Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  To my despair I found she was still enamored of Europe. To my horror I found she was now studying German in earnest. And to my rage I found Sam was starting to push me to open a German office.

  “Two years in London,” I said to him. “That was the agreement.”

  “Yes, and next year is 1955 and the London office will be two years old. If we don’t start planning for the German office now, it’ll be 1956 before I get to Germany.”

  That would give Vicky another year to return to her senses and become prostrated by homesickness for America.

  “You’ve waited so long to get to Germany,” I said to Sam. “What’s one more year?”

  “Look, Neil—”

  “I refuse to be rushed on this. I sanction the German office in principle, but I don’t want to tackle the expansion into Europe before we’re ready for it. Aren’t I allowed to be prudent and sensible when your beloved Germany’s at stake?”

  He just looked at me. If looks could kill, I would have suffered an immediate cardiac arrest, but I went right on smiling sympathetically and even offered him my hand to shake. I saw he was tempted to quit there and then, but of course he didn’t. It was worth waiting out the extra year and remaining under the lucrative Van Zale umbrella with a happy, untroubled Vicky at his side. Sam was playing for high stakes, and he wasn’t about to abandon them unless I flatly refused to send him to Germany.

  He somehow managed to shake hands with me, and we parted friends in an atmosphere thick with hostility.

  After such an exhausting interview, it was almost a relief to leave New York for the wedding in Velletria, the Cincinnati suburb where I had eked out my life amidst stupefying boredom from the age of five till the age of eighteen. I am by nature unfitted for life in a prosperous Midwestern suburb which numerous decent commendable citizens find delightful. Not even God had performed a greater service when he had rescued the children of Israel from Egypt than Paul Van Zale had performed when he had rescued me from Velletria, Ohio, and drawn me east to New York.

  The wedding took place at the Episcopal church where I had endured countless dreary sermons throughout my childhood, and Emily held the reception at the country club. It was a successful wedding even though Lori wore a skintight dress which reminded me of a mermaid. I wondered if she could possibly be a virgin but thought it most unlikely. Emily cried throughout the service, probably with relief. After I had given the bride away I gazed vaguely at the stained-glass windows and wondered what my mother would have thought of it all. My mother had been a forceful woman who had ruled her second husband, if not her first, with formidable domestic efficiency. I had had repeated struggles to prevent her from smothering me, and since my will had been stronger than her, I had won, but nevertheless I had been fond of my mother and had felt genuinely bereaved by her death. Bossy and opinionated though she was, she had loved me and done her best for me, and one can’t expect more of a mother than that. In fact, so sentimental did I feel that day about my mother that I jumped at the opportunity to sit up late with Emily that night and reminisce nostalgically about our shared past.

  As I reminded myself later, there’s no bigger mistake one can make than to give way rashly to sentimental impulses.

  “Oh, it was such a lovely wedding!” said Emily, dabbing away with her handkerchief again.

  “Lori looked very pretty,” I said generously, putting my arm around her and giving her a squeeze. I really was in a dangerously sentimental mood.

  “Dear Steve would have been so proud!” whispered Emily.

  “He’d probably have been in a wheelchair. How old would he have been by this time? Seventy?”

  “Sixty-seven,” said Emily coldly. “How small-minded you are sometimes, Cornelius, how utterly lacking in generosity of spirit. I’d have thought that tonight of all nights—just for once—you could have found it in your heart to be charitable toward Steve.”

  “But I didn’t say anything against him! I just made a comment about his age!”

  “You implied a debilitated senility. Cornelius, for years and years I’ve put up with your snide remarks, your acid comments, your—”

  “Now, wait a minute! You can hardly expect me to follow your example and canonize Steve’s memory!”

  “I haven’t canonized Steve’s memory. I should never have married him, and he made me very unhappy, but at least I have my two wonderful girls—and at least I have the Christian decency to remember his good points as well as his bad points, and to forgive him for all the wrong he did! However, I’ve long ago given up expecting you to show any Christian spirit. Paul wiped all that out when he ruined you with his wealth. Sometimes I feel glad poor Mama died when she did. I consider it a mercy that, unlike me, she was spared all knowledge of your later activities.”

  “Oh, Christ, Emily, what garbage you talk! Just because Tony Sullivan writes one melodramatic letter—”

  “Who told you about Tony’s letter?”

  “Elfrida showed it to me when I was in London last August. I was horrified and appalled. Why have you never confronted me with it? Why have you brooded over it in secret all these years? Don’t you think you had a moral duty to hear my side of the story before you silently sat in judgment on me and decided I was every bit as bad as Tony said I was? You knew Tony hated me. Why you should automatically accept the word of a biased, hotheaded young man without even deigning to hear the word of your own brother, I have no idea, but all I can say is I feel very hurt, I wasn’t going to mention the subject, but since you’ve brought it up …”

  “It was you who mentioned Tony’s name—no doubt out of guilt. I always thought it was a disgrace the way you treated that boy. You hardly ever spoke to him—it was always Scott this, Scott that, Scott, Scott, Scott! I guess it was because Tony looked like Steve, while Scott had inherited Caroline’s looks—Scott was the only one you could look at without feeling overcome with remorse!”

  “That’s not true. Listen—”

  “No, you listen to me! It’s true I’ve held my tongue for years and years, and yes, maybe that was the wrong thing to do—maybe I should have spoken up long ago to save you from yourself!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Give up that bank, Cornelius. It’s the root of all your present problems and past disasters. Give it up and devote yourself to your Fine Arts Foundation and your Educational Trust. That would be worthwhile and meaningful.”

  “Banking’s worthwhile and meaningful! And why in God’s name should you think the foundation and the trust offer the equivalent of a religious order to which I can retreat in order to lead a pure, unsullied business life? Jesus, you should come to some of the board meetings and see all those millionaires jockeying for position—that would disillusion you pretty damned quickly!”

  “I see that you’re deliberately choosing to misunderstand me. Let me try again. Cornelius, now that you’re middle-aged—”

  “Thanks, but I consider I’m still very much in my prime!”

  “—you should reassess your life and question your values. Do you ever pause to question your values, Cornelius? Or has your wealth put you so out of touch with reality that you’re no longer capable of getting your priorities right?”

  “You’re the one who seems to be out of touch with reality here! The trouble with you, Emily, is that you live such a cloistered life here in this godforsaken dump that you’ve no idea what goes on in the world. Why don’t you remarry or take a lover or lose twenty pounds or dye the gray out of your hair or go on a cruise or do something interesting for a change? All these endless good works and a single bed at night are enough to drive any sane woman off the rails!”

  “Well, of course,” said Emily, rising to her feet to terminate the interview, “I always knew you were obsessed with sex.”

  “And I always knew,” I shouted, rising to face her, “that you’re sublimating your sex drive by acting like a religious crank!”

  Like so many violent quarrels, the element of the absurd mingling with
the shafts of rage gave an additional savage twist to the explosion. I think Emily and I both realized this, and for one long moment we stood stock-still as if we were trying to make up our minds whether to embrace with laughter or part estranged. But there was no reconciliation. Emily just said coldly, “Poor Mama must be turning in her grave to hear us quarrel so disgracefully. I apologize for attempting to speak to you so frankly, and I hope you’ll forgive me when I explain that I acted only out of love and concern. Whatever you do, you’re still my brother, and I’ll never speak one word against you to anyone, but don’t think my loyalty represents a condonation either of your opinions or of your way of life. Now, we’ll set this scene behind us, if you please, and never refer to it again.”

  She swept out of the room. I laughed to try to convince myself I hadn’t been outfaced, but I knew I had. Later I went to bed and lay awake for a long time in the dark, but before I slept I had made up my mind what to do, and the next morning I said humbly to Emily, “Say, I’m real sorry about last night. You know how fond of you I am and how much you mean to me. I’d like to take back all those stupid things I said.”

  “The subject is closed,” said Emily, terminating the conversation with a ruthlessness which shattered me. “Apologize if you wish, of course, but I myself have nothing else to say.”

  I saw the wintry look in her gray eyes and knew I’d lost her. But perhaps in fact I’d lost her long ago when I had encouraged her to marry Steve Sullivan so that I could gain some temporary security for myself at the bank.

  “Emily …”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Nothing—it doesn’t matter,” I said, sick at heart, and abruptly turned away.

  II

  Ten months after Andrew and Lori’s wedding Vicky gave birth to a daughter, but this time not even my desire to see my family could coax me aboard a ship to Europe. The baby was named Samantha. I made no comment on this execrable name but merely sent the required christening present from Tiffany’s. However, the thought of a small granddaughter just like Vicky attracted me, and I had just written to suggest that the Kellers should visit us at Bar Harbor in August when my attention was diverted by a crisis which blew up over Sebastian.

  I did not dislike Sebastian, but he was very, very difficult. My task as a stepfather would have been easier if he had resembled Alicia, but I always found it hard to believe she could have produced such a son. However, since he was her son, I had been determined to establish a good relationship with him, and logically this should have been easy to achieve; Sebastian had an excellent academic record, he had never wavered from his early decision to be a banker, and he had been working hard at Van Zale’s since he had finished his army service under the draft (I had secretly used my influence to keep him out of Korea).

  During his childhood he had required little paternal discipline. Andrew had always been bouncing in and out of scrapes, but Sebastian, prowling around by himself, had needed only an occasional reprimand to keep him on the rails. It was true I often wanted to hit him, but that was because he exasperated me and not because I found his behavior insulting.

  The trouble with Sebastian, on paper the ideal stepson, was that he was totally charmless. Reserved and morose, he sat like a great hulk at the dining table and exuded a miasma worthy of any fabled death’s-head at a feast. I wanted to like him, but my efforts never seemed to get us anywhere. His desperately unattractive personality also made me worry about his future at the bank. There’s more to being a banker than working out an issue with financial flair and parceling it out to the public. A banker must take his clients to lunch and inquire tenderly after their families as well as their credit, and I had begun to doubt that Sebastian would ever be capable of more than a formal greeting, a few apelike grunts, and endless awkward silences.

  He was a continuous source of anxiety to me. The situation was complicated by the fact that Alicia idolized her son, and I lived in dread that if I somehow alienated him irrevocably I would also alienate her. The rockiest days of our marriage had not been when I had begun my affair with Teresa; the nearest we had ever come to divorce was that time in 1945 when we had quarreled over Sebastian.

  To put the whole sordid matter in the smallest possible nutshell, I can only say that he had indecently exposed himself to Vicky during one of our family summers at Bar Harbor. By a superhuman effort I had sufficiently controlled my rage and revulsion to send him to his Foxworth relations without laying a finger on him, but Alicia and I had quarreled almost fatally, and for months afterward I had been afraid of coming home from work in case she’d walked out on me. But she had stayed, and gradually by another superhuman effort I had taught myself to look back at the incident with detachment. Many adolescent boys find their new sexuality hard to handle, and Vicky was an exceptionally attractive young girl. The two of them were unrelated by blood. They had never even lived beneath the same roof until both were approaching puberty, and adolescence must have added to the awkwardness of a situation already rendered tense by adult squabbles over custody. Under the circumstances, I had decided I should feel sorry for Sebastian. I had to feel sorry for him anyway, because it was in my best interest to be sympathetic, and I was, as I reminded myself over and over again, always mindful of my best interests in adverse circumstances; I was essentially a pragmatic man.

  After Sebastian had been discharged from the army, he lived at home for a time, but shortly after the wedding in Velletria he moved into a gloomy apartment in Murray Hill. When we were grudgingly invited to visit him, we found black carpet on the floor, black fabric on the chairs, and a black coffee table in front of a black leather couch. Two prints by Hieronymus Bosch adorned the walls, and some horror by Dali (painted before he turned soft and started painting Madonnas) defaced a corner of the hall. God knows what was kept in the bedroom.

  I spent anxious moments wondering if these tastes indicated some form of sexual perversion, but although I checked Freud’s entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Freud’s views seemed such garbage that I didn’t bother to read to the end of the summary. No wonder Kevin had felt that Freud had never reached Staten Island, Brooklyn, or Queens in his journey through the psychological equivalent of the street directories of the five boroughs! Personally I thought Kevin was being generous in suggesting Freud had even made it through Manhattan and the Bronx. My knowledge of Freud’s theories had previously been confined to the intriguing hearsay guaranteed to stimulate a flagging cocktail party, but I saw now how wise I had been to keep my knowledge limited. All that talk about the id, the libido, and phallic symbols was enough to make any sane man look askance at himself.

  “Why do you like black so much?” I asked Sebastian in curiosity after Freud had failed to provide me with an answer, but Sebastian just said, poker-faced, “Because it’s dark.”

  I gave up, telling myself I had done all a father could to raise a normal well-adjusted son, and if Sebastian was odd, it could hardly be my fault. Having myself lacked even the most basic paternal advice from my own stepfather, I had made very sure my stepsons had gone out into the world knowing one end of a condom from the other and aware that VD wasn’t a reference to some Allied victory in World War II.

  When the crisis blew up over Sebastian, it was the spring of 1955. The weather was beautiful, the stock market was booming, and I had just bought a new milk-white Cadillac with pale blue upholstery. In fact, I was in such good spirits that I even stopped after work to buy a bottle of champagne for Teresa, but when I arrived at the Dakota I found her in a sour mood. Her painting was going through a bad patch. I had successfully steered her away from postimpressionism, but now she had been seduced by the current craze for the American abstract, and the malign influence of Jackson Pollock was leering at me from every canvas. I had told her politely that I thought she should return to her earlier pristine style. She told me she wanted more from life than the reputation of being a second Grandma Moses, and why the hell couldn’t I mind my own business. Our sexual relationship had beco
me unpleasantly mechanical. Once I had even asked her if she wanted to end the affair, but she had said “No, thank you” very politely and on my next visit had cooked me a magnificent steak with béarnaise sauce. Later she had asked me if I myself wanted to end the affair, and I had said “No, thank you” equally politely and had given her a gold bracelet from Cartier’s. I had hoped that this would mean we could be more relaxed with each other, but when I arrived at the Dakota that evening I was told that menstruation was on, sex was off, and the new picture was a disaster. She was right. It was, and declining her halfhearted offer of a hamburger, I left the champagne in the refrigerator and set off home in my Cadillac.

  As I entered the hall, the first person I saw was Jake Reischman.

  “Neil!” he exclaimed at once. “Thank God you’re here! I was on my way over to the Dakota to get you. Does Teresa usually leave the phone off the hook at this hour?”

  I was unsurprised by these references to Teresa; he met her every time I exhibited her work and had known for years that I kept her at the Dakota. But I was confused by his presence.

  “What are you doing here?” I said stupidly.

  “Alicia called me in a panic. She tried to call you, but you’d left the office, and when you didn’t come home she turned to me as one of the old Bar Harbor Brotherhood, someone she could rely on in a crisis—ah, here she is! Yes, it’s all right, Alicia, he’s here.” He took me by the arm and propelled me into the library. “Sit down and I’ll fix you a drink. Alicia, would you like me to tell Neil what the police said? You should go and lie down.”

  Alicia looked like death. “I couldn’t, Jake,” she said, “but do please stay and explain to Cornelius.” She sat down stiffly on a hard chair near the door.

  Jake had already moved to the liquor cabinet. “Scotch, Neil?”

  “Okay. But what the hell—”