Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  Realizing that our childlessness was at the root of the problem, we discussed the possibility of adoption, but the idea was discarded when Ralph remarried and gave me generous access to my boys. Soon afterward Cornelius won better access to Vicky too, so that we were able to see all three children at Christmas and Easter as well as during the month of August, which we always spent at Bar Harbor. In 1938 I was just telling myself severely that it was unreasonable to want to see the boys more often when I was already so fortunate, when Ralph was killed in the airship disaster at Lakewood, New Jersey, and Sebastian and Andrew, now aged nine and seven, came to live with us permanently.

  Matters at once improved out of all recognition. I was so happy to have the chance to be a full-time mother at last, and Cornelius, perhaps feeling that I no longer minded our childlessness, overcame his difficulties for a time. We never recaptured the perfection of the early days, but we probably managed as well as the average husband and wife who had been married for seven years, and the grinding awkwardness between us had dissolved. Then in 1941 Cornelius succeeded in winning sole custody of his daughter and Vicky came to live with us.

  I can think of a number of reasons why Vicky dislocated our marriage, but I can never decide which reason is correct. Perhaps the damage was caused by a combination of these reasons, but whatever the cause, the one indisputable fact was that our marriage once more entered difficult times.

  Perhaps the main trouble was that I had not anticipated how difficult Vicky was going to be. I knew her well by that time, but when she had visited us in the past she had always been on her best behavior. Once she came to live with us, matters were very different. Of course one cannot expect children to be on their best behavior all the time, just as one cannot expect a stepmother’s job to be easy, but I had underestimated the time, patience, and sheer mental effort required to help a troubled ten-year-old settle down in a new environment. Vicky was pert, rebellious, and determined to dramatize her situation by classing me as the wicked stepmother. I was equally determined to make allowances for her, since the custody struggles had been bitter, and the mother, an irresponsible nymphomaniac, had obviously no idea how to raise a child properly, but my nerves became frayed and I soon found I was under considerable strain.

  I wanted to love Vicky. I had always longed for a daughter, particularly a little girl who looked like Cornelius, so it was a great disappointment to me when Vicky proved so different from the ideal daughter I wanted so much. Naturally I concealed my disappointment; I thought I had concealed it perfectly, but perhaps Cornelius sensed my feelings and resented them. Or perhaps he felt guilty that he had imposed another woman’s daughter on me instead of giving me a daughter of my own. Or perhaps the strained atmosphere in the family caused subconscious tensions in his mind. As I have already said, I can think of more than one reason why Vicky should have dislocated our marriage, but whatever the reason was, the dislocation now showed signs of becoming not merely a temporary but a permanent feature of our domestic landscape.

  It was hard to cope. My one preoccupation was to present a normal front to the children so that they should remain untouched by our problems, but in 1945 came the incident which almost terminated our marriage. Vicky was fourteen and a half, Sebastian sixteen. I cannot describe this incident except to say that I was and still am convinced of Sebastian’s innocence. Vicky was maladjusted about sexual matters, thanks to that disgraceful mother of hers, and although I tried to talk to her sensibly about male behavior in certain circumstances, she was too hysterical to listen. Cornelius was useless; he was incapable of being sensible where Vicky was concerned, and in a flash he was siding with her against me when I tried to defend Sebastian. Since I could not forgive him for some of the things he said about my son and he could not forgive me for some of the things I said about his daughter, it was hardly surprising that we became estranged and for a whole year made no attempt to sleep together.

  But then he came back to me. He said he had been so miserable that he had asked Jake Reischman to lend him one of his mistresses—it was typical of Jake that he should have had more than one to offer—but the incident had been so sordid that he couldn’t repeat it. He said he loved me and wanted me back. I went back to him.

  We were happy for a little while, but it didn’t last, I guess we both knew it wouldn’t last, but oh, the pain, I can’t be cold and crisp and detached anymore, it’s beyond me, I’m so unhappy. I can’t describe the pain, it was there all the time, soaking through me, and when I could bear it no more, I went to the doctor and said please, please give me some tranquilizers, and when he asked me why I was so upset, I didn’t say: “My husband can hardly ever make love to me.” I said; “My husband and I have no children.”

  “But Mrs. Van Zale!” he said, amazed. “You have three children, your two sons and your stepdaughter!”

  “I mean the other children,” I said. “All the children we never had.” But I could not describe the loss to him. I could not tell him that Cornelius and I had planned to have seven children—yes, seven—one daughter and six sons (“One more than the Rockefellers!” we had often said, laughing); and we had planned their birthdays and named them and plotted their careers. “Oh, it was just a game,” I said to the first psychiatrist, “just a way of making me feel better because I missed my boys so much.” “No, it wasn’t a game,” I said to the second psychiatrist. “It was real, they were all real, I knew what they looked like, and then suddenly one day they were gone and I didn’t know—still don’t know—how to bear the loss, I still miss them so much, whenever I think of them I can’t endure their nonexistence.”

  The psychiatrist was kind, but he didn’t really understand.

  “I was so good at having children,” I said as I watched him write me a new prescription for tranquilizers. “I’m not a very special person, not clever or gifted, but when I gave birth to Sebastian, I felt for the first time in my life that I was someone, a real person, Alicia Blaise Foxworth, talented, brilliant, successful. I would have felt like that when Andrew was born too, except that I knew I was going to have to give him up, so I tried hard not to be emotionally involved in the birth. But I was. I cried and cried when I was parted from Andrew, but I had to stop because I didn’t want Cornelius to know. I had to shut up all my grief inside me and pretend not to mind. Sometimes I think I’ve been doing nothing else all these years except shutting up the grief and pretending, pretending, pretending. … I must never let Cornelius know I mind, you see, because it would hurt him so much, and I love Cornelius, I couldn’t bear to hurt him, I’d rather die than let him know how much I mind our childlessness.”

  But that was a lie. I lived and I let him know. On April 6, 1949, the unthinkable happened, my self-control broke down, and the fragile relationship we had preserved with such difficulty for so many years was finally wrecked beyond repair.

  IV

  The trouble began when Vicky, bent on melodrama as usual, embarked on a ridiculous elopement with a beachboy and the quiet facade of our troubled family life again cracked wide apart. Cornelius could do nothing but ask in despair where we had gone wrong, and when he looked at me as if I were the cause of Vicky’s selfish irresponsibility, I had trouble restraining myself from pointing out that the entire disaster had arisen because he had spoiled her from the cradle to compensate himself for all the children he had never had. However, I think this home truth must have been obvious even to him. Certainly the situation seemed to fuel his guilt toward me, and we were already on the borders of a vast new estrangement when I discovered that he was secretly planning to marry Vicky to Sam Keller.

  Sam was so like a brother to Cornelius that I always thought of him as my brother-in-law. Since he was a man who never let a woman feel unappreciated, I found it easy to be friends with him, but I knew very well that the charm he lavished on me was due entirely to the fact that I was Cornelius’ wife. If Cornelius had ever divorced me, Sam would never have given me another glance because Sam defined the world on
ly in terms of what was important to Cornelius. He was one of those men who gravitate instinctively to sources of great wealth and power; though born to neither wealth nor power themselves, they have an infallible instinct for latching on to the right patrons and sticking with them through thick and thin. Too clever to be merely a lackey and too shrewd not to take every possible advantage of his friendship with Cornelius, Sam was no mere sycophantic hanger-on but a formidable force in his own right.

  Of course he was the wrong husband for Vicky.

  I knew he could not love her, just as I knew he was capable of marrying her to please Cornelius. I am deeply opposed to men marrying girls they don’t love. My first marriage taught me in no uncertain way about the misery waiting for a girl in a loveless relationship, and although I secretly longed for Vicky to leave home, I found myself unable to sanction the idea of Sam as a husband for her, particularly since there was someone else far more suitable who could offer her all the love she would never receive from Sam.

  Sebastian had always loved Vicky. There was nothing unnatural about it. They were not related by blood, and although my marriage to Cornelius had made them stepbrother and stepsister, they had not been brought up together from the cradle. Personally I thought it was more unnatural for Sam to marry Vicky, since she had been taught from birth to regard him as an uncle.

  Sebastian was steady and quiet. He would have provided the perfect foil for Vicky’s exuberance. He was also clever and more than worthy of her self-conscious intellectual affectations. It was true that Vicky was set against him, but that attitude just sprang from the perversity of adolescence, and once she was fully mature, I felt sure she couldn’t fail to appreciate him as he deserved.

  However, if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I did not want them to marry just because I felt they were well-suited. In fact, under normal circumstances I might have thought Vicky was unworthy of Sebastian and hoped he would recover from the calf love which had afflicted him in adolescence, but of course unfortunately my circumstances were so very far from normal.

  I wanted them to marry because I felt it would remove Cornelius’ guilt and heal our crippled marriage. I felt that if his daughter and my son could give us grandchildren to replace those children who had remained unborn, our loss would be wiped out in the joy of our mutual gain. Gradually over the years I had come to believe that this marriage was the only cure for a marriage which was becoming too great a strain to endure, and by that April in 1949 the strain had brought me close to breakdown. I found it difficult to pretend I still wanted him sexually when I had come to dread the nights so much; I dreaded the agony of wondering whether he would touch me, I dreaded the probability of his impotence, and I even dreaded the rare occasions when he was successful because I resented that he could be satisfied when satisfaction was always beyond me. I was angry too after the incident of Jake Reischman’s mistress, although Cornelius had sworn he had been unable to make love to her. I thought he had no right to go to another woman when I had tried so hard to be a good wife to him. I could see no reason why I should have to be penalized just because I knew, as no other woman knew, that he felt less of a man because of his sterility. My anger grew. I clamped down on it but could not stamp it out, and eventually it combined with all my dread to annihilate the desire for him that I had always taken for granted.

  It was at this point, when our marriage was at its lowest ebb and I was clinging more fiercely than ever to my dream of Sebastian marrying Vicky, that I discovered Sam had been marked for the role of Vicky’s keeper.

  “I must talk to you, please,” I said politely to Cornelius after we had rescued Vicky from Sam’s apartment on that Wednesday evening early in April. “It’s important.”

  “Let me just see Vicky to her room.” As usual he was smothering her with paternal love and as usual the little minx was tugging at his heartstrings for all she was worth. “Wait for me upstairs,” he suggested as an afterthought. “I want to change out of these goddamned business clothes just as soon as I’ve got Vicky settled.”

  I did not argue with him, but went to my bedroom to wait. It was an hour before he reached his room next door and another five minutes before he had changed his clothes, but I spoke not one word criticizing him for the delay. I assumed he had been chatting away to her without noticing the time but this was nothing unusual. I always had to take a backseat when Cornelius was absorbed with his daughter.

  “I must talk to you,” I repeated as he entered the room. I was wearing my nightdress and peignoir by that time, although I had not removed my makeup.

  “Oh, God!” he groaned, not listening to a single word said. “Poor little Vicky! What the hell am I going to do?”

  My last ounce of patience evaporated. “Well, don’t pretend you don’t have it all arranged!”

  He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  That was too much. I could tolerate his genuine concern for his daughter’s welfare, but not his feigned ignorance or his conspiracies hatched behind my back. “I mean that you’ve lied to me!” I blazed. “You always implied you shared my hope that Vicky would marry Sebastian someday, yet now Sam tells me you’ve made this secret deal with him behind my back! Of course he said he was going to have to tell you he couldn’t marry her, but if you think for one moment I believed him, you couldn’t be more wrong! He’ll do whatever you say, of course, but I think it’s disgraceful. I don’t know how you could do this to your own daughter! How can you marry her off to a man who cares nothing for her while all the time, right here in our own family, is a young man who worships the ground she—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” He sprang to his feet. Every muscle in his body seemed to harden with rage. “Don’t hand me all that feminine romantic crap—as if Vicky would ever consider marrying Sebastian! Alicia, you’ve become highly neurotic about that boy. I haven’t said anything before because I haven’t wanted to hurt you, but I can see we’ve now reached the stage where something has to be said. This blind adoration of Sebastian is highly unfair to Andrew and very bad for Sebastian himself!”

  “You’ve never liked Sebastian,” I said. “Never.”

  “That’s quite untrue and shows how neurotically you view the situation. Now, listen, Alicia. You just must be sensible about this. It’s not healthy to live vicariously through Sebastian and Vicky by manufacturing a dream world where your son marries my daughter and produces half a dozen children you can pretend are the children of our marriage. You’ve got to come to grips with reality and realize that this dream hasn’t one hope in hell of coming true.”

  “But I truly believe … in time …”

  “No. I’m sorry. Please don’t think I’m unsympathetic, because I’m not; we have a central tragedy in our marriage, and I recognize that. But we must cope with it as best we can. In some ways it’s easier for me, because I have the world of my work at Willow and Wall, but you have your world here on Fifth Avenue and you could do so much more than you do at present to lead a full, rewarding, interesting life. Instead of wasting so much time with your soap operas, why don’t you get out, see more of your friends, maybe get involved in one or two new charities? Once you were occupying your time more meaningfully, I’m sure your life would seem less frustrating, so please—make an effort to get out of this rut you’re in! I don’t want to come home from work one day and find you’re in the middle of some neurotic breakdown.”

  “If I have a breakdown,” said my voice in fury, “you’ll have only yourself to blame. It’s not my fault we never had any children.”

  All the lights in the bedroom were on. There was no darkness to hide our expressions. For a moment we stood motionless, as if hypnotized by so much blinding clarity, and then Cornelius took a small step backward. His face was white as bone.

  “Why shouldn’t I spend my time enjoying soap operas?” said my voice. “It’s better than sitting around thinking of all those children you never gave me. And it’s certainly better than thinking of a husband who�
�s never any good in bed.”

  In the silence that followed, I told myself I had thought the words but not spoken them aloud. I couldn’t have spoken the words aloud because I was incapable of being so wicked.

  Cornelius took another step backward. His eyes were brilliant with pain, and I knew then that the words had been spoken and that nothing could wipe them out.

  There were no more words. I looked at his dear familiar face and saw it was stricken beyond recognition with his grief. He went on backing away until he blundered against a table, and then he turned, opened the door, and stumbled out into the corridor.

  “Cornelius!” I found my voice, but it was too late. I ran after him down the long corridor, down the yards of red carpet to the head of the grand staircase, and all the time I was crying his name. I saw him cross the hall, but he did not look back. The stairs seemed endless. My slippers whispered frantically on the vast marble floor. “Cornelius!” I sobbed. “Cornelius!” I dashed out of the front door, and halfway across the forecourt I reached him and clung to his arm.

  He wrenched himself free. “Stop that screaming,” he said sharply. “Stop it at once.”