Just how much does he really know about me? He knows about mother. ... They must have a file on me a foot thick.
Chris’s thoughts began to drift back and back and back in time. All the way back to the beginning.
Chapter Nine
FLORA SLOAN HAD BEEN described at various times as enchanting, fetching, witty and gay, terribly, terribly chic, charming, clever, empty-headed, flighty, hyperthyroid, and so forth. All of these descriptions fitted in one way or another, at one time or another. She was never still long enough for a comprehensive composite to be made.
Her background was mysterious. Midwesterner, most people thought Indiana ... small town in Wisconsin ... or something like that.
No one knew when she came to Manhattan or about her early failures and affairs. She was suddenly there. Eminently successful as a fashion executive, a financial wizard, a magazine editor, and later as the queen bee in a hive of social-climbers.
The most successful of her profitable ventures was a pair of marriages and subsequent divorce settlements, first with her magazine-publishing husband, then with a real estate operator from whom she extracted a commendable hunk of mid-Manhattan. After the second coup she retired to become a patron of the arts and grand matron of the Flora Sloan clique.
She did nothing worthy with her independent wealth, but Flora had the ability to do nothing in extremely good taste. Her only true dedication was to keep her face unwrinkled and her body beautiful. She ran through a succession of lovers, with whom she became bored in days, weeks, and occasionally months. The moment they began to ooze around to talking stocks and bonds, they were through.
It was inevitable that sooner or later she would get a pasting. She fell in love with a young artist. His paintings showed a rather sketchy talent, but he did have a positive talent in bed. For the first time in her life she behaved silly, lavished her lover with expensive gifts, became fiendishly jealous, and allowed herself to be pushed around. She sponsored a one-man art show at a time when her expression of like or dislike was a command, and he became a “rage.”
Everyone seemed to know that Flora was being had, but how does one tell a queen bee? She woke one rainy morning to find her lover flown from the nest after skinning her out of a small mint. When the detectives dragged him back for a tear-filled showdown, there came the revelation that he had a wife and three children “somewhere in Maine.”
Comforting friends soothed her. A trip to Europe would be the remedy for her shattering experience. She pulled herself together for “their” sake. Yes, they were right. An ocean voyage and the long-overdue grand tour to put the broken pieces together.
Flora, her traveling companion, secretary, Irish maid, and two poodles got no farther than the second stop, Monaco. In barreled the Count Alphonse de Monti at a hundred and twenty miles per hour in a red Ferrari. He saddled up to a chair opposite her at the Casino and began throwing around ten-thousand-lira notes like kleenex at the baccarat, table.
From the second he bowed and kissed her hand Flora knew what a hell of an elegant gentleman he was. And with a title to boot. She shrieked with exhilaration as he buzzed around hairpin turns in his red Ferrari. She listened breathlessly, as he whispered his way through Verdi love arias.
“God damn,” she told her traveling companion, “this continental charm is the living end. I checked his financial rating and the bastard’s loaded to boot.”
Since European titles and rich American divorcees were fascinating subjects, when Flora became the Countess de Monti it almost knocked the World Series off the front pages.
The glitter lasted through two spaghetti dinners. She found that Italians had very very funny ideas about their womenfolk. His old Kentucky home outside Rome was big and marbly enough, but although she had investigated his solvency she had failed to check into a stable of mistresses stashed in villas all over southern France. Now that she was properly the Countess de Monti, his charm became reserved for rivers yet uncrossed.
In fact, in many respects, he proved a slob.
He had peculiarities that she had not tested before in men. He was saturated with pride from head to foot. He bathed in old tradition. He professed to be deeply religious. And, like many normal and healthy Italian men of means, he fully expected his wife to stay in the old Kentucky home and get quietly plump while he barreled around Europe in his red Ferrari.
One more thing! An heir! Italians considered the production of a male offspring as some sort of monumental feat. With Flora as his mate, it was—but he managed.
She went into wild scenes about her treatment. Alphonse was proud because his wife was so spicy. But when she blurted out her plan to get rid of the unborn baby, it was another matter. He promptly slapped her into a private apartment under lock and key and the watchful eyes of a pair of matrons, then barreled off in his red Ferrari.
The result of this happy union was Christopher de Monti.
The proud father came home and celebrated long and hard. In fact, he dropped his guard so low that Flora was able to bundle Chris up and flee to the United States.
This time the divorce and custody battle did knock the World Series off the front pages.
Final judgment Momma got another splendid settlement mostly in olive groves. Chris was to spend summers with Poppa in Italy.
Flora never quite forgave little Chris for lowering her breasts, ruining her eighteen-inch waistline, and turning her stomach muscles to jelly. Unfortunately a society larger than her personal clique imposed certain conditions which called for her to be a “good mother.” She smothered Chris in a sea of motherliness—in full view of her friends.
He remembered being displayed by Flora, led into the parlor where she held court, listening to the “ohs” and “ahs” from the waxen-faced people posed about the room. Momma would tussle his hair. Momma would squeeze him. He hated that, because she was always nervous when he was around and her fingernails always dug into his flesh.
But summer! That was different! In summer he would get on a big ship with his current “Nana” and cross the ocean to Italy and Poppa. He traveled with Poppa in the red Ferrari, and they went to museums and the opera and to the Riviera. He loved his father deeply. He did not think he loved his mother. He cried and Poppa cried when summer was over and he had to return to America to school. Flora took Alphonse’s pleas to keep the boy as a personal vendetta against her “motherliness.”
And so Chris was kept in America nine months of the year. A veteran Atlantic traveler by the age of twelve, he was also an habitué of fashionable schools with names that all sounded like either Exeter or Briarwood.
He was a very quiet boy and a determined student. His true character was formed by teachers who taught in a day when political liberalism, sense of social conscience, and ideals were not frowned upon. He loved Poppa more than anyone in the world—but somehow, Italy was always a playland.
He read Lincoln and Paine and Jefferson. He completely identified himself as an American. He did not like the way the rich people treated poor people in Italy.
The American dream—the American ideal—became the guidepost in his life.
When he was old enough, Chris overlooked Poppa’s weakness for women, and often a new mistress formed a threesome on their travels in the summer. And as he grew older he began to see his father’s human frailties. Poppa was vain. Poppa was a snob. Poppa was unmoved by the poverty in Naples. Poppa guarded the iniquities of the class system.
Poppa was a Fascist.
Chris did not know what it meant at first, but each year it came more and more into focus and it rubbed against the grain of his American education.
Poppa would get a little drunk and talk about Benito Mussolini returning them to the glory of ancient Rome. Chris knew Mussolini—a pompous ass—but he never said anything to his father about that. The Italian people were warm and kind and they liked to sing and eat and drink and strut and believe they were great lovers. Years of privation as a second-rate power had allowed evil men to perpetrate the hoax of fascism upon them.