Albert poured himself a glass of port before going to bed. Recently he had begun reading the teachings of the Dalai Lama, which he had first encountered in his postdrug phase at Amherst. He pushed the Dalai Lama aside and wrote a $20,000 check in order to buy a $10,000 table at the New York City Ballet Nutcracker plus make another $10,000 donation. Judy told him to be sure to enclose a note that he was doing it to honor his new friend Mrs. Joseph Rose and her talented daughter. Judy had taught Albert that in this way his money could work in his favor. Looking back, he wished he had known this as a child. It could have saved him a great deal of pain and psychoanalysis.

·CHAPTER FOUR·

Abraham

Abraham Weissman had a system. Five years ago he began writing down his daughter Frankie’s name in his vest pocket diary every time he’d see her. He wrote down all the names he was most frightened of forgetting.

Frankie took her father to a museum—The Frick, the Whitney, the Metropolitan—almost weekly. She looked forward to being alone with him but her stepmother for the past twenty years, Helen, wouldn’t let him out of her sight. Abraham Weissman was eighty-two years old and Helen Ginsburg was still convinced that a Birkin babe in leather pants with plenty of Botox would snatch him away.

“Is that Gypsy Rose Lee?” Abraham asked Frankie as they walked past a statue of Venus in the Frick garden.

“No, Dad.” Frankie took her father’s arm. “But it could be. Want to see the girl with the bow? C’mon, you like that one. She’s very intelligent.”

When Frankie was a child it took a while for her to understand that when her father said a girl was “intelligent” it did not mean she scored double 800s on her SATs. This first dawned on her when they were in the Versailles Room at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel and her father pronounced that the Lido showgirls who opened for the Supremes were “Einsteins.”

Frankie began walking slowly with her father toward the Diana by Houdon. Even in his seventies her father had been a spry dancer. Now he walked carefully as if to be certain he was still doing it correctly.

“You go ahead. I’ll just rest.” Abraham stopped at a bench.

“Don’t let him sit down.” Helen rushed over from Bellini’s St. Francis of Assisi, her bouffant red hair bouncing as she moved. She still had a slight trace of an accent from her childhood in Argentina over half a century ago. “He sits and he sits and he sits. That’s all he does all day! He’ll turn into an old man if you let him sit.”

“Yes, dear.” Abraham beamed at her. After twenty years of marriage he had an almost Pavlovian response to her.

“How about some lunch? I’m really hungry,” Frankie deliberately suggested. She never wanted to eat when she saw him but she always pretended she did. Eating out was one way to allow Abraham to rest without watching television. Over the summer he had begun talking back to the television and accusing suspects on Law & Order of breaking into his apartment and taking his things. On September 11 Abraham was very concerned that Tom Brokaw knew he was all right. “I’m here! I’m here!” He had knocked on the television. “Tell them Abraham Weissman is here!”