What I Did for Love (2 page)

At last, prompted by exasperated friends, he offered reluctant apologies, which Bredon civilly accepted. Still, the friendship was finished. As word spread that Bredon wanted nothing to do with someone so crass, investors also backed away from the man, because he was now perceived as having shaky judgment.

Again with their friends’ intervention, Bredon relented somewhat, and endorsed an investment offering the fellow was making. Though it helped, his full range of clients and the power had yet to be regained. I was relieved that Bredon had shown mercy, and told him so. But the incident was clear warning to stay away from “advising” Bredon on anything concerning me. It was a social firewall, like the one he had set on his businesses so that none of his venture liabilities could ever touch me.

Following our parents’ long-ago instructions (it seemed so very long ago), Bredon and I never publicly said anything about each other. I lived my New York life, attending college, sharing my love of the city and its culture with my friends and my brother and his inner circle. Those in my own circles had learned, from my angry eyes and cold exit, not to question me about my brother or my family. The women at my college knew Bredon to be a socialite, a “catch,” unmarried. They did not know that my brother’s heart was spoken for, that his marriage announcement would have been made on the day after our parents’ return. Hardly anyone knew, for he and his fiancée had kept clear of gossip columnists and social reporters. At least a few of the more eager social climbers at my college had looked for an introduction to Bredon, frustrated at my unresponsiveness to their overtures and invitations. Only my closest friends had met my brother before the bombing, and now only Robin had met him
beyond a quick introduction.

When Bredon and I spent time together and had the strength for it, we would talk about our parents, recounting familiar stories, laughing, tearful. Bredon had told me more than once that our parents had always asked him to look after me if anything happened to them. “Take care of your sister.” They only said it a hundred times, maybe, Bredon kidded me, warming me. Only when we were totally alone would we openly cry with each other. The nights when I had screamed myself awake from my nightmares finally seemed to be over. I think they also died, of exhaustion. I do not know if Bredon had such nights. His focus was on getting me through it. He had doctors on call for me as I went through the daily motions mechanically, my heart feeling dead within me. I had slowly come back to life, but of course it was a different life for both of us now.

I still had occasional nightmares over our parents’ deaths, and though I tried to hide them from Bredon, I did slip once. I had a private dorm suite at my college in upper Manhattan, so that my brother’s early morning calls wakened only me. That morning my guard was down. I was sleepy, having been up late studying for mid-terms, then had fallen asleep to dreams so horrific, they had left me shaken. I must have sounded wild in my sorrow as Bredon asked his usual “How are you, how is everything?” As he pressed me, I told him I had dreamt of our parents’ death. Saying it aloud led me to break down, unable to control the tears that sobbed through as I spoke.

My brother waited for a pause, then said very calmly, “Get dressed and wait for me in front of the college gates.” He had hung up before I could protest. I scrambled into my clothes, running to Broadway, few people on the streets at that hour. Bredon had canceled his appointments, ordered his private car, and picked me up within twenty minutes of our call.

After a strong hug, all in silence, we drove up the Henry Hudson Parkway to Fort Tryon Park. We spent the morning in the
privacy of trees and back trails, walking, talking, with tears, with remembrances, with another hug now and then. Composed at last, we visited the park’s jewel, The Cloisters, to contemplate the incredible sculptures and paintings and tapestries born of faith and hope, and to pity the poor hunted unicorns. Thus did we cope. On special days, their birthdays, their wedding anniversary, and the overwhelming anniversary of their deaths, we visited the Columbarium where our parents’ names were inscribed as memorials, though even their ashes had been lost at sea.

Life went on, as it always does. Bredon had arranged the purchase of my apartment in one of buildings his corporation owned, which was just being renovated and reoccupied. Pretending he was looking for a hideaway or extra investment, asking for my opinion, I fell in love with the place that now was mine. It was in a charming old building that extended back onto a quiet side street. The small corner apartment gathered light through its wonderful great windows. Bredon had wanted me to take one of the larger apartments, but this one-bedroom place was my true nest. Over the school year, I would take some time to choose among the treasured pieces from our parents’ and grandparents’ loved antiques, but I kept the furnishings to a minimum, preferring air and light.

Bredon commissioned the shaping of the apartment to suit me. There was a curving niche off my bedroom that extended along one wall facing the park, which would be my study area. A full bath was next to my bedroom, a little powder room near the front door for guests. A hall led from my bedroom to the long living room where one side, near the small kitchen, served as a dining area. On the other side was a baby grand piano, one of the smallest models. After two years had passed I could finally play music again, though it was a halting return to something I had greatly loved.

When I asked for the small piano, my brother proposed that
he convert two adjoining apartments into one, to have room for an enormous Steinway B, a concert grand that would match the one in his penthouse. I declined, telling him that I would use his piano if I wanted to play some great thundering piece with full keyboard echoing in a large space.

“I’m still waiting,” he would say occasionally, although I had in fact used his piano several times when he was traveling. When he was home I preferred listening to him, gifted jazz man that he was. I favored the classics, but Bredon would improvise a jazz line woven around lines from Chopin, just as my teacher used to do. My piano teacher had also taught my brother many years before, and he was an old man when I took lessons from him. His Juilliard training shone through in his command of theory and his beautiful ways of explaining it. I loved learning the many devices a skilled pianist could use, as well as the classical and text-perfect ways of playing the music on the page. But I learned a few standard songs just to hear our parents sing. They had loved music and had sweet, graceful voices. When they sang together it was like love in musical form. They always held hands and sat so close together, each pressed against the other. It was so beautiful, it would leave me in wonder. Such love. Amazing to behold.

Bredon sent me to the Steinway store to pick a piano that suited, and I also had to get some things for the apartment on my own. I haunted the antiques galleries, alone and with my friend Robin, to find the exactly perfect desk that now sat in the niche facing the gorgeous park view. The arc of the desk matched the curve of the wall, its ancient cherry patina and clever drawers inviting to the student and the writer. A comfortable chair, low bookshelves at either end of the niche, cushions for the window seats, and I had my perfect little study. Its open arched doorway adjoined my bedroom which held a queen-size bed for my restless sleep. A huge closet built into one wall held the drawers and shelves that made extra furniture unnecessary.

There was another advantage in the elegant old buildings Bredon had selected for the search: the apartments had back entrances. Years ago, and sometimes even now, these were service entrances leading to freight elevators, back stairways, incinerators, places to store mops and pails. These back doors dated from the old days of live-in servants, when only they would deal with cleaning, laundry, and trash. But those back doors served also as an escape route that Bredon wanted me to have. He had paid for the same advantages in his building. Our parents’ death and the publicity aftermath had left us feral, like wild creatures who make sure that their lairs always have a way out if an intruder managed to get inside. We were known, yet we avoided being photographed when at all possible. Even the gentler editors from some of the magazine and websites, who requested interviews with great delicacy and tact, were sweetly thanked by Bredon’s assistant, who firmly closed the conversation with, “Perhaps at some future date. We will let you know.” That future date, as far as we were concerned, would be never.

Right after the semester ended I moved permanently from my dorm suite and the guest bedroom in Bredon’s apartment, to what was now my own home. Bredon had offered me the choice to remain with him, but I wanted the quiet and solace of a space where I could re-make my place in the world. He gave me his reluctant, loving, sad agreement, and my move was done. We were anyway both uptown, near enough to reach each other quickly.

Wealth made it all so possible. My brother did love being rich, and of course the temptation was always there to grow even richer if opportunity permitted. This was the New York financial scene, beautiful offices in gleaming mirrored buildings, elegant facades covering the clawing and scheming over money and its global reach. Money was the center of it all, and the dreadful reason for those first tense words with my brother. On that day,
as so often happens, one step, one decision, one “yes” or one “no,” and the rest of one’s life is never the same.

That Monday I had to go to Bredon’s office at two o’clock to sign a tax form. He had told me that his receptionist and guard-dog assistant, Mrs. Andrews (we never called her by her first name), would be out that day, so the reception area was empty as I arrived. Bredon and I were high profile in this building, so I had known to dress in chic Manhattan fashion. Forgoing my college “uniform” of jeans and sweatshirts, I wore a fashionably swaying skirt and layered top, a very-latest type of light jacket over my arm, a relatively small handbag, exclusive and chic. I hated handbags and loved pockets, to the dismay of “fashionistas,” and never got the point of the handbag obsession. I kept clutching the strap lest I forget it.

All these expensive clothes were gifts from Bredon, thanks to a Bergdorf personal shopper and a designer whose style he liked. But I refused to wear the outrageous five inch high heels that were in fashion. They looked like torture. Why not bind our feet like in old China, and have women hobbling about until their revolution freed them? Despite the protests that many women walked in them easily, and Bredon’s offer to have the shoes handmade so that they would be comfortable, I settled on a moderate heel and sheer hose. My long hair, a kind of gold brown with subtle blonde streaks, was the work of an inspired woman in a quiet east side salon. I had pulled it into a velvet tie at the nape of my neck, not swinging glamorously, but obviously a “coiffure,” and not a basic hairstyle. I did not look like an office worker, nor like a college girl, but like a young woman whose time was her own. I had sprayed and dabbed on perfumes, and misted some cologne on my clothes. It produced a sensation of roses. I could catch the fragrance only occasionally because the sense of smell tires so easily. My brother, though, would grin with approval. His tiny, gentlemanly sniff of appreciation
delighted me.

Rose perfume was special. “Mother would have loved this scent on you,” Bredon once – only once – told me. The fragrance brought back the incomparable perfume of the roses we had loved in India, where we had traveled as a family for my thirteenth birthday. Thus today, as on so many other days, the dress and scent were for Bredon, to reassure him that I was all right, that I had survived the tragedy that had stunned us into catatonic disbelief when we had first heard the news.

I was about to walk straight into his office but heard male voices. Bredon and another man were just coming out. Each of them possessed a strong presence like an aura, but I felt a jolt as I looked at Bredon’s visitor. I was used to the power that my brother seemed to exude, the excitement women told me they felt when they saw him. Because I was impervious to his attractiveness, I used to be amused that his effect was so compelling. Obviously my parents had instilled the incest taboo quite strongly in us. Added to that was our age difference and, with our parents’ urging, Bredon’s parental sense of responsibility for my safety and my fate. Other women saw that too, not only at my college. At parties and gatherings many a woman had tried to become friends with me in the hope that Bredon would pay more attention to her as a result of her connection to me.

So I knew about attraction and power, but now I felt it for myself, that air-shimmering effect this man was having on me, that I had seen in other women’s reaction to Bredon. The sensation startled me. I wondered if I looked as amazed as I felt as his magnetism pulled me. It was like a romance novel or a fairy tale, the bolt out of the blue, desire, love, lust, whatever. He caught me with his virility, his presence producing a tiny shock of electrical current that touched me everywhere.

He had the well-tailored look of the super financier he undoubtedly was, slender enough, some substance to him. He looked assured and powerful, but best of all he was handsome
without being pretty, his dark blond hair perfect for his regular, serious features. I was startled by his effect on me because I had never before just looked at a man and wanted his attention or his touch. But here I was, smitten.

He must have felt something similar, or seen what must have been a blush. Certainly my face felt warm. So did my body. He stopped abruptly and looked at me, and Bredon almost ran into him. He seemed to look disbelieving of his own reaction, which thrilled me. Holy cow, I thought, loving that expression even in my mind, holy cow, what just happened? Was it only lust? I was feeling flutters in my stomach and between my legs, lust yes, and desire, its newness and magnitude thrilling me.

My brother, who had just avoided colliding with him, could see the way we were looking at each other, no words sufficient to describe the obvious attraction between us.