Lovers by Judith Krantz Page A

started to acquire mall sites while he was a freshman at Harvard, by borrowing against the funds he could expect to come into at twenty-one.
    Most un-Bostonian, his father had considered it, disapproving of something that deviated so far from what he considered a proper use of a sound business mind. “You should plan to go into the family trusts, many of them eventually your own, Benjamin, instead of trying to cover good land with ugly parking lots and hideous shopfronts,” he’d said dryly, as he sat in the library of his Bulfinch mansionon Mount Vernon Street. “Brains like yours should be used for the conservation and growth of family capital and the protection of the public institutions that depend on our support. Certainly not on something as essentially vulgar and aesthetically immoral as those repulsive malls. That’s why I’ve decided not to invest with you.”
    Clearly his father was not the stuff of which clipper ship captains were made, Ben told himself, no matter how many such rip-snorting, rough-and-ready pistoleros had founded the family’s fortune. So much the worse for the old fellow. He’d been obligated to give his own father a chance to get in on the ground floor, but now that he’d missed his shot, there wouldn’t be another.
    Ben Winthrop took his father’s refusal as final proof that his own plan to base his future operation in New York was sound. The Boston financial decision-making climate was frequently influenced by moral judgments. Ben considered himself warned by Lewis Carroll in
Alice in Wonderland
. “Tut, tut, child,” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”
    Early in his life, at the age when people were still giving him children’s books, he’d decided that he didn’t have a minute to waste and morality didn’t intrigue him. No man ever made a fortune by seeking moral opportunities, and in the course of the last decade and a half, Ben Winthrop had become a millionaire eight hundred times over, both from his malls and other investments he made on the side, particularly in shipping. His eye was always on the alert for opportunity, and the gods of opportunity, so flatteringly courted, rewarded him richly.
    Although Ben Winthrop’s quick success in business might have indicated that he was an impatient man, such a judgment would have been wrong. He had an innate capacity to judge when patience, a keen and relentless patience, would repay the investment of his interest, and he was disciplined in the art of waiting and watching and coddling a project along until precisely the moment when it reached perfect ripeness. Then he would leap, quickly and thoroughly,and take what he wanted and make it his own. Anything he possessed, he insisted on possessing in its entirety. The concept of sharing was foreign to him, and profoundly distasteful.
    He treated women he coveted in the same way as he treated pieces of property, cultivating them with a deliberately lulling patience until exactly the propitious moment. He was more than enough of a self-observer to understand the advantage of his somewhat academic exterior that gave no clues to his inner and predatory self. He had graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, with a genuine interest in literature and history, and a genuine love of beauty in all its forms. His greatest pleasures were making money, loving women, and observing beautiful objects. When a woman or an object struck him as exceptionally worthy, he would stop at nothing to acquire her or it.
    Ben Winthrop had no idea of the extent of his pride. He would have been astonished if anyone had called him immoral. He was amoral, he occasionally told himself with an inward smile, a man to whom petty moral judgments could not apply since he was outside the narrow world of morality, elevated by his own efforts to the rational sphere of nonmorality where the sensible and rich existed, envied by those who were unable to leap as high.
    Ben Winthrop had