Marla Silk grew up amid that solid wall of Art Nouveau palaces along Central Park West. Her father was involved in some mystery called arbitrage. Marla loved to tell her friends at Fieldston that his name,
Mortimer Silk, was only a mask—the Silks were Marranos who had had to change their identity hundreds of years ago when they moved from Spain to Morocco.
Daddy had made quite a stir on Wall Street when he bet against the dollar and sank all the money of Silk & Silk into deutsche marks. For one or two days he must have owned half the deutsche marks in the world; and then Daddy dumped the whole lot. Marla was notorious after that at her high school.
