Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  I had told Vicky there was no need for her to meet the ship, since Southampton is some way from London, but of course she was there with Eric, Nurse, and the new baby. Paul Cornelius Keller was dark and glum. I turned to Eric with relief. He was three years old now and looked more like Vicky than ever, but he seemed to have become very shy, and it was difficult to get a word out of him.

  “It’s just a phase he’s going through,” said Vicky, embarrassed.

  “Sure! I understand,” I said, but I had expected an effusive welcome and couldn’t help feeling disappointed. “How’s Sam?”

  “Oh, Sam’s fine! He said he was so sorry not to be here to meet you, but he had this very important meeting …”

  “Well, of course business must come first!” I said, but I didn’t like Sam sidestepping the chore of meeting me.

  My aides had arranged for two limousines to transport us to London, but I traveled in the inevitable Keller Mercedes-Benz with Vicky. San used their other car, a Daimler, to impress his English clients in the City.

  I took a cautious look at England from behind the stout glass windows of the Mercedes, and as we left Southampton and rode smoothly deep into the Hampshire countryside, I felt that well-remembered tension rise within me to set my nerves on edge. The best way I can describe it is to say that it felt like a kind of nakedness—the nakedness of an unarmed soldier advancing toward heavy artillery lined up on some appalling battlefield. I looked at the pretty fields and the quaint little villages and felt not only foreign but stripped of the identity which nurtured me in New York. In New York I was someone special: Cornelius Van Zale, the well-known banker and philanthropist. But here I was no one, just an exile in a land as alien to me as the far side of the moon.

  I was back in my teens again suddenly, overwhelmed by feelings of inferiority, terrified that people would laugh at me, dreading their casual contempt. The anger returned too, the anger I could remember so clearly from my youth. The same voice in my head said: No man laughs at me and gets away with it. And as we passed through a little town, I looked out of the window at the British and thought: I’ll show them.

  “Isn’t England lovely?” said Vicky with a sigh. “Isn’t it nice to think most of our ancestors came from here?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I couldn’t imagine my ancestors being at home in any country except America. I couldn’t even imagine my ancestors. The only ancestor I’ve ever been interested in was my father, and I only got interested in him because I was going through such hell in the present that for once the past seemed to have something to offer. I was wrong. There was nothing there. My father might have been tenacious enough to build a small homestead into a large prosperous rural fiefdom; he might have been bold enough to marry out of his social background, and tough enough to withstand the Van Zale family’s disapproval; he might well have been the kind of guy I could have got along with. But what use was that to me, since he had died when I was four and I now had no way of communicating with him? Before the war I had bought the farm he had owned in the hope that it would somehow bring me closer to his memory, but I had been wasting my money and my time. The past is dead. It’s wound up and plowed under, and to believe anything else is self-indulgent fantasy.

  “Do you truly like England, Vicky?”

  “Oh, yes, Daddy! Everything’s so civilized, and I just love all the pageantry and the tradition and the …”

  I somehow kept my mouth shut, but I felt unutterably depressed. I had hoped Vicky would already be restless in her new environment, but evidently I had hoped for too much too soon.

  My depression deepened when we reached London. There’s something nightmarish about that city, those gray streets sprawling endlessly in all directions, those huge haughty buildings, those fanatically well-tended parks, those hostile inhabitants talking English with a whole range of unintelligible accents. London’s like some elaborate maze designed for a Minotaur whose desire for formality borders on obsession. I thought of New York, of cozy bunched-up Manhattan teeming with color and vitality, chockablock with gleaming skyscrapers and glimpses of glittering water, crammed with vistas ravishing in their geometrical simplicity, and by the time we arrived at the Savoy Hotel I was so homesick that I could hardly drag myself out of the car.

  I pulled myself together. It was now important that I make a good impression, since in the eyes of the staff of the Savoy I was just another American tourist who might or might not know how to behave in public. I felt thankful that I was traveling in a convoy of two Rolls-Royces and a Mercedes-Benz together with five servants, a beautiful wife, and a mountain of the best-quality leather luggage. The English could plainly see I was no carpetbagger from California or, worse still, some jumped-up Texas cattle baron in a ten-gallon hat. I checked my black suit, dusted my cuffs, concealed my nervousness behind my most impassive expression, and prepared to represent my country with as much dignity as possible.

  My aides had been working hard. On reaching the lobby I was welcomed effusively and ushered upstairs to a gargantuan suite overlooking the river. There were flowers everywhere. A complimentary magnum of champagne stood in a silver ice bucket. I was introduced to the floor waiter, who promised to do everything necessary to ensure my gastronomic comfort.

  “Thanks very much,” I said, keeping my face expressionless so that they would all think I was an old hand at touring the grand hotels of Europe, and nodded to my aide to start distributing tips.

  By this time I was feeling better. The Savoy had acknowledged that I was a visitor of consequence, and I began to feel that my New York identity might possibly be within my reach again. I saw the phone and picked up the receiver. That made me feel better too, and as I started to dial I knew that although my power had been temporarily switched off, like an electric current, it was now starting to flow smoothly again.

  “I’ll leave you to get settled in,” said Vicky after I had spoken to Sam and replaced the receiver, “but do come on over as soon as you can, won’t you? Eric can’t wait to show you his nursery!”

  I made a couple more calls to business acquaintances in order to jack up the voltage of my electric current, and afterward felt so completely recovered that I was reluctant to leave the phone.

  “Get that last letter I had from my sister,” I said to my aide, on an impulse.

  The aide came running, the letter in his hands.

  “Who are you calling now, Cornelius?” called Alicia from one of the bedrooms.

  “I promised Emily I’d call those English stepchildren of hers. I may as well get it over so that I can enjoy the rest of the trip.” I found the Cambridge telephone number and told the aide to start making the call.

  Alicia was in the doorway. “I guess we ought to see them while we’re here.”

  “No, why the hell should we? They haven’t been in touch with us for years. I didn’t like to complain to Emily, who always makes out she’s so fond of them, but I was kind of disgusted by their lack of gratitude.”

  “You should have told Emily. She may enjoy playing the long-suffering martyr who dotes on her husband’s children by another woman, but I don’t see why you should have to follow in her footsteps.”

  “It’s bad enough Emily and I never seeing eye to eye with each other about her canonization of Steve’s memory. I couldn’t make matters worse by arguing with her over those kids as well.”

  “The number’s ringing, sir,” said my aide. Then: “Hello? Mr. Cornelius Van Zale is calling Miss Elfrida Sullivan—is she there, please? Thank you, will you hold the line?” He passed me the receiver.

  I assumed a neutral voice. “Elfrida?”

  “Yes.” The monosyllable was bleak and uncompromising.

  “Hi, how are you,” I said, still maintaining my neutrality, but with increasing difficulty. “I’m vacationing in London, and Emily asked me to give you a call. How are Edred and George?”

  “Well.”

  “Good. Any special news that I can relay to Emily?”

  “N
one.”

  “I suddenly realized I was in the middle of a highly unpleasant interview.

  “Seen anything of Vicky lately?” I said. “She didn’t mention you, but I assume you’ve been in touch.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Any special reason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “You killed my father,” said Elfrida Sullivan, and hung up.

  II

  Of course I’d done nothing of the kind. Steve Sullivan’s death was an accident. When I gave the final order to Sam in 1939, I didn’t say: “Kill him.” I just said … Well, my exact words didn’t matter. Steve had been persecuting me for years, and I had had no choice but to ensure he emerged from our struggles with his career in ruins. It wasn’t my fault if he had found he couldn’t live with himself after Sam and I had proved to the world he was an unstable drunk who had been hospitalized in one of London’s best-known nursing homes for alcoholics.

  “Fix him,” I had said to Sam. “And I mean fix him.”

  I remembered Sam’s shaken voice later on the transatlantic phone. “When Steve saw that photograph and knew he was finished, he drank a bottle of Scotch and set off in his car to confront me. …”

  But there was no one now alive who knew exactly what had happened to Steve in 1939, no one except Sam and myself—and, apparently, Elfrida Sullivan.

  The full implications of this appalling fact suddenly streamed through my mind. How did Elfrida know? How long had she known? And who could possibly have told her?

  “How was Elfrida?” I heard Alicia call from the bedroom.

  “Fine.” I was in such a state of shock that I could hardly speak. Making a great effort, I sat down and started to arrange the known facts into some kind of coherent order.

  It was possible that after Steve’s death his wife, Dinah, had broadcast the unsavory facts to all and sundry, but all the evidence suggested she had told very few people. If she had made a fuss, I would have heard about it, but I had heard nothing and had concluded that she had been too upset to magnify her bereavement by making unpleasant public scenes. Perhaps her grief had been such that she had had difficulty discussing Steve’s death even with those closest to her, but that remained mere speculation; the one fact I did know was that after her own death at Dunkirk in 1940 only two people appeared to know the whole story. One was Alan Slade, the product of her famous liaison with Paul Van Zale back in the twenties, and the other was Tony Sullivan, Scott’s younger brother and Steve’s second son.

  I was in England at the time and met them both in London. Emily had cabled that she was willing to look after Steve and Dinah’s three young children, and because Alan and Tony themselves were hardly more than schoolboys who were going to find it difficult to care properly for their young half-sister and half-brothers, it was obviously best for them to accept Emily’s offer. Alan was reluctant. He disliked the idea of the children going off with me to America. However, Tony, who like Scott had been brought up by Emily after his mother’s death, had convinced him of Emily’s unrivaled talent as a stepmother.

  Despite our final agreement, it had been a hostile interview, and even after the agreement had been reached, Tony had still wanted to tell the children that I had been responsible for their father’s death. A most unpleasant scene then ensued, which was only terminated when I pointed out sensibly that the children would hardly consent to go off to America with me if they thought I was a murderer, and that it would be far better to leave the subject of their father’s death well alone. Tony (in many ways a stupid boy) continued to insist mulishly that at ten years of age Edred and Elfrida were old enough to hear the truth, but Alan (who was undoubtedly intelligent) saw the logic of my statement, and in the end they agreed to keep quiet for the time being.

  Both Alan and Tony were killed in 1944, and as far as I knew, they died without having breathed a word against me to either Edred or Elfrida or George. The children, brought up by Emily with her usual skill, remained civil to me for the duration of their stay in America, and even after they returned to England they were willing enough to spend their next two summer vacations at my Bar Harbor summer home. But on the twins’ eighteenth birthday in January 1948 they returned the check I had sent them as a present, and since then I had received no communication from them. At the time, I had been puzzled by this rudeness, but frankly I had always found the children difficult, and anyway, eighteen is an age at which many adolescents behave eccentrically. The thought that they might have uncovered the truth about their father’s death did cross my mind, but I dismissed the idea because I was sure no one could have told them. It was impossible.

  Yet it had happened.

  I roused myself sufficiently to summon my aide. “Get me my sister in Velletria, Ohio.”

  It took some time to reach Emily by phone, but at last the receiver was put in my hand.

  “Cornelius? Darling, why are you calling? Is something wrong?”

  “Emily, just what did you tell the English Sullivans after the war about my quarrels with Steve?”

  “Your quarrels with … Why, nothing! I’ve never told them anything that wasn’t common knowledge—I just said you two had disagreements which led to Steve leaving Van Zale’s and setting up a new business in London. Cornelius, what is all this? You sound very upset. What’s happened?”

  “Elfrida’s just accused me of murdering her father.”

  There was an absolute silence.

  “Of course it’s a slander,” I said, “and I’m trying to find out who’s at the bottom of it. Elfrida seems to have formed this opinion at the time of her eighteenth birthday, but by January 1948 there would have been no one left alive who might have felt inclined to give her such a perverted version of the facts. Unless, of course, you yourself drew some unfortunate conclusions about the past and then, without telling me, wrote to the twins on their eighteenth birthday—”

  “I did no such thing!”

  Before my bewilderment intensified, I had a moment of profound relief.

  “I’ll write to Elfrida,” Emily was saying strongly. “I’m very distressed. Hatred is so self-destructive. She must be very unhappy.”

  This was typical of Emily. As usual she had missed the whole point and got bogged down in the moral angle. I wasn’t concerned with the consequences of hatred. I wasn’t even concerned about being hated by Steve Sullivan’s three youngest children. What did concern me was that Steve had been Scott’s father as well as theirs. If someone had given Elfrida a brand-new view of the past, what was to stop her passing it on to her half-brother in New York? And what was to stop Scott believing her and turning against me? Of course, I had brought Scott up with my view of the past, but supposing he were to find out … I cut off all thought of what I didn’t want Scott to find out, and wiped the sweat from my forehead. “Emily, you don’t understand. Listen, Emily—”

  “I’ll do my best, I promise you, to persuade Elfrida to forgive you. You might have done wrong in the past, but you’ve done your best to make amends, and besides, it’s not for us to pass judgment on our fellowmen. That must be left to God.”

  I was so horrified that I couldn’t even hang up and cut myself off from all this theological drivel. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Emily, unfazed, started quoting the Bible. “ ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged—’ ”

  “No, no, not that! What did you mean about the so-called wrong I’ve done in the past? For Christ’s sake, has someone turned you against me too? I did no wrong, Emily! Steve and I had a rough fight, I admit it, but he initiated it. I only acted in self-defense.”

  The transatlantic connection hummed emptily between us.

  “Emily!”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Look, what’s been going on? Who’s been talking to you? Who’s been slandering me? Who—?”

  “If you’re so innocent, why are you working yourself into such a panic?”

  “I’m not in a panic! I’m just �
�� well, to tell the truth, I’m concerned about Scott. I don’t want him bothered by Elfrida’s hysterical accusations. You know how fond I am of him, and how fond he is of me. This could be very embarrassing to us both.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about Scott,” said Emily, and as if she felt this statement needed an explanation, she added after a slight pause, “Your relationship with Scott shows you at your very best, Cornelius. I’m proud of the way you took charge of him when he was such a disturbed, difficult boy of fourteen and brought him up with such complete success. You can be proud, too. That episode does you nothing but credit.”

  Shame gripped me so unexpectedly and so violently that I was speechless. I thought: That’s the way things ought to have been. But was that the way things really were? And then I thought with a terrible, unbearable clarity: What an appalling mess I’ve made of my personal life. Christ, I’ve been so unhappy. Christ, I am so unhappy.

  I blocked that thought out, pulled the shutters down over such unspeakable consciousness, switched on the lights of my self-protective reflexes, and prepared to settle down once more in the steel-lined cell I had built for myself so carefully over the years.

  “Yes, I am proud of the way I brought up Scott,” I said. “To be frank, I’m proud of my whole past. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. God deals out the cards of life, and you play the hand as best you can, that’s all. It’s not my fault if I occasionally found myself with a lousy hand.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Emily. She cleared her throat. “Give my love to Sam and Vicky, won’t you? And the little boys too, of course! Tell Vicky I can’t wait to see some pictures of Paul! I hope there wasn’t too much disappointment that he wasn’t a girl.”