by Linda Wolfe
Several days later, he did just that, driving back to their old house in St. Pete. But he wasn’t there an hour before Joy called to say she missed him, and after he’d been gone a few days, she flew up to see him.
They stayed at the Hyatt in Tampa and made love for the first time in weeks and it was good, and afterward Dick thought that maybe they could salvage their marriage. So he returned to Palm Beach. But right away, they started fighting again, and at last, he decided to leave for good.
Before he left town, he went to see Bibbs. “I’m going back to St. Petersburg again for a while,” he said, “and when I come back, Joy and I won’t be living together. We’re separating.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Bibbs said. “You should have told Joy, ‘I’ll give you anything you want.’ That’s all she wants. Other than you. She loves you.”
“She can’t love me,” Dick said. “All she wants is money.” Then he said, “I hope this doesn’t ruin our building project here, Bibbs—you know, I’m going to fulfill all my obligations on the job. But I gotta get away for a while. It’s really best for all of us.”
Bibbs smiled at Dick affectionately. “I’ve known you since you were a boy,” he said. “Since before I met Jeanette. Or Joy. Whatever happens between the two of you, you and I will still be friends. And partners.”
Reassured, Dick left town. And ten days later, Bibbs served him with nine lawsuits, charging him with abandoning their business in Palm Beach and leaving all their financial obligations in his lap.
Joy filed for divorce. She said in court papers that marriage to Dick had been so stressful that she’d become emotionally ill, and at a court hearing she explained that she was a fragile person who’d grown up filled with “insecurities” because her parents weren’t the same set of parents as those of her brother. “My childhood growing up wasn’t exactly a normal one,” she said, and comparing her existence to the entertainments she had always watched so avidly, she asserted, “My life is like a soap opera.”
It had certainly become a soap opera of sorts. Not only was she suing Dick for a divorce, but he and her stepfather were suing each other over their business ventures—not just the Palm Beach condominiums, but now, even the St. Petersburg property. Bibbs had decided to refuse to sell Dick the final plots of land he had promised to him.
Joy was on Bibbs’s side in the disputes, and Dick, to whom she was still speaking occasionally, was surprised at this. “How can you stand behind your stepfather, who hated your guts for so many years?” he asked her one day. “How can you lie for him and stand behind him when you know he’s doing what he’s doing just to hurt me?”
“Hurting you is the idea,” Dick recalled her saying. “We’re going to hurt you. And you won’t be able to fight us. We’re the Wolosoffs.”
“Aw, come on,” Dick said. “You’re not a Wolosoff.”
“Oh, yes I am,” Joy said. “I’m a Wolosoff because my mother is a Wolosoff.”
Infuriated by her response, Dick sought out Jeanette, whom he still considered a special friend. He wanted to talk to her about Bibbs, but she wanted to talk about the split between him and Joy. “Maybe it was all my fault,” she said. “You and Joy breaking up. But if it was, it was unintentional.”
He knew she was talking about the money, and he felt bad. She had tears in her eyes.
“I thought I was helping,” she went on. “I just wanted my daughter to have whatever she wanted. I just wanted her to be the Queen Bee.”
Dick forgave her. How could he not? But there was no way he was ever going to forgive Bibbs.
“I loved Bibbs,” he said. “He was like a second father to me. And I was like a son to him. But he’s a sneaky, no-good shit, and you can tell him that I said so. And tell him this: I may be younger, and I may not have the money he has, but I’m gonna prove that I’m right and he’s wrong, and I’m gonna get him for what he’s done to me.”
Jeanette was diplomatic. “May the man who’s right win,” she said.
Joan Wachtler, for all her blond beauty and her good Sarah Lawrence education, had been eclipsed by her husband, who cast an enormous shadow. When they went out together, he was the person to whom everyone wanted to talk, he was the funny one, the lively one, the important one. She was the auxiliary, the supporting player, the helpmeet. It had been this way for years. But it wasn’t just their friends and acquaintances who bathed him in admiration. It was the children too. As they’d scrambled through the thorns of adolescence, they’d grown even closer to him than they’d been before, telling him their hurts, their hopes, their secrets, vying with one another to gain his attention. She was often left out in the cold.
She was left out in the cold in another way too. After Sol’s campaign against Nickerson, when she’d discovered she enjoyed the details of politics and was a superb office administrator, she’d begun doing political work, volunteering in the campaign headquarters of Senator Javits and other candidates. She’d adored the work and reveled in the feelings of pride and identity it gave her. But one day someone had called Sol and said it wasn’t right for his wife to be doing political work, what with his being a judge. And that had been the end of her career. She’d had to give up the work she loved.
Now she was realizing that she’d better find something to do with her life. Something that was hers and hers alone and didn’t have anything at all to do with Sol. After a while, she began thinking about social work. It suited her. One of the reasons she’d liked working in politics was that she was interested in social causes, in women’s issues and poverty issues. If she became a social worker, maybe she could put those interests to work. Maybe she’d be able to help others at the same time that she helped herself.
Inspired by the possibilities, Joan decided to get a graduate degree in social work.
Once her divorce from Dick became final, Joy went up to New York. There, in New York Hospital, the same hospital in which she’d given birth to Evan, she had an abortion. It was very late in her pregnancy and the abortion required an operation.
Jeanette called Dick and told him that Joy blamed him for her having had the abortion. She wouldn’t have had it, Jeanette said, if she hadn’t been worried that because of all the tranquilizers she’d taken during the stormy days of their marriage, the child would be abnormal. “If I were you, I’d prepare myself,” Jeanette warned Dick. “I don’t think she’ll ever forgive you.”
And she didn’t. She stayed in New York, even though according to the terms of their divorce agreement, she wasn’t supposed to move away from Florida. And she wouldn’t speak to Dick anymore except when it was absolutely necessary that they confer so that he could arrange a visit to Evan.
Dick hoped she’d get over her anger at him. And he hoped her move to New York was a temporary thing. That she’d soon come back. In the meantime, he was busy with his litigation with Bibbs.
A new figure had entered that litigation. He was David Paul, a thirty-three-year-old real-estate developer who would one day be a major figure in the savings and loan scandal that rocked America in the late 1980s. A man who adored extravagance, he would be accused of siphoning more than twenty-five million dollars from CenTrust, a bank he controlled, and of using the money to pay for his pleasures, among them a nine-million-dollar estate, a ninety-five-foot yacht with gold-leaf ceilings, and an art collection that included priceless paintings by some of the old masters.
In the early 1970s, however, David Paul did not yet have an art collection, nor own a kingly yacht and palatial home. Nevertheless, for a man in his early thirties, he was already immensely successful. The son of a Great Neck businessman, Isadore Goldstein, who had lived not far from Bibbs and owned a chain of cleaning stores, Paul, who had changed his name, had already built three strikingly modern apartment developments and started a real-estate investment company.
He was something of a liar, fond of inventing distinguished educational credits for himself. And he had a titanic temper. Nevertheless, Bibbs was willing to d
o business with him, and when Dick began countersuing his father-in-law, Bibbs sold Paul all his stock in the company he and Dick had owned. Then he and Paul set up a new company for the building of the selfsame Palm Beach condominiums that had once been Bibbs and Dick’s venture.
Establishing such a firm might have seemed, to a different investor than Paul, a foolhardy project. Palm Beach real estate was in decline. It had by now been heavily hit by the recession, and story upon story of luxury apartments and condominiums were standing empty. Their prospective buyers had canceled their contracts, and the banks that had lent the money for their construction were getting tough. Indeed, Chase, which had given Bibbs and Dick a three-million-dollar loan, was demanding the return of its loan. And there was no money with which to repay Chase. It had all been spent. But Paul saw a way out. He arranged for a new, five-million-dollar bank loan, then paid Chase back its three million. But once he and Bibbs had the additional two million, they didn’t go forward with the building of condominiums. They terminated the project.
Dick Simons hired one of Palm Beach’s most noted lawyers, Joseph Farish, to represent him against Bibbs. Farish alleged that Bibbs and David Paul had each helped themselves personally to a million dollars from the new bank loan. One humid day in a Palm Beach court clerk’s office, Farish took a deposition from Paul and asked him why, in view of the recession and the cancellations, he had been willing to take a financial risk that the Chase bank had shied away from.
Dick was sitting in the clerk’s office. He listened while Paul began his answer, explaining that he had confidence in Bibbs because he knew him, had grown up in the very same town that Bibbs lived in back home. And then he heard Paul say that he was even dating Bibbs’s stepdaughter.
Dick was astonished. Joy dating David Paul! He had known David Paul for years and had always disliked him, always considered him untrustworthy. When the session ended, he made his way over to Paul and said to him, “You’re scum. You were scum when I knew you back in Great Neck, and you’re scum now. You must be as interesting to Joy as a dead worm on the street.”
But although he’d spoken as if he didn’t believe Joy would go out with David Paul, he knew it was probably true. Paul was a liar, but he wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. Dick went home miserable and tried to talk himself into not caring about what Joy did and whom she saw. It wasn’t his business any longer.
Joy married David Paul. It was a hurry-up, perhaps even a spur-of-the-moment, thing. She and Paul went to the Las Vegas county courthouse, where marriage licenses were issued all day and all night long, and they took their vows in a wedding parlor, the kind of place where the aisles are banked with artificial flowers and the windows covered with imitation stained glass made out of paper.
After the abrupt ceremony, at three in the morning, Joy telephoned Dick. “It’s me,” he recalled her saying, when he picked up the phone. “It’s the love of your life.”
“What do you want?” he asked her shortly.
“I just want to tell you I got married tonight. To David Paul.”
He sat up in bed—too quickly. He tried to act disengaged. “You mean you called me at this hour to tell me you got married—like I really care who you marry?” He laughed. “Or is it just to make me feel bad?” He knew that was why.
“Yeah,” she said from Vegas, but it was as if she were there in the room with him, still. “To make you feel bad. And I want you to know how I’m going to fuck him tonight.”
“That’s nice, Joy.” He got a grip on himself. He lay down and listened.
“Don’t you miss it?” she asked. “Don’t you miss doing all those things to me, and me doing all those things to you?”
“No,” he managed. “I really don’t think about it, you know.” But then he couldn’t control himself any longer. “Why’d you marry a fat pig like David Paul?” he demanded, almost shouting. “Why’d you do it?”
“Business is business,” Joy reminded him. “Obviously, if he can bail out my father and fuck you over too, then I’ll marry him.” She paused. “For a while.”
Dick never forgot those calculating words, the icy sound of her voice that night. She had come a long way, he decided, from being the little “Pocahontas” with whom he’d fallen in love.
CHAPTER 5
ONCE HE WAS ON THE COURT OF APPEALS, SOL BEGAN TRAVELING TO Albany and residing there, a hundred and fifty miles from Joan, for two weeks a month. He didn’t seem to mind. He and Joan had been married twenty years, and whatever passion had once existed between them had begun to evaporate. They still made love on occasion, but the sex they had was workmanlike, unspontaneous.
In any event, sex was apparently not a high priority of Sol’s—and perhaps it never had been. A friend who’d known him since college noticed when he went to a party with Sol, not long after he began serving on the high court, that although many of the women present were flirting with him, his libido seemed to be totally bridled, so that he was sending off no sexual signals whatsoever. For a moment, the friend thought this odd, but then his mind wandered back to the way Sol had been in college. Not so different from the way he is now, he thought. Articulate, witty, polite. But not sexy. It’s as if, the friend decided, all of Sol’s inner energies are channeled, and had always been channeled, into one thing only, a passion for worldly success.
He was having that success in spades now, making a name for himself not only as a hardworking judge but as a far more liberal and open-minded one than those who had worried about his law-and-order television commercials had ever imagined he might be. In his first year on the court, in a case involving two prisoners sentenced to death for having shot a prison guard, he wrote the majority opinion, overturning the sentence on the grounds that the trial judge had allowed a steward of the prison guards’ union to sit on the jury. In that first year, he also dissented from the majority when they upheld a strict law on obscenity and pornography, and he wrote such a thoughtful and socially sensitive decision in a negligence case that an Albany law professor told the press, “I think we’ve got a new Cardozo on the court.”
In his second and third years, he wrote other important opinions, one a dissent when the court voted to uphold the state’s right to penalize striking workers without first giving them hearings, and another a majority opinion ruling that people who suffered psychological injuries as a result of job-related traumas should be as eligible for workmen’s compensation benefits as those who suffered physical injury.
People who worked with Sol in those days were struck both by his energy and his unusual, and sometimes contradictory, characteristics. He was exceedingly responsible, working long hours, replying to virtually every letter he received, answering virtually every phone call. He was exceedingly kind—he never spoke haughtily to staff members, not even the lowliest, and when friends came to him with their personal, financial, or health problems, or even the problems of their family members, he was indefatigable in trying to help them. Additionally, he was exceedingly supportive of the lawyers who came to argue before him and the court. Once, when a colleague railed at a pair of opposing lawyers, “Both of you have given me briefs and arguments that are useless,” Sol sat forward and said compassionately, “I’m new to the court. I don’t have the knowledge and experience of law that my colleague has—but I found your briefs and arguments very helpful.”
But although he was dependable, accessible, and kind, and although he didn’t like to take part in or even witness public humiliations, he nevertheless liked tricking people, putting something over on them. He especially liked tricking Jacob Fuchsberg, a court of appeals judge who came onto the court two years after he did, and whom he disliked intensely. Sol’s chambers were on the second floor, and Fuchsberg’s on the third. On occasions when he and Fuchsberg boarded the elevator together on the ground floor, Sol would stand near the elevator buttons, press number two for himself, and then, as if to do a courteous service for Fuchsberg, poke out a finger toward the button for the third floor.
But instead he would press the button for the basement. When he got off the elevator on the second floor, it would head down instead of up, and he would come into his chambers laughing gleefully and saying, “I did it again! I tricked him again!”
He had other amusements. He enjoyed coming up with one-liners to convey complex judicial ideas—his most famous, expressed in opposition to the grand jury system, was that if a district attorney pushed for it, “a grand jury will indict even a ham sandwich.” But tricks were his special joy. He loved going unprepared to judicial conferences, getting a clever idea while listening to the discussions, and swaying others to his viewpoint. When this happened, he would say, “If you’ve prepared for a conference and people listen to you, there’s nothing special about it. But if you haven’t prepared and they listen to you—that’s executive talent!” He also got a large kick out of pulling the wool—almost literally—over people’s eyes when it came to matters of appearance. “Whadya think I paid for this suit?” he would ask staff members, who, invariably, would guess a high figure. This would make him cackle and say that the suit had been dirt cheap, but he’d fooled them by wearing an expensive tie. Then, he’d give them his sartorial advice—if you bought your ties at Saks or Brooks Brothers, you could buy your shirts at K mart and your suits at Syms, because no one would ever suspect a man in a Brooks Brothers tie of wearing a cheap shirt and suit.
If there was something of the trickster about him, there was also something of the comedian. He could imitate peoples’ accents and postures to a tee, could “do” his fellow judges so convincingly and so humorously that his staff would erupt into gales of laughter. He also loved telling jokes. But not sexual jokes. He abhorred those, preferring silly and often juvenile stories of the type that mocked cultural characteristics. He’d tell Jewish jokes, Polish jokes, Italian jokes—he loved the one about the Italian immigrant who sadly tells the judge examining him for citizenship that he doesn’t know the name of the man who shot Lincoln, only to have his friends and neighbors yell, “That’s-a-good, Luigi. You ain’t no informer.” But he never told a dirty joke—and he disliked it intensely when staff members did. He even disliked their using obscenities. Once, when a staff member in the throes of frustration did so, Sol snapped at him, “Watch your language, sailor!”