The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Nor did he like it when people on his staff made light of marriage. Marriage was sacred, he would say, so sacred that wedding ceremonies should really not be performed by judges like himself, but by priests, ministers, and rabbis, as they were the only people who could give such ceremonies the weightiness they deserved. Above all, he frowned on philandering—a common activity among certain legislators, who had wives back home in their districts and mistresses up in Albany. So many married people conducted adulterous affairs in Albany that there was even a joke about the city’s frequent liaisons. Infidelity was okay up in the capital, went the joke, because the legislators had passed a law, the Tappan Zee Rule, that said that anything goes once you’re north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Sol disapproved of that sort of thing, he let it be known. And the people who worked with him were sure he not only meant it but never gave adultery a thought.

  Joy’s marriage to David Paul hadn’t gone smoothly. “If I’d lived with him two days,” she told an intimate, “I’d never have married him.” They’d taken a lavish apartment on Park Avenue, living there with little Evan and Paul’s two sons from a previous marriage—he’d gotten custody of them after a bitter fight with his former wife. But the couple quarreled constantly, and within two months of the wedding ceremony, they got an annulment in the Dominican Republic.

  Six months later, Joy began to be seen with a friend of Paul’s, a businessman named Jeffrey Silverman who had just left his wife. Slim, handsome, and debonair, thirty-year-old Jeffrey was the son of an exceedingly wealthy Wall Street conglomerator. With his father’s aid, Jeffrey had become a member of the New York Stock Exchange when he was only twenty-one years old and had quickly established himself as a prescient private investor. At the time Joy started dating him, he had just gotten in on the ground floor of the soon-to-skyrocket business of cable television, having established his own cable company.

  Jeffrey and his wife, Pamela, had not separated amicably, and there were rumors that Joy was responsible. She’d set her sights on Jeffrey, Dick Simons heard down in Florida, and then she’d provoked or inspired him to leave Pamela. Whether or not this was true, Jeffrey and Pamela, who had two children, a boy and a girl, began to haggle over the terms of a divorce, and Joy, who badly wanted to marry her attractive new suitor, settled in for a long courtship.

  Joan Wachtler had been concentrating on her career. She’d been extremely scared when she’d gone back to school. She hadn’t been near a classroom in over twenty years, and she’d forgotten what it was like to have to memorize information, write papers, take tests. She hated tests. One day, sitting in a restaurant with Sol, she’d got so panicky over an upcoming exam in statistics that she broke down and sobbed. Sol was concerned. He drove her to school and sat in the car in the parking lot until she emerged from her ordeal. He helped her in other ways too. He gave her emotional support and sometimes, when he was down from Albany, he even assisted her with her homework, just the way he used to help the children with theirs. By 1975, Sol’s third year on the court, she was doing so well in her studies that she won an internship at the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, in Washington, D.C.

  When Sol was in his fourth year on the court, and Joy and Jeffrey were still waiting to marry, Dick Simons won his lawsuit against Bibbs. His lawyer had been able to prove that Bibbs had illegally and for personal reasons devalued the Palm Beach corporation and denied Dick the last of the St. Petersburg lots that were supposed to have been his. One day in 1976, a Florida judge informed Bibbs that he would have to pay Dick a large settlement and all of his legal fees. Dick walked over to Bibbs in the courthouse that morning, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “See, you never offered me the twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  Bibbs turned around, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “The twenty-five thousand dollars,” Dick said. “Remember? The money you always told me would buy off any lawsuit.”

  That afternoon, Jeanette took Dick to lunch. He told her what he’d said to Bibbs, and she laughed out loud. “That’s priceless,” she said. She, too, had heard Bibbs say a hundred times, maybe a thousand times, that you could buy off any lawsuit with twenty-five grand.

  “He made a mistake,” Dick said. “He coulda settled with me, Jeanette.”

  “No.” And no longer laughing, she turned serious. “Bibbs never offered to settle with you,” she said, “because he didn’t want to give you anything.”

  It was Dick’s turn to laugh. “He shoulda known better,” he said. Then he, too, turned serious. “What gets me,” he said, “is that I was like a son to Bibbs.”

  “I think,” Jeanette replied, “that Bibbs thinks of sons as dispensable.”

  Whether or not Bibbs thought of sons in general as dispensable, he was certainly beginning to think of his elder son, Jimmy, that way. He and Jimmy were not getting on at all. They were too alike, people who knew them both thought. Each of them was stubborn, contentious, fiercely competitive. But their unfortunate similarities might not have driven them apart, had it not been for Jeanette. She had been trying to alienate Bibbs from Jimmy ever since she’d married into the family. In the early years, she’d complained about Jimmy’s habits and personality, and in recent years she’d repeatedly insisted that Jimmy was interested in one thing only, and that was Bibbs’s money.

  Bibbs’s money. Everybody wanted some of it, more of it, as much of it as they could get. Dick Simons had gotten a chunk. So had Jeanette herself, largely in the form of jewelry. She had cost him so much, Bibbs would one day confide to Sol, still his trusted counselor and adviser, that she was spending him into an early grave. But the person who was greediest, he began to think, under Jeanette’s tutelage, was his son Jimmy. Jimmy had reneged on an agreement the two of them had made concerning some trusts he’d set up for the boy. Bibbs had put close to $1,500,000 into the trusts—it was a way of sheltering money from the IRS—and in return, Jimmy was supposed to pay him a tax-free annuity of $180,000 a year for the rest of his life. Jimmy had paid the annuity for a while, and then he’d stopped, saying that the trust wasn’t producing $180,000 a year. What kind of son was that? It wasn’t as if the boy didn’t have any other money. Bibbs began demanding that Jimmy pay up.

  Jimmy took him to court. He sued his father for lying about the annuity payments due him and also for having dealt fraudulently with him in dozens of business transactions—one had to do with the St. Petersburg land Bibbs had bought from Sol’s father, promised to Jimmy and Van, and then sold piece by piece to Dick Simons. “My father,” Jimmy told the court, “was the dominant, persuasive, and elemental force in our family life,” a man who controlled every aspect of the family’s affairs, down to the minutest details. He did so, Jimmy asserted, because he was convinced that he deserved to do so, in view of “his phenomenal financial success.”

  Accusations came tumbling out of Jimmy’s court papers. Bibbs, he asserted, had intimidated and terrorized his children. Bibbs had even tried to defraud the IRS.

  Bibbs hit the roof when he read Jimmy’s assertions. He countersued him and vowed he would fight him until he’d driven him into the ground.

  Jimmy’s lawyer, Allen H. Weiss, a good-natured, compassionate man, didn’t comprehend, at first, the extent of Bibbs’s rage. He believed he could bring about a rapprochement between father and son. After all, he reasoned, Bibbs had only two sons. Two natural sons. And one of them was a troubled fellow, a misfit. But Jimmy was exactly in Bibbs’s image. An intelligent, tough, well-spoken businessman. Surely Bibbs didn’t mean to destroy him. Even if he did have Van and the adopted son, Bruce. Blood was blood. Maybe, Weiss reasoned, if he could get Bibbs to see his grandchildren, Jimmy’s daughters, he’d come around, settle the suit.

  Weiss called Bibbs, and the two of them went to lunch at Stark’s in Great Neck. He begged him to see his grandchildren—the two little girls were about three and six, and he hadn’t seen them in close to a year, not since the litigation had begun. He told Bibbs he owed it to
his own father—a cantor—to see his grandchildren, his descendants, his only true lineage.

  Bibbs was surprisingly affected by Weiss’s entreaties. He not only paid the whole lunch bill, but he promised he’d see the little girls. Take them out somewhere. He’d have to take them out, rather than have them visit, he explained, because his wife didn’t want them in her home.

  Not long afterward, Weiss heard about the visit—not from Bibbs, but from his lawyers. Bibbs, they said, had spent an afternoon with his granddaughters. But he hadn’t enjoyed it. He’d felt a wall between them.

  Weiss shook his head. Bibbs made that wall, he thought. How could two little girls erect a barrier against a grandfather? But Bibbs hadn’t considered his own culpability in the building of the wall, or he’d chosen not to consider it. He’d simply decided that his granddaughters had become strangers to him. It was sad. And sadder still was the fact that Bibbs said he didn’t think he’d care to see them again. Not ever.

  The lawsuit between Jimmy and Bibbs dragged on for months and months, but in the end, Jimmy was the victor. He won release from having to pay the annuity. Bibbs was frantic, furious, besotted with rage. He told Sol that he rued the day that Jimmy had ever been conceived. And he began to focus whatever fatherly feelings might be said still to beat in his steely breast on Jeanette’s children. Not just Bruce, but Joy too, despite the fact that for years he hadn’t cared for her. He would show Jimmy, he decided. He would cut him out of his will. Him and his daughters too. They were dead, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t need them. He had Bruce. And Joy.

  She’d gotten married again, at last. Jeffrey and Pamela had finally divorced, and Joy, after a small and simple wedding, had become the new Mrs. Silverman.

  The year that Joy married Jeffrey—it was 1977—Joan got her master’s degree in social work and immediately became the director of the mental health and geriatric clinics of the Little Neck YM-YWHA. That same year, some New York Republicans who were beginning to think about the next year’s upcoming gubernatorial race started to bandy about Sol’s name.

  Sol had acted differently from other judges on the court of appeals. Whereas they tended to settle down to their fourteen-year terms, eschewing further politicking, he had continued to court the spotlight and make himself politically known. He had regularly attended dinners and fund-raisers and had become a much-sought-after speaker at these functions. It was easy to see why. His speeches were always a perfect blend of down-to-earth humor and high-minded inspirational phrases. Audiences loved them and the handsome, distinguished judge too.

  Sol, on his part, loved his audiences. He thrived on the sounds of their chuckling when he told a joke, reveled in the way they nodded their heads in solemn agreement when he turned earnest. It was always reassuring to be reminded that he was still popular, that he was still the Great Jewish Hope of the Republican party, the man who embodied all the noble liberal ideals of his mentor, Nelson Rockefeller. Invigorated by his audiences, Sol listened seriously to those who thought he ought to run for governor in 1978.

  Joe Margiotta scotched the idea. He wasn’t sure Sol could get the nomination. The conservative wing of the party wasn’t likely to go for Sol, he said. And besides, the state assembly’s minority leader had locked up the nomination months ago. He had so many IOUs out around the state, it would be virtually impossible to defeat him in a primary.

  Sol, cautioned, decided not to try for the nomination. But he continued to speak whenever he was asked. He’s got an extraordinary desire for praise, one of his staff members thought when Sol went on giving speeches even though he was no longer likely to be a candidate. It’s an all-consuming passion. He has to be fed constantly with applause and admiration, or else he goes empty and hungry.

  Jeffrey Silverman had made a lot of money in his career as an investor, but he’d lost a lot of money too. He was in one of his down times when he married Joy, and although he still had a limousine and a chauffeur, he couldn’t afford the kind of apartment he and Joy both wanted, something big and splashy on Park or Fifth. Instead, he moved into the apartment Joy had been living in for several years, a two-bedroom flat on Third Avenue.

  Joy may have been disappointed at having to live as a married woman in the abode of her single days, but the marriage brought her contentment in another area. After her abortion at New York Hospital, she had tried to content herself with just little Evan. But she had yearned for another child, a girl she could costume and pamper the way her mother had costumed and pampered her. In 1978, she was able to attain this heart’s desire. She and Jeffrey adopted a little girl, a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby who was so perfect in body and temperament that Jeanette dubbed her “the computer baby.”

  But apparently Joy wasn’t altogether at peace. Apparently a part of her was still on the lookout for adventure, romance, and perhaps even another husband, a more perfect one than Jeffrey. This is the view of a dynamic, exceedingly prosperous financier who met her at a party in the late seventies. According to him, he and Joy talked for a while, and when the party was over, she called a mutual friend to make inquiries about him. Was he available? Was he as successful as he seemed to be?

  The friend answered yes to both questions, and soon afterward, when Joy and the financier met at another party, he says he picked up signals that she was sexually interested in him.

  The financier remembers getting uneasy. Joy was smiling at him, touching him, telling him he was brilliant. And he remembers thinking, I don’t want to fool around with her. She’s too aggressive. And she looks like trouble, looks like the type who gets hysterical and demanding.

  He tried to discourage Joy’s interest subtly, without saying anything that would hurt her feelings. But it didn’t work. The next time they met, she was all over him again, and he finally had to let her know, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t his type.

  No, he didn’t have a middle name, Sol told a reporter in 1979. The fact that his name appeared with the middle initial M on his paychecks and in official state records was all a big mistake. But maybe he ought to accept the error that had been made. “What would be a good impressive name to match the initial?” he asked the reporter rhetorically. And then he answered his own question. “There’s always Macbeth,” he said.

  Why Macbeth? Why the name of a man who had stood high in the opinion of all men, yet ended by reaping their curses and contempt? It was, of course, a joke. But perhaps jokes, like slips of the tongue, can be guides to hidden thoughts.

  A number of Sol’s friends would eventually postulate this, pointing to certain of his favorite jokes. There was the one he told on himself about how he’d felt proud to sit on the court of appeals at the desk once occupied by the great Benjamin Cardozo, only to be brought up short by Joan, who’d remind him that fifty years from now, it would still be remembered as Cardozo’s desk. And there was the one about how, when he first ran for a judgeship, his mother said to him, “You mean they know you, Sol? They know you, and they still want you to be a judge?”

  But revelatory as Sol’s self-deprecating jokes might eventually come to seem, in the late seventies they were taken by his friends as signs of his unassumingness. He’s accomplished so much, they would say, yet he can still poke fun at himself, still be humble. And indeed, to all outward appearances, he was a fan of humility. One of his favorite stories was the Yiddish folktale of the porter Bontscha Schvaig, a man so modest that although he is beaten and starved, he asks for nothing, no help at all, his whole life long, and even in death, when angels reward his forbearance by offering him anything in paradise he wants, requests only a roll and butter.

  Bontscha, Sol told people, was his talisman. He so loved the story that he hung a drawing of Bontscha on the walls of his chambers.

  Joy needed things, things she couldn’t get from Jeffrey. But there was always Bibbs. When she wanted extra money, she went to him. And generally, he gave her what she wanted. Years later, she’d tell Sol Wachtler that she’d learned over the years just
how to get Bibbs to agree. She’d telephone him and make her demand, and if he didn’t say yes right away, she’d get angry, and sometimes she’d threaten to report him to the IRS.

  Generally, Bibbs capitulated. He wanted desperately to keep peace in his home and to make Jeanette happy, and the way to keep the peace and make Jeanette happy was to give Joy what she wanted.

  He was still in love with Jeanette. But in 1980, he realized he was going to lose her. She had stomach cancer.

  She fought the illness with all her strength, doing whatever the doctors advised, and, with the flair she’d always shown, drove around Great Neck in her white Bentley, a dramatic white turban atop her balding head. But after a while, the cancer got the better of her, and she became weak and fragile. Still, she never lost her fierce desire to provide for her children. “It’s too bad we can’t kill Bibbs a few minutes before I die,” she joked to Joy shortly before her death. “That way, you’d never have to worry. His money would go to me and then directly to you and Bruce.”

  When Jeanette died, Joy was inconsolable. She had been so close to, so intimately connected with, her mother. Her mother had been mother and father to her, she told friends. Her mother had been not only her nurturer but her protector, the only person who had ever really looked out for her. After her death, Joy put a memorial announcement in the Times, saying she would miss her and remember her always, and every year afterward on the anniversary of her death, she declared her love in yet another ad, as if trying to reach Jeanette in the great beyond.