Free Men of Intrgue A Trilogy by Doreen Owens Malek Page B

their point of view. She was poor and I was poor, dirt poor, while my father and his legal wife, and their legal children, lived in a big house, and were driven around in a fancy car, and ate off china plates.”
    Helen didn’t say a word, fearful he would remember that she was a lot closer in origin to the father he described so bitterly than to Matteo himself.
    “We ate off the clay dishes my mother made by hand, when we had anything to eat at all,” he continued, lost in the past. “And she was ignored once she got older and lost the beauty that had attracted my father’s attention. But he did do one thing for her, something that changed the course of my life and made me glad, for once, that he had sired me.”
    “What was that?”
    “He listened to my mother when she asked for me to receive an education. She knew it was the one route I could take to escape the cycle of poverty that had trapped her and everyone like her. She begged and pleaded and I guess she finally wore him down, or maybe I was getting old enough to become an embarrassment and he wanted me out of the way. I don’t know. But when I was ten he arranged for me to go to boarding school in Connecticut. He had a lot of diplomatic ties here because the ambassador to the U.S. at that time was a close friend of his.”
    Helen sensed that he had almost forgotten she was there, his memories were so vivid. He smiled slightly.
    “So I found myself living and studying with a bunch of rich Americans, the sons of doctors and lawyers and big businessmen. And there I was, the Puerta Lindan bastard without a word of English transplanted to the wilds of New England. The first winter I almost froze. I had never seen snow, and we had two blizzards, drifts up to the windowsills. I thought I was at the North Pole. And I couldn’t even say Connecticut.” He grinned suddenly. “When I get nervous I still can’t.”
    Helen smiled back at him, glad that his reminiscence had taken a humorous turn. “I can’t imagine your ever being nervous,” she said.
    “It happens,” he replied lightly.
    “What school was it?” Helen asked.
    “Longfield Academy, in Westport.”
    “I know it.” She didn’t add that she had a cousin there.
    “And so,” he went on, “I began my American education. The people in charge at the school knew who my father was, and they were very anxious that he should think everything possible was being done for his son. In enrolling me, he neglected to mention that he had never married my mother, so they treated me like the scion I never was in Puerta Linda—private tutors to help me with my English, the best accommodations, the roommate of my choice, and so on. It was a very schizophrenic existence; in America I was the Puerta Lindan prince, and at home I was the Montega bastard.”
    Helen could feel the pain in his voice as he spread his hands and said, “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I began to spend more and more time in America. On school vacations I would go to the home of a friend and have my bed changed by a maid who might have come from my village in Puerta Linda. I saw less and less of my mother, finding ways to remain on campus over the summer: sports camp, an extra course, a school job. She finally died the fall I started college at Columbia.”
    “Matteo, you were young,” Helen said gently. “No one would choose to be treated the way you were at home when there was an alternative available.”
    “She had no alternative,” he said flatly. “And I almost forgot she existed while I was so busy grabbing at the good life.”
    “You’re remembering now,” Helen stated quietly.
    He looked at her, really seeing her for the first time in several minutes. “That’s right. What I want to do is for her and everyone like her. If I can change their lives maybe hers won’t have been in vain.”
    “Did you go back to Puerta Linda after college?” Helen asked.
    “Not right away. I had majored in engineering, and I took a