Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  Or is it? Why do I keep feeling that somehow against all the odds Scott’s acting out some medieval allegory in which he plays Retribution stalking Evil in pursuit of the Holy Grail of Justice? Yes, I must definitely be succumbing to paranoia. All this medieval crap Scott keeps dishing out must have finally reached me. I must pull myself together before I give way to the urge to embroider The Canterbury Tales.

  “What was your father like, Scott?” I say suddenly, taking myself by surprise. “Everyone talks of him as if he was just another flamboyant hard-drinking Irishman, but he must have been far more complicated than that.”

  “He was no Irishman. He saw the world through Anglo-Saxon eyes and considered it was no more than an accident that he had an Irish name.”

  We’re moving onto familiar ground here. When I first married Elsa and felt like a member of a persecuted race, Scott and I spent some time discussing the ancient races of the world.

  “But didn’t your father have any Celtic characteristics?” I ask idly, preparing to enjoy yet another foray into ancient ethnic territory.

  “Hell, no!” says Scott, relaxing with me. “He knew only one world and one time and one reality—the view the Anglo-Saxons call ‘logical’ and ‘commonsense’ and ‘pragmatic,’ the view that dominates the Western world today.”

  “My view,” I say, smiling at him.

  “Your view, yes. But not mine.”

  He’s done it. It’s incredible, but he’s done it. He’s made a mistake. The shutters have slipped a fraction and I have a lightning glimpse into that opaque enigmatic mind.

  “Why, listen to me!” he’s exclaiming in amusement. “How crazy that sounds! Let me take that back. We both know that I’m no more a Celt than you’re an Anglo-Saxon—we’re just two Americans living in the great melting pot of New York, and to imply we’re anything else would be pure fantasy!”

  “Pure fantasy,” I say soothingly. “Sure.”

  “And besides,” says Scott, still furiously trying to get the shutters back in position, “didn’t you tell me how senseless it is to make distinctions about race nowadays, since we’re all so thoroughly intermarried and mixed up?”

  “I did say that, yes. And I still believe it to be true,” I say to reassure him, but part of my mind is already recalling Jung saying we are not of today, nor of yesterday; we are of an immense age.

  So you identify with the Celts, do you, Scott Sullivan? That’s very interesting. Thanks for giving me the missing key to your personality. You can be sure I’ll make good use of it.

  I remember all about the Celts. I came across them again and again when I was doing research into the Anglo-Saxons. The Celts’ enemies never understood them; such logical, practical, down-to-earth people as the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons must have been baffled by a race whose outlook on life was so radically dissimilar to their own. The Celts were mystical and alien. Their literature revealed worlds within worlds, the supernatural mingling freely with reality in an eerie dislocation of time and space. Since they believed in an afterlife, death held no terrors for them; in fact, their society was suffused by death, for over and above all the other hallmarks of the Celts which their structured, disciplined enemies found so barbarous, towered the mighty tradition of the blood feud, which meant that the Celts continually killed each other as well as all the enemies who stood in their way.

  If you were a Celt and someone killed your father, you couldn’t rest until you’d killed him in return. Your whole honor would be at stake. “Forgive and forget,” would have sounded a ridiculous piece of Christian folly to pagan Celtic ears, not only because forgiveness was unthinkable but because forgetting was impossible. The Celts never forgot the past. It was always part of the living present, kept effortlessly alive by the Celtic refusal to see time as their enemies saw it. Past, present, and future existed simultaneously in their looking-glass world, where death, the one reality, was treated as a myth which enabled them to waste their lives without regret in pursuit of a just revenge.

  “Still thinking of all those extinct Celts and Anglo-Saxons?” says Scott, laughing.

  “Extinct! What about the Irish-Americans and the WASPs? Say, have you ever met Jack Kennedy during any of your trips to Washington?”

  We talk about the Kennedys, as tribal and hierarchical as all the best Celtic families, dedicated to having their revenge on all the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocrats who once treated them like dirt, but all the time I’m thinking of Scott crowning his inborn folk memory of the blood feud with the intellectual trappings of medieval legend.

  For Scott’s Holy Grail is revenge. I’m sure of that now, just as I’m sure Scott’s forgiven his father for the wrongs committed long ago. But that’s all I’m sure of; although I’ve made enormous progress, I’m still up against a brick wall because I can’t for the life of me figure out what Scott’s planning to do. What can he do? Can he be mad enough to believe he could ever grab the bank, when we all know Cornelius can smell a whiff of treachery at fifty paces and cut down his opponent without even pausing for breath? It doesn’t make sense. But if Scott’s not planning some spectacular double-cross, just what the hell’s he up to?

  It beats me. But one thing’s certain. I’ve got to find out. If we’re all playing cards for high stakes and Scott’s got the ace of spades stashed up his sleeve, the least I can do to protect myself is to find out the other cards in his hand. Scott could be dangerous not just to Cornelius but to me too.

  For the first time in my life I see Scott not as a friend but as a rival.

  July 4, 1958. Another godawful family reunion, but not such a large one. Andrew and Lori whoop it up on their air-force base, while Rose, who teaches English at an all-female boarding school near Velletria, has gone to Europe to pick over educational theories with Elfrida. Aunt Emily almost goes to Andrew and Lori but comes to Fifth Avenue instead. I think Mother’s signaled that she’s worried about Vicky, and Aunt Emily loves to help people in distress.

  Vicky’s all right, just bored with being pregnant and being treated like some priceless vase from the Tang dynasty. Naturally she gets scratchy with nothing to occupy her. God knows I’d be climbing the walls if I had to live in that place with the four children wrecking everything in sight and Cornelius and Mother still carrying on their torrid love affair whenever they think no one’s looking. I bring Vicky a new translation of Cicero’s letters. They make Cicero so real that you fully expect to see him alive and well and fussing around the Knickerbocker Club. It seems impossible to believe he’s not holding a press conference somewhere and thundering about some morally offensive new batch of Wall Street shenanigans. I like the passage where he says he fears Caesar as he fears the shining surface of the sea. Yes, Caesar was deep. Caesar played his cards close to his chest.

  Like Scott.

  My favorite occupation at the moment is trying to put myself in Scott’s shoes and figure out what I would do if I wanted to avenge my father. The obvious goal would be to gain control of the bank—and perhaps change the bank’s name from Van Zale’s to Sullivan’s in order to draw a veil over Cornelius’ reign and create a memorial to Steve. That would avenge Steve neatly and rewrite a disastrous past; or, as T. S. Eliot might have said, it ensures that what might have been has assumed a reality equal to that which actually exists. Bearing this in mind, I don’t see how I can be wrong in assuming Scott aims to take over from Cornelius; the theory’s irresistible. The only trouble is that it just won’t stand up.

  Scott can’t get that bank. He might be able to grab it somehow if it were a corporation run by an oligarchy, but it’s not. It’s a dictatorship run by Cornelius, and Scott can’t possibly wrest the controlling interest in the partnership from him.

  So we’re back at first base again with the knowledge that if Cornelius can’t be forced to give up the bank, he would have to surrender it voluntarily, and if there’s one thing that’s certain on this earth it’s that he’s never going to donate his life’s work to Steve Sullivan’
s son.

  I sit back with a sigh of relief, but the funny thing is that I don’t feel genuinely relieved at all, and after a while I feel more nervous than ever. Is Cornelius psychologically capable of handing the bank to Steve’s son on a silver platter? Surely not! What about the grandsons? But they’re still very young and may not add up to much later. Even so, Cornelius would surely try to stay around until Eric was eighteen. … But will he be able to stay around? Maybe his health will finally fail him. And while on the subject of staying around, what about that incredibly sentimental speech he made recently on his fiftieth birthday when he said there were more important things in life than wielding power and making money? He even said he was thinking of retiring early and going off to live with Mother in Arizona! The whole speech was such a laugh I didn’t take it seriously, but maybe I should have. Maybe it was a mistake to sit back stifling my mirth at the thought of Cornelius wandering off into the desert like some kind of holy man to contemplate the evils of materialism.

  I consider it seriously. If Cornelius takes an early retirement—or drops dead—while the grandsons are still minors, the bank should go either to me, his saintly, dutiful, long-suffering, goddamned efficient stepson with the true financial brain (the obvious choice) or to Scott, the only other guy in the bank who’s as smart as I am. But it won’t go to Scott because he’s his father’s son. And do I really believe that Cornelius meant all those moist-eyed remarks about turning over a new leaf? No, I don’t. He was probably still unhinged by Sam’s death and he’d just succeeded in falling in love with Mother all over again and he was temporarily not responsible for his actions when he made that speech. People may evolve as the years go by, but they don’t fundamentally change, so any overnight conversion to a so-called “new life” should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Cornelius may believe he would be happy abdicating his powerful position and sinking into idleness Arizona-style, but he’s fooling himself. This particular leopard’s never going to change his spots.

  Yet Scott must be banking on Cornelius retiring soon. He must know he’d never get the chance of grabbing the bank once the grandsons are grown up.

  Maybe Scott’s been working on Cornelius, persuading him to retire early. It’s hard to believe Cornelius could ever be the victim of undue influence, but if he’s suffering from some middle-aged softening of the brain, anything could happen. God alone knows what goes on at those late-night chess sessions. Scott says they talk about eternity. Christ, any man who can get Cornelius interested in eternity almost deserves to win the bank. Still, the thought of Scott assuming the role of Rasputin in addition to the role of cat’s whiskers bothers me very much. I’ll have to find out more about what’s going on. I’ll have to keep talking to Scott in the hope that he’ll slip up again and drop another intellectual clue at an unguarded moment.

  “Are you still talking about eternity in those late-night chess sessions?” I say to Scott at the end of July. We’ve just finished a game of tennis on the court of Cornelius’ summer home in Maine, and we’re drinking Coke together in the shade of the patio. As soon as I’ve asked the question I know it’s a mistake, much too direct, much too obvious. Scott will sidestep the implications with the panache of an experienced matador.

  “Oh, we’ve moved on from theological speculation,” says Scott, uncapping another Coke. “We’re pondering on philosophy now.”

  “Philosophy? Cornelius? Christ, Scott, what a miracle—I don’t know how you do it!”

  “It’s no miracle. Why shouldn’t Cornelius start to do some serious thinking now that he’s approaching old age? And wouldn’t it be so much less irritating if instead of beginning a sentence by saying, ‘I consider it my moral duty to do such-and-such,’ he said, ‘I consider it would be more in accord with Plato’s theory of absolute good if I did this, that, and the other!’ ”

  “Oh, my God! Uh … peddling Plato to him, are you, Scott? And what does Cornelius think of Plato?”

  “He thought he was just fine at first. But then he found out Plato was a homosexual, so he lost interest.”

  We laugh heartily together. As anticipated, the matador has swirled his cape with a nonchalant flourish and easily sidestepped the rash charge of the bull. I wait, biding my time before making charge number two.

  “As a matter of fact,” says Scott, “I think Cornelius is more in tune with Descartes. I get the feeling he’s questioning everything, experimenting with new theories, testing all his old values. His fiftieth birthday obviously had a profound effect on him.”

  “Sam’s death, more likely.”

  “Perhaps. Anyway, the two together have certainly shaken him up.”

  “How long’s it going to last?”

  Scott looks dreamily up at the sky. “Who knows? His horizons may have expanded permanently. I’ve always thought you underestimate Cornelius, Sebastian—no, not at the bank. In his private life. If you strip away his despotic mannerisms and his tough-guy poses, he can be surprisingly sensitive. And he’s very lonely.”

  “Scott, you have to be kidding! He’s a power-crazed egomaniac!”

  “At the bank, yes. But he’s a very different man in front of a chessboard at one o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. If I had to face Cornelius regularly over a chessboard at one in the morning, I’d be round the bend in no time flat. So what’s going to happen, Scott?” (I seem to be unable to stop asking direct questions, but this one seems natural enough in the context of the conversation, so maybe it doesn’t matter.) “Is Cornelius really going to retire within the next five years and wander off to Arizona for keeps?”

  “I think he’d be bored to tears after one week in Arizona, but don’t tell him I said so. As for his retirement … again, who knows? I don’t. I just sit and listen to him speculating.”

  I’m puzzled by this apparent lack of interest in Cornelius’ early-retirement plans. If Scott’s ever going to get anywhere, Cornelius has to retire young.

  “I thought you sat and lectured him on Plato!”

  “Only when I’m asked!” He smiles lazily, so cool, so serene, so confident. It’s as if he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that he was going to get the bank in the end. It’s as if he feels he’s safe whatever happens; I’m irrelevant, the grandsons are irrelevant, the rest of the partners are irrelevant, because Scott and Cornelius are playing chess for the bank and Scott’s figured out exactly how he can call checkmate.

  This time the matador’s not only swirled his cape but flung dust in my eyes. I can’t see a thing. I’m baffled and bamboozled.

  “Oh, well,” I said, giving up and preparing to retire from the ring, “in fifty years’ time we’ll all be dead anyway, so what the hell. It reminds me of that line from East Coker in the Four Quartets—gee, I wish I could convert you to T. S. Eliot, Scott—”

  “I converted myself recently. I can’t think now why I always found him so unreadable. Which line in East Coker?”

  “The one about death. ‘O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, the captains—’ ”

  “ ‘—merchant bankers’!” he says with me, and we both break off to laugh. That’s what they call investment bankers in England. Eliot was a banker once.

  “Well, that’s life!” I comment phlegmatically. “Even Cornelius has to go into the dark one day.”

  “Yes, and I think he’s finally figured out the best way he can handle that tough Midwestern God of his when he reaches the end of the lighted hall.”

  That’s it. I know that’s it. I don’t know exactly what “it” is, but I’ll figure that out later. Meanwhile, keep talking, act naturally, and don’t let him see I know.

  “Oh, he’ll fix God, all right, no problem,” I say glibly, “and then he’ll go right up that primrose path to the big bank waiting in the sky.”

  Scott shouts with laughter and spills Coke all down his tennis shirt. “Now, look what you’ve done, Sebastian!”
<
br />   “Me?”

  “Yes, you! No one else can make me laugh the way you can!”

  Nice conversation between two old friends. Complicated conversation between two new rivals who could wind up very serious enemies. I wait till he goes off to change his shirt and then I go on sitting in the patio and think and think and think.

  I think that Cornelius, starting to consider his own death, has finally begun to feel guilty about his past. Is someone as amoral as Cornelius capable of feeling guilty? Yes. Never mind whether he’s amoral or immoral. The plain fact is that with his strict religious upbringing he’s probably riddled with guilt by this time. Anyway, those people who act as if they don’t know the meaning of the word “guilt” are so often the ones that suffer guilt most acutely. Their guilt is so enormous that they can’t even bear to acknowledge its existence.

  I’ll bet that Cornelius is tempted to give the bank to Scott in order to assuage his guilt about Steve. He’d see it as the only way he could fix that tough Midwestern God of his, the only way he could face the dark at the end of the lighted hall.