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  THE END OF NORMAL

  A Wife’s Anguish, A Widow’s New Life

  STEPHANIE MADOFF MACK

  with Tamara Jones

  BLUE RIDER PRESS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Mack

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN 9781101559222

  BOOK DESIGN BY CLAIRE NAYLON VACCARO

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  For my children,

  Audrey and Nicholas,

  and in loving memory of my husband,

  Mark D. Madoff

  CONTENTS

  One · The Last Day of Normal

  Two · Big Fish

  Three · Becoming a Madoff

  Four · Optical Illusions

  Five · The Book of Ruth

  Six · Riptide

  Seven · December 2010

  Eight · No More Lies

  Nine · Our Own Good-bye

  Ten · Wish Flowers

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  · one ·

  THE LAST DAY OF NORMAL

  Every night before going to sleep, I put a fresh towel down on my side of the bed, knowing it will be drenched with perspiration by the time I bolt awake, precisely and without fail, at 3:51 in the morning. Usually I’m sobbing already, my body shaking, my heart exploding. I don’t know this person, this scared new self. I wish I could believe even once that she isn’t real, that I’m seeing her through the fog of a bad dream. I was always the one who would nod off three pages into a book, or before the first commercial if Mark and I were watching TV after the kids were down for the night. Mark used to joke about how soundly I could sleep, how utterly peaceful I looked, and how loudly I could snore. Now night terrors have become my normal.

  How cruel that they would begin in a place that once felt so safe and comforting, so alive with our happiness. By day, our apartment on Mercer Street was airy and inviting, a signature SoHo loft with soaring ceilings and a full wall of windows. Mark and I loved the big, open floor plan, and we had eagerly knocked down more walls to make it even more expansive. I never imagined that there would come a time when our beautiful home would close in on me deep in the night, sucking the air from my lungs, waking me in a panic.

  Now it doesn’t matter where I am anymore: The terror will find me. I know I will lie there crying in the predawn hush, my children in their cartoon pajamas sleeping unaware in their bedrooms down the hall. Filled with dread, I follow what has become a horrifying ritual. I wrap my fingers around my throat and tighten my grip gradually, testing. How long do the lungs fight back? I imagine the moment when everything goes black. Is there a rush of pain, of fear, or is it euphoric relief?

  I turn onto my left side to stare at the alarm clock on the nightstand, willing the glowing numbers to fall into place. I need it to be time. I need it to be 4:14. There is a reason why I am awake at this hour, a vigil I have to keep.

  And so I watch the clock, silently counting off the same twenty-three minutes night after night, waiting for my husband to kill himself.

  By the time the first morning light spills through the window, I am able to be the person the world needs me to be again, finishing my cup of tea, getting both kids ready for preschool, checking my e-mail to determine what needs to be done and who can’t be ignored. I follow the Hallmark Hall of Fame script of a lucky stay-at-home mother, ordering cupcake slippers for my daughter online, signing up for a spin class at the gym, making plans to meet an old friend for a glass of wine before dinner. I apologize to the dog as he whimpers in front of the cabinet where his treats are stored. “You’ve already had enough.”

  If you were outside looking in on this tableau, you might think we were any normal family. You might think we were more than content, living a dream life, even. You would be wrong. But we were that, and we had that, once.

  Our last day of normal fell in the winter of 2008. It was December, and we were in Greenwich, Connecticut, where we spent every Tuesday night with Mark’s two children from his first marriage. It seems like I should be able to remember what we talked about that night, what news the kids had about their classmates or their tennis lessons or swim meets, the table manners we corrected or sibling quarrels we quashed. But these banalities of everyday life aren’t anything you think to preserve, much less cherish. Why bother? It was just another Tuesday.

  The next morning, December 10, we drove the kids to school before heading back to Manhattan. Mark rolled down his window as usual to heckle his thirteen-year-old daughter as she joined a clutch of friends heading to class. “Hey, Kate! Learn a lot!” he shouted, laughing when she shot him the mortified look he had hoped for. Mark worshipped Kate and her sixteen-year-old brother, Daniel, with a devotion I found alternately endearing and maddening. His kids came first, no matter what. As a parent, I understood that part of the equation perfectly. But Mark also had a chronic case of divorced-daddy syndrome, missing his son and daughter so much that he often overcompensated by trying to anticipate every possible need and kowtow to every whim. When we were all together, any restaurant we ate at or movie we saw was the children’s choice to make. Mark craved their company, but now that they were teenagers, Kate and Daniel both had busy social lives of their own to manage, and that didn’t always include blocking out Tuesday nights or every other weekend for their father. It didn’t matter. Even if he knew he wouldn’t see them, Mark insisted that we make the hour-long trip just so they would know he was there.

  Try as I did to be a good sport—and a good stepmother—I have to admit that being a second wife grated on me at times, and my insecurities about my own place in the pecking order of Mark’s close-knit family were the biggest bone of contention between the two of us. It wasn’t just my imagination, though. I
was often overshadowed by Mark’s failed first marriage, so much so that his mother routinely called me Susan instead of Stephanie, even though I had come along three years after his bitter divorce. It rankled me that Kate and Daniel’s mother remained, by extension, so deeply entwined in our lives. “It’s part of the mix,” Mark would shrug, anxious to keep the peace. I tried to suck it up, and was successful more often than not, but I never really perfected the art.

  Despite the challenges of a blended family, our marriage had found its sweet spot, and that December I was seven months pregnant with our second child. A little brother for our daughter, Audrey, who had just turned two. A very active little brother, if the kickboxing sessions in utero were any indication. We debated names that morning on our drive back to the city: Nicholas or Joe? We were still torn. Audrey was in her car seat, blissing out over a strawberry-frosted doughnut with rainbow sprinkles. In the cargo hold, our shamefully spoiled Labradoodle, Grouper, dozed in the dog bed I had bought especially for road trips. The lack of squirrels to chase in SoHo always put Grouper in a sulk on the way home.

  As usual, I claimed control of the radio dial for the commute, quickly nixing Mark’s soft-rock preferences for a Top 40s mix. Taste in music was one of the rare differences that underscored our ten-year age gap, and I refused to be the enabler of someone who wanted to linger forever at some 1980s high school prom. I teased Mark about it mercilessly, but he held fast to his romanticism, and truth be told, it was pretty charming. He always knew how to make me laugh. Once, after I had won yet again in our power struggle over who got to be deejay, Mark fired off an e-mail to my iPhone minutes after dropping me off somewhere. I opened it to find a picture of the car’s radio console, triumphantly displaying the call numbers of Mark’s favorite XM station, The Heart, which played nothing but lovesick ballads. Had it been left to Mark, we might have ended up with Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” as our wedding dance.

  If easy listening was Mark’s cheesy weakness, then Christmas was mine. I’m a sucker for every sentimental movie, nostalgic decoration, and Rockwellian moment the holiday season has to offer. Knit reindeer hats can be found in my closet—and I actually wear them. As a child growing up in New York, some of my fondest memories are of Christmastime, when December turned the grimy city into a big enchanted snow globe. You could be walking down Fifth Avenue and come across a Juilliard quartet playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” on a street corner, and the taxi-honking, bus-wheezing, brake-screeching cacophony of the evening rush hour would suddenly hold still. In Central Park, skaters twirled and tumbled across the vast frozen pond, and the rich, smoky smell of roasting chestnuts would make your eyes sting and your mouth water.

  Best of all were the big department stores like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor in full holiday glory, trying to outdo one another with their magical Christmas windows. I would stand outside on the sidewalk, mesmerized by the animated elves busily making toys in Santa’s workshop, or the tender beauty of a Victorian doll family in exquisite period costumes, waltzing around a candlelit tree. I could never drink in enough of the season. Every year, my parents would take my brother and me to buy a Christmas tree from a stand in front of a private girls’ school on 91st Street, a few blocks from our apartment. A portion of the tree sales went to charity, and my stepdad, Marty, loved to tease my brother and me by feigning horror at the outrageous prices and then picking out the tiniest, scrawniest Charlie Brown tree he could find. My mother would then make a great show of putting her foot down, and ultimately we would lug home a big, magnificent tree, which we would decorate while listening to the Supremes singing Christmas songs. There were beautiful heirloom ornaments my mother had had as a little girl, and handcrafted ones my aunt lovingly made each year, crocheting snowflakes from delicate white yarn or turning clothespins into toy soldiers. My favorite was the ice-cream cone she made using a big hot-pink pom-pom for the scoop.

  Mark was Jewish, but his parents had never been observant, and he eagerly embraced my Christmas traditions when we became a couple. Still, I was fearful of offending anyone in his family, so I started the tradition of hosting a big Hanukkah party for Bernie, Ruth, and the children. I made sure the kids all got gifts from us for both holidays. Between that and Audrey’s birthday, I generally spent the fall in a perpetual state of frenzied wrapping. With the new baby on the way that year, though, I’d finished my gift shopping months in advance. We’d gotten our tree the week before and trimmed it, too. It was the first year that Audrey was old enough to get excited about it, and watching her squeal over some of my own childhood ornaments had been one of those special motherhood moments for me. With all of the prep work out of the way early, I was really looking forward to just taking it easy and enjoying the festivities with my little family.

  After inching our way through midtown traffic that Wednesday morning, Mark pulled the SUV over as we neared the red-granite Lipstick Building, where he worked at his father’s brokerage firm. Bernie was a titan in the financial world, a widely admired former president of NASDAQ. A glassed-in office at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities commanded respect. At forty-four years old, having worked for his father his entire adult life, Mark was proud to have earned his spot as a senior manager on the nineteenth floor of the market-making segment at the firm. He had never had any doubts that this was where he belonged, and he had never known anything else.

  “Talk to you later, kitten,” he promised as he jumped out onto Third Avenue and I maneuvered my pregnant belly behind the steering wheel. We had the company’s annual holiday party to attend that night at a popular Mexican restaurant the firm had rented out for the bash. Reluctant as I was to keep buying maternity clothes so close to my due date, the party was reason enough for me to splurge on a festive top to go with my standard dark “going out” maternity jeans. Too bad pregnancy had made me such a major party pooper—I was wiped out by eight o’clock most evenings—but I was still looking forward to having a fun time, even if the margaritas were off-limits for me now. The Wall Street crowd knew how to blow off steam, especially the young traders. It was bound to be loud and lively. And my in-laws would be there, too, of course.

  Though we saw each other often, I was especially curious to see what kind of mood they would be in that night. Both had been acting strange lately, and Mark suspected that his father might be hiding a serious illness from the family. He just wasn’t himself. The last time Bernie had behaved this way was when Mark’s younger brother, Andy, had been diagnosed with lymphoma a few years back. Andy had fought his illness with quiet courage and a strong will, but Bernie had fallen apart at the word cancer and had barely been able to function throughout Andy’s treatment.

  Now Bernie seemed unhinged again, and both Mark and Andy, who also worked at the firm, were worried. Their mother seemed somewhat anxious and preoccupied, too. Bernie was nearing seventy and was an unhealthy eater; he often had a pack of those orange fake-cheese and peanut butter crackers in his pocket and never exercised. Mark loved to tell the story of his father getting a sudden spurt of motivation and climbing onto the treadmill that Ruth had in her home gym. Bernie hadn’t gotten far when his sneakers began to literally disintegrate on his feet because the rubber on the soles was so old and dry. He hadn’t replaced them in at least twenty years. Just what kind of shape Bernie was in was hard to say, though. His phobia of doctors prevented him from making an appointment for even a routine physical, much less a full workup. For a few weeks now, Mark and his brother had watched Bernie sitting in his glass office at the Lipstick Building, staring at the ceiling all day.

  “What do you mean ‘all day’?” I initially pressed Mark when he had brought it up at home after a troubling day at work.

  “Steph, I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “I think he’s very sick, or maybe dying.”

  Usually, Bernie spent his workdays glued to the phone, ushering important investors into and out of his office, and intently monit
oring every twitch, shudder, and surge on his trading room floor. Now, Mark said, he seemed completely disinterested. Attempts at conversation were met with monosyllabic responses, and when Mark asked him what was going on, Bernie insisted nothing was wrong. But something definitely was.

  I had witnessed Bernie’s odd behavior for myself soon after, when I dropped by the office with Audrey so we could all go out to celebrate her second birthday with a family lunch and a trip to FAO Schwarz afterward. A friend had given Audrey a gift certificate to make her own Muppet at the famous toy store, and I knew her grandparents would want to share the fun. Ruth kept an office in Bernie’s fiefdom, too, where she ostensibly managed the family charitable foundation. Usually, when I showed up with Audrey, Bernie and Ruth couldn’t drop their work fast enough to smother their youngest grandchild with attention. For her birthday, they had really gone overboard; they bought Audrey a fully outfitted pink kitchen from Pottery Barn Kids, complete with every accessory the store had to offer, from the miniature rolling pin and the tiny pot holders to a gazillion pieces of fake food. Whenever Audrey was around, there was no question at all that she was the center of their universe. That November 21, though, as we stood waiting expectantly outside Bernie’s office, we may as well have been standing on Mount Kilimanjaro. There was Bernie, sitting at his desk, eyes fixed on the ceiling just as Mark had described, his head thrown back, his hands steepled beneath his chin, still as a sculpture. He didn’t look lost in deep thought—he just looked blank.

  “Shit, I see what you mean now,” I murmured to Mark as we stood outside Bernie’s office. “He looks so strange.”

  Soon Ruth appeared and fussed over Audrey, and Bernie finally snapped out of his spell and ambled out to greet us. But as we got ready to head to the restaurant, Bernie hung back.

  “You’re not coming with us?” I asked. Bernie said something vague about being too busy and retreated to his office as we left. Begging off a granddaughter’s birthday lunch might seem minor, but for Bernie it was completely out of character.