The Lady and the Panda Read Free

tumors from his neck and torso and wretched from his latest incision, he found himself unable to eat or drink, then even to breathe. Thesportsman who lived to rough it in the wild died under starched white sheets, in a ward reeking of antiseptic. His young life had ended in the pursuit of the most mysterious animal of his time, yet he had never managed to set a laced boot in the great snow-covered mountains that separated China and Tibet.
    A world away, back in the noise and lights and rush of Manhattan, it had been an even chillier winter, one of the snowiest and coldest anyone could remember. Late in the afternoon, on the very day her husband took his last breath, Ruth Harkness was making her way home from a salon where she had enjoyed a luxurious shampoo. Bundled up, she happily picked her way along icy sidewalks that were dusted with ash for traction and walled in by freshly shoveled snow. Friends were due for cocktails shortly, and in the larger scheme of things, she had even more to look forward to. Now that things were beginning to go well for Bill, she thought, he might just be home within months. Then the two of them could travel the world as they had always imagined.
    But as she stepped inside her comfortable West Side apartment, before she had time to hang up her coat, her “pretty little mulatto maid” and her houseguest, Margaret Freeland, confronted her with the horrible news: Bill was dead. A cable message had been relayed by telephone.
    Her first reaction was stunned disbelief. It was too awful to accept. This must be some fantasy of the press—reporters were fascinated by Bill and the other men of high adventure, but in their hunger for sensational stories, they were always getting things wrong. It had to be one of those false bulletins. Surely, over the course of the afternoon, that would become clear.
    So she waited, as the winter darkness descended and lamps inside the apartment were snapped on. But hours later a telegram from Secretary of State Cordell Hull made it official. The love of her life was gone.
    The devastation of that loss would consume her for weeks, and haunt her always. “Do you have that tremendous necessity of needing one person,” Ruth Harkness would ask a friend in the bruised aftermath of Bill's death, “some person who understands you and trusts you completely in everything you do and you are—and ever can or will be? Someone withwhom you can let down all barriers? All pretense of any kind and still be liked or loved?… That is what Bill meant to me and in return I gave him what he needed.”
    Through their ten years together, few understood the singular nature of their bond. To the outside world, Ruth and Bill were opposites. But they were also as perfect a fit.
    Both had arrived in Manhattan in their early twenties. It was the Jazz Age, when under the cover of darkness, whites began slipping into Harlem for the music. People spoke openly of birth control, and women were enticed by the makers of Chesterfield cigarettes to “blow some my way.” Josephine Baker had her own nightclub in Paris. Films turned talkie. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. D. H. Lawrence imagined a scandalous dalliance in
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
and Margaret Mead was discussing sex among young Samoans. It was the birth of
Time
magazine,
The New Yorker,
and the Milky Way bar. For young party-minded Manhattanites during Prohibition, speakeasies were all the rage. It was no surprise, then, that the worlds of two hell-raisers would eventually collide.
    Handsome, short, and slender, with slicked-back straw-colored hair and light blue eyes, William Harvest Harkness, Jr., was born to privilege. The sound of his name alone declared it. He was not a member of the famous Standard Oil Harknesses. But Bill had graduated from Harvard, class of 1924; he was a rich boy whose name showed up in the society pages, the son of a successful New York City attorney, and the scion of a wealthy New York family, as the press