Free Rothstein by David Pietrusza

even on Broadway where it was the fashion to be well groomed.
    Above everything else, from the moment he had been introduced, he had paid no attention to any one except me. That flattered me, his manner charmed me, his appearance pleased me. I was as much in love with him as he was with me.
    They continued dating. A. R. continued gambling, but though he made a living at it, he was not immune from periodic strings of bad luck. He was undergoing one now, and though he wished to impress his new girl, he didn’t possess the requisite cash. “He sent me flowers on one or two occasions,” Carolyn recalled, “but not more than that, had funds enough to take me to dinner, and drive me home in hansom cabs. He never made me any presents.”
    Carolyn Rothstein’s autobiography, Now I’ll Tell, describes a straightforward, uncomplicated courtship. Boy meets girl. Boy dates girl. Boy marries girl. It was more complex. Shortly after they began dating, A. R. stopped calling, stopped visiting the Casino Theater. She learned A. R. was interrogating friends and acquaintances: What did they know about her? What were her habits? Her virtues? Her vices?
    Mostly her vices.
    Outraged, Carolyn exploded. “How dare you ask people about me? What business am I of yours?”
    Rothstein replied calmly. “A man has a right to know all about the girl he’s thinking of marrying.”
    Marrying?
    A. R.‘s response startled Carolyn. But no more than his next move. He tipped his cap and walked silently away. She heard no more from him but soon thereafter received an invitation from attorney George Young Bauchle to a supper party at Delmonico’s. She asked the maitre d’ for Bauchle’s party. He escorted her to a table for two. There sat A. R. He stood up and announced. “I’m the party, a party of one. I hope you’re not angry.”
    She was indeed, but calmed down. A. R. had his charms. And, after all, a dinner at Delmonico’s was, well, a dinner at Delmonico’s. Their courtship resumed.
    Soon another bump arose. Arnold had drifted away from his family, from Abraham Rothstein and his world. Now, strangely, A. R. wished to present his prospective bride to the family he had spurned. He informed her, “I want you to meet my family.”
    “I’d like to,” she responded. Meeting her potential in-laws was fairly standard for two people pledged to marry each other.
    “I’ve got to take you there,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn’t matter what they say or think. I’m a stranger to them. I live my own life.”
    Now she caught his meaning: “But you say you have to take me to them.”
    “That’s right. It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the way it is. It’s something I have to do.”
    “Maybe you’re not such a stranger to them after all.”
    He took her home, and Abraham Rothstein asked the inevitable question. He was, as Carolyn Rothstein bluntly put it, “an intensely religious man, a religious zealot.”
    “Are you Jewish, Miss Green?”
    She explained that her father, Meyer Greenwald was Jewish; her mother, Susan McMahon, Catholic. “I have been brought up as a Catholic,” she told the Rothsteins.
    “But you will change your religion if you and Arnold should marry, will you not?”
    “No, Mr. Rothstein,” she responded-and she meant it. In her autobiography she wrote:
    I was brought up in the [Catholic] religion, and regularly partook of communion until my marriage with Arnold. After that I continued to attend church more or less regularly and, at times, as in the lovely Cathedral of Milan, have gone to church as often as twice daily. I have always found in church the deepest sense of peace and contentment. It has been, and still is, a place of refuge and help.
    She would not give up that sense of security. Abraham Rothstein could respect her feelings. But he respected his own religion more. “My son is a grown man,” he responded. “I cannot live his life for him. If you should marry him, you have all my wishes for