Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent Read Free Book Online Page B

weight when they were registered outside of Brazil, which was well known for its bureaucratic red tape and corruption.
    Lily would have gladly married Alfredo twenty times over. She appeared desperately in love with her second husband, and tried to do everything to please him. And for a while at least, it seemed she did.

TWO
“Everything in Its Place”
    B Y MOST ACCOUNTS , it was initially a happy marriage. Alfredo, a striking European émigré with wavy brown hair and an easygoing manner, was head over heels in love with Lily—at least in the early part of the courtship and the marriage, while the conquest was still fresh.
    For most of his adult life, Alfredo was known as a serial womanizer; he had been married twice before. But Lily was different, he told his family. Here was a beautiful woman and a wonderful mother whom he adored. The marriage to Lily had been a good decision, Alfredo assured his friends and family.
    Alfredo João Monteverde, born Alfred Iancu Grunberg in Galati, Romania, on June 12, 1924, was the younger child of Iancu Grunberg, a prominent Jewish banker to the Romanian royal court, and his wife, Regina Rebecca Leff Grunberg. Alfred and his older sister, Rosy, lived a privileged life in Romania. Black-and-white family snapshots show the Grunberg children posing with their French and Austrian governesses and attending children’s parties in a palatial family residence. In one photograph, Alfred, who appears to be six or seven, is dressed up as Mickey Mouse, after the popular Walt Disney comic strip that was first released in 1930. Although the Grunbergswere Jewish, the family was so assimilated that photographs show them posing in front of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in their living room. Their aunt Josephine, on their mother’s side, ended up joining the Catholic Church and becoming a nun.
    From an early age, Alfred was extremely close to his sister Rosy. The two siblings shared a made-up language to confound their nannies, and were pretty much inseparable even as they were both sent off to the Millfield School, which was the first elite boarding school in England to become coeducational in the 1930s.
    Tragedy struck the Grunbergs on November 21, 1937, when Iancu, forty-three, committed suicide while undergoing treatment for his severe depression at a hospital in Vienna. Following the death of her husband, Regina Grunberg, thirty-nine, decided to join her children in England. With a war looming in Europe, Regina packed up the house in Romania and traveled to London with the family’s gold reserves. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, the Grunbergs applied for permanent residency in England. Told that they would have to surrender their large fortune in order to stay, Regina and her teenaged children began to cast around for another country that would take them in without such a huge financial penalty. They applied for visas to the United States but were told that the wait would be long, and that there was no guarantee the American government would issue travel documents to Jews fleeing from war-torn Europe, no matter how wealthy they were. Then, as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England came under fierce attack by the Germans, the Grunbergs knew they were running out of time and needed to act quickly. When they managed to obtain visas to Brazil, they didn’t hesitate for a moment even as the British government froze their assets after the outbreak of hostilities. In December 1940, as German bombs rained down on London during the Blitz, Regina, Rosy, and Alfred sailed from the port of Liverpool aboard the Andalucia Star to Rio de Janeiro.
    It was a dangerous voyage and proved to be the ship’s final Atlantic crossing before it was sunk by German U-boats in 1942. The Grunbergs spent much of their time at sea practicing lifeboat drills with their fellow passengers, dozens of Mormons sailing third class. Like many other moneyed refugees