“You promised me a Cupid and now it’s going to be a Jason,” I joked, thinking of the hockey-masked villain in the Friday the 13th movies.
I arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital at nine p.m. on the twelfth, and a resident hooked me up to a fetal monitor.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
“No,” I said, then noted off-handedly that my stomach sort of hurt. “But I think it’s just stress.”
“That was a contraction,” the resident replied. He went off to call my obstetrician. There would be no inducing; I was already in labor.
Mark had brought his Kindle and some of the miniature bottles of Scotch I had put in his Christmas stocking that year. I had piles of magazines, and Grey’s Anatomy was on TV. What a perfect night, I thought contentedly as we settled in. The residents kept checking, but my cervix had apparently settled in for the night, too. By midnight, it was still stubbornly undilated.
“We’re going to have to put a Foley bulb in,” I was told. The procedure the resident then explained sounded like something out of Medieval Torture for Dummies. An anesthesiologist was paged to come give me an epidural. No one showed up.
“Look,” the resident said, “I spoke with your doctor, and he said this has to be done now.”
The pain was beyond anything I had ever felt or even imagined.
“I’m going home,” I sobbed.
The chief resident appeared. She was blond and cheerful and named Christy, with perfectly manicured black fingernails that I wasn’t sure I wanted anywhere near the parts of my body involved in this particular procedure. I could go home if I really wanted to, she said, but why not just give this another try? She would do it herself this time. “C’mon, Steph, just try it,” Mark urged.
I reluctantly agreed. The anesthesiologist appeared just as the pain started again, and I got my promised epidural.
“Mark, I don’t feel well,” I mumbled before turning first white, then blue. A shot of epinephrine brought me to.
They let the epidural wear off and I went from being numb to sheer agony. I was terrified to push. My doctor shouted encouragement at me. Mark was hovering near my face, but remembering that he had bolted during Audrey’s delivery, the doctor made me hold my own legs this time.
When Nicholas Henry Madoff finally emerged, I looked for Mark, but Daddy had done the disappearing act again.
“I went behind the curtain because I was crying hysterically and didn’t want everyone thinking I was a freak,” he sheepishly admitted when he reappeared. Mark held his new son, tears still streaming down his face.
“I just can’t believe my parents aren’t here to share this,” he said sadly.
The Madoffs learned of their grandson’s birth via our lawyers. They sent congratulations back via theirs.
A few weeks later, the day after Mark’s forty-fifth birthday, Bernie was back in court again to formally plead guilty to the eleven counts lodged against him. In a voice reporters would later describe as devoid of emotion, he expressed remorse and insisted he had acted alone. The judge declared him a flight risk and ordered his bail revoked. He was handcuffed and led away to the city jail to await sentencing.
Mark and I were both worried sick about his mother; she had never been alone her entire life. Behind the puppeteers’ backs, I began e-mailing Ruth again, telling her what the kids were up to, sending photos and our love.
I’m so isolated here, she responded. I’m aching for news of you all.
In late April, our lawyers gave the green light for me to communicate with her about the grandchildren, and by May we were allowed to arrange for her to come visit the kids and me. Mark wasn’t ready to see his mother yet, and the lawyers didn’t like the idea, either. I invited Ruth to come on a Tuesday while Mark was in Greenwich visiting Kate and Daniel. I was a nervous wreck and felt my eyes well up with tears when the doorman buzzed to say she was on her way up. When I opened the door, she made a beeline straight for Audrey’s room, no hug for me, and spent the afternoon blowing bubbles and playing with her, with a brief interlude to hold baby Nick for the first time. She looked her usual casually fashionable self in designer jeans, but she seemed beat-up, desperately trying to hold it together. I found her sobbing quietly as she gave Audrey her bath. I wrapped her in a hug. Somehow, the words we couldn’t find to say to each other in that moment found their way into the e-mails we exchanged later that night.
Please don’t feel that today was the only day you could come and visit, I told her. You are welcome any time . . . and I really mean that. I am here for you. I am sure it was a difficult day for you, but with time it will get easier . . . and one day we will have a normal family again. We just have to find a “new” normal. I love you.
She answered me a few hours later:
After I recovered a little from seeing you all after so long and missing you all so much, I did feel better . . . I hope you are right when you say we will be back to a certain kind of normal. Do you think it is really possible? I dream of such a day. Love, Ruth.
I was dreaming of the future, too. I wanted us to shed everything, go somewhere far from the city and just start fresh. “Let’s go to Jackson Hole, just rent someplace for a year,” I urged Mark. We had taken family vacations there twice. Bernie had never ventured off the bunny slope and skied with a fat cigar in his mouth. It was hilarious at the time, and if a place was going to conjure any images of Bernie for me, I preferred one where he looked like an idiot. Wyoming was big enough and empty enough to allow us some freedom to live our lives quietly until everything settled down.
Mark immediately nixed the idea. He couldn’t be that far away from Kate and Daniel. I refused to let go of my escape fantasy, though, and simply plugged a new zip code into my Internet real-estate searches. We could relocate to Greenwich instead. It would be ideal: Mark would be closer to his older kids, but still within commuting distance of the city, so he could keep looking for work. I would become a suburban mom until fall, when I planned to start classes toward my child life degree. Enrolling in school filled me again with a wonderful sense of possibility. I would be doing something, committing myself to moving forward.
Mark was still paralyzed, though, and I didn’t realize at first how much he silently resented my plans. Every time I showed him a house that looked promising, he was noncommittal. Moving permanently into the house Mark bought before we were married didn’t feel right—I wanted to start over, together. The courts had yet to decide whether the compensation Mark earned over the years he worked for his father was untainted by Bernie’s criminal conduct.
Bernie’s ability to compartmentalize baffles me most when I remember him enjoying lunch on the deck of our home in Nantucket and watching his grandkids play in the pool, knowing all along that summer that his house of cards was about to topple, bringing us all down with him. But Bernie had had his own optics to maintain for decades, and his family’s life was his biggest illusion. “Was he living vicariously through our happiness?” I asked Mark. We decided to spend one last summer in the magical place where we had assumed we would grow old together. Bernie was due to be sentenced that June, and we wanted to be out of the city when it happened.
When we arrived on Nantucket, some friends who lived there year-round were waiting to greet us in the driveway. I fell into their arms and started sobbing. It just felt so good to be there again. Mark filled his lungs with the sharp, purgative smell of low tide. On June 26, 2009, the day Bernie was sentenced, we went out to dinner with our friends to celebrate.
“Congratulations, buddy, you made it,” one of our friends toasted Mark.
“We survived,” I said, repeating it for good measure. “We survived.”
That afternoon, Mark had deliberately stayed down on the beach, fishing for shark, until the appointed hour. I watched the news for us both. The judge noted that not a single person—even from his own fa
mily—had written a letter in support of Bernie.
“What’d he get?” Mark asked when he came inside.
“One hundred and fifty years,” I reported. He would be spending it as Inmate Number 61727054 at the medium-security Federal Correctional Complex in rural Butner, North Carolina.
Bernie Madoff was gone for good.
What I didn’t realize was that Mark Madoff was, too.
· five ·
THE BOOK OF RUTH
The perfect family proved to be, like everything else revolving around Bernie, pure illusion. The little cracks I noticed in that smooth, shiny surface long before the scandal turned fissures into canyons, marooning each Madoff on a different cliff’s edge. How each member of this family coped, or didn’t, in the face of disaster would be fascinating, I suppose, for some social scientist looking from the outside in. But from the inside looking out it was maddening and, at the end of the day, achingly sad.
Maybe it’s a result of being raised by a lawyer, but I prefer to face trouble head-on and push past it. And if someone I love has been wronged by anyone, my loyalties are never ambiguous. The Madoffs were the complete opposite; what I had initially presumed to be a lack of conflict within their ranks was actually an inability to deal with it. The result was a sort of collective emotional paralysis. Bernie, the patriarch, was the weakest of them all, yet he cultivated a public image as a financial genius, one that gave him an undeniable aura of authority. His family, like his unsuspecting investors, held him in awe. People mistook his reserve for intellect, though I can’t remember ever seeing Bernie scan a newspaper or read a book, as Ruth was wont to do; TV and movies were his medium. It took me years to figure out that my father-in-law’s pleasant veneer was just that, and only that. The façade was highly polished, but whatever substance there once might have been behind it had long since dried and crumbled by the time I knew him. That said, it was easy to like Bernie and get along with him, to enjoy his company. You just had to accept that you weren’t ever going to genuinely connect with him on anything beyond a superficial level. You might laugh at him, but never with him, over his little idiosyncrasies.
Though Mark loved and admired Bernie greatly, I never heard—or heard of—a meaningful conversation between father and son. On the rare occasions when some deeper feeling nudged its way to the surface, Bernie panicked and shut down altogether. When Mark was fourteen, I learned in a jailhouse letter from Bernie, he had discovered a lump on his groin one Friday afternoon while the family was getting ready to leave on a boat trip from Montauk to Maine. A doctor friend on the dock in Long Island took one look and told Ruth and Bernie to get their son to his pediatrician right away. Fearing Hodgkin’s disease, the pediatrician arranged for Mark to undergo a biopsy that Monday at the hospital. My reaction was to crawl into bed that Friday afternoon and sleep straight through until Monday morning, Bernie recounted.
This story was intended to show me what a caring, devoted father Bernie had been, but it still reinforces my suspicion about just how deep this man’s narcissism ran, how well rehearsed he was in the cold art of abandonment. In his mind, Mark’s health scare was all about what a terrible ordeal it was for Bernie. Ruth, Mark, and Andy are conveniently forgotten and left to cope on their own with the scary three-day wait. The biopsy came back clean. Mark was fine, and the swelling turned out to be just an infection. Decades later, Bernie would hit the off switch again when Andy was diagnosed with lymphoma. Bernie exhibited those same symptoms of an impending zone-out in the weeks leading up to the exposure and collapse of his Ponzi scheme. His soul simply lacked the square footage for ego and emotion to comfortably coexist.
I was shocked, and terribly hurt for Mark, by Bernie’s lack of concern for his son after Mark had stormed out of his parents’ penthouse the morning his father confessed. Bernie didn’t call out or run after him, nor did he try to telephone, visit, or reach out to his wounded son following the stunning confrontation. Mark’s legal team had advised him, needlessly, not to have any contact with Bernie or Ruth while the federal investigation moved forward. It’s safe to assume that Bernie’s lawyers issued a similar no-contact edict. But Bernie had promptly admitted his guilt to the FBI agents who arrested him, and he surely knew from the beginning that he would no doubt die in prison. So what did he really have to lose, I had to wonder, if he chose to ignore the lawyers and answer to some deeper, father’s instinct? The only answer I could come up with: There was nothing deeper.
Although the media would miscast her as a Stepford wife, Ruth, truth be told, was far more complex and intriguing than her childhood sweetheart. Mark and I initially worried that his parents might carry out some kind of suicide pact before Bernie was sent away, but Ruth proved to be an extraordinary survivor. She also had an uncanny ability to compartmentalize, coupled with a talent for playing two sides against the middle in any scenario. She knew how to subtly manipulate people to get what she needed, and she wasn’t above doing it for pure sport, either. At the last family Thanksgiving dinner I had hosted, just before Bernie’s arrest, I was horrified to discover that Ruth had quietly invited her son Andy’s estranged wife, Debbie, to my get-together, knowing full well that Andy would most likely be bringing his new live-in girlfriend, Catherine Hooper. I was able to warn Debbie off in time, and I knew better than to even try to ask Ruth what she had been thinking. Her defense when she was caught out in these little pocket dramas was to act nonchalant; if it didn’t make any difference to her, it shouldn’t to anyone else, either. Her casual indifference gave her power. When I look back now, I can see how Ruth’s constant little digs and comments used to feed my animosity toward Mark’s ex-wife, Susan, as much as anything Susan herself did or said. Ruth loved to build you up, and then not so much knock you down as flick you aside.
“Oh my God, I can’t figure out what to get Kate and Daniel for Hanukkah,” Ruth once called me up to moan. “What are you doing? You always give the best gifts.” I felt a surge of gratitude and pride that my mother-in-law had noticed how much thought I put into choosing presents for my family and friends. “I’m such a dope,” Ruth went on, “I don’t know what to do! Do you have any ideas?” Before I could make any useful suggestions, Ruth fired her sharpest arrow straight into my Achilles’ heel. “Oh, you know what? Forget it, I’ll just call Susan!” Now you count, now you don’t.
For nearly a year following Bernie’s confession, however, I felt closer to Ruth than I ever had. I pitied her and was genuinely frightened for her. Her loyalty to Bernie was hard to stomach, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and view it as a form of denial that would wear off once she was faced with the reality of her husband’s being locked up for good. Bernie had always been her validation. Despite her brash Queens exterior, Ruth could be surprisingly insecure. Looks were extremely important to her. She was obsessed with staying thin and looking younger than her sixty-something peers, and she worked hard at it. Her fashion sense was youthful enough to make Andy’s girlfriend, who was nearly thirty years her junior, exclaim out loud how excited she was that they wore the same size, so she could claim any Ruth castoffs. For the most part, though, Ruth’s look was firmly rooted in the 1980s, and she was averse to change. Navy eyeliner rimmed her beautiful blue eyes, and pancake foundation created a monotone complexion. She wore berry-pink lipstick outlined with a brick-colored lip liner, and her frosted blond hair in a simple chin-length bob. She would ask where I had my hair done, make an appointment, and try something slightly different, only to quickly revert to what was familiar. At my wedding, I was thrilled when my close friend Nei, a makeup artist, offered his services as a gift. Ruth asked him to do her face, too, and Nei obliged with his signature understated style. Ruth looked fresh and pretty. She headed off to her room to change into her pewter sheath and diamond-rope necklace. When she reappeared at the ceremony, Nei was hurt to see that she had wiped everything off and whipped out the pageant-queen pancake and lip liner again.
>
Despite her preferences at the makeup counter, Ruth could easily pass for a woman ten years younger. Her two face-lifts had been expertly done, and she aggressively fought any wrinkles with fillers, laser treatments, and Botox. Veneers gave her a perfect smile, and you were more likely to see her laughing than not, before her world came crashing in.
Ruth worked out with a personal trainer a few times a week, and when it came to dieting, her self-discipline was unmatched. A carb never touched her lips. Even on vacations, I never saw her eat so much as a single dinner roll, slice of toast, or even cracker with cheese. She would rinse the mayo off the coleslaw when I bought a tub to go with a roast chicken for a casual family lunch—if she wasn’t going to have it, I guess no one was—and when we occasionally made the mistake of tossing out the chicken carcass after Mark had carved it and put the meat on a serving platter, Ruth would dig through the trash to retrieve it. The carcass was her favorite part. She would put the skeletal remains on a plate in front of her and happily nibble and suck away at the bones. While Bernie scarfed down his favorite cherry pie for dessert, Ruth permitted herself only frozen chocolate-dipped bananas from John’s Drive-In in Montauk. Her freezer there was always full of them. She also let me in on her secret trick for portion control at restaurants: Once she had eaten the amount of lean protein she considered reasonable, she would dump a ghastly amount of salt over whatever was left on her plate to keep herself from overeating. Wine was her only real indulgence; Bernie’s adherence to Diet Coke or iced tea didn’t mean she wasn’t going to enjoy a few glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. If he disapproved, he never showed it.
The End of Normal Page 9