The Secret by Harold Robbins

later.
    We were on our way.

18
    LEN
    During the years when my father was turning his little string of shops into the major chain that would be selling scores of millions of dollars worth of Cheeks products by the time I was old enough even to know what his business was, I was blissfully living in the care of my mother, then in good schools, having no idea what kind of struggles were going on. Those were my years of oblivion. I have memories, but the highlights are rare, and the rest is foggy.
    —I remember that one summer we rented a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that we—that is, my mother and I—could go to the beach every day. I remember that the house was grand but the floors were deeply scarred. Last summer’s tenants had roller-skated over the parquet.
    —I remember that Aunt Therèse came to Greenwich and stayed with us for two or three weeks that summer—Therése, the collaborator who had been stripped and shaved. By the time she wore her Cheeks international-orange maillot on the beach in Greenwich, it was no longer scandalous, though she turned heads. I had no idea my father manufactured and sold it.
    —I am too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy. I do remember the election of Richard Nixon and what my mother said about it. She said, “Well, that’s the end of optimism in America. The country has been taken over by the pancake eaters.”
    —I remember Nixon’s resignation. I remember with what quiet, tearful horror the event was noted in the halls of Lodge, in contrast with the amused satisfaction I saw in my father and mother when I went home.
    —I remember a lot of dumb things, like my fascination with the first color television set in our home; my pride in learning that my father went to business meetings in his own corporate airplane, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron—named Cheeks, of course; understanding that my father and mother could, well, do it at eight thousand feet over some obscure town in Pennsylvania, and did, behind a curtain that hid them from the pilot.
    It dawned on me, slowly, that my father was somebody.
    —I remember trips to Europe—to Paris, chiefly, but also to Lyon and to Nice and St. Tropez, where for the first time I saw topless girls on the beach. I remember eating hamburger au cheval without realizing it was horsemeat. (And why not? If we slaughter a steer to eat as flesh, why not a gelding?) I remember Paul Renard and visits to the Lido and Folies Bergère. I would learn only much later that my mother had once danced on the stage of a Paris nightclub as naked as those girls who gave me erections.
    I should remember the symptoms of my mother’s fatal illness. I loved her, and I was not insensitive to her, but I suppose I thought—like many children—that my parents were invincible. You are so dependent on them when you are young that you cannot imagine what it might be like to have to try to live without them.
    My father lost both his parents at once, in a car crash, when he was about the same age I was when I lost my mother. Both! I shuddered. I couldn’t even think about it.
    Anyway, if I had been a more realistic boy I might have realized that it was not natural for my mother to be losing weight so fast. She turned into a pallid wraith within a few months. Suddenly she was delicate and vulnerable. I saw that, but still I had no idea that when my parents left for Europe that fall that it was for her last visit to her native land, her sister, and her friends. I guess they knew she would not return alive from that last visit.
    Before I went to Amherst my father educated me a little.
    “Len,” he told me, “we are Jews. Some people are proud of that. Some are ashamed of it. I am neither. It is a part of life. I am a Jew just as I am a male. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be. I am. Your mother was a Catholic. Same thing. She just was. There are some things you can’t change, and I would be disappointed in you if you tried. You can renounce