The Dream Merchants by Harold Robbins Page A

eyes were dark and troubled.
    “You know,” she said, “it is something I’ll never understand. Mark was one of the most self-centered, egotistical men that ever lived, he never gave a damn what happened to the other guy. And yet he went to Spain and joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and died fighting for a cause he never truly believed in and against a way of life that he might have admired if he hadn’t been a Jew. My first thought was for Mother—how she would take it. She hadn’t been well since Mark went away. He was her baby still and she was never quite the same after Papa threw him out of the house. She was always after Papa to get Mark to come back home. I think Papa wanted him to come home too, but you know him—he got his Dutch stubbornness up and kept putting it off.”
    She fell silent, looking into the leaping flames of the fire. I wondered what she was thinking. Peter had always favored Mark and she knew it. But she never complained. She never talked much either. I remembered the way we found out she could write. It was the year she graduated from college. She hadn’t said anything at all about her writing until her book had been accepted by a publisher. Even then she had used a nom de plume, not wanting to trade on her father’s name.
    She had called the book
Freshman Year
. It was the story of a girl’s first year in college and away from home, and it was very successful. It was a story of warmth and homesickness and a girl’s growing up. The critics made a great deal of fuss over the book. They were all amazed at the depth of understanding and perception of the girl who had written it. She was just twenty-two at the time it came out.
    I hadn’t paid much attention to it. Matter of fact, I hadn’t even read it at the time. The first time I saw her after the book came out was when I brought Dulcie to Peter’s home the day after we were married.
    They were all seated at breakfast when Dulcie and I came in the room. Mark was about eighteen at the time; he was a tall, thin boy with the acne of adolescence still clinging to his face. He took one look at Dulcie and whistled.
    Peter had cuffed him and told him to mind his manners, but I just laughed proudly and Dulcie blushed a little and I could tell she didn’t mind. Dulcie liked people to look at her, she was a born actress. Even then, as she stood there blushing, I knew she was acting and I loved it.
    That was part of Dulcie’s charm for me. Wherever we went, heads turned to look at her. She was the kind of a woman men wanted to be seen with. Tall, slim, and full-breasted, with a tawny look, she gave an impression of latent sexual savagery that carried every man back about five thousand years.
    Esther got to her feet and had chairs brought out for us. Up to that moment I hadn’t told them we were married. I began to feel awkward, wondering how I could tell them. I looked around the table and saw Doris looking at us curiously. There was a question in her eyes.
    I had a bright idea. I spoke to Doris. “Well, sweetheart, you won’t have to worry about your old Uncle Johnny anymore. He finally found a girl that would marry him.”
    Doris’s face turned a little pale, but I was too excited to pay any attention to it. “You—you mean you’re getting married?” she asked, her voice shaking a little.
    I laughed. “What do you mean, ‘getting married’? We were married last night!”
    Peter jumped up and came around the table and shook my hand. Esther had gone over to Dulcie and put her arms around her. Only Doris sat there in her chair looking at me, her face still pale, her blue eyes dark and wide, her head tilted to one side as if to hear better.
    “Ain’t you comin’ over and kiss your Uncle Johnny?” I asked her.
    She got up from her chair and came over to me. I kissed her, and her lips were cold. Then she went over to Dulcie and took her hand. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” she said, kissing Dulcie’s cheek.
    I looked at them