The Rothman Scandal (40 page)

Suddenly, outside the window, she heard a branch snap. She knew, from having grown up in the country, that no animal in nature, except a human, will step on a branch that will not hold its own weight. And it couldn't be Mel returning from the beach because the sound had come from the side of the house that faced the highway. She turned, and saw—or, for a fleeting second was certain she had just seen—a white face pressed against the glass window-wall. Then it was gone. Someone had been watching her!

They had grown used to intruders pressing their noses against the walls of the glass house in daytime, hoping for a glimpse of the famous anchorman, but, at one o'clock in the morning, this was something else again. For a moment, she stood frozen with fear.

Then she leaped across the thick-piled carpet to the small kneehole desk where she knew Mel kept his pistol. He had rarely needed to produce it, but there had been times when the sight of it had helped send unwanted visitors on their way. She pulled the gun from its drawer, ran to the sliding glass door, and flung it open defiantly. “Who's there?” she demanded. But the dune seemed empty now in the moonlight, though she was certain she could hear the sound of running footsteps retreating in the sand. “Stop or I'll shoot!” she cried.

Briefly, she thought she saw an object move, low in the beach grass, and she aimed the gun low at that, her finger on the trigger. But then she saw that it was only the broken branch of a sea grape tree, dangling in the breeze. There had not been sufficient wind to break that branch. Whoever had broken it had fled off into the night. She stepped back into the house again, slid the door closed, and snapped the dead-bolt lock.

“What the hell are you doing, Alex?” He stood there, still naked, but with a beach towel draped about his head and shoulders.

“We had a prowler. I heard someone, and I saw someone.”

“Gone now?”

She nodded.

“Another member of my fan club, I suppose. Now put that thing away, Alex. It makes me nervous.”

“I know how to handle a gun.”

“I know. That's why it makes me nervous.”

She returned the pistol to its drawer in the desk.

“Now, come here,” he said, and opened his arms wide.

She flew—flew to him, as though wings had been provided—and buried herself in his embrace with a little happy sob.

When it was over—and it had been immensely, complexly satisfying for her tonight—she curled, like a nesting spoon, against the warm curve of his back, and thought about it. There was something different about making love with Mel, very different from making love with any other man she had ever known. She tried to define the difference, but it wasn't easy. What was it? It was more mature, perhaps, more grown-up, but that didn't quite explain it, for “mature” implied that they didn't do silly, sexy adolescent things with one another. They did. Tonight, for instance, she had been so excited that she whipped off her clothes in front of him, and let him lift her by her shoulders and let him enter her as he stood there, and she locked her arms and legs tightly around his back. He carried her, danced with her really, like that, around the room before carrying her, locked to him, to the bed, where they fell, laughing at how they must look if someone were still looking at them through the glass, across the cool white sheets. Their lovemaking was adult in the sense of adults playing a childhood game, and she thought of the young men in their banana hammocks playing volleyball on the beach. Yes, their lovemaking was like a game in which no one really cared who won—the volleyball flew back and forth—it was all for the fun of it, the good times of being together, of being friends, and in love. In their lovemaking, there was no victor and no vanquished. Everybody won, when it was over …

It was so different from the way it had been with Steven, or that first one. When Mel made love to her, they laughed. They had little jokes. He had given her breasts names. Her left breast was Sarah, the right was Beatrice. He claimed to much prefer Beatrice to Sarah, but he tried to be fair. “Sarah is getting jealous,” he said, after nibbling on Beatrice for a while, and he would let his tongue glide gently around Sarah's nipple.

“Sarah wants more than that,” she would say, and they would both laugh, before getting serious again for a while.

And so she was revising her thoughts again. Love didn't have to be only loss, only sacrifice. It could be something even more complicated than that. It could be sharing—the first, and most difficult, thing that preschool children were taught to try to do, and how slow most children were to learn to share! Some of them never learned to do it. Probably most of them never learned to do it. And perhaps that was the special thing about Mel's and her lovemaking, perhaps that was why it seemed so mature, adult, grown-up. They were two children who had finally grown up and learned to share.

“I've been thinking,” she whispered. “You are absolutely right about that painting. It doesn't belong there. That wall should be left absolutely bare.”

“Mmm,” he mumbled drowsily.

“I'm calling Findlay the first thing Monday morning to tell them to take it back.”

He muttered something unintelligible. Then she heard him say, “It must have been one of the waiters,” and she knew he was asleep.

But she wasn't thinking about Maggie Van Zuylen's waiters, or the women's purses. She was thinking now about poor old Ho Rothman, who had been her friend, but who had never learned to share. For most of his adult life, Ho Rothman had waged a pitched battle with his oldest son, knowing, intuitively perhaps, that one day Herbert would try to take over the company and that, when that happened, everything that Ho had created would be destroyed. Now that day appeared to have come, and Ho was too old and ill to know it was happening, the fall of the House of Rothman.…

The pale face she had fleetingly glimpsed at the window tonight seemed familiar. Where had she seen it before? As she drifted off to sleep, it became the face she had seen in her dream, her own face from the Bouché portrait, looking up from the spinning boat and calling for help.

The next morning, she slept late, as she often did on Sunday mornings. When she opened her eyes, there was no sign of Mel. She rose, put on a loose cotton robe, and opened the sliding parchment panel that separated the bedroom from the rest of the house.

The day was bright and sunny, and an easterly wind was raising whitecaps on the sea, and there was a heavy surf. From the top deck, she surveyed the beach, bridging her left hand across her eyes to shield them from the sun. There was still no sign of Mel. He was probably off somewhere, walking Cronkite. She stepped back inside the house.

That was when she saw it. The Sam painting had been hung on the white wall. He had driven a nail into the white wall, and hung it there. For a moment she thought her heart would break.

Then she burst into tears.

20

Back in the spring and early summer of 1912, with his—and the
Explorer
's—new celebrity, Ho Rothman found himself flooded with new orders for subscriptions. Newsdealers from across the Hudson, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, now begged to stock the weekly tabloid on their stands. This put Ho in a unique position of power, and he was quick to seize it. Newspapers were sold in those days—and most are today—on a returnable basis. In other words, newsdealers were able to return any unsold stock to the publishers for credit. Ho informed the big-city dealers that, if they wished to stock
his
newspaper, the terms would be cash, and no returns. There was considerable grumbling over this policy, but Ho was adamant. “Supply and demand,” he said, citing one of Sadye Rothman's capitalist precepts. “You demand, I supply. No returns.” This no-returns policy continued to apply to Rothman newspapers to this very day.

Handling this sudden spate of new business, needless to say, presented serious distribution problems for the youthful publisher, but Ho was still unwilling to take on any extra paid hands. Fortunately, his new friend Sophie Litsky and her family came to his rescue. The
Explorer
went to press on Thursday evenings, and was distributed Friday mornings. Early Friday morning, before school, Sophie herself took on two of Ho's Newark routes, toting the papers up and down the streets in a child's red express wagon. Her two-years-older brother, Morris, who had a bicycle, was able to cover a more extensive area. On Friday mornings, Mother Bella Litsky herself undid her apron and joined Ho on the ferry to Manhattan to help him make his deliveries in the city, and presently even Rabbi Litsky, caught up in the enthusiasm for the enterprise, abandoned his phylacteries and his Talmudic texts and, in his black hat and flowing side curls, joined his wife and Ho on the weekly cross-river treks to New York, where, on streetcars, the three fanned out in different directions across the metropolis and to the outer boroughs, carrying bundles of newspapers tied in twine. The rabbi's only condition was that he be home by sundown for
Shabbes
.

The reasons why the entire Litsky family were so eager to assist their young friend were not entirely altruistic. Privately, Bella and her husband had noted that this ambitious, hardworking young
mensch
—this national hero and celebrity-of-the-moment who had not only been the first to report the worst disaster in maritime history, but who had also forewarned that it could occur—might be an excellent choice as a husband for their Sophie, when the time came. Of course Ho had no such plans. But he did not discourage the Litskys from supposing that he might.

Still, even with the Litskys' help, Ho was getting only two or three hours' sleep out of twenty-four. And, on the short ferry crossings, it was not uncommon to see little Ho Rothman curled on one of the vessel's hard wicker benches, with a bale of
Explorers
as a pillow, sleeping until roused by the bell that announced that the ferry had entered its slip.

Ho had followed his
Titanic
stories with a series of profiles of some of the great men who had gone down with the liner—Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, the traction heir Harry Elkins Widener. Some of these stories paid off in interesting ways. For example, he had headlined one “JOHN JACOB ASTOR—AMERICAN HERO!” His account of Mr. Astor's heroism was a mixture of contemporary reports and certain fictional details that Ho invented himself. He wrote of how “Colonel” Astor assisted his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, and promised to follow her in a later boat, which was true enough. And he added that the colonel had then spent his final hours seeing to it that little children were warmly bundled up in caps, mittens, and mufflers before being lowered in boats into the icy sea, which Ho thought was a nice dramatic touch.

Not long after that story appeared, he received a letter from her private secretary saying that Colonel Astor's widow wished to see him.

In his best suit, he presented himself at the front door of the Astor mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue, where he was greeted by a butler in a black swallowtail coat and a gold-and-white-striped vest. Ho had reached out to shake the butler's hand, and the butler had accepted the handshake rather limply. Later, this would become one of the great stories he told around the dinner table at “Rothmere”—how he had shaken the hand of Mrs. Astor's butler.

The butler escorted him to the Venetian drawing room, where Madeleine Astor sat in a kind of throne—a small, delicate-looking young woman with a gold throw across her lap, which was intended to conceal her pregnancy. She extended her hand, and Ho bowed formally. “I just want to thank you for what you wrote about my husband,” she said. “I always knew he was a hero, but I did not know that he spent his last hours seeing to the welfare of the little children. That was so like Jack, and I was very much moved by your account of it.” Then she handed him a check for a thousand dollars.

At the same time, capitalizing on his fame as the newspaperman who had predicted the
Titanic
disaster, Ho added a regular feature called “The
Explorer
's Crystal Ball.” The Crystal Ball department specialized in predicting other dire occurrences, and it was soon one of the best-read features in the paper.

It didn't matter that many of Ho's predictions did not come true. They made titillating reading. He predicted that the sixty-story Woolworth Building that was going up in downtown Manhattan—to become the tallest inhabitable structure in the world—would blow over in the first high wind. It is still standing to this day. He predicted that the New York Giants would defeat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, but the Red Sox won. He predicted that the Leaning Tower of Pisa would fall down in six months' time. He predicted that President Theodore Roosevelt's split with the Republican party to form his own “Bull Moose” party would result in an overwhelming victory for William Howard Taft, but it actually led to the victory of Woodrow Wilson. He predicted an earthquake in the heart of Paris that would topple the Eiffel Tower. On the other hand, he did predict that a massive volcano would erupt “somewhere west of the Mississippi,” and when Mount Katmai conveniently erupted in Alaska, burying Kodiak Island a hundred miles away under three feet of ashes, Ho insisted editorially that this was the volcano he had been talking about. Alaska was west of the Mississippi, wasn't it?

As circulation climbed, so did orders for advertising pages. One of his first important new advertisers was the Newark Light & Power Company, and it struck Ho as a nice irony that the company that was still unwittingly supplying him with free electricity should also be paying him handsomely to advertise in his pages. For his advertisers, Ho began employing a system he called “discounting.” The idea was simple. The more frequently a company advertised, the deeper was the discount that the company was given. This tactic is widely used today, but Ho was the first to come up with it.

In the back of Ho's mind was already the notion that he would expand the
Explorer
from a weekly to a daily operation. But, prudently, he decided to take his time. Wisely, too, he decided to hold on to his job at Bamberger's, where, instead of being fired for running off the job that April night, he now found himself being treated as the store's fair-haired boy. His reporting exploit, after all, had generated a great deal of free publicity for the store. Now the suddenly benevolent Mr. Gossage invited Ho Rothman to be his assistant furniture buyer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, and presently Ho was helping Mr. Gossage prepare the same ads for spurious furniture sales that would end up appearing on the back page of Ho's newspaper.