Lucky giggled. Sometimes mommy made good jokes. “Dario’s got yellow hair.”
“So he has. Now go to sleep.”
“Will daddy come home tomorrow?”
“Yes, he will.”
“Can we all swim together?”
“If he’s home early enough.”
“Good.” She popped her thumb in her mouth. Within minutes she was fast asleep.
Lucky was an early riser, jumping out of bed anywhere between 6 and 7 A.M. Dario and Nanny Camden never got up before 8:30, but she didn’t mind. She had learned to fix her own breakfast and enjoyed running about by herself. Of course, she wasn’t allowed out of the house until the grown-ups were around, because of the bells that would go off if she opened any doors or windows. She had tried it once and daddy had gone mad! Yelling and shouting and running around with a gun in his hand. Just like television. It had made her giggle a lot, but Dario had cried.
When daddy was home he got up early too. Sometimes.
Lucky knew how to ping the switch to make the kettle boil. She knew how to make daddy’s coffee—just the way he liked it. When she made it for him she got extra kisses.
Mommy usually got up late. Nine o’clock. Or half past. Daddy smacked her bottom and called her lazy. When they kissed it made Lucky shy.
The birds were talking to each other, chattering away. Lucky could hear them outside her window. She jumped out of bed and ran to watch them. And what a surprise! Mommy was up and in the swimming pool. Resting on the striped raft that floated lazily in the middle of the pool.
Excitedly, Lucky wriggled into her yellow bathing suit. Daddy said she had a fat tummy. Gutso, he called her. It made her giggle.
She ran downstairs and was delighted to find the glass doors open.
“Mommy!” she called happily as she raced outside, “mommy—mommy—mommy, me swim too. Pleeeease!” She ran toward the pool giggling and laughing and happy as could be.
As she neared the pool she realized that her mother was asleep. The most beautiful mother in the world—that’s what daddy called her, and Lucky agreed—was lying motionless, her long white-blond hair fanning out in the water, her arms and legs trailing limply from the sides of the raft.
Two things struck Lucky at once. Mommy was a naughty girl She was in the nudie rudie.
And the water in the pool was a different color. It was pink.
She stood at the side and said, “Mommy,” Then, louder, “ MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!”
She knew that something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. Where was daddy? He would know.
Silly daddy. He’d gone away.
She sat down, her short little legs dangling near the water. She would wait until mommy woke up. That’s what she would do. She would just wait.
Steven
1955-1964
When Steven was sixteen years of age he was summoned home from the private school he attended, and Carrie told him, red-eyed and heartbroken, that Bernard Dimes had passed away in his sleep. He had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Steven was stunned by the news. While he knew that Bernard was not his natural father, he loved him just as much as if he was. After all, Bernard was the only father he had ever known. They had spent many good times together—in New York and at their summer house on Fire Island.
Steven stood loyally by his mother at the funeral, a tall good-looking boy. And after that, at the Park Avenue house, he held her trembling hand while a stream of Bernard’s friends and acquaintances stopped by to pay their respects.
Carrie was very brave. She held her head high and hid her tears with a long black veil.
A week later Steven was back in school.
“I can manage,” Carrie had insisted. “Your studies are more important than being with me.”
She always put his studies first. Always. It was a drag, but he had learned not to fight with her. His mother had a temper that could scorch ice. She expected top grades in everything. Early on he had learned to get them. If he didn’t…
At thirteen he had goofed off, spent the term boxing and getting involved in the whole sports scene. It was great, but his school marks were really down. Carrie had blown a fuse. Whacked him and burned his ass so bad he hadn’t been able to sit for a week! It had taught him a lesson.
“When you are black you have to try harder,” she snapped coldly. “Just you remember that.”
Steven couldn’t figure that one out. He had never come across racial prejudice. He lived in a beautiful house with loving parents. The fact that one was white and one black had never bothered him. They had plenty of friends who didn’t seem to care either. All types of people came to their house: movie stars, foreign producers, musicians, actors and actresses, opera singers.
In school, he and a boy called Zoona Mgumba were the only black students. But they were just a part of the melting pot in the very expensive private school. The others were all sons of diplomats, financiers, or traveling dignitaries. Carrie had picked out such a school for Steven because she wanted him to worry about his grades, not about the color of his skin.
Bernard had argued that it would be protecting the boy from the real world. But Carrie had insisted.
Zoona Mgumba’s father did something very important at the United Nations, Steven never quite figured out what. Zoona’s main activity in life was jerking off. He was always “beating his meat,” as Jerry Meyerson, Steven’s best friend, called it.
Jerry was all right. Tall and gangly with a shock of red hair. Like Steven he was very into work, and being close friends, they helped each other enormously.
Unlike the other boys, work came first, discussions on sex a poor second. Who had time to discuss the merits of this pair of stapled tits against that pair? Some of the boys spent hours drooling over dirty magazines—especially Zoona, who was eventually thrown out of school for whacking off in full sight of three mothers during parents’ day.
By graduation, Steven’s sexual experiences were sadly limited. Like Jerry, he thought about girls, but who ever got to meet any?
“We’ll kill ’em in college,” Jerry boasted. “The campus will be teaming with girls, and you and I together—what a combination!”
Steven and Jerry were planning to study law, and they had managed to swing it so that they both got to go to the same college just outside Boston.
Jerry was right. Girls were everywhere. Short, fat, thin, tall. Big breasts, little breasts, long legs, rounded asses. It was like being on a diet all of your life, and then suddenly you were let loose in a candy store.
Jerry went mad. Getting into a girl’s pants became numero uno on his list of things to do. After six months of trying, his success rate was nil. His studies were pretty bad too.
Steven helped him all he could. He was enjoying himself enormously at college. He liked the work, found it a challenge, and had become an enthusiastic member of the basketball team. It took his mind off girls and sex. He could see the trouble Jerry was having, and he didn’t need those kinds of problems in his life. He had problems—but they were with his mother. Since Bernard’s death, Carrie had all but become a recluse. She sat in Bernard’s study in the Park Avenue house for hours on end. Just sat there. Staring. Day after day.
Home on vacation, Steven tried to jolt her out of her apathy. He suggested they go to the Fire Island house for a break. “I’m selling it, Steven,” she said sadly. “Too many memories.”
He asked about their financial situation. Were they all right? Should he quit college and get a job?
She assured him that Bernard had left them well provided for. And icily she added that if he ever quit college she’d kill him.
He could not get through to her at all, and it worried him. His mother was a very attractive woman in her early forties. She should be out enjoying herself, not locked away in a dead man’s study surrounded by memories.
One day he had a great idea. “Hey, mom,” he said brightly, “whyn’t we take a trip to Kenya? You must have a whole sle
w of relatives there. We could go see some of them.”
Her reaction was not what he had expected. She didn’t say “I’ll think about it” or even “maybe.” She just said, very coldly, “Never go back in life, Steven. Remember that.” End of discussion.
He knew what everyone else knew about her, the things he had read in magazines and articles. But sometimes in the middle of the night he woke in a cold sweat and thought, Who am I? Who is my real father? The only information he could ever get out of Carrie was “He was a good man, a doctor. He died when you were one.”
He tried not to let her silence on the past bother him. She had her reasons. If she didn’t care to tell him who his natural father was, that was just something he would have to accept. So he did.
Nineteen fifty-seven was an event-filled year for Steven. He turned eighteen, was called nigger for the first time in his life, got laid, and learned how to defend himself.
Being black was not the same as being white, Carrie had told him enough times, but he had never really listened. Now he knew. For a fact. And he started to become concerned about civil rights and the way things could be changed. Martin Luther King interested him, and the campaign for desegregation he was running down in the South.
He began to be very aware of his blackness, and now understood what Carrie meant when she had said things like, “When you are black you have to try harder.”
He was an excellent student as it was, but suddently he did start to try harder, and excellence turned to brilliance.
His first sexual experience that went all the way was with a very pretty black girl called Shirley Sullivan: classic college sex in the back of a friend’s car, with Shirley’s skirt around her waist, her panties around her ankles, her sweater pushed up under her chin, and one tit pushed painfully out of a bra cup.
Steven was fully dressed, penis at attention rigidly sticking out of his trousers. It was messy and undignified. It was also the best thing he had every done in his whole goddamn life!
He went with Shirley for seven wonderful months, asked her to marry him, and was heartbroken when she jilted him for a pre-med student from another college.
He learned a lesson. Girls said one thing, meant another. And were not to be trusted.
After Shirley he spread out. It wasn’t difficult. He was now over six feet tall and incredibly good-looking. Girls fell at his feet, even white girls. He tried a few. They were no different. Pussy was pussy whatever color it was wrapped in.
Steven entered law school when he was twenty. That same year, Carrie married again. She surprised everyone by marrying Elliott Berkely, a snobbish, twice-divorced theater owner. A man who stunk of old money and old ideas although he was only forty-five years old.
To Carrie, Elliott was no Bernard Dimes. He was not a man she could ever dream of being truthful with. But contrary to what she had assured Steven, money was becoming a problem, and to see him safely through college and law school and keep up their lifestyle, an answer had to be found. Elliott Berkely was that answer. He had been pursuing her for years—and although she didn’t love him, one morning she woke up and thought, Why not?
When they married she already had a signed document guaranteeing Steven’s education for as long as it would take. She also persuaded her son to change his name to Berkely.
Security was the name of the game. Security for Steven.
Zizi blew into his life like a blisteringly hot wind on a freezing day. He was twenty-five years old, a graduate of law school with a Bachleor of Arts and Law degree. He had passed his bar exam and was working as an assistant public defender to gain courtroom experience.
Zizi was a dancer of sorts. She appeared as a witness in an assault case, and Steven took one look and got a hard-on there and then. He didn’t know why. It was just one of those things. She grabbed the instant attention of his cock, and there was no escape.
Zizi. Five foot two of dynamic tits, snaky legs, flashing eyes, purring voice. Hot lover.
Zizi.
Carrie hated her on sight.
Lucky
1965
Lucky Santangelo stood at the front door of the Bel Air house, watching the chauffeur load her suitcases into the trunk of a long black limousine. She was almost fifteen, a tall coltish girl with a jumble of jet curls and huge widely spaced black gypsy eyes. She was thin and rangy, deeply suntanned, her figure as yet undeveloped, and no makeup decorated her strong good looks.
Dario Santangelo sat disconsolately on the hood of the limo, much to the chauffeur’s annoyance. He had picked up a handful of pebbles from the driveway and now threw them moodily at an outdoor light. They pinged infuriatingly.
As dark as Lucky was, that’s how blond Dario was. Thirteen and a half, with perfect features, longish white blond hair, and startlingly blue eyes.
He stared at his sister, then made a face at the chauffeur, who was too busy with the suitcases to even notice.
Lucky giggled, winked at him, and silently mouthed, Jerko! It was their favorite word, the word they used to describe most people they knew.
A woman emerged from the house. Tall, bossy, she issued a few instructions to the chauffeur, glanced at her watch, and said, “Come along, Lucky, get in the car, we don’t want to miss our plane, now, do we?”
Lucky shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind—” she began.
“Now, now, miss!” snapped the woman. “None of that.”
Behind her back, Dario mouthed, Jerko! Jerko! Jerko! making ears of his hands and waggling them insolently.
Lucky stifled a laugh, although she really didn’t feel like laughing, she felt like crying.
Marco appeared. He was assigned to accompany her whenever she left the Bel Air house. She liked Marco. He was soooo good-looking.
Unfortunately he treated her like a kid. Had never even given her so much as a sideways glance of interest. Today he wore a light jacket, sports shirt, and tight jeans. He must be at least thirty, but he was lean and muscular, not fat at all like some older men she had seen.
For the thousandth time she wondered about his private life. Did he have a girl friend? What did he like to do when he wasn’t on bodyguard duty?
“Get off that car right now,” snapped Miss Bossy at Dario, “and say goodbye to your sister.”
Dario threw the remainder of his pebbles in one triumphant lunge at the light. The glass shattered.
“Dario!” screamed Miss Bossy. “Wait until I tell your father what you just did.”
She would have a long wait, Lucky mused. Gino’s visits to the Bel Air house were getting further and further apart.
Dario slouched in her direction, trying to look cool, trying to look like he didn’t mind the fact that she was being sent away to boarding school. “S’long, sis,” he mumbled. “If you feel like writing, I don’t mind.”
She took a step forward and hugged her brother. Normally he would have shoved her away, but today he let her hold him. “Don’t let ’em get you down,” she whispered, very very softly. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
He gave her a damp embarrassed kiss and fled inside the house before anyone could notice his tears.
Lucky climbed into the car. She was frightened and apprehensive, but in a way she was relieved. At last she was going out into the world. Ten years of nannies and private tutors were coming to an end. Ten years of privacy, and loneliness, and hardly being able to do anything. She was sorry about leaving Dario, but still, she needed companionship. Girls of her own age. And soon Dario would go off to school too.
It was Aunt Jennifer who had insisted that she be sent away to school “You can’t keep the children locked up and protected forever, Gino,” Lucky had overheard on one of her father’s rare visits. “I know a very good girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. It will do Lucky a world of good.”
She dozed on the plane, reluctantly, because she really didn’t want to miss anything at all. Miss Bossy sat rigidly beside her, keeping a sharp eagle eye on things.
Luc
ky thought it ridiculous that she needed a traveling companion at her age, but Gino had insisted. “You go, she goes. When she delivers you safely to the school she leaves. That’s it. No discussion.”
Gino. Her father. King of the no discussion.
She loved him so much it hurt. Yet sometimes she wondered just how much he really cared about her and Dario. He spent so little time with them. They lived in Bel Air, he lived wherever it suited him at the time. New York, Las Vegas, he had apartments all over. She knew the phone numbers but had never seen the homes. Sometimes, lying in bed late at night, she could remember a far-off time when she was very little. He had always been around then. Hugs. Kisses. Attention. Real love and caring. She could remember her mother, too, a beautiful pale angel with a sweet soft voice and skin like velvet….
Abruptly her memories would stop. Too painful to continue. Something would flash across her memory—a lightning vision. Pool. Raft. Body. Naked. Blood.
She must have said something in her sleep. Miss Bossy snapped crisply, “Yes, dear, what is it?”
“Nothing.” She jogged herself awake. “Can I get a Coca-Cola?”
The air in Switzerland was so clear that Lucky felt she wanted to take large gulps of it to free her lungs of the Los Angeles smog.
A car met them at the airport, transporting them on an hour and a half’s drive into lush green countryside. L’Evier, the school she was to attend, nestled at the foot of rolling hills and dense woods. It was very picturesque and totally unlike the manicured greenery of Bel Air and Beverly Hills.
Miss Bossy had the car wait while she took Lucky inside, deposited her with the principal, and left with a brisk efficient, “Goodbye, dear, see that you behave yourself.”
Miss Bossy had been in charge of Dario and Lucky for three years. She had given them about as much love and affection as a plank of wood. Lucky was not sorry to see her go.
“Miss Saint,” the principal said, “welcome to L’Evier. I am sure, like all my girls, you will enjoy it here. I demand respect and obedience. Remember those two words, honor them, and your time at L’Evier will be happy and fruitful.”
Chances Page 45