The Matchmaker's Gift(23)
Sara thought perhaps that she and Ida Raskin had more in common than anyone knew. “Mr. Raskin,” she said. “I would be honored to help your daughter.”
“But she says now she will not trust any shadchan. She says she’ll only marry if she finds a love match.”
Sara placed her hand over her heart. “That is the only kind of match I make.”
SIX
ABBY
1994
Abby was still thinking about the Pickle King article when she got out of bed the next morning. She considered bringing it in to show Diane—her boss might get a kick out of it, especially given the vigilance with which she read the New York Times wedding announcements—but by the time Abby’s half-hour bus ride was over, she had decided against it. Diane wouldn’t want to hear any more about Grandma Sara—the woman who had somehow intuited Michelle Nichols’s lie. Better to leave that small humiliation buried in the back of her boss’s mind, especially on the day of their meeting with Diane’s longstanding client, Evelyn Morgan.
As everyone in New York City knew, it was Evelyn Morgan’s second divorce, back in 1979—and the voluminous press surrounding it—that had catapulted Diane from a well-respected divorce attorney to a bona fide legal star. Diane had gotten Evelyn such a favorable settlement that, of course, she’d been rehired for divorce number three. Now, with divorce number four on the horizon, Evelyn had enlisted Diane’s services again. Only a meeting with a client like Evelyn could have kept Diane in the city on the Friday afternoon of the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Abby had no plans—other than a possible dinner with Will—but she knew that were it not for Evelyn’s request, Diane would have left the city that morning to head to her beach house in the Hamptons.
After a quick cup of coffee, Abby pulled Evelyn’s files, which turned out to be more informative than she anticipated. Evelyn was the only daughter of Abraham Morgenstern, owner of Morgenstern’s Resort in the Catskills. Born in 1931, she had two older brothers, both of whom had been partners in the family business. At age twenty-two she married Ronald Berkowitz, in a wedding so lavish and over-the-top that every subsequent Morgenstern’s brochure featured photographs of the twenty-foot Viennese table. Ronnie was given a position in the company, while Evelyn was expected to stay home and make babies. As it turned out, Evelyn had more business savvy than all the men in her family combined. In the mid-1960s, as the golden age of the Catskills faded, she begged them to sell off the resort. But none of them, especially not her philandering husband, would deign to listen to her advice.
In 1965, Evelyn and Ronnie divorced. As part of the settlement, she traded her shares in her family’s hotel for an apartment on Fifth Avenue and East Seventy-First Street. Five years later, when the resort folded, Evelyn’s father admitted his daughter had been right. He helped her secure backing to build the Morgan, a luxury “boutique” hotel in midtown, and from there, she swiftly built an empire. Soon enough, she had hotels in London, Paris, and LA, and married the famed British hotelier, Ethan Woodmont.
Evelyn and Ethan lasted seven years together. Given all their overlapping business interests (jointly owned hotels and plans to build more), the marriage took more than three years to unravel. It was, by all accounts, the most contentious and most complex divorce of the decade, covered in every possible publication, from Vanity Fair to the New York Law Journal.
The next time Evelyn called Diane, it was to negotiate an ironclad prenuptial agreement for her third marriage to Senator Jack Willoughby. The third divorce—thanks to Diane’s foresight—was relatively painless and efficient. It came as no surprise, therefore, when Evelyn hired Diane again to write the prenup for marriage number four.
From everything Abby could discern, Evelyn’s fourth husband was an entirely different sort of man from the previous three. Ronnie, Ethan, and Jack were all comfortable in the public eye. They were tall, they were handsome, they enjoyed attention. The fourth, Michael Gilbert, was a professor of creative writing who had published two little-known volumes of poetry. He had no previous marriages, he was not much to look at, and, other than English majors, almost no one had heard of him. Abby remembered studying one of his early poems for a survey class she’d taken her freshman year of college.
According to the notes Abby found in the file, Michael had not asked for a single change to the terms of the prenup Diane had drafted two years earlier. He had signed the document immediately, over the objections of his attorney. Abby wondered what had attracted a glamorous woman like Evelyn to the balding, obscure poet. The story was that they had met a few years earlier when the Academy of American Poets held their annual dinner at one of Evelyn’s hotels. Evelyn had been passing by the ballroom as Michael was speaking at the podium. After hearing him recite one of his poems, she had asked to meet him.
Evelyn arrived at exactly two o’clock, walking slowly into the conference room in layers of grays and creams—a bias-cut silk skirt and two overlapping silk tank tops, all topped with a deconstructed linen jacket. Evelyn was only eight years Diane’s senior, but on the surface, the two women could not appear more different. Diane’s taste ran to close-fitting knits, structured suits, and the boldest jewelry. Abby had expected Evelyn Morgan to dress similarly. But though Evelyn’s clothes were surely equally expensive, she favored a more minimalist, loose-fitting look. Her shoulder-length hair was simply styled, her makeup neutral and lightly applied.