The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Joy frowned. “Whatever,” she said. “I’m still miserable.”

  Lunch was grand. But Joy’s gloom didn’t lift.

  “I don’t want Honey to be the cotrustee of my trust,” Joy said to Sol one day around this time. She had come to see him in his chambers in Mineola. He remembers listening to her arguments patiently, just as he listened to legal arguments in court. But his cousin Joy was different from the lawyers he was used to listening to. She was excitable, emotional. She got so mad when she talked about Honey that she became a little breathless, huffing and panting in indignation. She resented Honey, it was plain to Sol. And she felt that in making Honey cotrustee of her money, Bibbs had played a trick on her. He’d left her lots of money, but he’d put her in the position of having to get it doled out, bit by bit, by someone with whom she couldn’t get on at all. “Bibbs hated me,” she complained.

  It was hard for Sol to see why.

  “He always hated me.”

  To Sol, despite her excitability—or maybe because of it—Joy seemed immensely worthwhile. Charming. He promised her he’d look into the possibility of getting Honey to resign.

  “I think Jeffrey’s fooling around,” Joy told Kathy Greenberg one day.

  Kathy tried to reassure her: Perhaps Joy was just worrying, imagining.

  “Maybe, but I’m having him spied on when he goes out of town.”

  And then, a bit later, she asked Kathy, “Does Sol Wachtler fool around?”

  Kathy found the question offensive and reported it to Sol’s daughter Lauren, who was also a lawyer at Shea and Gould. Lauren had a good laugh about it. Her father, as far as she knew, was the most straitlaced man imaginable. He didn’t even like it when his kids told off-color jokes.

  What should he call Joy? Sol wondered. His niece? She was the right age for a niece, thirty-eight to his fifty-five, but she wasn’t the child of a sibling of his or Joan’s. She was Joan’s uncle’s child. Stepchild. That made her Joan’s cousin. Stepcousin. And his cousin-by-marriage. Stepcousin-by-marriage. But that sounded so distant. And so unimportant. A stepcousin-by-marriage wasn’t much of a relative, wasn’t much of a connection. Perhaps, he decided after a while, he ought to call Joy his ward. It was an old-fashioned designation. Dickensian. It conjured up images of men in tall hats and girls in bonnets and crinolines. But it seemed right. She was, as the word ward meant, a person under his protection—his financial protection, at least.

  In an effort to make her happy with that protection, he talked to Honey about resigning her cotrusteeship. He could handle all the work on his own, he told her. What did she need the headaches for?

  Honey saw the sense to what he was saying. Clearly, Sol knew more about financial matters than she knew. Or cared to know. She told him she’d be happy to resign and leave everything in his capable hands.

  When she agreed to resign, he thought how happy the news would make Joy. And a short while later, he dreamed up a way to make Joy even happier. He’d make a delightful little game for Joy out of Honey’s resignation, he decided. He’d give her the resignation. Literally. He’d get Honey to sign the proper document, and he’d wrap it up and present it to Joy on her birthday. It would be fun, the kind of fun he used to invent for his girls on their birthdays.

  Joy’s birthday was April 8. Prior to that date, he got Honey to sign the resignation document, and when April 8 itself came around, he filed it with the surrogate’s court. Then he hand-delivered a copy of the document to Joy.

  What a gift! She was thrilled. He’d given her the best present ever, she said. He’d given her just what she’d wanted.

  In the next few months, according to Sol, Joy began asking him for assistance and advice in all sorts of matters. Would he meet her at Bibbs’s house—it had better be sometime when Honey wasn’t there—so she could collect some of her possessions? There was a set of Porthault tea linens she especially wanted, and a Chinese porcelain figure, and a copy of a Jackson Pollock painting. Should she and Jeffrey buy a new apartment? They’d seen one they liked on Park Avenue in the Eighties, but she wasn’t sure they’d get past the co-op board. Could he help them? Recommend them? And while he was at it, could he use his influence to get the board to let her keep her dog, her darling little bichon frise, whom she’d named after the great designer—did he know the clothes of Coco Chanel?

  Sol helped her with all her questions and requests. He also began making suggestions to her about her future, about how she ought to be doing something more than just being Jeffrey’s wife and Evan and Jessica’s mother. “You should go back to school,” he told her.

  “I don’t want to go back to school,” she explained. “I hate to read.”

  “Then you ought to get a job,” he recommended. “It’d be good for you.”

  She listened to him, her big eyes fixed on his, and said she’d think about it.

  He liked giving her advice. Advising young people was a role he was used to, a part he’d played in the lives of each of his children. But they no longer seemed to need him very much. They were all off and on their own. Just like Joan.

  James Wolosoff had grown used to the idea that Bibbs, against whom he had fought and often won so many battles, was dead, but one thing he couldn’t grow used to was the way that, in the end, his father had humiliated him, triumphed over him. It wasn’t just that he’d divided up the bulk of his estate among relative strangers—a new wife, children and grandchildren who were not really his—but that he’d left money to all sorts of peripheral people. Ten thousand dollars to his chauffeur. Ten thousand dollars to his secretary. Even ten thousand dollars to the former superintendent of his Kew Garden Hills apartment development. But nothing, just as he’d threatened, to his firstborn son.

  Raring to do battle once again, albeit this time with a ghost, a hand from the grave with its middle finger pointed straight up, James consulted with Allen Weiss, the lawyer who had helped him win his lawsuit against his father back in 1979.

  Weiss thought they had a chance at overturning Bibbs’s will. They could argue, he told James, that Bibbs hadn’t been in his right mind when he’d cut him out. He didn’t mean that Bibbs hadn’t been in his right mind in the way that estate lawyers generally used the phrase. Customarily, he explained, they applied it to people who made their wills when they were senile or demented. But clearly Bibbs had been suffering from a mental problem—“I call it monomania,” Weiss said—when he made his will. The monomania, the pathological obsession that had dominated Bibbs’s brain, had been a maniacal hate. He had detested James ever since the lawsuit. His hatred for James had become so powerful a psychic force that it had caused him to lack testamentary capacity, had interfered with his ability to think rationally. Not in all areas. Just in this one.

  Would he be able to prove it? Weiss, remembering how irrationally Bibbs had behaved about his two innocent little granddaughters, James’s girls, thought he could.

  He’d start by examining the court of appeals’ new chief judge, Sol Wachtler. Wachtler was the executor of Bibbs’s estate. Bibbs had been so clever, it was possible he’d appointed Wachtler just because he’d expected that Jimmy would want to contest the will, and he’d wanted to make certain his son’s efforts failed. He’d no doubt figured that simply having Wachtler as executor would discourage any contest. What lawyer would have the guts to challenge a will whose executor was a member of the court of appeals!

  Well, he did, Weiss decided. And if he did, Wachtler would probably have to step down from being Bibbs’s executor. There was a provision in the state code of judicial conduct that stated that while a judge could serve as executor for a family member’s will, he was supposed to disqualify himself if a will was disputed and he sat on a court that might get involved in the litigation. Which surely included the court of appeals, since any litigation in the state could potentially end up there.

  In November, in the Mineola courthouse in which Sol had sat as a judge for so many years, Weiss called upon him to testify concerning B
ibbs’s testamentary capacity. During the examination, Wachtler didn’t seem particularly discomfited by the fact that, as chief judge of the State of New York, he wasn’t supposed to serve as executor of a will that was on the verge of being contested. Rather, he volunteered, without even being asked, that back when Bibbs asked him to be his executor, he’d not only checked the law but asked his colleagues on the court of appeals whether they thought he ought to disqualify himself, and neither he nor they had seen any reason for him to do so.

  Weiss could have gone after him, could have pointed out that that was then and this was now, and back then Bibbs was still alive and the will wasn’t being contested, whereas now it was going to be. But he let the matter ride. Wachtler was using the politically powerful firm Shea and Gould as his counsel, and Raymond Radigan, the surrogate court judge hearing the case, had a son who worked at Shea and Gould. He was also a friend of Wachtler’s. So Weiss just skipped to the meat of what he wanted to get at—that Bibbs had been so consumed by hatred for Jimmy that he hadn’t been able to think straight. And on that score, Wachtler’s testimony helped him out. The father and son had been so at loggerheads, Wachtler testified, that he hadn’t dared mention Jimmy in Bibbs’s presence. “You don’t speak of rope,” he said, “in a hangman’s house.”

  At the end of his examination of Wachtler, Weiss notified the surrogate court that he would, indeed, be filing objections to Bibbs’s will, and that they would be based on monomania.

  Fathers and sons. Sons and fathers. In December, Dick Simons, who was in New York for a hospital examination, saw his son Evan standing on a streetcorner near the hospital. Although the boy was now fifteen and he hadn’t seen him for years, he was sure it was him. Evan played with his sister’s children, and sometimes she sent down pictures of him. A lanky kid with dark brown hair and big green eyes. How he missed him!

  He hadn’t seen him because Joy hadn’t let him. At first, he used to call and tell her he wanted to fly up and visit Evan on such-and-such a day and she’d say okay and he’d come north, but then, when he’d arrive at her house, she’d be gone. And the boy too. Vanished. Out of town. After a few bouts of that, he’d taken to writing to Evan, telling him he loved him and wanted to see him. But the boy never wrote back. Dick figured Joy was confiscating his letters. But he couldn’t be sure. Maybe the kid just wanted nothing to do with him. So in the end, he’d just stopped trying to see Evan. But now, here the boy was, standing on First Avenue just a few feet away from him. “Evan! Hey, Evan!” he called out, his heart racing. “It’s me. It’s your father!”

  Evan heard him. Dick was sure he heard him. But to his chagrin, the boy started running away. He darted across the street, his lean legs pumping.

  “Evan! Wait up!” Dick shouted, his voice soaring above the traffic noises. But he didn’t run after his son. He felt unable to move. Felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He stood there on the avenue and his heart sank and he told himself, Let him go. Let him go. Clearly the kid wants nothing to do with me.

  A moment later, the boy had vanished around a corner.

  Dick never saw him again. But there was no question that the fleet youth who had darted away from him was his son. Soon after their encounter, he heard from his sister that Evan had told her children, his cousins, about the incident. He told them his father had spotted him and tried to talk to him, and that he’d run away, run as fast as he could. It was like an instinct, his running. But he was sorry about it now. Or sorry, anyway, that his father had just let him go. He wished, he told his cousins, that his father had sprinted after him, caught up with him. Made him stop running.

  At Christmastime Jimmy Wolosoff went down to the Caribbean, touring the islands in a sailboat. Allen Weiss went to Florida.

  He’d been there only a few days when he received a call from Judge Radigan. “I think I can settle this case,” Radigan said. “Get ahold of your client.”

  It took a while to find Jimmy. Weiss had no idea exactly where on the high seas he was. But at last, he reached him, and as soon as the holidays were over, the two of them went out to Mineola for a settlement conference. Usually, law clerks preside at such conferences, but at this one, Radigan himself was presiding. “This case should be settled,” he said.

  It was clear that Wachtler wanted it settled. To make sure that it was, he was offering Jimmy a tax-free settlement of four hundred thousand dollars.

  Jimmy didn’t want to take it, at least not at first. But Weiss thought he should. He pointed out that they were going to have an uphill battle proving Bibbs’s monomania, and that their suit was liable to drag on for a long time. So in the end, Jimmy said okay. And that was that. He took the money. His father had cheated him—but not as completely as he had planned.

  “I’m going to get a job,” Joy told Sol proudly one day, after the fight over Bibbs’s will had been averted.

  “What sort of a job?” he questioned her.

  “With the mayor of New York,” she said. “Picking up dignitaries at the airport.” She didn’t mention that her mother had done the same sort of thing years ago, when Joy was little, for the mayor of Newark. “I’ll use Jeffrey’s limo and chauffeur,” she explained, “and it’ll be interesting. I’ll meet interesting people.”

  Sol remembers thinking it wasn’t such a hot idea. “You’re going to run a taxi service?” he said disapprovingly. Then he told her, “Joy, you have far too much talent to waste your time doing something like that.”

  “Then what should I do?” she asked him. “Think of something for me.”

  “I will,” he promised. “I will.”

  He was still mulling over her future when, in 1986, he bought a house and land in Albany. He’d been living, when he was up there, in a condominium apartment, but ever since he’d become chief judge, he’d been spending more and more time in the capital and the apartment had begun to seem too confining. Having a house would give him greater comfort, he thought, and it would provide Joan and the kids with a destination for their summer vacations.

  The house he chose was small, a rustic little place with only two bedrooms, but the land was extensive, nineteen acres of woods and fields. He set up a picnic area and a ball field for the kids, and for Joan, who loved to swim and walk, he put in a lap pool and hiking trails. He also took up gardening, planting rows and rows of bushes and flowers.

  Gardening became his passion, satisfied a yearning he had not quite known he had and could hardly put into words. He spent a lot of time at it.

  One day not long after Sol had bought the house in Albany, Joan was with him in their home in Manhasset when a present arrived from Joy. It was for Sol—a huge gift basket from Abercrombie and Fitch that was stuffed with domestic items, among them a big woolly blanket and a clunky fireplace set.

  Joan was used to Joy’s sending Sol gifts—she sometimes joked to her children: “It looks like Joy’s pursuing your father, she sends him so many gifts.”

  So at first, when she looked at the basket and realized it was from her stepcousin, she was as amused as ever. It was only when she saw that it came from Abercrombie’s that she blew up.

  “These are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen,” she said to Sol. “And it’s absurd. Buying these kinds of items from Abercrombie’s! Where they’ve got to cost a fortune. Why don’t you return them and get yourself a gift certificate and buy something nice instead.”

  Sol didn’t say anything, and Joan shook her head. “You know, Joy really is a stupid little girl.”

  PART 2

  The Affair

  CHAPTER 7

  ON A FREEZING THURSDAY IN JANUARY 1987, SOL GAVE THE keynote speech at a luncheon held by the Long Island Association, an organization that promoted the interests of Island businessmen. When he finished his speech—he’d talked about society’s need to remedy the urban blight and poverty that were so often at the root of the crimes judges were asked to rule upon—a crowd of people thronged around him on the dais. He was fielding their questions and
listening to their comments when he noticed Joy among them.

  He was surprised to see her. She’d come to a number of his speaking engagements, and several times she’d turned up without giving him notice that she planned to attend. But today the weather was terrible. Snow had been circling down from the heavens all morning, and the weather bureau had declared the storm a blizzard. It had taken people considerable extra time to make their way to the luncheon, and it was going to take them hours and hours to get home. But there she was. She’d come despite the blizzard. He felt flattered. But he felt even better when she made her way closer to him and said, “You were incredible! You were fantastic!”

  She kept him company while he made his farewells, and then, as he headed down the steps, she took his hand. It was the first time he and she had ever touched.

  She had, by then, taken the job with the mayor, and he had, by then, helped her figure out a more ambitious career to pursue. He’d pointed out to her that candidates for the 1988 presidential election were already launching their campaigns, that she and Jeffrey were by now wealthy enough to make major contributions and elicit them from their friends, and that if she played her cards right and backed a winner, she could end up with a job in the next president’s Washington administration. Or even with an overseas ambassadorship. “There’s nothing that wins the hearts of politicians more than funds,” he told her, and promised he’d show her the ropes. “For example, you have to be seen at the right functions. But you’ve got to get the guest lists in advance so you can decide whether it’s worthwhile going. Some you go, some you don’t bother. And you never go unless you go with someone of significance, because you don’t want to be buried. That’s worse than not going at all.”

  He’d also suggested she put her money on Vice President George Bush.

  She’d taken eagerly to his suggestions. And he had enjoyed playing Pygmalion to her Galatea. But he had not thought of her in an erotic way—not until she took his hand on the day of the blizzard.