The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress

Chapter Thirty-Three





QUEENS, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1931



MARIA read the letter first. She found it on the bed in her parents’ spare room, along with a copy of the Daily News from the day before. Vivian Gordon’s picture was on the front page next to the headline NOTORIOUS MADAM FOUND STRANGLED IN VAN CORTLANDT PARK! She’d been murdered two days earlier, on the eve of what would have been her testimony before the Seabury Commission. Her frozen, garroted body was found by a truck driver walking along Mosholu Avenue and was identified later at the city morgue. The article was clear in its implications, and Maria couldn’t have missed it even if Ritzi hadn’t gone to the trouble of underlining it for her: “Miss Gordon was the center of the seething fires of graft, bribery, shakedowns, and judicial corruption.”

But none of that mattered to Maria. She lay, curled up on the bed in a fetal position, grappling with the reality that Ritzi was gone, and the baby with her. She had felt it moving in Ritzi’s belly on her last visit. It was the first time she’d had the courage to ask, and she’d sat there for ten minutes, marveling at the tiny elbows and knees so active beneath her hands. Maria had considered names on the train ride back to the apartment—some charming combination of American and Castilian. She still did not know how to tell Jude that Ritzi was alive and that the child would be theirs. There was time, or so she thought. But now the fantasy came crashing down.

Ritzi hadn’t signed her name, had simply explained that with Vivian dead, she had to leave. That she was afraid. That she couldn’t risk endangering Maria or anyone else. And that if she remained, it was only a matter of time before Owney found her. Then Ritzi had scratched two words into the paper that ended Maria’s only hope of ever becoming a mother. I’m sorry.