Jack in Love

Jack Richardson is the mildly autistic son of a major international criminal who became a hero when he led Detroit’s efforts to build planes and tanks to help America win WWII. Jack’s father, Jon, has recently died, and he has left Jack a worldwide fortune worth more than a billion dollars; so Time Magazine has breathlessly pronounced our Jack to be The Richest American Under the Age of Forty.

Beryl Christian has graduated from Smith College during this pivotal year of 1968, when the Vietnam War is raging, America’s cities are rioting, and young women are seeing their horizons expanding, so Beryl is now dreaming very big dreams of maybe even becoming the first woman President. She has come to Manhattan straight from college to find the best-quality husband; and she has taken a job with Larkin Enterprises, which is Jack’s personal holding company. She is setting out to learn computer programming because it is said by everyone to be the big career of the future. Larkin has just bought an IBM 360 which is fashionably burnt-orange, and it is all punch-card-readers, tall tape-drives, and a central processing unit almost the size of a house. But Beryl is truly beautiful, so she soon is invited to share dinner with her ultimate boss in his penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Then when sulky and brooding Jack Richardson, and the sunny and always joyous Beryl Christian first discover one another, they find that, oddly, they rhyme somehow. They perfectly fit together, beyond all rational reason; and after his horrendous and always lonely past, Jack soon comes to see that he very badly needs to keep this wonderful woman in his life.

Beryl enjoys the process of assisting in settling Jon Richardson’s worldwide estate, especially since Jack flat cannot be bothered with any of it. As a criminal, Jon had never trusted banks; but instead, he had bought land and buildings all over the world. He even had befriended Mao Tse-Tung and Chiang Kai-Shek in Communist China when Russia had cooled on doing business with them, in the late Fifties and the early Sixties, during Nikita Khrushchev’s period of thaw with the west. So then, Jon had insanely invested tens of millions of dollars in buying real estate in Communist China, and if they are to have any hope of claiming ownership of all that real estate now, Jack and Beryl are required to fly to Hong Kong and meet in person with the Chinese bureaucracy prior to some arbitrary, draconian deadline.

Mostly, however, Beryl is mothering, and ever more deeply loving Jack as He heals past the worst of his awful childhood. And we are coming to ever more deeply know, and then to really love them both. With Beryl by his side, Jack is overseeing the very expensive complete rehabbing of his ancestral northern Virginia estate, and his Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park, while they also envision the tearing down and burying of more than a hundred beachfront homes right on Long Island Sound so Jack can build his own truly spectacular, forty-thousand-square-foot mansion on those two-hundred newly-cleared acres.

As Jack reaches the age of thirty, and he comes into full control of his stupendous fortune, at last he asks Beryl to marry him. But to her own surprise, now she starts to feel reluctant. Clearly, Jack can buy Beryl everything she wants. He loves her desperately, and helping him to manage and build his wealth would likely give her a fascinating life! But Jack expects her to become just a society wife. He frowns at the thought of her ever even going to law school, because she never will need to work for even a single day. And is that the kind of future that will let our Beryl be her own woman, and stretch and grow and try to fulfill all her own biggest and most wonderful dreams?