Daughter of the Mob (Sample)

03 | Through the Window

"I wanted to be an independent woman, a woman who could pay for her bills, a woman who could run her own life - and I became that woman." — Diane Von Furstenberg

PAMELA WAS AS JITTERY as a jive dancer as she dragged her suitcase along the concrete road off Fifth Avenue. Her darkened blonde hair bobbed in the wind, her lips parted in concentration as she attempted to heave her luggage onto the curb.

She hoisted the bag up onto the sidewalk with some help from a courteous street vendor.

Thanking him, she rounded a corner and stared up at the Altman building: one of the oldest buildings in the city, if the newspaper articles she frequently read were correct. The contractors had constructed it as an elegant department store, encouraging other businesses to set up shop uptown and attracting wealthy clients to the once barren block.

Shiny display cases lined the streets—each the stage of an idealistic world where middle-class women cleaned and cooked in frocks and stage makeup and men lounged about the backyard in Hawaiian camp shirts and shorts, grilling steaks on the barbecue and throwing balls for the family dog.

In the caricatures, Pamela saw her elder sister Cecelia and the image of everything a good American girl ought to become: a subservient wife and mother without her own ambitions or plans. Everything Caroline Kelly desired for her daughters. Everything Pamela wasn't.

Fifth Avenue, or the 'Ave' as her mother had affectionately dubbed it, was a two-way street within the stomach of Manhattan, with traffic swarming each way and cars honking incessantly like two opposing battalions readying themselves for war.

The thoroughfare boasted bands of ornate mansions and established museums, though it wasn't as posh or snobbish as some places on the Upper Eastside. The Ave was one of the unique places in New York where the privileged and the poor, the young and the old, the black and the white crossed paths: an intersection for thoughts and people and ideas.

Pamela sank into a throng of straw hats.

Nervousness ignited her senses and the noise buzzing about her became magnified: the crude whistling of working people and the cackling laughter of women, the hum of automobiles as they waited, and the roar of engines as the stoplight flashed from green to red. Teenage greasers cruising around in their fords, whistling at girls and looking for something to do.

Pamela straightened her shoulders as she approached her destination, totally unaware that she looked as though she had stepped out of one of the five-cent magazines advertised on the shelves of the convenience store.

She was dressed in a pretty pastel rose circle dress, complete with a cinched-in waist and a sweetheart neckline, her lips coated in a red shimmer, and her eyelashes thick with jet black mascara.

When she reached Albright Trimmings & Co: a simple shop with velvet drapes hanging in the windows, she rushed inside.

A strong gust of wind swept into the place followed by a booming voice. "Well, if it isn't the notorious Pamela Anne Kelly!"

Her new boss, Mr. Friedenberg, revealed a yellowed smile. He pulled the coat off her shoulders without asking, hanging it on the coat rack near the door.

"Hello, Mr. Friedenberg!" Pamela braved a smile.

"I presume you had a decent trip?" Clyde Friedenberg squared his back so that he was eye-level with Pamela. He was perhaps as old as her da, with a polished head losing silvery hair that appeared to have once been red. He wasn't handsome, but his grin was jovial, and his smile spread from his mouth to his slanted brown eyes.