I'll Take Manhattan (21 page)

His months in Manhattan had only made Cutter more compelling to look at; deepening the contrast between his blondness and his darkly proud, purposeful manner. He seemed older than twenty-four and more dangerous; a mysterious danger made more seductive by his perfect manners and the unexpectedly warm, rarely won smile that totally changed his expression, that humanized this aloof man. He was well born, he was beginning to be rather respected by the older men in the world of banking but, as the women of the Bay City told themselves, he was apparently not marriage-minded. Cutter Amberville remained resolutely, inexplicably hard to get, fascinatingly, infuriatingly, tantalizingly free of heart. None of the women who gossiped about him suspected that his reason for avoiding an involvement with one of the elegant, unmarried girls of San Francisco was a question of clear-eyed policy: what trouble might Lily cause if she heard about any new romance?

Cutter was absolutely armored against even the most delicious girl—if she represented a possible entanglement. But, in spite of a degree of emotional control that most men of any age could never achieve, he was utterly unable to dominate his avid, brutal need for sex. He had to have women and he had to have them often and now, after Lily, he had to have them in a condition of risk. Not for him the easy, relatively safe conquest of the women who worked at his office or women he could pick up in bars. Quite logically he recognized that there were women within Society, women who moved in his own world, who were just as restless as he was, who lived with unslaked desire to the same degree as he did, women he could possess at will. But to attract him they had to be women who had too much to lose to become a threat to his public life. He never pursued a woman who could make a claim on him, never stalked a woman who could injure him, and if he sensed in a woman any hint of that crazy, reckless, cap-over-the-windmill view of life that had been Lily’s, he never went after her.

But there were so many others! For a man with eyes to see, a man who was surrounded by married couples, there were possible conquests everywhere. Secret swift conquests, made without any ritual of courtship, conquests
that were a kind of mutual recognition of an uncomplicated lust. Cutter was the cleverest of lovers. He knew how to make danger work for him, how to seize the most unexpected opportunities, how to sniff out the woman who was as wild and hot as he was under all the proper trappings of their world. With a glance he could tell a mere flirt from a woman in heat, and make his move in a way that drew no attention.

Cutter’s reputation as the most elusive single man in the city grew with every year that passed. He went out almost every night: at Ernie’s, the Gatti brothers both knew that he liked to begin dinner with the local Dungeness crab, served as simply as possible; at Kan’s, Johnny Kan himself came to the phone when Cutter called for a reservation; at Trader Vic’s his table was always in the Captain’s Cabin; but normally he was invited to private homes, not restaurants.

Cutter had realized that the quickest way to total social acceptance in San Francisco was through music. He never failed to attend some twenty of the twenty-six scheduled opera performances and he went to the symphony on both the “fashionable” nights and the “listening” nights. After a few years he was asked to join the Bohemian Club, an institution that was founded in 1872 to promote the arts. By the 1900s it had become a center of all-male power; a club to which the most important men in America were invited for the annual encampments on the Russian River.

Soon Cutter became known to banking leaders like Richard P. Cooley, president of the Wells Fargo Bank; George Christopher, chairman of the board of the Commonwealth National Bank, and Rudolph A. Peterson, president of the Bank of America. He was careful to maintain his New York banking contacts as well. His months in Manhattan had given him that sort of patina that is comparable to a year spent in the best finishing school in Switzerland for a debutante from a middle-sized American city. He hadn’t learned anything to which a specific dollar value could be attached, but he had been thoroughly dipped in the currents of the ocean of major American finance.

On his return Cutter had rejoined his old firm, Booker, Smity and Jameston, but soon moved on to another, larger one. By the time he was thirty, he was seasoned enough to become a junior partner in the firm of Standings and Alexander, one of the most influential in the city.

The head of Cutter’s new firm, James Standings III, was a fifth-generation San Franciscan. He had been born as royal as any citizen of a republic can be, and he thoroughly approved of Cutter. He invited him to play golf at the Hillsborough Country Club; he invited him to join the Woodside Hunt, to sail from Sausalito Harbor on his forty-eight-meter yacht, and he proposed him for membership in his town club, the Union League on Nob Hill, for James Standings, like Mr. Bennett in
Pride and Prejudice
, was a man with daughters to marry. Not five, as he often thanked the Deity, only two, and although it pained him to admit it, Candice, his firstborn, was far from a beauty.

Along with its view of the bay, its charm, its culture and its restaurants, San Francisco takes justified pride in the beauty of its women. Such girls as Patsy McGinnis, Penny Bunn, Mielle Vietor, Frances Bowes, Mariana Keean and Patricia Walcott, lovely though each was, were not exceptions in the early 1960s, they were the rule. Compared to the average local belle, Candice Standings was, even in the eyes of her adoring father, just … average. Not
desperately
plain, mind you, but no, he had to admit, much as he loved her, she was not even pretty. No one had ever even dreamed of calling her Candy. He and his wife, Sally, also a fifth-generation San Franciscan, were just average too, but they both felt that their older child, a sixth-generation San Franciscan, should somehow have been born beautiful, defying all the laws of genetics. After all, their younger daughter, Nanette, showed definite signs of prettiness and she was only fourteen.

Candice had perfect teeth at last, after years of orthodontia, and glossy hair. She had well-developed arm and leg muscles from practicing all the right sports, but an unfortunately boyish body; she’d graduated from Miss Hamlin’s and Finch, her pearls were the best Gump’s could offer—but she lacked utterly that certain quality possessed
even by girls from that lower-class place called Los Angeles, that unfortunately necessary dash of something sexual that appealed to men.

James Standings III was enormously rich and getting steadily richer. Even if Sally Standings didn’t send all her dry-cleaning to Paris by air as did Mrs. W. W. Crocker, or possess a Chinese cook of thirty-seven years standing, like Mrs. Cameron, they lived, when they weren’t traveling or vacationing, at the Ramble, a thirty-five-room mansion in patrician Hillsborough, eighteen miles south of the city. The Ramble, inherited from Sally Standings’s parents, had terraces and formal gardens that were almost as impressive as Mrs. Charles Blyth’s Strawberry Hill, but alas, alas, for Candice, Hillsborough was honeycombed with equally vast houses, populated by equally rich fathers of far too many other girls—less plain, so infinitely, incontestably much less plain than Candice, girls who
all
had to be married off in order to produce seventh-generation San Franciscans.

If James Standings III had ever recognized a buyer’s market, it was on those many many evenings when he and Sally dined with twenty-five-year-old Candice and waited, just as anxiously as she did, for the telephone to ring. When it did, as it was beginning to more and more frequently, it was always for Nanette.

Cutter was thirty-one. He had never again felt the emotions he had felt for Lily, and he looked back at that time in his life as a form of clear insanity. But he had made a promise to Lily. He had written her the only kind of letter that he felt sure would ensure her silence. Since that time he had written her other letters, carefully uncompromising, not so many that their arrival in New York would cause comment, far, far fewer letters than the ones she wrote him, but cunningly phrased to keep her from any rash action, for Lily was now more determined than ever that soon they must be together.
They had waited seven years
! Zachary had a mistress, she wrote—everyone knew about it, someone who worked on
Style
, a girl named Nina Stern—so there could be no possibility of his succeeding in keeping the children. Lily was wildly impatient. She hated Cutter’s
ambiguous letters and thought he was being insanely cautious. Cutter could sense her gathering anger in each letter she sent him, asking what he was waiting for in order to claim her.

Cutter had absolutely no intention of marrying Lily and living with her and her children and making his way, step by step, like any ordinary man. He knew his full value and he planned to capitalize on it. He had decided to marry the girl who could do him the most good. He intended, most precisely, to marry Candice Standings, his boss’s daughter. He wanted the fat, easy commissions that would fall to him as her husband.

She was fairly plain, true, but not so outstandingly pudding-faced that people could say, without even thinking twice, that he had only married her for her money. She seemed to have a good disposition, she rode and skied, played tennis and bridge, all with equal competence, and would make an excellent wife. Candice would always be utterly
grateful
to him. Their marriage would just be another example of a good-looking man being united to a less attractive woman, an arrangement accepted for centuries. Candice had a nice smile, after all, and he imagined that she wouldn’t run to fat, judging from her mother.

His only problem was Lily. What might she not be capable of saying about him if she heard of an engagement to marry Candice Standings, a Society event that couldn’t be kept secret? True, his entanglement with Lily was now old news, no matter how unsavory, and gave her no hold over him.
But that boy
? Justin. His son. Even James Standings III would think twice about giving him even a homely daughter if Lily, in rage, were to tell him about Justin. Ever since Cutter had heard of the child’s birth he had tried not to think about him. He had never lain eyes on the child that Lily, damn her, had chosen to have out of arrogance and vanity and selfishness. Justin’s existence was entirely her responsibility, no matter how she imagined that the boy was a claim on Cutter.

seriously enough to become gossip. He knew that Candice was in love with him, with a timid, humble love that put her utterly at his mercy. His only chance, he calculated, was to present Lily with a
fait accompli
, to elope with Candice to Vegas some weekend and then let happen whatever would happen. By that time he would be James Standings’s son-in-law and heir apparent, and no one could take that away from him. Lily’s only solid weapon was that single letter. Even if she were mad enough to use it they were the words of a boy he no longer was.… No other real proof existed.

The Standingses skied at Squaw Valley and at Klosters, in Switzerland, but recently they’d bought a lodge in Aspen. They were all expert enough to negotiate the steep, open meadows and thickly wooded trails without difficulty. James and Sally Standings preferred to ski only in the sunny afternoon, but Cutter and Candice were always the first ones up the mountain, ignoring the freezing air and the possibility of frostbite at the high altitudes in order to get the first run down. In her ski clothes and goggles, Candice was as good-looking as anyone else, Cutter thought, and a better skier than most. She could follow wherever he led and he never had to worry about her ability to check her speed on the narrow trails that cut through the thick forests here and there on the mountains.

A love for skiing was perhaps Cutter’s deepest emotion—after hatred for his brother. It was the only sport which made him feel utterly free, unbound for a few downhill minutes from whatever people thought about him, from his past, from his future, from himself, particularly from himself, living entirely in the clean, clear present.

One morning, early, as he skied through the icy crust of newly fallen snow, rejoicing in the untouched surface before him, he suddenly realized that he couldn’t hear Candice’s skis behind him as usual. He stopped and turned. She was nowhere in sight. Cursing, Cutter began to climb back up the trail which was so narrow that he barely had room to sidestep up the mountain. He called her name but there was no answer. No other skiers appeared. After a few
minutes he spotted her body off the trail, dangling, motionless, in the branches of two closely growing pine trees, a foot off the ground as if she had been flung from above. She must have caught an edge and pinwheeled, he realized, using all his skill to clamber up through the dense forest.
Caught an edge and pinwheeled
. He shuddered with the knowledge. Anything could be broken in the wild flight of a pinwheel. Finally he reached her. Cutter had seen enough ski accidents in his many years on the slopes to guess, from her unnatural position, that there was a chance that her back was broken. He took off one of her mitts to feel her pulse. She was alive and that was all he could be sure of, for she was unconscious, and he must not try to move her. Cutter left her there, facedown on the bed of icicle-dripping branches, while he dashed on down the trail to alert the ski patrol.

It wasn’t his fault, of course. Nobody could blame him. People hurt themselves skiing all the time. Everybody knew Candice was a good skier. A cold morning, a steep narrow trail. No, nobody, not even her parents, could reasonably blame him. However, he could
choose
to take the blame. He could say that he blamed himself, that it was his fault, that he should have known that the snow was too icy, too risky. He could have stopped her, should have stopped her. Yes, he could take the blame. And he could marry her if she lived. He could have everything Candice Standings could bring him and not even Lily could utter a cry of reproach, if he married a crippled girl, crippled by his fault.

It had taken Nina Stern longer than she would have believed possible to seduce Zachary. After the difficult birth of Justin, the Ambervilles’ third and last child, Lily had been very ill for months. Maxi, finding herself the least attention-getting member of her family, had proceeded to outdo herself in inventive acts of naughtiness. Not even Mary Poppins could have handled her, Zachary used to groan to himself, as his heart melted at her genuinely contrite tears when she was eventually caught and had to be punished. Thank God television had been invented. Being deprived of her favorite shows was the only punishment
that he could inflict on her. He could never have brought himself to spank Maxi or lock her in her room. How had people disciplined their children before television?