Bitter Bronx (11 page)

“Dearest, I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. You have no sister.”

Marla wouldn't pester Daddy, because he was so sensitive and might have started to cry. So she interrogated the doormen. They looked at her as if she had seen her own goblin in the elevator.

“We can't help you, Miss Marla.”

She lived with that goblin, grew up with it, and when she graduated from Columbia Law, she volunteered for duty aboard her father's frigate. Within a year she was chief counsel at Silk & Silk. She married her high school sweetheart, had two children, and lived in the same apartment-palace on Central Park West.

Mortimer died before he was sixty. Marla cleaned up all the mess. And while going through her father's safety deposit boxes she found the first hard evidence of Little Sister. Daddy hadn't abandoned her. Sister's real name was Irene. Mortimer had put her in a home for alcoholic movie stars and mental patients on an isolated block near the Bronx Botanical Garden. Mortimer had kept a record of every transaction with Rhineland Manor, like a ship captain's log. He'd visited Little Sister every second week, set up an account for her in perpetuity. Marla wouldn't have uncovered a single clue if she hadn't gone into the vault at Daddy's bank. Irene wasn't even mentioned in Mortimer's will.

She ran home with all the records, confronted Lollie. Marla ranted for an hour, but Lollie didn't blink once, didn't falter under Marla's attack.

“We did what was best,” Lollie insisted. “She tried to smother you with a pillow while you were asleep. Little Sister was an aberrant child.”

“Mummy, Little Sister has a name—Irene.”

“You mustn't shout,” Lollie said. “No one ever called her Irene.”

Marla decided not to tell her children until she had gone up to see Little Sister for herself. She'd become chief counsel at another arbitrage firm, and she had the company chauffeur drive her into the wild lands of the Bronx. What she saw wasn't so wild. Rhineland Manor was in a neighborhood of Tudor-style apartment houses. The mansion itself had once been a cloister for decrepit nuns and was surrounded by a sculpted garden.

Marla had a hard time getting through the mansion's gates. It meant nothing that she was her father's executor and one of his heirs. Little Sister wasn't insane and could decide for herself whom she wanted to see.

Marla could have gone to court, but she wasn't going to sue the mansion and Little Sister. And there was another problem about Irene. She would answer to no name but Bunny.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Silk,” the chief nurse said. “Bunny says she has no sister.”

Marla didn't have to discard her husband's name. She was always known as Mrs. Silk. And she was just as stubborn as Little Sister.

“Then I guess I'll have a very long wait. And even if my father has paid Bunny's upkeep for the rest of her natural life, I'll dig right into his estate and ask to have that money returned. So you may have a pauper on your hands.”

The nurses whispered among themselves, and then Bunny appeared. She had broad shoulders, looked like a man. Marla could sense the rage in her. Perhaps Lollie hadn't made up that tale about Little Sister trying to smother her with a pillow.

Something was wrong with Bunny's eyes. They seemed to wander even as they took Marla in. There was a pulse between her eyebrows, like some strange target. Marla wasn't sure how to introduce herself.

“I'm your sister,” she said.

“I don't remember you,” Bunny said. Her voice wasn't tentative. But it didn't have the lilt of Manhattan. Marla couldn't trace the accent. Little Sister could have been the soprano of Rhineland Manor and the Bronx Botanical Garden.

“But Daddy visited you every other week. He must have told you about . . .”

Marla couldn't even finish her sentence. Mortimer had told Little Sister nothing about the Silks.

Bunny smiled. “He called himself Uncle Mort. He took me on excursions . . . and he paid for all my tutors. I couldn't sit in a classroom with other kids. No school would have me. I destroyed the first classroom I was in. Ripped out every seat. . . . Why the hell are you here?”

“Bunny, I found—”

“Don't call me that,” Little Sister said. Her eyes had a yellow gleam. The smile was gone, replaced by a wolf's grin. “That's for my friends. Uncle called me Irene. You know, from that song, ‘Goodnight, Irene.' He sang it to me all the time, said he'd see me in his dreams.”

Marla was filled with her own rage, not against Little Sister, but against Mortimer, who hadn't serenaded her once.

“And he cried a lot, said he couldn't take me with him, because no insurance policy in the whole world could guard against a danger like me.”

“Daddy didn't say that.”

“Yes, he did,” Bunny said, smiling again. The dentists around Rhineland Manor couldn't have been so perfect—she had missing teeth. And then her accent started to crumble; she sounded like the gang leader of some housing project in the neighborhood. “Listen, girl, I'm not that stupid. I'm in this dump because of you. I'll rip your tits out, like the sockets on a chair.”

Two male nurses arrived and led Bunny upstairs to the living quarters, while Marla was summoned to the directress's office, where a certain Mrs. Mahler was waiting. The directress seemed about fifty. She served Marla coffee in a beautiful cup.

“I suppose I'm a pain in the ass,” Marla said. “An intruder.”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Mahler said. “It happens all the time. A relative hidden away, not entirely for medical reasons. No one's under lock and key.”

“But I thought my sister was violent. Didn't she tear up her own school?”

“She had a tantrum. But we kept a nurse in the class, you see. And your father chose a better arrangement. He hired a bunch of sophomores from Fordham University. It was quite convenient. Fordham's ten blocks away. The students liked to come here, and your sister received a fine education.”

“Did my father pick the tutors himself?”

“Indeed. Often he was here every other day.”

Marla couldn't hide the shudder that leapt right through her.
Every other day.
She had to keep herself from asking if Daddy had his own bed at this mansion. She took out her checkbook and began to scribble a check. Mrs. Mahler seemed perplexed.

“We can't accept money from you, Mrs. Silk.”

“A few extras,” Marla said. “In case my sister shatters one of your coffee cups.”

“But it's forbidden.”

“Forbidden by whom?” Marla had to ask.

“Your father. He didn't want Bunny to become a burden. He's endowed this home, you see, and we stand to lose that endowment if the financial arrangement for his daughter is tampered with or compromised in any way.”

Marla began to wonder if the directress had her own law degree from Fordham. She didn't argue. She thanked Mrs. Mahler and said she wouldn't trouble her or Little Sister again.

But her anger turned to bile. Mortimer had shut her out, denied Marla the rights to her own little sister. She had her chauffeur drive from the Botanical Garden to the Madison Avenue offices of her father's lawyer. She gave Martin Goodson, Esq., fifteen minutes of warning. But when Marla arrived in Goodson's own office, all the senior partners were there. Goodson was a portly man who wrote novels in his spare time. He'd never cheated Mortimer out of a nickel.

“Martin,” she said, “I'd like to see the codicil to my father's will.”

“The will didn't have one, Marla.”

“Then I'll subpoena all your records. I'm Dad's executor, not you.”

Goodson motioned to his partners, and they all left the room.

“If Daddy set up an endowment, I'm going to claim he wasn't in his right mind. I don't trust that shyster home in the Bronx. It smacks of a prison.”

“Marla, did you know that your mother and father once had a wolf?”

She should have been furious, with her father's lawyer going off on some tangent like that. But it pricked her imagination. “What wolf?”

“A Siberian wolf-dog with a white coat and silver eyes. They called her Princess. She was the envy of your father's building. And she was devoted to Mort, terribly devoted. That white wolf would only eat from your father's hand.”

A she-wolf with silver eyes on Central Park West. Marla had a horrible premonition.

“Then I was born,” she said. “And the wolf was jealous.”

“She attacked the doormen. Mort had to put her away.”

M
arla had two daughters in their teens. They would text at the dinner table, text while they brushed their teeth. They loved Marla but considered her a relic from some century without tweets. So it was futile to mention a maiden aunt.

But it was Lollie who read the sad lines on her daughter's brow.

“You went up to see that maniac, didn't you?”

“Mummy, she's not a maniac. She's a prisoner in a golden cage. But why didn't you tell me about the wolf?”

Now it was Lollie who had that fierce pulse between her eyes. “Princess wasn't a wolf. Your father couldn't be consoled. He wept for days.”

And soon Marla could weave in all the particulars of the tale. Daddy had to make a second sacrifice, give up another she-wolf, Little Sister, who had rages he couldn't control. He tried and tried, with a little army of specialists and shamans. But they must have come to the same conclusion: the wolf cub couldn't live at home, or Marla's life might have been in mortal danger. So they found a way to “gas” Little Sister and keep her alive.

And Marla had become a kind of golem whose husband had left her for his secretary. No, she was a succubus who fed from afar on Little Sister's blood. She thought of resigning her job. She had love affairs with silly men. A succubus might as well feed on someone's blood.

Then she got a call from Rhineland Manor. Little Sister wanted to see her. Marla borrowed the same chauffeur and company car.

She could hardly believe the transformation. Bunny's hair was longer. Her shoulders were tucked in. She wore pumps and a silk blouse. Most of her masculinity was gone. They sat on the mansion's verandah, could listen to the lions in the Bronx Zoo. Bunny didn't have the musk of a prisoner. She served coffee in a silver tray. They had almond biscuits from an Italian bakery on Arthur Avenue.

“I'm shameless,” Bunny said. “I put on a big act. . . . Do you know how many times I dreamt of sitting here with you?”

“But you could have asked Uncle Mort to bring me along. I would have come. . . . Did he ever talk about me?”

“Sometimes. But he never said we were sisters.”

Daddy wanted to keep Little Sister in a grandiose closet. He didn't have to talk about money and ambition with her, about arbitrage . . .

And then a thought seized Marla. “Did Daddy ever mention his wolf-dog, Princess?”

Suddenly Little Sister's eyes were flecked with wild spots. She began to mold an almond biscuit in her hand. She looked like some axe murderer in her silk blouse.

“That was his pet name for me—Princess. He took me there . . .”

“
There
,” Marla muttered.

“He put up a marker after Princess died. He had a tiny gravestone dug into the earth, in Central Park.”

“I don't believe you,” Marla said. It was a fabrication, a vast plot to rob Marla of whatever tranquillity she had left. There was no such creature as Princess, no wolf-dog with a white coat, no matter what Daddy had told his lawyer, or what Lollie had said. Lollie always lied. No wolf had been put to sleep on Marla's account.

“I don't believe you . . . about the marker.”

Little Sister clutched Marla's hand; Marla thought the bones in her fingers would break. But she didn't squeal.

“Uncle Mort had a pair of silver eyes painted on it.”

Marla thought she would swoon. Little Sister released her hand. And Marla fled the mansion like a half-crazed vagabond.