Free The Scarlet Thread by Evelyn Anthony Page A

“Steven’s coming into the office. I’ll get him down to work. But no heavy talk from you, or anyone. If it’s needed, do it, but don’t bring him in on it. You understand me?”
    And to his wife he was comforting. “Steven’s suffered. More than we realized. I remembered that poor boy of Giovanni’s. Still in the psychiatric hospital. I was hasty, Anna. You were right. He needs to feel the family around him. Help him forget. There’s the wedding.… He’ll meet some nice girls, get back into the old life. Just give him time. He’ll settle down. Next thing, he’ll find a wife. Maybe that’s what he needs.”
    But it would be six long years before that part of his prediction came true.
    On May 18, 1950, Steven Falconi got married. It was his little son Charlie’s sixth birthday. Three thousand miles from the children’s tea party in England, Steven drove his new wife away on their honeymoon and called out another woman’s name as he took her virginity.
    They had married in Palm Beach. First a full nuptial mass in the Church of Santa Margarita and then a huge reception at his uncle’s house. She was a beautiful bride, with dark hair, brilliant black eyes and a voluptuous look about her. Clara Fabrizzi was the only daughter of Aldo Fabrizzi, who controlled the garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and had just acquired a string of hotels on the Florida coast. A marriage of dynasties, the Fabrizzis uniting with the Falconis. Both families were pleased; other alliances would follow as a result. She was an heiress and a rich prize, even for a man as important as Steven Falconi. They looked good together, leading off the dancing that evening. He was tall and a war hero. The Falconis’ business was flourishing, and money was filling the family’s coffers and finding its way across the Atlantic to Switzerland.
    Clara’s dress had cost a fortune, and there was another fortune in diamonds around her neck, her father’s gift. She was twenty-one, her virginity guaranteed by her family to the Falconis, and she was passionately in love with the man they wanted her to marry. The men exchanged crude jokes about the wedding night, and the women, some of them well past their first blush, wondered what it would be like to be bedded by Steven Falconi. None of them could claim to know, because he hadn’t looked at any of his own women since he came back from the war.
    There was music and dancing, and a lot of men got drunk, while others slipped away and talked business in little groups. The weather was hot and sunny as in the old country, and the ocean lapped blue at the edge of the private beach. Special caterers had come down from New York with the best Italian dishes and the finest Italian wine and French champagne. Two rooms in the mansion were given up to displaying the wedding presents. The ice-blue Cadillac with bulletproof glass and armor plating was Aldo Fabrizzi’s wedding present to his son-in-law. It waited outside, festooned in white ribbons.
    The fathers stood together, watching their children circle the open-air dance floor as the band played the “Wedding Waltz.” Fabrizzi was small and stocky; in his youth he had been a boxer, and he still walked with the light spring of a man used to moving in the ring.
    â€œThey look good,” he said to Lucca Falconi. “Your boy and my little girl. They’ll have fine-looking children.”
    Lucca nodded. He was pleased, happy about the whole arrangement, happier still because his son had found a suitable wife and would settle down at last. The war had been bad for him in many ways. Still, he had come back and taken up his responsibilities in the end. A very good organizer and a real moneyman. He owed the first to the army and the second to his college education.
    â€œHe’ll be a good husband,” he assured Fabrizzi. “He doesn’t run around