The Secret Page 5

  “How far are you gone?” my father asked, using an expression Sue Ellen had never heard before.

  She understood him, all the same. “Two months, two and a half,” she said.

  She was painfully embarrassed. Besides the two of us and her doctor, my father was the only person who knew.

  “Well, it looks to me like you got a decision to make, Sue Ellen,” he said. “It’s a decision nobody else can make for you. Len can’t make it. I can’t make it. Your parents can’t make it. The church can’t make it. You’ll have to make the decision all by yourself. Other people can advise you, but it’s the woman’s decision.”

  “What would you advise, Mr. Cooper?”

  “Have the baby and put it up for adoption,” my father said without so much as an instant of hesitation.

  “I can’t do that,” she said tearfully. “People would see I was pregnant. My parents would find out.”

  Things like that just came out of him now and then. I am sure it genuinely surprised him when Sue Ellen began to shake with sobs.

  “There are places where you can go,” he said. He didn’t apologize but he tried to relieve the situation by being rational. “Places where you can—I mean in total confidence.”

  She shook her head. “My father and mother would have to know,” she wept.

  “Well then…”

  Well then was what happened. He called her dormitory and spoke to the house mother. He introduced himself and told the woman that he had managed to get tickets for Amadeus—a very difficult ticket to get—and would like for Sue Ellen to stay so he could take her and me to the show. It was not the house mother’s responsibility and she suggested he should call her parents.

  “Oh, of course. I haven’t reached her parents yet, but I’ll keep trying until I get them.”

  Sue Ellen pondered for three hours, then made her decision. The abortion—at that stage in a pregnancy a very simple procedure—was performed Saturday evening. She had all day Sunday and Monday to rest, before we drove back to Massachusetts on Tuesday morning.

  She wept softly for hours on end. During the drive she was silent. I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t break it off with me and never let me see her again. It was during that weekend and that drive that I decided I loved her. I had hurt her, after all, and there is some perverse instinct in a man that drives him to love a woman he has injured.

  13

  It is difficult to believe there was a time when a woman could not get a prescription for the Pill unless she showed the doctor proof that she was married. Naturally, that sort of thing continued in Massachusetts when it had died elsewhere. At the very least, the doctor might insist on notifying the girl’s parents. My father saw to it that Sue Ellen got a prescription in New York and had it filled in a New York pharmacy before we went back to Amherst.

  “You can make her your woman, if that’s what you want to do,” he said to me. “But don’t worry about her. She can take care of herself. With knockers like that, she can have any man she wants. And she knows it.”

  I was the man she wanted. She was the woman I wanted. Our shared experience of the abortion drew us closer together, rather than alienating us as we had been warned. My feeling for her was not just the old ache in the crotch but tenderness. She saw that and was drawn to me.

  I don’t mean to say that we weren’t horny anymore. We were, for damn sure, and the Pill made it possible for us to be carefree in our lovemaking. It was a great time to be alive, what with the ardor of kids and the prescription protecting us.

  When we left Amherst, we married and moved to New Haven where I would study law and she would study Chinese.

  Why Chinese, for God’s sake? Because, she said, it would be an intellectual challenge.

  That was Sue Ellen. She could think up the most hair-shirt things to do. For example, she played a musical instrument. An accordion maybe? The piano? No. She played the violin. Never very well. I thought she could have played the piano very well, but to her the violin was the most challenging instrument, so that was what she wanted to play, and she struggled with it until she did manage to generate tunes that were at least recognizable.

  By now I knew what my father’s business was. He’d told me and shown me the summer after I graduated from Lodge. The partner at Hale & Dorr was damn well not going to allow his daughter to marry the son of a man who sold women’s undies for a living—and not only that but sold erotic undies that a respectable woman would not wear, in his judgment. He changed his mind when he found out what a big business Cheeks was.

  By the time I married Sue Ellen, there were forty-seven Cheeks stores, all in cities on the Atlantic seaboard. Her father scowled and harrumphed but had to concede that my father ran an immensely successful business and was a wealthy man.

  One Sunday evening in New York my father took Sue Ellen and me to a Cheeks shop on Madison Avenue. It was, of course, closed, and we explored it privately.

  As always, the façade of the shop was discreet. The show window was dominated by a small cast-metal sign that stood on a pedestal and was lighted by low-wattage spotlights:

  CHEEKS

  LINGERIE FRANÇAISE

  Behind the little sign, a dark blue curtain hid the interior of the store, as did a matching curtain on the door. From the street you knew this was a shop that sold intimate apparel, and did so discreetly. In the daytime passers-by could not glance in and see someone they knew shopping for scanties.

  Otherwise the window displayed a few—a very few—posters advertising concerts and art exhibits and the like, all nonprofit and for the benefit of various causes. The posters were not enough to clutter the window but did suggest the store management’s commitment to culture and good works.

  Inside, Sue Ellen was astonished to find a marble floor, subdued lighting, gilded showcases, and racks and hangers of negligees, nightgowns, corselets, teddies, bra-and-panty sets, bikini bathing suits, and so on, all conspicuously high-quality merchandise offered for high prices. Displayed in the showcases were G-strings, crotch-less panties, and bras with holes cut to display the nipples. One showcase was given to leather goods: leather corselets with no bras, leather pants, and leather collars that could be fastened with little padlocks.

  “‘Supermarket Sweep,’” my father laughed. “Take anything you want. You’ll find something very different for your wedding present—that is, different from what will be on display at the wedding as your gift from me.”

  Sue Ellen was not bashful. She chose a sheer black shorty nightgown and a pair of black crotchless panties. But she grinned. “Great bras and…” she said. She cupped her hands over her bosom. “I only wish…”

  “Let me show you something, then,” my father said. He pulled a tray from under a counter and displayed an assortment of nipple clips, most of them in pairs attached by fine chains. “I guess you can figure out how they work.”

  Sue Ellen was fascinated with the nipple clips and chose a pair of wire loops that would fit over erect nipples and be fastened in place by slide rings that tightened the loops. My father nodded his approval of her choice, then disappeared into a back room for a moment and returned with the identical item in platinum, with a square-cut emerald hanging from the chain.

  “Slip back there and try them,” my father said. “You get them on right, it takes a pretty good tug to pull one off. Try them.”

  We did. I used my tongue to bring her right nipple erect, then helped her slip the loop over the rigid, wrinkled bud. She pulled the slide ring up until the platinum loop was snug. She tugged experimentally and found that my father had been right: The loop would not easily slip off.

  I helped her put the loop on her left nipple.

  I pulled down on the emerald. Her nipples stretched but did not yield the loops.

  “Oh … Len!”

  “Feel good?”

  “Like you can’t believe. Pull more. And so sexy!”

  I never knew the price, but I guessed that my young wife would be wearing two th
ousand dollars worth of platinum and emerald on her nipples. She took great pride in her clips and wore them often. She showed them to her girlfriends.

  14

  JERRY

  We didn’t discuss our business with our neighbors in Scarsdale. I suppose it was Buddy who discouraged me from identifying myself as the owner of Cheeks. He persisted in sneering that I’d gone into “the ladies’ undergarments business.” He actually made me reluctant to talk about it. It was difficult to live with the self-image of a merchant of women’s underwear.

  Even Giselle didn’t broadcast the definition of our line of business. Our son didn’t really learn what it was until long after his mother was gone—and he was surprised and I think a little distressed at first to know what his father’s business was. He’d thought of me as a tough guy, and selling erotic lingerie contradicted that image.

  Anyway … I remember a cocktail party in Scarsdale. It was the first to which we were invited. Giselle always attracted invitations. Her beauty attracted attention. Her accent charmed. Besides, our country had not yet matured enough to have ceased assuming a Frenchwoman was especially erotic. We all remember President Kennedy saying in Paris, “I am the man who brought Jacqueline Kennedy to France.” Well, at parties in Scarsdale I was usually the man who brought Giselle Cooper.

  She drank well, she ate well, she talked well. She didn’t smoke. She was elegant in simple black dresses and single strands of pearls. She was admired.

  “And what business is your husband in?” a woman asked her that evening of our first Scarsdale cocktail party.

  It was a small-town question. People in the city were less likely to ask what you did for a living or what was your religion. Scarsdale was a Jewish town, and maybe that had something to do with it. People there had a sense of community and imagined they had a right to know just who their neighbors were and what they did. Around their swimming pools, everybody knew all about everybody—or thought they did.

  “My husband is in a business we don’t very much talk about,” Giselle said.

  The woman who had asked her was shocked and offended. She was offended because she took herself as having just been emphatically put down. She was shocked because to her Giselle’s answer meant that I was in a criminal business. Visions of Mafia danced in her head—visions of guns and blood.

  Giselle understood instantly. “He is in a completely lawful business,” she said. “But it is one involving confidentiality. I am sorry.”

  That exchange gave us cachet in Scarsdale. In a community of suits—stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, and a variety of corporate hacks—I was in some mysterious business we would not discuss.

  No one went to any great effort to find out what that business was. Okay, not the Mafia. But a few people actually suspected I worked for the CIA. Or something like it.

  Oddly, though Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky were in our house from time to time, as was once or twice Jimmy Hoffa, no one ever seemed to recognize them. We were damn lucky about that.

  Today I am proud of the business Giselle and I built. Why I wasn’t proud from the beginning, I don’t know. It is something from our past, that is from the culture of our past. When I was growing up in America, a photographer was prosecuted for pornography after he showed photographs that displayed a model’s underarm hair. When the first bikinis appeared on public beaches, girls were arrested. In television studios, silk handkerchiefs or silk flowers were fastened to the necklines of dresses, lest the audience should see on those black-and-white sets the shadow in the cleft between a woman’s breasts. Faye Emerson was condemned for refusing to tolerate this and so showing a modest little suggestion of cleavage. Audiences ogled—supposedly—a blonde called Dagmar because her breasts were big. Operators of carnivals attracted crowds by arranging for jets of air to blow up women’s skirts, and in many towns the law closed shows down for that—this, of course, before Marilyn Monroe laughed before the cameras while air from a grating blew up her skirt and showed her panties.

  I could go on. We were an uptight society. By the time we opened the first Cheeks store the country was well on its way out of that, but remnants of old attitudes hung on—and, though diminishing, would hold on—and sometimes cause us worry.

  I’ve said before that launching Cheeks wasn’t easy. Worry about anal-retentives was the least of our problems.

  Acquiring merchandise to stock the stores was a far bigger problem. For the most part, the kind of stuff we wanted just wasn’t manufactured in America. Not in any quantity. Not so that you could place an order and expect delivery.

  For the first year or so, almost everything we sold came from France. The merchandise came in through Idlewild Airport, as it was then named. That is to say, 90 percent or so of what we bought in France arrived at our stores in Manhattan. Some 10 percent was pilfered at the airport. Not just ours. Everybody’s.

  If you didn’t like the cost of air freight, you could use ocean freight—and pay the cost in pilferage off the Jersey docks.

  For decades, maybe for a century, the longshoremen had lifted what they regarded as their share of every shipment they handled. They took a relatively modest percentage and heard few complaints. When freight shifted to the airports, the freight handlers there mimicked the old dock custom.

  It was a “tax” for doing business in New York, just as protection was another tax, and every business understood it. You paid more for having your trash hauled than a business in, say, Scarsdale paid—and in Scarsdale you paid more than someone in, say, Springfield, Illinois.

  If you wanted to do a little remodeling or have part of your store repainted, the contractors ripped you off for inflated labor costs, plus a little extra profit on the side for the contractor himself.

  How many times did I hear something like this?—“That’ll come to twenty thou, even. ’Course, if you could give me fifteen by check and, say, three in cash, the eighteen thou will cover it.” That meant he was going to pay income tax on fifteen. It also meant that I was going to pay eighteen and be able to claim only fifteen as a business expense. Another tax on doing business in New York.

  All you could do was raise your prices to cover this element of the cost of doing business.

  But my losses on air freight rose and got out of hand.

  I talked with Buddy. I always talked with Buddy. Since the day not long after my parents’ death when he had mysteriously appeared and made himself my friend and mentor in street smarts, I had always talked with Buddy.

  “Your problem is like this,” he said. “Stock of your merchandise shows up in a shop in, say, Philly, how’s anybody, including the cops, going to lay an identification on that an’ say, ‘Hey, these here scanties belong t’Cooper!’ Y’follow me?”

  “I follow you,” I said bitterly.

  “’Nother thing. You ain’ got no affiliation. I’d like to affiliate with you, but affiliation with me is gonna bust no balls at Idlewild or on the Jersey docks. You got two ways of doin’ business, Jerry. One is straight, an’ you gonna get ripped off good. The other is affiliation.”

  I knew what he meant. All I wanted from Buddy was confirmation of what I already understood.

  I had two options, just like he said. I could work straight and take my lumps, be ripped off by every two-bit racketeer that preyed on business in the city, or I could—as Buddy put it—affiliate.

  Well, what the hell? Tens of thousands of businesses survived without affiliating. Some, actually, were pressured into affiliating. Most were not. They paid their tribute and raised their prices and made a profit.

  But I was just hard-nosed enough to prefer having muscle to being muscled. I have never been content to be a victim. It had taken me time to settle with Uncle Harry, but I had, eventually—and found great satisfaction in it.

  * * *

  I called Frank Costello, naturally. We met again in the Norse Room, in the Waldorf. I was not entirely surprised to find Meyer Lansky with him.

  “A neat little business,”
Lansky said quietly, with that sly small smile that characterized him. “A lot of potential.”

  “If I’m not nickeled-and-dimed to death,” I said.

  “That can happen,” said Costello.

  Understand that I’m sitting here with two statesmen of Cosa Nostra. Albert Anastasia, whom I had met once, was called the Executioner, for good reason. I’d met Crazy Joey Gallo and Tony Pro Provenzano. When you’re a hustler around New York, you do meet these characters. But Frank Costello, so far as I know, never killed anyone and never arranged a hit—and neither did Meyer Lansky. These two men were peacemakers, conciliators. They understood there was more money in the insidious invasion of businesses than there had ever been in violence, particularly in gang wars.

  On the other hand, they represented muscle. It was not wise to get crosswise with men like them. They might not kill you, but they could break you, for damn sure.

  “You’re looking for a partner,” Lansky suggested. “That’s how I figure.”

  “You think so? Well … I suppose I am. I don’t want a partner, but I suppose I should have one.”

  Lansky stubbed out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray on the lunch table. “It damages a man’s pride to have to take a partner he doesn’t want,” he said in a soft, sympathetic voice. “But pride is not all that important, Jerry. I’ve been arrested, handcuffed, made to stand in a lineup.” He shrugged. “None of that hurt me. I did a few months in jail, once. It didn’t hurt me. A man who puts too much emphasis on his pride is looking for a sure fall.”