Never Too Rich Read Online Free PDF

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conventional; in fact, it had been downright bizarre.
     
    Edwina had been born in New York. She never knew her
father, and her mother, Holly Robinson, never talked about him.
About all she had ever learned was that her father’s name really
was Robinson and that her mother’s perverse sense of humor showed
on her 1956 birth certificate and would haunt her to her grave:
Edwina Georgia Robinson.
    Edwina G. Robinson.
    It didn’t take long before everyone took to calling
her—what else?—”Eds.”
    An odd name hadn’t hurt Edwina, but her mother’s
absences did. Holly Robinson was the original party girl. She loved
to play and travel, and moved on the edges of the jet set, relying
on the generosity of men and the invitations and gifts from friends
and acquaintances to get by. She was showered with both, because
she was ravishingly beautiful and her razor wit and bubbling
personality brought life to any party. She was a fixture at all the
fabulous playgrounds of the world: Paris, Sardinia, Monte Carlo,
London, the Caribbean. Wherever the jet set descended, so too did
Holly. There was never any real money, and she and Edwina often had
to move from one residential hotel to another, sneaking furtively
out at night without paying their bill. But there was never a
shortage of gowns and furs and jewels, charge accounts and airline
tickets, and constant house-party and yachting invitations. Holly
Robinson’s beauty and personality were her ticket to another world.
But it was a ticket for one: children weren’t included.
    When Edwina was two, Holly left her with a childless
couple, a school friend and her young doctor husband. “I’ll only be
gone a few days,” she promised them vaguely. “I mean, what’s there
to do on Mykonos? You’ve seen one island, you’ve seen them all.”
Then she blew kisses to her daughter, waggled her fingertips to her
school friend, and didn’t return for nearly three months.
    It was the beginning of a pattern.
    When Edwina was three, she spent more than half a
year being shuttled between Holly’s various friends. And never the
same ones twice. One long visit, and they all knew better.
    When Edwina was four, the half-year turned into
nearly nine months.
    And when she was seven, Holly, running out of homes
to stick Edwina in, left her with two men who lived together in
Greenwich Village.
    “ This is Alfredo, and this is
Joseph,” her mother had said in her whispery, breathy little-girl
voice. “They are your uncles, darling. Be good, and Mama will be
back soon.” Holly blew Edwina the by-now-familiar kisses, wrapped
herself in her newest sable, and was gone to a party in a chateau
halfway around the world.
    She never returned to claim her daughter, nor did
she reach the party. Her plane crashed in the Alps, and Uncles
Alfredo and Joseph found themselves with a seven-year-old on their
hands.
    They lived on the fifth floor of a run-down walk-up
on Bleecker Street. But Edwina didn’t know how seedy it was, and
even if she had, she couldn’t have cared less. The tenement
building might not have been much better than a slum, but the
railroad flat with the tub in the kitchen was spotlessly clean and
furnished on a far grander scale than it deserved. The linoleum was
bright red. Huge twin tubs of rhododendron leaves stood on
pedestals to either side of the crumbling fireplace. Colorful
Indian fabric draped the run-down furniture, and a plaster bust of
Madame de Pompadour, sprayed silver, was crowned with a straw hat.
Pink silk scarves were thrown over every lampshade, and the
softened light hid cracks in the plaster and the constant movement
of roaches. Soft zither music and pungent incense kept the city at
bay.
    Uncle Joe and Uncle Al were the first people Holly
had dropped her off with that Edwina really liked. She was too
young to understand that “normal” men didn’t live together and hug
and kiss each other the way Al and Joe did; but whatever else they
did, it had to be said that