Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Never,” said Cornelius. “I enjoy my work, I enjoy my position in life, and I’m entirely happy with no regrets, no misgivings, and no morbid introspection of any kind.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, drinking my brandy too fast. “Then let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you never think of Steven Sullivan? And do you never remember Dinah Slade?”

  VII

  I hadn’t intended to ask those questions. Nowadays Cornelius and I seldom mentioned our old enemy Steve Sullivan, and we never under any circumstances referred to Dinah Slade.

  It was now over twenty years since Cornelius had first clashed with Steve. Although barely out of our teens, we had by our hard work at the bank since Paul’s death acquired a certain confidence, and Cornelius had begun to feel he could no longer tolerate his most powerful partner’s indulgent, patronizing contempt. However, when he first suggested that we might try “persuading” (his word) Steve to abandon the New York office in order to run the London branch of Van Zale’s, I thought he had gone mad.

  “How could we ever force him to do that?” I was scared as well as horrified. The idea of us kicking Steve out of One Willow Street conjured up a vision of two kittens trying to deprive a lion of his dinner by hauling him away by the tail.

  “Don’t be dumb, Sam,” said Cornelius, always astonished by the naiveté which even after two and a half years at the bank I still occasionally displayed. “Have you really forgotten what happened when Paul died?”

  To protect the bank after Paul’s murder in 1926, Steve had been driven to conceal the true facts of the crime from the police and pursue his own private, ultimately successful vendetta against the murderers. Cornelius now proposed the time had come for us to use this technical obstruction of justice as a lever to oust Steve from Willow and Wall.

  “But that’s blackmail!” I said, appalled.

  “No, no, no,” said Cornelius soothingly. “There’s no extortion of money involved. I’m just going to point out a few facts, apply a little logical persuasion. What’s wrong with that? Salesmen do it all the time.”

  I wasn’t present at Cornelius’ interview with Steve. I just sat in my office and waited dry-mouthed. I didn’t think he could possibly succeed in twisting Steve’s arm, but I admired him very much for having the guts to try.

  Eventually he rejoined me. He looked a little white around the mouth, but his smile was radiant.

  “You did it?” I gasped.

  “Sure.” Cornelius tried to sound nonchalant and failed. We laughed, and after I had shaken his hand with enthusiasm we hurried home for a celebration drink. I remember thinking as we scampered up the steps of Paul’s Fifth Avenue mansion and yodeled “Yippee!” exuberantly in the hall, that Cornelius was the most remarkable person I had ever met and that I was very lucky to have him for a friend. I knew it was in my best interests to like him, since my future success as a banker lay in his hands, but I could never have worked for any man I despised. Nowadays, when Cornelius has such a reputation as a despot, many people find it hard to believe how generous he was to me when we were young, sharing his home and his wealth readily with me, never taking advantage of our disparate financial and social positions, as willing to stand by me as I was to stand by him during our early struggles to survive at the bank. He was loyal and straightforward with me always, irreproachably honest, untiringly considerate and good-natured. He was also—and nowadays plenty of people might find this hard to believe too—great fun. We had a lot of laughs together in the old days, particularly during that golden summer of 1929 after we had ousted Steve Sullivan from New York, and I’ll never forget my twenty-first birthday when we threw a huge party, drank illegal champagne, and danced with our favorite girls to the music of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

  We were not alone in enjoying the summer of ’29. Far away in London Steve Sullivan had become involved with the young woman who had been Paul’s mistress, Dinah Slade. Since we knew it was only a matter of time before he fought back to reestablish himself in New York, we regarded this new alliance with extreme suspicion.

  Dinah was more than just Paul’s former mistress. She was also one of his celebrated protégés, and in 1922 he had set her up in her own London cosmetics business. She was seven years our senior, evidently competent, obviously ambitious, and although we had never met her, Cornelius had long regarded her as a threat to his peace of mind. His antagonism was probably rooted in jealousy; she had been very close to Paul and highly regarded by him. She had even borne Paul a son, Alan, who was later killed in the war. Cornelius, who had set his heart on being Paul’s heir, not unnaturally disliked the idea of this illegitimate son’s existence, and it had been a great relief to him when the child had been omitted from Paul’s will.

  “If Steve’s messing around with Dinah Slade,” he said to me in 1929 when rumors of Steve’s exploits reached us from London, “he’s up to no good.”

  “At least she may keep him securely anchored in London!” I suggested hopefully, but I was wrong. The Wall Street crash brought Steve back to New York, and once he was home he soon bulldozed himself into an impregnable position at Willow and Wall. It took the 1933 government investigation into investment banking to drive him back to Europe to avoid testifying before the committee (Van Zale’s, like so many other eminent investment-banking houses, had lived recklessly before the Crash), but once he was back on the other side of the Atlantic, our troubles with him began in earnest. Leaving his wife, he renewed his old ties with Dinah Slade. Later he married her, confirming our suspicion that the two of them had formed an unbreakable alliance, but before they could attempt to reestablish Steve’s control over the bank, Cornelius had moved to outflank them. The senior partner in New York was “persuaded” to retire (a routine income-tax-evasion problem had been uncovered by us some time before), and when Cornelius assumed control of the New York office, he also assumed the whip hand over Steve. Steve had a free rein at the London office, but ultimately London was answerable to New York. All we now had to do was set Steve up in a tight corner. Then we could cut him down when he tried to break out.

  “This time we’ve got him,” I observed with relief, but I was wrong, for now it was Steve’s turn to outflank us. Resigning from Van Zale’s, he used the money from Dinah’s cosmetics business to found his own London issuing house, and soon our best European clients were leaving Van Zale’s to follow him. Although Steve was no longer a Van Zale partner, it seemed the war was far from over; on the contrary, as Cornelius remarked, incensed, it had entered a new, even more virulent phase.

  “What are we going to do?” I said in despair.

  “Well, of course,” said Cornelius, “he’ll have to be stopped. He’s annihilating our London business. The survival of our entire European office is at stake.”

  “But how can we possibly stop him?”

  “When attacking the enemy,” said Cornelius, “always aim for the Achilles’ heel.”

  “His drinking problem?”

  “What else? We’ll let it be known that he didn’t resign from Van Zale’s. We’ll say all the partners combined to force his resignation on account of his alcoholism.”

  “But that’s slander!”

  “Then let him sue! Let him get up in a witness box and try to convince a jury that he’s taken the pledge!”

  I was disturbed. “But are we morally justified in cracking his reputation like that?”

  “What’s morality got to do with it? This is survival! We have to protect our interests in Europe!”

  This was undeniable. I clamped down on my doubts, and the rumors began.

  Soon afterward we heard Steve had been admitted to a private nursing home which specialized in the treatment of alcoholics, and we realized he was making a serious effort to overcome his drinking problem.

  “Okay,” said Cornelius, “this is where we move in for the kill. I’ll broadcast from one end of Wall Street to the other that Steve’s been hospitalized for DTs, and you’ll go to London to spread the
news around the City. Oh, and while you’re there, make sure you fix him. And I mean fix him. For good. I want all the world, not just the financial community, to know that he’s a drunken has-been.”

  “But short of forging a photograph of him at this place and getting it printed in a national newspaper, I don’t see how—”

  “Exactly. Do it.”

  “But—”

  “Sam, I want that man to see that newspaper and know that he’s finished. Got it? Look, this guy’s been persecuting us for years. He’s done untold damage to Van Zale’s, and if we let him crawl away from this mess now, he’s sure to try to stab us in the back as soon as he’s recuperated. We’ve got to finish him now, Sam. We must. What choice do we have? It’s his fault—he’s forcing us to take this action. We’re just victims acting in self-defense.”

  “Neil, you don’t really believe that. You can’t.”

  “Oh yes, I do!” said Cornelius fiercely, and then he said in a very polite voice, “I hope we’re not going to quarrel about this, Sam. I hope you’re not going to try to tell me what I should do for the good of my firm.”

  I looked at him and he looked at me. I knew at once that I was being presented with a reality that I couldn’t afford not to face, the reality that my best friend was first and foremost my boss, who could and would fire me if it suited him. It was a bleak, bare, bitter moment of truth.

  I thought, though of course did not say aloud: You’ve changed. Things shouldn’t have to be this way between us. We should still be the friends we were long ago back in the twenties at Bar Harbor.

  And when I thought of Bar Harbor, I remembered Paul saying to us all: “If you boys want to get on in life, don’t waste your time yearning for the way things ought to be. Just concentrate on dealing with the way things really are.”

  “Well?” said Cornelius.

  I stood up and turned away from him. “I’ll have my secretary book a passage to England right away.”

  I arrived in London.

  I obeyed my orders.

  Steve died.

  He had been on the wagon for some time by then, but when he saw the forged photograph, he drank a bottle of Scotch and tried to drive from Norfolk to London to see me. His car crashed into a tree somewhere near Newmarket. There was no other car involved in the accident. He died later in the hospital.

  “Tell Cornelius I’ll never forgive him,” wrote Dinah to me in reply to my formal letter of sympathy, “and I’ll never forget.”

  “That’s a declaration of war if ever I heard one!” said Cornelius at once when I relayed the message. “Okay, this is where I take care of that lady once and for all.”

  I’d met Dinah in London and liked her. I was feeling sickened by the part I had played in Steve’s death, and amidst all my guilt I was conscious of revulsion. “I think we’ve done enough, Neil. Let her be.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything but sit on the sidelines! I’m going to settle this score in person!”

  “Neil, Dinah loved Steve. She’s suffered enough—”

  “Shut up. Stop trying to give me orders.”

  “I’ve no intention of giving you orders! I’m just trying to point out—”

  “Forget it! That woman’s been nothing but trouble for years and years. She tried to stop Paul making me his heir—of course she always wanted her son to get the Van Zale fortune. She broke up my sister’s marriage to Steve, and you know as well as I do that Emily’s never been the same since that bastard walked out on her. She gave Steve the money to set up his own banking business in order to smash Van Zale’s in the teeth—naturally he’d never have been able to do that without her backing. And now … now she’s got the godalmighty nerve to declare a new round of hostilities! I’m sorry, Sam, but my patience is exhausted. I’m going to teach that woman a lesson she’ll never forget.”

  But in the end it was Dinah who did the teaching; in the end it was Cornelius who received the lesson he never forgot.

  By a malign combination of circumstances, he had the legal means to deprive her of her home, Mallingham Hall, and now he decided to embark upon his revenge by evicting her. He went to England himself in 1940 to administer the coup de grace, and although I saw no possibility of Dinah turning his inevitable triumph into a defeat, I found later I had underestimated her. She outwitted him by burning the house; she destroyed her ancient family home rather than let it fall into Cornelius’ hands, and by that act of destruction she proved to him that there were some things no money could buy, no power could extort, and no man, not even Cornelius, could corrupt. She didn’t even give him the chance to get even with her. On the day the house was destroyed, she sailed to France to take part in the historic rescue of the British Army at Dunkirk, and when she failed to return, it was as if she had outwitted him yet again. She died a heroine’s death, putting herself beyond his reach once and for all; he lived on with the memory of her indisputable victory.

  “So she won,” I said to him when he eventually returned to New York. I had to say that. It was a mistake, but I couldn’t resist it. I suppose I knew then that I too often wanted to turn the tables on Cornelius but suspected I would never have the courage to do so.

  He just looked at me. Then he said: “I refuse to discuss that woman with you either now or at any other time. I never even want to hear her name mentioned again.” And he turned his back on me before I could reply.

  I kept my mouth shut after that. Day after day, month after month, year after year I never raised the subject with him, but at last on that April day in 1949 when my guilt and my self-disgust and my unbearable isolation were driving me far beyond the barriers erected by my common sense, I heard myself put to him the two questions which I knew should never be asked:

  “Do you never think of Steven Sullivan? And do you never remember Dinah Slade?”

  VIII

  Cornelius’ eyes assumed their remotest expression. He sipped his brandy and looked out of the window. “I hardly think the subject of Steve Sullivan and his last wife is germane to our present discussion.”

  “But I think it is! I think the Sullivan affair shows as clearly as this Hammaco mess what kind of lives we’ve been leading since you gained control of this bank back in the thirties, and I think you should be reminded occasionally that we ruined Steve Sullivan and drove him to his death!”

  “As far as his death was concerned, I disclaim all responsibility. He got drunk and drove his car into a tree, and that was that.”

  “He would never have got drunk if you hadn’t ordered me to—”

  “I did what I had to do. He left me no choice. Sam, do please stop trying to drown yourself in your own misplaced remorse! I happen to find these neurotic displays of guilt very tiring.”

  “Okay, maybe you can argue that Steve left you no choice but to fight him to the very end of the line. But what about—?”

  “I’m not interested in discussing Dinah Slade. It was hardly my fault that she sailed off on a suicide mission! I categorically deny all responsibility for her death!”

  “Then why did you take care of Steve and Dinah’s three little kids after Dinah was killed? Why did you bring them back here for the duration of the war? You were shamed into it by your guilty conscience! You were shamed into it because she died a heroine’s death after wiping the floor with you and making you look cheap and small!”

  “This is pure fantasy, Sam. Obviously you must have had too much to drink. It wasn’t my decision to bring those children to America in 1940. Emily insisted on it. Of course it was typical of Emily to volunteer to look after her ex-husband’s children by the woman who had usurped her.”

  “Was it? Are you sure Emily didn’t take care of those kids because she’s your sister and she felt in some degree responsible for the wrong you’d done?”

  “Now you appear to be suffering from some sort of persecution mania. There’s nobody alive today who knows exactly what happened back in the thirties when Steve and I were fighting for control of this
bank. Certainly Emily herself knows virtually nothing about what went on.”

  “But do you think she isn’t smart enough to have figured out what happened? And tell me this, Neil: do you honestly think Scott hasn’t figured it out as well?”

  Cornelius swiveled round in his chair. “Scott and I understand each other.”

  “Are you sure? Neil, that’s what I meant when I said that maybe you should take time out occasionally to remember Steve Sullivan; maybe you shouldn’t just keep on telling smug lies to yourself about how you’ve no guilt and no regrets; and maybe, just maybe, if you think hard enough about it, you’ll see that it’s not me but you who’s slipping out of touch with reality. I think Scott’s trouble, Neil. I know his story has always been that he hated his father ever since Steve walked out on Emily to chase after Dinah Slade; I know your story has always been that he’s more devoted to Emily than he was to his own mother and that he’s as close to you as a kid brother. But the plain fact is that neither you nor Emily is related to him by blood and that when all’s said and done he’s the son of the man you ruined. Don’t get me wrong—I like him. But I don’t trust him. I think he’s a time bomb ticking quietly away under our feet. When the time comes, don’t offer him a partnership. Help him into a partnership in some other house, if you’re so fond of him, but whatever you do, get him out of this bank at Willow and Wall.”

  Cornelius had quietly picked up the receiver and was dialing Scott’s number on the interoffice phone. I stopped speaking. At the other end of the wire Scott picked up the receiver.

  “Scott,” said Cornelius politely, “could you please come down here right away? Thank you.”