Most of the time Hubert accompanied Rosalie on her rounds, but on a few occasions she left him behind, assuring me that I would find him “an angel—no bother at all” and adding, “It wouldn’t kill you if you got down on the floor and played with him.”
I had no wish to get down on the floor and play with him.
Besides, I had serious business to attend to.
During the first week of Rosalie’s stay, I kept three different appointments with three different doctors, ac quiring three prescriptions—each for twenty of the painless poison pills. All the prescriptions were written for a Mrs. Yvonne Kaiser, of Stamford, Connecticut, a dear but forgetful woman who was visiting her son and had left her gout-prevention pills at home. A friend of her son’s, whose name she couldn’t remember, had recommended this doctor, she told each one. That modest fib, and payment in cash (instead of by a revealing personal check), evoked not the slightest tremor of suspicion.
Now all I had to do was go to three different pharmacies and fill my prescriptions, and my foolproof murder weapon would be in my hands. How it would get from my hands into Mr. Joseph Monti’s belly was my next challenge.
• • •
Though Jake and I had declared a tacit truce for the duration of Rosalie’s visit, my mood (though I concealed it well) was not merry. Jeff was calling me every day with the latest in his impending financial disaster, explaining that by October 19, if he didn’t come up with three hunched, thou or a miracle, he would be handing over his Jaguar, his Rockville houses, and his Watergate condo to Monti Enterprises. After which he might find himself in need of temporarily moving back home.
“You still don’t want me to mention this business to Dad?” Jeff, not—I confess—for the first time, asked me.
“Not with those lawsuits on his mind,” I replied. “Obviously, if you move back home, we’ll have to tell him why. But maybe that won’t be necessary. Maybe”—I had one more avenue to explore—“there’ll be a miracle.”
I didn’t have any miracles to offer my suffering Wally, who refused to turn to me in his hour of need, although he indeed was in need, as the slump of his shoulders, the pain in his Mel Gibson eyes, attested. As that recently overheard quarrel on the porch and subsequent snippets of phone conversation informed me, Wally and Jo were in a relationship crisis. And while I yearned to tell Wally that this speedy emergence of Josephine’s fierce sense of self might eventually augur well for their relationship, he wasn’t sitting still for any augurs. He ached, so I ached; he was cut, so I bled, as a good Jewish mother should. But my once-so-accessible son would not let me help him.
With his love life, that is. He did, however, allow me to give him a hand when he paid a home visit to one of his more intransigent socialwork cases. It seemed he’d been trying for quite a while to persuade his client, Dwayne to move out of his mother’s apartment and to sign himself into a psychiatric hospital. Dwayne, who was manic-depressive, not to mention somewhat paranoid, urgently belonged—Wally said—in a hospital. But so far he had refused, and his mother, no mental-health triumph herself, was going to pieces watching him going to pieces.
“She can’t stop blaming herself—for his manic-depression, his paranoia, even his athlete’s foot. And she can’t,” Wally said, “stop interrupting my sessions with Dwayne to explain to me yet again why it’s all her fault.”
I had a terrific idea: I’d go with Wally and kind of sit there with Dwayne’s mother while he did some undisturbed one-on-one with Dwayne.
“No, thanks, Mom,” my son replied.
“Just this once,” I pressed. “Maybe you and Dwayne will have a breakthrough.”.
Wally reconsidered. “Well, it might be worth a try. But please,” he added, “don’t give her advice. I’ve got my own way of working with her, and I think it’s the right way to go. So make sympathetic noises, but no advice.”
We drove over to Eleventh Street, to a not-quite-middle-class block of peeling three-story houses and brick apartment buildings. The building we entered stood tall between a pungent carry-out and a laundromat.
A skinny mid-twenties man with thinning dark hair and dark darting eyes opened the door a crack, then tried to shut it, vanishing into his bedroom when his mother, in too-tight pants and a fuzzy pink sweater, invited us into her overly knickknacked apartment. Five seconds later, the introductions made, Dwayne’s mother was into nonstop mea-culpa-ing.
“So you’re Wally’s mother. So pretty. So calm. So relaxed. Yeah, relaxed—not like me. From the moment they handed me Dwayne I was tense as a tick, and they pick up your tensions, you know, even babies do. And when he was three and he ran in the street, I lost my temper—I’m so ashamed!—and I smacked him, and I promised to come to his second-grade play, but I couldn’t because of this crisis at my office, and I’ll never forget what he said when I bought him a blue tenspeed bike for Christmas. ‘If you would have listened better,’ he said, ‘you would have remembered the color I wanted was black.’ ” She wiped away a tear from her careworn Shirley MacLaine-ish face. “You do wrong by your kids,” she said, “and they never recover.”
Wally joined Dwayne in the bedroom, while his mother, perched anxiously on the living-room couch, continued her psychological self-flagellation. “I should have read to him more and not let him watch all those violent programs on the TV, and when he was twelve I divorced his dad, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d known it would drive him crazy, and—”
“I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.” The reedy refusal drifted through Dwayne’s bedroom door. “I won’t let my enemies lock me up in some mental hospital.”
“And who,” my shrewd Wally asked him, “are your enemies?”
“I don’t have to tell you,” Dwayne whined. “You know who you are.”
“I know I care about you. I know I’d like to help,” Wally said gently. “Can’t we—?”
His soothing words were interrupted by a high-pitched yowl. Dwayne was terminating his therapy session. “Out out out out out,” he yowled. “Out out out out out.” “Can’t we”?” Wally tried again. Apparently they couldn’t. “Out out out,” yowled Dwayne. “Out out out.–
“See you in a couple of days then.” Wally, who knew it was time to withdraw, withdrew, pausing to tell Dwayne’s mother, “Try to be patient. I think we’re making a little progress.”
“I hope and I pray that the hospital can undo the damage I’ve done,” she mournfully told him. “But how can they ever make up for that time I went to New York for the weekend, and he wanted to come but I forced him to stay with the sitter? Or that time—”
I couldn’t keep quiet another another minute. “Don’t dwell in the past,” I said. “Get out more, take an art class, train for a marathon, study French cooking, read to the blind, go join a—”
Wally pulled me away and, as we drove home, he observed, with a tad of irritation, “You can’t quit doing it, can you, Mom? You can’t lay off. You’ve always got to fix it.”
I gave him some irritation right back. “That’s your father’s complaint. But it didn’t, I’d like to remind you, used to be yours. In fact”—I warmed to my subject—“I have a few things to say about Josephine that might help you reconceptualize your relationship, plus make you feel much better.”
Wally reached for the radio and turned up the music, loud, a trick—I regret to say—he learned from Jake. “Thanks for coming this morning,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about reconceptualizing. Jo and I have to figure that out for ourselves.”
• • •
Jo, who had not been around for a while, dropped by our house after lunch and instantly fell in love with Rosalie’s Hubert. Instead of cuddling with Wally, she was down on all fours carousing with the dog. I’d forgotten what a delightful girl this Josephine is,” said Rose, beaming with, approval at the sight of the two of them rolling around on the floor. To Josephine she presented what I’m certain she believed was the ultimate compliment: “You’re got a magnificent way w
ith dogs. I can tell that you’re a lifelong animal person.”
“Not really,” said Jo. “I never had pets because I had so many allergies. But now I don’t have allergies anymore.”
“But I thought you were scared of big dogs,” said Wally, who clearly wished he, not Hubert, were getting Jo’s hugs.
“I used to be scared of all kinds of things,” said Jo, “that I’m not so scared of anymore.”
She continued cavorting with Hubert. Wally looked hurt.
“Stay for the rest of the afternoon, and I’ll make us an early supper,” I urged Josephine, hustling on behalf of my forlorn son.
“Thanks, but I can’t,” Jo replied. “I’m meeting my mom to go to the top of the Washington Monument.”
“The top of the Washington Monument?” Wally was amazed. “But how can you do that, Jo? Heights give you nosebleeds.”
Josephine glanced at her watch. “Oh, hey,” she said, “I’ve got to leave.” She leaped to her feet and then addressed Wally’s question. “Before my therapy, heights gave me nosebleeds,” she rather coolly informed him. “But heights don’t give me nosebleeds anymore.”
Going to this therapist, I thought, as Jo made her farewells, was surely the next best thing to going to Lourdes. Even though, at the moment, her impressive improvement was breaking my baby boy’s heart.
Philip’s heart, on the other hand, appeared to be mending nicely, or so his most recent phone call seemed to indicate. “Just checking to see if you’re feeling the need to use me again as a sex object,” he had said, chuckling. This time he took my refusal with cheerful aplomb.
• • •
On Friday, October 9, I lunched with Edmund Standish Voight, Sunny’s zillionaire uncle, who, with his pointy chin, pointy nose, and neatly trimmed mustache, could have been a suaver David Niven. We met at the Jockey Club, where the tables that day were mostly occupied by exes—retired ambassadors, defeated senators, once–numero unos of the CIA, and other former Washington stars, all of whom had now become consultants. A consultant, as I understand it, uses the contacts and knowledge obtained before he was exed to offer his clients access and information, much of which these clients—with a couple of telephone calls—could obtain for them-selves. These clients, however, can bill their clients for the consulting fees, and these clients’ clients can probably bill someone else. Besides which, people seem willing to pay for consulting and consorting with a former ambassador (from a well-known country), a former senator (from a well-known state), and (any) former head of the CIA.
“Awfully nice to see you.” Edmund pumped the pudgy hand of a former (and never should have been) cabinet officer. He also greeted three ladies who lunch—in the latest Ferre, Ungaro, and Saint Laurent—each of whom (I had learned on the highest authority) had once been his mistress. After dispensing a few more hellos and ordering our meals, and after some flattering words and some casual chat, Edmund leaned back and said, “And now I’m eager to hear why you called and suggested this meeting.”
He listened most attentively as I spoke of the noble purpose of Harmony House. He continued to listen attentively as I urged him, over our creamy seafood pastas, to purchase Jeff’s eight buildings in Anacostia and donate them to CBBF to turn into the Voight Homes for the Homeless. The amount of the check I hoped he would write was precisely the same amount that Jeff had to pay Mr. Monti a week from next Monday. That $300,000, I noted to Edmund, was a mere three-fourths of the original down payment.
For those of you who are interested in the exciting world of high finance, let me explain the arithmetic of this enterprise: The down payments had totaled $400,000. Jeff had come up with $65,000. Joseph Augustus Monti had lent him the rest. To stall off Mr. Monti when he started demanding immediate payment in full, I’d given Jeff my personal check for $35,000—$25,000 of which was a loan to he repaid when he reached age thirty, and $10,000 of which was all of his birthday and Chanukah presents until he reached fifty.
I had nothing more to offer, financially speaking. But I hoped that my last-ditch pitch to super-rich Edmund Standish Voight could—while helping the homeless—solve my son’s problems.
It didn’t.
“The only thing that sounds better than the Voight Homes for the Homeless is the Voight Neonatal Center of Children’s Hospital.” Edmund gave me a warm and rueful smile. “I do so hate saying no to my favorite columnist, but that’s where our family foundation money is going.”
“And it couldn’t spare just three hundred thousand dollars to contribute to another worthy cause?”
Edmund looked startled. “But surely you know that if we bought and donated those buildings, their mortgages would be part of the purchase price. And once you include the mortgages”—he spoke in the patient tones of a preschool teacher—“you’re asking us for a total contribution of maybe a million a million two.”
In other words, in my eagerness to cut a deal with Edmund, I seemed to have made a few miscalculations.
In other words, if you’re interested in the exciting world of high finance, don’t depend on me to do the arithmetic.
I could feel from the heat that my face had turned red with embarrassment. I could tell from his face that Edmund felt sorry for me. “Not that we’re unwilling,” he was quick to reassure me, “to give consideration to other good causes. Your request was quite legitimate, and I thank you for thinking of me and the foundation. Perhaps some time in the future—”
“Yes, of course, some time in the future,” I interrupted, still aflame with terminal embarrassment. “But right now could we please just change the subject?”
Boyohboyohboy, did we change the subject.
For without a moment’s pause, Edmund said, “I’ve got a little surprise. I’ve invited my niece to join us for dessert Won’t she be astonished when she sees who I am dining with today.”
It was clear from his guileless expression that Edmund knew nothing about the Sunny-Jake affair—neither about the original show nor about its very recent revival. For a fellow who had spent his life in the diplomatic corps, he had really screwed up.
“You girls—I mean, you young women—used to be such constant companions,” Edmund continual. “So I thought, well, why don’t I do this, for old times’ sake.”
Right, I wanted to say, and while you were getting folks together, you should have invited Ivana Trump and Marla. I buttered a second roll instead, while chipper Edmund chatted. Except that, all of a sudden, I couldn’t hear him.
In fact, the entire horsy room, with its crowded red banquettes and too-small tables, was wrapped in silence. I looked around and all I could see were mouths. Thin-lipped, fat-lipped, chapped-lipped, lip-sticked, all of these mouths were in motion—talking and laughing and yet not making a sound. Oh my God, I thought, as my pulse accelerated, my heart began to pound. Oh my God, I’ve been struck with hysterical deafness.
A moment later my deafness was cured when a Leslie-Audrey voice greeted me with a melodious “Hello, Brenda.” An exquisite blast-from-the-past kiss-kissed my cheeks, then kiss-kissed Edmund’s, then sat down. Now who, I would just like to know, can go for eight years without aging a day? The answer, annoying to say, is Sunny Voight, who also displayed remarkable poise as she murmured, “What an unexpected pleasure,” and ordered a double decaffeinated espresso.
Wearing a chocolate-brown body suit and a chocolate-brown wrap-around skirt, she looked like a gorgeous elf with a high I.Q. Her intelligent oversized eyes displayed die only discernible makeup on a face that otherwise seemed to be dipped in dew. I have to confess that I, if I weren’t basically fond of fellows, could have fallen in love with Sunny, who was effortlessly laying on the charm.
“I’ve been following your career. You must be so proud of what you’ve accomplished,” was Sonny’s opener. She ran her fingers through her gamine hair. “And the boys—I still remember how adorable they were. Those gorgeous smiles—exactly like their mother’s.”
The trouble with Sunny Voight was she proba
bly meant it.
“You’re too, too kind,” I said, though I’d never spoken like that in my life. I was struggling to regain my self-command. It certainly was my plan to behave with dignity and maturity and grace, which is why I will swear on my children’s heads that I didn’t do it on purpose when I knocked the espresso into Sunny’s lap.
You want to know how much liquid there is in a double decaf espresso? Plenty.
A waiter arrived with fresh napkins. A waiter arrived with club soda. Another waiter brought Sunny a dry chair. Everyone blotted and patted and mopped while I, in addition, apologized, with Sunny—who’s not into Freud or his slips—exclaiming, “Of course it was,” every time I wailed, “It was an accident.”
As I believe I’ve already mentioned, apologizing is something I do really well.
“This is terrible, just terrible!” I told Sunny.
“Please don’t feel upset,” Sunny replied.
“What a nasty mess I’ve made,” I told Sunny.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be all right,” Sunny replied.
“Can you possibly forgive me?” I asked Sunny.
“I doubt it.” Sunny—ha-ha-ha—was making a little joke. “But let me think about it.”
As we were speaking it dawned on me that, considering which of us had really hurt whom, Sunny (husband snatcher) and I (betrayed wife) should have teen delivering each other’s lines.
“This is terrible, just terrible!” Sunny should have said to me.
“Please don’t feel upset,” I would have replied.
“What a nasty mess I’ve made,” Sunny might have conceded.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be all right,” I would have lied.
Sunny: “Can you possibly forgive me?”
Me: “I doubt it—ha-ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha—but let me think about it.”
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 19