Blood Ties Read Free

roused
him. He had kissed her again, spreading the silken robe so that his mouth could
find her nipples.
    But that was when Dawn had mattered. Briefly, he had
considered marriage. Defiantly, since she was a Jewess. On the sunny side of
thirty-five, he had pondered the matter in sleepless turnings with her beside
him, breathing with quiet contentment. A designer of women's clothes, with a
worldwide clientele, she had sat beside him on the plane to Paris and it had
happened to him somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Once he could have remembered
the exact moment. The stewardess had cleared their after-dinner drinks. They
had talked nonstop for three hours by then, become intimate in the way of
casual travelers. But the intimacy had lingered.
    It embarrassed him now to remember how they groped for each
other under the first class blankets, electric charged spontaneous embraces
that lasted the remainder of the trip. And after.
    He had endowed Dawn then with deliciously exotic qualities,
like a rare grape that had suddenly fermented and become wine, soft to the
pallet. Yet not addicting. No woman had ever done that to him, a troubling
circumstance in itself. What then was permanent? He wanted love to last. But it
came and went, like the seasons. There had been scores of women.
    It was, of course, the contemplation of marriage that had
raised the Jewish thing. The urge for possession had completely captured him
and even during the day in the midst of the most plebeian events, despite
absorbing business interests demanding his total mind, he could not erase her
from his yearning. Surely, that was love.
    Yet the blood thing was so heavily programmed into him that
the guilt could not be dismissed. It was a family axiom that all von Kassels,
the great extended line of Estonian Barons, do not genetically combine with
Jews. One might, he knew, using modern values, not particularize the bigotry to
Jews alone. It extended also to Slavs, Poles, blacks, the entire conglomeration
strewn on the shores of the Mediterranean and all their offal washed up on the
beaches of the Americas, as well as Indians, red and brown. All but the Nordic,
the Germanics. His Aunt Karla was a rabid Hitlerian anti-Semite, whose late
husband, the Count von Berghoff, could be virulent on the subject, boasting of
his destructive acts against Jews. His father's prejudices were much more
institutionalized. He did not hate Jews alone. Mostly he hated all non von
Kassels. All marriages were compromises of the blood. Even Siegfried's marriage
to a girl from a titled British family and Rudi's marriage to a South American
German were merely tolerated.
    The Baron père had married a Hohenzollern, his mother. But
she had died soon after he was born, providing him and his brothers with a
lifetime curiosity. Since there were no pictures of her, no possessions, not a
trace of her existence on earth, the curiosity was only natural. "She is
dead," was the Baron's only retort to their youthful questionings. But
how? Disease? Accident? Murder? She had simply expired and they must exorcise
forever the idea of her. Such was the fatherly implication and so it was.
Somehow, too, the matter of her absence was considered a fault, a betrayal of
von Kassel interests, however the circumstances of her demise. How dare she!
What was important, though, was that she had performed her single function, to
reproduce von Kassels and mix it well with Hohenzollern blood, ancient cells,
the stuff of Rulers, Kings, Knights and Barons.
    Albert cursed his own weakness in bringing Dawn to the
reunion. Ironically, her ardor had multiplied as his diminished. But she would
behave herself. She had always done that. And she had, almost as an implied
bargain for a permanent future as a von Kassel, promised to keep her antecedents
to herself. She could easily do that. She was a natural blonde, blue-eyed
Jewess with a straight symmetrical nose and high cheekbones. Most people took
her for a Swede, since she looked