Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “It must be odd to have a baby,” said Teresa, unable to imagine any creative urge which did not involve paint, but willing to concede the experience could be memorable. “Is Vicky okay?”

  “They told Sam when he saw her this morning that it was an easy birth, but she was very overwrought tonight. In fact, she was quite unlike herself. Vicky’s always so sweet and bright and nice-natured, but tonight … well, she seemed real upset. She even cried.”

  “Postpartum blues.”

  “Do you think so? Is that what it was?”

  “Sounds like it. But don’t worry, honey, postpartum blues are very common, and they never last long. She’ll be her old self again in a day or two, you’ll see. … Coffee?”

  “Thanks.” Now that I realized there was a simple medical explanation for Vicky’s behavior, I felt much better. “Sam and Alicia seemed to think it was all my fault that she cried,” I said on an impulse, “but it wasn’t. I was just surprised because they’re giving the baby a German name.”

  “Trust Sam to wave the German flag!” said Teresa, offering me milk for my coffee.

  “Well, they’re going to anglicize the name by calling him Eric, but personally I think he should be called after my great-uncle, the one who left me all the money. After all, Paul picked Sam out when Sam was just a gardener’s boy clipping a hedge! Sam owes him everything.”

  “Sam owes you a lot, too. The baby should be called Paul Cornelius.”

  “Well, I know most people don’t like the name Cornelius.” I fidgeted with my hamburger. “But personally,” I said, again deciding to confide in her, “I’ve always liked it. It’s different. Special. That’s why I’ve never let anyone except Sam, Jake, and Kevin call me Neil—and they only call me Neil because Paul told them to. He thought Cornelius was a difficult name for an adolescent boy to handle, and I was too shy of Paul in those days to say how it had always given me confidence. Neil’s just ordinary, but Cornelius is a great name.”

  “Maybe the next one will be Paul Cornelius. Anyway, honey, I shouldn’t worry about the trouble tonight—it’ll blow over. Don’t forget, it was a big event, and emotions were running high.”

  “Right. And talking of emotions running high, I wish Sam would stop behaving as if he’d found the secret of eternal youth. It’s getting irritating—almost as irritating as Alicia talking about my grandson the whole damned time. Christ, just because my daughter has a baby, I don’t see why everyone should treat me as if I’m ripe for an old folks’ home!”

  “Eat up your hamburger, old man, and let’s go hit the sack again.”

  An hour later, in bed, when we were drinking coffee and Teresa was snacking pound cake, I dusted the crumbs off my chest and glanced reluctantly at my watch.

  “Guess, I’d better be getting back.”

  “Stay longer if you want. I shan’t work anymore tonight.”

  “No, I have to go and make my peace with Alicia.”

  “Was she really that tough at the hospital? Jesus, I think you’re a saint to stand it! Most other men would have divorced her long ago and followed in Sam’s footsteps—wedding bells, a pretty young wife, and a baby before the first anniversary!”

  I got out of bed without a word and began to pull on my clothes. The room now seemed intolerably squalid.

  “Sorry, honey, I goofed. I practically bust a gut trying never to criticize Alicia, but sometimes the gut busts and I spill over. Don’t take any notice of my bitchiness.”

  “You’re not jealous of Alicia, are you?”

  “Hell, what would I want to be jealous of her for? She’s welcome to her empty life!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Honey, you know I love you and think you’re great in bed and more handsome than a film star, but can you seriously imagine what I’d be like if I was transplanted to your Fifth Avenue palace? I’d be stark staring mad within twenty-four hours! Anyway, what possible motive could I have for wanting to step into Alicia’s shoes? I don’t want children, and having a wedding ring wouldn’t make me paint better pictures.”

  In the end, everything still centered on the painting. Wedding rings, children, and Fifth Avenue mansions were all unreal shadows trying to impinge on the brilliant surface of the canvas. I knew Teresa, and Teresa knew herself. I was safe.

  “Good night, honey,” she said, kissing me at the door. “Take care.”

  “Paint well, Teresa.”

  Outside, it was dark, and turning up my collar against the chill spring wind, I hailed a cab and was jolted back across the park to that other world on Fifth Avenue.

  III

  Whenever I came home from Teresa, I always had a shower. This had nothing to do with the level of hygiene in her apartment. At the beginning of our affair I had showered before leaving her, but I still found that as soon as I reached home I felt compelled to shower again. I spent much time pondering on the significance of this fanatical quest for cleanliness, but concluded I was responding to the need to keep my life in two strictly sanitized compartments. The shower was an attempt at purification akin to the old Roman custom of lustratio which my Bar Harbor summer tutor had once mentioned to me; the Romans always made acts of lustration after celebrating some pagan rite and before returning to the normality of their civilized routine.

  I was heading swiftly up the main staircase for my rendezvous with the shower when Alicia called my name from the hall. I didn’t stop—the pull of the shower was too strong—but I did turn my head to look at her. She was wearing a gray dress with a diamond clasp at the shoulder, and diamond earrings below the smooth dark curves of her hair. She looked matchlessly beautiful. My pace automatically quickened up the stairs.

  “Cornelius … wait!”

  “Give me five minutes, would you?” I fled to the bathroom, locked myself in, stripped off my clothes, and bundled them into a heap out of sight behind the trash basket. Then with enormous relief I stepped into the shower.

  After counting slowly to one hundred and eighty, I turned off the water and dried myself vigorously for a further sixty seconds. It was soothing to follow the familiar routine. Feeling much better, I knotted my towel carefully around my waist and made sure my genitals were hidden. This was a very important part of the routine, because no one, not even Teresa, was ever allowed to see me naked from the front. It was true that Teresa had once been exposed to this view by accident on a long light summer evening when we had kicked off all the bedclothes, even the sheet, which I always took care to keep drawn up to my navel, but she had made no comment, so I had kept calm and pretended I didn’t care. Perhaps she had noticed nothing unusual. Human beings came in all shapes and sizes, and for all I knew, small testicles were a dime a dozen, equally common among those who have suffered from mumps and those who have no idea what the word “orchitis” means. Perhaps at a casual glance my testicles even looked normal. To my eyes they looked deformed, but since I knew exactly how deformed they were, it was hardly surprising that to me they should seem so hideously abnormal. I often wondered what Teresa thought of my eccentric modesty, but knowing Teresa, I guessed she would have shrugged her shoulders and accepted it long ago. Teresa concentrated on the basic issues. So long as the rest of my sexual equipment felt and acted as if it were in first-class condition, she wasn’t about to bother to find out why I went to bed with my shorts on and only wriggled out of them when I was safely under cover of the sheet.

  With the towel around my waist I unlocked the bathroom door and with shock discovered that Alicia was waiting for me in the bedroom. My hands flew at once to my waist to make sure the towel was secure.

  “Please excuse me for bothering you like this,” she said, and I noticed suddenly how tense she was, “but there really is an immediate problem. Vivienne’s here. Apparently as soon as she heard the news about the baby from Sam she got the first flight out of Miami, and now she wants to know why Vicky’s receiving no visitors. She says she won’t leave here till she’s spoken to you in person.”

  “Chr
ist! How did she get in?”

  “She arrived when we were at the hospital, and the new footman admitted her. I’ve reprimanded Carraway for not instructing him properly, but—”

  “Okay, let me fix this.” I pressed the bell by my bed and kept my finger in place until my valet arrived on the double to bring me fresh clothes. Then I picked up the house phone. “Hammond?” I said to my chief aide. “I want my ex-wife out of this house. Give her money, buy her a meal, do whatever has to be done, but get her out.” I hung up, switched phones, and dialed Sam to suggest that since he was responsible for Vivienne’s invasion of New York, it was his duty to ship her right back to Florida, but the housekeeper at the Kellers’ new home on East Sixty-fourth Street told me that Sam was out to dinner.

  “Vivienne seems to believe that you bribed the doctors to keep her out of the hospital,” said Alicia tentatively after I had reemerged from the bathroom with my shorts on.

  “Christ!” I fought my way into a clean T-shirt and grabbed the sweater my valet was offering me. “Well, all I can say is,” I said, wrenching on my pants, “that if that woman thinks she can bust into the hospital and upset my little girl—”

  I was interrupted by loud voices shouting in the corridor, and almost before I could button my fly, the bedroom door was flung open as Vivienne, hotly pursued by Hammond and his two henchmen, burst across the threshold.

  “How dare you order your punks to manhandle me!” she screamed. “I’ll sue you, you bastard!”

  “So sue me. I’ll wipe you off the map.” I turned to my aide. “Hammond, you’re fired. Get out.” I had managed to step into a pair of loafers before anyone had noticed I was barefoot. A man may just possibly be able to exercise power without socks on, but without shoes he can only look ridiculous.

  “Now, you listen to me, you son of a bitch—” Vivienne was shouting at me.

  “Be quiet!” I blazed, discarding my neutral expression and level voice so abruptly that everyone in the room jumped. “How dare you burst in here as if you were still mistress of this house with the right to come and go as you please! And how dare you harass my wife by creating these disgusting scenes!”

  “I want to see my daughter! I want to see my grandson! What right have you to keep them from me? They’re mine as well as yours!” Vivienne suddenly collapsed in a heap on the bed. She was wearing a powder-blue suit, very high heels, and a load of gold jewelry which clinked when she walked. Her tears were making deep furrows in her makeup. She looked wrecked, raddled, and revolting.

  “Cornelius,” said Alicia in a quiet, composed voice, “I know Vicky can’t receive any more visitors tonight, but couldn’t Vivienne at least see her own grandchild for a few minutes?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t keep mentioning that word ‘grandchild’! Do you think Vivienne wants to be reminded she’s nearer sixty than fifty these days?”

  “Isn’t he a bastard?” said Vivienne to Alicia. “He’s not even proud to be a grandfather! You’d think he’d go crazy over this grandson, wouldn’t you—particularly since he’s never been able to produce a son of his own!”

  I wanted to vomit. I even turned aside for fear I might begin to retch, but before I could take a step toward the bathroom, Alicia said with the most exquisite dignity, “Please, Vivienne—it’s a great disappointment to me that I’ve failed to give Cornelius the children he would certainly have had with someone else. You may not care what you say to him, but as one woman to another, I must ask you not to intrude in a private matter which is so full of sadness for me. Now, as far as the present problem’s concerned, I’ll personally take you to the hospital and make sure you’re admitted—if Cornelius gives his permission. May I have your permission, please, Cornelius?”

  I did not look into her eyes for fear of the pity I might find there. I just walked over to her without a word, took her hands in mine, and kissed her on the cheek. Then I kicked off my loafers, sat down, and pulled on my socks. My eyes felt hot. I was dumb with the humiliation that she had felt obliged to tell such a lie on my behalf. I wanted to retch again when I realized how pathetic she obviously thought me.

  “Wonderful!” Vivienne was saying sarcastically. “I just adore cozy little marital love scenes! Well, now that you’ve shown me you’re still capable of kissing your current wife, would it be too much to hope that you’ll fall in with her offer to take me to the hospital?”

  “You’ve caused Alicia enough trouble for one night,” I said, stepping back into my shoes. “I’ll take you.”

  “Thanks, but I’d rather go with a sympathetic woman who understands how disgracefully I’ve been treated!”

  “You’ll go with me and like it,” I said, and set off ahead of her down the corridor.

  IV

  “What a lot of time we’ve spent screaming at each other in the past,” said Vivienne, powdering her nose in the back of my new azure Cadillac. “Looking back, I can see what a waste of energy it all was. I’ve got news for you, darling. When you get old—truly old like me—you form quite different ideas about the kind of things that are important. The most important thing for me now is to reestablish my relationship with my daughter and see as much of my grandson as possible. Wasn’t it just the craziest piece of good luck that we produced Vicky? That honeymoon in Palm Beach at Lewis Carson’s gorgeous château—God, I can hardly believe it happened, so much has happened since. Remember how you’d given up smoking and used to munch chips in bed after we’d made love? It’s funny, but I can hardly believe that you and I, now two strangers sitting side by side in this heavenly car—darling, what divine upholstery!—were once two lovers wrapped up in the most torrid affair in town! Doesn’t it seem just the teeniest bit fantastic?”

  “Fantastic, yes. But we were different people then.”

  “I guess we were. But in some ways you’re even more attractive now than when you were just a cute little kid with an angel face and fifty million dollars! It’s sweet you’re still so fond of Alicia. Do you screw a lot of other women in your spare time?”

  “Mind your own fucking business.” This was evidently destined to be the day when I was hounded into using obscenities in front of the opposite sex.

  “I remember when you were just a nice well-brought-up little boy who never used that kind of language in front of a lady!”

  I somehow refrained from making the obvious comment. If we were ever to survive the visit to the hospital without coming to blows, I had to ignore all her attempts to needle me with her idiotic chatter.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by that time, but I had no trouble gaining admittance to the hospital, which in its efforts to accommodate its rich patients was run on the lines of a deluxe hotel. The head nurse on the fourth floor confirmed that Vicky was not to be disturbed, but a junior nurse took us to the nursery, where Eric Keller was sleeping in the company of three other infants.

  “Oh!” said Vivienne thrilled, as the baby was brought out to the nursery for our inspection. “Isn’t he lovely! Can I hold him?”

  She held him. The nurse smiled indulgently. Sam’s son slept on serenely, eyes closed, little pale oval face unmoving.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” whispered Vivienne. “Just think, Cornelius—our grandson! Ours! Isn’t it wonderful?”

  All I could think was that I was with an oversexed bitch whom I detested and that she was trying to tell me Sam Keller’s son was some kind of a miracle. The depth of my misery startled me. Groping for a more conventional response, I stared down at the baby in an effort to share the emotion which was transforming Vivienne’s hideously artificial face, but I felt nothing. I was back on the crosstown bus again, surrounded by people yet remaining in isolation.

  “Yeah, he’s great,” I said. I wondered vaguely if I was jealous of Sam, but I didn’t see how I could be. The baby had to have a father, and what better father could I have wished for him than my best friend?

  I wondered if Sam was still my best friend. I was almost one hundred percent sure he was, but
twenty-four years of surviving in a world where the most unexpected people became insane enough to believe they could double-cross me with impunity had given me somewhat cynical views on friendship. However, my fears for Sam’s sanity had receded considerably since he had married Vicky the previous June. I had no doubt now that he genuinely loved her; certainly he seemed so wrapped up in marital bliss that I thought it unlikely he would upset Vicky by stabbing me in the back for snitching Teresa—assuming, of course, that he still held it against me for snitching his mistress when she herself had regarded the affair as dead as a doornail.

  I shuddered as I remembered the circumstances surrounding my acquisition of Teresa. How could I have known she’d misled me about Sam’s feelings for her? And how could I possibly have guessed that Sam, who had always chased blond glamor girls with no talent, no brains, and no hope of luring him to the altar, should have fallen so crazily in love with Teresa that he had even talked of marrying her? I had sailed blithely into the biggest possible mess and had been damned lucky to scrabble my way to safety without getting my throat cut, but occasionally I still fingered my neck warily and had nightmares about blades flashing in the dark. Perhaps I should have played safe and given up Teresa, but she was such an ideal mistress for me and when Sam, out of pride, had insisted that I kept her, it had almost seemed less awkward to keep her than to give her up. Certainly Sam’s later devotion to Vicky had helped convince me that he no longer cared whether or not I had once annexed his girl.

  Or did he still care? I didn’t like him choosing those German names. It was like a gesture of defiance, a hostile act reminding me that he had the power to name the baby and I had no power at all. I didn’t like any situation where my power quotient was nil, and I very much disliked Sam reminding me how powerless I was on this particular occasion.

  Erich Dieter. My God.

  “Oh, I feel so happy!” said Vivienne with a little sob as the baby was borne back to the nursery. “Darling, let’s go somewhere and have a little sip of champagne!”