Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent Read Free Book Online

get over Izidor, and following the trip to Uruguay she returned to Rio de Janeiro already engaged to a handsome and older Italian-born Jew named Mario Cohen.
    â€œLily went on vacation for a long time with her parents, and when she returned we all heard that she was going to be married,” said Bentes Bloch. “That’s how we all heard about her first marriage.”
    Lily married Mario Cohen in Montevideo, Uruguay, on September 19, 1952, two months before her eighteenth birthday. Mario, who was nearly nine years older, came from a respectable family that had made a small fortune manufacturing hosiery in Argentina, where their company was based. Less than a year following the wedding, Lily gave birth to her first son, Claudio, on July 16, 1953. She had two other children—Adriana and Eduardo—in rapid succession.
    After her pampered adolescence in Rio de Janeiro, life as a mother of three young children in Montevideo, far from friends and family, must have come as a bit of a shock. Although the Cohens lived amongst upper-middle-class Jews in Montevideo, the city and the country were growing increasingly unstable as the world market for agricultural products began to decline in the 1950s. In Montevideothere was massive unemployment and inflation coupled with increasing student militancy and unrest. The civil unrest led to the birth of an urban guerrilla movement known as the Tupamaros, who first made their mark robbing banks and distributing food to the poor. By the 1960s, the guerrilla group began to play a part in high-level political kidnappings in Montevideo.
    If Uruguay was emerging as an increasingly unstable country, Lily Cohen took little notice. In the early days at least, she was the wife of a successful hosiery magnate who occupied her time organizing the servants, fixing her hair, and vacationing in Punta del Este, an upscale resort and casino town on the southern tip of Uruguay where upper-middle-class Jewish families flocked between December and February at the height of the austral summer.
    But Lily, who seems to have inherited Wolf’s passion for spending money, also indulged in what was to become her favorite pastime—shopping. During one memorable spree in downtown Montevideo, Lily managed to spend thousands on lingerie—an astonomical sum of money in the late 1950s. When he received the bill, Mario was so furious he ripped up all her new purchases, said a family friend.
    â€œMario wasn’t like Lily’s father when it came to money,” said Marcelo Steinfeld. “I think he had very little patience when it came to Lily’s excesses.”
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    IN FACT, WHEN it came to money, Mario was the polar opposite of Wolf, which might explain why Wolf seemed to have little tolerance for his new son-in-law, who, he believed, failed to treat his daughter in the manner to which she had become accustomed in Rio. In Uruguay, where the young couple lived to escape the severe economic policies and other repressive measures directed at Jews during the presidency of Argentine leader Juan Peron, Mario bought his new wife a car. It was a Morris Minor, a British import designed for the working classes. Furious at his new son-in-law’s miserly gesture,which he viewed as a slap in the face to the entire Watkins clan, Wolf ordered a Cadillac through his friend Gastão Veiga and had it shipped to Lily.
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    THROUGHOUT THE DECADE she spent in Montevideo, Lily yearned to return to the cosmopolitan city of her youth. She missed the family dinners at the Bife de Ouro in the Copacabana Palace hotel and high tea at the Confeiteria Colombo in her old neighborhood. She missed the family vacations at the hot springs at Poços de Caldas and Caxambu, where many well-heeled Jewish families escaped the month-long frenzy of Carnaval in Rio. By the time she was pregnant with her third child, she had already grown tired of Mario.
    When her beloved father died of a liver ailment while on a