Dear Pussycat
Eve Marx
Word Count 1105
My father died unexpectedly when I was very young which, obviously, changed my life. Not only was I immediately rendered half an orphan, but my mother lost her mind. My father was 59 at the time of his death; she was widowed at 42. They’d been married seventeen years, the first ten spent living under his mother’s roof. They had to wait for her to die to get their own place, a sprawling four-bedroom apartment on a beach block in Atlantic City, at the time a glamorous vacation destination. My father, an attorney, represented a number of night clubs and music halls and a burlesque theater. He may have had a hand in booking some of the acts as he had a record label and a pile of credits from ASCAP for music and lyrics he’d composed for a long-forgotten crooner. Before I was born, he owned movie theaters. He had a fondness for muscle cars and at the time of his death — on an Easter weekend — was driving a candy apple red Dodge Dart which my mother sold straightaway because she didn’t drive or even possess a license.
I never got to know my father well as he was often on the road. He sent postcards from all over the country addressed to a girl called Pussycat which was the only name he ever called me. When he was home, he and my mother hit the clubs after dark to rub shoulders with his business associates. She had a closet full of cocktail dresses and evening gowns and spent her days in a peignoir with her hair in rollers. In the morning, I would find on my night table a pile of brightly colored paper umbrellas and plastic monkeys my mother collected from the rims of their cocktail glasses. A few days after his death a man I’d never seen before appeared at our door to hand my mother a small, slim briefcase. He didn’t come inside. Instead, he patted my mother on the arm and said “Good luck, Gerri,” and left. Inside the apartment my mother opened the briefcase which was filled with crisp new bills.
It became apparent to me after my father died my mother didn’t have friends. She was older than the other moms and she cursed like a sailor which excluded her from certain social circles, like the trio of shirt waisted mothers who oversaw my Brownie troop. She didn’t play canasta or bridge. She said being widowed was as bad as being a divorcee. “Everyone thinks you’re trying to steal their husband,” she remarked bitterly when she received zero invitations.
She was rescued from her single state six weeks after my father’s death when she began dating his flashy former best friend and legal partner from whom he’d been estranged. He rented an ocean front apartment in a grand Art Deco building and docked his baby cabin cruiser at the AC marina. He took a box at the AC racetrack. The only fly in the ointment was that he was still married.
I was nearly 50 years old when the journalist Nick Pileggi (married to Nora Ephron) published “The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, The Notorious 500 Club and The Rise and Fall of Atlantic City” which caused me to question just who my father was. I’d wondered for decades about that briefcase filled with money and how no one attended his funeral except for my mother’s brother. The only information I’d ever received was that he had suffered a massive heart attack on the Black Horse Pike while driving home from somewhere. I combed Pileggi’s book looking for my father’s name but didn’t find it. What I did recognize were the names of his friends and business associates who I now understood were mobsters.
When my son was 15 and there was a spring school break, I took him to Atlantic City. We stayed in a casino hotel and because he was underage, we had to sneak through the lobby. We spent three days walking the boards and playing mini golf and gorging on all the fabulous food of my youth including Steel’s fudge and James’ salt water taffy and giant meat and cheese stuffed hoagies from the world-famous White House Sub Shop. On our last day I took a chance and guided us to Plaza Place to the home of my best childhood friend. Her parents still lived in the house. They recognized me instantly and invited us in.
We didn’t stay long. It was wonderful to see them. At the time, nothing in the house was changed. My head was spinning but I had questions. The missus left the room so her husband, a retired psychiatrist and physician, could tell me what I needed.
“I don’t think your father was a mobster,” he said. “But those people were his clients.” He told me my father routinely dealt with shady characters from the burlesque club and also his record label. I instantly recalled the miniature French poodle who came with the name Wyatt Erff my father brought home one night after a club date. The dog was the canine half of an act with a scantily clad showgirl who did neat tricks like jumping through hoops and bouncing a ball off its nose. The dog slept all day and came to life only at night when it normally would have been onstage. My mother refused to have anything to do with it and after three days it conveniently (for her) disappeared.
Before my mother’s younger brother died, he called me on the phone. “I’m the last living person who remembers your father,” he bragged. “I'll tell you everything and you’ll get the truth.” He began telling me things I already knew, like how my father was a prodigy who started college at 16 before proceeding to call him a louse, a loser, a one-time talented guy who made one bad decision after another including marrying my mother. I cut him off before he could say anymore. We never did get along.
A few years ago, a friend who dabbles in genealogy offered to do some research. She unearthed some information I didn’t know including my father had a younger sister who died when she was not more than an infant. She told me he was born in Cleveland which was news to me. She suggested I’d have better luck if I tried using an Ancestry kit like 23andMe. Here’s the thing. I don’t want to know. Some things in my life are better left a mystery. My father is one of them.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
