Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  Of course it’s misleading nowadays to make any generalizations about racial, cultural, and religious groups. In the old days when the groups were clearly defined, there was some excuse for it; Celts were redheads who wore mustaches, Anglo-Saxons were huge blonds, and so on, and such was the homogeneity which existed within each group that it was possible for an outsider to make certain intelligent generalizations that had a hope of being accurate. (Even so, one wonders about some of the more prejudiced remarks of historians like Caesar and Tacitus.) But nowadays we’re all so intermarried that any generalization must surely be garbage, and any form of prejudice must be untenable from an anthropological as well as a moral point of view. However, that didn’t stop the Reischmans from treating me as if I were a member of an inferior species, and that didn’t stop me from beginning to wonder in despair if they were right. My mother-in-law was no problem (I think she found me sexually attractive), but my father-in-law was a disaster. At first I thought he would make some effort to be pleasant to me, since Cornelius was one of his oldest friends, but evidently he had taken offense somewhere along the line around the time Elsa and I became engaged, and he behaved like a man who couldn’t bear to set eyes on me because I reminded him of some deep personal hurt. Mother’s rampant anti-Semitism had probably got to him in the end, and remembering some of the remarks she had handed out to me at my engagement, I wasn’t one bit surprised.

  With few exceptions the rest of the Reischmans were equally tough. Elsa had a younger brother, a good kid who found the home scene just as stultifying as I did, but the married sister in New Jersey was as dreary as her mother, and the Reischman relations were appalling. I’m not being anti-Semitic. Some of my Foxworth relations are appalling too, but at least I feel I can handle them because I know I’m just as good as they are.

  I decided I had to learn to handle the Reischmans, and automatically I turned to my culture to sustain me. If the Jews could glorify the Passover and the Irish could swoon over Brian Boru in order to sustain them in hostile environments, surely I could discover some appropriate Anglo-Saxon skeleton in the closet! It was only then I realized I knew next to nothing about my remote ancestors. Having walloped Western civilization and come out on top, the Anglo-Saxons have no need to be interested in their early origins; why waste time picking over tribal myths when you can spend that time enjoying your position as top of the heap? Besides, the exquisitely civilized present, crammed as it is with privilege, snobbery, and power, is so much more entertaining than the violent, savage, distinctly murky past. Ah yes, I knew exactly what it was like to be a member of a privileged minority! But what the Reischmans succeeded in teaching me against all the odds was what hell it is to be a member of a persecuted race, and within six months of my marriage they had reduced me to a constantly simmering state of humiliation, mortification, and rage.

  No wonder I felt I had to do something drastic. I fought back. Scott recommended a couple of books to me, and, still livid that anyone should treat me as a second-class citizen, I embarked on some research. At this point I quickly forgot my rage. In fact I even felt grateful to my in-laws for propelling me into a study of the ancient races of the world and rekindling my interest in history.

  I was sorry to discover that the Anglo-Saxons weren’t entirely the villains their enemies would have everyone believe, but once I’d recovered from the disappointment of learning that they weren’t just a bunch of lice-ridden louts who burned every Roman villa in sight, I enjoyed making their acquaintance. I was particularly excited by the story of King Alfred, the greatest Saxon of them all. He was the youngest of four sons, and when he was a kid he did nothing but shit at the wrong moment, so people probably thought he was dumb, but Alfred, underestimated Alfred, battled away against the invading Danes until he emerged not just king of Wessex, his own homestead, but king of England, king of the whole damned heap. He admired culture, taught himself to read at thirty-eight, and developed intellectual tastes which would have put most Americans to shame. Yes, I like Alfred. I liked him very much, and in my new role of persecuted Anglo-Saxon I clung to the memory of his glory.

  When my son was born I was informed by the Reischmans without so much as a “by your leave” or an “if you don’t mind” that the baby was to be named Jacob Isaac.

  “Forget it,” I said. I probably sounded like a Nazi, but I wasn’t. I’d married a Jewish girl willingly and had been delighted to do so. It’s true I don’t care for the names Jacob and Isaac but I like the name Jake very much despite all my father-in-law’s attempts to transform it into a dirty word. However, no one on earth, Jewish or Gentile, is going to wave the flag of prejudice in front of my eyes by dictating to me what I should call my son.

  “His name’s going to be Alfred,” I said firmly at the inevitable interview with Jake Reischman.

  “Alfred?” said the proud grandfather in disbelief. “Alfred? But what kind of a name’s that?”

  “Saxon,” I said. “This is a matter of cultural, religious, and racial pride.”

  I thought he was going to have apoplexy. Jake is a pale man with eyes the color of blue ice, but he went bright red. At last he spluttered, “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No, sir. I come from a great race and I want my son to be proud of it. Alfred triumphed over the heathen Danes to keep England Christian. He was a great guy.”

  “My people,” said Jake, maddened into making a big mistake, “were cultured when Alfred’s forebears were illiterate savages shouting insults at Caesar across the Rhine.”

  “Your people,” I said, “were itinerant parasites. Mine built the world.”

  “Why, you—”

  “Exactly!” I said violently. “Now you know how I feel when you treat me like dirt! I feel mad and want to say all kinds of dumb obscenities like that remark, which we both know is the most disgusting bullshit. I would never have said it if you hadn’t looked down on the name Alfred. Now, you listen to me. I’m willing to respect your culture but I’m damned if this respect is going to be a one-sided affair. You’ve got to give me some respect too, and you can start by respecting the fact that I’m the father of this baby. I’ll call him Jacob as well as Alfred, but only on condition you treat me with the respect I deserve.”

  There was a silence before Jake said, “And his religion?”

  “Christian. It’s my right to choose, not yours.”

  “Elsa—”

  “Elsa,” I said, “will do as I say.” I paused to let this sink in before I added, “If all goes well and I’m finally made to feel welcome in this house, I’ll see he gets proper instruction in the Jewish culture. If not, forget it. You’ll have a totally Gentile grandson whom you won’t see too often.”

  There was another silence, but at last Jake said pleasantly, “I see. Yes. Ah, I’ve just remembered that one of the Seligmans was called Alfred—and of course there was Alfred Heidelbach of Heidelbach, Ickelheimer … A good German name! What are we quarreling about? What a tempest in a teapot!”

  Jake was a smart old bastard and he had my measure then, all right. He probably had me figured out better than Cornelius did, although Cornelius was getting there slowly, groping his way along. After that incident Jake and I got along much better, because he respected me for standing up to him. You’ve got to stand up to that kind of people, and when I say “that kind of people” I don’t mean the Jews. I mean people like the Bar Harbor Brotherhood, men Paul Van Zale marked for worldly success. You’ve got to talk to those people in their own language, but I can speak that language when I want to, and all the words are right there in my head.

  They say Paul Van Zale often picked out unlikely protégés, people others would have overlooked.

  I think he would have picked out someone like Alfred of Wessex.

  I think he would have picked out me.

  February 26. I go to see Vicky. She’s been in the hospital two weeks and she’s due to leave tomorrow, which is why I picked tonight to call. I’ve stayed away until now. I didn
’t want to see her with a load of other visitors, but I figure no one will be around just before she’s discharged. They’ll all wait till she goes home.

  Vicky has a private room at Doctors Hospital and it’s full of brightly colored flowers, as if people were determined to compensate her for the nauseous riot she missed at the funeral. I like flowers, but they should be in gardens where they belong—or if not in gardens, they should at least be out-of-doors, like the magnolia tree in the back patio at One Willow Street. That magnolia blossom’s beautiful in the spring.

  Like Vicky.

  Vicky’s wearing a white nightgown trimmed with white lace and her hair is held back from her face by a white band. She’s very surprised to see me and not one bit pleased, although she pretends she is, to be polite.

  “Sebastian! How sweet of you to come, but you needn’t have bothered.”

  “Right.” I pull up a chair and sit down by the bed. I don’t ask her how she is. That’s a stupid question. Obviously she’s miserable. I don’t say I’m sorry about Sam. She probably feels ready to scream by this time if one more person says that to her, and anyway I wrote her a note the day he died. “Dear Vicky: I’m very sorry. Sam will be missed by many people. Best, Sebastian.”

  I give her a little book of John Donne’s poems. No flowers or chocolates or magazines. I wouldn’t bring Vicky what everyone else brings, because unlike everyone else, I’ve spent great care choosing the gift and taken time to ensure it’s not meaningless.

  “Know Donne?” I say to her.

  “I’ve heard of him, of course,” she says carelessly. “Yes, I think I read a couple of his poems ages ago.”

  “They should read Donne more in school instead of going on and on and on about Shakespeare. I met a guy once who had had to spend two years in school studying Hamlet. Such things should be banned by law. Two years of picking over Hamlet would make even Shakespeare hate Hamlet. The class could have been reading Donne for part of those two years instead. Nowadays when you say ‘poet’ you think of some sloppy beatnik bumming around California, but in those days the word ‘poet’ really meant something. You said ‘literature’ and what you meant was poetry, and poetry was communication. Donne communicated. As a writer he’s strong and tough with a terrific grasp of syntax and a mind which has triumphed over the inadequacies of language. Language is hell, and most people are incapable of expressing their feelings verbally, but Donne made language the mirror of his mind. Language isn’t futile with Donne. Language lives.”

  She looks at me with wide gray eyes. I’ve never seen Vicky look so astonished. She thinks I’m a gorilla, unable to string more than a couple of sentences together. She thinks I really do like drive-in movies about werewolves.

  “Oh,” she says awkwardly at last. “That sounds great. Thanks. I’ll read the book.”

  I look at the magazine on the table. There’s a book there too, a spy novel, a modern fairy tale for people bent on escape from the hell of being modern.

  “Kevin Daly’s got a new play coming on Broadway next month,” I said. “You like Kevin’s plays, don’t you?”

  “Yes, most of them.”

  “Want to see the new play? I’ll take you, if you like.”

  She looks wary. “With Elsa?”

  “No, Elsa doesn’t understand Kevin’s plays. She thinks they’re just about married couples being polite to each other when they should be having a fight.”

  “But wouldn’t it look odd if you took me without Elsa?”

  “No. Why shouldn’t I give my stepsister an evening out after she’s been through all this hell, and if she wants to go to a play Elsa wouldn’t enjoy, what’s wrong with Elsa staying home?”

  I see her swallow hastily at this reminder of her bereavement. I at once blot out the image of her going to bed with Sam—an easy exercise in willpower for me, since I’ve had nine years’ hard practice at perfecting the art—but I still look at her and wonder what kind of a mess he made of her life. If I could open up Vicky’s head and take a look inside, I suspect I’d be reminded of a ball of wool which has been pushed around for hours by a couple of cats. Before the ball of wool is fit for use again, the whole complicated muddle has to be unraveled and rewound correctly by someone who cares enough to produce the patience needed for the job, but Sam Keller was not a patient man. He just hadn’t the time. He was too busy trying to prove things both to himself and to other people; he tried to prove he was smarter than Cornelius (he wasn’t) and just as tough as any blue-blooded Eastern Seaboard aristocrat (he was) and just as anti-Hitler as Churchill, FDR, and Uncle Joe Stalin (he didn’t fool me), but the truth was he was just a hardworking son of a bitch with no imagination, no intellectual interests, no independence (Cornelius had bought him lock, stock, and barrel years before), and no taste for unraveling balls of wool. He used to boast about how he could reassemble television sets (“It takes a machine to make a machine,” quipped some wag at the office in the days before ethnic jokes became repugnant to me), but I suspected that when it came to reassembling his own wife, he wouldn’t have had any idea where to begin.

  “Well,” Vicky’s saying doubtfully, “it’s nice of you to want to take me to the theater, of course, Sebastian, but—”

  The door opens. In walks Cornelius. I might have guessed he couldn’t let even one evening go by without treating Vicky as if she were Electra. Those Greeks knew what went on in families, all right. I admire the Greeks. Too bad they got so civilized they fell to pieces, but that seems to be the destiny of man no matter whether he’s part of a superb classics civilization or a modern junk culture: work hard, get rich, wallow in luxury, and go to pieces. Cornelius, that arch-representative of our materialistic society, certainly looks as if he’s about to fall apart, although as we all know at One Willow Street, you couldn’t dent him with a diamond cutter. But he’s probably the last of his line to escape decadence. Vicky’s sons will grow up to become disciples of Jack Kerouac—or whatever Time magazine will call the Beat Generation of the late ’60s. The name will change but the scenery won’t: a lot of drugs and inertia and everyone dying all over the place of boredom.

  “Hi,” says Cornelius to me after he’s slobbered over Vicky.

  “Hi.”

  He waits for me to leave. I stay. We all think automatically of that stupid incident years ago at Bar Harbor when he made such a disgusting scene. I was sitting in the sun by the pool and reading a book, Eliot’s The Waste Land it was—I remember because I was far too young and ignorant to grasp all the allusions—and I was just looking up at the view when Vicky came down from the house for a swim. I didn’t swim anymore in daylight by that time because I hated people noticing how hairy I was. I don’t mind being hairy, but I hated people staring. One of the nicest things about Elsa is that she likes me being hairy. She says it’s sexy. No one ever said that to me before or behaved as if it could possibly be true.

  Vicky’s wearing a navy-blue swimsuit, all in one piece, but it’s too small for her now and she flows over the top of it. She’s beautiful, fourteen years old, like Juliet, and I know just how that poor bastard Romeo must have felt.

  Well, she sits down with her back to me as if I don’t exist, dangles her legs in the water, and gazes out to sea. I have an erection and it’s damned uncomfortable, so I unbutton my pants and shift around trying to adjust myself and the wicker chair squeaks and Vicky glances over her shoulder to see what all the fuss is about.

  Disaster. Tears and scenes. Mother looks at me as if men’s genitals were the most disgusting thing ever invented, but she tries to stand up for me. Fat chance. Cornelius has hysterics and treats me like a rapist, and I have to spend the rest of the summer with some Foxworth cousins whom I loathe. Finally Cornelius calms down, realizes he’s been behaving like a Freudian casebook, and makes us all swear to put the incident behind us. Except, of course, we never do.

  Vicky’s mixed up about sex, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t me who made her that way. Any normal girl, confronted with he
r stepbrother messing around with his fly in a fever of embarrassment, would just have said, irritated, “What on earth are you doing?” Or maybe, if she was shy, she would have averted her eyes and pretended not to notice. But to have hysterics and run sobbing to Daddy is not normal, and when I look back on the incident again now, it makes me wonder afresh how she really got along with Sam Keller. Everyone keeps saying what a fantastic marriage they had and how they were such an advertisement for married bliss, but I wonder. I wonder very much.

  “Well, thanks for stopping by, Sebastian,” says Vicky, giving me the brush-off—not because she wants to be rid of me but because she can see Daddy wants to be alone with her, and Vicky always tries to give Daddy what he wants. “And thanks for the book. That was sweet of you.”

  I’m tempted to kiss her, just to scare Cornelius, but I don’t. I touch her left hand, which is lying on top of the sheet, and say, “So long.”

  I don’t bother to ask her what she’s going to do when she leaves the hospital. I know what’s going to happen. Cornelius is going to sell the Kellers’ home in Westchester, ship all four kids and the nurses downtown to Fifth Avenue, and rake Vicky back into the family compound. Cornelius is going to take over as usual and go right on making a mess of his daughter’s life.

  But I love Vicky and I’m going to save her. Cornelius thinks he has the whole problem sewn up because I’m safely married off, but he’s wrong. Cornelius is a smart guy, but where Vicky’s concerned, his head’s so buzzing with Greek drama that he can’t think straight.

  But I think straight. You’re living in a fool’s paradise, Cornelius. Your problem’s only just beginning.