The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (9 page)

A cop in uniform was watching it all with glum resignation. I elbowed my way through the crowd to him, my Borsalino down low over my face, and told him I was expected. The cop went into the vestibule and buzzed Ruth. She let me in.

“It’s been a long time, Ruth,” I said, bending down to kiss her cheek. The last time was when I had interviewed her for
Esquire,
back in both of our heydays. “How are you doing?”

“It stinks out loud is how I’m doing,” Ruth fumed, her voice a raspy, defiant snarl. “It’s humiliating, it’s painful and it’s
so
typical. He does whatever he goddamned wants and I have to swallow it to the last drop and pretend I like it, just like women have been pretending they like it for centuries.”

At our feet Lulu let out a moan. Any allusion to oral sex has always horrified her.

“It’s still a man’s world, Hoagy,” Ruth raged on. “Nothing has changed. Not one thing. Did you know that the average amount a divorced man pays in child support has
fallen
by twenty-five percent in the past fifteen years? That the number of women in domestic violence shelters has
doubled?
That the largest percentage of working women in this country are
still
entry-level clerks and typists?” Typical Ruth Feingold scream of consciousness, this. Only occasionally did the woman come up for air. “Everyone acts as if we won the war. Baloney. Working women all over this nation are still being shat upon.”

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Ruth. We’re all being shat upon.”

She stood there in the doorway with her hands on her hips, scowling up at me. “Are you getting taller or am I getting shorter?” she demanded accusingly.

“Never fear, I’m getting taller. Deep down inside I’m still a growing boy.”

She let out a snort and closed the door while Lulu and I tried to maneuver our way around her in the hallway. Not so easy. Ruth Feingold was very close to being a perfectly round human organism—no more than an inch or two over five feet and no less than two hundred pounds. You didn’t know whether to go around her or over her. Not that you’d make it either way. There wasn’t so much as a hint of give to Baby Ruth. She was pure attitude—blunt and passionate and tough. A New Yorker in the truest sense of the word. She was wearing a somewhat ratty cardigan over an EARTH DAY—DO MORE IN ’74 tie-dyed T-shirt, slacks, and shearling slippers. Her shock of frizzy hair was silver now, and a pair of reading glasses was suspended from a chain atop her mountainous bosoms. But she’d lost none of her fierceness. The black eyes were still piercing. The fire still burned.

Her apartment smelled of chicken soup and mothballs. Lulu headed straight through the kitchen into the garden out back. She can’t stand the smell of mothballs. Don’t ask me why. Ruth and I went into the living room, which seemed a lot more Upper Montclair, New Jersey, than it did West Village. There were plastic slipcovers over the somewhat assertive chintz sofa and armchairs. There was thick gold shag carpeting on the floor. There were heavy burgundy velvet drapes over the front windows, blocking out any light from the street. Several lamps were on. There were more plastic slipcovers over the lampshades. One wall was nothing but framed photographs of Ruth with Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, with Mailer and Breslin, with Gloria and Betty and Bella and the Shirleys, MacLaine and Chisholm. There were empty spaces on the other walls, outlines of where Thor’s pictures used to hang. It was not a tidy room. Dirty dishes and newspapers were heaped on the coffee table, shoes and socks and jackets strewn about the floor.

“As you can see, there’s a teenaged boy in the house.” She sat, puffing out her cheeks. “Plus I’m still traveling two, three days a week on the lecture circuit. That’s how I make my living now. And believe me, it hasn’t been easy lately, being a public laughingstock. Women candidates all over the country used to beg me to come speak on their behalf.
Beg
me. Not anymore.”

I sat, crossing my legs. “How’s your law practice?”

“It sucks,” she answered sharply. “Who the hell would hire me?”

“And Arvin?”

She hesitated, swatting at some crumbs on her sweater. “He’s been better. We all have.”

“I wonder if I could spend a little time with him this afternoon after school.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“To talk to him.”

She bristled. “And maybe pass along a message from Thor?”

“Not at all. I have no message.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Hoagy,” she said, shaking her finger at me. “I regard you as in the enemy camp. I agreed to see you out of courtesy and because you’re an old family friend and because I didn’t have any other reason to get dressed today. But Arvin is off-limits, understood?”

“If you insist, Ruth.”

“I do insist,” she said, struggling to get comfortable on the sofa. It wasn’t easy for her—her feet didn’t touch the floor and she wasn’t supple enough to fold her legs under her. She finally settled for a Humpty-Dumpty position, footsies swinging in midair. “I cannot believe that that man actually stooped so low as to peddle a film of Clethra taking her underwear off.”

“You think he’s the one who sold it?”

She stared at me. “Don’t you?”

“I’m trying not to think.”

She shook her head at me disgustedly. “Listen to yourself, Hoagy.”

“I’m trying not to do that, either.”

“There’s nothing that man won’t do to get what he wants.”

“And he’s got her,” I pointed out.

“But he hasn’t got Arvin,” she fired back. “And I’ll fight him all the way to the Supreme Court to make sure he doesn’t get him. That’ll cost him hundreds of thousands in legal fees. So wake up and smell the coffee, Hoagy. Ask yourself who else in this whole miserable affair has had their assets frozen. Ask yourself who else has—” She stopped short, her eyes bulging at me. “Isn’t that his bracelet you’re wearing?”

“It is.” I twirled it around my wrist, examining it.

Ruth glared at me witheringly. “I can’t believe you’re helping him.”

“Actually, I’m helping her.”

Her face darkened. “What does the little tramp have to say for herself?”

“That she can’t please you. That you’re always in her face.”

“Oh,
please,
” she huffed, thrusting her chin at me. “I am what I am, Hoagy. My parents were German Jews who got off the boat in 1936 without three cents in their pockets or a word of English in their heads. My father, who pressed pants in Washington Heights until the day he died, taught me to aim high for myself. So I aimed high. I was valedictorian of my high school class, first in my class in Radcliffe, editor of the law review at Columbia. When I was twenty-five I defended a black woman in Little Rock who’d been accused of murdering a white man—a white man who happened to be raping her in the alley behind her beauty parlor at the time. When I was twenty-six I helped form the National Organization for Women in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton. We had a treasury of one hundred and thirty-five dollars. I’ve marched in every city in the world. I’ve been thrown in jail seven times. Elected to Congress four times. When I ran against Abe Beame for mayor of this city I lost by two percentage points.
Two.
Strictly because I wouldn’t cozy up to the goddamned unions.” She was waving her arms now, the words spilling out in a juicy torrent. “Am I in Clethra’s face? You bet I am. She’s a straight-A student with a first-class brain. I want her to use it, not sit around on her fat duff watching reruns on TV and spouting all of that Generation X crapola about how pointless and empty life is. I despise that whole goddamned mind-set. I despise laziness and self-indulgence. Do I expect a lot of her? Yes! I expect a lot of everyone.” Bitterly, she added, “But this new generation doesn’t want to listen to me. I don’t tell them what they want to hear.”

“Which is what?”

“That they aren’t to blame for whatever happens to them in life. That it’s somebody else’s fault. That they’re
victims.
Crapola! Crack babies are victims. Bright, healthy, middle-class women
aren’t.
They’re self-indulgent weaklings is what they are, weaklings who blame their mommy and their daddy and their nursery school teacher for every goddamned thing that goes wrong, instead of looking in the goddamned mirror. Let me tell you something, Hoagy. Before I came along, the women’s movement was just a bunch of neurotic, overprivileged
kvetches
in search of the perfect orgasm. And that’s precisely what it has gone back to. But don’t listen to me. I’m old-fashioned. I believe if a woman wants equal rights then she has to take responsibility for herself and stop pointing fingers.” She paused, a rare thing, and narrowed her eyes at me. “So you’re helping Clethra with her book?”

“I am.”

She sighed wistfully. “It was always my dream that she’d someday be an author.”

I grinned at her. “Spoken like a true Jewish mother.”

“Hey, I told you—I am what I am,” she fired back indignantly. But with a hint of thaw, too.

I studied her face. “Did you ever physically abuse her, Ruth?”

Ruth studied mine, flaring her nostrils at me. “Never. That’s something they cooked up so they can get Arvin away from me. Let ’em try.”

“How about Arvin?”

“What about him?”

“Did you ever beat him?”

“I spanked him once when he was four,” she answered, turning sardonic on me. “Does that count?”

“You said you expect a lot of people,” I mentioned, shifting gears.

“So?”

“What did you expect of Thor?”

She puffed out her cheeks, considering this a moment. It was quiet in the room. I could hear the mantel clock ticking. I could hear the reporters outside joking and laughing. “I expected him to grow old with me,” she replied. “I expected him to be by my side. To be true to
me
—instead of to that goddamned heroic quest of his. Which wears mighty thin as a daily diet, believe me. He’s insane, you know. He’s totally lost control.”

“He claims he’s in love.”

“Oh, please! The man’s phallus is in wonderland. He’s found the proverbial honey pot. She’s young. She’s voluptuous. She’s flattered by his attention. What college girl wouldn’t be? He happens to possess one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century.”

“Do you hate him?”

“Out loud,” she affirmed. “He killed me, Hoagy. I’m dead inside. If he walked into this room right now I’d claw his goddamned eyes out.”

“And Clethra?”

“She’s just a child rebelling against her mother,” Ruth said mildly, rocking back and forth on the sofa. “Nothing more, nothing less. How’s Merilee?”

“Tired a lot of the time.”

“Drag her away from that baby if you can,” she advised. “Set aside one evening that’s just for you two—flowers, wine, a romantic supper. It’s vital for young couples.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call us a young couple.”

“She was a wonderful campaigner,” Ruth recalled fondly. “So passionate. When she believes in someone, she
believes.
”

“Yes, I suppose she does.”

“Cherish her, Hoagy. What you two have together is priceless. You don’t realize it until you’ve lost it like I have. Because you can never get it back. Never.” She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her sweater, shuddering. “Know who’s been like a rock through this whole thing? Barry. I guess because he knows from public humiliation. Went through so much himself when he came out after our divorce. Marco’s been incredibly supportive, too. Gay men, they know what it means to be ostracized, to suffer. If it weren’t for those two I’d never have made it through these past few weeks, believe me. Barry has a country place out near you, in Essex. He and Marco have invited Arvin and me out for the weekend.”

“How do we fix this thing, Ruth?”

“Fix it?” She gaped at me, incredulous. I couldn’t blame her. “We don’t
fix
it, Hoagy. We go to court. When we do I’ll win sole custody of Arvin. And I
will
win. And then, one of these mornings, Clethra’s going to wake up and realize she has absolutely zero interest in sharing another day of her promising young life with an aging lunatic. And when that happens I’ll take her in my arms and we’ll cry and we’ll laugh and then she and Arvin and I will get on with our lives. We’ll survive. Hell, I don’t blame Clethra. How can I? I just feel sorry for her, that’s all.”

“I feel sorry for Thor, too.”

“You can afford to,” Ruth Feingold pointed out. “He hasn’t ruined your life.
Yet.
”

Barry Feingold and Marco Paolo shared an airy twelfth-floor corner apartment in a pre-war building on Riverside and Seventy-ninth Street. Their view, which soared all the way up the river to the George Washington Bridge, was to die for. Their decor was not. You’d call it eclectic if you were being tactful. Kitschy if you were not. Not so much because of the marble cherubs and the gold-veined mirrors. Or the overstuffed, over-the-top Victorian rosewood chairs and the matched pair of fainting couches. No, it was their collection of antique dress mannequins from the 1930s—those two dozen life-sized plaster men and women, fully costumed, who were positioned about the living room as if in the midst of some scintillating smart set soiree. And who were exceedingly—well—unnerving. Unless, like Bill Clinton, you can get used to being watched over constantly by a Greek chorus of dummies. I know Lulu found them totally unnerving. She never stopped growling at them the whole time we were there.

The sun was still rather high over the New Jersey Palisades but we decided on martinis anyway, heavy on the olives in my case. Marco went clomping off to the kitchen to make them while I sat across from Barry, who was draped languorously across one of the fainting couches with his ankles crossed. On the stereo Janet Jackson was going
ooh-baby-ooh
with what I suppose she thought was feeling. And, compared to Mariah Carey, I suppose it was.

“So how is old Thorvin these days?” Barry asked me politely.

“Not well, in my opinion.”

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “it was someone he ate.”

Barry Feingold was in his early sixties, second-generation New York real estate money. His father, Herschel, built those awful brick apartment towers in Queens that are clustered practically on top of the Long Island Expressway, the ones you pass on your way to the airport and wonder how anyone could possibly live there. As far as I knew, Barry had never actually held a real job. During the Koch years, he had served as the Mayor’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Before that he’d been on some board or another at Lincoln Center. Lately, he’d been backing experimental theater, which is a graceful way of saying he was sleeping late most mornings. Not that Barry wasn’t a self-made man. He most decidedly was. He’d made himself into what the British theater people call a laddy boy. Barry was trim and tanned, with a cultivated air of wry detachment and just a hint of the dissolute scamp. He had lovingly coiffed silver hair and a proud, aquiline nose and not a trace of sagging skin. Not under his eyes. Not under his chin. Not nowhere. We’re talking multiple tucks. I think he was also wearing a girdle. Either that or he didn’t exhale once while I was there. He had on a red velvet smoking jacket, white silk shirt, an ascot, gray flannels and black suede lounging pumps with little gold foxes braided on them. It was not an easy outfit to pull off, especially for someone who grew up in Douglaston, Queens. But Barry worked at it, and Barry Feingold was good at his work.