Free Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent Page B

Alfredo’s summer retreat at Aguas Lindas, where they went sailing and snorkeling.
    In a family portrait taken of Lily and the children soon after their marriage, Lily is the very picture of the well-to-do matron—slim and smiling, with perfectly coiffed hair, a fashionable silk foulard tied loosely around her neck—surrounded by four beautiful children.
    For her part, Lily was relieved to be back in Rio, which was decidedly more cosmopolitan than Montevideo, a quiet backwater where it was nearly impossible to find a Parisian-trained hairdresser and a good bottle of champagne, among other luxuries she could now simply never do without.
    Alfredo appeared to be a dream come true. Not only was he handsome and a good father to her children, he was one of the richest men in Brazil. With Alfredo, Lily was living the fairy tale she had dreamed of as a teenager at the Colegio Anglo-Americano. Now they not only vacationed in South America, but Alfredo took her on expensive tours of Switzerland, Italy, and France. She could now shop in Paris and New York, and lounge on the French Riviera. When Lily complained to him that she had little to do during the long, hot afternoons in Rio, he helped her launch a boutique in the most elegant part of Copacabana, next to the Metro Theater and a few blocks from the Copacabana Palace hotel where Lily now frequented the hotel’s lavish hair salon several times a week.
    â€œWe set up the store as part of Fred’s larger company,” said Trotte, the accountant. “It was a diversion for Lily.”
    The store was named Galati, after the city in Romania where Alfredo was born. It sold only the finest Baccarat crystal from France, imported jewelry, and other objets d’art.
    â€œShe had the best of everything in her store,” said her friend Vera Contrucci Dias. “But it wasn’t really a serious business. It was justsomething Alfredo had opened for her so that she had something to do during the afternoons.”
    Although the store became a favorite haunt of Rio’s young socialites, Lily and Alfredo were never part of the elite crowd in the city. “They were never among the first team,” said Danuza Leão, who has chronicled Rio society for years. “Of course, everyone knew who Alfredo Monteverde was, but he didn’t frequent any of the high-society events. Lily and Fred weren’t exactly boldface names in those days.”
    With four young children to raise and a rich man’s house to run, perhaps the pretty debutante in the white organdy dress at the CIB balls in the 1950s was now simply too busy to worry about high society. Moreover, Alfredo was not the kind of man who cared about appearing in the social columns, even though many of his friends in Rio belonged to the city’s richest and most prominent families.
    Indeed, Lily seems to have been too wrapped up with more mundane things, like shopping, to work on her entrance into high society. That would come much later.
    Like Mario, her first husband, Alfredo quickly learned about his new wife’s extravagance. Alfredo could never understand why Lily insisted upon ordering bottles of champagne from Le Bec Fin, then Rio’s finest French restaurant, rather than just buy them directly from the liquor store, which charged significantly less. Or why she would order the restaurant’s elaborate French meals and try to pass them off as her own creation. In a society where servants were plentiful, and wealthy women like Lily were rarely judged by their husbands on their cooking or housekeeping abilities, Alfredo could never figure out why Lily tried so hard to make herself into the perfect housewife.
    â€œShe had this geisha complex,” said one of her acquaintances from the 1960s. “She went out of her way to please men.”
    In Rio, they had busy social lives that revolved around their children and friends, even if they were far removed from the grand soirees and