Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Then Edward John would have lived and died for nothing.” Now it’s my turn to present the brutal truth. “Sure you love me, Vicky—like a sister loves a brother. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” I get up. I don’t touch her. I don’t kiss her good-bye. But I say quietly in my firmest voice, “Good luck, Vicky. Lots of luck, all the luck in the world. And remember—wherever you are and whatever happens to you, I’m with you all the way.”

  She can’t speak, just covers her face with her hands.

  I leave.

  I’m blind with pain. I walk but don’t know where I’m walking. Once I stop in a bar, but I can’t drink. I want to talk to someone, but there are no words.

  Should I go back to Elsa? No, she’d never have me back. I’d swallow my pride to be with Alfred again, but Elsa’s all Reischman and she’ll never forgive me for walking out on her.

  I wonder what I’ll do about women in the future. I guess I’ll eventually make it with someone again, although at present this seems inconceivable. I’ve no desire. I’m dead from the waist down,

  I walk and walk and I know it’s late because I see fewer people on the streets. I must go home, but where’s home? There’s Elsa’s place and Vicky’s place and Mother’s place, but none of them feels like home to me now. I must get a place of my own. A studio apartment. I’d like to live in one room, like a monk. I wonder who lives in Kevin Daly’s attic nowadays.

  I’d like to talk to Kevin Daly. I’d like to talk to the man who understands that two people can love each other yet still be cut off from true communication; I’d like to talk to the man who knows that love doesn’t necessarily conquer all.

  But Kevin’s so famous, so popular, so busy. Better not to bother him.

  Where the hell am I? I stop to look around. I seem to be on Eighth Street west of Fifth Avenue. Not far from Kevin”.

  I find a pay phone and get the number from the operator. Kevin’s listed under the pseudonym Q. X. O’Daly. I remember Vicky and I laughing about that once, long ago.

  The phone rings.

  “Hello?” says Kevin.

  “Hi,” I say. It’s so hard to speak, but I manage to tell him my name.

  “Ah!” says Kevin, sparkling as ever. “The man who compared me with John Donne! When are you going to come and see me?”

  I want to be polite and diplomatic, but it’s beyond me. I just say, “Now?”

  “Okay. You know the address, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” I say good-bye. Then I hang up and glance at my watch. It’s half-past one in the morning.

  Kevin’s wearing plain blue pajamas with a white robe on top. He opens the door and says he’s making coffee. Would I mind sitting in the kitchen?

  I try to apologize, but he waves that aside and somehow succeeds in making me feel welcome. His kitchen is warm and unpretentious. I tell him so, and he’s pleased.

  We sit down with our coffee. I’m not sure what to say—I don’t even know if I want to say anything—but I like sitting in a well-lit room with someone friendly. It’s better than being alone in the dark.

  “Well, how are you, Kevin?” I say, feeling that I must make some effort to talk, since he’s been so kind to me.

  “Frightful,” says Kevin. “My personal life’s like Hiroshima after the bomb. How are you?”

  He’s probably lying, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s signaling a message which has nothing to do with the surface meaning of this extravagant declaration. He’s seen that I’m wrecked. He’s agreeing how hellish life can be. He’s saying that if I want to talk he’ll listen.

  I talk a little, but not much, because I’m afraid of not behaving like an Anglo-Saxon.

  “Christ, this coffee’s terrible!” says Kevin. “Have a drink.”

  He’s writing a prescription to help me along.

  “Okay.”

  “Mind what you have?”

  “No.”

  Kevin produces a bottle with a picture of a bird on it, and soon talking gets a little easier. I can’t tell him everything, but it doesn’t matter, because Kevin picks up my disjointed sentences and reads meaning into them as no one else would.

  We have another drink.

  “I keep asking myself what will happen to her,” I say at last. “Will she in fact ever be able to stand alone? And if and when she does, will she like her new life any better than the old life she’s rejecting? What does independence mean for a woman anyway? Isn’t it a contradiction in terms? How can a woman reconcile the concept of independence with the biological fact that in most male-female relationships both parties are more comfortable if they feel the man’s the dominant partner?”

  “Ah, but is it biological?” says Kevin quickly. “Or is it just social conditioning? I remember discussing this point once with my sister, Anne, and she said—did anyone ever tell you about my sister, Anne?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t talk much about her nowadays. Well, Anne called this problem the classic feminine dilemma, and years ago, after her husband died—or was it after she left him? the two events were almost simultaneous—we sat down right here at this table and debated the subject together. I took the optimistic view: I thought that if only a woman would have the courage to be herself she’d have much more of a chance of finding a man with the courage to accept her as an independent person, even if she didn’t live up to our society’s concept of the ideal woman. But my sister Anne said I was deluding myself. She said this was sheer romantic idealism.”

  “Your sister Anne sounds a depressing cynic.”

  “My sister Anne is beautiful, intelligent, witty, and talented. But she said any woman who wanted to be independent automatically cut herself off from men in the male-oriented society we live in today because this society ensured that men could only cope with their own plastic fantasies of womankind; she said that by the time our society had raised these poor guys to fight wars and chase the godalmighty dollar, they just had no energy left to face any woman smarter than an animated doll. Anne said that until society changed, men’s attitudes to women wouldn’t change, but she saw no hope of change while the world was preoccupied with war and materialism. She told me to pray for a better world.”

  “And did you?”

  “No, I decided to leave it all to her. She’s a nun now, although whether she became a nun to pray for a better world or because she thought no man was good enough for her, I’m damned if I can decide. Every Christmas I go up to Massachusetts to see her, and every Christmas I get drunk out of my mind with rage. Anne says I’m jealous of God. Maybe she’s right. Christ! Have another drink.”

  “Okay. Kevin, this sister of yours …”

  “Oh, yes, it’s just another one of those run-of-the-mill till-death-do-us-part sibling relationships, nothing unusual, nothing sensational, but I was so pleased when her marriage broke up—it was after the war, and I’d bought this house and she was going to come and live with me, I had the attic all fixed up. She used to paint—Christ, I liked her paintings, I wanted Neil to buy one, but you know Neil, he probably thought it wasn’t a good investment.”

  “Yeah. He would.”

  “Then Anne went into the convent, so there I was with the attic fully converted for artistic use and no artist to put in it. That was when I embarked on my illustrious line of caretakers. I didn’t need a caretaker, of course, but no one seemed to think my behavior in the least extraordinary. It just shows that if you act with enough confidence people accept your actions without questioning them. Incredible. Did no one find it odd that I kept a caretaker? Apparently not. … I can’t think why I’m telling you all this. I usually keep my mouth shut about my more bizarre behavior.”

  “I don’t think it’s bizarre. Did you ever find anyone who measured up to Anne?”

  “No, of course not. And even if I had, I’d have been incapable of doing anything except treating her as a sister. God, isn’t life hell! More ice?”

  “Thanks. Say, Kevin, talking of your care
takers, is anyone using your attic at the moment?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I’ve just had the most godawful crisis. My last caretaker fell in love with me. I can’t tell you what a mess it was. I had someone living here at the time—a most unusual departure from routine, because I can’t stand anyone getting under my feet when I’m trying to write—and in a reckless moment I went to bed with both of them. Not together, of course, I’m much too old for orgies, but then, goddammit, the two of them got together and compared notes and all hell broke loose. The stupid thing was that Betty, my caretaker, was the one I really enjoyed living with—or not living with, if you follow me—but of course it was no good in bed, while my other house guest … Well, you can guess the rest. The truth of the whole matter is that I’m incapable of sustaining a close personal relationship with either sex. It’s a defect of my communications system. I communicate by writing, not by loving. My so-called talent’s just a profitable way of handling a huge inadequacy.”

  “Christ, Kevin, if everyone inadequate wrote your kind of plays, I’d go down on my knees and pray for a whole lot more inadequate people in the world!”

  “What shameless flattery! I love it. Have another drink.”

  I laugh and he laughs with me. Can I really be laughing? Yes, I am. I mustn’t think of Vicky, though, or I’ll start hurting again. Oh, God.

  “Now, tell me why you wanted to know whether the attic was free,” says Kevin, filling our glasses again.

  “I was wondering if I could rent it from you for a while. I’ve nowhere to go. I promise I’ll keep myself to myself and not be a nuisance.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll heave you out if you get tiresome. Yes, of course you can have the attic. Stay as long as you want. I think I may have reached the end of my long line of caretakers.”

  “How much rent shall I pay you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Buy me a bottle of bourbon occasionally to replace the ones your stepfather drinks.”

  “How often does Cornelius come here?”

  “About once a month. After Sam died, Neil and I decided we both found it comforting to talk occasionally to an old friend of well over thirty years’ standing. One gets appallingly sentimental, you know, once one’s past fifty.”

  “Christ, I wonder what Cornelius will think when he hears I’ve moved in here!”

  “The worst, of course,” says Kevin, poker-faced.

  We laugh again, and again I’m amazed that laughter’s possible. I feel very grateful to Kevin, but I don’t know how to show it except by not outstaying my welcome. I get up to leave.

  “Where are you off to now?” says Kevin, surprised. “I thought you said you had nowhere to go.”

  “Well, there’s Fifth Avenue …”

  “Forget it. You’d cut your throat in despair before you were halfway across the threshold. The attic’s in a mess at the moment, but I do have two guest rooms. Use one.”

  I use one. I sit down alone and think that communication’s like love. It doesn’t matter where, how, or with whom you do it so long as you do it because if you don’t do it you die.

  I’m going to live.

  I lie on the bed and think: I won’t sleep.

  But I do.

  PART FIVE

  SCOTT: 1960–1963

  Chapter One

  I

  THE TELEPHONE RANG.

  “Scott? Cornelius. The latest development in this godawful crisis is that Sebastian says he wants to go and work in the London office—he thinks it would be better if he went right away for a while, and personally so do I, I’m all for it, I don’t want him sulking around here and upsetting Vicky, but of course Alicia’s hysterical at the thought of Sebastian going to live so far away and she’s been saying some very harsh things about Vicky which I just can’t accept. …

  “Life’s tough at home at the moment, let me tell you, and I’m beginning to feel like I’m going crazy. It would all be so much easier if Alicia and I knew why this marriage has collapsed, but nobody explains, nobody tells us anything, and we’re just supposed to make guesses as if it was some damned quiz show. …

  “Do you think it’s got something to do with sex? I mean, if two people get on real well together yet still feel they’ve got to live apart, wouldn’t that imply there was some overriding sexual problem? Christ, that oaf Sebastian! First he walks out on Elsa, now he walks out on Vicky—the man’s obviously sexually unstable. I never told you this before, Scott, but there were a couple of incidents years ago, one at Bar Harbor and one right here in New York … What was that you said? Yes, yes, I know it’s Vicky who’s walked out, I know it looks as if Sebastian’s not the guilty party, but what else could my little girl do after winding up married to a sex pervert? … What did you say? … Oh, cut it out, for Christ’s sake! What do you know about marriage anyway? You’re just a forty-one-year-old bachelor who never gets involved! … The hell with you!” yelled Cornelius, having whipped himself into a rage, and slammed down the receiver.

  II

  The phone rang again five minutes later.

  “Hi, Scott, it’s me again. Look, I’m sorry I bawled you out just now—the truth is I’m so miserable I can’t think straight. Vicky’s gone to that apartment of hers on Sutton Place, Alicia’s not talking to me, and I’ve given up trying to confide in Kevin because he’s on Sebastian’s side and just says stupid things like, ‘Neil, fuck off, for God’s sake, and mind your own business.’ But it is my business! It was my grandson who died, wasn’t it, and my daughter whose heart’s been broken, and my wife who … well, let’s not talk about Alicia. I tried to tell Kevin all that, but he hung up, and then I just felt so down and so upset that I automatically dialed your number. … What was that? … Chess? Well, I hate to ask you, Scott, because I know how late it is, but … You will? That’s wonderful of you, Scott—many, many thanks. God, sometimes I wonder what I’d ever do without you. …”

  III

  “This is about the last private house left on Fifth Avenue, isn’t it?” said the cabdriver five minutes later. “Gee, the taxes must be sky-high! How does the old guy afford to live there? If I was him I’d sell out to the real-estate guys and go live in Miami Beach someplace and sit in the sun all day long …”

  The driver chattered on, unthinking, unfeeling, unaware that he was no more than a microscopic speck imprisoned in the straitjacket of time. Scott lived in time too, but I was beyond it. Scott saw the shabby interior of the cab and heard the driver’s Hispanic accent, but I saw the great gates of the Van Zale mansion and thought as I had so often thought before: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”

  It was Scott too who entered the house when the door was opened, but I was right there with him, just as I always was, and in my impregnable invisibility I watched his world with detachment from behind his smiling eyes.

  “Scott! I sure appreciate you coming …” Cornelius, wearing three sweaters, was hunched over an electric fire at one end of the library while he read a book by Harold Robbins. The temperature in the room was probably ninety degrees. “What are you drinking, Scott? Coke? Seven-Up? Root beer?”

  Cornelius was reminding me again of Masaccio’s portrait of St. John in his painting The Tribute Money. According to Masaccio, St. John is beautiful. He has curling golden hair, gray eyes, and exquisitely molded features, but despite these dazzling looks the face remains hard, the eyelids lowered at a sinister angle. Masaccio had caught the humanism of the Renaissance but had ruthlessly tainted his idealistic vision with the ferocious despotism of the Medicis.

  “It’s cold, isn’t it? Makes me wish I was in Arizona, but God only knows when I’ll see Arizona again. Alicia now tells me flatly that she hates it and has no intention of spending more than two weeks a year down there in future, so it looks like my dream of an early retirement and going to live at the ranch isn’t going to come to anything. …

  “But that doesn’t matter. I’d just about decided anyway that God didn’t intend me to live in Tucson, Ariz
ona, any more than he intended me to live in Velletria, Ohio. The truth is, I don’t know what I’d do down there to keep myself occupied. I guess I could start an art museum, but I can’t see it ever being as much fun as the one here in New York—in fact, I can’t see anything down there being as much fun as anything in New York, and besides … what would I do without the bank? I don’t think, after all, I’m cut out for an early retirement. …

  “Yes, I admit that when Sam died all I wanted was to work myself into a position where I could give up everything and live a quiet, peaceful domestic life with my wife somewhere a long way from New York, but I think I was in some kind of shock or something, I don’t think I was being realistic. If my asthma forces me to retire eventually, okay, so be it. But until that happens …

  “Oh, sure, I know that money and power are really very important, but banking’s my whole life, and goddammit, someone’s got to run the country’s banks, and if God didn’t mean me to be a banker, why did he make me the way I am? If God gives us specific gifts, isn’t it up to us to utilize them to the best of our ability? It seems to me I’ve got a kind of moral duty to keep working.”

  “Cornelius, your mind never ceases to amaze me once you start to wrap it around metaphysical problems! Let’s get going on our game of chess.”

  Half an hour passed. Two bottles of Coca-Cola were emptied, and the soft glow of the lamp illuminated the ivory figures edging toward one another across the board.

  “Are you mad at me, Scott?”

  “Why should I be mad at you, Cornelius?”

  “For postponing my retirement.”

  “No. Obviously you want to do what’s best for you and best for the bank. I could hardly expect you to do other than that.”

  “Well, I still want to be fair. I still want … Scott, I’m going to be just about this, and generous. I want to make everyone happy.”