“This is where he lived,” the driver said. “Here and in Ramat Gan. He lived in a lot of places.”
She stared at his turned face.
“He said the rent would be taken care of. I told him I would take you here and give you the keys. You can do whatever you want after that.”
She sat there looking at it through the window, the narrow walkway up to the glass door beside the post boxes. It was a gray building like a thousand others in Tel Aviv, built on concrete stilts so cars could be parked beneath it. Inside, there was a tiny elevator with a brass gate that you had to pull back by hand before the door would close. There was barely enough room for the two of them. On the third floor, they exited into a dim hallway with a linoleum floor, mezuzahs on the identical doorframes, a smell of cabbage. It was smaller than her own hallway. It looked like a place to die.
Another war broke out — on Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked from the west and the north, in Sinai and the Golan Heights. It meant long weeks of sitting in the TV light, warming soup or just tea, bathing her mother, skeletal and bruised. The city would disappear, the country would disappear, bodies amid the shredded cars and buildings. She wanted to leave, to move to New York, but her mother kept living and so for a long time she forgot about her ambitions and her plans.
The war ended. She read that in Miami, Meyer had been acquitted of all charges: contempt, conspiracy, tax evasion. She felt certain now that it was not because he was innocent but because his life had been lived so invisibly. No one knew who he was, neither had she. Every once in a while she went back to the apartment to see that it was still there, still waiting for her. Three empty rooms with marks on the bare white walls from where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung. Broken slats in the closet door. The water in the kitchen sink would sputter out brown until it ran clear. Such a strange, unwanted gift, as if he were finally telling her something crucial. The future will not be much different from now. Tsilya. Gila. Look at the odds.
3 Only Connect NEW YORK, 2012
A memoir without a self. A memoir about someone other than “me.” An understanding that the story of other people connected to “me” might communicate more than the usual “me,” might show the cultural context of “me,” might even cast doubt on the viability of “me.”
I remember being in Florida to cover a murder case you may have heard about because it involves the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The case had been tied up in court since 2005. When it went to trial, Abramoff was not expected to appear, though he had of course been convicted of other crimes for which he’d served forty-three months in federal prison. He’d appeared at his previous trial in a dark trench coat and fedora, like a gangster from decades ago. In news stories, he was sometimes likened to Meyer Lansky.
When Gila first told me her story in the spring of 2010, I knew almost nothing about Meyer Lansky and wasn’t very interested in him or in the lore surrounding him. It was the women in his life, starting with Gila, that made me interested.
From the New York Times, June of 1995:
Hannah M. Groff, daughter of Lawrence H. Groff, of New York, NY, is to be married today to John V. Haynes, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Donald Haynes, of East Hampton, NY. The civil ceremony will take place at the Hayneses’ home in East Hampton with a reception to follow.
Ms. Groff, 25, is a recent graduate of the journalism school at Columbia University. Mr. Haynes, 28, is a litigation associate at Byrons and Company, a New York law firm.
I remember when I was young, hearing a song called “The Adultress,” about a woman, like Gila, who loses herself in secrets. The singer, Chrissie Hynde, seemed like the kind of woman I might be someday, the kind of woman I thought I wanted to be someday — the song seemed autobiographical. Later, when I became something like that kind of woman, I had long since forgotten the model for the role I was playing, though by then it might have occurred to me that the song was less a boast than an indictment. The song had come out the year I first met Gila, 1981, though I didn’t hear it until much later. I had mostly forgotten Gila by then. I had forgotten how much she’d meant to me when I was young, though some shadow of her must have always been there.
Nathanael West writes: It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh.
Frankie Lymon asks, Why do fools fall in love?
home n. a place of residence or refuge, as in the Promised Land, Tomorrowland, Never Never Land.
I’ll tell you one more story about the women in Meyer Lansky’s life before I tell you about myself. One more story about a woman who loses herself in secrets.
4 Immigrants, Part 1 NEW YORK, 1928–29
I
She touched up her lipstick in the powder room mirror, a girl who’d sewn her own dress from a Butterick pattern, a blue shift she wore with a brooch of fake pearls — Anne Citron, formerly Anna — the name change a hopeful step away from the past, a step toward here, the Park Central Hotel. The beige light settled behind her on a grouping of cane chairs on a pale carpet. Her face in the mirror seemed too long, the curves Semitic. The longer she stood taking in the room’s stillness, the more haughty and derisive it became.
She left the nickel Meyer had given her in the attendant’s basket and went back into the dining room. At her place on the table was a small velvet box. The whole night so far had felt illicit — American, unfamiliar, not Jewish. Now he was giving her a ring, as in the movies.
She looked at him and his eyes changed and she looked back down, trying to smile, imagining the way it ought to appear. He prodded her to open the box. She didn’t know whether to sit or keep standing, so she sat clumsily back in the chair. The ring’s small size surprised her — the smallness made it less dreamlike. It was a round crystal set in what she imagined at first was silver. Only gradually did she understand that it wasn’t silver and it wasn’t a crystal.
He looked at her with his mouth parted, eyes mistrusting. She was worried now in a way that was almost superstitious.
“Is it paste or is it real?” she asked.
“That’s a diamond.”
“Meyer.”
“That’s a real diamond.”
There was something flummoxed about how he adjusted himself in his chair. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.”
He had reached across the table and taken back the box. He snapped it closed with a quiet movement of his index finger, then secreted it away in the lower pocket of his jacket.
“Does it mean what I think it means?” she asked.
“That’s a real diamond. You think about it for a couple days, then you tell me what you think it means.”
On the table between them were stemmed glasses, white dishes, silverware arrayed on the white cloth — whiteness and high spaces full of air. He wished she would sit up straighter, not be so dour and scared. The waiter brought over two cut-glass dishes filled with diced melon and pineapple — fruit cocktails, they were called. It was Prohibition, so there was no wine.