The Secret by Harold Robbins Page B

and how he had earned it. It was while I was at Friends School in New York and then at Lodge that I was ignorant of all he’d gone through, and my mother, to build their small chain of lingerie shops into a big business.
    The problem was, there was no one to tell me. My mother would have, I am sure, if she had lived. My mother was open and honest. She told me what she wanted to tell me when she thought I was old enough to know it.
    So has my father, though he has a very different idea of what I should know and when I should know it. My father has been honest with me—but in a different way, his own way.
    I’ve had to pick up bits and pieces from here and there. From wherever I could get it.
    I have never liked Buddy. He knows it. Still, when my father met my mother, Buddy had already been his best friend for many years, since my dad was a kid. Why Buddy so closely befriended my father was a mystery to me—and to my father, really. Inevitably I am thrown into Buddy’s company, and when that happens I encourage him to talk about the years when they were not just friends, but partners. Buddy knows more about my father than even my mother knew.
    The sudden death of both his parents was a defining event in my father’s life. How could it not have been? Then he discovered that his Uncle Harry had snookered him out of what little inheritance he might have had. Though he had reason to hate Uncle Harry, he had to work for him. In 1941 jobs were not easy to come by for a kid just leaving high school. He was forced to work for a pittance and watch his uncle cheat everyone who came near him.
    My father became a hustler. Buddy was a hustler. A certain bitterness lay behind it—Buddy’s probably because he was a victim of racism, my father’s because he was a victim of his Uncle Harry and also, in a far larger sense, because he was a victim of the way too many people had to live in New York City in those years. I know about poor people. But poor people today don’t live the way poor people did when my father was a boy—with no so-called “safety net” offered by welfare, and no hope.
    Why Buddy chose to befriend my father is a complete mystery to me—and I wonder if it’s not a mystery to my father.
    But then came Pearl Harbor Day. There was something irregular about the way the two friends went into the service. I am not sure what happened. It was even a scam when my father was given noncombat status and somehow managed to get the same for Buddy, though Buddy didn’t deserve it. The two of them had all kinds of resources and knew how to use them. They were hustlers. Not only that, they were hustlers who were willing to take risks.
    They wound up in Paris, which is where my father met Paul Renard and Giselle, my mother.
    *   *   *
    My father liked to eat at the Palm. I went there to meet him one day and found Buddy waiting for me. He said my father would be a little late, but we would have a glass of wine and wait for him.
    As we sat I made a few comments about Sal Nero, specifically that I found him an bad character. “In fact,” I said, “I’d think he was Mafia connected, except for one thing.”
    “What thing is that, Lenny?”
    “Well … when he joined my father in the business, my mother was still alive and active. My mother would never have consented to be associated with—”
    “Lenny, for Christ’s sake! What do you think your mother was, some kind of plaster saint?”
    “She was a good woman,” I said truculently. “She was a good woman.”
    “Damn right she was,” said Buddy. “A good woman. Brave. Smart. But you want to know what she was the first time I saw her?”
    “What?”
    “Stark staring mother naked. She was a stripper in a Paris club called the Blue Note, which was run by Paul Renard. A stripper. No funny business. She didn’t hustle. But she danced in the nude. I don’t mean in a G-string and bra: I mean in the nude, showing her … well, she didn’t have any. She