“What’s the point?” She spun around. “The point, my darling husband, is that we are married. That may not mean anything to you anymore but it means everything to me. I will not become some sad pathetic divorcee for everyone to pity. I care about what people think of me.”
That was the response Adam had been counting on. It was his only way out. “Lilith, I intend to get this divorce,” he said. “If you force me to, I will take you to court and say you have been unfaithful to me.”
She laughed. “Oh, Adam, that’s ridiculous! Everyone in town knows you’ve been going to Sally Stanford’s for years. We’re both guilty on that count.”
“But there’s one difference between you and me, Lilith,” he said. “I don’t care who knows it. I don’t care who knows that I fuck whores. And that my wife fucks everyone from Italian gigolos to Japanese gardeners. And that she had a little ménage à trois with her girlfriend and a famous opera star last month in an opium house on Grant Street.”
Lilith’s face went white.
“I don’t care who knows any of it,” Adam said. “But you do and I know that you do. If you don’t give me a divorce. I’ll drag you into court and lay out all the ugly details of our marriage for everyone to see. You know how this town loves dirt. It’ll be the best-read story in the newspaper.”
“You bastard,” she said.
“Don’t make me do it, Lilith,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.”
As Lilith stared at him he could almost see her mind working, analyzing her position, looking for his weaknesses, sizing up her chances.
“I was going to ask you if there was another woman,” she said, “then I realized how absurd that is. There’s no room in your life for anyone but you. You’re a robot. You have nothing to offer a woman.” She gave him a final, spiteful look. “Get out of my room,” she said.
“There’s one more thing,” Adam said. “I want Ian.”
She laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding! What do you want with him?”
“He’s my son.”
“Oh, you noticed?”
Adam took a breath. “I don’t like what you’re doing to him. You’re turning him against me, Lilith. I won’t have it.”
“So you’ve decided to try out for Father of the Year all of a sudden? For God’s sake, Adam, if you cared at all about Ian’s feelings you wouldn’t put him through a custody fight. Why don’t you think of him for once?”
She turned back to her mirror. “You stole the newspaper from me, Adam,” she said, as she calmly applied cream to her face. “And someday, some way, I intend to get it back. But you might as well forget Ian. You lost him years ago.”
Adam knew now she would agree to the divorce but her words about Ian cut into him. If he wanted him he would have to endure a custody battle and all its sordid fallout. Josh was right; the courts would never grant him custody and putting Ian through it would only alienate him further.
He stared at Lilith’s back, at the rippling movements of her thin shoulder blades. Suddenly, all he really wanted was to be free of her forever.
“I’ll be staying at the club,” he said. “I’ll have the divorce papers delivered to you tomorrow.”
It was dusk, and the grounds of the Palace of Fine Arts were deserted. Adam sat on a bench alone, near the pond. He pulled his coat collar up against the cold wind that was blowing up from the bay, his eyes trained on the street. He had just come from Josh Hillman’s office. Lilith’s lawyers had delivered the divorce papers, signed. It had been only eight days since he last saw Elizabeth on the bridge. He shivered and glanced at his watch. When he looked up, he saw Elizabeth coming toward him and he jumped to his feet.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “It was hard for me to get away when you called. Then I couldn’t get a cab and had to have my aunt’s driver bring me here. I gave him fifty dollars to shut him up.” She smiled. “I hope it was enough.”
Her smile faded as she noticed Adam’s somber expression. “What is it, Adam? Why did you want to see me?”
She was swathed in a silver fox coat, a white scarf wrapped around her hair. Her cheeks were red from the cold and her lips were parted expectantly. She had never looked so beautiful and he had never felt so unsure of himself. What if, after all this, she didn’t want him after all?
“Adam? What is it?” she asked. “You look so strange.”
He took her by the shoulders. “Marry me, Elizabeth.”
Her eyes grew wide. He was acutely aware of the silence, growing unbearably longer with each second she hesitated. He searched her face for a clue to her thoughts. There was a glimmer of the same wariness he had seen in her eyes that day on the bridge, when she said she thought he had wanted her for her money. He grasped her hands. They were icy cold.
“Marry me,” he whispered urgently.
“But, Adam —-” she said.
“I’m getting a divorce. I love you, Elizabeth. Marry me, please.”
The details of her face were growing blurred in the fast fading light but her eyes were locked on his. Suddenly, he felt her fingers curl tightly around his.
“Yes,” she said. She smiled, and it grew into a laugh. “Yes,” she repeated. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
He clasped her to him, burying his face in the soft warmth of her fur and neck.
Finally, she pulled away. “I have to go home to Atlanta. I have to tell my parents.”
His fingers tightened around hers. “When will you be back?”
“As soon as I can.” She glanced at the waiting car. “I have to go, Adam,” she said.
He wouldn’t release her hand.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It will work out. It will be different this time. I’m not sixteen. I’m twenty-seven. My father can’t tell me what to do anymore. This time, I won’t listen to him. This time, I’ll listen to my heart.”
She leaned into him. “Oh, what a wonderful life we’re going to have together,” she whispered against his cheek. “I’ll share your dreams. I’ll make you so happy. We’ll have children, so many children. I love you, Adam.”
She pulled away and with a final smile ran across the lawn. He stood watching the car’s lights creep up the hill until they were gone. He sat down on the bench and looked up at the Grecian statues on the colonnades but they were lost in the dark. He looked to his right down to the water. The fog was creeping in from the ocean and the lights of the East Bay flickered and went dark.
His life, he knew with a sudden aching certainty, was never going to be the same.
PART TWO
ELIZABETH 1937
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Adam and Elizabeth were married a month later.
It was a small ceremony, held in the rustic sanctuary of the Swedenborgian Church in Pacific Heights. Elizabeth’s sister flew in from Atlanta to be the maid of honor but her parents refused to come. Adam, realizing he did not really feel close to any man, asked Josh Hillman to be his best man. There was no one else in the small candlelit church to hear the tender ceremony.
Elizabeth wanted a honeymoon in Paris but Adam felt it was unwise because of the growing threat of war in Europe. They decided on a week in New York.
They arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria in late afternoon on a balmy day that promised summer. In their suite, Elizabeth went immediately to the window and gazed down on the busy street below.
“I like this city,” she said. “There’s so much to do here, so much to see.”
“We’ve been married less than a day,” Adam said with a smile, “and you’re bored with me already.”
Elizabeth came to him and slipped her arms around his waist. “I will never be bored with you,” she said.
He kissed her, almost formally. She gave him an inquisitive half smile and kissed him back, a deep kiss that left him stirred. She brought up her left hand to examine the thin gold band.
“Why didn’t you want a diamond?” Adam said.
&nb
sp; “I like the way this feels,” she said.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go to Paris.”
“Oh, Adam, I don’t care about that,” she said softly. “We’re finally together. That’s all that matters.”
He stared at the face before him, the one that had haunted his dreams for so many years. He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
When she pulled back, she was breathless. “We should take off our coats at least,” she said. She drew the drapes, muting the dusky light. She kept her eyes on him as she began to undo the buttons of her suit coat. Adam’s hands moved mechanically toward his own clothes, his eyes on hers. He looked away for a moment to slip off his belt. When he looked up again, his fingers froze.
She was standing by the window in her slip, her hair freed from its coil at her neck. The white satin slip pulled across her hips, outlining the soft curve of her pelvis and the tips of her breasts. Adam stared, mesmerized, as he felt himself growing hard. He had known she was beautiful but not like this. He had relied on his dreamy memory of a girl. This was a woman before him...his wife.
He shrugged out of the rest of his clothes and went to her. At the first press of her body he felt he would explode. He fought back the urge, drawing on a mental trick he had learned from one of Sally Stanford’s prostitutes, and guided her down on the bed. He had always been vaguely ashamed about going to prostitutes but he had learned much about pleasing women from them, things he could now bring to Elizabeth. He didn’t expect much sophistication from her. She had been a sheltered teenager, and what could she have gained from a marriage to an old man like Willis Reed?
He was fully prepared to be the patient teacher. But at this moment, delirious with the feel of her flesh against his, he was fighting for control. He had to hold back. He had to perform.
He was losing himself in her body, kissing her, feeling her, trying to be gentle. Finally, when he could stand it no longer he positioned himself above her. Her eyes stared up at him, clear and steady. Slowly, he inserted himself inside her and immediately had to shut his eyes.
Then the wave reared, and he began to move inside her, helpless.
Suddenly, he felt her inner muscles grow tight, then tighter, her wet warmth gripping him. Stunned, he could only stop and the wave subsided.
“Wait for me,” she whispered.
Her arms were draped gently across his back. But inside, she was holding him fiercely, with no apparent effort. She lay there quietly looking up at him. He was totally in her control. It was the most incredibly erotic sensation he had ever experienced.
“Oh my God,” he whispered hoarsely.
Her lips turned up in a small smile, and she closed her eyes in pleasure. She released him then tightened, repeating the exquisite pulsing rhythm for several minutes. Then she let go and began to move her hips rhythmically, her breath coming in short gasps. She raised her legs to take him deeper, pulling his back, as her climax tore through her body. With a final quivering thrust and cry, he collapsed.
He was breathing hard and his back hurt from where her fingers had dug into his skin. But he was completely, gloriously spent, bathed in sensation and sweat.
“I wanted to make it good for you,” he whispered against her neck.
“You did,” she said.
They lay there, entwined, as the room grew dark. After a while Adam moved to his side so he could see Elizabeth’s face. Her eyes were closed, her red hair fanned out on the pillow, a half smile on her lips, one hand draped languidly across her breast. She looked so blatantly sensual, and the way she had moved, and held him like that —- where had she learned such things?
His ego was slightly bruised and he felt vaguely disconcerted, unable to reconcile the fact that this woman he had held up as some ideal goddess had sexually manipulated him as no prostitute ever had.
She opened her eyes. “Hello, husband,” she said softly.
“Hello, wife,” he said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They returned home to take up residence in a suite at the Mark Hopkins until they could find a house. Elizabeth said she didn’t mind, but Adam did. He had lost the house on Vallejo to Lilith in the divorce and the rest of his finances had been greatly limited. He had retained majority ownership in the Times and the paper in Sacramento, but Lilith had extracted high alimony payments, her lawyer claiming she was entitled to be supported in the style equal to her social position.
The irony of his situation was not lost on Adam. Here he was, just married to the widow of one of the country’s wealthiest men, yet he was so financially strapped himself that he could not afford to buy her a new home.
Elizabeth had inherited $100 million from Reed but it was tied up in stock holdings, set up in a trust directed by a board of executives from her late husband’s company. The revelation had come as somewhat of a disappointment to Adam. He certainly hadn’t expected to plunder Elizabeth’s fortune but he had expected to have some access to it eventually. As it was cunningly set up, however, Elizabeth could sell small blocks of stock and spend the capital as she wished but Adam could lay no direct claim to it. She could buy whatever she wanted. But nothing could be in his name.
Someday she would also inherit money from her father. But Charles Ingram, Adam was sure, would do whatever was necessary short of disowning his daughter to prevent Adam from using Elizabeth’s inheritance for his own means.
So money was, for Adam at least, an unspoken issue. To have all that money so close yet so far was unbearable. Especially since he was so eager to get on with building his newspaper empire. He had plans, such big plans. But no big money of his own to back them up.
He often thought about bringing it up to Elizabeth, asking if she could sell some stock. But however he framed the question in his mind it sounded like a confirmation of what Charles Ingram had said -- that Adam was nothing but a fortune hunter.
Even now, after nearly twelve years, he still smarted whenever he remembered Ingram’s dismissal that day when he came to see Elizabeth in the mansion on Broadway: “You have nothing to offer my daughter.”
Three months after the wedding, they settled into a rented home on Jackson Street. It was a big cheerful Victorian but on a less desirable fringe of Pacific Heights. Elizabeth did not seem to care about her newly scaled-down lifestyle. The only discontent she expressed was over her inability to conceive. After five months, she still had not become pregnant.
She wanted children so badly. She wanted them partly to make up for the fact that Adam had lost Ian in the divorce.
Soon after Adam returned from his honeymoon, Lilith had called him. She ranted that his marriage to Elizabeth was an insult to her, that it made her look foolish to her friends.
“You never had any sense of propriety,” she told him. “This will ruin any chances you ever had of being somebody in this town. And Ian’s, too.”
“She can’t control me or the newspaper anymore,” Adam told Elizabeth. “So she will control Ian and turn him even further against me.”
“He’s your son, Adam,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure he still loves you.”
But Adam’s fears were confirmed when Ian finally came for his first visit. He was withdrawn and silent, greeting Elizabeth with indifference and cold good manners. Adam had arranged to have the day off and they went to see the new film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which the eight-year-old Ian pronounced “a baby movie.” By the end of the weekend, Adam returned Ian to the house on Vallejo, feeling defeated.
“Lilith’s right,” he told Elizabeth. “He’s lost to me.”
“Oh, Adam, it’s not true,” she said. “He’s probably just very hurt and confused by the divorce.”
“I don’t like the way he treated you.”
“He’s just a boy, Adam,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t be so hard on him.”
He took her in his arms. “Let’s have a baby,” he said.
“We’ve certainly been trying,” she said.
“I want children,” Adam said.
“A house full of them.”
“Yes, I know, sons,” she said. “And maybe a daughter to keep me company?”
Later, they lay quietly in each other’s arms after making love. Adam stared at the ceiling lost in his thoughts. As always, Elizabeth had surprised him with her passion and he found himself wondering more and more about Willis Reed and what kind of marriage they had had.
“Elizabeth, are you awake?” he said.
“Barely,” she said.
He propped himself up on one elbow to look at her. “Why didn’t you have children with Reed?” he asked.
She was quiet for a moment. “You’re worried that I can’t, aren’t you,” she said. “I know I can, Adam. I just know it. And we will.”
Adam lay back again. The long silence was broken by the muted call of a fog horn.
Elizabeth sighed and sat up against the headboard. “I should tell you something about Willis and me,” she said softly.
Adam waited but she didn’t seem to want to go on.
“Elizabeth, what is it? You can tell me anything, you know that.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s not that I can’t have babies. It’s just...Willis never made love to me. Not once in ten years.”
Adam looked at her in astonishment but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She sat naked, slightly stoop-shouldered, her eyes on the sheets. “He was a strange man,” she whispered. “He stayed in the city and came up to the house only on the weekends. I was alone there all the time.” She paused again, her voice faltering. “On Saturday night, always at nine, he’d come up to my room. He’d sit in a chair near the bed and then order me to take my clothes off and touch myself. He sat there and watched. After a while, he would get up and leave.”
When she finally looked at Adam her eyes were glistening. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I was only seventeen and I had some stupid notion that it was my duty as a wife or something.” She shook her head. “I owe that to my mother. I never once saw her show any affection to my father but she still felt qualified to give me quite a little speech about a wife’s duty before I got married.”
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