“Of course, when we announced our engagement, the old lady went off the deep end. I was great as hired help, but not marriage material, for goodness’ sake! But Davida wasn’t half as angry as Lilah’s brother. Talk about tantrums! Guy popped his seams, he was so mad.”
“Which brother?”
“King—oh, excuse me, Doctor Kingston Merritt, FACOG, s’il vous plaît.” Goldin leaned back in his seat. “Dr. Pomp and Circumstance. What an overbloated stuffed shirt. Good doc, though. Had more degrees than an isobar map. More than once I heard him talking to patients over the phone. Guy could be soothing when he wanted to be. Too bad he never showed that side to any of his family members.”
“Soothing?” Decker asked.
“Yeah, you know … ‘I’ll be right down, Mrs. So-and-so. You just keep breathing and everything will be just fine.’ Mr. Sincere.” Goldin shrugged. “Maybe his sincerity was genuine. But then he’d hang up the phone and breathe fire on me or his sister or his mother. A real Jekyll and Hyde.”
Decker wrote as he spoke. “What about the other brothers?”
“I never saw too much of John … he kept to himself. John was also a successful doc. Lived in this big house in Palos Verdes. You know, both he and King are OB-GYNs. You don’t have to be Freud to know why they both went into a profession where they could dominate women.”
“Davida?”
“The great Ms. Eversong herself. Woman has tremendous charisma … a real siren. She’d turn on the anger and have me quaking in my boots. And I wasn’t even a blood relative. As I look back, I think, why did I put up with it? My self-esteem wasn’t great, but it wasn’t ground level, either.” He sighed. “It was Lilah. She had such … power.”
Decker raised his brows. “Power?”
“Sexual power but also energy. She’d say these wacky things and I’d believe her because she radiated such force.”
“What kind of wacky things?”
“Predicting the future. That kind of rot.”
“Anything she say ever come true?”
“At the time I was married to her, it seemed like everything she said came true. Then one day when I was really ticked off at her, I did some mathematical computations showing her with numbers that her predictions weren’t any better than the law of averages would dictate. Man, she flew into a rage. After that, I kept my mouth shut about her powers.”
“So it was all nonsense.”
“Why?” Goldin said. “She’s got you believing in her magic? She can be pretty convincing. Don’t be fooled.”
Decker remained impassive but took in Goldin’s words. Time to change the subject.
“What was your impressions of Frederick Brecht?”
“Little Freddy. He was a pathetic kid when I married Lilah. Totally dominated by Davida—and Kingston and Lilah. Poor guy never had a chance.” Goldin paused. “I heard he became a doctor.”
Decker nodded.
“That’s good. Maybe now Davida will stop tormenting him. She was always biased against him because he was adopted—”
“Freddy’s adopted?”
“Is that significant?”
“I’m not sure,” Decker said. But he wrote the word adopted in his notebook.
“The family made no secret of it,” Goldin said. “Davida was in her forties when Lilah was born. I suppose her late husband wanted a son and Davida just couldn’t pull it off again. Hence Freddy.”
He thought a moment.
“Davida wasn’t nice to him, but Davida wasn’t really nice to anyone. She had a real combative relationship with King, who was her biological son. King was the bull seal of the family—Lilah’s surrogate father. He despised me, tried to buy me off. I refused the money, and Lilah and I married, much to everyone’s chagrin.”
“What about John Reed? You said you didn’t see too much of him.”
“John was actually all right. Not that we were ever friendly. But he wasn’t tangled up in Davida’s little web. His words to me were: ‘If you want your marriage to work, get the hell away from Mother.’ I tried, but …”
Decker said, “Davida can be a very formidable person.”
“So you know.” Goldin appraised Decker. “Old lady went for you, didn’t she? You’re her type. You’re Lilah’s type, too. Despite her brief fling with Jewish intellectuals, she really likes the big macho, shoot-em-up Gentiles à la Clint Eastwood, no offense.”
“I’m Jewish,” Decker said.
Without missing a beat, Goldin said, “Okay, so how about you talk for a moment so I can yank my foot out of my mouth.”
Decker smiled.
Goldin paused to take a breath. “You’re not putting me on?”
“No, Perry, I’m not.” Decker flipped a page of his notebook. “Why do you think Lilah picked you to rebel with?”
“I’ve often thought about that. Probably because I was handy—I was around. I was hired by King to teach Davida bridge. I wasn’t intimidated by Davida’s money and I think Lilah liked that. Also, Davida liked my attention and Lilah was acutely aware of that. My ex got a big thrill out of diverting my attention away from Davida. There was fierce competition between the two.”
“Competition and jealousy,” Decker said.
“You’ve got their number. Toward the end, Lilah was convinced I was sleeping with her mother. Nothing I could say or do could convince her otherwise. It was awful.”
“Were there good times?”
Goldin was thoughtful. “In the beginning, it was wonderful. We’d talk a lot about solving the world’s problems. The kind of thing you do when you’re young and idealistic. She seemed so moved, so full of desire to do good. Once we even sailed with Greenpeace into the North Sea waters to prevent the Soviets from whaling. With the wind-chill factor, it was forty below on the seas. We were all freezing our butts off. Lilah loved it—thrived on it.”
“Was that the extent of her altruism?”
“Not at all. We did a lot of other things on a smaller scale. Collected coats and blankets for the homeless, volunteered to serve in the hash lines at the missions. She even taught an arts and crafts class for the elderly at a recreation center. Matter of fact, one of Lilah’s students became one of her best buddies for a while. Turned out the old lady was from Germany and vaguely knew Lilah’s father.”
That got Decker’s attention. “She knew Hermann Brecht?”
“Vaguely. Lilah had a real hang-up about her father. Idolized him even though she never really knew him. We used to watch his movies together. I don’t mind movies that tell life like it is. But his movies … whew! What a thoroughly depressing, debilitating view of life. I’m not the least bit surprised old Hermann committed suicide.”
Decker said, “Do you remember the old woman’s name?”
“Sure. Greta Millstein. Like I said, they were pretty close. Greta was different—offbeat—and I think Lilah liked that. She claimed one of her daughters was a Jewish baby given to her by neighbors right before they were sent off to Dachau. Of course the family perished, so Greta raised the child as her own. Maybe she was snowing me because I was Jewish, but I saw no reason to doubt her.”
“Do