by Susan Isaacs
“What should we do?”
“I told her. I told her she’d better watch her step every single minute of the day and night and that this was it.”
“All right.”
“No, listen to me. This is her last year here. She’s out. On her own. If she doesn’t get a full scholarship we’ll have to help her along, but no living here, no University of Cincinnati for her, hanging around with that Lynn Friedman who has no restrictions whatsoever. Whatever her little heart desires she gets. Her parents indulge her every whim. What they say about them is true: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing and that’s what’s influencing your daughter, but since she can’t get a convertible and she can’t go to Florida she wants something more. Why not? Everything’s up for grabs, so she’s grabbing the boys any which way she can because they’ve never given her a second look. But she’s not going to do it in Cincinnati, I can tell you that. Oh, no. Not her. Not where she could undermine everything we’ve ever worked for. She’s going and that’s final.”
“Dorothy.”
“What?”
“We can’t afford out-of-town college and Country Day.”
“We’ll have to. Anyway, you’re due for a raise. Overdue. You can speak to Mr. Tisman about it first thing Monday. Ask him to go right to Mr. Hart. Don’t take no from him for an answer. Do you hear me, Richard?”
“Maybe Jane just stayed out late, you know, talking.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I’ll go speak to her.”
“Now? No, it’s too late. I know you’ve gone to talk to her late at night and I never minded, because she obviously needed more than I could give her and I hoped you could talk some sense into her. But let her stew in her own juices for a while. Let her know that what she is will not be tolerated in this house.”
“All right. But, Dorothy, maybe if I—”
“Richard, listen to me. She’s an actress, just like her mother was. She can be very, very convincing, but don’t let her trick you. Promise me. You’ve always been soft where she’s concerned, and it’s brought us nothing but anguish. I want her out of the house for all our sakes. Promise me.” She reached out and stroked his forehead. “Promise me. Richard.”
Her father had not come to her room since before the night with Bobby Spurgeon, and nearly two weeks had gone by since then, so the past few nights she’d allowed herself to fall asleep before midnight instead of keeping vigil. Thus, it was not until he lifted her blanket that she knew he was back. “It’s only me,” he whispered. She twisted her arms in front of her in the manner of a child imitating an elephant’s trunk, to hide as much of herself as she could. “I thought you could use some company.” As he had before, he climbed into her bed and lay beside her under the covers. His pajamas smelled of Clorox. “It’s all right. Don’t get upset. I don’t believe you were a bad girl. Do you want to tell me your side of the story?”
She managed to whisper back, “I didn’t do anything.”
“All right. Don’t get yourself all upset now. If that’s what you say, I’ll believe you. No, don’t turn over. Stay like that. Now let’s have our talk. I know you really don’t want to go east. It’s true, so don’t shake your head. Your guidance counselor called Mom. Didn’t know that, did you? She said we should work on you, that you belong at one of those high-power colleges. Now don’t be upset. Come on, let me see a big smile. That’s my girl. Don’t think I don’t understand. No big fancy schools for you.”
“Please. I think I want to go, Daddy. Smith or Pembroke, whichever gives more money.”
“Oh, come on. I could talk to Mom. Wouldn’t it be nice staying here, where you have so many nice friends? Have your own nice, comfortable room?”
“No, Daddy, really, I—” Suddenly her whole body began to shake.
“You’re cold.”
“No.”
“So cold, my little Jane.” He had never touched her before. He’d only lain beside her, talking for the first time about Sally, about her beautiful black eyes, her smile, her bewitching ways. But now, as Jane’s legs convulsed in spasms, he hooked his leg over hers. “Poor Jane,” he said, and he rubbed against her, much more slowly than Bobby Spurgeon had, but with the same intent. “Let me warm you up. Isn’t this nice? Such a sweet girl you are. So pretty. I know you’re not a bad girl.” His hand ran back and forth along the curve from waist to hip. “Like your mother. Do you know that? You remind me so much of your mother. Just like Sally. Just like pretty little Sally.” His hand grazed her stomach and her breasts, then slid under the elastic waistband of her pajamas and rubbed her pubic hair.
“Oh, no.”
“Shhh.”
“Daddy, don’t.”
“I’ll talk to Mom. You can stay here, go to UC. Wouldn’t that be nice? Hmmm? Isn’t this nice? Loosen up a little bit. Come on. Feeling better? Warmer?”
“I want to go east.”
“No, you don’t. No. Easy. Take it easy.”
“I do. I really do.”
“My girl. Doesn’t this feel nice?”
“I’m going east. I am. Now stop. Please, stop—”
“Quiet.”
“Daddy, don’t. Please, I don’t want you to—”
“Shhh. You’ll wake the whole house.”
“Don’t!”
“Quiet, I said!”
“No!” She began to scream. “No! No! No!”
BOOK TWO
NICHOLAS
5
…we have our movie critic, Patricia Hynes. Pat?
Thank you, George. I’m standing here on Fifth Avenue in front of Nicholas and Jane Cobleigh’s exclusive co-op apartment. But I could be standing in Connecticut, in front of the Cobleighs’ country home, or on the sunswept California coast in front of the Cobleighs’ Santa Barbara estate. Where did it all begin? Well, for Jane Cobleigh, now fighting for her life in a London hospital, it began with a typical midwestern family. But her husband, superstar Nicholas Cobleigh, is used to the trappings of wealth. He was born into a family rich in privilege and tradition, an aristocratic…
—Excerpt from WABC Eyewitness News, New York
Despite his genteel name, Nicholas Cobleigh’s grandfather, Henry Underwood Cobleigh, was of exceedingly humble extraction. Henry’s father, Johnny, had sailed to America from England in 1868, ten years before Henry’s birth, with twenty pounds of another man’s money in his breeches. A warrant for his arrest on charges of robbery and manslaughter had been issued in Liverpool, and he obviously thought it politic to skip town. Johnny jumped ship at the first port in America—Newport, Rhode Island. But Newport was a real jog-trot city and Johnny wanted action. So he wandered north a bit until he found a spot congenial to his temperament.
Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was industrial, ugly, and brutal, its air yellow-gray from its own waste. Johnny felt at home. And soon, with the gold in his pocket combined with his entrepreneurial spirit and ham-size fists, he was owner of a thriving tavern in his adopted city.
The tavern was in the toughest part of Pawtucket, and with all the beatings, knifings, and shootings, most tavern owners in the area were, within a few months of opening for business, either disfigured or dead. But Johnny Cobleigh had no trouble with homicidal millworkers or schizophrenic whores. He was six feet tall, weighed three hundred and forty pounds, and had a veiny, triple-chinned face. He resembled a side of beef.
Henry’s mother, born Henrietta Underwood, was the daughter of a millworker whose leg had been irreparably crushed by a falling bolt of ice-blue taffeta. Thus, her marriage to a man of commerce like Johnny Cobleigh was considered a big step up. Henrietta was vaguely pretty—with blue-black eyes like Concord grapes—and dull-witted. She was completely unremarkable except for her thinness. She was average height but weighed only eighty-three pounds. As a child she had been taunted with “Henrietta Underfed” and “Henri ett a stick and that’s why she looks like one. Har, har.”
But a happy marriage made up for a bleak girl
hood. Unfortunately, her happiness was short-lived. On May 3, 1878, Henrietta bled to death giving birth to a strapping eight-pound son.
Johnny named the baby for his wife and gave him away to the Catholics, a decision not as unfeeling as it sounds, for Johnny could not raise an infant in Pawtucket, where its lullabies would be the wails of syphilitics and the retchings of drunks. Although he had been christened in the Church of England thirty-one years before, Johnny gave Henry to the Roman Catholic Sisters of Saint Helene in nearby Providence because, having visited four orphanages, he found that theirs was the only one that did not smell of feces.
Johnny probably did the right thing. Henry Underwood Cobleigh had garnered a couple of recessive genes from his parents and, as a result, was quite handsome and intelligent. The nuns doted on him as he grew, on his little-boy lisp when he breathed “Yeth, Thithter” to their commands, on his glittering blue-black eyes, on his quick mind, his modest mien, his cleanliness, his decorum. So when Johnny’s Sunday visits ceased, when Henry was four (he was preoccupied with his second wife, another pretty, dim-witted girl, his growing business success—he now owned three taverns—and his new avocation, local Democratic politics), his boy scarcely seemed to miss him, surrounded as he was by twelve good, nurturing sisters.
Not that they were putty in Henry’s hands. The nuns were demanding and strict, and by the time he was seventeen they had taught him Latin and history and geography and mathematics. He could recite Macbeth by heart. He was a budding Aquinist, having already read and reread all seven quaestiones disputatae and Summa theologica.
And his manners. He no longer lisped, but he still offered a courteous “Yes, Sister” to any request. The sisters were mostly from well-off Catholic families, and they reached back into their girlhoods for standards of excellence in male conduct. Henry, tall and slender and fair, grew into manhood with the bearing and courtliness of an upper-class Catholic gentleman.
What a charmer he was! His mind and his manners were nearly flawless. Unfortunately, his soul was another matter. Perhaps his father’s rejection really did hurt; Henry may even have heard that Johnny and his second wife had had twin daughters. Or possibly twelve mothers are eleven too many. Love gushing from so many sources can seem a flood; the boy may have been so busy stemming it that he never comprehended that it was meant to flow back.
More than anything else he wanted to be a man of substance. He loved to imagine himself all decked out, looking natty. His light hair would be parted stylishly on the side and kept perfect with sweet bay rum hair tonic, the kind Mr. O’Keefe, railroad man and trustee of the orphanage, wore. He’d own fifty pairs of silk hose and a homburg. And naturally he’d have a fine lady in a pink brocade gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves clinging to his arm, and she’d murmur, “Oh, Henry, you’re the finest figure of a man in all of Rhode Island.”
Henry never mentioned his reveries in the confessional. Nor did he allude to his liaison with Minnie Halloran, a middle-aged spinster who came to the orphanage to help with the laundry. For more than four years, he had relations with Minnie at least once a week, but his Saturday afternoon confessions were so bland that the priest, on hearing Henry’s voice, slouched in his seat, believing he was about to hear the small sins of an amiable soul. “I cursed five times this week, Father,” or “I committed the sin of avarice. I wanted the jackknife Billy Thomas’s uncle from Maryland sent him, and…”
So it was just as well that the day Henry turned eighteen, he laughed off the sisters’ prayers that he become a Jesuit. He simply said goodbye to twelve stunned nuns with as much warmth as if he were taking leave of a shopkeeper and strolled out of the orphanage, never, of course, to return. Then he paid a surprise visit to his father’s tavern, where Johnny, now a Democratic ward leader, held court. Two hours later he emerged with enough money to pay for his college education—and then some. Naturally, he never saw his father again.
Henry Underwood Cobleigh became an Ivy League man. He entered Brown University in Providence as a member of the Class of ’99 and emerged four years later with a bachelor of arts degree, a letter of acceptance from Harvard Law School, a mastery of poker and polo, and a passion for young high-born women which he managed to satisfy surprisingly often.
Louise Kendall was a beauty, the third of six gorgeous daughters of Roderick Kendall, a Baptist minister and descendant of one of Providence’s oldest, most distinguished, and, alas, impoverished families. It mattered not a whit, however, that the Kendall girls had no dowry, for all were extraordinary-looking, with thick, wavy, strawberry-blond hair and the fine, angled bones of aristocrats. Gentlemen from as far away as Boston were so eager to call that Mary Kendall, Roderick’s wife, actually had to allot parlor time to each of her daughters.
Louise was eighteen when one of her sister Abigail’s beaux brought Henry Cobleigh to the Kendall house. As she confessed to Abby that night, it was simply love at first sight. He was handsome and regally straight-backed and so—Louise giggled with pleasure—and so elegantly dressed, with matching gray spats and gloves and a gray frock coat with a black velvet collar. “And did you hear him, with that deep, deep lawyer’s voice, the way he said ‘Good afternoon, Louise’ to me?”
“Hush, Louise. You’ll wake Mother.”
“Do you think he finds me attractive, Abby? Do you think he’ll be back tomorrow?”
He came back. Henry, worldly at twenty-five, was both a connoisseur and a realist. He was impressed with Louise’s face and form, her flawless breeding. Such a woman would be an asset as a wife. And she was the best he could do; he had sought the hands of two wealthy young women, both wildly enamored of him, and their fathers had rejected his suit out of hand. “Who are you, young man? Who are you?” one had demanded. Despite his lofty social position, the Reverend Kendall could not afford to turn away a fine-looking, brilliantly educated, well-spoken man of substance, a man who was on his way to becoming a pillar of the bar of the city of Providence.
If Louise Kendall’s marriage was not as advantageous as her sisters’, it was certainly the most exciting. She adored her handsome husband, adored their jewel of a Georgian house on Benefit Street, adored birthdays, anniversaries, even the Fourth of July, for each holiday eve Henry would come home from his office and call from the entrance hall, “Where is my angel girl? Where is my lovely Louise?”
“Henry, is that you?” Louise would descend the stairs one graceful step at a time, lifting her skirts so she wouldn’t trip and allowing her husband a peek at her shapely ankles. “How was your day?” she’d ask, standing on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, trying so hard to act demure and suppress her rising giggles of anticipation—she knew what the hand hidden behind his back was holding. But her eagerness was so great she couldn’t stay still. She fussed with the curls on her forehead, patted the dainty embroidered bodice of her blouse. “Oh, Henry,” she would finally blurt out. “Show me. Please show me. Pretty please.”
“Show you what?” he’d demand in mock ignorance. But then he’d relent, perhaps wanting to see the glee that was hiding behind her dazzling blue eyes. “Oh, all right. Take it. It’s for you.” He’d move his hand from behind his back and hold a gift box high in the air. Louise would jump for it.
“Oh, pooh!” she’d exclaim after a few unsuccessful jumps. “You’re too tall for me.” Her soft mouth would form a sweet pout, and Henry would lower his hand and allow her to grab it. Ripping off the ribbon and the wrapping, squealing with delight, she’d find her holiday present, what her husband called “a little trinket”—a rope of pearls or a brooch, hair clip or ring, often set with sapphires to match her eyes.
There were those in Providence who wondered at the Cobleighs’ elegance: For a man from nowhere and a girl with nothing, they lived, perhaps, too well. But most people didn’t speculate because watching the Cobleighs was such fun. Henry (far handsomer than his movie star grandson would ever be), strolling along Waterman Street in a blazer and white trousers, doffing his boater to passersby had the grace o
f nobility, and indeed the younger members of the bar referred to him as Prince Henry. But with affection.
And Louise, chin high, looked as majestic as a Gibson girl. Her already slender form was held in further check by a tight corset with long metal straps in front and hook fastenings in the back, and it molded her figure into a graceful S curve, her breasts thrust forward, her posterior pushed back. At church, at a lawn party, at a banquet, her costume was always the height of Edwardian fashion: elegant, chaste, and rich. Her body was a dressmaker’s delight, a man’s dream.
However, such indulgence is costly. Henry could not sustain such high style on his lawyer’s income, and he had seen the last of his father’s money disappear across a card table in his last month at law school. But Henry found a way.
He began his legal career in the offices of Broadhurst & Fenn, probably the most distinguished law firm in Providence—certainly the oldest. At such a venerable institution, life moves slowly. Papers are passed from attorney to attorney with languid courtesy. Old partners never die, but shuffle to high-backed chairs and dictate memoranda in the shaky voices of nonagenarians. Young men of twenty-four are given a small desk, a low salary, a modest amount of encouragement, and a fair degree of prestige. It was not sufficient for Henry Cobleigh.
After his first two weeks at Broadhurst & Fenn, Henry recognized that he would not be rich for another thirty years. And then not really rich. Lawyers might belong to the best clubs, smoke the best cigars, and run the country, but they didn’t own yachts.
He brought some papers to Spencer Howell to sign. Mr. Howell was one of the firm’s most important clients, fabulously rich, the owner of the second-biggest textile mill in New England, T. L. Howell & Sons.