The Prodigal Daughter (23 page)

“Who is she?”
said Richard out loud as he watched her double back and enter Bendel’s. The
doorman saluted respectfully, leaving a distinct impression of recognition.
Once again Richard peered through the window to see saleswomen fluttering
around Jessie with more than casual respect. An older lady appeared with a
package, which Jessie had obviously been expecting.

She opened it to
reveal a full-length evening dress in red. Jessie smiled and nodded as the
saleslady placed the dress in a brown and white box. Then mouthing the words
“Thank you,” Jessie turned toward the door without even signing for her purchase.
Richard barely managed to avoid colliding with her as she hastened out of the
store to jump into a cab.

He grabbed a
taxi that an old lady had originally thought was hers and told the driver to
follow Jessie’s cab. “Like the movies, isn’t it?” said the driver. Richard
didn’t reply. When the cab passed the small apartment house outside of which
Richard and Jessie normally parted, he began to feel queasy. The taxi in front
continued for another hundred yards and came to a halt outside a dazzling new
apartment house complete with a uniformed doorman, who was quick to open the
door for Jessie. With astonishment and anger Richard jumped out of his cab and
staried to make his way up to the door through which she had disappeared.

“That’ll be
ninety-five cents, fella,” said a voice behind him.

“Oh, sorry,”
said Richard. He thrust his hand into his pocket and took out a note, hurriedly
pushing it at the cab driver, not thinking about the change.

“
Thanks,
buddy,” said the driver, clutching on to the
fivedollar bill.

“Someone sure is
happy today.”

Richard hurried
through the door of the building and managed to catch Jessie at the elevator.
He followed her into the elevator. She stared at him but didn’t speak.

“Who are, you?”
demanded Richard as the elevator door closed. The other two occupants stared in
front of them with a look of studied indifference as the elevator glided up to
the second floor “Richard,” she stammered. “I was going to tell you everything
this evening.

I never seemed
to find the right opportunity.”

“Like heU you
were going to tell me,” he said, following 143 her out of the elevator toward
an apartment.
“Stringing me along with a pack of lies for
nearly three months.
Well, now the time has come for the truth.”

He pushed his
way past her brusquely as she opened the door. He looked beyond her into the
apartment while she stood helplessly in the passageway. At the end of the
entrance hall there was a large living room with a fine Oriental rug and a
magnificent Georgian bureau. A handsome grandfather clock stood opposite a side
table on which there was a bowl of fresh anemones. The room was impressive even
by the standards of Richard’s own home.

“Nice piace
you’ve got yourself for a salesgirl,” he said sharply. “I wonder which of your
lovers pays for this.”

Jessie took a
pace toward him and slapped him so hard that her own palm stung. “How dare
you?” she said. “Get out of my home.”

As she -aid the
words, she started to cry. Richard took her in his arms.

“Oh, God, I’m
sorry,” he said. “That was a terrible thing to suggest.

Please forgive
me. It’s just that I love you so much and imagined I knew you so well, and now
I find I don’t know a thing about you.”

“Richard, I love
you too and I’m sorry I hit you. I didn’t want to deceive you, but there’s no
one else-I promise you that.”
She louched his cheek.

“It was the
least I deserved,” he said as he kissed her.

Clasped tightly
in one another’s arms, they sank onto the sofa and for some moments remained
almost motionless. Gently he stroked her hair until her tears subsided. Jessie
slipped her fingers through the gap between his two top shirt buttons.

“Do you want to
sleep with me?” she asked quietly.

“No,” lie
replied. 1
want
to stay awake with you all night.”

Without speaking
further, they undressed and made love, gently and shyly at first, afraid to
hurt each other, desperately trying to please.

Finally, with
her head on his shoulder, they talked.

,
,I
love you,” said Richard. “I have since the first moment I
saw you.

Will you marry
me? Because I don’t give a damn who you are, Jessie, or what you do, but I know
I must spend the rest of i-ny life with you.”

“I want to marry
you too, Richard, but first I have to tell you the truth.”

She pulled
Richard’s jacket over her naked body as he Jay silent waiting for her to speak.

“My name is
Florentyna Rosnovski,” she began, and then told Richard everything about
herself. Florentyna explained why she had taken the name of Jessie Kovats-so
that she would be treated like any other salesgirl while she learned the trade,
and not Re the daughter of the Chicago Baron.

Richard never
spoke once during her revelation and remained silent when she carne to the end.

“Have you
stopped loving me already?” she asked. “Now that you know who I really am?”

“Darling,” said
Richard very quietly. “My father hates your father. “

“What do you
mean?”

“Just that the
only time I ever heard your father’s name mentioned in his presence, he flew
completely off the handle, saying your father’s sole purpose in life seemed to
be a desire to ruin the Kane familv.”

“What? Why?”
saij Florentyna, shocked. “I’ve never heard of your father.

How do they even
know each other? You must be mistaken. “

“I wish I were,”
said Richard, and he repeated the little his mother had once told him about the
quarrel with her father.

“Oh,
my God.
That must have been the ‘Judas’ my father referred to when he told how he
changed banks after twenty years,” she said. “What shall we do?”

“Tell them the
truth,” said Richard. “That we met
innocently,
fell in
love and now we’re going to be married. And that nothing they can do will stop
us.”

“Let’s wait for
a few weeks, said Florentyna.

“Why?” asked
Richard. “Do you think your father can talk you out of marrying me?”

“No, Richard,”
she said, touching him gently as she placed her head back on his shoulder.
“Never, my darling.
But let’s find out if we can do anything
to break the news gently before we present them both with a fait accompli.

Anyway, maybe
they won’t feel as strongly as you imagine. After all, you said the problem
with the Richmond Group was over twenty years ago. “

“They still feel
eveiy bit as strongly, I promise you that. My father would be outraged if he
saw us together, let alone thought we were considering marriage.”

“All
the more reason to leave it for a little before we break the news to them.
That will give
us time to decide the best way to go about it.”

He kissed her
again. “I love you, Jessie.”

145

“Florentyna.”

“That’s
qomething else I’m going to have to get used to,” he said, To begiii, Richard
allocated one afternoon a week to researching the feud between the two fathers,
but after a time it became an obsession, biting heavily into his attendance at
lectures. The Chicago Baron’s attempt to get Richard’s father removed from his
own board would have made a good case study for the Harvard Business School.
The more he discovered, the more Richard realized that his father and
Florentyna’s were formidable rivals. Richard’s mother spoke of the feud as if
she had needed to discuss it with someone for years.

“Why are you
taking such an interest in Mr. Rosnovski?” she said.

“I came across
his name when I was going through some back copies of The Wall Street Journal.
“ The truth, he thought, but a lie.

Florentyna took
a day off from Bloomingdale’s and flew to Chicago to tell her mother what had
happened. When Florentyna pressed her as to what she knew of the row she spoke
for almost an hour without interruption.

Florentyna hoped
her mother was exaggerating, but a few carefully worded questions over dinner
with George Novak made it painfully obvious that she hadn’t been.

Every weekend
the two lovers exchanged their knowledge, which only added to the catalogue of
hate.

“It all seems so
petty,” said Florentyna. “Why don’t they just meet and talk it over? I think
they would get on rather well together. “

“I agree,” said
Richard. “But which one of us is going to try telling thern that?”

“Both of us are
going to have to, sooner or later.”

As the weeks
passed, Richard could not have been more attentive and kind.

Although he
tried to take Florentyna’s mind off “sooner or later” with regular visits to
the theater, the New York Philharmonic and long walks through the park, their
conversation always drifted back to their parents.

Even during a
cello recital that Richard gave her in her flat, Florentyna’s mind was occupied
by her father: how could he be so obdurate? As the Brahms sonata came to an end
Richard put down his bow and stared into her gray eyes.

“We have got to
tell them soon,” he said, taking her in his arms.

146THE PRODIGAL
DAUGITMR

“I know we must.
I just don’t want to hurt my father.”

“I know.”

She looked down
at the floor. “Next Friday, Papa will be back from Washington.”

“Then it’i next
Friday,” said Richard quietly, not letting her go.

As Florentyna watched
Richard drive away that night she wondered if she would be strong enough to
keep her resolve.

On the Friday
they both dreaded, Richard ducked his moming lecture and traveled down to New
York in time to spend the rest of the day with Florentyna.

They spent that
afternoon going over what they would say when they respectively faced their
parents. At seven o’clock the two stepped out of Florentyna’s apartment onto
the pavement of
Fifty-seventh
Street. They walked
without talking. When they reached Park Avenue they stopped at the light.

“Will you marry
me?”

It was the last
question on Florentyna’s mind as she braced herself to meet her father. A tear
trickled down her cheek, a tear that she felt had no right to be there at the
happiest moment of her life. Richard took a ring out of a little red box-a
sapphire set in diamonds. He placed it on the third finger of her left hand. He
tried to stop the tears by kissing her.

He and
Florentyna broke and stared at each other for a moment. Then he turned and
strode away.

They had agreed
to meet again at the apartment as soon as their ordeal was over. She stared at
the ring on her
finger,
and at the antique ring on her
right hand, her favorite of the past.

As Richard
walked up Park Avenue he went over the sentences he had so carefully composed
in his mind and found himself on
Sixty-eighth
Street
long before he felt he had completed the rehearsal.

He found his
father in the drawing room drinking the usual Teacher’s and soda before
changing for dinner. His mother was complaining that his sister didn’t eat
enough. “I think Virginia plans to be the thinnest thing in New York.” Richard
wanted to laugh.

“Hello, Richard,
I was expecting you earlier.”

“Yes,” said
Richard. “I had to see someone before I came home.”

“Who?” said his
mother, not sounding particularly
interested.

“The woman I am
going to marry.”

147

They both looked
at him astonished; it certainly wasn’t the opening sentence Richard had planned
so carefully.

His father was
the first to recover. “Don’t you think you’re a bit young?

I feel sure you
and Mary can afford to wait a little longer.”

“It’s not Mary I
intend to marry.”

“Not Mary?” said
his mother.

“No,” said
Richard. “Her name is Florentyna Rosnovski.”

Kate
Kane tumed white.

“The
daughter of Abel Rosnovski?”
William Kane said without expression.

“Yes, Father,”
said Richard firmly.

“Is this some
sort of joke, Richard?”

“No, Father. We
met in unusual circumstances and fell in love without either of us realizing
there was a misunderstanding between our parents.”

“Misunderstanding?
Misunderstanding?” he repeated. “Don’t you realize that jumped-up Polish
immigrant spends most of his life trying to get me thrown off my own board-and
once nearly succeeded? And you describe that as a ‘misunderstanding.’ Richard,
you will never see the daughter of that crook again if you hope to sit on the
board of Lester’s Bank. Have you thought about that?”