

  It was at one of her functions that Bibbs had met her. He talked to her briefly and, family legend has it, was instantaneously smitten. The next day, he sent her flowers—ten dozen roses.

  After that, they started seeing each other, albeit surreptitiously at first. But after he and Sylvia broke up, Bibbs invited Jeanette for a two-day cruise on his yacht and, during the cruise, asked her to marry him.

  Jeanette’s little girl, Joy Fererh, reveled in the story of their romantic courtship. Joy was a pretty little thing who looked a lot like her mother. Indeed, sometimes, when she dressed up in her mother’s clothes, her mother would say, “You’re me! You’re a carbon copy of me.” And while some young girls want to look like anyone but their mothers, Joy seemed happy to think that she might have inherited not only her mother’s extraordinarily good looks but her remarkable ability to make a man fall—in an instant—head over heels in love with her.

  It didn’t take Bibbs long to realize that Joy was exceptionally attached to her mother. After he married Jeanette and moved her and her kids into his mansion, the little girl was always getting underfoot. When he’d come home from work, she’d be parked in his and Jeanette’s bedroom, chattering away. And at night, after dinner, she’d be sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, trying on her mother’s jewelry. Jeanette had a pass
ion for jewelry. “Bibbie,” she’d say—she always called him Bibbie—“you are going to buy me that emerald, aren’t you?” Or, “Let’s go to Winston’s on Saturday. There’s a diamond necklace there that’ll take your breath away.”

  “Oh, let’s,” Joy would say, considering herself part of the plan. And her mother would kiss and cuddle her and promise to take her along.

  Bibbs found her an annoyance, a constant interference between himself and Jeanette. He liked Jeanette’s little boy. The kid was self-reliant and musically talented. He could sit and play the piano for hours on end. But Joy was always hanging on her mother’s skirttails, demanding her attention. And getting it. Bibbs resented the love Jeanette lavished on Joy. “But she needs all that love, Bibbie,” Jeanette would say. “The poor little thing, she never had a father. I’m all she’s got.”

  Joan Wachtler, whose father had been Bibbs’s brother, was living nearby with her husband, Sol. After the Army, although at first they’d planned to go back to Florida and live there, they’d moved up north.

  They’d done it largely at Bibbs’s urging. The aging, rich builder had taken a great liking to his niece’s husband. He liked educated men, he told Sol, men with whom he could discuss business and ideas. And it was good to have a lawyer in the family, he told friends, especially a good, sharp lawyer like Sol.

  Bibbs needed a good lawyer. People were always threatening to sue him. Tenants. Subcontractors. Copartners. He didn’t mind being sued. One of his favorite sayings was, “You do what you have to do in business. And if people don’t like it, screw ’em, let ’em sue you. The most it’ll cost you is twenty-five thousand dollars. That’ll buy out any lawsuit.”

  Still, he needed a lawyer to handle all the threats and keep him on the good side of the government. Only one year before he’d persuaded Sol to move north, he and his brother Morton had been investigated for fraudulent practices by the Federal Housing Administration. They’d been accused of reaching into federal mortgage money and helping themselves to a half million dollars. Bibbs had been cynical about the government’s probe. “What’s the big deal?” he’d said to friends. “They wanted houses. We wanted money. We both got what we wanted.” But he’d had to testify at an unpleasant hearing at which Prescott Bush, the Republican senator from Connecticut, had been caustic and harsh. A smart young lawyer like Sol could have been a boon at a time like that.

  After the hearing, Bibbs had corresponded regularly with Sol, and at last persuaded him to rent a little ranch house in the Lake Success area of Great Neck.

  Sol took a job with Austin and Dupont, a law firm in nearby Queens, with offices facing the elevated subway. It wasn’t the kind of firm he’d dreamed of working at. But that kind of firm, a prestigious Manhattan firm, didn’t hire Washington and Lee law graduates. Firms like that hired Harvard men, Yale men. Sol contented himself with his thirty-five-dollar-a-week job—though he never grew used to the rumble of the elevated train. When he was talking to a client on the phone and a train started to roar by, he’d say, “Just a minute. I’ve got to find some papers,” and keep the receiver covered until the noise was gone. But while Austin and Dupont wasn’t much, he was practicing law—and although Bibbs didn’t let him handle any of his big real-estate deals, he gave him some work, good work, and took him under his wing, made him his confidant, his adviser, his counselor.

  Once, Sol even negotiated a land deal for him. It was a family affair. Philip Wachtler had bought a large tract of land near St. Petersburg, Florida. He’d paid thirty thousand dollars for more than three hundred acres, much of the acreage right on the water. The price had been cheap because the land was virtually inaccessible. No roads ran through it and no ferry or bridge connected it to already developed areas. Then, lo and behold, the state decided to construct a superhighway through the land, and suddenly Sol’s father was offered two hundred thousand dollars for his property, and then three hundred thousand, and then more and more, until at last he was being offered eight hundred thousand. He didn’t know whether to take the offer, and so Sol asked Bibbs, who knew so much about real estate, to come down to Florida and look over the site. The three of them walked what part of the land they could, but much of it was mangrove swamp, so they rented a little boat and motored through the rest, and then Bibbs said to Philip, “This land is terrific! You can pump out the water and double the size. How much were you offered? Eight hundred thousand? I’ll give you eight hundred and fifty.”

  Philip cheerfully said okay.

  Two weeks later, a construction company which had developed much of Florida offered him a million and a quarter. Hearing the figure, Sol told his father that he wasn’t bound to accept Bibbs’s offer—they hadn’t yet signed a contract. But Philip stood by his word. “Look,” he said, “I shook hands on it.”

  Bibbs was impressed. “Your father’s a man of honor,” he told Sol. And he promised to build Philip a beautiful house, right on the most exquisite part of the land, where it would be surrounded by water on three sides. He also told Sol that if he liked, he could be the one to develop the land. All he had to do was put up fifty thousand dollars. But Sol didn’t have the money. Joan didn’t, either. Her father had left her mother all his income-producing properties and given Joan property that, while potentially worth a great deal, was not yet earning much. Sol let go the offer to develop the land.

  It didn’t bother him much at the time. He was busy with other matters. For one thing, with Bibbs’s backing, he’d begun to try his hand at politics, this time in the real, not the ivy-walled, world. He was a Republican—he’d been one ever since he could remember, having learned at an early age that in the South, the Republican party was the liberal one, the one his father and indeed nearly all the Jewish people he knew voted for. Before he’d moved out to Great Neck, he’d asked one of Bibbs’s stockbroker friends to put in a good word for him with the local Republican bigwigs. The stockbroker had called Joe Carlino, a New York State assemblyman and vice-chairman of the Nassau County Republican Committee, and told him, “I got a young guy from a very good family moving out to Nassau. He’s a real personable young fellow. I’d like you to meet him.”

  Carlino never forgot the call. He remembered it because the young man, when he finally met him, really was personable, a find, which wasn’t always the case when people touted protégés to him. But this Sol Wachtler was unique. Affable, witty, smart. After talking with him, Carlino introduced him to all the Republican leaders in Nassau. And after that, Carlino remembered, “Sol just got going. He joined the Republican Club in North Hempstead, and the first thing I knew, he’d made a whole lot of friends there.”

  That was in 1956. By 1960, the year that Bibbs married Jeanette, Sol was thinking about entering electoral politics. Joan had an uncle who’d been a state senator. Maybe someday he could be one too.

  “Jeanette! Good God, what happened to you?” a friend of the new Mrs. Wolosoff said to her one afternoon shortly after she’d married Bibbs. The two women were sharing a fitting room in a Great Neck dress shop. Jeanette had just removed her blouse, and her friend had noticed that her flesh was flecked with tiny little bruises. Hickeys. From here to there!

  “It’s nothing,” Jeanette said, smiling. “Just Bibbs. You know he can’t keep his hands off me.”

  He also couldn’t keep himself from buying her whatever she wanted—which was a great deal. She asked to have the house redecorated, and he gave her free rein to indulge her taste for costly white lacquer furniture and thick white and beige carpets. She coveted jewelry, and he bought her diamonds and rubies, sapphires and emeralds, necklaces so intricate they looked like tracery and earrings that shone on her ears like beacons. He’d pay for the purchases from the wad of crisp hundred-dollar bills pinched together by a shiny money clip that he always carried in his pocket. He didn’t use a credit card and almost never wrote checks. Sometimes he’d reach into the safe he kept in his den and take out ten thousand dollars and slide it into his money clip.

  Bibbs
enjoyed going shopping with Jeanette. She had a way of turning everything, even sitting around in a shop, into an adventure. They’d ride into Manhattan in the Lincoln Continental, driven by Bibbs’s chauffeur, John Green. They’d go to Bonwit’s or Saks, Jeanette’s favorite stores. And then, her eyes glistening with excitement and her hands caressing him, Jeanette would select dresses and suits and furs—a mink cape was his special treat.

  Jeanette was a big-boned woman, and she worried a lot about her weight. But she had magnificent slender legs, and when she put on her highest heels and her latest Pucci print, pulling back her fine black hair the better to show off her diamond earrings, she was unforgettable, a presence. At parties men would vie to talk with her, and Bibbs, seeing their avidity, would gloat.

  At home, he was happier still. Jeanette fussed over him, brought him little surprises—shirts made of cotton so smooth it felt like silk and ties that looked better with his blue blazers than anything he himself could have picked out. And she ran the house with unique style and largesse. Was Bibbs expecting a visit from a business associate who liked fruit? When the man arrived, there would be not just a bowl of fruit, but platters and baskets of fruit, perfuming the rooms with sweetness. Did Bibbs have a friend who liked chopped liver? Jeanette would order pounds of it. Did one of his business associates crave nothing for lunch but an omelette? Jeanette, although they had a cook, would herself go into the kitchen and whip up an eggy extravaganza. At large parties and dinners, for which she hired waiters who flipped open soft damask napkins and laid them upon the guests’ knees, just as it was done in England, visitors felt just as pampered. Jeanette thought of everything, having written most of the guests’ preferences down in a notebook. She made everyone feel swaddled in luxury and made all the men feel envious of Bibbs.