Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

“How can you possibly make such a statement? You don’t know the first thing about me! You probably don’t know the first thing about that daughter of yours either! You’re all cut off and sewn up!”

  “My God, how could I sleep with you for nine years and not know you? You’re—”

  “I’m Teresa Kowalewski and I need a canvas and room to paint and no money worries and—oh yes, a good fuck on a regular basis, I guess I’d miss that if I didn’t have it, although it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. However, knowing your talent for seeing women in only one light, you probably think we’re just like a married couple—oh, I’m a little eccentric, sure, but basically I only live for your visits, when I can play house, cook you a nice meal, and pretend I’m just another happy middle-class housewife. Well, I’ve got news for you, honey. I’ve got a whole big meaningful life which exists quite independently of you, and although I’m content for you to stop by now and then, all you really are to me is a checkbook and a hard-on. That’s the real world, Cornelius. That’s the way things really are. Am I getting through to you at all, or am I still talking Chinese?”

  The doorbell rang.

  We went on staring at each other. The doorbell rang again.

  “Shit,” said Teresa. “I guess I’d better see who that is.” She moved into the hall.

  I went on sitting on the couch and looking at my untasted glass of Scotch, but dimly I became aware of voices.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve got to see him.”

  “Hey, wait a minute! What the hell—”

  “Excuse me, please.”

  My two separate worlds were grinding crazily against each other. The park had ceased to exist. Fifth Avenue was streaming alongside Central Park West in a great roaring freeway, and I was trapped on a concrete strip in the middle.

  I was on my feet as Alicia appeared in the doorway, and as I stared, not understanding, Teresa pushed past her into the room.

  “What the hell’s going on? Look, if you two are going to have some big bust-up, would you mind not doing it in my apartment?”

  Alicia’s eyes met mine. My heart began to beat quietly, like the sea thudding far away in the distance.

  “Cornelius, if Alicia’s going to make some shitty scene, could you for God’s sake get her out of here right away?”

  Alicia’s face was still but shadowed with grief. My heart began to thump a little louder, surf pounding more insistently on some deserted shore.

  “Jesus Christ, what is it? Why the hell doesn’t someone say something? What is it, for God’s sake?”

  We were still halfway across Bede’s lighted hall, but someone had slipped out ahead of time into the dark.

  “It’s Sam, Cornelius,” said Alicia.

  The sea rushed toward me, and all was lost in the roar of the undertow.

  “What about Sam?” said Teresa suspiciously. “What’s he done?”

  I did not answer, for I was way back in another era, and as the years cartwheeled away before my eyes, I saw the tall homely boy hold out his hand at Bar Harbor and exclaim: “Hi, good to meet you!” The kaleidoscope of time revolved. I was at Willow and Wall after Paul’s murderers had shot themselves to death, and Sam was shaking with me as we helped Steve Sullivan to his feet. I was on Fifth Avenue in the great golden summer of 1929 when it seemed the good times would never end. I was dancing with long-forgotten girls, I was drunk on bathtub gin, I was having the time of my life with the best friend I would ever have, and far away in the distance I could hear Miff Mole and his Molers playing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

  “He had a heart attack when he was halfway home,” said Alicia. “The chauffeur drove at once to the nearest hospital, but it was too late. He died almost at once.”

  I thought again of Scott saying: “Has it all been worth it?” and now, when I looked back at my struggles with Sam, I saw at once that they were meaningless. Everything was meaningless, all our schemes for revenge and counterrevenge, all our empty preoccupations with power—even power itself was ultimately meaningless, because when you reached the end of that lighted hall there was no power on earth that could save you from the dark.

  My whole world tilted on its axis and then shattered as if it had been blown to bits in some huge crucible. If all power was ultimately meaningless, then it no longer mattered whether or not I had the power to father children. In the end it made no difference whether I had one daughter or ten sons. In the end, sterile or fertile, we all had to die.

  The one unalterable fact of life was death, and as I allowed myself to look my death squarely in the face for the first time, I realized I would have to find some way of living with that death’s unendurable relevance. I had to find an antidote to negate the horror of nonbeing, and the opposite of nonbeing was surely to be—I had to be, I had to live, but not in the old sterile way of communicating with people through power. Power had only cut me off from people, but now I had to reach them, I had to break out of that steel-lined room my power had welded around me, I had to communicate with others if I were to avoid isolation’s living death.

  I looked at Alicia and saw her actor’s mask had been broken. I saw past her immaculate self-control then, past all her defenses, past all the grief and suffering that had separated us for so long. I looked at her and saw that she grieved for me, that the pity which I had always resented so fiercely wasn’t pity at all, but something far finer, a compassion incapable of contempt and an unselfishness rendering no sacrifice too great to endure. I looked at her and saw the past transformed.

  Jake no longer mattered, just as Teresa no longer mattered. I did not need to be told now why she had rejected him as soon as I had discovered the affair; I knew it was because she loved me too much to force me into the role of complaisant husband and too much to hurt me again by turning to someone else. She had always loved me, just as I had always loved her, and by some miracle almost too great to grasp, I looked at her and saw she loved me still.

  Teresa was whispering in a hushed voice, “But that’s terrible news … terrible. He was so young—was he even fifty? Why, I can’t believe it … Sam …”

  I heard her, but I never saw her. My eyes saw only Alicia. I began to walk across the soft carpet.

  Teresa was saying, “Honey, I’m so sorry—it must be terrible for you. But you hadn’t been close to Sam for years, had you? You weren’t truly friends anymore.”

  Alicia said clearly in her crispest voice, “Miss Kowalewski, can’t you see what this means to Cornelius? It’s as if he’s lost a limb. Can’t you see how completely alone he is?”

  But I wasn’t alone after all. I went on walking, one step in front of the other, past the ugly orange couch, past the ugly orange chair, and as I walked, I thought: I’ve got to get there. I’ve got to make it.

  Yet in the end I didn’t have to go all the way. Alicia came to meet me. She stepped forward, holding out her arms, and the next moment, when I reached her, our long nightmare came at last to an end.

  Her tears were wet against my cheeks. Closing my eyes, I held her in the dark, and all I said as the great wasteland of our troubles disintegrated was: “Take me home.”

  PART FOUR

  SEBASTIAN: 1958–1960

  February 12, 1958. Sam Keller dies but I’m reborn because I now have a second chance to get what I want, and this time I’m going to succeed.

  I see Cornelius, who looks like a tubercular wraith. I don’t know what to say. In the end I mutter, “Sorry.” He looks at me as if I’m some kind of ape, but he’s in such a state of shock that he takes my condolences at their face value.

  He’ll never know how much I always disliked Sam.

  February 17. Sam Keller’s funeral. Bright colors glowing against the wintry background of the godawful Westchester cemetery. Cornelius has made room in the Van Zale family plot for his brother by unofficial adoption. Sam’s mother died last year, and he had no other blood relatives.

  The sun shines. Crowds of mourners cram round the grave. Sam alienated a
lot of people at Willow and Wall during the last year of his life, when he was crashing around trying to be a bigger son of a bitch than Cornelius, but that’s all forgotten now and people can only remember how popular he once was; everyone talks of that famous Keller charm.

  The riot of flowers glows obscenely against the frozen background. The repulsive ceremony progresses inch by inch. Horrible. Why can’t we dispose of our dead better? In ancient Rome they had the right idea: a big funeral pyre and a lavish dignified oration. Even the Celts were more natural with their keenings and their wakes. Some of the Germanic tribes once cremated their dead in style, but once those Angles and those Saxons got together for keeps they developed this nauseous tradition of stealthily scraping little holes in the earth for their dead and then stealthily scraping the earth back again over the corpses, like cats burying a mess. Disgusting. I wonder what the Reischmans think of all these closed Anglo-Saxon faces striving to maintain an impassive silence. I haven’t been to a Jewish funeral yet. A treat in store. Oh, God.

  I see Mother with her face like a marble effigy. Why doesn’t she cry? Why does no one cry? It’s so unnatural. We should be yelling and screaming and tearing our hair in a rage against the horror of death. Now, that would be an interesting scene. Dali would paint it well: a lot of tortured faces with funeral wreaths spewing out of their mouths, all set against a desert to express the sterility of repressed emotion. Or maybe Bosch would have painted it better: a canvas dotted with little creatures suffering, and the dark horrors lurking in the background.

  I see Andrew in uniform, and Lori, looking glamorous, beside him. The eldest child is only three, so they’ve left the kids behind in Manhattan, but I think children should come to funerals no matter how old they are; they could teach the adults how to behave more naturally. I must talk to Andrew, but it’s difficult. What goes on in Andrew’s head? Can he conceivably be quite so happy as he appears to be? Probably, yes. He may be bright enough to learn how to drive a plane without crashing it, but even the dumbest animals can be taught clever tricks, and there’s something very dumb about Andrew. Dumb people are the lucky ones, of course. They haven’t the brains to grasp how godawful life really is. I like Lori though. Wonder what she’s like in bed. Oh, well.

  I see Aunt Emily, looking like a virgin, and Rose, who undoubtedly is and always will be a virgin, standing beside her. Rose is like Aunt Emily, sexless, not dumb, but like someone with restricted vision, a first-class horse in blinkers. I guess I like Aunt Emily, and Rose too, but I can’t connect with them. Nothing to say.

  I see the Van Zale partners, the stuffed shirts, all dumber than me except Scott. I like Scott. I especially notice Scott with his black hair and black eyes and white taut face. Wycliffe probably looked like Scott—all the medieval heretics probably looked like Scott as they went to the stake prepared to die for something that exists purely on a cerebral level. There’s something very strange about Scott. Spooky. But he plays a good game of squash and he’s smart on the job. The other day he figured out that Coastal Aluminum issue like a master chef boning a sole.

  I see the Bar Harbor Brotherhood, gray middle-aged men in black, their faces beaten with grief. Cornelius and Jake stand some way apart, but Kevin is right beside Cornelius, and when they met before the service they shook hands and talked for a while. I like Kevin Daly but I don’t know him well. Probably I never shall. How I wish I were like Kevin Daly, so sparkling always, never at a loss for something to say, always so full of charm—but not charm like Sam Keller’s celebrated mannerisms, which to me always reeked of artificiality. Sam’s charm was like water spewing out of a faucet, but Kevin’s charm is like water bubbling up from a spring. Yes, I admire Kevin Daly and I like his plays. He’s better than Williams, although I like Williams’ plays, Southern sex and neurotic tension. Kevin writes about sex and neurosis too, though he’s not so interested in sexual mechanics. He’s more interested in sex as a form of communication, which can range so astoundingly from blissful perfection to hellish failure. Sometimes I think Kevin’s as good as Miller, although I don’t believe there’s an American playwright alive who could surpass Death of a Salesman.

  Yes, Kevin’s a gifted guy. … Wonder what it’s like to do it with boys. Maybe I should have tried that, but no, I’d miss all the things that women have. Funny about Kevin’s sexual tastes. He looks so obviously like that segment of the American male population that Kinsey was generous enough—or dumb enough—to describe as normal.

  Kevin’s the only one of the Bar Harbor Brotherhood that I can look at without wanting to smash something. Jake looks sick, the old hypocrite, although he hated Sam for being one of the Master Race. But it must be a bad jolt when one of your contemporaries drops dead, even if the contemporary happens to be an ex-Nazi who always made you want to throw up. God, how the Jews suffered in the war.

  I see Cornelius looking like a corpse. One day he will be a corpse, and then where will I be? In clover, with any luck—the clover field of the senior partner’s office at Willow and Wall. I don’t like Cornelius and he doesn’t like me, but I respect him. I think he respects me a little too. He’s going to respect me more. I think Cornelius knows that he’s going to respect me more. There’s one thing I have to admit about Cornelius: although he’s extraordinarily dumb in many ways, he’s no fool as soon as he crosses that threshold at Willow and Wall. In fact, as far as survival on Wall Street’s concerned, he’s the smartest guy I know. It takes a certain effort to admire a man who seldom opens a book and who thinks of art primarily in terms of financial investment, but it’s worth making the effort, because it doesn’t pay to underestimate Cornelius. We all know that at Willow and Wall, because the unemployment rate among those who forget is always one hundred percent.

  I see more bankers; I see brokers, lawyers, and politicians; I see endless rows of blank faces. Everyone’s come to the sordid cemetery to breathe the air polluted by those nauseous flowers—everyone except the most important person of all, the girl who’s going to belong to me someday, the heroine I’m going to save. Vicky’s in the hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion. Three doctors swore she was incapable of attending her husband’s funeral.

  I love Vicky. There’s a line by John Donne: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” If Vicky would only stop talking and listen to my silences, she would learn so much. I have no words for all I want to say, but if I were given the chance, I could so easily prove how much I love her. What a stupid system language is. How strange that we should all communicate by opening our mouths and flapping our tongues and uttering little sounds. There should be a more concise way of communicating; we should have lights on our foreheads or hands with fifty fingers all tapping out some faultlessly unambiguous code. If there is a God, which I doubt, he fell down very badly on the communications front.

  “Oh, Sebastian!” sighs my wife, Elsa, as we walk away. “Wasn’t it a lovely funeral?”

  I like Elsa. She’s stupid but I like her anyway. At first I thought she was clever because her designs are so good, but the designs are a freak. I read once about a mental defective who couldn’t write his name but could calculate logarithms in his head. That’s like Elsa. She does these highly original designs of human eyes on richly patterned backgrounds, but there’s nothing else there. I used to take her to New Jersey because I found it such an amusingly eerie reflection of our abominable culture, but although Elsa laughed with me, she secretly liked it. I discovered that when I asked her where she wanted to go for our honeymoon. “Las Vegas,” she said, and she was serious. I offered her the whole of South America—I’d temporarily had Europe up to the eyeballs after my mandatory period of slavery as an army officer in Germany—I offered her Rio de Janeiro, all the Inca relics of Peru, even the chic coastal resorts of Chile, but she said no, Las Vegas, and please could we stay in a motel. Well, we did, and I have to concede it sure made New Jersey look tame. God, what a culture we have. It’ll all get wiped out one day, of course. I give it fifty yea
rs. Of all the great empires the world has known, ours will be the shortest. Two hundred years of chasing the godalmighty dollar, and what do we produce? The A-bomb and I Love Lucy.

  But I didn’t mind Las Vegas because Elsa was so cute, dumb but cute, and I liked looking after her. I’d never had anyone to take care of before, because Cornelius always takes care of the people in our family. I liked having sex anytime I wanted it, too. Elsa never said no, and I was so pleased that she never seemed to mind that we saw little in Las Vegas except our motel bedroom. But after all, that’s what honeymoons are for.

  When we got settled in our new East Side apartment, I suggested we might as well have a baby and she said okay, so we did. No problems. I liked her being pregnant and I was pleased when the baby was a boy. I would have been pleased with a girl too, but I always think it’s best to have the boy first so that he can take care of his sisters later. However, it turned out this boy was destined to have no sisters, because not long after the birth, something went wrong with Elsa’s ovaries and the doctor said sorry, no more children. That was a pity. I liked this baby. It was red with black hair and it kept its eyes closed most of the time. It interested me. Probably I loved it, although the emotion I felt didn’t feel like love in the usual sense. However, if anyone had tried to take the baby away I would have gone after the thief without thinking twice, clubbed him to pieces, and grabbed the baby back. Elsa moaned about how painful breast-feeding was and how her hemorrhoids were killing her, but the little baby lay snug in his crib, saying nothing stupid, a minute individual with a mind of his own. Smart, clever baby. Dumb, stupid Elsa. Poor Elsa. I was fond of her in many ways.

  Half the trouble with Elsa was that her culture remained foreign to me. I tried hard to study it, but I found nothing to tie me emotionally to those Oriental aspects, and all the time I was conscious that I would always remain an outsider, the Gentile who had had the outrageous nerve to marry into the great House of Reischman. I was conscious too how different the Jews were, not inferior, not superior, but just different, different, different. They looked at the world from a different angle, saw history from a different point of view, and had different defense mechanisms for dealing with their vast collective consciousness of suffering and pain.