Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  ‘But you’re wrong. You’re adept, and you’re bright, and you have an extraordinary understanding of money.’

  Caldwell watched the way in which she touched the slight redness at each of his knuckles, and then followed the length of his fingers to the tips, and circled his close-trimmed nails. For some reason, he found her absentminded caress to be extraordinarily erotic; and he watched her face with growing fascination.

  He said, That’s why you keep me here? Because of my extraordinary understanding of money?’

  ‘That’s why you’re here. But that’s not why you’re with me.’

  ‘Then –’

  Effie placed a finger across his lips to prevent him from saying any more. ‘You’re here because you’re a good bank representative. You’re with me because I love you, just as much as you love me.’

  They said very little more. In the warm, careering interior of The Twentieth Century Limited there was scarcely any need. They finished the very last dregs of the bottle of champagne, and then Effie did nothing more than get up, and lock, with great poise, her stateroom door. Caldwell tugged loose his tie, and prized off his shoes with his toes.

  They fled through Elyria, Ohio, with a whistle that screamed as lonely as any coyote. In the top bunk in Effie’s bedroom, watched over smartly but benignly by a coloured Gérard lithograph, in mauve and turquoise, of a sophisticated couple sharing a cigarette and a glass of champagne, Effie and Caldwell made exertive love together, Effie, naked except for her diamond necklace and her diamond-and-saphire earrings, her breasts gathered in her hands, her legs stretched wide apart, one heel lodged against the chrome light-fitting on the wall, the other awkwardly crooked around the side of the bunk, while Caldwell, as muscular as a tennis-player, as thin as a prisoner-of-war, sheathed himself over and over again in the furry pink flesh of her vulva, grunting, beating with his fist against the partition, sweating, crying out loud, cursing the sheer damned difficulty of making love in a railroad bunk.

  They tried again on the carpet, in the sitting-room. The floor of the train rocked wildly beneath their naked bodies. They panted together, and thrust together, but at last Caldwell sat up and said, ‘I’ve had too much champage. It’s no good. I’ve just drunk too much.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Effie, and slithered herself down between his thighs like a snake lady. She took him firmly in her left hand, in spite of his softness, and guided him close to her lips, kissing him, and darting out her tongue at him. He said, ‘No, Effie, you mustn’t,’ but she rubbed him up and down until he couldn’t help himself, licking and lollipopping at him until she could taste sugar and salt both at once. Then he said, ‘Oh, God,’ and whatever his reservations, whatever his fears, he ejaculated, and Effie felt the warm glutinous drops fall on to her forehead, on to her cheeks, and on to her eyelids.

  He was silent afterwards, almost morose. He was sitting in the stateroom with a bathroom glass full of cognac when she reappeared from the bedroom, her face brightly washed, her hair brushed, her pulse-points touched with perfume and her peach silk robe changed for a black and silver negligee. She sat down beside him and kissed him, and said, ‘You’re not unhappy?’

  ‘Only with myself.’

  She kissed him again. ‘Why do you expect so much from yourself? Can’t you be satisfied with what you can do already?’

  ‘You always seem to outdo me.’

  ‘Does that worry you?’

  He lifted his drink, swilling the brandy around and around in the tooth-glass. ‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ he said.

  ‘Are you really?’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘I enjoyed it! If two people decide to make love together, to be completely intimate with each other, anything that makes them delighted and happy is permissible.’ She paused. Then she said, ‘I learned that a long time ago, Caldwell.’

  Caldwell frowned at her. He looked as if he were seeing her for the very first time: as if he could recognise her at last for what she was, and understand what she was saying to him.

  ‘You mean –’ he began, describing a circle around his face with his hand.

  ‘I’ve just told you. I enjoyed it. I love you.’

  He put down his drink, quite abruptly. It no longer seemed to serve any purpose. He pressed his hands against his mouth for a second or two, as if he were playing one of the three wise monkeys, and then he took them away again, and said, ‘I didn’t realise. I didn’t realise. I didn’t think that you actually did. But you do, don’t you? You love me.’

  Effie couldn’t stop herself from laughing. ‘All this time, you didn’t believe me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t let myself. But you do! My God, I think that’s marvellous! Do you think they could find us some more champagne?’

  Effie reached over and held his wrist. ‘I think you’ve had enough for one night. We’ve got a business meeting in Chicago tomorrow, remember? And, besides, I want you to do what you did to me before, just one more time.’

  Caldwell nodded his head emphatically up and down. ‘You’re right. I’ve had enough. And we do have that meeting tomorrow.’

  Then he focused on her with a very serious expression and said, ‘I do want you to marry me. You know that, don’t you? I very much want you to be the first Mrs Caldwell Brooks.’

  ‘What do you want me to say to a question like that?’ asked Effie. She was trying to be flippant, trying to be hard, but there was a noticeable catch in her voice.

  ‘I’d prefer it …’ said Caldwell, struggling hard not to slur his words. ‘I’d prefer it … if you’d say “yes.”’

  The Twentieth Century Limited shrieked and whooped, a highball whistle that echoed far out across the Ohio night. Effie said, in words softer than leaves of tissue-paper falling on to a silk gown, ‘If that’s what you’d prefer, then yes.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  They were married on Saturday, 12 May 1928, at the home of the Justice of the Peace of Arroyo Grande, in San Luis Obispo county, California. They emerged talking and laughing on to the sidewalk to find themselves suddenly surrounded by photographers and reporters and jostling passers-by; and the local sheriff, with stained underarms and a conga-dancing beer belly, had to hustle them forcibly down the street to where their Lincoln Brougham was parked. Effie arranged herself on her seat, and the police office closed the limousine door behind her; but a sharp-faced lady journalist in a maroon cloche hat managed to thrust her head in to the open window, and demanded, ‘Tell me, Miss Watson, does this mean you’ll be happy at last?’

  Effie clasped Caldwell’s arm tightly, and beamed as beautifully as she could manage. ‘I’ve always been happy, thank you. Now I’m happier.’

  ‘Does your daughter approve of your marriage?’

  ‘My daughter’s delighted. I spoke to her on the telephone for half an hour this morning. She’s coming out to join us in a week.’

  A young man reporter in a fraying straw skimmer elbowed the lady journalist aside, and snapped, ‘Pete Jones, Los Angeles Examiner. Tell me, Mr Brooks, what do you think of May and September marriages? You know – young man marries mature lady?’

  Effie could feel Caldwell stiffen in annoyance; but he kept his temper, and replied calmly, ‘I don’t know, Mr Jones. I never thought about it. Tell me, what do you think about noncumulative preferred stock?’

  The reporter blinked. ‘I don’t know. I never thought about it.’

  They were driven away at last with a wailing police motorcycle escort, and took the highway north to Point St Luis, overlooking the Pacific, only a mile or so away from the old Spanish mission of St Luis Obispo de Tolosa. There were three cars in the procession: Effie and Caldwell’s extraordinary Lincoln Coaching Brougham, an $8500 luxury car designed to look like a Concord stagecoach, complete with carriage-lamps and brass doorhandles; James Beckman’s Cadillac tourer; and a black Pierce-Arrow which had been hired to carry four of James Beckman’s friends from the United Trust. It was a misty, sun-golden, Pac
ific seasore day; with a cool breeze blowing through the telephone lines and feathering the wings of the California gulls. When they were still half a mile away from the white-painted house where they were staying as James Beckman’s guests, Effie asked the driver to stop, so that she and Caldwell could walk the rest of the way along the beach.

  For the first few minutes they said nothing at all, but walked arm in arm by the very edge of the ocean, where the foam softly sizzled on the grey sand. Effie, for her wedding, was dressed in a light primrose-coloured dress of pleated crêpe-de-chine, with a low belt and a three-tiered skirt. She wore a matching wide-brimmed hat, and a long pure-silk scarf, which billowed out behind her in the breeze. In the blurry sunshine, the yellow pleats of her dress clung to the outlines of her body, and Caldwell felt that she looked like a girl of twenty, a fashionable young faun. He hoped to himself that he could keep up with a woman who combined such apparent youthfulness with such experience; such prettiness with such hardheadedness.

  Effie herself felt a peace within her which she hadn’t felt for years. She was conscious that she loved Caldwell dearly, rather than passionately, but he didn’t disappoint her, neither as lover nor as a friend. She had proved to herself on board The Twentieth Century Limited that she could love him in every possible way, both romantically and erotically. Taking him into her mouth had been a gesture to herself, rather than to him, that she loved and accepted everything about him. (It had also been, in a strange and complicated fashion which she hadn’t yet been able or willing to analyse, an act that had been somehow provoked by what she had seen that night in Robert’s bedroom on Long Island.) The act had set the terms for the relationship: candour, complete openness, and mutual respect. Caldwell expected to be given credit for his talent, and his manliness. Effie, in return, expected him to understand how much of an independent spirit she was; and that there would be times when he would have to let her throw herself into some wildly unpopular financial cause; just as there would be times when she would come to him for warmth, and reassurance, and words of simple comfort.

  She would think back on this day in later – much later – years, and wonder how a single sexual act could have established so much; forgetting that in 1928 it had been an extraordinary and scandalously liberated thing for any woman to perform.

  She took Caldwell’s hand as they neared the house. It was James Beckman’s summer cottage, a simple colonial-style building that had been reconciled to its California surroundings by the addition of an ornate Spanish-style verandah and a baroque gable with violin-like curves. James Beckman and the rest of the wedding-guests were already there, standing by the steps, waiting for them.

  Effie said, ‘You do love me, don’t you?’

  Caldwell leaned over and kissed her. ‘I love you like nobody else.’

  ‘I hope I’ll remember this day forever. I don’t want it to pass.’

  There’ll be hundreds of other days.’

  ‘Yes, but never like this.’

  Caldwell gave her hand a gentle squeeze. ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

  ‘Only of myself,’ she told him. ‘It’s a burden, sometimes, trying to live your life so freely. Sometimes I feel like giving up banking altogether, and being nothing more than an ordinary wife, an ordinary woman who doesn’t upset anybody. I don’t want to upset anybody. I never set out to upset them. But I can’t avoid it. I can’t be what I have to be without upsetting them.’

  Caldwell said, ‘Now, Mrs Brooks, you’re feeling sorry for yourself.’

  She smiled, and shook her head. Her scarf was lifted behind her like the diaphanous banner of a sailing-yacht. ‘I don’t really feel sorry for myself. I don’t even feel alone any more. I have you to help me now. But I feel less like struggling – less like fighting. My only desire at the moment is to make you happy.’

  Caldwell kissed her again, and then led her up the tussocky path that took them to the front of the house. James Beckman, in a flamboyant white suit and turquoise spats, had already ordered the champagne opened, and as Effie and Caldwell approached, the guests all raised their glasses, and drank them a toast.

  Later that day, as the sun began to melt in the Pacific mist, and the shadows walked on stilts, the wedding-party sat in the chintzy living-room listening to Duke Ellington records and talking quietly, like people who had been friends for many years. There was a white frosted cake, and a buffet of smoked duck, California cheeses, apples and oranges and salad. Effie sat close to Caldwell and said hardly anything: just listened to him talk, just touched him and kept him near, her husband.

  One of the guests, a young man with brilliantined hair and a striped yachting blazer, played a ukelele and sang Here In My Heart.

  ‘Here in my heart,

  Where history meets art

  Where Greek philosophy meets sof-ta-ly

  With passion and compassion

  And with love …’

  That night, in the wallpapered bedroom, hours after they had made love, hours after Caldwell had fallen asleep, Effie lay awake and listened to the rustling, breathing sound of the Pacific. If anyone could have seen her in the darkness, they would have noticed at once the tears that pooled at the sides of her eyes, sparkling in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Effie and Caldwell’s marriage made nationwide news: they were photographed for newspapers and magazines all over America, and interviewed on every subject from managing a household budget to the state of potato farming in Idaho. Effie suddenly found that, as a wife, she was much more acceptable to the public and to the banking community. She was respectable now, she was Caldwell Brooks’ ‘little woman’, and if anybody really had any trouble with her, they could always rely on Caldwell to straighten things out.

  She did nothing to disenchant either the press or the banksters. If they felt happier doing business with her because she was married to Caldwell, and because she had given her recipe of ‘Scottish buns’ to Farm & Fireside, then she was quite content. To the farmers and fruitgrowers of California, she seemed to have just the kind of reliable, traditional, down-home personality they were looking for in a woman. She even made a point of wearing classic, tweedy dresses when she was at work; and renting a plain black sedan instead of the Pierce-Arrow or a Cadillac.

  The offices of a Commerce Bank of California were opened at the corner of Flower and First Streets on 25 July 1928. The building had originally been a plant and flower shop (‘Flowers on Flower’), and Effie had ordered that the decorators should keep intact all the original red-and-white marble cladding on the outside, and all the cool marble floors inside the main entrance. The bank was advertised on the radio, and in every California newspaper and magazine. The slogan, which was written for Effie by Arthur Pendler of Young & Rubicam, was, ‘Dan McKay is Sowing Tomorrow’s Seeds Today …’ The ad wasn’t another ‘All Right, Ann Ward’ or a ‘Tell It To Sweeney’, but it brought more than 800 customers in the first week, and by the closing days of 1928, the Commerce Bank of California was the fastest-growing and most profitable new financial enterprise on the West Coast.

  Caldwell, as president, ran the bank with prestigitorial efficiency and smoothness. There were some heart-lurching moments – such as the time when he inadvertently offended one of their biggest new customers, the oil tycoon R. Walter Leaming, by kissing the hand of Leaming’s fat Spanish maid and saying, ‘How do you do, Mrs Leaming.’ But most of the time he was calm and orderly and brilliantly popular with the bank’s staff, and when he asked them to save on paperclips and cut down on personal telephone calls, he always managed to sound sympathetic rather than stingy. The Commerce Bank was run on the lowest overheads and the tightest salary budget of any West Coast bank – partly because Effie didn’t approve of waste, and partly because they needed all the money they could get to send representatives out to canvas for new business. Caldwell hired a team of twenty salesman (most of them handsome and personable young Hollywood extras) and sent them out in a fleet of rented Model
A Fords to Bakersfield and Kettleman City and Fresno and Tulare, each with a clearly-written sales-pitch and a suitcase full of free gifts (a Commerce Bank calendar in simulated leather, a Commerce Bank moneybox in the shape of a castle). Their brief was simple but strong. Talk to the grower, and warn him that bad times are coming. He has an inkling of that already, because he’s seen how steeply the price of his produce has been falling. Tell him that his money will only be safe, and available for next year’s planting, if he trusts in the honest and straightforward policies of the Commerce Bank. Money that’s put into Commerce accounts isn’t used for wild stock-market speculation, no sir, nor to line the pockets of fat Sacramento politicians. At Commerce, even the chairman has to save her paperclips, because they’re paid for by the customers, and nobody, but nobody, from the mail-room clerk to the founder, is ever allowed to waste the customer’s money. No matter what happens, Commerce guarantee payout of all deposits; so when the bad times come, Commerce may go through bad times too, but your money will always be safe.

  ‘Don’t you owe it your family?’ the salesmen would always wind up, with an expression on their faces which Effie and Caldwell had worked out between them. A mixture of Abraham Lincoln wisdom, Dale Carnegie faith and Jackie Coogan wistfulness. Effie had said, at the policy meeting, ‘Make them feel guilty … make them lose sleep if they don’t change their account to Commerce Bank.’ Then, in the spring of 1929, she ordered a series of third-page newspaper advertisements with the caption ‘Commerce Makes Sense accompanied by lithographs of happy, wholesome, California families. None of her customers ever complained that she was running the most expensive advertising campaign that any American bank had ever run. They only remembered that she too was obliged to save paperclips.

  James Beckman brought in millions of dollars’ worth of small business; nectarine orchards, orange groves, tomato farms, and some of the larger growing-combines too. One of the greatest prizes he won was the overseas account of The San Joaquin Apple Corporation, a huge association of apple-growers which was organised and overseen by Vito Malucci and his brothers, three powerful and wealthy Neapolitan immigrants who had once been photographed with Al Capone on board his houseboat in Florida. Anybody who tried to undercut Malucci’s apple prices usually found their trees sprayed with acid, and their pet dogs dead.