Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Great. And bring us a bottle of champagne too, would you? I just got engaged.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Foxworth!”

  “Thanks.” He drank half his Tom Collins and resumed munching his eggs Benedict. “Say, isn’t it about time you two followed Carraway’s lead instead of cross-questioning me about my dating habits?”

  “Cornelius,” whispered Alicia, “did you truly tell him …?”

  “I never, never told him to—”

  “Oh yes you did!” said Sebastian fiercely.

  I shot to my feet but Alicia grabbed my arm and said rapidly before I could speak, “That’s enough, Sebastian. Don’t talk to your stepfather like that—and stop eating, sit up straight, and look at me when I talk to you!”

  Sebastian clenched his fork, straightened his back, and stared at some point past her left shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mother, but—”

  “And don’t interrupt!” I had never before seen Alicia so angry with him. “How dare you behave like this—as if we hadn’t already had enough of your sordid escapades! I’ve never been so ashamed of you in all my life! You’ve taken the daughter of one of Cornelius’ oldest friends and treated her exactly as if she were no better than some cheap prostitute!”

  “But he—”

  “And don’t you dare say Cornelius advised you to do so!”

  “Pardon me, Mother, but he told me to have sex with the girl I intended to marry, and frankly, I think that’s good advice. I wouldn’t dream of marrying a girl I hadn’t slept with. I’m sorry if you find that offensive, but—”

  “You can’t possibly want to marry Elsa!”

  “Oh yes I do!” said Sebastian, mouth turning down stubbornly at the corners.

  I managed to get a word in. “Alicia, I’m afraid Sebastian’s trying to pay me back for a very unpleasant conversation we had after the incident with the police.”

  “You couldn’t be wider of the mark,” said Sebastian. “I thought your advice was pretty good. In fact, I was just thinking I’d be stupid not to follow it when I met Elsa midtown one day outside Korvette’s. Well, I said hi and she said hi and suddenly I thought: Maybe she’ll do, so we went into the nearest coffee shop and had a couple of malteds. She was shy, so we didn’t talk much. I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she said no, she guessed men thought she was too fat. I thought she was cute. I like fat girls. Anyway, when we got talking, I found she was kind of interesting. She’s studying design at art school, and later, when she showed me some of her designs, I thought they were great—surreal. She gave me one to hang up in my apartment. Then we talked about Dali’s pictures and went to the Museum of Modern Art. Why have you never bought any of Dali’s work, Cornelius? I wish I could paint like Dali or design patterns like Elsa. Anyway, on our next date I said, ‘Now I’ll show you something truly surreal,’ so we drove out along Route 22 and saw a real dead-beat film about a werewolf. It was fun. Then a couple of weeks later—it was after we’d checked into the motel for the first time—”

  “Cornelius,” said Alicia, “we don’t have to listen to any more of this, do we?”

  “—we found a Coke machine looking just like a surreal robot, and oh boy, we sure laughed! Anyway, we got our Coke and went to bed and it was very nice, and afterward we switched on the TV and watched a rerun of I Love Lucy—and boy, did we laugh again! It was one of the funniest I Love Lucy’s I’ve ever seen—maybe you saw it? It was the one where Ricky says to Lucy—”

  The terrace doors opened as Carraway, flanked by two footmen, made a grand entrance with the champagne. “—and then Lucy says to Ricky—”

  I watched, riveted to my chair, while Carraway opened the bottle. The entire scene was quite beyond my control.

  “—and then Fred and Ethel get in on the act—”

  The servants finally managed to tear themselves away.

  “Oh well, here’s to Elsa and me!” said Sebastian, diverted at last by the champagne, and raised his glass to his lips.

  Neither Alicia nor I attempted to drink.

  “Sebastian,” said Alicia, surprising me again by taking the lead in the conversation, “I’m sorry … I do understand you’ve had a pleasant time with Elsa, but I can’t possibly approve of you marrying a plain fat Jewish girl with no poise or charm when you could do so much better for yourself.”

  “And my God, Sebastian,” I added with a shudder as I hastened to give her support, “if Jake ever finds out you’ve been sleeping with his daughter, he’ll not only break you in two, he’ll probably break me in two as well!”

  “No, he won’t!” said Sebastian, dark eyes suddenly hard and bitter. “Why shouldn’t I sleep with his daughter if he runs around with your wife?”

  Nothing happened. It was quiet. Then a bird hopped lightly across the balustrade, trilled sweetly, and flew away into the shrubbery. Sweat started to trickle down my back.

  Alicia’s face was like carved ivory, smooth, inscrutable, exquisite. “You will leave this table, please, Sebastian,” she said without raising her voice. “I can see exactly why you wanted to hurt me by inventing such a wicked lie, but perhaps when you’re calm enough to consider my reasons for disapproving of your plans, you’ll see fit to apologize. Now, please go.”

  Sebastian drained his glass, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and made off with it in the direction of the summerhouse.

  “Alicia,” said my voice, “are you …?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Cornelius,” she said. “Can you imagine me ever having an affair with a Jew?”

  I couldn’t. I wiped the sweat off my forehead. “But what the hell gave Sebastian such an idea?” I said, puzzled.

  “God only knows! No, wait—it must have been that time … Oh, but how stupid! Jake came here once when Sebastian was still living at home, Cornelius—it must have been shortly after Sebastian had left the service. You’d gone away somewhere—Boston, was it? I don’t recall. However, Jake thought you were due to leave the following morning, and so he stopped by after work to see you about some matter connected with the Fine Arts Foundation—don’t you remember? I told you all about it afterward.”

  “Yes, I think I do remember. But why should Sebastian …?”

  “Naturally I invited Jake to have a drink, and Sebastian discovered us in the Gold Room while Jake was telling me some long story about one of his daughters. If Sebastian thought that scene was an illicit rendezvous, he must have been out of his mind, but I’m sure the only reason he made that insane remark was that he was livid that I don’t want him to marry that huge flabby girl who’s as plain as a pumpkin and never has a word to say for herself. Oh, God, Cornelius, what on earth are we going to do?”

  Carraway, who was certainly working overtime that Sunday, reopened the French doors.

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Reischman—”

  The Reischmans streamed past, setting him aside with the efficiency of Old Money accustomed to treating servants like pieces of furniture.

  “Good afternoon, Neil,” said Jake, pale with rage. “Good afternoon, Alicia. Please excuse us for interrupting your meal.”

  We rose as one to our feet.

  “Good afternoon, Jake. Good afternoon, Amy,” I said.

  “Good afternoon, Amy and Jake,” said Alicia. “Good afternoon, Cornelius and Alicia,” said Amy.

  “Please sit down,” I said politely. “May I offer you a drink?”

  “Thank you, no. We will, however, sit down. Sit down, Amy.”

  Amy, a large overdressed woman with graying hair locked up in the tightest of permanents, sat down obediently on the chair which Sebastian had abandoned, while I pulled up a fourth chair for Jake. As I sat down, I managed to press Alicia’s foot under the table and point to my chest to indicate she should leave the talking to me. Despite the Reischmans’ obvious wrath, I had a shrewd suspicion they knew less than we did; Elsa would surely have cut her own throat rather than confess to her parents that she had lost her virginity in a New Jersey motel
before a gala performance of I Love Lucy.

  “I presume you have been informed, as we have just been informed,” said Jake, “that your son has been seeing our daughter on the sly and making what can only be described as clandestine assignations?”

  “You mean he’s been dating her,” I said.

  “He never asked our permission!”

  “Jake, this is 1955. Which century are you living in?”

  “Your son persuaded our daughter to concoct some outlandish alibi with her sister so that we wouldn’t discover he was taking her to a series of New Jersey drive-ins!”

  “Jake, I’m not responsible for your daughters. You are. And what’s so wrong with a drive-in movie?”

  “Such vulgarity!” whispered Amy with a shudder. “So immoral!”

  “Be quiet, please, Amy. I’m sure we’re all aware of what goes on at drive-in movies. Just why Sebastian couldn’t give my daughter a respectable night out, I don’t know. Wasn’t my girl good enough to be properly entertained? The whole situation would be different if he had taken her openly to Carnegie Hall or the Met, but to sneak off with her to a New Jersey drive-in is, I consider, nothing short of an insult to my daughter’s background, family, upbringing—”

  “Oh, forget it, Jake!” I said good-humoredly. “Try to remember what it was like to be young! I know it sounds crazy to us to go to a drive-in movie in New Jersey, but is it really so different from that time in 1928 when you and I and our favorite girls snuck off to ogle Mae West in Pleasure Man before the police closed the show down?”

  “Did you really, Jacob?” said Amy with interest.

  “Be quiet, please, Amy. Now, listen to me, Neil. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I have an eighteen-year-old daughter, and she’s going to be a virgin when she marries, and I’m not letting her run around the New Jersey drive-ins with a man who, I think you’ll concede, is very far from inexperienced.”

  “I can’t think why you’re saying all this to me,” I said. “Sebastian’s over twenty-one and his own master. Why don’t you say it all to him?”

  “You know very well why. Because the four of us have got to unite against this crazy idea that Sebastian and Elsa should marry after a two-month courtship punctuated by visits to drive-in movies.”

  There was a pause while the four of us sagged in our chairs with relief that we were to remain friends despite such adverse circumstances.

  “Naturally,” resumed Jake, “I’m opposed, as no doubt you are too, to the principle of marrying out of one’s religion and culture. Marriage is difficult enough at the best of times. To begin marriage with such a handicap can only be sheer folly. I speak, of course, without cultural or religious prejudice. I’m just stating the facts.”

  I listened with half my mind to this predictable tirade, but with the other half I was remembering how happy I had been as a young man with Alicia. I recalled an occasion long ago in a California hotel when she and I had laughed together over a bag of peanuts; there had been no television in those days, but we had lain on the decadent circular bed, I with my crossword puzzle, she with her confession magazine, and life had been good and warm and happy. Nostalgia overwhelmed me. I thought of Sebastian and Elsa ingenuously enjoying television together, and for the first time in my life I found myself wholly in sympathy with my stepson. Maybe I hadn’t found him easy to understand, maybe I had made mistakes, but now at last I saw I was in a position to make amends for my shortcomings.

  I said, “Jake, just stop for a moment and listen to yourself. I’m not going to accuse you of racial prejudice, but just think back over what you’ve said and see if you can’t revise it. I don’t like this attempt to discriminate against my son.”

  “I wasn’t discriminating against your son!”

  “Oh? Are you sure? Look, Jake, the days are long gone when the twin aristocracies sat side by side in New York like oil and water and never mixed. Why shouldn’t you have a Gentile in your family, and why shouldn’t I have a Jew in mine? We’re New Yorkers, aren’t we, living in the world’s most cosmopolitan city, which is perhaps the nearest modern equivalent to ancient Rome, where all races met and mingled. Remember what we learned long ago at Bar Harbor during those godawful Latin tutorials! There was an Etruscan aristocracy as well as a Latin aristocracy in ancient Rome, but did they remain separate forever? No, they did not! They merged to become a single Roman elite!”

  “I’m amazed by your retentive memory. However, even if we set aside all the cultural and religious objections to this marriage, the fact remains that Elsa and Sebastian are totally unsuited—”

  “Are they?” I said.

  “Cornelius!” Alicia could contain herself no longer. “You’re surely not in favor of this—you can’t be!”

  “Look,” I said to her and to Jake and even to the subservient Amy, who was watching me round-eyed, “let’s strip aside all this myth and prejudice and stultifying middle-aged outlook and examine the situation as it really is. Sebastian’s not easy to know, and he’s had his difficulties in the past, but he’s a good boy who’s doing well in life and is going to do better. He’s never taken a serious interest in a nice girl before because he’s always felt too shy, but now that he’s made the effort, you can be sure he’ll be far more appreciative of Elsa than the young men who spend their time propping up the New York debutante dances every season. He wants to settle down and be a good husband—and for his wife he’s chosen your daughter, who’s also shy and who’s never had a boyfriend before and who—dare I be this honest?—is never likely to win the title of Miss America. Admit it, Jake! Sebastian’s a good catch for Elsa. Amy, you’ll admit it even if Jake won’t!”

  “Just a moment, please, Amy,” said Jake automatically as Amy opened her mouth. Taking out a handkerchief, he mopped his forehead. “Neil, I can’t believe you’re serious.”

  “He isn’t serious, Jake,” said Alicia.

  “But I am! Darling”—I was careful to choose an endearment I hadn’t used in years in order to signal to her that I was sincere—“I’ve just seen this could be the making of Sebastian. Remember California, December 1930, and how happy we were?”

  “Sebastian is nice-looking, Jacob,” said Amy tentatively. “Clever, too. Will he be head of Van Zale’s one day, Cornelius?”

  “Amy, who am I to foretell the future?”

  “Sebastian won’t get the bank, Amy,” said Jake. “Neil will take over one of the little Kellers and train him up to be Paul Cornelius Van Zale III. Blood’s always thicker than water.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alicia to Amy, “but I don’t think they should marry. It’s got nothing to do with prejudice. I just don’t think Sebastian’s in love with her. I’m sure he likes her very much, but—”

  “I entirely agree,” said Jake. “Elsa’s not in love with Sebastian, either. It’s just a young girl’s infatuation.”

  “Of course the children would be brought up Jewish,” said Amy to me.

  “Amy, I’m sure Sebastian and Elsa will work out some acceptable arrangement!” I turned to her husband. “Come on, Jake!” I said pleasantly. “Face reality! If you persist in burying your head in the sand, Sebastian and Elsa may well decide to graduate from their New Jersey drive-ins to a New Jersey motel!”

  “My God.” He shuddered, found a clean glass on the serving cart, and poured himself some lemonade. “Is this a Tom Collins?”

  “No. Carraway!” I called.

  He was on the terrace in seconds. Of course he and the footmen had been straining their ears at the nearest window. I felt like Aladdin rubbing the magic lamp.

  “Bring another bottle of champagne, please.”

  “I oppose this marriage,” said Jake. “I oppose it.”

  “You can’t stop a girl marrying if she’s put her mind to it, Jake,” I said mildly. “I’ve had personal experience of that painful fact, and if you keep acting as if it’s 1855 instead of 1955, you too could have a daughter marrying at some city hall in Maryland.”


  “Oh, Jacob,” said Amy, “we must give Elsa a wonderful wedding! It would kill me if she wasn’t a proper bride!”

  “Amy, can’t you understand? She’s not in love with him!”

  “Yes, but, Jacob, she may never get another chance to marry someone who’s not after her for the money—you may be ruining your daughter’s whole life! And Sebastian’s such a good-looking boy, so tall and virile. It’s like a dream come true for Elsa. You don’t know how miserable your daughter was, crying and crying every night because she was so fat and so homely and had no boyfriend—”

  “Stop!” shouted Jake.

  “But, Jacob, you want your daughter to be happy, don’t you?”

  Jake looked at the pitcher of lemonade as if he wanted to hurl it through the window. “I don’t think Sebastian would make her happy!”

  “I think the marriage would be a disaster,” said Alicia, “but the trouble is, Jake, that nobody’s going to listen to us. It’s also very hard to disagree with Cornelius’ view of the reality of the situation. Sebastian’s determined to marry her, I can tell, and Elsa’s probably more than capable of following in Vicky’s footsteps to Maryland. In the old days we might have worked out some scheme to keep them apart, but nowadays children do as they please, and to hell with the parents.”

  Jake gritted his teeth. We all waited. Finally he said, “A year’s engagement.”

  “Oh, Jacob!” said Amy. “Girls can’t wait a year nowadays, and neither can young men!”

  “Well, perhaps there is something to be said for premarital sex,” I began mildly.

  “Absolutely not!” said Jake fiercely. “Not where my daughter’s concerned! All right, nine months.”

  “A spring wedding!” said Amy, pleased, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Carraway sweeping majestically toward us with the champagne to seal the deal.

  V

  That evening when I was alone working in the library on some cost projections for my new arts magazine, Sebastian knocked on the door and looked into the room. I had not seen him since he had stalked off the terrace with the bottle of champagne, although Alicia had called him at his apartment after the Reischmans had departed and asked him to come back.”