I think about that day in my room, my mother and Sylvia sitting me down. Marcella had pivoted. She had replaced the truthbecause what kind of woman tells their fifteen-year-old daughter that she has just died?
“But what about Dad?” I ask.
And now I see it—why she was always so worried about him. It wasn’t because she had saved him once before. It was because she never had, because she knew about his heart, knew what might be coming for him, and was already aware that there would be nothing she could do to stop it. It was the worry we all have—the worry of the unknown. The worry of what it means to be human, to love someone, to be powerless in the face of it.
“Dad knew, too,” she says. “He told me to tell you so many times. He said I’d get you off his back.” She laughs. “But he knew it was my choice to make.”
Hysterical strength, the term used to address the phenomenon of the adrenaline mothers get when their children are in danger. The superhuman capabilities these women uncover. The mom who lifted a car off her baby, who scaled a building to save her toddler. What was the ticket if not hysterical strength? What has our life been if not that?
“I’m sorry you had to carry this,” I say, and when I do I see her body crumple. She pitches forward, and I catch her in my arms—my mother. She folds into me, and I hold her, and once her body is pressed against mine, once we are connected, in ways we haven’t been in so long, I feel myself give way, too. And it’s there in the passage—mother and child, child and mother, grief and love and love and grief, the indistinguishable nature of these things, their inherent ties, that I finally understand the legacy I come from.
We are saviors.
What does it mean that I chose—selfishly, hastily, thoughtlessly—to save myself?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
When I was twenty-nine I met a man on a trip to Las Vegas. Bobby Montgomery. A cowboy from Kentucky with a Southern drawl and biceps built like a bison.
We fell in love almost immediately. I don’t use that term lightly. I’m old, and I have no reason to lie anymore, to narrate my life in any way other than what it was. Love, yes. I had never felt it the way I felt it for him, and nothing later came close, either—although there was a split for second place a mile long.
It was Sin City back then, and the whole town dripped with devil-may-care. The mob still ran the town, and Lefty ran the desk at the International. I used to gamble, play the slots. Tables, too. My family wonders where the money comes from, and the truth is no one ever made a living at blackjack but me. Fifty thousand dollars in 1964 can become ten million by 2020 without too much effort. All I ever bought was the house, and the rest just got to grow.
But back to Bobby.
The Rat Pack—Frank and Sammy and Dean—called the shots right along with the Family. Elvis had just come out with “Viva Las Vegas,” and people were pilgriming in droves. I already knew I had a knack for the tables—call it luck, intuition, who knows.Mostly it was bravery. I had the silver ticket, you see. Any mistake I made, any bad thing that happened, I could take it back. I was invincible. I lived without fear.
“Excuse me, miss, you seem to have dropped something.”
He appeared at my side, all six feet four inches of him, with a cowboy hat tipped forward on his head and his palm outstretched. I was at the Trop—not staying there, too rich for my blood—but posted up at the Theatre Restaurant. It was the see and be seen of 1964.
The something I had dropped, apparently, was his hand.
Bobby was in town working a slot route—he’d been hooked up with Phil Kastel somewhere in Louisiana and was in Vegas seeing the fruits of his friend’s new venture.
We became inseparable. He had a suite with two rooms and offered me the second, but by our third night it was obvious—there really wasn’t a need for more than the one.
I’d had sex before. I was an unmarried woman in the fifties, which was a tough thing to be if you were anyone else, but I’d grown up with a mother who left me to my own devices.
Bobby and I fell fast. The Little White Chapel had been built in 1954 and he asked me to go.
“Little lady, won’t you be my bride?”
I was a Jewish girl with a Ukrainian mother, and he was a Southern heir with one dead father, and together, we were an absurdity—but dear, did I want to.
We spent four and a half months all over the strip. Dinner at Louigi’s, Golden Steer Steakhouse to hear Sinatra grab the mic after two martinis. It was like living in a movie. I knew, even in it, how rare the air was. I loved every minute of it.
It was the closest I ever came to being married, but in the end, there just wasn’t enough time.
Kastel was getting pushed out of the casino because of his connections to mob boss Frank Costello. I was worried Bobby would get caught in the crosshairs. Carlos Marcello was taking over, and he didn’t like anyone who was left from the old regime. That was Bobby.
It was a Friday morning. I remember because I was going to tell him that night at dinner—our Shabbat. I was going to light candles in the room and order up the chicken and open some nice Scotch.
I had suspected it for a week or two and then called the doctor to confirm. An old guy who went by Dr. Sam and came to the room.
“You’re about two months along,” he told me. I’d been in Las Vegas eighteen weeks.
Bobby never came back for dinner. He didn’t come back the next night, either. It was Sunday before I went downstairs and asked for Kastel. No one knew. Then I went and found Lefty.
