For the Rich they Sing-Sometimes

Someone said of one of the great merchant barons, many times a millionaire before he was 30, "He had the cunning of the very rich, who are hunted all their lives," and so had Miles Flynn. Miles had native cunning (not to be confused with intelligence) and the cunning aforesaid (even less to be confused with intelligence) and in addition he'd been conditioned: he was married, the first time, five days after his 18th birthday. One Charles Courtney Batt, chief of the legal hierarchy that managed the Flynn estate, had had the marriage annulled, which was easy, but first miles had to be convinced, and that was hard. He was stubborn. Even after they'd shown him the girl's record he wanted to keep her. The marriage lasted five months and 16 days. His second wife was Terra Louise Traut. She was pedigreed, beautiful, certified by the best American and Swiss schools, loved by one and all. Miles was 23 when he and Terra were married and 19 months older when she divorced him. Terra hadn't been able to stand the sight of him, ever, an aberration which rather distinctly set her apart from the herd. She had been in there for the sole purpose of looting the vaults and that she did very well: the settlement for her, and the baby, had been over half a million in cash, and the alimony agreement stipulated no cutoff in case of remarriage -- it went on forever. Her lawyers felt that she was a brave girl and deserved all of it. To get the pictures of Miles knocking her down, for example, she had had to make him fighting drunk -- he was not a big drinker -- and bring him to the climax of weeks of goading. He might very well have hurt her, or even have killed her. As it was, he loosened two lower teeth when he hit her, but that was an advantage; her dentist was her most effective witness.

Miles Flynn was elusive for a couple of years after Terra Louise. He said he felt like the mechanical rabbit at a dog track. It was probably true that every woman in the country over the age of 16 had at one time or another allowed herself a fantasy that included marrying Miles Flynn. His picture had been in the papers so much that everyone knew what he looked like, and then there was the money. Coming into the 1950s the estate had been worth around $50,000,000, and even if the executors had been idiots it would have doubled by 1960. Miles had a kind of Lady Mary Docker attitude toward money: he wasn't ashamed of it, and he never allowed the possibility of attendant publicity to influence a decision about spending. He lived it up, but the first thing a girl got on the second date was his heartfelt assurance that he would never marry her, not under any circumstances, conceivable or inconceivable.

"I wouldn't for the world offend you, dear heart," he'd say. "It's just that I want you to know how it is with me. It's like the stuff they print on plane tickets: the conditions of the contract, and so on. If you don't like the ticket you don't have to get on the airplane."

Most of them got on anyway.

Miles met Mary Kennedy on a real airplane. She was a stewardess on a Pan-Am 707 he took from Paris one day in May. She was pretty, what else? and she had a pretty figure, what else? She was a Standard Stewardess Type 89-T, for Tall. Her eyes were blue and hadn't missed by a great deal being violet. She was First Girl on the airplane and she should have been. She wasn't diffident and she wasn't forward; she had authority and firmness and she was sweet and comforting and all woman. None of this would have got her a look from Miles Flynn, but she had something else.

Three hours out of New York she leaned over Miles' seat, giving him a drink, looked out his window and said, "It's miserable out there, isn't it. But the sun will be shining in New York."

"The captain was on the horn a couple of minutes ago, didn't you hear him?" Miles said. "He said it would be pouring rain when we land."

Miss Kennedy smiled. "I have better information than he can get," she said, and she went away and didn't come back.

When they started letting down for Idlewild the weather looked like New York November, wet, thick, cold and horrid; they broke out into a light rain at about 7500 feet, the stuff was moving off under a driving wind when they landed, and just as the plane hauled up to the ramp the sun came out bright and hot.

Miss Kennedy had the door and when Miles Flynn came by she smiled and inclined her head charmingly and said, "You see, I told you."

• • •

A month later he decided to go to Stockholm to see the raising of the Vasa, and he drew Mary Kennedy again. He remembered her. "Tell me," he said, "how's it going to be in Paris six hours from now?"

"I don't know," she said. "I haven't thought about it. My view is, it's always nice in Paris."

Halfway over she brought him a radiogram. It was short. Sorry cannot meet you. Lise.

Miles was annoyed. It hadn't been any last-minute date; he'd phoned the girl three days in advance. He didn't like it that the message gave no reason and cited no alternative. He wadded it and stuffed it into the ashtray on the seat arm. Miss Kennedy came down the aisle. From his point of view, her legs looked longer than they could be, and the rest of her, up to her breasts, looked flat and iron-hard. She smiled at him.

"Of course I will," she said.

For a second he thought of playing it dumb, but he was basically an honest man. He didn't say anything.

"You were going to ask me to have dinner with you, weren't you?" she said.

He nodded.

"Are you still?" she said.

He nodded again. "That's some little radar you've got there, or whatever," he said.

She laughed. She had a big, merry laugh. She was a big, merry, generous girl. She had a two-day layover in Paris and he canceled his Stockholm flight.

• • •

When he came back to New York he intended phoning her and he would have, within a week or so, but as it turned out there was no need. He had dined with a playbroker one night; he left the man at the restaurant door and for no reason he could remember, afterward, he decided to walk to his flat instead of taking a cab. He met Mary Kennedy at Park and 56th Street. She was walking aimlessly and slowly, looking into the Mercedes-Benz showroom.

"I thought you'd never get here," she said softly. "What delayed you?"

He felt distinctly spooked. He had intended to be home by 11 because he had half promised to catch a television show; he and his friend had had a lot of laughs during dinner and he'd quite forgotten about it. There was no way for her to know this.

"What are you doing, wandering around in the middle of the night?" he said. "Where are you going?"

"I was waiting for you," she said. "And I'm going wherever you want me to, I hope."

He didn't ask her anything more. She had been enchanting in Paris; in New York he really couldn't bear to go to sleep. There was no magic about it: she made him believe that he mattered and that nothing else did. When she screamed he somehow felt she was not giving vent to her own ecstasy but crying her pride in him. When she was in possession of herself she held him lightly in her arms and her arms and her hands moved questingly over him, searching out every reaction. In the dawn he sent her across the room to open a curtain, so that he could watch her as she walked. She moved like a queen, but she bent to his crooked finger.

They left the bed at noon and had champagne for orange juice. They had a shower, and more champagne, a careful amount, and went to a Hungarian place in the 80s for a big lunch.

"Now tell me," Miles said, "how did you know I was going to come along Park Avenue last night?"

"I don't know how I knew," she said. "It was the same as it had been the first two times: when I knew it was going to be sunny in New York and that you were going to ask me to dinner."

"You're not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter?" Miles said.

"I'm not even Irish," she said. "If I were I could give you a windy tale, but as it is I have to say that I seem to come by things oddly every once in a while, and that it's no doubt some kind of extrasensory perception. All I know is that there's a certain amount of emotion involved. It hasn't happened often."

She didn't tell him more; and he began to think she didn't know more. He kept on seeing her. He went to some pains to convince himself that bed was all of it, and he waited, apprehensively, for passion's inevitable decline. He could detect no sign, and the weeks wore merrily on. If anything, the canvas on which she painted seemed to enlarge. She did not indulge him in anything so mundane as a fuller repertory. She was not expert. She was selfless. When he understood this he began to be moved.

When the very rich are moved, they think of gift-giving. Rather, when the rich are very moved, they think of gift-giving. Miles Flynn was sufficiently moved to buy a small golden brooch for (continued on page 50) For the Rich they Sing (Continued from page 48) Mary Kennedy, and he was sufficiently sentimental to choose one in the shape of an airplane. It was not junk: the running lights were represented by a diamond and a ruby, small but fine. It was by his standards a modest if not trifling gift at $265 plus tax. Mary wouldn't take it.

"I don't want anything from you that has anything to do with money," she said. "It's too corny. You've given little presents like this to more girls than you could lay end to end from here to Central Park. I don't want anything from you that has anything to do with money. If you didn't insist on eating in places like this I wouldn't even let you buy me a lunch. It's just too dreary, you and money." She put the top on the box and pushed it across the tablecloth. "But it was dear of you to think of it."

A little red flare of anger burned brightly in Miles, but only briefly, briefly. He'd seen this gambit before, and he knew the counter: a 20-carat zircon set in white gold in a Cartier box. He had once had even that refused, but the girl had lost on the next move: a phony deed to a cooperative flat on Sutton Place.

"If you're thinking, and you are," Mary said, "that I'm turning this little iron bird down so that you'll raise the ante, you can just stop. Because you couldn't give me a prefab Taj Mahal or a first mortgage on Monaco or anything else that costs money."

"Ok," he said.

"I, on the other hand, can give you some small material token of my affection, of value up to say half a week's salary, because money and me are on a wholly different basis. You can understand that, can't you?"

"OK," Miles said. "I can understand, but don't do it."

"Are you hungry?" she said.

"You know I'm not," he said. "Let's get out of here."

The concept of heterosexual romantic love was repugnant to Miles Flynn; he didn't like even the word, love, but he began to wonder what other term to use in thinking about Mary Kennedy. When he admitted this to himself he was frightened. This was the fatheaded emotion that had led him to pledge formal lifelong free access to his soul, body and worldly goods to, first, a dedicated blackmailer, and second a hatchet-hearted bitch who should have been put into a bucket of warm water at birth. And both had been most dear to him, early on.

Every 30 days Miles was reminded of these lapses in judgment when he met with Charles Courtney Batt. Batt was thin, gray, all Brooks and 18 inches wide. He had made his own money, and a lot of it, by pure intellectual effort.

"I am told, Miles," he said, "that you have not been much in the gossip columns of late. Have you turned to celibacy in your, uh, middle years?" He lined up the edges of the July financial folders, his eyes cast down.

Miles smiled broadly to show that he knew a joke when he heard it.

"Oh, no," he said. "Not that." And, hating himself for it, he began to tell Batt about Mary Kennedy, emphasizing what was easiest to emphasize: her apparent prescience.

"Dear me," Charles Courtney Batt said, "a most enterprising young lady. Rather dangerously so, I should think. Of course you saw through to her modus operandi, I'm sure. In the first instance, she merely gambled: knowing that a weather front was going through New York, she bet it would have cleared Idlewild when you got in. If she'd lost, it wouldn't have mattered, but winning, she won a lot: she impressed you. On the trip to Paris, naturally she read the radio message from Lise Givenchy. If the radio operator had sealed it before he gave it to her, she sealed it before he give it to her, she persuaded him to let her read it and give her another envelope. Knowing that you would be angry at Miss Givenchy, she knew, if she picked the right moment to walk provocatively toward you, that you would contemplate her seduction, in anger at Miss Givenchy, and that, being a gentleman, you would naturally preface seduction with dinner. Nothing could be simpler than that."

"Perhaps," Miles said. "But what about the time on Park Avenue?"

Batt smiled. "Nothing extraordinary. She made an arrangement with someone in your apartment. Or, more likely, she happened to see you go into the restaurant and simply waited for you."

"You make it seem very simple," Miles said.

"No," Batt said. "It is very simple."

"I'm not sure," Miles said. "There are so many times when she seems to know absolutely what I'm thinking."

"You are in Love," Batt said.

"That's no answer," Miles said.

"Yes, it is. You are in love, and it's affecting your judgment."

"Oh, balls!" Miles said. "Don't talk nonsense. There is such a thing as prescience. Telepathy has been demonstrated. Extrasensory perception of all kinds has been demonstrated."

"Not to me," Batt said.

The room was almost perfectly quiet: the barest sibilance from the air-conditioning duct was the only sound. Charles Batt affected a Sheraton game table as a desk; he was not one to allow papers to pile up, and the mahogany of it glinted warm and red in the sunlight. They were on the 39th floor and Miles could see the Battery below, and the harbor beyond it.

"Maybe it should be demonstrated to you," Miles said.

Batt smiled. "By all means," he said. "I am willing."

"For a small side bet," Miles said.

"I never gamble, as I think you know," Batt said. "However, this is not gambling, since the outcome is not really in doubt. We'll arrange some little test, and if Miss Kennedy passes it, I'll buy you a rather nicer birthday present than usual -- say a new boat?"

"All right," Miles said. "A new boat. Let's say a 20-foot jet."

"I think the test can be simple," Charles Batt said. "If, as you say, Miss Kennedy is perceptive in an extrasensory fashion, she should be able to determine one number of two digits without seeing it. Anything simpler than that would hardly be fair, I think. And since these people always claim, as you have said Miss Kennedy claims, that their ability is emotionally linked, let us take a number with which you are intimately connected. I have one in mind. I'll put it on a piece of paper, fold it, you can initial it here, we'll seal it up in this envelope and have my secretary put it in the safe. Satisfactory?"

"Great." Miles said. "I'll bring Miss Kennedy around sometime soon."

"Splendid," Batt said. "Good-day, Miles."

• • •

"You son of a bitch," Mary said. "In some ways you're the dearest man in the world, but I'm going to write you out of my life as if you'd never been near me. You have just died. You are a nonexistent creep."

"Steady," Miles said. "If you're not careful you'll say something mean."

"In the first place," Mary said, "I'm not a witch; I can't see through a cement wall on command. And I'm not a trained seal, and nobody, by God, is going to win anything betting how many times I can jump through a hoop. And in the third place or the fourth place or whatever the hell it is, why do you have to prove anything to this damned lawyer? What business is it of his, if I know who's going to win the world series in 1982? What do you care? Does he have to certify everybody you sleep with? Well, does he?"

"Naturally not," Miles said. "And for Christ's sake, what are you so sore about? I just made a little bet, trying to take Batt down a peg. I don't see any mortal insult to you in that."

"Well, I do," Mary said. "Because as (continued on page 116) For the Rich they Sing (continued from page 50) far as the bet's concerned, you don't care if you win it or lose it. What you really want to know is how did I know you were going to ask me for dinner, and how did I happen to meet you on Park Avenue that night? Did I have your apartment wired for sound or did I just know you were coming down the street? That's what you want to find out, and this big bet nonsense is just a gimmick your suspicious, nasty, cloak-and-dagger-type mind figured out for it. Right? Right."

"No."

"Close enough," Mary said.

"This is a hell of a place to be having a screaming argument," Miles said.

"Don't worry," Mary said. "As soon as I can summon the energy to get up and get dressed the argument will be over, permanently. But just to finish everything up nicely, tell me: is this Batt your friend? Does he want things to be nice for you, does he want you to be happy and all that?"

"What does he know about happy?" Miles said. "He thinks God appointed him chairman of the board, Gurley Flynn Associates."

"Could you fire him?" Mary said.

"I guess so," Miles said. "It wouldn't be easy, but I could."

"This number," Mary said. "Two digits and intimately connected with your life?"

"That's right."

"Do you want me to tell you I see it floating in the air, outlined in purple fire, or do you want me to tell you how I really see it?"

"Without the fireworks," Miles said.

"Batt is a giant brain, you say, and all he really thinks about is money. And the biggest thing in his life is that he's chairman of the board. All right. How old were you when your father died and Batt got to be Mr. Big?"

"I was 14," Miles said.

"Call up Mister Batt," Mary said, "and tell him I told you the number is 41."

"Not 14?" Miles said.

"No, 41, because he's a crook at heart and he'd want a little insurance against my being right."

"I'll call him," Miles said. "But not with you way over there."

"All right."

• • •

Batt was still in his office when Miles did phone. Mary lay looking at the distant ceiling, dégagée, and listened indifferently until Miles hung up and turned back to her.

"You were wrong, pet," he said. "It was 22, the number of corporations we control."

Mary looked at him, her eyes slitting down. "Why didn't you say, 'Batt says you're wrong, pet'? Why didn't you say, 'Batt says the number was 22 ...'? Tell me that."

"Because I don't think he'd actually lie about it," Miles said.

"Maybe not," Mary said. "It doesn't matter. He's just less of a crook or more of a crook than I thought, that's all. But it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're mixed up with him, he's important to you, and the reason he's important to you is money again. It's the whole dreary business of you and money."

"Should I burn it?" Miles said.

"You're a dear boy," Mary said, "and anybody who wouldn't rather be in bed with you just doesn't know. But don't call me anymore. I'm going to put in for the Hong Kong run and I'll have to live in San Francisco."

He didn't believe her until he tried, three days later, when she should have been back from Paris, and he didn't see her until late in September. He and Batt were at Idlewild, on their way to London to pick up a few hundred thousand guineas. They'd had seats assigned and they were standing together, looking through the heavy glass at the fat, cylindrical body of the aircraft, when Mary materialized beside them and said hello to Miles. She was in civilian clothes, just in, she said, from Buenos Aires. She said nothing of Hong Kong. Miles introduced her to Batt, who smiled.

"Excuse us, Charles," Miles said. "I'll be right back. Once around the newsstand," he said to Mary.

"The man's a crook," she said, moving beside him and with him and against him.

"Probably," Miles said. "But tell me: where are you living, and what's your phone number and what about dinner next Thursday?"

She was standing, looking backward.

"Miles," she said softly, "don't get on that airplane."

He smiled, more to himself, as the rich mosaic of memories unreeled, like a curtain flying up, but clear for all that, in his mind.

"Got to, pet," he said. "Have to go to London. Big deal. But I'll be back Thursday, five in the afternoon, and --"

"Not if you get on that airplane, you won't," Mary said. "Not next Thursday or any other Thursday."

He looked at her. She was white, and her eyes had gone the color of ink.

"Don't get on it, Miles," she said. "Please, don't."

He looked at the clock. There were 12 minutes to departure. He left her and walked over to Batt.

"I'm not going, Charles," he said. "I haven't seen Miss Kennedy for so long, and in any case she's had one of her premonitions about this plane. I gather she thinks it's never going to get to London, and I want to humor her, for possibly evil purposes of my own."

"Oh, come now, Miles," Batt said. "This is ridiculous. You've got to come."

"The hell you say, I've got to," Miles said. "You can do it all. I was just going for the ride, really."

"I'll cancel, too, and we'll both go tomorrow," Batt said. "How would that be?" He smiled, electing himself a full partner in a conspiracy against Mary Kennedy's inhibitions, if any.

"I won't feel any more like going in the morning," Miles said, "and besides, you forget Warwick: he's coming from Paris just to have breakfast with you in the morning."

"But I don't want to go alone!" Batt said.

"You know, I think you're scared," Miles said. "You don't mean to tell me that little Miss Kennedy has scared you? After all, she was wrong about the number, wasn't she?"

"Don't be absurd," Batt said.

Miles took his elbow and walked him across the little bridge into the airplane.

"Nice trip," he said, and he hurried back to Mary.

"You know something?" he said. "He really didn't want to go."

"You know something?" she said. "He has good reason not to want to go. That number really was 41!"

Miles laughed and grabbed her arm and hustled her out. Forty minutes later he had her on a charter, heading for Maryland. They had been Mr. and Mrs. Miles Flynn for almost three hours when the engineer on Batt's London flight noticed that he had 650 of exhaust-gas temperature in the Nos. 3 and 4 engines: both indicators had jumped out of the yellow band into the red. He hit the Freon/nitrogen button and cut the fuel. If he had noticed the indicators a few seconds sooner, and if both engines hadn't been on one side he might have made out all right, but as it was, he didn't, and everything went.

• • •

For a long time, as those things go, Miles Flynn believed that his third marriage was an extraordinary success. Two things about his wife amazed him: Her indifference to his money remained absolutely constant; except as he changed it, her material life was what it had been when she had met him. And her passion diminished not even minutely, but rather, steadily grew as it fed. At first he was enchanted, but in the course of time -- and we live at an accelerated rate these days -- he became bored with the one and worn by the other. Still, they lived amicably together, at least he believed they did. Batt's death had made it necessary for Miles to concern himself with business, and he found that things went best if he was in the office every day. Mary always had breakfast with him, during the winter before a cannel-coal fire in the study of the house on 76th Street, and in summer on a terrace over-looking the water at Easthampton. He used a helicopter to go in and out, and they had a standing gag about it.

"No matter how cross you might get at me," he'd say, "even if you're really sore, you will tell me if that thing's going to throw a blade someday?"

"Of course I'll tell you, darling," she'd say, and she'd smile across the one thin piece of rye toast she gave herself for breakfast. It was possible, Miles thought, that she had the greatest body of its type in the world, and sometimes he wondered that he could now look at it so objectively ... well, he didn't want to go into that.

"I tell you everything, you know that," Mary said. "For example, I had a dream about you last night. Not a very nice one, either. It distressed me."

"Really?" Miles said.

"You were in bed with this girl," Mary said. "She was small, very small, and pretty, in a way, and very, very blonde. Do you know anyone like that?"

Miles laughed, and he made it sound easy and natural. "Only one," he said. That was the truth, all right. "And what were we doing, as if I didn't know?"

"You weren't doing anything," Mary said. "You were just lying there on your backs. She had a bullet hole between her breasts, and you had one between your eyes."

Miles looked out over the pale blue water. He could just see Connecticut, and he would rather have been there.

"And you?" he said.

"I was just leaving," she said. "And not much caring, either, whether anyone saw me go."

It's getting very late around here, he thought. It's time to go. It's past time.

"Mary," he said, "I've been thinking about you and me, lately. I've been thinking that we should talk things over. Maybe we should think about--"

"No," she said, softly.