A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [47]
“I don’t know what I don’t know,” Carlos said, “only that you and I as lovers would further poison the well with the O’Connells and my parents. Rita, I have never known days like these. I love you. I want you to be mine always.”
“But?” she asked.
“I am only starting my career. I am not so far along that I can take a wife. I travel endlessly. We have an office in Denver I can work out of once or twice a month.”
Reluctantly, Rita had to come around to his way of thinking. “Papa’s heart would be broken if I did not finish my schooling,” she said at last.
“We’ll see each other in Denver,” he asked pleadingly, “until the way becomes clear for us?”
“Something is going to happen, Carlos, something bad.”
“Don’t be superstitious,” he said.
Carlos Martinez would be a fine choice, she thought. I’m glad he was the first man. Yes, a fine choice, if she could not have Quinn.
Chapter 13
PAWTUCKET, RHODE ISLAND—
LATE 1970s
The personal greening of Thornton Tomtree began with spring’s warm breezes hushing up the immaculate lawn of Dwight Grassley’s yachting club, a somewhat tattered royalty that once had defended the America’s Cup. With T3’s name gaining coin about the country, Dwight sponsored Tomtree into the elite world of Newport.
Scion of the old Grassley family, Dwight had the duty of seeing that his female siblings made suitable marriages. He had three sisters: one barely coherent, in a Tribeca loft, one who did everything right, and one who was a problem. Penny, the barefoot, skinnydipping contessa, was not a bad artist, but she loved the many men who passed her way. Three of them had left her bearing three quite different children. It bothered Dwight that she was the happiest of them all, give or take a suicidal incident or two.
Nini, on the other hand, did everything right. A Newport Yacht Club wedding to be forgotten as soon as the ice sculpture melted. The couple were both homely but produced beautiful children.
Pucky was the problem. She was a long streaker, a tall, thin girl of five foot eleven. She had a pleasant face, though her teeth were a mite large. Pucky knew from her first boarding school what her route would be in the airless, closed Newport society. She’d leave the race car drivers to Penny.
Looking closely at Pucky, one would see a personality bubbling like a newly opened bottle of Perrier. Her body was thin but made the right slow turns at the right places, giving her a tall flow which she knew how to use.
What seemed to be a shallow inlet was very deep, filled with disarming knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Somewhere along the line Pucky became very comfortable with herself, and she stopped the bull-moose monetary charges of a number of the yacht club’s finest who tried to court or seduce her.
Thornton Tomtree’s appearance immediately drew her interest. He seemed even taller than he was because of his growing stature in the national community.
T3, as he came to be known, didn’t like the yacht club scene, but neither did she. Those qualities, deep down, unspoken, got to her. She saw him as a great big Newfoundland puppy, not quite coordinated, but a lonely man needing a compassionate woman, wife, lover.
Pucky, whose short list usually ran to actors, writers, and artists in Providence, suddenly found herself taken by an industrialist!
She was far from invisible. She sailed splendidly, was a charming hostess, a charity workaholic, and mainly—a force in the cultural life of the state, including the great jazz festival.
Providence had become a strong satellite community for the artists who couldn’t quite cut it in New York. Pucky’s long suit was her quiet but very serious help for the creative. “’Tis told” she was very romantic.
When all was said and done, Pucky wanted Thornton Tomtree’s magnificent mind, or enough of it to take her to places where she might get a chance look into his ethereal world.
Penny set Thornton up by sending him to the family’s beach cabana to get Pucky a towel, and he entered to find her naked. Totally unexpected, she appeared as a tall, beautifully proportioned