Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Page A

merchants. Had Mother married some king of extracurricular activities at Ohio State, she might have been better off.
    And now she was locked into endless lunches and teas at Rumpelmayer’s. The waiters knew her, and so did the manager and the concierge at the St. Moritz. She was their local celebrity—Mortimer Silk’s wife. But Marla couldn’t bear to see Lollie sit in her white mask.
    â€œMummy,” Marla would say, dizzy from the aroma of Rumpelmayer’s dark chocolate. “You can’t sit here forever.”
    â€œWhy not? I might meet a nice man—a guest at the St. Moritz. An uncomplicated cattle rancher, or someone like that.”
    Rumpelmayer’s did belong to the St. Moritz, so Mother’s mind was intact, even if there was a bit of folly in what she said.
    â€œMother, you already have a man. And what would a cattle rancher be doing at the St. Moritz?”
    â€œLooking for what’s precious . . . like the grazing rights to Central Park. Now scram! I don’t need to be plagued by my own daughter.”
    â€œYes, you do,” Marla said. But she couldn’t have a battle royal with her own mother at Rumpelmayer’s. She had to let her list all her grievances against Daddy and wait for that brush fire to burn out. And then they’d walk home together along the park.

    M arla graduated summa cum laude and went on to Columbia Law. And after passing her bar exams, she became an in-house lawyer at Silk & Silk. She had no ambition to work anywhere else. “Silks have to serve Silks” was Mortimer’s motto. Meanwhile, Marla had married her high school beau, Raphael, who also went to work for the Silks. She had two lovely daughters with Rafe—Candice and Lollie Jr.
    Marla realized that Lollie Jr. wasn’t a proper name for a girl. Lollie Jr. loved her name. She was as willful and enterprising as Marla, and talked about building empires by the time she was ten.
    But Lollie Sr. grew worse and worse. Marla no longer had the time to rescue her from Rumpelmayer’s. She and Rafe lived in the very same palace as Daddy, but on a lesser floor. Mother had to have a full-time nurse. She sank into a profound melancholy, and neither Marla nor Lollie Jr. could bring her out. Still, her own decline wasn’t as steep as Mortimer’s.
    Suddenly there were auditors and bloodhounds all over the place, and Silk & Silk was padlocked for a week. Daddy was indicted. You could watch him on the evening news as he was whisked out of his apartment-palace in handcuffs. He could have been an axe murderer in a velvet coat. That’s how crazed he looked. The witch right behind him was Marla, who didn’t even have a minute to comb her hair. Daddy was arraigned and released on bail. He returned to his castle like some woebegone man. “I’ll kill myself,” he told Marla. The government had stool pigeons inside Silk & Silk and witnesses against Mortimer at rival arbitrage houses.
    He’d swindled when he had to swindle, had walked a very thin line between what was legal and what was not. And now Daddy faced twenty years at some government facility in Kansas. He would have to sit and groan with other white-collar criminals. His handsome mane was on the cover of the Post . He was called “Silk, the Confidence Man.”
    Daddy sulked and sat with egg stains on his satin robe. He was fifty-seven and his face was whiter than Lollie’s had ever been. One of his hands seemed palsied. He couldn’t even navigate his own spoon.
    Marla met in secret with a couple of high-priced fixers, known as shadow men in that netherworld of theirs, and she did what a daughter had to do. All the government witnesses “vaporized,” as the shadow men had predicted. The case was dropped. But Daddy had a stroke.
    Marla shut down Silk & Silk and sold whatever assets the company had. Her husband left her.
    â€œMarla,” he scribbled in a short note, “you