On a rainy spring day in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, my parents made love and unknowingly created me. I was fine where I was, but they dragged me into their messy lives. They were both young, April was eighteen and Robert nineteen. Too young to know what they were doing and too careless to use protection. Then again, maybe Robert was well aware of the possibility of creating a new being. After all, April was very attractive, with her amber curls, her big eyes and her nicely curved body. Even more attractive was her family, though. George Warner was a tycoon with an empire that spanned from steel companies in China to start-ups in Manhattan and a toy factory in Nebraska that produced one of the most popular dolls on the market.
Robert’s mother, Louise, often wondered what went wrong and when. She and her late husband, Emil, were decent people and lived a modest life in a small town in Bavaria. They did everything they could. They loved little Robert, cared for him without crushing him, provided him with a good education and where always there, when he needed them. They gave him what he asked for, the latest pair of sneakers or the expensive Lego set everyone else in class got for Christmas. They never let him know or feel that this meant doing without the better car or the watch Emil liked or that holiday in Italy. How he became the self-centered fortune hunter with an inflated sense of entitlement and no inner moral compass baffled Louise on a daily basis.
And a fortune hunter he was. Louise had used a good deal of her savings to send him to Columbia University in New York City to make sure that yet again he would get the best there was. He repaid her by squandering her money, skipping classes and chasing women in an effort to latch on to a wealthy girl. Although nothing in his upbringing justified the feeling, he felt deprived. He yearned for riches and for being part of a world where deals were sealed on the golf course and copious allowances spent on long exquisite lunches in fancy restaurants in Midtown.
When he met April in one of the finest clubs in SoHo, he knew he’d struck gold. Able to turn on a convincing charming persona when needed, he sprayed April with compliments and attention. This charming persona even changed the way he looked. In his usual state of general dissatisfaction he looked like the sourpuss he was. His charming persona on the other hand highlighted his pleasing features under nice thick black hair and he became quite attractive.
April fell for it. Her father had not taught her how to judge a man’s character or detect a gold-digger. George had never seen the need to teach his daughter these skills, nor how to choose the right man. She was his little princess, his surrogate wife, and no man was ever going to be good enough for her. He saw the young men circling her as a distraction until he was going to pick a suitable husband for her. One who would listen to him and do what he asked him to do.
He had not counted on Robert. Once it was clear April was pregnant, the gloves came off. Robert proposed and George swore his precious little daughter would never marry that fortune hunter. Hewas able to read a man’s character and he knew who Robert was when he met him the first time. The charming persona had no effect on George.
At first, George tried to talk April into aborting me. He thought he knew her better than she did herself and expected her consent. She caught him by utter surprise when she refused. He tested her resolve in various arguments and then began watching April’s newly grown back bone with interest. When it became clear to him, April never even let the thought of not having me enter her mind, George decided to change his tactics. He couldn’t have built Warner Enterprises if he hadn’t known how to deal with resistance or refusal. He took a closer look at the prospect of a grandson (there never was a granddaughter in his mind) and realized I was the heir he had wanted – just sooner than he had planned. In the end, he found it easy to make peace with my impending arrival and even felt a pang of remorse at his initial idea of aborting me.
The next step was more difficult. Having learnt from her refusal, George was careful not to make another wrong assumption. He followed his intuition that April would only want Robert more if he opposed their marriage. So, he took a different approach. He fully embraced Robert as his future son-in-law and invited him to the mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, to parties in the city, to golf events in Cape Cod – always making sure April was there, too. He wanted her to see Robert’s true nature and abandon the idea of marrying him. Unfortunately, and I mean this with all my heart, Robert was able to keep up his charming veneer for much longer than George had thought or hoped.
Robert rejoiced every day in his luck of finally having tapped into a fountain of wealth, which he thought was well-deserved and worth the effort of playing nice for a little while longer. He was able to fool many of George’s friends and business partners and ingratiated himself deeper with April with every week that passed. Occasionally, George heard a fleeting question where Robert had suddenly come from and whether his intentions were honest, but all in all, nobody seriously suspected that he was a fortune hunter and found him to be a charming son-in-law and perfect husband.
April thought she was in love and Robert had won too many people over for George to stop the engagement from going forward. George had to regroup again.
He had no idea that this was only the beginning of my thwarting his plans.
End of chapter 1
2. PREMONITION – preview
George pulls off a high society wedding before April shows. Louise, Robert’s mother, flies from Germany over the big pond to attend the wedding. Her heart sinks when she sees, how self-involved and sometimes outright mean the adults in the Warner mansion are, and she makes an important decision.
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Copyright by Ines Strohschein tnwc@gmx.com