Tycoon (17 page)

“The only other man I know who might tempt me is Jack Lear, and I assure you absolutely that I have never approached him and never will.”

“If you did, I'd kill you both,” said Cocky.

K
IMBERLY STALKED AROUND THE BEDROOM.
J
ACK WAS ALL
but ignoring her, which he knew infuriated her.

“You make a fool of yourself,” she averred. “Half the people we know are outright laughing at you.”

“To hell with them,” he muttered.

“To hell
with them? To hell with our friends? To hell with important people who've done things for us?”

Jack ran his hands down across his eyes. “I really don't care,” he said. He slumped wearily in a small overstuffed chair, with his legs stretched out before him. He had not even untied his black bow tie.

Kimberly had thrown her dress in a corner of the room. She was wearing what she had taken to wearing regularly in the past year: a tight black corselet with long garter straps. She had the idea that her flesh was looser than it had been before she was thirty, and confining it inside what she called a foundation garment was an easy way to make herself sleek.

“I can recite it,” she declared, throwing out her hands. “So can everyone we know. And they
do!
‘It was a pleasant spring morning. The women trudging along the road pulling their carts might have been picturesque if we had not known the grim reason that had impelled them to abandon their homes and set out in the bleak hope of finding safety . . . .' Then you get
tearful!
People aren't sure if you're drunk or what. I
know
it made you sick to see people machine-gunned. Everybody knows it. But we don't have to hear about it again and again and again.”

“Let some of them see a thing like that and see how soon they forget it. Anyway, I don't
want
to forget it, and I don't want anybody else to forget it.”

She stood with her hands on her hips and faced him angrily. “You know what they're
saying
about you? They say you are obsessively anti-Hitler because you are a
Jew!”

Jack put his head back against the upholstery of the chair and closed his eyes. “I am obsessively anti-Hitler because I am an eyewitness to Nazi inhumanity—just one small example, actually, of Nazi inhumanity.”

“All right. But
enough!
Stop making yourself the spokesman for Belgians who get shot on roadsides and for Jews who get knocked around because they're Jews. Everybody knows you
are
a Jew, and they have accepted you—”

“In spite of it,” he interrupted dryly.

“I've worked, struggled, to see us welcomed in the best—Jack! All I'm asking you to do is be more subtle.”

“More the gentleman.”

“You
are
a gentleman, almost. Do you resent it?”

“No. But how I react to seeing women and children machine-gunned on a Belgian road has nothing to do with being a gentleman, or sophisticated or unsophisticated, or Jewish or goyish.”

“Oh, I know.
Kristallnacht
and all that.”

Jack drew a deep breath and blew a loud sigh. “How do you want me to react?”

“As my father reacts,
” she said coldly. “As a citizen of the world. As a humanitarian. Not as a fanatic.”

“Be specific, Kimberly.”

She stepped over to the bed and sat down. “We married as a
very unlikely couple,” she said quietly. “Your father and brother hated the marriage. My friends couldn't believe it. You asked me to make you . . . worthy of me. Those are your words, Jack, not mine. ‘Make me worthy of you, Kimberly.' All right. I have worked at it for ten years. And you're not the man you used to be. You're a
better
man.
Goddammit!
Did I make you a better man or did I not?”

Jack nodded, but he said, “It's a question of values, isn't it?”

Her face hardened. “Jack, gentlemen adopt causes. But they support their causes with gentlemanly restraint. If you want to help B'nai B'rith, help it. I don't object. But don't be identified with it. My father contributes generously to the support of Irish foundlings, but he's not a goddamned mackerel-snapping Catholic! Can you understand the difference?”

Jack nodded and said nothing.

Kimberly came toward him. “Husband . . . I try so hard to make you what you told me you want to be.
We are what we are, Jack!
Which is not—Okay, never mind what it's not. Think about what it is! A home on Louisburg Square! Even my parents don't have that. Don't blow it all! You can't defeat Hitler all by yourself. Don't get yourself identified with—”

“With what, exactly?”

“With FDR! With going to war.
Our
kind of people are rational. That's what we are: rational. Be rational, Jack, I
beg
you!”

O
N
J
UNE
4, J
ACK RECEIVED A LETTER FROM
H
ARRY
H
OPKINS,
assistant to the President. Hopkins said the President was going to appoint a committee to encourage more complete and more accurate broadcast information about the war and about steps he was taking to strengthen hemispheric defense. He asked if Jack would serve on that committee.

Jack replied by telegram that he would be honored to serve on the Hemispheric Defense Information Committee.

He made no announcement of his appointment, but the White House did. On Thursday of the following week he stopped at the Common Club on his way home for the evening and joined his father-in-law at the bar.

Times had changed the Common Club. Ten years before almost every man at the bar after six o'clock was wearing white tie and tails. Even five years before white tie or at least black tie was de rigueur. Now most of the men were in business suits, as were Jack and Harrison Wolcott.

Jack had not been in the club since his appointment to the HDIC, and several men came up to him to offer congratulations. Some who knew him and might have congratulated him did not—rather pointedly, Jack thought.

Harrison Wolcott thought so, too, and commented: “Some of our fellow members are committed America Firsters. Some hate FDR so much they despise any man who helps him in any way.”

Jack put his glass down on the bar. “To hell with them.”

“I have to warn you of something: Kimberly is very upset.”

“About the HDIC?”

“Someone sent her a copy of the Dearborn
Times
—you know: Henry Ford's newspaper. It translates HDIC as ‘Hebrew Defense Information Committee' and says the committee is part of a plot to get the United States into a war to save the Jews of Europe from Nazi anti-Semitism.” Wolcott shrugged. “That's what Mr. Ford's paper says.”

“Does anybody take it seriously?”

“No one but semiliterate anti-Semites. Kimberly doesn't take it seriously in the sense of believing anything in the story is true. But she's upset that you're being attacked on this ground.”

“She doesn't like the identification.”

“I'm sorry, Jack.”

“My father doesn't like it either,” Jack confessed. “I got a wire from him asking if I'd lost my mind.”

T
HE
H
EMISPHERIC
D
EFENSE
I
NFORMATION
C
OMMITTEE MET
only twice. Its members conducted most of their business by exchanging letters and memoranda and by occasional telephone calls. After the second meeting, in September in Washington, Jack stayed in town an extra day, at the Mayflower.

He had not come to Washington alone. Betsy was with him and shared his suite. They lay together in bed, and Jack told her what the committee had said and done, acknowledging that it was probably a waste of time. No one of any great consequence in the administration had appeared at either of the meetings.

Betsy lifted Jack's cock and stared at it intently. Then she closed her fingers loosely around it. “You're hung,” she said quietly. “I wish Curt had one as big.”

Jack grinned. “He has other good qualities.”

“He does, you know. He's a fine man. A trusting man. I should be in London, where he is, and instead I'm in Washington in bed with you. Does that bother you at all? I mean, aren't we betraying your friend, my husband, and a fine man?”

“Let's talk about that in parts. You say Curt's a fine man. He
is
a fine man. And he's your husband, and he's a friend of mine. But is ‘betraying' the right word? You're lonely. You need a man now and again. I can be that man. There's no complication, because I'm married to Kimberly, for sure, and you're married to Curt, for sure.”

“That's me, okay. I'm lonely. My husband's in London. But what about you? Your wife's in Boston.”

“I'm just as lonely as you are, Betsy.”

“She's shut you out of the bedroom?”

He grinned. “Not at all. She's developed a whole new set of interests. She wants me to spank her. She's actually suggested I use a riding crop on her backside.”

“My God! So, then—”

“Bets, there is something more to a relationship than just—Put it this way: she
wants
me, but she doesn't
like
me. We're lovers, for certain, but I'm not sure we're friends anymore.”

“Meaning?”

“Ten years ago we set to work to
build
something together. To defy my goddamn father. And we did it, too. That's what I call a friendship in a marriage. I don't think we could do it anymore. Her values—”

“I know, Jack,” Betsy said quietly. “If it could have been you and me—”

“If not for the kids, it could have been.”

“Do you mean that? If not for your children, you could have left her for me?”

“I'm comfortable with you, Bets. Nobody is ever comfortable with Kimberly.”

Betsy gently squeezed his cock and balls. “I could have made you
so comfortable
,” she whispered.

“You'd have been proud of me, Bets. That's something she can never be: proud of me. She's not proud of anything I do. I bought two more radio stations this year. She's not proud of that. My fuckin' father's not proud of me—though about that I couldn't care less. Kimberly's not proud of me, and that hurts.”

Betsy rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom. She did not close the door but let him hear her stream falling into the toilet. She was four years older than he was, which made her almost forty, but she was as playful as a girl. She had not boarded the train in Boston but had caught it at its first stop, in Dedham. As soon as she was in his roomette and had handed the conductor her ticket, she undressed and remained stark naked until the train was pulling into Penn Station. It was like the trip in the Duesenberg when she had kept her skirt pulled up all the way to her hips from Boston to White Plains. Betsy was bold, earthy, and fun.

She had a more generous figure than Kimberly or Connie had, and yet her underthings were designed not to confine and slenderize but to emphasize and show off. Her brassieres lifted her breasts and thrust them forward. Though she had a round belly and tush, she wore nothing tight around her middle. She
wore very simple nylon panties, not panty girdles. That was what she was wearing now, with a white lace push-up bra.

“Well . . .” she said, tipping her head to one side and showing him a wicked little smile. “So she likes to be spanked, does she?”

Jack grinned. “I shouldn't tell it.”

Betsy sat down on the foot of the bed. “I want an honest answer to an honest question. I want to know if you enjoy spanking her.”

“Well . . .”

“C'mon. Tell the truth. Do you get anything out of it?”

He hesitated, then said, “I suppose I like it, sort of.”

“Tell me. Describe it. I want to know how it goes.”

“Bets!”

“C'mon, now, if you want me to be cooperative tonight.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Let's start with, say, how does she—How does she, shall we say,
dispose
herself? Across your lap?”

“No. She gets on her hands and knees on the bed, pushes her face down into a pillow or two, and shoves her butt up in the air.”

“Do you hit her hard?”

“Pretty hard. She's not satisfied if I don't.”

“Does she
come
, for God's sake?”

“Sometimes.”

Betsy shook her head and grinned. “
Jesus!
The elegant Kimberly Wolcott Lear, kneeling and taking a
spanking!
It's all I can do to believe it!”

“Believe it,” Jack said dryly. He lit a cigarette. “Believe it.”

Betsy chuckled. “Will you spank me?” she asked solemnly.

He frowned and shook his head. “You don't want that, Bets. You really don't.”

“You're right,” she said quietly. “I don't. My daddy spanked me once. I hated it. I hate the memory of it. I was twelve and thought I was too old to be treated that way. He was very angry. He pulled my skirt and petticoat up and my drawers down—we still wore drawers in those days, if you can believe it—and spanked me on my bare bottom in front of my mother and my brother and my sister. The pain wasn't so bad.
What was intolerable was the
humiliation.
I never really forgave him, until the day he died.”

“I'm not going to spank you, Bets.”

“No, you devil, you're not. But I'll tell you what you are going to do. You're going to take your belt and give me a lacing on the ass.”

“Forget it.”