Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Yes, he did,” she says, “at the end. After Kristin was born, I took an overdose of sleeping pills. I didn’t mean to kill myself. I just wanted to … well, to communicate with him, I guess, but it was a wicked thing to do. Poor Sam—he was frantic. I felt so guilty and so ashamed.”

  I feel guilty and ashamed too—for selfish son of a bitch Sam Keller driving his wife to the brink of suicide and loading her with a guilt that has nearly crushed her to pulp.

  “The hell with him!” I mutter, very unwisely. It’s always asking for trouble to criticize one’s rival to a woman who feels morally obliged to defend him.

  “But he loved me,” she says earnestly. “He really did. He loved me very much, and he was so sweet, so kind, so …”

  It’s teeth-gritting time again, and God knows how I control myself, but I do. “Yeah. Well … but that’s all over now, isn’t it, Vicky?” I manage to say calmly. “That’s all over, and you’ve got a whole new life just waiting to begin.”

  “What a heavenly apartment!” cries Vicky. “And how wonderful to have a place where I can be on my own with no one breathing down my neck! Look at the dear little kitchen! Sebastian, I’m going to learn to cook. Will you come to my first dinner party?”

  “What do I get? Soft-boiled egg?”

  I’ve taken some time to find the apartment, because I wanted to make sure I found the right one. It’s north of Sutton Place and both the living room and the one bedroom face the river. The building is postwar, well-run, spotless. I open all the closets but there’s not a roach in sight. The appliances are new. The floors are parquet. The heat works. There’s air conditioning.

  “Sebastian, I dread to think what would happen if Daddy ever found out about this place. After he’d got over feeling hurt, he’d be hiring decorators for me and giving me pictures from his art collection, and I think I’d go mad. I’m just so excited at the idea of us fixing it up by ourselves. … When can we go shopping for furniture? Next weekend?”

  “Okay. You pick it out, I’ll charge it, and you can pay me back.”

  “Will it be expensive?”

  “Yes. You’ve got to learn about money, Vicky.”

  “I want to learn, Sebastian,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to learn.”

  Vicky’s a case of arrested development. She may be almost twenty-eight, but after nine years of Sam protecting her from everything under the sun except childbirth, the one thing she should have been protected from, she often seems no more than eighteen.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say comfortably. “I’ll teach you.”

  “Oh, Sebastian, this is such fun! How great the living room looks—like a real home, not a museum! And how sweet of you to have bought all those lovely books in order to make the room look lived in!”

  “Don’t be dumb, I bought them in order to read! Say, I know it’s your apartment, but could I come around here sometimes and read them?”

  “Of course! Anytime. Now, Sebastian, how are we going to fix up the bedroom?”

  “Tell you what: you leave it all to me and I’ll give you a big surprise.”

  “How exciting! I’ll keep the door closed and the room’ll be like Pandora’s box!”

  “Do me a favor, Vicky, and don’t come here for three days till I get everything fixed. Okay?” I have everything waiting to be delivered, but she doesn’t know.

  “Okay, Sebastian. Thanks a million. …”

  Elsa goes to a hen party at the apartment of one of her friends. I take Vicky to dinner at the Colony. We have oysters Rockefeller, lobster, and champagne.

  “To celebrate the new apartment!” I say, raising my glass.

  “Can’t wait to see the bedroom, Sebastian!”

  We laugh sociably. For dessert we order strawberry mousse, black coffee, and Courvoisier.

  “Gee, Sebastian, I feel kind of loaded. I’m not used to drinking so much.”

  “Does that mean Postumus gets drunk tomorrow morning?”

  “I’m not nursing Postumus. Oh, stop calling Postumus Postumus!”

  We laugh again. I wonder why she’s not nursing Postumus. Breast-feeding’s interesting. Considering how far we are from the natural order in this plastic society, it’s a wonder any function like breast-feeding survives. It gives one hope for the future. Maybe natural man will survive the plastic society after all, instead of degenerating into a computerized robot.

  We return to our apartment, and the living room’s beautiful, the best of W. & J. Sloane offset with thick dark blue rugs and plenty of glass and a watercolor which Vicky picked up for five dollars in Greenwich Village for no other reason than that she liked it. It’s a view of snowcapped mountains across water, a scene which reminds me of Tahoe in Nevada, but on the back the artist has written, “The South Island seen from the coast near Wellington,” and we figure the location is New Zealand, a beautiful country a long way away, somewhere to aim for someday, like heaven.

  I have more champagne in the refrigerator, so I whip into the kitchen to pull the cork.

  “Sebastian, no! I can’t drink another drop!”

  “Just one glass!”

  We take our glasses to the bedroom door.

  “Okay,” I announce. “Sound the trumpets! Hey, presto!”

  Opening the bedroom door, I switch on the light. A black-and-white pattern dances before my eyes. Chiaroscuro. Erotic. My guts feel as if they might melt. I drink my champagne very quickly.

  “My God!” says Vicky in awe. She tiptoes unsteadily toward the Picasso drawing on the wall. “Sebastian, is this an original?”

  “Of course not. I think it’s obscene to spend thousands of dollars on overpriced originals. That’s a first-class print and it costs twenty dollars, which in my opinion is exactly what that drawing’s worth. But it’s nice, isn’t it? I like the long line of her neck and back.”

  “It’s beautiful. The whole room’s gorgeous.” Vicky subsides weakly onto the bed, but she’s not watching her glass and the champagne spills on the floor. “Oh, no! The white carpet! Quick, where’s a cloth?”

  I get two cloths, one for each of us, and sinking onto all fours, we sponge furiously at the pile.

  “I think it’s going to be all right,” says Vicky seriously at last.

  “I know it is,” I say, looking straight at her.

  She hears the note in my voice and shrinks against the bed at her back.

  We’re silent. At last she says, “What a fool I’ve been.”

  “No, Vicky. You’re not that much of a fool. You wanted it all the time but you’ve been pretending to yourself that you haven’t because the thought of it makes you angry—not frightened, but angry—and you don’t want to be angry with me. But Vicky, I’m not going to treat you as you were treated in the past. I love you and I respect you and it’s all going to be very different.”

  She says without hesitation, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not angry. Nobody’s made me angry. Nobody’s treated me badly.”

  I get up, retrieve the champagne bottle from the kitchen, refill our glasses, and knock back as much champagne as I can manage without pausing for breath. Then I say in a remote academic voice worthy of a college professor who’s trying to get through to an intelligent but obstinate student, “Okay. You’re not angry. You just don’t like sex anymore. So what? A lot of people don’t like sex. There’s a whole industry built around people who don’t like sex. People aren’t breaking the law if they don’t like sex. This is a great big wonderful country, and you don’t have to like sex the way you have to like your mother, the flag, and apple pie. But why don’t you give poor old sex a break for once? Why not give poor old sex another chance? After all, you’ve got all that first-class equipment for free, and it seems a shame not to use it occasionally. Have you ever read the plays of Middleton?”

  I’ve thrown her off balance. “Who?”

  “Thomas Middleton. He was a contemporary of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur. He wrote about our sort of situation,
although he laced it with a lot of seventeenth-century melodrama. The villain pursues the heroine. The heroine repulses him. The villain somehow gets her to give in, and then—surprise! The heroine finds she likes it after all.” I touch her lightly with my index finger and she doesn’t draw back. “I won’t hurt you, Vicky,” I say urgently, moving a little closer. She still doesn’t shrink away. My hand glides to her thigh. My guts must look like full house at the snake pit. I want to take off my clothes. “It’ll be okay,” I insist in a low voice. “I’m not like Sam. All men are different. No one makes love quite the same way. Like handwriting.” I’ve got closer. My hand’s on her hip, then on her left breast. I kiss her neck. My blood feels molten, like some new liquid metal cooking in a surrealist fantasy. “I want to make love to you, Vicky,” I say. “Not just a female body with the right vital statistics, but you, the person who listens to Kevin’s plays with me and knows what they mean, the person who knows that Cicero was a philosopher as well as an orator, the person whose favorite color is blue and who likes oysters and bright lights reflected on wet sidewalks and the fountain in front of the Plaza and Frank Sinatra’s singing and Gervase de Peyer on the clarinet. You, you, you.”

  She lets me kiss her. She says nothing. I must be sweating at every pore. I don’t want to take off my clothes with the light on, because that might bring back the inhibiting memory of our Romeo-and-Juliet scene at Bar Harbor. I unbutton her dress instead. She lets me. My fingers don’t work properly, can’t connect with my brain. Can’t unhook her bra. Oh, hell. Mustn’t be clumsy. Please, please, God, make me be smooth and calm and confident like Frank Sinatra’s voice, another form of liquid metal flowing effortlessly out of the phonograph.

  I get rid of all the clothes. She never moves, never speaks. I kiss her all over in the hope that she might respond, but she doesn’t, and suddenly I realize I just can’t wait anymore. Pulling back the bedcovers, I ease her onto the black satin sheets. Jesus Christ. I try to turn out the lamp, but I knock it over and it goes out by itself. That was dumb. I’ve got to cool off. But I can’t. Everything’s molten now, not just me but everything, as if I’m in the midst of the white glowing lava which burst out of Vesuvius to inundate Pompeii in A.D. 79. In the darkness I strip off my clothes and find the satin sheets are like ice; there ought to be a sizzling sound, white-hot lava streaming into subzero water, but no, there’s just Vicky, firm, round, beautiful, perfect. …

  There must be a God somewhere, must be, because I’m in heaven. I’m in heaven and still alive. The ultimate triumph.

  She screams.

  I tell her it’s okay. I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know anything except that I can’t stop.

  She claws my back, tries to push me off.

  Maybe she’s afraid she’ll get pregnant, but don’t worry, Vicky, I’m no dumb kid, I know what I’m doing even when I’m almost out of control, almost, almost … Jesus, that was a close call. But I made it. I got out in time.

  Next time I’ll wear a rubber, but this time was special. This time it had to be just you and me with nothing between us.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, I’m so happy.

  I lie breathing very fast on the satin sheets, but Vicky pulls away from me, runs to the bathroom, and locks herself in.

  I hear her sobbing. Getting up at once, I pound on the bathroom door. My legs feel weak.

  “Vicky, are you okay?” Dumb question. Obviously she’s not. I rattle the handle. “Vicky, let me in, please.”

  I hear the hiss of the shower. She’s washing off everything, my kisses, semen, the whole paraphernalia. Question: Does she always do this, or is it because I’ve revolted her?

  Don’t know. Have to hope for the best. I turn on the light in the bedroom and scramble into my clothes. I don’t want her to be more repulsed by seeing me with no clothes on. Then I pour myself another glass of champagne and drink it right away.

  I wait.

  After a long time she comes out wrapped in a red towel. I want to communicate, but I can’t think of the right words.

  She’s unnerved by my silence, although she needn’t be. Averting her swollen eyes, she says, “It’s all right. It’s always hell the first time after childbirth. It doesn’t matter.”

  I want to take her in my arms and hold her gently, but I know she’d push me away. I’m just a sweating, hairy, slobbering beast, who hurts her inside. God, what hell women go through sometimes, and what hell men go through when women go through hell.

  “I love you,” I say at last.

  “Yes,” she says wearily, but she doesn’t understand.

  I haven’t communicated.

  I must try to think of something that will fix the pain. If she knows I’m concerned about her pain, I’ll communicate.

  “I’ll buy a lubricant,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer. She’s thinking of something else, or maybe she’s in some kind of shock. She picks up her clothes and goes back to the bathroom to dress. I hear the lock turn again on the door.

  I drink some more champagne. I hate champagne now. It seems like an offbeat lemonade, a perverted 7-Up. Finishing the bottle, I chuck it into the garbage can.

  When she leaves the bathroom she looks fresh and tidy, but her eyes are still swollen.

  “I want to go home now,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  I take her home.

  “ ’Night,” she says when the cab stops.

  “ ’Night.”

  We don’t touch, don’t kiss. I’m alone, she’s alone, but we’re both in hell.

  I go home to Elsa and pass out with all the drink just as she’s screaming to know where on earth I’ve been.

  January 15, 1959. I write Vicky a note because I can’t talk to her. “Dear Vicky: I love you very much. I want to make everything right. Please let me try to fix it. Sebastian. P.S. I want to see the latest Ingmar Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal, for the third time. Will you come with me? We don’t have to go to bed afterward. I just want to be with you.”

  She calls me at the office. “Thanks for the letter.”

  “Okay. How about the movie?”

  “All right. If you want.”

  “Uh-huh. Vicky …”

  “Yes?”

  “What movie do you want to see?”

  There’s a pause. Then she says, “Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.”

  “Right. Let’s go.”

  It’s not a new film, but Sam said it was junk when it first came out shortly before his death, and he refused to take Vicky to see it. I’ll bet it’s junk too, but I don’t care. If it makes Vicky happy, that’s good enough for me, so we set off downtown to where the movie’s showing in some incredible dump on Avenue B.

  I’m right. Sam was right. It’s junk. We’re back in the plastic culture again, stooping to the lowest common denominator, but that’s okay, it’s a laugh—we both laugh. The only defense against a plastic culture is to enjoy its awfulness or else it’ll send you completely up the wall. Vicky knows that too, and suddenly we’re together again, splitting our sides with mirth as Presley swivels across an elaborate set and rasps about the party he’s attending in the county jail. Jailhouse Rock is in black and white. Chiaroscuro. Exciting.

  When I clasp Vicky’s hand, she doesn’t pull it away, and afterward she agrees when I suggest we stop for hamburgers and malteds at a Greenwich Village coffee shop.

  “Can we go to our apartment, Vicky?” I dare to say at last. “Or don’t you want to?”

  “Okay.”

  We get to the apartment, and it’s a wonderful surprise because she’s cleaned it up and there’s a present for me on the table.

  I’m so overwhelmed I can’t speak. I unwrap the package clumsily and find an edition of two of Middleton’s plays: The Changeling and Women Beware Women.

  I kiss her and kiss her. Finally we go to bed. I’m in better control this time, and I cling to the control for all I’m worth, because I know I’m damned lucky to get a second chance. I do
n’t push too hard and I’ve got a packet of Trojans and enough lubricant to polish a ballroom floor.

  She doesn’t scream.

  I’d like to shower with her, but I don’t want her to see me with the light on. Maybe later when I’m more secure. We get dressed and I have a Scotch while she drinks Coke. We sit on the couch in the living room and look at the lights twinkling beyond the window. I’m much better. I don’t dare to be happy yet, but I think I might be soon.

  “How’s Postumus?” I say after a long silence, but Vicky seems to accept my silences at last, so I don’t have to worry about them.

  “Postumus is sweet. He smiles beautifully now.”

  “I like Postumus,” I say. “Sometimes I feel as if he’s mine.”

  Vicky considers this. “Because you stood up for me about calling him Benjamin?”

  “Uh-huh. And because after he was born you asked me for help. Because I loved you all the while you were pregnant, and afterward. Because there was no Sam around to remind me Postumus isn’t mine after all.”

  She asks if Elsa wants more children.

  “She can’t have any more. Pity. Still, we’ve got Alfred.”

  “Sebastian … what exactly is the situation with Elsa?”

  I explain my concept of the liaison. “You’re not interested in marriage, are you, Vicky?” I add, just to make sure.

  “No,” she says automatically, but adds with great haste, “I mean, not at the moment. Of course, I know I should get married again someday for the children’s sake.”

  “And what about your sake, Vicky?”

  “Oh, that too, of course! There’s no other acceptable alternative.”

  “There’s the alternative we’ve got going for us right now.”

  “Yes, but marriage is—”

  “Marriage is just a code word for society’s attempt to make order out of the chaos between the sexes. It’s like philosophers talking of the Absolute and the One in their attempts to make order out of a chaotic universe. But you can philosophize without referring to the Absolute and you can love someone without referring to marriage.”

  “You talk as if there’s no such thing as morality. This liaison of ours may suit us very well, but what about poor Elsa? How can you morally justify your behavior with me when you’re going to make her unhappy?”