Cast Adrift

The heroine of this story is Helen Anderson, a young woman who appears to have everything going for her. She is very beautiful, blond and blue eyes; she is very well spoken and well educated (an Sc.D. in engineering from M.I.T.); and to top it all she is quite wealthy, a multi-millionaire, due to a surprise inheritance from a spinster aunt.But underneath that charming façade she was unhappy. She was unpopular as a girl at school, for no reason that she could understand. She compensated by working hard at her studies. The main reaction to that was that she was labelled "a brain." She was the class Valedictorian; she was not invited to the Prom.The story starts one Saturday evening when she can find nothing better to do than go to the laundromat. Her apartment was on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. She walked over to the Gardens and down the Brimmer Street hill to the laundromat, which only contained three young women, gossiping, and a young man, attractive enough, but she was too shy to speak to him.Eventually he leaves and shortly after she does also. She sees him climbing the Brimmer Street hill, when suddenly three men dart out and mug him. She rushes up to save him but too late: he is barely conscious, and his pockets have been emptied. She gets him on his feet, then something primitive happens to her. She feels that he is hers and that she will look after him whatever the circumstances.The circumstances are not favorable. He shows amnesia, a result of the blow to his head. He does not know his name and he has lost all his papers. He is truly a foundling, a non-person. As time goes along she gets medical attention for him, clothes him at Filene's basement, evades police and missing person bureaucrats, finds a job for him at a local restaurant, and gets him enrolled in a Northeastern University night class.She also gives him a name - Christopher Anderson - and persuades her parents to adopt him.Of course, they marry and are very happy. Christopher turns out to be particularly adept at business practices and after some disappointments he lands a job as assistant to Bill Spartus, the President of Teletronics Atlantic, a struggling microprocessor company. Quickly Christopher becomes the right-hand man of the President.At one point the company runs into serious financial threats due to unclear problems with a customer in Birmingham, England. Spartus tells Christopher and Helen (pregnant by now) to go to England to sort out the difficulty, and to have a vacation. They go to a village in Shropshire where they have a few days of an idyll. Then the day comes when Christopher drives to the nearby city of Birmingham.But Christopher simply disappears. His car is discovered but it contains only the business papers, his passport, and his traveler's checks.That is a summary of Part 1 of the book; it omits the struggles Spartus has with the banker, Ellsworth Dodge, and his financial advisor, Kenneth Dewar.Part 2 deals with how Helen saves Teletronics, and how Spartus finds Christopher.