Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  When the evening did come to an end and neither of them could drink any more coffee, they left Allen’s and Richard looked for a taxi, but they were all taken or off duty.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Fifty-seventh Street,” she said, not thinking about her reply.

  “Then let’s walk,” said Richard, taking Florentyna’s hand.

  She smiled her agreement. They started walking, stopping and looking in shop windows, laughing and talking. Neither of them noticed the empty taxis that now rushed past. It took them almost an hour to cover the sixteen blocks and Florentyna nearly told him the truth. When they reached Fifty-seventh Street she stopped outside a small old apartment house, some hundred yards from her own building.

  “This is where my parents live,” she said.

  He seemed to hesitate; then he let go of her hand.

  “I hope you will see me again,” said Richard.

  “I’d like that,” replied Florentyna in a polite, dismissive way.

  “Tomorrow?” Richard asked diffidently.

  “Tomorrow?” asked Florentyna.

  “Yes. Why don’t we go to the Blue Angel and see Bobby Short?” He took her hand again. “It’s a little more romantic than Allen’s.”

  Florentyna was momentarily taken aback. Her plans for Richard had not included any provisions for tomorrows.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” he added before she could recover.

  “I’d love to,” she said quietly.

  “I’m having dinner with my father, so why don’t I pick you up at ten o’clock?”

  “No, no,” said Florentyna, “I’ll meet you there. It’s only two blocks away.”

  “Ten o’clock then.” He bent forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. “Good night, Jessie,” he said, and disappeared into the night.

  Florentyna walked slowly to her apartment, wishing she hadn’t told so many lies about herself. Still it might be over in a few days. She couldn’t help feeling that she hoped it wouldn’t.

  Maisie, who had not yet forgiven her, spent a considerable part of the next day asking all about Richard. Florentyna kept trying unsuccessfully to change the subject.

  Florentyna left Bloomingdale’s the moment the store closed, the first time in nearly two years that she had left before Maisie. She had a long bath, put on the prettiest dress she thought she could get away with and walked to the Blue Angel. When she arrived, Richard was waiting for her outside the checkroom. He held her hand as they walked into the lounge, where the voice of Bobby Short came floating through the air: “‘Are you telling me the truth, or am I just another lie?’”

  As Florentyna walked in, Short raised his arm in acknowledgment. Florentyna pretended not to notice. Mr. Short had been a guest performer at the Baron on two or three occasions and it never occurred to Florentyna that he would remember her. Richard had seen the gesture and looked puzzled, then assumed that Short had been greeting someone else. When they took a table in the dimly lit room, Florentyna sat with her back to the piano to be certain it couldn’t happen again.

  Richard ordered a bottle of wine without letting go of her hand and then asked about her day. She didn’t want to tell him about her day; she wanted to tell him the truth. “Richard, there is something I must——”

  “Hi, Richard.” A tall, handsome man stood at Richard’s side.

  “Hi, Steve. May I introduce Jessie Kovats—Steve Mellon. Steve and I were at Harvard together.”

  Florentyna listened to them chat about the New York Yankees, Eisenhower’s golf handicap and why Yale was going from bad to worse. Steve eventually left with a gracious “Nice to have met you, Jessie.”

  Florentyna’s moment had passed.

  Richard began to tell her of his plans once he had left business school. He hoped to come to New York and join his father’s bank, Lester’s. She had heard the name before but couldn’t remember in what connection. For some reason, this worried her.

  They spent a long evening together, laughing, eating, talking, and just sitting holding hands listening to Bobby Short. When they walked home, Richard stopped on the corner of Fifty-seventh and kissed her for the first time. She couldn’t recall any other occasion when she was so aware of a first kiss. When he left her in the shadows of Fifty-seventh Street, she was aware that this time he had not mentioned tomorrow. She felt slightly wistful about the whole nonaffair.

  She was taken aback by how pleased she felt when Richard phoned her at Bloomingdale’s on Monday, asking if she would go out with him on Friday.

  They spent most of that weekend together: a concert, a film—even the New York Knicks did not escape them. When the weekend was over Florentyna realized that she had told so many white lies about her background that she had become inconsistent and had puzzled Richard more than once by contradicting herself. It seemed to make it all the more impossible to tell him now another entirely different albeit true story. When Richard returned to Harvard on Sunday night she persuaded herself that the deception would seem unimportant with the relationship ended. But Richard phoned every day during the week and spent the next two weekends in her company, and she began to realize it wasn’t going to end easily because she was falling in love with him. Once she had admitted this to herself, she realized she had to tell him the truth the following weekend.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Richard daydreamed through his morning lecture. He was so much in love with that girl that he could not even concentrate on the “twenty-nine crash.” How could he tell his father he intended to marry a Polish girl who worked behind the scarf, glove and woolly hats counter at Bloomingdale’s? Richard was unable to fathom why she was so unambitious for herself when she was obviously very bright; he was certain that if she had had the chances he had been given, she would not have ended up in Bloomingdale’s. Richard decided that his parents would have to learn to live with his choice, because that weekend he was going to ask Jessie to be his wife.

  Whenever Richard returned to his parents’ home in New York on a Friday evening, he would always leave the house on East Sixty-eighth Street to go to pick up something from Bloomingdale’s, normally a little-wanted item, simply so that Jessie would see that he was back in town (over the past ten weeks he had already given a pair of gloves to every relative he possessed). That Friday he told his mother that he was going out to buy razor blades.

  “Don’t bother, darling, you can use your father’s,” she said.

  “No, no, it’s all right,” Richard said. “I’ll go and get some of my own. We don’t use the same brand in any case,” he added feebly. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  He almost ran the eight blocks to Bloomingdale’s and managed to rush in just as they were closing the doors. He knew he would be seeing Jessie at seven-thirty, but he could never resist a chance just to look at her. Steve Mellon had told him once that love was for suckers and Richard had written on his steamed-up shaving mirror that morning, “I am a sucker.”

  But when Richard reached Bloomingdale’s this Friday, Jessie was nowhere to be seen. Maisie was standing in a corner filing her fingernails, and he asked her if Jessie was still around. Maisie looked up as if she had been interrupted from the one important task of her day.

  “No, she’s already gone home, Richard. Left a few seconds early. She can’t have gone far. I thought you were meeting her later.”

  Richard ran out onto Lexington Avenue. He searched for Jessie’s among the faces hurrying home, then spotted her on the other side of the street, walking toward Fifth Avenue. She obviously wasn’t headed home and he somewhat guiltily decided to follow her. When she reached Scribner’s at Forty-eighth Street, he stopped and watched her go into the bookshop. If she wanted something to read, surely she could have got it at Bloomingdale’s. He was puzzled. He peered through the window as Jessie talked to a salesclerk, who left her for a few moments and then returned with two books. He could just make out their titles: The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith