Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky

I later learned from my girlfriends, this was happening about three years early. Of course no one had ever told me about the facts of life, the birds and the bees. Talking about sex at our house would have been like talking about crime. Both were unmentionable. There was no warning for me. I was a little horse-riding tomboy. I didn’t have breasts; I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a clue. I thought I was bleeding to death, so I showed Mommy, thinking she would take me to the hospital. Instead, she flashed the biggest smile I had ever seen, and gave me a huge hug and kiss, as if I had won a riding competition, or gotten a great report card.
    She soon told Daddy, who gave me a pat on the backside, I’m sure to feel the sanitary napkin Mommy had gotten for me. That was almost as embarrassing as seeing him naked. But he, too—dead serious Meyer Lansky—lit up with a huge smile. Still, nobody told me what it meant, other than “it’s part of growing up.” Mommy told me it hadn’t happened to her until she was sixteen. I guess that was supposed to mean I was a precocious, gifted child, or something like that. Instead, I just felt weird and confused. So I had to turn to Terry and Eileen, who clued me in. I never told them about the penis-sighting episode, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that accidental encounter with Daddy’s great white whale was so traumatic that it accelerated my adolescence.
    Finally, the third remarkable thing of the 1946–1947 period was Daddy’s sudden disappearance from the Beresford, like a thief in the night. In one day, we went from happy family to nonfamily, just as suddenly as seeing my naked father or getting my period, out of nowhere. As it turned out, my parents has been planning the divorce for a long time—a year or so—but in the most cordial way, they kept it from me and my brothers. Like everything else Daddy did, the divorcewas a deal, a negotiation. Just business. Yet for me, it wasn’t business as usual, and it shook my ordered little world.
    The divorce business had its origins on the long-distance telephone line to Beverly Hills. Even though Mommy and Aunt Esther Siegel were separated by a whole continent, they seemed to lead copycat lives. They were like the Bobbsey Twins of the aristocracy of what would soon be referred to as “organized crime.” Mommy and Esther both lived in splendor and raised their children like pampered little lords and ladies. On the other hand, they were equally miserable in exactly the same way, singing the same blues over their absentee husbands.
    If Mommy went away for a “rest,” as Daddy had called it, you could be sure Esther had gone to at an equally posh sanitarium, Esther’s Malibu to Mommy’s Riverdale. And if Mommy had electroshock therapy, which Buddy claimed she had, you could bet that Esther had it, too. Although electroshock sounds like some kind of terrible treatment, in those days it was cutting edge—technology, not torture. Daddy never complained about Mommy’s huge bills at Wilma’s and Saks, but I did hear him complaining about her huge long-distance bills. She was on the phone to California day and night with Aunt Esther, bemoaning their mutual mistreatment by their husbands. The American gambling empire that Daddy and Uncle Benny were creating in the mid-1940s was probably the world’s most jealous mistress.
    Uncle Benny, who was always considered one of the world’s great ladies’ men, had also acquired a flesh-and-blood mistress who was giving him even more aggravation than the new wagering mecca of Las Vegas that he and Daddy were laboring to turn into a desert version of Monte Carlo. The challenge was just as absurd as it sounds, trying to turn sand into gold. They pulled it off, although at a horrible cost to both of them; Daddy, his family, Benny, his life.
    One thing Daddy did not seem to have was a weakness for women. In all our nights out on the town, whether in New York orNew Jersey or Florida,