Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn

woman or a man—Lord Lekë was both. He wasn’t like Angela’s muscle-bound sisters at the farm, whose lust was limited to conquering all the new “chickens.” Lekë was always gentle with her, and it was the gentleness of a man. Angela was now queen of all the Dukagjinis, who doted on her and waited for a male heir.
    She’d never been happy, not once in her life, until the king claimed her as his bride. But it was Lekë who seemed forlorn.
    â€œI’d like to throw it over,” he said. “This pathetic charade of kingliness . . . all my little lords, with their male jokes. I’d love to crush their skulls. I promise you, I’ll go to my next meet wearing a dress.”
    â€œLekë darling, you’ve never worn a dress in your life.”
    He came down off his hill one afternoon and was seen wearing lipstick and a scowl while he sat with his lieutenants. What could he have said to these young, ambitious hunters of his clan? Did he have to remind them that the Dukagjinis had had other women warriors? Did they all laugh and toss little wooden knights into the air?
    He survived until the next afternoon. While Angela was out walking with a bodyguard, his own hunters threw him off the terrace. They buried him at Woodlawn, traveling in a long procession to their own family plot, but without Angela, who was no longer recognized as their queen. They removed all her clothes from the penthouse. She returned to Papi’s fifth-floor apartment on Crescent Avenue. He didn’t even say a word, just looked at her with his bloodshot eyes, and howled once. It could have been the sound of her own heart. Her cash ran out after a month and she had to go back to work at the Italian market. It was almost as if she’d never been gone, as if she’d dreamt of that warrior-king from Little Albania, so near to Arthur Avenue and so far away.

SILK & SILK
    M arla Silk grew up amid that solid wall of Art Deco palaces along Central Park West. Her father was involved in some mystery called arbitrage. Marla loved to tell her friends at Fieldston that his name, Mortimer Silk, was only a mask—the Silks were Marranos who had had to change their identity hundreds of years ago as they moved from Spain to Morocco.
    Daddy had made quite a stir on Wall Street when he bet against the dollar and sank all the money of Silk & Silk into deutschmarks. For one or two days he must have owned half the deutschmarks in the world; and then Daddy dumped the whole lot. Marla was notorious after that at her own high school.
    She had the SATs of a rocket scientist. Marla picked Columbia, because she couldn’t leave her mom all alone. Mother was like a sleepwalker at Saks, and she got high on ice cream sodas every afternoon at Rumpelmayer’s. Marla would join her when she could, while Mother wept in a mad fever. Her name was Lollie. She’d been Mortimer’s campus sweetheart at Ohio State. Lollie was a Lutheran from Kansas.
    â€œYour mother was willowy.” That’s how Mortimer had described her. “No one could keep his eyes off her for very long. She had the longest legs in the world. Lollie was born too late. She should have been with the Ziegfeld Follies. Manhattan overwhelms her. That’s what she says.”
    Marla did her own bit of penance and sat on one of the stools at Rumpelmayer’s. She’d rather have suffered through a whiskey sour, but Marla was only seventeen at the time, surrounded by nurses and nannies with their aristocratic charges and by dowagers who never missed a lunch at Rumpelmayer’s. Lollie painted her face white while she was in that pink world, with teddy bears in the window. Mother was still in her thirties, and it was as if she had been fossilized and remained the campus queen—with a white, white face. She shouldn’t have married Daddy, a brooder from the Bronx. He’d grown up along the Grand Concourse, among a hoard of Marrano