Pool_1

Louis Prio fathered two children, a daughter also named Rose after his sister, and a son Frank, whom he adored. Money and power does not buy nor beget luck and it is only luck which can totally insulate us from misfortune. Nature teases us with tastes of good happenstance but seldom puts luck firmly in any one man’s hands. Young Frank, adored son, heir to an empire, a next level of ascendancy, newly married, died at the age of nineteen of blood poisoning. A simple splinter. Such was life before antibiotics. Such is chaos. Frank dead? This was HIS son. Prio's son. Life, everywhere else, had no special expectation in those days, but Prio had always been a step ahead, had always come from and through the fire untouched, had always anticipated and preempted misfortune. This was not a bullet from mobsters, but a poisoned arrow from God. This was manhood crushed at it's most proud and at it's most powerful, his son. His son. His only son. This was his offering to the future, spit upon, his ascent, his next level, cut off, his spiritual destruction. Was this was the God speaking, who demands, "I AM I. BOW BEFORE ME!" No man stands in His wrath. Louis Prio couldn't pray to a god who would kill his child. Could he? But he could fall to his knees and cry. Is that a prayer? If you don't spit at the air and shake your fists in rage, is that enough? His hands covering his face were also pressed to his knees. Through the closed big paired wooden doors you could hear the sobbing. Was this the place for that? That room was a room of power. Dressed in mixed old Italian and Victorian style, richly wooded, appointed in cut glass mirrors, and elegantly layered walnut trim, trappings, it was an environment for men of power in seclusion. Some chapel. Was this fetal posture? Was Louis in submission - or - self destruction? He probably didn't know, himself.