I was particularly fascinated by a bronze satin dress whose top resembled a Roman breastplate—except that it was slit to the waist. I kept trying to figure out how its wearer managed to keep her breasts from spilling out into the middle. Starch, maybe, or Scotch tape.
When the chimes sounded to announce the end of intermission, the woman in the breastplate moved toward me. I was thinking that the diamond choker didn’t go with the dress—that it was just a chance for someone with Trump-like ideas of female adornment to display his wealth—when my heel caught once more in my skirt. I twisted around to free myself as a man in a white dinner jacket hurried toward us from the other end of the foyer.
“Teri! Where’ve you been? I wanted to introduce you to some people.”
The light, authoritative baritone, with its faint undercurrent of petulance, startled me so much that I lost my balance and fell into the path of another diamond-encrusted woman. By the time she’d disengaged her spikes from my shoulder and we’d exchanged frosty apologies, Teri and her escort had disappeared into the theater.
I knew that voice, though: I’d woken to it every morning for twenty-four months—six months of sweetly tormented eroticism as we finished law school and studied for the bar, and eighteen of simple torment after we married. It was as though by wearing my best outfit from those strange days I had conjured him up.
Richard Yarborough, his name was. He was a partner at Crawford, Mead, one of Chicago’s giant firms. Not just a partner, but a significant rainmaker in a place whose clients included two former governors and the heads of most of Chicago’s contributions to the Fortune 500.
I only knew these facts because Dick used to recite them at breakfast with the awe of a cathedral guide displaying his reliquaries. He might have done so at dinner, too, but I wasn’t willing to wait up to eat with him at midnight when he had finished salaaming to the prestige gods for the day.
That kind of summed up why we’d broken up—my not being impressed enough with the power and money he was wallowing in and his suddenly expecting me to drop everything and be a Japanese wife when we finished law school and started working. Even before our formal split, Dick had realized that a wife was an important part of his portfolio and that he should have married someone with more clout than the daughter of a beat cop and an Italian immigrant could ever carry. It wasn’t my mother’s Italian-ness that bugged him, but the taint of immigrant squalor that clung to me. He’d made that clear when he began accepting invitations to Peter Felitti’s Oak Brook estate while I was doing Saturday duty at women’s court—“I made your excuses, Vic, and anyway, I don’t think you have the wardrobe for the kind of weekend the Felittis are planning.”
Nine months after our final decree, he and Teri Felitti were married in a fanfare of white lace and bridesmaids. Her father’s financial prominence made the nuptials a major news item—and I couldn’t resist reading all the details. Which is how I knew she was only nineteen at the time, nine years younger than Dick. He had turned forty last year; I wondered if Teri at thirty-two was starting to look old to him.
I’d never seen her before, but I could understand why Dick thought she was a better ornament for Crawford, Mead than I’d been. For one thing, she wasn’t sprawled on the floor as the ushers were closing the aisle doors; for another, she didn’t have to sprint, holding up her dirty hem to avoid her high heels, to get inside ahead of them.
Chapter 3 - Feeding Frenzy
I dropped back into the box just as Michael returned to the stage with Or‘. Hearing my panting, Lotty turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Did you need to run a marathon at intermission, Vic?” she muttered under cover of the polite smattering of applause.
I made a throwaway gesture. “It’s too complicated to explain now. Dick is here, my old pal Dick.”
“And that set your pulse racing like this?” Her astringent irony made me flush, but before I could come up with a snappy rejoinder Michael started speaking.
In a few simple sentences he explained the debt his family owed the citizens of London for taking them in when Europe had become a hellhole in which they couldn’t survive. “And I am proud that I grew up in Chicago, where people’s hearts are also moved to help those who— because of race or tribe or creed—can no longer live in their native lands. Tonight we are going to play for you the debut performance of Or‘ Nivitsky’s concerto for oboe and cello entitled The Wandering Jew, dedicated to the memory of Theresz Kocsis Loewenthal. Theresz supported Chicago Settlement most ardently; she would be moved to see the support you give this important charity.”
It was a rehearsed speech, delivered quickly and without warmth because of the coldness of the audience. Michael bowed slightly, first in the direction of our box, then to