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Sins of the Fathers

Page 23

by Susan Howatch


  Jake paused. I felt his arms relax around my waist. He had not moved his hands during the embrace, yet I had been acutely aware of those strong fingers pressing insistently against my spine. I felt frightened again, lost, muddled.

  I saw him glance swiftly at the door as if he wished he could retreat upstairs to less formal surroundings, but of course that was impossible, as some servant would have been certain to see us. Finally, in an attempt to make the room less inhibiting, he said in a low voice, “Shall I draw the drapes?”

  I nodded, and presently the drapes swung shut to mute the early-evening light, but although it became darker in the room, I could still see him clearly. When he slipped off his jacket, I noticed that although he was so much bigger than Cornelius, he was far from being so well-proportioned. I thought of the perfect line of Cornelius’ neck and shoulders, and suddenly I longed for him, not just for his physical presence but for his simple direct uncomplicated attitude to passion, which had always pierced straight through the armor of my reserve and effortlessly allayed my most private fears.

  Jake pulled off his tie and undid the top button of his shirt.

  When he took me in his arms again I could feel the increased heat of his body, and aware in panic that I could not now withdraw without alienating him forever, I managed at last to open my mouth to his. His manner at once altered. The deliberate, sensual restraint which had made his kisses so oddly flexible and so wholly foreign merged into a darker, more aggressive sexuality directly at odds with the urbane mask he presented to the world, and as I had my first glimpse into the rough, angry, bitter reaches of his personality, I realized with horror that I was about to give myself to a man I had never known.

  I could no longer make a conscious effort to adopt the right responses. As his hands began to move and I felt the strength of the pressure building in his body, my nerve failed me. I went rigid with tension, then struggled to be free.

  He at once released me and stepped back. His eyes were a hot violent blue. I was terrified.

  “I’m sorry … forgive me … I don’t understand … I wanted you so much …”

  “You wanted him.” I saw him swiftly conceal all trace of the mysterious primitive personality he had revealed. Producing a handkerchief, he carefully wiped the sweat from his forehead and buttoned his shirt rapidly to the neck. Then he picked up his glass of Scotch, drained it, and reached in the pockets of his discarded jacket for a cigarette. When it was alight, he inhaled once and left it in the ashtray while he knotted his tie.

  “Jake, I hardly know what to say. I feel so embarrassed and ashamed …”

  “Don’t be absurd. If anyone has to feel embarrassed and ashamed, it should be me. I can’t think why I was naive enough to imagine a complicated problem could ever be solved so simply. Here, have some of this.” And he passed me his cigarette while he slipped on his jacket.

  I put the cigarette to my lips but could not inhale. I was feeling lost again, not knowing what to do, but then he took charge of the situation, made me sit down beside him on the couch while we shared that cigarette, and put his arm around me as I edged nearer to him for comfort. After a moment I had the courage to say, “Are you very angry?”

  “No. Disappointed, yes—I’m only human! But not angry. How about you? Do you feel better or worse?”

  “I’m not sure, I feel so muddled. Is it possible that I could feel better after making such a mess of everything? Isn’t this the moment when I should go completely to pieces?”

  He laughed. “I wish it was—I’d like nothing better than to put you together again! Now, tell me what’s at the root of this problem. Don’t you think I’ve earned the right to know?”

  I told him everything. It took a long time. Afterward Carraway brought us sandwiches and coffee; I had no desire for food, but Jake was insistent, so I ate half a chicken sandwich. The coffee was rich and at last I began to feel stronger.

  “It’s an interesting idea of yours,” Jake was saying, “that the situation would be improved if Vicky were to marry Sebastian, but I doubt that you’re right. I think Neil needs a much stronger jolt than that to set him back on the rails.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he’s got everything out of proportion, hasn’t he? He’s got all his priorities screwed up. Any balanced man would see that so long as he has you it doesn’t make a goddamned bit of difference that he’s sterile. God, if I had a wife like you … However, I don’t want to wander from the point. What Neil needs is some kind of blinding reminder of the vital facts of life, but I must admit I don’t see how he’s going to get it. Has he seen a psychiatrist?”

  “Oh, no!” I said, appalled. “He’d never consider such a thing! I’ve seen two or three psychiatrists myself, but—”

  “You! My God, you’re the one who’s normal!” Jake set down his coffeecup, flicked a crumb from his cuff, and stood up. “I must go or there’ll be a row with Amy when I get home. Listen, my dear, we must, of course, meet again. I usually work till six-thirty or seven, but at least one night a week I always arrange to leave the office at five. Which day next week would suit you?”

  “It’s difficult. … You see, Cornelius will be back from Chicago by then.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to suggest we meet here! I have an apartment in the East Fifties. Why don’t we meet there a week from today?”

  “Well, I … yes, I’d like to but—”

  “We’ll just talk. That’s all you need right now.”

  “But would that be fair to you?”

  “Why not? Would it be any fairer to either of us if I insisted you went to bed with me when all you wanted was to go to bed with someone else? Do you imagine I’d enjoy that any more than you would?” Without waiting for an answer, he wrote down the apartment’s address and gave me one of a pair of keys which he extracted from his key ring. “There’s a doorman in the lobby,” he said, “but if he stops you, just say you’ve come to see Mr. Strauss.”

  I took the key and folded it carefully in the paper recording the address. As we walked to the door, I wanted to say so much to him, but the words were too difficult to choose. I even found it hard to say a simple thank-you and good-bye.

  In the hall a footman opened the front door as Carraway hovered by the stairs, and Jake and I paused, two actors playing their opening scene before their first audience.

  “Good night, Alicia. Thank you for the coffee and sandwiches.”

  “You’re very welcome, Jake. Good night,” I said politely, and stood watching from the porch as his car slipped away into the twilight.

  II

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Strauss,” I said a week later to the uniformed doorman of the modern apartment building on East Fifty-fourth Street.

  Evidently this was an unremarkable event in the doorman’s daily life. With a smile he gestured toward the elevators and said, “Number 6D, ma’am.”

  Trying to behave as if I were well-accustomed to meeting Mr. Strauss at his apartment, I entered the elevator, pressed the button, and wondered how many other women had held the key which I now took from my purse. Jake suddenly seemed unreachable, walled off from me by years of extramarital experience. No doubt he was only interested in me because I presented more of a challenge to him than the women whom he was accustomed to seducing without effort, and feeling deeply depressed, I fitted the key in the lock and opened the door.

  “Jake?” I called nervously.

  There was no reply.

  Closing the door, I tiptoed across the little hallway into the spacious living room beyond. Long low couches upholstered in dull crimson lay limpidly on an enormous Persian carpet. The couches were peppered with plump cushions covered in a heavily embroidered material which matched the thick luxurious drapes, and the walls were hidden beneath the coordinating dull crimson of the flocked wallpaper. The room’s three paintings, all showing elaborately detailed scenes of Venice, looked as if they might be Canaletto originals borrowed from the Reischman art collection,
while the three low brass tables, which added an Oriental touch to the room’s sumptuous atmosphere, reminded me that Jake, as well as being a German-American, was also a Jew.

  Feeling further removed from him than ever, I took off my hat and coat and put them away in the empty closet by the front door before I searched my purse for a cigarette. My lighter refused to work. I found a little kitchen, but there were no matches there, so, taking a deep breath, I entered the bedroom. The huge bed was canopied with yards of crimson silk, and again I was reminded not of Europe but of the Middle East. Moving across another exquisite Persian carpet, I ignored the full-length French Impressionist nude which was the room’s only picture and opened the drawers of the nightstands on either side of the bed. One nightstand was empty. The other contained a slim volume of cartoons reprinted from The New Yorker, a book of untranslated poems by Goethe, and three packets of male contraceptives.

  “Alicia?” called Jake as the front door opened in the distance.

  Guiltily ramming shut the drawer, I hurried back to the living room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said incoherently, “I was just … Why, what have you got there?”

  Jake was carrying a large brown paper bag. We kissed as casually as if we had been meeting every week for twenty years, and then he moved past me into the kitchen.

  “I haven’t used this place in a while,” he said. “I just stopped for a few of the necessities of life.” Opening the bag, he extracted a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, a jar of olives, one lemon, four bagels, half a pound of cream cheese, and several slices of lox. “There’s already gin and vermouth here,” he said. “Can I fix you a martini?”

  “Well, I don’t usually drink martinis, but perhaps …”

  “Wait a minute.” He was hunting in the closet below the counter. “The last incumbent of this place seems to have walked off with two bottles of vermouth and one and a half bottles of gin. God, how shoddy! Would you object strongly to drinking Scotch?”

  “I’ve never drunk Scotch before. I shall feel very decadent! My father had old-fashioned ideas about what women should drink.”

  “I’ll call up the liquor store.”

  “No, no—let me try the Scotch! But make it very weak.”

  “Sure.” He began to fix the drinks. “Do you like bagels?”

  “I …”

  “You’ve never had one!” He was smiling at me, his eyes bright with amusement but also with wariness, as if I were as much an unknown quantity to him as he was to me.

  “Of course I’ve had bagels before!” I said defiantly. “Why not? You don’t have to be Jewish to eat bagels?”

  When he laughed, the faint tension between us immediately dissolved. “Good! But let’s get to the food later. Can I give you a light for that cigarette?”

  We went into the living room and sank down on one of the crimson couches. It was wickedly comfortable.

  “What do you think of this place?” said Jake before I could start to feel nervous again.

  I did not know what to say, because his taste was obviously so different from my own. I like light pretty rooms full of pastel colors and elegant furniture, rooms which give an impression of uncluttered space. “It’s very striking,” I said cautiously.

  “But not in accordance with the best white Anglo-Saxon Protestant standards of the Yankee aristocracy!” he said, amused, but before I could look as embarrassed as I felt, he raised his glass in a toast. “To us both,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you.”

  I was still feeling overwhelmed by our differences, but I managed to return his smile, raise my glass to his, and murmur, “Thank you.” The Scotch tasted odd, but softer than a martini. Replacing my glass on the table, I tried desperately to think of something to say, and as if he sensed my panic, he at once began to speak.

  “It’s unfashionable now to talk about the aristocracy, isn’t it?” he said casually. “But do you remember how it was in the old days when everyone talked so freely of Our Crowd and Yours? The Jewish and Yankee aristocracies, the twin pillars of New York society, the parallel lines that never met!”

  “I don’t think we should talk about …” I said rapidly, and then found the gulf between us impossible to name.

  “But yes, we must!” said Jake at once. “We should discuss the subject endlessly until we’re bored to death with it, or it’ll be nothing but a millstone round both our necks!”

  “I …”

  “Let me start by telling you how much I’ve been admiring your courage.”

  “Courage?”

  “The courage to step outside the conventions we were both taught to respect.”

  “You mean …”

  “Parallel lines are never supposed to meet. You reached out and bent them. Perhaps it would be hard for someone who wasn’t raised in either Your Crowd or Mine to realize the courage that took.”

  “No, it wasn’t courage, it was just …” I struggled to explain how unimportant the differences had seemed in the circumstances. “Of course, one can’t pretend the differences don’t exist,” I said at last, “but now only the similarities seem important—the fact that we both come from the same world, even though that world has two such separate halves. I feel that despite everything, we must still talk the same language.”

  “Ah, but talking’s so difficult!” said Jake. “It’s so easy to say the same old words and never say anything new. That’s why I’m so convinced we should say all the things we’ve never said to each other in all the years since we first met—how many years is it? Twenty? Well, never mind how long we’ve pretended to know each other, that’s not important now, and there are other questions I’d prefer to ask. For instance, what was it like growing up Dean Blaise’s daughter, a little white Anglo-Saxon Protestant princess in the heart of Old New York?”

  “Jake!” I had to laugh at the appalling description, and suddenly the gulf which separated us no longer seemed unbridgeable. “You can’t really want to know about that!” I protested. “You can’t!”

  “Ah, you mysterious Anglo-Saxons!” he exclaimed, laughing with me as his fingers closed tightly on mine. “You’d suppress the whole world if you could, in the name of your so-called good breeding and good taste! Well, I prefer to acknowledge the absurdities of the world frankly, and even laugh at them if I choose. If one really stopped to think about the insane way the universe is arranged, one would go mad in no time, so now and then it’s good to laugh, it’s therapeutic, it dilutes the pain. … Now, please … tell me about your early life. I have this amusing suspicion that despite our differences, it was far more like mine than either My Crowd or Your Crowd would be willing to believe.”

  III

  I talked to him through several meetings. We met always on Thursday, always at the same time, always for no more than an hour. I told Cornelius I was on the committee of a new charity, and he said he was glad I had found another interest to occupy my time.

  During all our meetings Jake never suggested that we should adjourn to the bedroom. We kissed casually when we met and kissed warmly when we parted, but otherwise there was no physical intimacy between us. Yet the intimacy which did exist became increasingly important to me. We would sit drinking his favorite Scotch, and while I talked I would watch the way his fingers gripped the glass and notice the angle of his profile when he raised the glass to his lips. The curve of his fine elegant mouth became familiar to me, as familiar as his high forehead, his thin nose, and the solid line of his jaw, and as the days shortened and I saw him only by artificial light, I noticed the way his straight thinning hair seemed no longer pale but the subtlest shade of gold.

  Whenever we met he would bring something different to eat. The bagels with lox and cream cheese were followed by pastrami, which I could not eat, and then by potato pancakes which I found delicious. It was only when I arrived with some caviar, which he refused to eat, that I realized he was enjoying all the food he never had at home. The cuisine at the Reischman mansion on Fifth Avenue was much t
oo grand to acknowledge the existence of bagels and pastrami.

  In fact, Jake and I ate little at the apartment. I developed a taste for Scotch, although naturally I was careful to continue drinking sherry at home in case Cornelius started wondering where I had acquired my new drinking habits. I also smoked more than usual, but I never felt guilty about that because Jake was a chain smoker, lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. Sometimes I wondered if he smoked so much because it was a strain to listen to me, and sometimes I wondered if he smoked so much to take the edge off his sexual appetite, but I did not know and could not guess. Instead I went on talking. I talked about my isolated childhood with a stepmother who disliked me and a father who was absorbed in his work, and Jake smoked and listened but remained an enigma. I talked about the boarding schools, the dreadful summers when I had been exiled to Europe with a succession of governesses, and Jake nodded and was sympathetic but unfathomable. I told him how I had married Ralph to escape from home, I tried to describe how I had felt when I had been someone special, giving birth to my sons, I recounted the whole sorry history of my first marriage with its disastrous conclusion, and Jake listened and encouraged me to talk, though for what purpose, I did not know.

  Yet I talked. I went on talking to this stranger who was outwardly beginning to seem so familiar to me, and then, one day, halfway through our sixth meeting, our roles slowly reversed themselves, and he began to talk to me.

  IV

  “Of course, I always knew we were different,” said Jake. “I always knew we were special. When I was a little boy I thought we were royalty, the cream of Old New York. My father was like a god. Everyone bowed and scraped to us. There was a horde of lesser relatives, all reinforcing my childish belief that we were the center of the universe. It would be hard for you to imagine how protected I was, but perhaps not so hard for you to imagine what a shock I had when I finally went out into the world and encountered prejudice. Nothing had prepared me for it. My father had had a little talk with me when he had conceived the heretical idea that I might go to Groton, but since I never got as far as the gates, I never got the chance to mix with boys from the other world. The powers at Groton put my father very politely in his place by saying they just didn’t think Groton was quite the right school for me; they didn’t think I’d be happy there.

 

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