let me dangle in the wind.â
It wasnât as simple as that. Sheâd kept him in the dark because she didnât want Candice and Lollie Jr. to be the daughters of a jailbird. But Rafe hadnât been wrong. He wasnât a Silk, and she couldnât entrust her fatherâs secrets to him. Rafe ran off with his own secretary, a cousin of Marlaâs. And she put Mortimerâs thirty-room apartment on the market. Marla had to move Mortimer and Lollie into her own fifteen-room affair.
After having rescued her father from a court battle, where all the Silks would have been sullied, Marla was hired as the in-house lawyer at an arbitrage firm almost as grandiose as Silk & Silk had once been. She was thirty-seven now, and she began to paint her face white, like some Egyptian queen.
She couldnât even talk to her own girls, who would Twitter or tweet at the kitchen table and seemed part of some arcane universe where anyone over the age of fifteen had no right to exist. She was lonely. She had love affairs. None of the lawyers or brokers she met made much of an impression. She kept a room at the St. Regis under Mortimerâs name, and thatâs where she had her âtwitters and tweets,â as she liked to call her little liaisons.
But Marla had problems at home. Mother was bereft without Rumpelmayerâs, which had locked its doors forever, and Daddy wandered around in a tattered robe from his student years, one side of his face disfigured from the stroke.
Once every two or three months, Lollie would get lost in Central Park. It wasnât serious unless she was trapped in the middle of a snowstorm. Mother had her own nurse, but Marla wouldnât trust a paid companion to extricate Lollie from the snow. So she put on her galoshes and fur hat, left her midtown office in the middle of a meeting, and plunged into the park.
Mother didnât have a favorite bridge or tree, and Marla had to travel by instinct. She worried that Mother might fall and lie buried in the snow. But Marla always found her, as if she had some hidden radar. It was silence that was her real accomplice, the silence of the snow; it was as if she could hear the whole planet breathe while she traversed the park.
And there was Mother, sitting on a bench beside Belvedere Castle, with snow in her lap. Whipped by the wind, the huge snowflakes had begun to sting Marlaâs face.
âItâs a pity,â Mother said, playing with her mittens.
âMummy,â Marla said with a touch of bitterness, âif you keep talking, youâll get snow in your mouthâand Iâll have to call an ambulance.â
âItâs a pity,â Mother said, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. âIf I had Rumpelmayerâs, I wouldnât be on a park bench. Rumpelmayerâs might have consoled me.â
âConsole you for what?â
âFor having a daughter whoâs a whore.â
Marla considered strangling Lollie and leaving her to drift in the snow.
âConstance Bengelman saw you at the King Cole Bar. The barman told her that you have a room at the St. Regis, and that you flirt with every sort of man who wears pants.â
âAnd suppose I do?â
Marla was bewildered. Did Lollie have her own network of spies? Constance Bengelman must have been one of her former soul mates from Rumpelmayerâs. âAnd suppose I do?â
âThen youâre cheap, and I raised a daughter whoâs a common harlot.â
âBut you never raised meâDaddy did. And both of us raised you.â
âThatâs unfair,â Lollie said. âThatâs brutal. Iâm a Kansas girl . . .â
âJust like Dorothy,â Marla said. âIn your favorite film. But I have no Cowardly Lion to lend you.â
Lollie preened on her bench. âYou shouldnât make fun of a widow.â
And Marla realized she could never winâMother knew how to wound with her
1802-1870 Alexandre Dumas