I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 5

  Except that when I returned the next semester, things weren’t going right. He changed and grew distant. Not really a talker, George didn’t offer much by way of a reason. But the why hardly mattered. His coldness turned into a physical hurt, a punch to the stomach or a kick to the kneecaps. Desperate and crying constantly, I couldn’t go to class. I couldn’t do anything. For the first time in my life, I found it difficult to get up in the morning.

  George’s abandonment brought up an old sensation. With a real father who was a stranger waiting outside school for me, I felt the trauma of desertion run through my core.

  I stopped eating and didn’t get out of bed for days. My inability to function bewildered and terrified me. And I didn’t even have Annette to turn to. In my single room, a housing decision made while high on love and adoration, there was nowhere to go. Who was going to come? I had to get help for myself.

  Although I’d never had therapy before, in my great distress I sought out the school psychologist. I talked through the whole situation, but if she offered insight, I didn’t hear it. While I plaintively asked why George was doing this to me, why he had changed, I had the distinct impression that this was nothing more to her than a dumb love affair.

  I stuck out the semester, but when I returned to Chicago, my family, alerted to my visits to the therapist’s office, decided I wasn’t going back. At home for good, I would apply to college in the city. Somehow, though, I never got around to it. I blamed the heat for my lethargy, but the truth is, I hardly noticed the choking humidity, because I didn’t feel anything at all. A thousand miles and worlds away from my experiment with independence, I still smarted from my breakup with George.

  I had no appetite but still took refuge in the kitchen, where Martha had been replaced by Margaret, a wonderful cook with a quick smile and a heavy Irish brogue. In a saucepan she whisked yolks, water, melted butter, and lemon juice together into an immaculate hollandaise (everything Margaret did was immaculate, including changing her uniform and apron twice a day). It was an attempt, I knew from my corner perch, to get me to eat. I normally adored eggs Benedict, but in this moment the frothy, pale yellow mixture Margaret set carefully over heat made me gag.

  “You’ve done enough furrowing of your brow, my child,” she said, whisking in a measured speed all the while. “God’ll take care of all of this, he will.”

  While envious of Margaret’s deep religious belief as a devout Catholic, I could not share in her faith for the future. She gently coddled a pair of eggs, placed an English muffin into the oven, and detected my wordless skepticism.

  “You think a broken heart can’t mend any better than a broken leg?”

  She lifted the eggs out of the water and retrieved the perfectly browned muffin.

  “The heart’s much stronger still.”

  After assembling the egg and muffin, she poured the rich sauce over them and placed the plate on a white linen napkin, used as a makeshift place mat over the butcher block in front of me. There was no use. I just couldn’t. And the quickly congealing hollandaise only added to my guilt. I adored Margaret—her mile-high popovers, the way she left looking like the “lady of the house” on her day off, and how she was known for her old-fashioneds (it was something in the muddling). Wasting her food was a sin.

  “Och, come now. If God can’t convince you, then maybe the tea leaves can.”

  Margaret took the teacup that was her constant companion, swirled the dregs three times, dumped the excess liquid out into a saucer, and turned her cup back over. Then she set about discerning my fortune by concentrating on the clumps of tea leaves and droplets of liquid.

  “Look here!” She pointed to a squiggle halfway down the cup’s side. “This section represents the future of no more than a fortnight, and there, as clear as day, is a fish. Why, that’s wonderful news!”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “As my dear old mother used to say, ‘There are more fish in the sea than anyone ever pulled out of it.’”

  Sweet Margaret and her tea leaves proved prescient, because soon thereafter I started dating the boy next door. Just as the sadness with George had come upon me like a wave, practically drowning me, so like a wave again it ebbed and I was over it.

  Buddy was literally the boy next door; I could look into his apartment from ours. He was a sad soul, sweet but a bit light. This was the summer of 1945, and all the availables were at war. Buddy, who suffered from a sort of asthma, was definitely a 4-F’er, but he had a brand-new Hudson, a car that impressed me greatly. Not for long, though. I soon tired of him, as I had done with so many before.

  Despite my own experience with rejection, I was just as terrible at terminating a relationship as ever—and I was the girl who once made a date for New Year’s so far in advance that by the time the date arrived, I no longer liked the boy. However, I was too honest to pretend I was having a good time and too guilty to hurt him by calling it off. So I hid in my room and refused to come out—even after my date arrived! My poor mother had to make up some excuse, anything short of my being dead. I didn’t have a clue how to untangle myself, except to beg my mother to do it for me.

  So instead of my saying to Buddy, who clung to me like a particularly smothering leech, “This is over, even though from my window I can see your mother and father, who drive me around on gas rationing,” my mother packed me up and whisked me to Miami Beach for a vacation with my aunt Etta and uncle Sam—which is where I met the handsome hotel owner’s son, Sonny.

  Less than a week after arriving in the place I’d come to get away from a boy, I’d fallen in love with another. Sonny came over to our cabana, and the next thing I knew, I was in his convertible. Not only was he handsome, but his car, a brand-new blue Lincoln Continental with red leather seats, was one of the first luxury cars off the assembly line after the war. It was his father’s expensive welcome-home gift to him.

  Everything about Sonny was spectacular. While we drove around exciting Miami Beach with the top down to enjoy weather my mother described as “balmy,” he told me about how after two years at the University of Virginia he’d enlisted in the army. After officer’s school, I learned, he spent his war years leaning against the bar at the Copacabana in tailor-made uniforms. Alluding to a secret division of the army, he played it up as very important and hush-hush. Spies in nightclubs? All I knew was how marvelous he was to look at. Indeed, after his discharge from the army, Sonny went to the Racquet Club—a favorite of Hollywood celebrities and birthplace of the Bloody Mary—where he was spotted around the pool of the Palm Springs resort by the comedic troupe of the Ritz Brothers, who set him up with a screen test for a biopic of Rudolph Valentino.

  I was gone. Here was this twenty-seven-year-old eastern sophisticate in linen trousers and a button-down, spread-collar blue shirt who introduced me to stone crab. I couldn’t believe that someone like Sonny wanted to be with someone like me, a nineteen-year-old whose favorite piece of clothing was a Liberty of London print cotton skirt that you wound around and bound to a broomstick handle when wet and out it came a pleated skirt. What did he see in me?

  He saw something, because things moved very quickly. We spent every day and evening together, and then he asked me to meet his parents and his sister, Mildred.

  Walking hand in hand with Sonny down the rows of cabanas alongside the boardwalk, I wanted to run into the ocean and swim away. The closer we got to the big cabana in the corner, the more panicked I became, so that by the time we stood in front of it, the blood in my ears pounded louder than the surf.

  “Mother, Dad, Millie,” Sonny said. “This is Betty.”

  His mother sat under the shade of the cabana’s thatched roof in a long cover-up, her skin brown without sunning. On one of her extremely well-cared-for hands, she had a huge star-sapphire ring. His father smoked a cigar near a big pitcher of iced tea and large bowls of fresh fruit. I could see where Sonny got his looks
. Otto Halbreich, just starting to go gray, was handsome—not in a distinguished, older-man way but rather with the virility many men half his age would envy. A moment of silence felt like an eternity as I bore the weight of their stares, until Sonny’s beautiful sister piped up.

  “Oh, I didn’t think you were going to be so pretty,” Mildred said.

  At her own joke, her small, delicate features broke out in a hearty laugh that I wouldn’t have thought them capable of producing. Her laugh prompted the rest, and they all started laughing big, open-mouthed, loud laughs that defused the tension. I was glad to have the attention shifted away from me but could not bring myself to laugh. I’m not a laugher.

  Still, they invited me to go to the Colonial that evening, and I agreed. If, after the war, gangsters and former bootleggers opened enough horse-betting parlors and carpet joints in Florida to make it the gambling capital of the nation, then the Colonial Inn was its high temple. When I walked into the first of many lavish rooms filled with tourists playing roulette, craps, blackjack, and every other kind of betting game, I was surprised by how the women really dressed. Everywhere I looked, there were cocktail dresses with big skirts and cinched waists in satins and taffetas, gloves that went to elbows, and enough jewelry to make you tear up. It was very posh and, to me, unexpected.

  On our trip to the casino, both Sonny’s mother and sister wore custom-made cocktail dresses from Kreinick’s, high heels, gloves, and loads of diamonds. In a Kelly green dress from an unknown label, I might as well have been Cinderella before her fairy godmother appears. Not that I didn’t look right. I wasn’t as glitzy as the women around me, but I didn’t worry about competing. Appearing in the wrong clothes was never my problem.

  Otto, not to be outdone by the ladies, imitated his idol, George Raft, the dancer-turned-actor, who was so good at playing mobsters in movies like Scarface that many wondered if he was a gangster in real life. He certainly set the style for them in jackets with wide lapels, dark shirts with long collars, white ties, high trousers with sharp creases, and spats. Otto, dressed just like him down to a light gray fedora pulled over one eye, headed straight for the chemin de fer table.

  There were plenty of other things to do at the Colonial, such as enjoy a luxurious dinner of crab and steak or take in a floor show starring Carmen Miranda. We spent a moment, however, watching Otto play.

  Sonny, who stood by my side, had been explaining everything to me since I’d arrived in Miami, and tonight was no different. The Colonial was partly owned by the infamous gangster Meyer Lansky (whom Sonny’s father knew); the boisterous groups of players sat at what were called gaming tables; and his father’s game, chemin de fer, was a version of baccarat. I appreciated the lesson but didn’t want Sonny to suffer on my account.

  “You can play, too,” I said to him.

  “I never gamble,” he said. “That’s my father’s game.”

  A showgirl in a green sequined playsuit (no doubt about it, the playsuit was in) stopped when she walked by us and squealed, “Sonny!” After she planted a kiss on his cheek that lingered a little too long for my taste and told him to give her a call sometime, he turned to me and winked. “Copacabana.” I did not share the Halbreich sense of humor.

  Concentrating on the game instead of Sonny as punishment for the showgirl, I watched Otto reveal a roll of cash the likes of which I had never seen. It was so thick that I couldn’t figure out how on earth it had fit in the man’s pant pocket, no matter how forgiving the pleats. He peeled off ten hundred-dollar bills and handed them to the dealer. A thousand dollars? What for? My parents didn’t allow me to go to the casinos in French Lick, Indiana, and here I was in the ultimate den of vice. My dismay must have announced itself on my face, because Sonny leaned in. “That’s just the buy-in, the amount to get started in the game. These guys can play for hundreds of thousands. They’re high rollers.”

  I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill before in my life, but I didn’t reply to Sonny’s remark. Where I came from, you didn’t talk about money or those who had it. We were comfortable, and that’s all I needed to know. Money wasn’t nice, according to my family.

  It was back to reality when Mother and I returned to Chicago—and the reality I faced was breaking the news about Sonny’s existence to my father.

  My mother, a terrible romantic, had encouraged the relationship while we were in Florida. I never had to keep any secrets from my mother about men. She, like my grandmother, felt just as strongly about them as I did. Mother thought Sonny walked on water, most probably because of his looks. If my father had been with us on vacation, things would have been very different. He was the person we kept secrets from.

  From the time I was a young teenager, he’d wait up for me on the stoop of our apartment in his pajamas until I was home from a date. He didn’t care about what others thought. I was expected home when he dictated the time. A rule was a rule. No exceptions. He was so strict that it prompted my friends to coin the expression “Don’t be a Harry Stoll!”

  We would probably have kept Sonny a secret from Daddy forever, but we didn’t have that luxury. Sonny planned to fly to Chicago the first weekend we were back, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Daddy threw a living fit. Although he was a native New Yorker, he had a very large dislike of New York. “Why is he better than anyone here?” he yelled at me. My poor mother, however, took most of the blame. Why hadn’t she watched the “baby,” he demanded to know?

  The irony of my father’s anger is the great love that developed between the two that year as Sonny dutifully and extravagantly flew from New York to Chicago every weekend. I was surprised at how they became as close as brothers, since my father was nothing like Sonny. But whenever he arrived, off they went for lunch at the Standard Club, a private club that after its start in the late nineteenth century by German-Jewish businessmen catered to Chicago’s elite. Only fifteen years apart in age, my father and Sonny talked easily about business or family or food.

  Daddy’s camaraderie with Sonny quieted the little doubts that popped up now and then: How come Sonny didn’t know what “apoplectic” meant? Why did he have to call his mother every evening while in Chicago? Did his eye really linger on any pretty lady who passed by, or was it my imagination? Chicago’s unabashed approval of Sonny didn’t hurt either. Everyone was completely entranced with the man. (Even my dear nana, who gave him the third degree, got on board after Sonny answered all her questions, including how many rooms his family lived in. In her way and with cigarette ashes falling all down her front, she was a wonderful, delusional snob.) They truly couldn’t get enough of the handsome New Yorker with the infectious laugh.

  Everyone was still enamored with our liaison when Sonny and I were engaged in the winter of 1946.

  My father, my mother, and I traveled together to New York, where we stayed at the Hampshire House. As a nineteen-year-old who wore very little makeup and washed her hair every day like a good girl, it was my first time in the big city, and my one wish was to have a black dress—another first. My mother and father didn’t think I should wear black. No one my age wore black, they said, except to funerals.

  Now that I was getting married, however, I could have one, and I was taken to “Uncle Al’s” office. Uncle Al was Al Neiman, the ex-husband of Carrie Marcus, who after getting her start in retail as a blouse buyer and saleswoman at the A. Harris and Co. department store became one of the highest-paid women in Dallas by the time she was twenty-one. Al, an orphan who somehow landed in Texas, married Carrie and together with her brother they created Neiman-Marcus. After their divorce he sold his interest in the specialty store and moved to Chicago, where he impressed my father as a tough merchant and eventually came to think of me as a daughter, since he never had any children of his own. Eventually he moved to New York to open a buying office.

  I was very fond of him, and he spoiled me by taking me directly to the manufacturers to fi
nd the perfect black dress, which I did. It was a Nettie Rosenstein sheath with a light French lace off-the-shoulder top and a delicate little belt. It hadn’t been put in the stores yet, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was a very glamorous dress, or so I thought.

  I wore it with high-heeled black suede shoes, a string of cultured pearls, and small clip-on pearl earrings to the celebratory gathering Sonny’s mother and father held in their home at 25 Central Park West. Only a few short blocks from our hotel (the beautiful Hampshire House), their building, grandly called the Century, rose up to the sky in two ominous art deco towers that dwarfed all the other beaux-arts buildings around. Inside, their apartment was no less impressive. A gracious foyer gave way to a step-down living room with a view of Central Park from the fifth floor that just grazed the tops of the trees. A very expensive decorator had thrown around a lot of Persian rugs and ivory pieces to create an air of rococo opulence. The place was fancier than any other I’d ever seen. The only giveaway of Florence’s hardscrabble beginnings and inbred thrift was the clear plastic that covered the upholstered furniture in the rooms not designated for our little party.

  After Mother and I smiled our way through a tour of the apartment, Otto summoned everyone to the foyer for a champagne toast.

  “Come in, everybody,” he said, and then all of a sudden, without explanation, he grabbed my hand and he put a five-carat, emerald-cut diamond on my ring finger.

  As a young girl, I had lusted after jewelry but wasn’t allowed to wear much of it. I’d had an Add-a-Pearl on a gold chain and watches—I particularly loved one with the Orphan Annie logo—but broke them all (I’ve always felt there is something in my metabolism that stops the workings). How many times had I prayed for a ring? But I didn’t want it this way. In my future father-in-law’s grip, I went blank and looked to Sonny for rescuing. But he accepted this as a natural happening. If it hadn’t been for the size of the ring, I would have run right out.