The End of Normal

by Stephanie Madoff Mack

  The brothers still saw each other at work every day, but that was pretty much it. After Bernie’s arrest, without the daily contact they had had at the office, Mark and Andy grew even further apart, dealing with the family’s implosion in their own separate ways. Where there had once been such solidarity, there was now just tension, emptiness, and heartache.

  Andy was in the same straits as Mark as a result of their father’s crime, though he reacted very differently from how his brother did. At one point, when on the street while picking up dinner from a take-out place, Andy was confronted by an enraged former employee who made a nasty remark about Catherine, who was sitting in the car nearby. Andy punched him.

  But Andy didn’t seem to be devastated by the relentless scrutiny, and even found ways to exploit the infamous Madoff name in publicizing the disaster-preparedness kits Catherine had begun selling online. Without a job to go to every day at his father’s firm, Andy focused on other business ventures that he and Mark had explored apart from Madoff Securities, including their fly-fishing reel company and an alternative-energy enterprise. Andy had encouraged Mark to take a more active role in developing a new product line they envisioned for the fly-fishing business, but Mark had quickly grown bored. It wasn’t challenging, and it wasn’t filling his days.

  Mark by then was uninterested even in the things he used to love, like live theater or working out. Andy had poured himself into his outside pursuits. He became an avid bicyclist and joined a cycling club. He focused more intently on the piano lessons he had taken for years. Mark passed the time by obsessively following every scrap of news and commentary about the Madoff scandal, stewing in his own indignation about its effects on him. When the story of Ruth being evicted from the penthouse broke, with the U.S. Marshals Service holding a lobby news conference to announce that she had “vacated the residence” and “surrendered all personal property” to federal agents, Mark reached out to his mother for the first time in seven months.

  I’m sure that today f*cking sucked, he e-mailed her. However, try and look at it as a new start. I love you.

  Ruth answered back a couple of hours later, describing it as “beyond any humiliation you can imagine.” The media, she said, was ruining any chance she might have of making a new life for herself. I’m pretty numb by now but not numb enough. How did I become the focus of all this.

  That fall, with Bernie gone and nowhere to go herself, Ruth broached the possibility of seeing Mark again for the first time in nearly a year. “I’m still confused about her,” Mark told me. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he didn’t want to see her, either. “Do you think this is okay?” he asked me, showing me the e-mail he had carefully crafted to send her.

  Mom, I need you to be patient with us. When I tell you that we are on the edge, I am not kidding, he wrote. That means individually and as a couple. Unfortunately, the shame of what my father has done has become almost too overwhelming. On top of that, I may be facing bankruptcy and I’m not sure how we will deal with that. Stephanie and I are hunkering down and doing our best. Right now, it’s just me and her. Once we get some closure, you and I will work on things and begin rebuilding.

  Tragically, Ruth opted to pitch her tent in the rubble instead.

  · six ·

  RIPTIDE

  What happened to us reminded me of a recurring nightmare I’d had as a little girl. I was with my stepfather, mother, and brother on Marty’s boat, which had a big, open back you could fish off of. I was standing there when, out of nowhere, a huge wave appeared and started chasing us, growing bigger and closer as Marty, at the helm, tried heroically to outrace it. The dream was a child’s version, I guess, of sailors’ stories about freak waves suddenly appearing in the middle of the ocean, rearing a hundred feet high and swallowing large ships whole. Eyewitnesses described the deep trough created by the monster wave before it crested as a hole in the sea.

  Exactly how and why rogue waves form is still debated, but they appear unexpectedly from directions counter to prevailing winds and waves, and they loom at least twice the size of surrounding waves. If a ship has the right amount of ballast and is floating at the proper level before the wall of water hits, it can survive a rogue wave and right itself. Survival is a matter of balance.

  A love of the sea, with all its mystery and majesty, was something Mark and I had always shared. When we returned to Nantucket just before Bernie was sentenced in the summer of 2009, I was certain that the island would shelter and restore us, that the sharp salt air would scour us of the lingering stench of the Madoff scandal. This place where we had been married, more than any other, defined us as husband and wife. Maybe here Mark would snap out of his funk and allow himself to enjoy life’s little pleasures again, like digging for clams with your toes and grilling them for dinner, or watching the dog chase waves.

  Learning to surf topped my list of things to try that summer. I tracked down the colorful van that served as headquarters of the Nantucket Island Surf School in the parking lot of Cisco Beach and, three months after giving birth to Nicholas, signed up for lessons. I arrived each day to squeeze into my borrowed wetsuit, eager to paddle out beyond the frothy breakers.

  Getting to your feet is the hardest part. I remember straddling the surfboard, legs dangling in the sea, waiting for the current to swell beneath me and carry me, laughing, back to shore. Mark would be waiting there, waving and cheering me on, while the kids played in the sand. As beginners, we were tethered to our loaner boards by ankle leashes, guided by the impossibly healthy, suntanned college kids who made up the faculty of this eclectic summer academy. At thirty-five, I was by far the oldest student. The instructors would offer to tow us out to catch a wave, but I always refused. I wanted to earn my wave. I wanted to feel every muscle burn and every nerve tingle. If I wiped out, I wanted to right myself and fight my way back in. Rescue defeated the purpose of risk.

  The wetsuit made me feel snug and secure, insulated from the cold tide and the unseen dangers below and beyond me. I tried not to think about the dusky sharks Mark regularly caught fishing off the beach just below our beloved gray-shingled Nantucket house, or even worse, the great whites that had been spotted a few times that year. Surfing is my happiest memory of that season in Nantucket. It was to be our last. The house would likely be going on the market.

  Moving on and reclaiming the joy in life was much harder for Mark, though. Severing all ties to his father had been instantaneous and irrevocable for him, but his relationship with his mother was still at an impasse. Mark had always been something of a mama’s boy, much more like his extroverted mother than his rather reserved father. He and Ruth had been close, and Ruth left no doubts that she was proud of her eldest son. When she met my mother for the first time before Mark and I were married, Ruth made a point of quaintly assuring her that “my son is a very honorable man.” But when that same quality she so prized in her child proved to be chillingly absent in her husband, Ruth faltered. Six months after Bernie’s arrest, Ruth still didn’t see that there was no such thing as neutrality in this particular war. Even if she had had no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever of Bernie’s crimes, choosing his side after he was exposed seemed both foolish and dangerous. Optically unwise, as the crisis managers would say. To an already unsympathetic public, Ruth looked as if she were tacitly endorsing Bernie’s actions.

  Mark’s own aversion to Bernie ran so deep that he would take detours to avoid driving past his parents’ apartment building if we were in midtown Manhattan. Once, when Audrey was invited to a friend’s birthday party right across the street from the Madoff penthouse, I cajoled Mark into coming along. I felt guilty as soon as we turned into the block, though; Mark looked absolutely nauseated. He bolted within minutes of arriving.

  I knew even at the beginning of our relationship that Mark’s personal life could be thoroughly affected by broken relationships. When his first marriage had ended, Mark told me, he had felt so
hurt that he had purged himself of any reminders of that union in one fell swoop, tossing all his personal belongings away—watches, clothing, even shoes. He rented an apartment in the city, and on the same day went to Crate & Barrel and bought a new life, simply pointing to the staged displays: “I’ll take that bedroom, and that living room.”

  Bernie’s betrayal had triggered a similar purge. Every single picture of him came down in our home, and Mark pitched everything his father had ever given him, down to the last sweater. Bernie had been a shopaholic, especially when it came to clothes. He put Carrie Bradshaw to shame. He often picked up an extra shirt or sweater for Mark when he was making the rounds of his favorite designer boutiques. Mark himself favored Brooks Brothers and Patagonia, but his dad preferred to buy him the more expensive brands that he liked. After the arrest, I came across Mark cleaning out a hall closet in our Greenwich house.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, pulling a suede jacket I loved out of the garbage bag he was filling with clothes. “This is what you wore on our second date!”

  “My father gave it to me,” he answered grimly, stuffing it back in the bag.

  His alienation from Ruth had not yet reached that stage, but it was headed that way. Following the advice of his lawyers and his own heart, Mark was still maintaining a cool distance from his mother, who had lived with Bernie until the day he was sent away to prison, and continued afterward to accept his collect calls and visit him. His curt but sympathetic e-mail to her on the day she was evicted from her home by U.S. marshals hadn’t, to Ruth’s disappointment, led to a reunion with her eldest son.

  I was the one who had softened and stepped into the role of peacemaker. It made me feel helpful. I wasn’t covered in muck the way the rest of the Madoffs were, either. And truth be told, I gobbled up Ruth’s gratitude, feeling acknowledged at last after years of being reminded that I was Mark’s second wife. But I had a newborn and a two-year-old to care for, too, and the neediness of my husband and my mother-in-law was more than I could handle. They both left me drained. A final summer in Nantucket would give me a break from trying to fix everything for everyone else. I just wanted us to escape, to float away for a brief while in our own fragile little bubble. Most of all, I wanted my husband back, the old Mark. Maybe the change of scenery would give him fresh perspective and show him that we could make it back to shore if only he could stop thrashing against the current that was so much stronger and swifter than we were.

  My determination was fueled by a deep faith in our justice system. There are days now when I beat myself up for believing this so fervently back then, but I was convinced that the truth would always win out. My stepdad was my living proof of that. Growing up, I had heard about Marty’s famous First Amendment cases at the dinner table and sometimes watched him in the courtroom. When I was twelve, he had commanded national headlines in a libel case against CBS and Walter Jacobson, a wildly popular Chicago news anchor who had falsely accused a tobacco firm of secretly strategizing to seduce minors into taking up smoking. The tobacco firm had not only rejected the proposed marketing campaign aimed at “starters,” but also fired the advertising agency that proposed it. My mother took my brother and me out of school for a special trip to Chicago to watch Marty present his closing argument. We were thrilled when he pointed to us and used our names in an analogy about stolen cookies from a cookie jar and the telltale evidence of crumbs on our mouths. Marty won a landmark $3 million verdict for his client. We won, too: for months afterward, Marty’s fans sent chocolate chip cookies to Rob and me. I was so proud that I was Marty’s stepdaughter, and even at that tender age, the righteousness of what he told the court resonated: It didn’t matter what you thought of tobacco companies, or what presumptions or misgivings you harbored about the way they do business; at the end of the day, all that mattered was the truth. Everything else was just noise.

  Mark needed to learn how to turn off the noise. But he loved technology and gadgets, and he couldn’t stay away from the Internet, no matter how much we all pleaded. “Don’t cruise the Web, don’t read the New York Post and trash papers, and don’t watch junk TV like CNBC, which is just full of publicity seekers like Donald Trump,” Marty admonished. Trump was before the TV cameras within days of Bernie’s arrest to assert that “of course the brothers were guilty.” He wasn’t the only publicity hound milking the scandal, to be sure, but he was one of the most reckless.

  “Stop listening to it all. It doesn’t mean anything,” Marty told Mark again and again. Each time a new article or item appeared, Mark freaked out. Marty would patiently go over it with him, interpreting the journalese, pointing out that unnamed sources, rank speculation, and mere regurgitation of what was already out there did not add up to anything new. And if there was genuine cause for concern, Marty explained, Mark’s lawyers would catch wind of it before some basement blogger or Donald Trump did. Mark would be temporarily reassured, but then he would head straight back to the computer, and the cycle of disbelief and despair would start all over again. It was a compulsion he couldn’t seem to control.

  Mark spent most of his waking hours reading everything he could about the case and its developments. News reports, gossip, blogosphere blather, even the jumbled comments from anonymous cranks, conspiracy nuts, and lonely lunatics. Mark was his own aggregator, and he had no filters or firewalls. Once we arrived in Nantucket, I thought that if anything, the beach would pry him loose. Mark had always been athletic and outdoorsy, and water was his element. When my first attempt to coax him into letting go flopped—he claimed his bum shoulder hurt too much to try surfing—I went on to Plan B.

  “Let’s do the New York City Marathon together!” I proposed. I had always wanted to run the famous 26.2-mile race, which was four months away, in early November. “C’mon, we can spend the summer training together. It’ll be so cool.” We were both runners, and I thought tackling the world’s biggest road race would bring us back together as a couple. Having something that exciting to focus on would be good for us, and the endorphins sure couldn’t hurt, either. It seemed like the perfect antidote for six months’ worth of pent-up stress.

  “Running hurts my knees,” Mark protested. “But you should go for it, Steph.” My disappointment was tempered by his eagerness to help me train, and I decided to enter the race without him. I was flabbergasted to learn that I would have to get permission from the lawyers first, since securing a number would require that I raise money. The marathon attracts more than a hundred thousand applicants a year, and all the individual spots were already taken. If I wanted to compete, I would need to sign on with a charity’s team. I chose Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong. To clinch a charity spot, though, you had to solicit donations and raise a certain amount of money for your entry fee. It was just a few thousand dollars, but our legal team nixed it. Optics again: The press would have a field day writing about a Madoff family member asking people for money.

  I ended up just paying the donation out of my own pocket, and started training on the treadmill Mark moved out onto our covered porch for me. Our house occupied a prime stretch of beachfront property, and the ocean view was magnificent. While Nicholas took his morning nap and Mark played with Audrey down on the beach, I would put on my iPod and listen to a playlist of upbeat songs, slipping into the zone while watching the waves curl to frothy peaks and then crash to shore. I started out at six miles, then eight, then ten, until I finally got up to thirteen. I felt ready to get off the treadmill and tackle a long run. Mark set out to chart a twenty-mile route for me around the island. On the big day, I left at seven a.m. to beat the heat, and ran to Milestone Road, the main drag heading toward the center of the island. I turned and pointed myself toward the red-and-white-striped Sankaty Lighthouse and called Mark when I hit the halfway point of my course. He drove out to meet me with water. I was feeling really good. This isn’t so bad, I thought.

  Two miles later, I changed my mind. I could see the famous lig
hthouse in the distance, but it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was getting hot out. My feet were aching, and my legs were growing leaden. I finally made it to the lighthouse and snapped a picture with my phone as I trudged past. I still had miles to go. I stopped at Sconset Market and downed a Gatorade. I was so drenched in perspiration, my sneakers were squishing. I made my way back to Milestone Road only to have the sun burning in my face the rest of the way. By the time I got back to the house, I was in serious pain. My hips felt as if they would snap. Mark, Audrey, Nicholas, and our babysitter, Petal, were waiting at the end of the driveway for me, clapping. Mark was incredibly impressed. “Wow,” he congratulated me. “You should be so proud of yourself.” I limped straight to the shower and let the hot, hot water soothe my screaming muscles.

  There were some hopeful signs that Mark was starting to come around as the summer yawned lazily before us. I was ridiculously happy when he picked up a fishing pole again for the first time. “You should take the boat out,” I prodded him. Mark had a little black Boston Whaler he kept in Nantucket, but now he refused to remove the fishing boat from dry dock, fearing that someone might snap a picture of him and sell it to the tabloids, or that the Nantucket regulars who recognized him would pass judgment. The boat was named Little Bull, after the $7 million superyacht named Bull that Bernie had bought in 2007 and docked off the French Riviera near his Cap d’Antibes apartment. The yacht was an extravagance topped only by the private jet Bernie bought the following year. Professional decorators had outfitted both, sparing no cost. That Mark was afraid of anyone equating his Boston Whaler with his father’s ostentatious lifestyle was maddening.