“For the present, Mr. Martin, we would appreciate it if you would address your conversation to Mrs. Yusupov. We seek advice on how to avoid the awkwardness and inconvenience of the bias in the law towards females,” responded Kyle.
“Then, Mrs. Yusupov, why don’t you tell me what is on your mind. First of all, would you prefer to speak to me alone?”
“Everything to be discussed in this room today involves both of us, Mr. Martin. We will both be present throughout.”
“Then–by all means–let us commence, Madam.”
“I will be brief. Mr. Bradshaw and I are considering marriage. As awkward as it is to talk about, there is a considerable disparity between our financial holdings, with mine being the larger. Australian commercial law discriminates against women and makes it difficult if not impossible for women to enter into business transactions without doing so behind a man as titular head of a family. I have every intention of doing business: buying and selling, building, striking legal contracts for investments, and the like. We are not crusaders. The law will be changed one day but not before I am too old to benefit, I fear.”
“Well and unfortunately stated, Mrs. Yusupov.”
“Yes…so we wish to marry and to conduct married and family life like anyone else, except for certain financial activities. We ask you to tell us how to have me invest my money in my projects under the umbrella of Mr. Bradshaw as my husband. I wish to be able to make day-to-day decisions such as land purchase, hiring and firing, and determining the course to be taken in my businesses. So that you will not think me selfish and unfeeling about my husband-to-be’s interests, we wish to set aside a portion of our mutual assets for Mr. Bradshaw to control for his own business enterprises, and a third account for our mutual living and pleasure.”
“Mr. Bradshaw, does this concept of Mrs. Yusupov’s meet with your approval?”
“Thank you for asking. Currently, the lady is very wealthy on her own. After we are married, I am sure that our mutual business interests will also be mutually profitable. I am a patient man. We can enjoy each other’s company and enjoy an affluent lifestyle for a long-married life. So, yes, I am in agreement. I have to ask Mrs. Yusupov: this is a bit sudden. Are you sure that you want to marry me?”
“Of course, I do, silly. It has been as obvious as the nose on your face for months now. Today is just the business day, and tomorrow we will see to the proposal and the romance,” she said with a self-assured laugh.
He responded with a large grin.
Mr. Martin was thoughtful and waited three or four minutes to digest what he had just learned and to think about how to handle his clients’ problem.
“I must say this is rather unusual, despite the general issue for women…for families, in the nation. Our laws are more than a little backward, as you know. The solution is not really so difficult, however. First of all, we are not about to launch a referendum on an entrenched policy; even if we should win, it would take years and years. Secondly, we will have to draft what is called in the law, a “prenuptial agreement”. Are either of you familiar with the legal concept?”
“I’m not,” said Alexandra.
“I have heard of it, but isn’t it usually a protection for marital partners so that the rich husband can’t be fleeced by his younger and attractive wife; and the wife can’t be booted out of the marriage with all of its mutual benefits without her receiving some money or land, that sort of thing?”
“That’s it in a nutshell, Mr. Bradshaw. I can draw that up. In order for the document to be helpful rather than hurtful, both of you should be involved in every line and paragraph of the agreement. With that agreement, and with the further agreement that Mrs. Yusupov—then Mrs. Bradshaw—can use your name to do business without tedious meddling by other parties, including the government, making life inconvenient. Shall I begin to draft the documents?”
“Yes,” Alexandra and Kyle replied at the same time.
As they walked back to their carriage, Kyle asked Alexandra bluntly, “Do you intend to treat me as a man, and not a kind of a shill, Alexandra? I need to know that. We can enjoy your money, but I am not a gold digger who would trade his manhood for a…mess of pottage, as the Bible put it.”
“I knew this would be very awkward. But you must understand that I was treated very poorly by my late husband in Russia. I have felt very vulnerable ever since whenever I even thought about the possibility of marrying again.”
“I understand. I do love you, Alexandra; and I am determined to make our relationship work.”
“Well, Kyle, you haven’t even proposed yet.”
“I rather thought your speech to Mr. Martin presumed that.”
“You don’t know much about girls, apparently, Mr. Bradshaw. I am down deep a romantic. I expect a beautiful proposal, maybe even tomorrow. You know, flowers, down-on-one knee, hands imploring, a pledge of undying troth…all of that. The money is an incidental.”
“Well, my dear, I will have to get my gumption up and prepare for a romantic day to end all days.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
TOP OF THE WORLD
“The money you make is a symbol of the value you create.”
—Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of your Ability
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Number 1-8, Collins Street, Victoria State, Melbourne, Commonwealth of Australia, March 30, 1912
The years…the decades…passed with alarming speed Alexandra mused, as she took inventory of herself in the foyer gilt framed mirror. She had been married to Kyle for nearly twelve years. It seemed impossible for her to admit that her second wedding was three children, twenty-five major investment successes, and a wonderful experience of traveling the globe that had taken place in that seemingly brief span. The years had not been particularly unkind to her. She was rich by anyone’s calculation. Her husband was still strong, handsome and virile—still a “catch”. He had been perfectly decent to her and the children—honest, affable, kind, and funny. In any other ordinary family, he would have been considered a good provider. In fact, they lived on what he brought in; and they lived an affluent life.
Alexandra, however, had accumulated enough of a fortune to be considered a millionaire, i.e., she netted more than a $ million dollars (AUD) a year and had stable conservative investments with relatively easy liquidity of nearly one hundred million dollars in Sydney and Melbourne alone. She was–by experience–not trusting of banks or even of Australia itself enough to keep her money centralized in any single country or type of investment.
Her accountancy firm—Wilson, Bishop, & Henderson–estimated her total net worth as nearly $ five hundred million AUD or $ three hundred seventy-five million USD. She had seen the handwriting on the wall when the debate began on establishing a national Australian currency. She divested all her provincial and private bank notes in exchange for the new Australian dollars as soon as the Australian Notes Act of 1910 was passed, and the new ten-shilling notes came off the press and completed her transference when the new security notes were printed. Her safety consciousness prompted her to spread out her investments to China, Russia, Germany, Argentina, Canada, and France. The types of investments ran from currency exchanges, stock and bond holdings, raw real estate and gold and silver bullion hedges against future economic downturns, real estate ownership in housing developments, hotels, factories, clothing businesses, and mining and minerals.
Her fifty-one-year-old reflection in the full-length mirror was no less satisfying, the half-century mark notwithstanding. She had a trim, still rather voluptuous, form; clear—largely unwrinkled—white skin; a full head of long lustrous natural blond hair; she was not a bluehair yet. She cut a fine figure in the latest fashion. She could still turn a wandering eye towards her “well-turned ankles”. She had never strayed and never intended to. Kyle had admitted to having had one brief fling for which she forgave him, and their
marriage seemed to be rock solid.
Her three children: Irina, age eleven; Kyle, Jr., age nine; and Margaret, age six, were healthy, rambunctious, and bright. Kyle and Irina were off to Trinity Grammar School–an independent, Anglican, day and boarding school for boys–in Sydney and Wynona Boarding School for Girls in North Sydney respectively where they had survived homesickness and excelled scholastically and in athletics as their proud parents knew they would.
Her only cause for being less than happy all the time was that she had no idea where her two sons and her former—and technically still legally–husband, Boris, were and whether or not they had escaped the frequent battles involving her general mayor husband and the twins he had stolen from her. If she dwelt too long on such thoughts, she would become depressed; and she could not afford to do that. With all the positive things about her life, she would be an ingrate if she did not thank God for what she had. She determined not to blame God or herself for the empty holes in her life. It was a source of frustrating discomfiture to her that she had to lie to her husband–to deny her bigamy–and not to show her feelings of being in mourning when birthdays and holidays came around.
For all the triumphs, worries, elaborate planning of her activities, and the enjoyment of her considerable fortune, Alexandra felt as if something was missing in her life to give her a sense of true fulfillment. She did not know what prompted such feelings nor did she have an idea of how to resolve them. She had decided that this was silly and something she simply had to live with or to forget somehow.
One of Kyle’s more endearing qualities was that he did not treat her like a spoiled rich girl, a grand lady, or anything more than the world’s best wife—which was the honest way he saw her. His teasing was a form of affection, a way of saying that he treasured and loved her.
When she dolled up for an evening out, and did her face just so, he would give her a back-hand compliment like, “ I guess you won’t have to double bag your face tonight” or even suggest that she only needed to be a one-bagger—which was the equivalent of being ‘coyote ugly’ and that she would need to hide her face in public to avoid embarrassing her family or frightening puppies and little children.
He never ceased to surprise her with his depth and breadth of knowledge of Aussie slang—“sline”. Alexandra was always his ‘sheila’, but sometimes his ‘small heifer’, an allusion to her voluptuous figure—which he loved dearly and lusted for regularly but gave her a moment of pause to be sure it had not been a real insult. That was true even when he joked about her having been eating watermelons when she was pregnant with the three children. He would raise an eyebrow and question her about her past activity, “or were you just overeating watermelons?” Frequently, when she could not quite fathom what some strange Aussie bit of slanguage meant, he would chide her with a disdainful look for being “from away”, meaning that she was born, bred, and lived away, and was not quite a true Aussie yet. All of those mild insults were common parlance among friends in Australia and all the more common between affectionate spouses and close friends.
Alexandra took up hobbies. She loved her flowers, and when she covered her hands, her farmer’s pants, and flanno with dirt, Kyle would come out with his now well scripted litany.
“G’day, Sheila, nice pair a daks and the black and blue flanno yer wearin’. Pick ‘em up new?”
After giving him an Aussie salute to brush away some flies, “Nice of you to notice, Kyle,” was her usual rejoinder.
“Got to hand it to ya, Sheila. Makes you look poor but honest—nothin’ of a bludger, you. Who could ask for more than that?”
Rejoinder: a shrug.
“Crikey, Alexandra, you’ve been doin’ a bit o’ hard yakka. How ‘bout I scramble us up some nice brekkie?”
“Oh sure, my grand chef husband, thinking of something like a choccy biccy and some of that left-over dog’s eye are we?”
“It hurts me to think that all I care about in the way o’ gourmet food is a crusty chocolate biscuit and meat pie which is–after all–our national food.”
He said it with theatrical down-turned sad eyes as he always did.
“All right you lazy blighter, I’ll clean up and get us some brekkie. Actually, I have some fresh John Dory straight from Sydney Bay. That and some fried mashers, and a cold one; and you should be fit as a fiddle.”
“Blimey, wench, fish again?!” would be his last attempt at a serious insult, all the more pathetic because they had not had good fish for over a month.
“I’ll do the clean-up. That’d be a fair crack o’ the whip, wouldn’t it?”
During breakfast, it was their custom to tell each other their plans for the day, and at supper they told each other what they had actually done; Kyle’s rendition was usually fairly fanciful.
“Have the neighbor’s ankle biters been in our apple trees again, Luv?”
“No, I had Mrs. Thompson and her three children over for a spot o’ tea yesterday afternoon, and they were cleaned up and well behaved. Tell the truth, I do love kiddies and miss ours lots during the school year.”
“Me too,” Kyle said wistfully, “it was better when I was young. Went to the local public school and had a lotta time for fishin’. Those were good times, and I turned out all right without a fancy private school. You weren’t here in those days. The way it worked was that there were two Melbourne systems: the Denominational School Board (DSB) for the churches and the National Board which was funded by Parliament—which had to be voted in every year, making schooling and teaching an unsure kind of thing. The National Board managed non-sectarian schools which provided combined reading, writing, arithmetic and separate but required religious instruction. I went to the Melbourne Grammar School, which was open only to boys, of course.”
She gave him a lifted eyebrow which was a comment on his statement about having gotten a decent education and also about him having turned out all right.
“At least, I think so,” he said.
“Tell the truth, I am trying to figure out what to do with myself today. The lawyers, business advisors and the CPAs are tired of seeing me. I’ve worn out my welcome. I think I’ll just shlep around, maybe try and find a new hobby. I’m about done with my planting, and I think the flowers are going to look great, if I don’t say so myself.”
“You’ve a green thumb, you do, Lassie. I can’t successfully plant a handful of nettles, perennials, or woody weeds.”
“I guess you’ll have to leave that part of the farm work to me, Hubby.”
He shook his head to indicate, “Guess so.”
“What’s on your plate today, Kyle?”
“I’m gonna go out to the suburbs and check on some down market properties—be a stickybeak–maybe offer them half the askin’. See what shakes out, eh?”
“Good on ya,” she said, glad that he would be out of her hair for most of the day.
She always enjoyed their back-and-forth bantering. With him gone, and no children to take care of, Alexandra took half an hour to decide on what she was going to occupy herself for the day. She thought about crocheting, knitting, macramé, making pottery, writing letters, having a little shopping spree; bubkis came to mind; and nothing captured her interest enough to get into an activity.
It was sunny; so she took a little snooze on the chaise longue on the back lawn.
No sooner had she gotten to sleep than a young man’s voice interrupted with, “Catchin’ a few flies, are ya?”
She worked to wake up and to see who was rude enough to awaken her from such a nice and time killing slumber. There were two young men wearing black suits with long coats, white shirts, and dark, narrow ties standing there, hands folded behind their backs. Unusually for men so young, each of them wore a black bowler hat. It was hot, and they were sweaty; so, their Sunday dress seemed well out of place, especially in comparison to the Australian boys Alexandra knew living around her. The speaker had a distinct Aussie accent and was obviously facile with the slang. The other young man was yo
unger and shyer; the Aussie was obviously the senior of the two in authority.
“Are you lot both from down-under here, boys?”
They had a look of innocence about them; so, she held back the accusation that they were being rude to come into her back yard to surprise her.
Instead, she said, “You must be about something pretty important to be all gussied up in your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes on a Tuesday. You morticians, maybe?”
Both young men laughed heartily and tipped their hats.
“No, M’am, we’re ministers of the gospel…missionaries of the Mormon church. You ever heard of it?”
“Can’t say I have. Where’s your church?”
There was an awkward pause.
The Aussie spoke quietly, “Well, actually, there is only one in all of Australia at the moment. It’s in Woolloongabba, up near Brisbane. We have our regular Sunday meetings here in the basement hall of the Duke of Wellington Hotel on the corner of Flinders and Russell Streets. Maybe you are familiar with it.”
“I am aware that it is probably the oldest hotel in Victoria, and not in the best of condition.”
“You’re right, M’am. But we have to make do or do without for the time being,” said the other missionary.
“Boys, my name is Alexandra Bradshaw. What are your names, if I may?”
“Aye am Elder Phillip, M’am,” said the Aussie.
“And I am Elder Young. I’m from Utah.”
“That’s in America, right?”
“Yes, M’am.”
Alexandra paused for a moment until a little something she had heard came to mind. She was too curious not to mention it, even if it would come across as rude and gossipy—a regular John Dory.
“Ah, yes,” she said, “so how many wives do each of you have?”
She was not even sure that her memory was serving her correctly or that this was the American church that did have polygamy.
The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov Page 41