The Last Princess (5 page)

“Because I’m engaged,” she whispered. Randolph signaled the driver to proceed, but not before she had seen the shock on Harry’s face.

“Lily, I have to talk to you,” Randolph said on the way home. She had been so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she scarcely heard him. “I have to talk to you about Harry Kohle,” he said more loudly.

“What about him?” she asked defensively.

“He’s not for you, Lily.”

“What makes you think I care?” she retorted.

“I was with you tonight—you seem to forget—and I saw the way you looked at him.”

“I really don’t think that’s any of your business. I had a wonderful time tonight.”

“That’s just the point—”

Interrupting him, she said deliberately, “There was nothing wrong with anything I did so don’t try to make me feel guilty about it!”

Lily was so adamant that Randolph subsided into injured silence. She was obviously in no mood to listen to reason, but tomorrow he would warn her in no uncertain terms. For there was another obstacle to any further involvement with Harry Kohle, something far more important than his reputation as a womanizer. Harry Kohle was a Jew and Charles Goodhue was a vehement anti-Semite. The reason for his prejudice had puzzled Randolph until his father had told him the story.

Apparently, Charles Goodhue, in his first independent venture, had bought a copper mine in Montana from a Morris Birnbaum. The surveyors’ reports had been glowing, and it had seemed that young Charles was going to score a monumental coup. Then several months later he discovered that the reports were faked, the mine worthless—and that he had been a naive victim of Birnbaum’s chicanery. Charles’s father excoriated him with fierce contempt for taking any man’s word on a business deal without investigating. Deeply humiliated, Charles couldn’t bear to admit his own foolish error and rash judgment. As a result, he came to despise not only Birnbaum but all Jews. Even now, years later, he was known as one of the most virulent anti-Semitic men in the country, ranking with his good friend Henry Ford.

Randolph was sure that Lily knew nothing of her father’s prejudice, but that made no difference. It was impossible for Lily Goodhue even to have the most casual relationship with a Jewish man. Randolph vowed to tell this to Lily tomorrow morning before she got some crazy idea about falling in love with Harry Kohle.

Lying awake in her own bed, Lily cautioned herself to be sensible. Yet it seemed Harry had introduced her to a whole new world she didn’t know existed. It wasn’t just the champagne. She’d drunk it before without this heady sense of release. Tonight she had felt a total release from the stress of the last few months. Dancing in Harry’s arms she had felt as if she were floating on air. Then she remembered the look on Harry’s face when she had told him that she was engaged….

Engaged,
she thought with a shudder. Soon she would be Roger’s wife and that would put an end to evenings like tonight. But she wanted to get married. Not for the first time, she tried to imagine how it would feel to be in bed with Roger. Would he take her to heights beyond her wildest imaginings, fulfill her deepest yearnings? Instinctively, Lily knew that she possessed a capacity for sexuality. But for all her look of sophistication, she had never before experienced that mysterious sensation of sensual awakening—until tonight. Still she rejected the idea that it had anything to do with Harry Kohle. It was the champagne, the music, or simply a reaction to the idea of settling down, a last fling of sorts. If only Roger were not so restrained in his lovemaking. Suddenly it seemed as if her engagement were on very shaky ground. It was dangerous to romanticize her feelings for Harry. She didn’t need Randolph to tell her this was no more than an evening’s diversion.

I
N MANHATTAN, THERE WAS
at least one other person who wrestled with disturbing, conflicted thoughts.

Beneath his happy-go-lucky countenance, Harry Kohle was a man of extraordinary perceptiveness. Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, he realized his attraction to Lily went far beyond her extraordinary beauty. He sensed her intelligence, her warmth, her utter lack of pretense. Harry knew after just a few hours that Lily was the woman he wanted for his wife.

But that realization was like opening a Pandora’s box. Convincing her to break her engagement was the least of his problems. He knew from the way she had responded to him tonight that if he put his mind to it she would. But that led to the fact that he had no way to support her. Here he was, twenty-four years old, with no reliable source of income, and obviously not in a position to marry. Even his future was muddied by the turbulent currents of his own desires, in conflict with his father’s wishes. As sure as he felt about Lily, she couldn’t have come into his life at a worse time.

The Kohles were an old banking family; they had established themselves in New York Jewish society over one hundred years before. Anton Kohle had been the first of his name to come to America, arriving from Bavaria in 1776, just as the Declaration of Independence was being framed. In Europe, the Kohles had been petty moneylenders, but the first generation in America had moved into merchant banking. The family business grew into one of the most prestigious international firms in the country. In the present generation, there were three sons who had followed their father into the lucrative field of banking—and one who so far would not: Harry, the youngest, the thorn in all their sides.

Temperamentally, Harry knew himself to be utterly unsuited to sit behind a desk and pore over figures. From earliest youth, he had hated the musty smell of the Wall Street bank with its correct atmosphere. His father’s stiff white collar became a symbol of everything Harry was rebelling against. The world of commerce bored him; his only interests were art and music and, most of all, literature.

Although the Kohles were patrons of the arts—they collected prodigiously—it was not for the love of beauty. To them, art was an investment. The Kohles’ fondness for collecting had nothing to do with appreciation; it stemmed from the pure pleasure of possessing priceless works in as vast a quantity as possible. The thought of one of their own becoming a writer or painter was appalling. In fact, they held artists and other “creative” people in something like contempt.

Harry’s embrace of the aesthetic for its own sake was something that his father, Benjamin Kohle, could neither understand nor condone. He wanted no dreamers in the family; his children were to be shrewd businessmen—and the two qualities were mutually exclusive. He could little fathom Harry’s love for pure aesthetics; his youngest son had long been the least pragmatic of the Kohle fold.

All his life, Harry had been troublesome, rebelling at school and at home—and Benjamin had been baffled by the unexpected strength of will he had discovered in the boy. It had taken severe discipline to keep him in line—or God knows what kind of wastrel he would have become.

He didn’t realize how much his attitude hurt Harry, who had always wanted to please his father, but in his own way. As a little boy, he had secretly wept when told he would never live up to his three older brothers’ achievements. Over the years, though, he developed a deep resentment at being forced to live up to their standards, but even then, under a guise of bravado, he remained bitterly unhappy that his father held him in such low regard. It was as though he had no choice in his life, no voice in his future. When the time came for him to go to Harvard like his brothers, he wanted to skip college and embark on a writing career. As a child, he had read voraciously—Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky. They were his idols and he began to feel that he, too, had the ability to create if he were allowed to pursue that talent.

But the combined weight of opposition from his family had been too much for him. In the end he agreed to a compromise—he stayed in New York but only to enroll in Columbia. His triumph was illusory: Benjamin Kohle promptly insisted that Harry study business at Columbia, not creative writing.

Unenthusiastically, he waded through his courses in management and market economics, loathing every minute of it.

“This is a disgrace to the family!” Benjamin Kohle thundered at the end of Harry’s first semester, when he barely made Cs. “I’m amazed that you dare to show your face around here with marks like these!” He would have been angrier still if he had known that in his free time Harry had begun to write a novel.

At first, he had been doing little more than playing with words, but then ideas had come. His was to be a novel about death and destruction—and rebirth. As the first few chapters began to take shape, he started to think that he might be creating something of worth, perhaps even something of long-lasting significance. But Harry spoke of it to no one, especially not to his father. He knew that becoming an author was not a “practical” goal. The publishing world was fiercely competitive and his kind of serious work was often rejected in favor of cheap popular fiction, but for many months he worked late into the night while his friends slept or studied. Then the demands of his own courses caught up with him. Although he hated the business courses, his own pride kept him from continuing to get such low grades and he was forced to spend more time with his texts. His social life became pretty demanding too. Harry had always been popular, and now at nineteen he was discovering a whole new world of debutantes, college girls from Poughkeepsie and Bryn Mawr, even a few bored wives who were only too eager to share the bed of the darkly handsome Columbia student.

Still, the manuscript was always in the back of his mind; finally, in the middle of his senior year, he went to Benjamin and said, “Father, would you consider my taking a few years off after college and trying my hand at writing?”

Benjamin Kohle could hardly contain his rage. “That is the most boneheaded idea I have ever heard! I’ve been too tolerant with you already. I hope you will have finished your business degree by the end of the next term.”

Harry stared back angrily. “I can’t promise you that,” he said tightly. “I’ve signed up for several English courses this semester.”

Benjamin Kohle said menacingly, “I see you’ve been fooling around in your usual self-indulgent fashion, and as a result you’ll not finish on time.”

Harry exploded. “Good God, Father! I’ve done everything you want so far! Why can’t I take a little creative writing? What difference does it make if I finish six months later?”

“God damn it, Harry! This is the last straw. I have no intention of subsidizing this ridiculous venture. I’ll pay for one more semester at Columbia and after that you’re on your own. And let me tell you, if you persist with this ridiculous idea of becoming a novelist, you’ll starve. You’ll be begging me to take you back into the bank.”

Later, Benjamin relented and paid another full year’s tuition. He’d agreed to give Harry a small allowance after graduation, but he restricted his youngest son’s spending severely. “Since you’re thinking of becoming an artist, you’d better learn now how to live on a pittance.”

Harry was disconcerted to discover just how much he missed his formerly generous funds. He had become fond of his social life, and it was a rude shock not to be able to take his girlfriends to the best nightclubs and restaurants.

Still, he would not abandon his hope to become a writer. Secretly he harbored the hope of going to Paris after he was graduated from Columbia—if only for a year. His father would no doubt drive a hard bargain, make him promise to enter the family business in exchange for a year’s worth of garret rent.
But it would be worth it, thought Harry. It would give me the time I need to prove myself as a writer.
And after all, wasn’t Paris the place where writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein had begun? He had already rehearsed the speech he planned to use on his father. There was a good chance that if he struck a bargain like the one he envisioned, the old man might relent.

But now, lying in his small apartment and thinking about Lily, he realized that if he really wanted to pursue her he would have to give up his writing ambitions, at least for the time being. He knew that once he put it aside he might never return to the novel, but if he went to work in the bank there would be no financial problems.

The idea of postponing his career as a writer—much less abandoning it—still gnawed at him. If only Lily could have come along two years later, when he could have had his dreams fulfilled by having written his novel, maybe even to see it published. But time was not on Harry’s side. He well knew it. If Lily were engaged, she would be married in a matter of months, maybe weeks. He had to pursue her now or lose her forever. And that he was not prepared to do. Suddenly the bank, which had long loomed in his mind as the worst alternative, took on a benign cast.

He would not be admitted to full partnership immediately, but right from the start he would be paid enough to support a wife and family, just as his brothers had been. With that question settled, the only real obstacle was Lily herself. Suddenly he realized how crazy he was being. Here he’d been up half the night trying to figure out how to support her, when he didn’t know if she would even see him again. He twisted restlessly on the bed, willing it to be time to call her.

By eight o’clock the next morning, he couldn’t wait any longer.

“Randolph, I’m sorry to be calling you this early, but this couldn’t wait. Now don’t hang up. I know Lily’s engaged, but I must speak to her. Insane as it may seem, I’ve fallen in love with her, and whoever her fiancé is, I don’t believe she’s in love with him.”

Randolph’s instincts hadn’t been wrong. “Look, Lily is going to be married soon. She’s very happy. I want you to stay away from her.”

“I just want to talk to her, Randolph, that’s all. There’s no harm in that, is there?

“I know you, Harry. I’ve seen you in action and I’ve watched a lot of girls get hurt. I don’t intend my cousin to be one of them.”

“I don’t blame you for feeling that way. But you must believe me. I fell madly in love with Lily last night.”

“Harry, if I had a dime for every girl you’ve thought you’d loved, I could retire. Go get some sleep. You’ll feel better.” And with that Randolph slammed down the phone.