Later

6

When Mom realized how bad things were, I heard her talking to Anne Staley, her editor friend, about Uncle Harry on the phone. Mom said, “He was soft even before he went soft. I realize that now.”

At six I wouldn’t have had a clue. But by then I was eight going on nine, and I understood, at least partly. She was talking about the mess her brother had gotten himself—and her—into even before the early-onset Alzheimer’s carried off his brains like a thief in the night.

I agreed with her, of course; she was my mother, and it was us against the world, a team of two. I hated Uncle Harry for the jam we were in. It wasn’t until later, when I was twelve or maybe even fourteen, that I realized my mother was also partly to blame. She might have been able to get out while there was still time, probably could have, but she didn’t. Like Uncle Harry, who founded the Conklin Literary Agency, she knew a lot about books but not enough about money.

She even got two warnings. One was from her friend Liz Dutton. Liz was an NYPD detective, and a great fan of Regis Thomas’s Roanoke series. Mom met her at a launch party for one of those books, and they clicked. Which turned out to be not so good. I’ll get to it, but for now I’ll just say that Liz told my mother that the Mackenzie Fund was too good to be true. This might have been around the time Mrs. Burkett died, I’m not sure about that, but I know it was before the fall of 2008, when the economy went belly-up. Including our part of it.

Uncle Harry used to play racquetball at some fancy club near Pier 90, where the big boats dock. One of the friends he played with was a Broadway producer who told him about the Mackenzie Fund. The friend called it a license to coin money, and Uncle Harry took him seriously about that. Why wouldn’t he? The friend had produced like a bazillion musicals that ran on Broadway for a bazillion years, plus also all over the country, and the royalties just poured in. (I knew exactly what royalties were—I was a literary agent’s kid.)

Uncle Harry checked it out, talked to some big bug who worked for the Fund (although not to James Mackenzie himself, because Uncle Harry was just a small bug in the great scheme of things), and put in a bunch of money. The returns were so good that he put in more. And more. When he got the Alzheimer’s—and he went downhill really fast—my mother took over all the accounts, and she not only stuck with the Mackenzie Fund, she put even more money into it.

Monty Grisham, the lawyer who helped with contracts back then, not only told her not to put in more, he told her to get out while the getting was good. That was the other warning she got, and not long after she took over the Conklin Agency. He also said that if a thing looked too good to be true, it probably was.

I’m telling you everything I found out in little driblets and drablets—like that overheard conversation between Mom and her editor pal. I’m sure you get that, and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the Mackenzie Fund was actually a big fat Ponzi scheme. The way it worked was Mackenzie and his merry band of thieves took in mega-millions and paid back big percentage returns while skimming off most of the investment dough. They kept it going by roping in new investors, telling each one how special he or she was because only a select few were allowed into the Fund. The select few, it turned out, were thousands, everyone from Broadway producers to wealthy widows who stopped being wealthy almost overnight.

A scheme like that depends on investors being happy with their returns and not only leaving their initial investments in the Fund but putting in more. It worked okay for awhile, but when the economy crashed in 2008, almost everybody in the Fund asked for their money back and the money wasn’t there. Mackenzie was a piker compared to Madoff, the king of Ponzi schemes, but he gave old Bern a run for his money; after taking in over twenty billion dollars, all he had in the Mackenzie accounts was a measly fifteen million. He went to jail, which was satisfying, but as Mom sometimes said, “Grits ain’t groceries and revenge don’t pay the bills.”

“We’re okay, we’re okay,” she told me when Mackenzie started showing up on all the news channels and in the Times. “Don’t worry, Jamie.” But the circles under her eyes said that she was plenty worried, and she had plenty of reasons to be.

Here’s more of what I found out later: Mom only had about two hundred grand in assets she could put her hands on, and that included the insurance policies on her and me. What she had on the liability side of the ledger, you don’t want to know. Just remember our apartment was on Park Avenue, the agency office was on Madison Avenue, and the extended care home where Uncle Harry was living (“If you can call that living,” I can hear my mother adding) was in Pound Ridge, which is about as expensive as it sounds.

Closing the office on Madison was Mom’s first move. After that she worked out of the Palace on Park, at least for awhile. She paid some rent in advance by cashing in those insurance policies I mentioned, including her brother’s, but that would only last eight or ten months. She rented Uncle Harry’s place in Speonk. She sold the Range Rover (“We don’t really need a car in the city anyway, Jamie,” she said) and a bunch of first edition books, including a signed Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel. She cried over that one and said she didn’t get half of what it was worth, because the rare book market was also in the toilet, thanks to a bunch of sellers as desperate for cash as she was. Our Andrew Wyeth painting went, too. And every day she cursed James Mackenzie for the thieving, money-grubbing, motherfucking, cock-sucking, bleeding hemorrhoid on legs that he was. Sometimes she also cursed Uncle Harry, saying he’d be living behind a garbage dumpster by the end of the year and it would serve him right. And, to be fair, later on she cursed herself for not listening to Liz and Monty.

“I feel like the grasshopper who played all summer instead of working,” she said to me one night. January or February of 2009, I think. By then Liz was staying over sometimes, but not that night. That might have been the first time I noticed there were threads of gray in my mom’s pretty red hair. Or maybe I remember because she started to cry and it was my turn to comfort her, even though I was just a little kid and didn’t really know how to do it.

That summer we moved out of the Palace on Park and into a much smaller place on Tenth Avenue. “Not a dump,” Mom said, “and the price is right.” Also: “I’ll be damned if I’ll move out of the city. That would be waving the white flag. I’d start losing clients.”

The agency moved with us, of course. The office was in what I suppose would have been my bedroom if things hadn’t been so fucking dire. My room was an alcove adjacent to the kitchen. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but at least it smelled good. I think it used to be the pantry.

She moved Uncle Harry to a facility in Bayonne. The less said about that place the better. The only good thing about it, I suppose, was that poor old Uncle Harry didn’t know where he was, anyway; he would have pissed his pants just as much if he’d been in the Beverly Hilton.

Other things I remember about 2009 and 2010: My mother stopped getting her hair done. She stopped lunching with friends and only lunched with clients of the agency if she really had to (because she was the one who always got stuck with the check). She didn’t buy many new clothes, and the ones she did buy were from discount stores. And she started drinking more wine. A lot more. There were nights when she and her friend Liz—the Regis Thomas fan and detective I told you about—would get pretty soused together. The next day Mom would be red-eyed and snappy, puttering around in her office in her pajamas. Sometimes she’d sing, “Crappy days are here again, the skies are fucking drear again.” On those days it was a relief to go to school. A public school, of course; my private school days were over, thanks to James Mackenzie.

There were a few rays of light in all that gloom. The rare book market might have been in the shithouse, but people were reading regular books again—novels to escape and self-help books because, let’s face it, in 2009 and ’10, a lot of people needed to help themselves. Mom was always a big mystery reader, and she had been building up that part of the Conklin stable ever since taking over for Uncle Harry. She had ten or maybe even a dozen mystery authors. They weren’t big-ticket guys and gals, but their fifteen percent brought in enough to pay the rent and keep the lights on in our new place.

Plus, there was Jane Reynolds, a librarian from North Carolina. Her novel, a mystery titled Dead Red, came in over the transom, and Mom just raved about it. There was an auction for who would get to publish it. All the big companies took part, and the rights ended up selling for two million dollars. Three hundred thousand of those scoots were ours, and my mother began to smile again.

“It will be a long time before we get back to Park Avenue,” she said, “and we’ve got a lot of climbing to do before we get out of the hole Uncle Harry dug for us, but we just might make it.”

“I don’t want to go back to Park Avenue anyway,” I said. “I like it here.”

She smiled and hugged me. “You’re my little love.” She held me at arms’ length and studied me. “Not so little anymore, either. Do you know what I’m hoping, kiddo?”

I shook my head.

“That Jane Reynolds turns out to be a book-a-year babe. And that the movie of Dead Red gets made. Even if neither of those things happen, there’s good old Regis Thomas and his Roanoke Saga. He’s the jewel in our crown.”

Only Dead Red turned out to be like a final flash of sunlight before a big storm moves in. The movie never got made, and the publishers who bid on the book got it wrong, as they sometimes do. The book flopped, which didn’t hurt us financially—the money was paid—but other stuff happened and that three hundred grand vanished like dust in the wind.

First, Mom’s wisdom teeth went to hell and got infected. She had to have them all pulled. That was bad. Then Uncle Harry, troublesome Uncle Harry, still not fifty years old, tripped in the Bayonne care facility and fractured his skull. That was a lot worse.

Mom talked to the lawyer who helped her with book contracts (and took a healthy bite of our agency fee for his trouble). He recommended another lawyer who specialized in liability and negligence suits. That lawyer said we had a good case, and maybe we did, but before the case got anywhere near a courtroom, the Bayonne facility declared bankruptcy. The only one who made money out of that was the fancy slip-and-fall lawyer, who banked just shy of forty thousand dollars.

“Those billable hours are a bitch,” Mom said one night when she and Liz Dutton were well into their second bottle of wine. Liz laughed because it wasn’t her forty thousand. Mom laughed because she was squiffed. I was the only one who didn’t see the humor in it, because it wasn’t just the lawyer’s bills. We were on the hook for Uncle Harry’s medical bills as well.

Worst of all, the IRS came after Mom for back taxes Uncle Harry owed. He had been putting off that other uncle—Sam—so he could dump more money into the Mackenzie Fund. Which left Regis Thomas.

The jewel in our crown.