MAMAN
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
In August of 1992 my father wrote this letter from the infirmary on the island in the Bronx East River known as Rikers Island, where New York City’s largest jail is situated.
Dear Tony and Alice,
I hope this letter finds you both well. It has been a very hot summer and I was disappointed in not getting down to see you. How is the summer going? I had heard from Tilly and Walter Jones at Christmas last year and we had looked forward to all getting together. When I was last down there with you both at Granaway Gate I enjoyed the view you have from the dock there almost more than anywhere along the Harbour Road in Warwick Parish. Have you been out on The Little Mermaid yet many times? She is a beautiful yacht. Bermuda is full of tourists now I know, falling off their mopeds everywhere, but we never worried about anything at Spithead, and as the summer is coming to an end so maybe I will plan to spend Thanksgiving there this year. I had heard from the Faiellas at Waterlot, and from the Outerbridges, and the Powells as well as some other Bermudians that Christmas.
I was hoping to see you well before now, but I am waiting for my trial to begin in September, and I will be out after that as soon as it is over depending on how long the trial takes. They say I killed my girlfriend, but I don’t remember because I was drunk.
I will leave you with this as it is time for lunch.
My love to you both,
Chester
*
Chester March Goldman and stepsons Toby and Angus Beavers at Spithead, Bermuda
In 1992 my father was arrested and charged with homicide. I learned of the arrest from Erwin, the manager of the bar and restaurant at The Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, a favorite haunt of my father’s and Michael Caine’s alike for decades, along with many entertainment industry contenders, and he ate many of his meals there, if they can be called meals because mainly Erwin would insist and bring him a sandwich that was never added to the bill after the third scotch and soda. Toward the end of my stay with him in New York, he would sometimes fall in the street walking the two blocks home on his own and had to be taken to the drunk tank at Bellevue Hospital. By the time I arrived to collect him he would be cracking jokes all the way to the cab as if nothing had happened.
Erwin said he had not believed the news at first, it was the boys behind the bar who showed the paper to him There it was, he said with sad eyes and a kind voice, in The New York Post, and it was the same address he gave me only a day or two before, that I was to give you when you came in again. See, it says there. He handed me the page and I read the following:
Police from Midtown North Precinct were called to the scene of a homicide at 155 West 55th Street, the building adjacent to The Warwick Hotel, at 6:00 am on the morning of January 29th. There they arrested Chester M. Goldman, age 59, a New York City real estate developer for commission of the crime against Meredith Coulter, age 57, his partner. He was taken into custody and transported downtown to jail at The Tombs where he will remain until his arraignment tomorrow morning on the charge of second-degree murder. No witnesses have come forward and residents in the building had no knowledge of the escalated disagreement that led to her death. If you have any information related to this crime, please call Detective Ware at The Midtown North Precinct 212 555 1212.
~ Why do they say second degree murder? I asked Erwin after around twenty minutes. I had been staring wordless off into space while Erwin stood there waiting patiently all the while.
~ Because first-degree murder is reserved for crimes against police officers.
~Oh. That makes sense, I guess.
*
Two nights before I had stopped by The Regency Bar after attending a music business meeting with musicians and producers in the hotel with my manager from Sony, and I popped in to say hello to Erwin. He was about the same age as my father, and he ran the bar of the hotel that was an upper east side fixture and watering hole for wealth and celebrity. When my father had a few drinks, he would start chatting with Erwin, asking him if he knew this and that Maître D’ and if he remembered this and that restaurant and bar in the city, and when did he think the St Regis would ever open again.
Erwin handed me a card with a handwritten address on it though the handwriting was unrecognizable.
~There’s no phone?
~ He said he didn’t have one yet. He wants you to go by.
~How was he?
~He is very anxious to see you.
*
~ You will go over there over my dead body, the manager from Sony said when I told him on the way uptown in the car.
~I have no intention of going, I told him, and I had none.
Two years before this conversation took place in the Regency Bar when I learned of my father’s plight, and after which Erwin insisted on bringing me a pot of tea, a cognac, cookies from the kitchen, and pressing me to have the chef makes me an omelet, which I declined, as well as Erwin’s offers to get them to whip me up something in the kitchen, I had signed my record contract and had gone to live elsewhere in the city, at that time in The Metropolitan Tower on 57th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and the only contact with my father after the initial shock at my leaving the house in the care of the housekeeper, was to visit him at the townhouse on 63rd street to bring him money.
These visits were very strained. He looked wan and unwell. He coughed excessively, and even in his Savile Row suit, flawless Charvet shirt and tie along with the diamond cufflinks from H Stern in Brazil, even with a close shave and a hint of expensive cologne, you could see the signs of decline in his health and in his mental capacity. His hands shook even while he drank, he shuffled instead of walking properly, and I saw him early in the day while he drank as usual starting from 10 in the morning, so if you talked to him before midday, he was reasonably sober. He disapproved of everything I was doing, telling me how unsuitable the music industry was, all the while pocketing the hefty check in its envelope, and scanning the other envelope of cash deftly counting the C notes.
~You’re a smart girl, he said of my news of a recording contract and a portion of the signing bonus going right into his hands and bank account. The account would bear my name and he could write the checks, to protect the money from being seized during the federal indictment process he was facing. I gave him the leather-bound checkbook with the checks already signed by me. He would be able to hire a companion now, and Odila the sweet charming older Dominican housekeeper who came in every morning at six before starting her shift at the Lowell Hotel next door every afternoon would now resume proper receipt of her paychecks.
~Why do you mess around with this artist business?
I had stopped asking what business he did approve of my messing about in. I would get up and kiss him on the forehead and walk out until the next time.
*
When these visits were no longer tolerated by my manager as they took a toll on me, the Sony executive took to having the cash delivered by messenger as it concerned my career. Then there came a time when my father having moved to The Carlton House was five months behind on his rent, and I heard his belongings including the portrait of my grandmother Lillian Levy Goldman that had hung over the fireplace at Eagle Ranch and at Julian Goldman’s apartment on Park Avenue was sitting out on the street while he was evicted. I knew that my uncle the screenwriter Bo Goldman and my aunt Mab Ashforth were engaged in helping my father, and I retreated further until I lost contact completely with my father amidst swirling rumors in New York society of my withdrawal from view~ that I lived a fast life, that if I wasn’t dead already, I was bound to die young, and leave a very pretty corpse.
I began writing this on Father’s Day and it just wasn’t possible to sit with the very few photographs and the interminable memories. My father was a former Classics scholar at Amherst which is where the drinking began according to Maman, and it only exploded in Bermuda she reflected. He loved to examine my classical knowledge at dinner parties in front of guests to amuse himself, and he enjoyed remarking that he was born on the Ides of March. The irony of his departing the world from the prison medical facility at Rome New York in August of 1995 just three months into an eight-year sentence at the age of 63, would not have escaped him at the time. He had contracted tuberculosis while awaiting trial for 18 months on Rikers Island.
I will write more on this in future, and more happens~ for now in the words of King Lear’s Cordelia~ I am sure, my love’s More ponderous than my tongue.
Here is what the former director of The Met, Tom Hoving, wrote about my father and his brother Bo in his memoir:
For several summers three New York City brothers, the Goldmans, Chet, Doug and Bo, would show up and stay either on a beach or, clandestinely, in houses of friends. Bo, my contemporary, was my favorite because of his ability to mimic anyone. I must have been a bit jealous of him because when he was around, he outshone my attempts at wise-guy humor. He was a heavy-set, round-faced Pixie who could run like hell and pedal a bike faster than the rest of us. I'm convinced he had an I.Q. in the genius level. At Princeton Bo excelled in the Triangle Club for which he wrote the book and music for the smash hit of the graduating year. After Princeton he would write Broadway musicals and would be awarded two Academy awards for writing the movies One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Melvin and Howard. I adored him although he married one of my girlfriends, Mab Ashforth.
*
On the court documents pertaining to his appeal, he is marked Indigent. His remains were cremated, and the ashes were placed next to his parents in upstate New York where there is a beautiful stone dedicated by my cousins Mia Goldman and Paul Cooke, which brought me comfort in knowing it was not all as I imagined~ his ashes had not been tossed to the winds off the coast of New York City’s Ward Island, where the prisoners are put to work to lay their fellow men who die in prison to rest in this potter’s grave, wrapped only in black trash bags, and the menacing birds circle above them, swirling and swooping about in an indifferent halcyon blue sky.