“I saw you in the papers today.”
“I went to a Christmas party with a girl I met recently,” he said casually.
“She’s very pretty. Someone special?” He laughed when she asked him. He knew her better.
“Stop playing Jewish mother, it doesn’t suit you. And the answer to your question is I don’t know yet. I just met her. She seems very nice. She and her sisters are very popular at the moment. Her parents give fabulous parties.” She thought it was interesting that he had responded “I don’t know yet” to her question, instead of the usual emphatic no she’d been getting from him for years. She told Jakob about it that night and showed him the picture. He glanced at it for an instant and nodded.
“Are they engaged yet? Should I be calling her father?” he teased her. They both knew their son better than that. His romances never lasted more than a few weeks or months, and then he’d be off to another project and another girl.
“I’d be happier if it said they were giving a Chanukah party,” she commented drily and Jakob laughed at her.
“Not likely with a name like Morgan. But we have ourselves to blame for that. We should have sent him for Hebrew lessons and had his bar mitzvah if that’s what you wanted. We don’t go to temple, so why should he?”
“He may not care, but maybe she does.” He glanced at the newspaper photo again and shook his head.
“Doesn’t look like it. If she were hanging on to him any tighter, she’d have cut off the circulation in his arm.” She was wearing long elegant white gloves, and she was smiling radiantly. “His friends are always Catholic or Episcopalian. He has a knack for finding them anywhere. We never made a point of his being Jewish, so neither does he. Do you really care?” Jakob asked her, serious for a moment, and she answered honestly.
“Maybe. It’s his heritage, even if we’re not religious. And I wouldn’t want him to convert for some Christian girl, if that’s who he falls in love with.”
“Maybe she’d convert for him,” Jakob said sensibly. “Why don’t we wait to see if he’s serious about this girl, before we worry about who’s converting for whom.”
“If he marries a Christian, their kids won’t be Jewish,” Emmanuelle said, looking worried, since the mother had to be Jewish, in order for the children to be Jewish too.
“Be sure to remind him the next time he calls you,” Jakob said, making fun of her.
“I asked him today if he’s serious about her and he said he doesn’t know yet. Usually he just says a flat no,” she said, pursuing the subject.
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself here.” But her instincts were better than he gave her credit for and she had a feeling about this girl. She was very good looking, and there had been something about Max at dinner that had never been there before. He was excited about something and she could sense this girl was it.
There was a photograph of them again a few days later. He had taken her to El Morocco on New Year’s Eve, and she was wearing a sexy, low-cut black dress in the picture, and the photograph showed them toasting each other at midnight and kissing. She showed Jakob again over breakfast and he nodded.
“I don’t think she’s the first girl he’s kissed.”
“New Year’s Eve is different,” she insisted, and he went back to reading his newspaper. He wasn’t going to get wound up over some girl Max was dating. They never lasted long with him, no matter how many times he was in the papers with them.
But the next time they asked him to dinner, he asked if he could bring Julie and Emmanuelle reported it to Jakob immediately.
“He wants to introduce her to us. That’s a sure sign that she’s important to him. Normally, he won’t let his dates near us.”
“Then we’d better behave and make a good impression,” Jakob teased her, but now he was intrigued too.
Jakob made a reservation at La Côte Basque, which they went to for special occasions, and when they got there, Max and his date hadn’t arrived yet. Jakob and Emmanuelle sat at the table waiting, and they were fifteen minutes late. When they came, she was wearing an expensive red silk dress that Emmanuelle thought was much too short to look respectable, but she was an extremely pretty young woman, with exquisite features, milky white skin, big blue eyes, and masses of blond hair piled high on her head. She looked like a model, and Max seemed besotted with her. He held her hand for most of the evening, except when they were eating, and she was very polite, responded to questions they asked her, but she seemed to have no particular interests. She spent the entire dinner staring adoringly at Max, and giggled when he spoke to her, which Emmanuelle found irritating and somewhat immature. But she was undeniably beautiful and Max seemed crazy about her.
She said her family lived in Connecticut, and she hadn’t gone to college, but she was on a number of charitable committees with her mother and older sister. She said her younger sister had gone to college, but had dropped out in sophomore year. Max didn’t seem to care. She liked to ride horses, went to Europe with her parents every year, and had made her debut in New York five years before. Emmanuelle did the calculation, and since girls were debutantes at eighteen, according to tradition, that meant she was twenty-three, nine years younger than Max. His mother had no concrete objections to her except that she was very young and seemed a little silly, and she wasn’t Jewish. She would have liked to see him with someone slightly older, a little more serious, and who had gone to college. And she would have preferred it if Julie were Jewish. But a debutante from Connecticut was not likely to be a Jewish girl. And Max seemed to hang on her every word. Her family had invited him for a weekend at their ski house in Vermont in two weeks. After thanking them for dinner, the young couple left right after dessert. They were meeting friends at Studio 54.
“It’s serious,” Emmanuelle said as soon as they were out of earshot. And Jakob didn’t disagree with her. He just didn’t think it would last. Max’s romances never did. “I wish she were Jewish,” she said wistfully. “I wish she’d gone to college. What would they talk about for the next fifty years? Men don’t think of that when a girl is as pretty as she is.” And it was obvious that Max was very taken with her, for the moment at least. The fact that he’d brought her to dinner with his parents spoke for itself, or maybe he felt obliged to, since he had met her parents at their Christmas dance for four hundred people, and they’d invited him to go skiing with them in Vermont.
“Let’s not get worked up about it yet,” Jakob said calmly as he paid the check, and a few minutes later they left the restaurant.
The following day, there were photographs in the paper of all three Morgan girls and the men they were dating. Pamela, the oldest, was dating the scion of an important Boston banking family, and Belinda, the youngest, was dating a famous movie actor. Julie had been photographed with Max again, and the caption read “Youngest tycoon in town Max Stein,” and they referred to him in the article as the most desirable bachelor in New York. None of it was his parents’ style. They thought he should be more discreet, about both his success and his love life, but he was young and handsome and went out a lot. Max was the image of his Viennese father and grandfather. He had their dark-haired, blue-eyed good looks. Emmanuelle was green-eyed and fair.
For the next several months the newspaper coverage continued. Max and Julie were in the papers almost every day, and had become the darlings of the press. Emmanuelle didn’t like to see it, and thought he should conduct his romances in private, but they had been seen together in public too often to be able to avoid the photographers now.
It was hardly a surprise in May when he told his parents he was deeply in love with her. They had been dating for five months and he told them over Sunday lunch in their new apartment that it was serious and he wanted to propose.
“Already? Don’t you think it’s a little soon after five months?” his mother said, looking anxious. “She’s awfully young, Max
.”
“She’ll be twenty-four in June. That’s old enough. We don’t want to wait.”
“What do her parents think?” Jakob asked him calmly.
“I think they like me,” he said innocently. He would certainly be able to provide for her, but his parents weren’t sure what she’d be bringing to the table, other than her family name and a pretty face.
“How do they feel about your being Jewish?” his father asked him.
“They haven’t said anything. I’m not sure they care.”
“Have they asked you to convert?” his mother wanted to know.
“No, they haven’t. And I haven’t asked her to. We’re not religious, so it would be hypocritical of me to make her do that. She’s Episcopalian, and they go to church, but I don’t think she’s very religious. She never goes to church when she’s with me.”
“I’ve only met her once,” Emmanuelle said, “but she doesn’t seem like a serious person to me. Life can be hard at times, and you need someone who can weather that with you. When we met her, she only talked about her horses, going to Studio 54, and organizing fashion shows for the Junior League. Is that what you want, Max? You need someone who can help you in your career, take care of your children, and support you in hard times.” What she was saying was reasonable, but her son looked amused.
“You mean like if there’s a war, Mom? Or another Holocaust?” He had heard her say it too often on every subject while he was growing up. She always predicted disaster, although he understood why and had compassion for them.
“Your mother’s not wrong, Max. Things happen that you don’t expect. Difficult things sometimes. It doesn’t take a war to have something bad happen. You need someone solid who can go through that with you. Young people don’t always see that. I’m not sure she’s mature enough to give you the kind of support you might need.”
“It’s my job to take care of her,” Max said nobly, which was what they had taught him, but they wanted him to get something in exchange, and neither of them could envision Julie being anything but frivolous, beautiful, and very spoiled. It didn’t seem like a solid foundation for a marriage to either of them. Max didn’t want to hear it. “I’m going to ask her to marry me in the next couple of weeks. I just wanted you to know. I’ve made up my mind. Do I have your blessing?” He gave them no choice.
They both hesitated for a moment and then nodded. He had made it clear they had no right to object. And why would they? But he was marrying a Christian, and what seemed like to them a very indulged young girl. It wasn’t what they had wished for him. But saying so would have alienated him from them, possibly forever.
“Would you consider waiting a few more months to be sure?” his father asked him, and Max shook his head.
“I am sure. That’s why I’m here today. I know you want the best for me. But I know what I’m doing. We love each other, and she’s a great girl. We have a lot of fun together, and we both want to have kids, like three or four.” He could afford them, they knew, but he would have no time for them if he continued his career at the same pace, and neither of them could see Julie bringing up four kids with no help from him.
“You’re going to have to slow your work down a little if you want a wife and children,” his mother said seriously. “They’ll need you around, or sooner or later she’ll get upset, and you won’t even know your own children.”
“Stop seeing disaster at every turn, Mom. We’ll have nannies, I can afford them, and I want her to spend time with me when I’m not busy, and that’s what she wants too. I don’t want her being a slave to our kids and changing diapers all the time.” The one thing Emmanuelle was sure of was that there was no risk that Julie would be spending much of her time changing diapers. “We’re going to have a lot of fun, you’ll see.” It was the second time he’d said it, and Emmanuelle glanced at her husband and then at her son.
“Marriage isn’t always fun, Max. I love your father, but things happen. It’s not fun every day.”
“You two have had an unusual experience. Your whole world fell apart. That’s not going to happen to us, or anyone in this country today.” Buchenwald had moved him deeply, but it had nothing to do with the life that he and Julie were going to lead once they were married. But that wasn’t what his parents were worried about. Julie just didn’t seem like a serious, solid young woman to either of them. She only wanted to play.
“We love you, we just want you to be happy,” his mother said as he stood up after lunch.
“We will be. I promise.” He smiled at both of them. His announcement hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as he’d hoped, but they weren’t going to object. He was thirty-two years old and they weren’t the kind of people to forbid him to marry the girl of his dreams, which Julie was. He had never been as in love as he was with her, and she was too.
There was a long silence after he kissed them goodbye and left the apartment, and Emmanuelle glanced at her husband.
“So, what do you think?”
“I think the same thing you do,” he said unhappily. “I think he’s making a mistake, but there’s nothing we can do about it. And I don’t even care that she’s not Jewish. She’s a lightweight. I wouldn’t leave a dog with that girl, let alone three or four kids, no matter how many nannies he gets for her. And what does she need nannies for if she doesn’t have a job? Why can’t she take care of the kids herself?”
“She’s not the type,” Emmanuelle said. “She seems very spoiled. I’m sure her parents indulged her, and she was brought up by nannies herself.” And then she thought of something else. “And why are they so obsessed with ‘having fun’? We never thought about that. Marriage isn’t about fun, it’s about supporting each other.”
“We never thought about it because we were too busy trying to put food on the table to feed our son. They don’t need to worry about that.” He looked at his wife long and hard then. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Neither do I,” Emmanuelle admitted, “but if we tell him that, he’ll never speak to us again.” She didn’t want to lose her only son to a superficial, possibly not very bright girl who might turn him against them.
“Do you think we should be telling him that?” Jakob asked her.
“No, I don’t. Unless you don’t want to see him again for the next ten years, or until she divorces him and proves us right.”
“I hope that never happens,” Jakob said quietly.
“So do I. I just don’t have a good feeling about her. She’s a party girl. That’s great when you want to go dancing at Studio 54, it’s not who you marry. I guess we never taught him that.” Max had always dated nice girls, but the girl he married had to be more than that, and this one wasn’t. Jakob nodded agreement, and they were both upset for the rest of the afternoon. They went for a long walk together. He was their only child and they didn’t want to let him down, but they were worried for him, and he couldn’t see why.
* * *
—
Julie had had a similar conversation with her father over brunch with her parents. She had told them that she and Max wanted to get engaged. They weren’t surprised and Mike Morgan had already checked Max out with a full financial investigation.
“I never expected any of my daughters to marry a man with the last name of Stein,” he said honestly, “but he checks out perfectly. The guy is worth millions, and he’s done it all himself, with a little bit of help from his father. He’s very bright and ambitious, with a great reputation. He’s going to go far. And he’s a Harvard graduate. You’re going to have a very comfortable life,” he said, looking pleased, and then as an afterthought, “Do you love him?”
“Yes, I do,” she said demurely. He was handsome as well as smart. And they’d been fooling around a lot lately, she was on the pill, which her parents didn’t know. She had pretended she was already married to get it.
“D
o you think he’d be willing to convert?” her father asked her.
“No, I don’t, and I don’t want to ask him. He’s not religious, and he’s never gone to temple, but he’s proud of being Jewish. It’s a cultural thing with him. And his parents were in a concentration camp. He wouldn’t want to offend them.” Mike nodded, and then thought of something else.
“He hasn’t asked you to convert, has he?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Just make sure you don’t, and if you have kids, he has to agree to their being raised Episcopalian like us.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“We’ll put it in the prenup,” Mike said confidently. “Has he proposed yet?”
“No, but I think he will soon.” She wouldn’t have slept with him if she didn’t think he would. He’d been hinting at it. And she’d made him wait four months until she gave in. It had driven him crazy.
“He’d better treat you right, or he’ll have me to deal with,” he said menacingly and she nodded.
“He will, Daddy. He already does.” Her mother hadn’t spoken during the exchange between father and daughter, but she nodded approval the entire time. She liked Max, he was very bright and charming, and had good manners, and Julie would have a good life with him, and everything she wanted. That was important to them. It was what she wanted for all her daughters, and Julie was going to be the first to marry. She had done well, except for the fact that he was Jewish, but he was a handsome man with a ton of money, and that was good enough for them.
In His Father's Footsteps Page 15
