Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Page B

let me dangle in the wind.”
    It wasn’t as simple as that. She’d kept him in the dark because she didn’t want Candice and Lollie Jr. to be the daughters of a jailbird. But Rafe hadn’t been wrong. He wasn’t a Silk, and she couldn’t entrust her father’s secrets to him. Rafe ran off with his own secretary, a cousin of Marla’s. And she put Mortimer’s 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 couldn’t 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 Mortimer’s name, and that’s where she had her “twitters and tweets,” as she liked to call her little liaisons.
    But Marla had problems at home. Mother was bereft without Rumpelmayer’s, 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 wasn’t serious unless she was trapped in the middle of a snowstorm. Mother had her own nurse, but Marla wouldn’t 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 didn’t 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 Marla’s face.
    â€œIt’s a pity,” Mother said, playing with her mittens.
    â€œMummy,” Marla said with a touch of bitterness, “if you keep talking, you’ll get snow in your mouth—and I’ll have to call an ambulance.”
    â€œIt’s a pity,” Mother said, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. “If I had Rumpelmayer’s, I wouldn’t be on a park bench. Rumpelmayer’s might have consoled me.”
    â€œConsole you for what?”
    â€œFor having a daughter who’s a whore.”
    Marla considered strangling Lollie and leaving her to drift in the snow.
    â€œConstance 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€œAnd suppose I do?”
    Marla was bewildered. Did Lollie have her own network of spies? Constance Bengelman must have been one of her former soul mates from Rumpelmayer’s. “And suppose I do?”
    â€œThen you’re cheap, and I raised a daughter who’s a common harlot.”
    â€œBut you never raised me—Daddy did. And both of us raised you.”
    â€œThat’s unfair,” Lollie said. “That’s brutal. I’m a Kansas girl . . .”
    â€œJust like Dorothy,” Marla said. “In your favorite film. But I have no Cowardly Lion to lend you.”
    Lollie preened on her bench. “You shouldn’t make fun of a widow.”
    And Marla realized she could never win—Mother knew how to wound with her