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PARTISAN REVIEW
signed to Marlborough - including charges for storage, handling,
and restoration . Finally, in November 1971, we filed a petition to
oust the executors and revoke the contracts.
Meyers is wrong when he writes that Levine "promptly divorced
himself from the other two executors," and implies that he had been
misled by them. What Levine did was to engage different lawyers for
his defense, which, I am sure, did not please the others. Nevertheless,
it must be remembered that at that June 1971 meeting he vehe–
mently defended his actions, almost two years after becoming an ex–
ecutor. In addition, the Rothkos had designated him and his wife as
the six-year-old Christopher's guardians, and they had served in that
capacity after Mel's death. In October 1970, when they insisted on
giving up the guardianship because they said they could not get
along with the boy, my wife and I pleaded with them not to subject
the child to another change so soon after his parents' death. In fact,
Levine must have known he would have been in a conflict of interest,
as both guardian and executor, since he might have had to oppose
the other executors to protect his ward or fail to do so by acceding to
them. The best way to have resolved this conflict, of course, would
have been for him to have resigned his executorship and continue as
the boy's guardian . In any event, Christopher became the ward of
his aunt, not Mark's and Mel's first choice. I have been asked disap–
provingly by Levine's friends why I had not excluded him from the
suit, since he claimed that he had been naive in these matters. But
Levine had been party to questionable acts, so it was the surrogate's
task, not mine, to judge his conduct.
It would appear from Meyers's article that the defendants,
whose suffering is described in some detail, were the only ones hurt
by the suit. I should point out that at the beginning I was distressed
to act against friends, though the defendants tried to relieve me of
that feeling by spreading unpleasant stories about my character and
my motives. Because of the violent partisanship generated in the
course of the trial, I lost other friends and acquaintances. But, more
important, Meyers did not think it pertinent, after so much specula–
tion about everything else, to consider the trauma of the children
who lost both parents within six months. Nor did he consider the ef–
fect of all the publicity on the children, their apprehensions, and the
violent disruption of their lives during five years of litigation, or that
Kate's studies at medical school were being constantly interrupted.
(Earlier, Meyers has an unkind and petulant description of Kate
