Cheyney Fox (32 page)

They had made a joint decision. Cheyney would retain her name, though she was by law the Baroness Walbrook. And everywhere they went he would introduce her as his wife, Cheyney Fox. It was no small thing, her retaining her own name. It served to remind them both that, as two strong and independent individuals, they would remain within their marriage their own autonomous selves. Kurt Walbrook and Cheyney Fox detested the idea of merging into “the Walbrooks.” To be swallowed up by the institution of marriage was not what they were about.

Kurt was not at all naive about the power of his position in the world, or his wealth. He had seen time and again how daunting it could be. There had been many a man and woman working either for him personally, or for the foundations he subsidized, or for his collections of fine arts and artifacts, ruined by the Walbrooks’ power, position, and wealth. He had no intention of letting that happen to Cheyney. But then he had no intention of overprotecting her either. And so he doled out the responsibilities of her new position in life as his wife and a part of his whole little empire, in palatable doses, and watched her take them in her stride and assimilate them into the life of Cheyney Fox.

Every week he presented her with yet another piece of jewelry from the family’s collections of gems, rather than overpowering her with it all at once. Had he done that, she might have rejected it as too important a collection for her to wear. That would not have pleased him. She was, after all, still the same person who, only a short time ago, had been walking the
streets of New York hawking her pathetic wares from a basket over her arm.

One of the many reasons he had married Cheyney was to pass on all he had into her hands. He sensed she could withstand the pressures of such vast responsibilities, having a strength of character honed by some pretty hard times. Another was her creative spirit. She never disappointed him.

Six weeks after they married, Cheyney Fox found herself walking down the curved staircase of the Walbrook family home in Vienna on the arm of her husband. But this time it was to greet the five hundred guests assembled for Kurt and Cheyney’s formal wedding reception. There was the same heavy security surrounding the house and gardens. A similar number of guards at the door, checking invitations and ID cards. Discreet gun-laden men prowled the house. But there were no watery eyes for Hitler and the glorious days of the Third Reich, no campaign ribbons worn on proud chests or iron crosses dangling menacingly from ribbons around stiff and wrinkled Nazi throats. They had been warned: the new wife of Kurt Walbrook, Cheyney Fox, was not one of them. She was no Nazi neophyte, and, in her home, discretion was the better part of Valhalla. It was twilight for the old Nazi gods. She had put them in the shade, where they belonged. She was greeted with nothing more menacing from her guests than applause, good wishes for her future happiness, and exquisite Viennese charm wherever she turned. They mingled with other guests from London, Paris, New York. To all appearances, they were no more than they seemed: cosmopolitan, European old-guard high society.

Cheyney responded not with silver-lamé and a king’s ransom in diamonds, but in a red taffeta ball gown with dramatic puffed sleeves of silk cabbage roses worn off the shoulders, a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg set in a wide band of diamonds, the choker worn around her long, slender neck. She descended those stairs with a pride of self, dignity, and beauty, an outsider, a rebel in their midst. If they could not take her to their hearts, they could at least admire her, and most of all for luring him, when no other woman had, to the altar. One jealous woman was heard bitchily to say, “Our modern-day Empress Elizabeth, American-style, I think.”

Cheyney stood in the reception line to receive her guests. She recognized men who had flown in from Paraguay, Rio, Caracas, Montevideo, Lima. Helmut Furtwangler was there, her favorite Saudi prince, and so many more she had met briefly. Their attitude toward her now that she was married to Kurt was different. She was uncertain how, but she could guess why. There was, too, an even greater respect shown by these men to Kurt. Cheyney put the near-fawning attention they paid to her husband down to the death of their heroine, the late baroness. She learned a lesson from that evening: that Kurt would no sooner turn his back on these men and women than his mother had. Not for her or anyone else.

It was impressive, that ball. Yet not at all uncomfortable for Cheyney. She had found a way this time to mingle with them. She determined likewise to find in the future a way to deal with them on her own terms. But until then, she had only to enjoy the ball.

Already by the night of the wedding-reception ball, they both knew that Cheyney was pregnant. They were both delighted. They sat down and carefully worked out the dates. There was no doubt about paternity. It had to have been Grant Madigan.

The dramatic changes that kept flowing in a steady stream through Cheyney’s life for the first nine months of her marriage were made easier for her by the huge staff of retainers that had helped keep Kurt Walbrook and his mother and their lives and their interests ticking over.

The greatest lesson that Cheyney would learn from her husband was how to delegate and remain independent and in control. He was a grand master at it. The luxury of having the right people to delegate to was in itself enough to change the habits of anyone’s lifetime. Arrange that luxury for yourself, and the mind opens and expands. Life gets its chance to change you. That was what was happening to Cheyney every day.

Cheyney was slower to appreciate the idea of motherhood than Kurt thought she should be. But he was patient and said nothing. If anything, he grew every day more besotted by his pregnant wife. Her pregnancy made his always-strong libido a voracious one. His sexual stamina, more remarkable than most men’s she had been with, seemed to feed on their every sexual
encounter. That did wonders for Cheyney, and her ego, at a time when it might have been fragile. It enhanced their already excellent erotic relationship. It was his constant sexual hunger for her, and his eager involvement in every detail of the coming birth of her child, that finally brought home to her the momentousness of what was happening within her own body, that she was going to have a baby for them. Thanks to Kurt, she learned in those early months of her pregnancy to love that unborn child and its natural father for what he, however reluctantly, had given her.

Kurt Walbrook had what he had always wanted from Cheyney Fox. He had wooed her strangely, with his secret benevolence, and had won her heart forever. It was evident to both of them that she could never look at another man as long as she was with him. He could see that in her eyes, hear it in her voice, and his utter domination over her sexually, and her enjoyment of it, was his reward. Yet her strange self-possession daily led him on to play his game of courtship with her. He adored her for that.

One of Kurt’s many projects, dear to both their hearts, was the building of the museum for Acton Pace. The site once chosen, and the architect’s preliminary plans approved by both Cheyney and Kurt, the Walbrook Fine Arts Foundation issued a press release. The Kurt Walbrook Gallery for Acton Pace Paintings was to be built in Boston, Massachusetts. It would be a gift to Harvard University, with Cheyney Fox as its lifetime director. Then Kurt entrusted the entire project to Cheyney. Of all his gifts, this one touched her most deeply. Her career was no longer dabbling in the art world, she was back as a midfield player. The American art world buzzed with the news of the magnanimous gift from the Walbrook Collection.

Cheyney Fox at last had a real home for her own Acton Pace paintings to come to. She, reassembled them from the various museums that had them on loan and redecorated one of the large morning rooms in the Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg as a room of her own to work and play in. It was there that she hung them.

And it was from there, in the months before her child was born, that Cheyney was once more launched in the grandest
and most secure fashion back into the contemporary art world. She was welcomed with open arms. Never was there a hint of the notions of bankruptcy, failure, fraud. The words had apparently vanished from the vocabularies of every art person of significance in New York. But not from Cheyney’s. No matter how far back in her mind she pushed the memories those words evoked, the past was still there.

Cheyney had never been happier than when she was pregnant and living with Kurt in Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg. Their life was more exciting than ever. Within weeks of the announcement of her directorship of the gallery, she had enough letters and phone calls — from instant friends, in or on the fringes of the international art world — to flatter a film star. The greater number were of course from Andy Warhol. She found it a bitter irony to receive so many offers of friendship and work in the art world now that she didn’t need any. Kurt was amused and as usual was able to teach her to be amused by them. She gave in to Kurt, saying, “I can afford most of the things that make people happy. I suppose I can also afford now not to be bitter.”

He had laughed and answered, “Well, if you can’t, I would surely like to know who can.” She fell on him with kisses, and they made love on her new white marble desk.

Nurseries were being made ready in each of their three houses. Kurt was as puffed with pride as if he were really the father. While she bought teddy bears and carriages and played with the Walbrook period baby clothes, he brought back baby wardrobes from Porthaults in Paris, shops in Zurich, London, and New York. He had already made arrangements to put the boy’s name down for Eton. He was booking an education, masculine and English, a decade in advance. Yes, he had decided it was going to be a boy. He laid down a wine cellar, he admitted for him or her, conceding that a girl could drink. Bought him an elaborate antique train set and her a collection of antique articulated dolls with porcelain faces, in period costumes, from France. He took over the decoration of one of the nurseries himself. He presented it complete, down to the diaper pins, to Cheyney as a surprise.

They each had their work, their love for the other, and their social life and traveling. Yet, with such an outgoing life, they
still managed to keep it a very private one. It was not easy to get to the Walbrooks.

Cheyney bought and paid for her fourth Acton Pace painting. It was as good as lighting a fuse under the explosive widow Pace. Combustion was postponed when Cheyney, heavily pregnant, and flanked by Kurt on one side and Judd Whyatt on the other, selected the eight other paintings she wanted to buy. She placed eight hundred thousand dollars in escrow to be released at the rate of one hundred thousand dollars a year to the widow Pace. Neither Cheyney nor Judd would make any other concessions to Reha. They were determined to follow as closely as possible Acton’s instructions, issued in his legacy to Cheyney.

They had Christmas and New Year holidays at Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg, with a houseful of guests that included Lala and Roberto and Della. A house party fit to make the huge hunting lodge echo with laughter long after they all left. It was now only a matter of weeks before the baby was due. Kurt infiltrated the idea that it should be born in the States. Cheyney wanted the baby born at home in the Schloss.

“I think your son should have an American passport as well as an Austrian one.”

That surprised Cheyney. “I thought you would be so pleased to have our baby born here.” She was talking to a man who had seen frontiers and nationalities dissolve before tides of history that rubbished frail European documents overnight. He simply said:

“I would like nothing better. But I don’t think we should deprive the baby of being born in his own country. Both his natural parents are, after all, American. Our world can be a very unstable place. Even with all that we have — all that we will always have — that will one day be his, I think it would be better if he were born in the United States rather than here as an Austrian. Please don’t ask me to go into it any further. I have very deep personal feelings about it. I hope the hint will be enough for you? However, if you can honestly say we are being fair to that child, and to Grant Madigan, to have him born here, that’s good enough for me.”

Taggart was born in the Lennox Hill hospital in Manhattan. Kurt Walbrook was at Cheyney’s side for most of her ordeal.
And it was an ordeal. Whereas her pregnancy had been an amazingly comfortable and easy one, the birth was not. She was in labor for forty-two hours, but was finally delivered of a perfectly beautiful, healthy boy. Only once did she think of Grant Madigan, and that was when they placed her newborn son, still womb-warm and wet, at her breast. She experienced the most intense, sensual, yet purely angelic moment of her life, in spite of all the pain and devastating exhaustion. How uneasy the experience would have made him; it could have bound them to each other for the rest of their lives.

Cheyney had never told Kurt about her abortion. It was one of the things about her past that she instinctively chose to keep from him. For the first few days after Taggart’s birth, she was tortured by memories of that searing experience. She kept slipping into half sleeps where she relived that night, again and again. Kurt listened to her restless sleep and watched her closely, affected by the look of sadness in her eyes at a time he knew she was happier than she had ever been. One morning he arrived in her room with yet another armful of flowers. He kissed her and whispered, out of nothing more than intuition, “Sheyney, banish the past from your thoughts, my darling. We three have a lot of living and happiness to get through.” A few days later she had regained her strength enough to do just that, and the dreams stopped.

The rich years of early parenthood rolled by, and their life was full. Only imperceptibly did they adapt their established life-style. They just added Taggart to it. Taggart was never denied the right to know who his natural father was, or what relationship had existed between Cheyney and Grant Madigan. At the age of eight, he was told the whole story by Cheyney and Kurt, and with such sensitivity it seemed only to add to Taggart’s life. Once he knew who his real father was, he began following his other famous father’s career. That was the way he referred to Grant, innocently flattering Kurt in the process, and talked openly about him to his mother and stepfather. Mercifully for Cheyney, that was not very often. She didn’t much like it, but held her counsel, sensing that it was the right thing.