Despite their father, Reuben Schiff, owning a prestigious brokerage house, both brothers were in the importing business. Which we all knew was code for their real occupation. The brothers were bootleggers, defying Prohibition to supply New York and New Jersey with the best wine and liquor they could bring in through Canada. They’d started out working together, but after a personal rift involving Ari’s first wife, they split up the business.
Ari was in charge of the importing, Monty the distribution. They had separate offices and intermediaries and as little as possible to do with each other. Monty also owned one of the most popular nightclubs in Manhattan, which gilded his wealth and reputation. And he was, at that moment, also making his way over to where I sat. Monty and Ari crossed the floor from opposite directions, both alerted by Clara’s too-loud protestations.
Ari reached her first. Before he could even see the drawing, she burst out with “It’s only a parlor trick, Ari. It’s all Delphine’s fantasy.”
I wanted to tell her to shut up. That her nervous reaction was the very worst way to handle the situation. That with every single excuse she blurted out, she was hurting her case. But it was too late.
Ari pushed her aside to inspect my drawing of his naked wife, who, even as a cat, had Clara’s face. Her lovely bow lips were pursed, her wide eyes half-closed, her high level of animation subdued into an expression of lust about to be satiated. Leaning backward, her legs spread, she awaited the encounter.
Her paramour’s expression was every bit as telling. The bold look in his eyes, the way his lips parted, how his right hand reached for her breast, and, of course, his erection all made any other interpretation of the scenario impossible.
I had captured the lovers in the throes of an anticipated passionate and completely adulterous embrace.
“My brother?” Ari turned away from my drawing and to his wife. “What am I looking at, Clara?”
“It’s Delphine’s twisted mind. Not one iota of the truth. It’s her imagination. Her portraits are always weird and strange. Tell him, Delphine,” she pleaded.
Ari didn’t give me a chance. “Don’t lie to me, Clara. Everyone knows exactly what these drawings are. And even if she is a charlatan, she didn’t come up with this scenario on her own out of thin air.”
“Maybe she did. You did, didn’t you?” Clara turned back to me, desperation in her voice. All signs of inebriation gone, chased by the panic that surged through her.
“Yes, yes, I did. I made it up,” I said. I would have agreed to anything to defuse the situation, because I could see the danger in a colored haze of orange around Ari’s form.
Monty reached our sorry group. He stood on Clara’s other side. Taller and darker than Ari, with a wicked smile he wasn’t wearing just then, he was the more charming and popular of the brothers. Both were invited to all the best parties, but it was Monty the women flirted with and invited into their beds. It was Monty the men invited to play golf and to whom they offered cigars.
“What is all this fuss?” Monty asked. “Certainly, there can’t be anything that—”
He walked around so he could see the drawing. After he took it in, he looked to me, to Clara, and finally to his brother.
“You are not going to take some silly drawing seriously, are you?” Monty asked.
“So you are going to claim this is just the artist’s wild fantasy, too?” Ari responded.
“Calm down, Ari,” Monty said, in a soothing voice that belied his concern. As he spoke, I noticed he’d positioned himself between Ari and Clara, protecting her from her husband’s rage.
“Calm down? While I stand by and watch my brother try to destroy my life? Again?”
The Schiff scandal that had turned the brothers against each other was well known among New York’s social set. After returning home from the war, Ari had married a woman named Mabel Taub. Within six months of the wedding, Monty had seduced his brother’s wife. Ari divorced Mabel, and shortly thereafter Monty married her. A year later, she died in a tragic train accident.
And now the two brothers stood face-to-face. History, if my drawing was to be believed, repeating itself.
Chapter 3
“Delphine didn’t make this up. The two of you are having an affair!” Ari shouted.
“You’re imagining things,” Monty said, also raising his voice.
“Oh, really?” Ari asked in a nasty snarl.
“Both of you have to stop,” Clara cried.
Accusations continued to fly back and forth above the din of partygoers who had no idea what was transpiring in our corner.
From halfway across the room, Tommy looked over in our direction. A friend of Ari’s, he’d recognized his voice and was concerned. I motioned to him, and he broke away from his conversation and pushed through the crowd.
Monty was now trying to soothe his brother. “This isn’t the place to discuss it, Ari. You have to calm down.”
Ignoring his brother, Ari grabbed the drawing off my easel. Pushing past Monty, he shoved the offending illustration under his wife’s face. “Tell me what is going on!”
“It’s nothing, Ari.” Clara’s voice trembled. “It’s Delphine’s fantasy.”
“Tell me the truth!” Ari stepped even closer to her.
“Please, Ari,” she begged, tears filling her eyes.
“Tell me!” He rubbed my drawing across her face in an ugly, violent motion. Graphite smeared her pale peach skin.
Tommy had reached us, and together he and Monty pulled Ari away from his wife.
“That’s enough for now, Ari. You are terrifying Clara,” Monty said, as he fought off his brother’s efforts to keep from being restrained.
“Enough for now? Are you insane? You seduce her and turn her into a whore and then tell me it’s enough?”
With a great surge, Ari pulled free of Tommy’s and his brother’s grip.
The scene that ensued belonged in a horror film, not a Fifth Avenue penthouse filled with millionaires and flappers.
Ari fumbled into his suit pocket and pulled out a gun with a mother-of-pearl handle. Absurdly, it gleamed in the party’s soft lights, for a moment just another jewel among the diamonds, emeralds, and rubies adorning the guests. Then, like a snake, it slithered into the spotlight, threatening an end to the gaiety. A poisonous reminder that evil is never far from laughter.
I sucked in my breath and watched as Tommy sidled up to Ari and tried to cajole him into letting go of the gun. “Now, now, Ari, there’s no need for that.”
“No,” Clara whispered, and then kept whispering that one word over and over. Even to this day, it is always in my mind when I picture the scene. “No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no . . .”
With the gun pointed at him, Monty, almost too calmly, glanced around. He seemed to be measuring the size of the gathering. Assessing the danger of a gun in such a crowded room. Looking back at Clara, he smiled at her. A moment of tenderness passed between them in the midst of the madness.