Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  Yet the big irony of my situation was that despite the fact I had so little to offer, I was never short of partners. Once I had been amazed that women should be anxious to go to bed with me, for I was neither as good-looking nor as personable as my brother Tony, but eventually I had come to accept that there was no accounting for feminine taste and that I might as well make the most of this unexpected advantage. So when I periodically traveled my escape route, I always tried to have as many women as possible, but this led to yet another irony in my offbeat private life: I couldn’t take full advantage of my good fortune. I was much too afraid of losing control.

  I’d been all right in the navy. With my fear of involvement anesthetized by alcohol, I had had no trouble producing a sexual performance which even the great Kinsey would have certified as normal, but after the war, when I had abandoned alcohol and had become steadily more absorbed in the need for self-discipline, matters had changed. For years now I had suffered from a chronic inability to complete the sexual act in the normal manner, although fortunately—and this was the crowning irony of my ironic private life—most women never realized the extent of my limitation and assumed with profound gratitude that I was prolonging the act for their sake.

  Sometimes I used to get upset, but not often. There are worse sexual problems. Why complain when most women think one’s some kind of supremely considerate stud? I had enough common sense to realize I must see the humorous side of the situation, so whenever I found myself getting upset, I’d smile to myself and shrug my shoulders and pretend the failure was very unimportant. So long as I kept up the appearance that I was successful with women, what did the reality matter?

  But reality was waking up alone in a hotel room in a city far from home. Reality was touching people yet making no contact. Reality was a chase which never ended and a longing which no one satisfied and a freedom from fear which was always beyond my reach. Reality was isolation, a lifeless life, or, as Emily had said before she died, a living death.

  I sat in the dark thinking of Emily for a long time, but eventually I stood up and moved back into the kitchen to open another bottle of Coca-Cola. I was determined not to be depressed that night. Later, when my vacation was over, I could allow myself a few minutes of self-indulgent gloom, but not now when my vacation lay ahead of me and I had the chance of traveling a two-week escape route from Scott’s life at Willow and Wall.

  Thinking of the bank reminded me of Cornelius, and I looked up at the picture on the wall. I had only one picture in the apartment, and I kept it above the kitchen sink because it would have been an intrusion in the bedroom or living room. It was the detail from The Tribute Money, an enlargement of Masaccio’s sinister portrait of St. John. I wondered if Cornelius would have seen himself in that picture, but I thought not. We never see ourselves as others see us.

  Switching on the gooseneck lamp in the living room, I picked up my copy of JFK: The Man and the Myth, but Victor Lasky’s critical assessment of Kennedy irritated me and I soon put the book aside. It was fashionable nowadays to knock Kennedy, but I was determined to have no part of it. We were almost the same age, Jack Kennedy and I, and sometimes I thought his courage and his glamour and his supreme fulfillment of all his father’s dreams gave me the will to go on with my quest. He was the living proof that all the sacrifices were worthwhile; he proved that if one had enough ambition one could go on and on and on to the very end of one’s dreams.

  I put on a record, soft jazz by Dave Brubeck, and thought about my dreams.

  I was satisfied with my progress. My position was excellent. Of course there was no possibility that I would accept Jake’s offer, but it would be politic to flatter him by taking a long time to turn the offer down. Later I would tell Cornelius about it and we would laugh together. That would make Cornelius happy, and his confidence in me would reach new heights. Jake had the situation summed up entirely wrong, but that was hardly surprising, since he was only an outsider, trying to decipher a complicated situation from a long way away.

  Unless I either went mad or made some incredible mistake, I was going to get that bank. Cornelius’ guilt, which I had exploited so carefully for so long, would never let him rest until he had conceded more power to me than he could afford, and once that happened, I could wrap up my quest in double-quick time. Nineteen-sixty-eight, the year he had promised to retire in my favor, was still five years away, but I often wondered if he would last that long. He was fifty-five years old now, and his asthma was becoming an increasing burden. He had already outlived my father by three years.

  I thought about my father for a while. I did not consciously think of him often, but he was with me always, a shadow on the mind, a weight on the soul, a memory burned on the brain, and so completely had I absorbed all essence of him into my personality that usually I was him, although sometimes I could stand apart and view him dispassionately as a separate entity. I wished I could have understood more clearly what he had seen in Dinah Slade. I could now accept that he had been out of his mind as the result of a sexual obsession, but the irrationality of his action still upset me. “Dinah was the love of his life,” my brother Tony had written in his famous letter which had given Cornelius such a fright, but I had read those words and felt more baffled than ever. Dinah Slade? I remembered a large plain woman with an irritating English accent. I had forgiven my father, but even now I was still a long way from understanding him.

  I meditated again on the extraordinary phenomenon of sexual attraction, and the next moment I was remembering Sebastian, wrecking his career by pursuing his irrational obsession with Vicky. Vicky? I couldn’t think what he saw in her. It was true she was pretty, but her mind was as limited as her father’s, and her frivolous personality should have been far too shallow to attract a man of Sebastian’s caliber. His infatuation with her was as incredible as my father’s infatuation with Dinah, and made me wonder again how any sane person could believe that falling in love was a romantic dream. Falling in love was no romantic dream. Falling in love was a nightmare.

  I sighed as I thought of Sebastian. I missed him. I thought: If Sebastian were here we could talk about the Greek concept of Eros and contrast it with the medieval convention of chivalrous love, and Sebastian would say chivalry was all a myth, and then we would debate whether myth was superior to reality: I would argue in favor of myth, citing the legends of Finn Mac Cool and Cuchulain, but because Sebastian thought Celtic legends were incomprehensible, he would dredge up all his Anglo-Saxon heroes to argue that reality was always superior; he would exclaim: “Give me Alfred any day … or Edwin … or Oswald carrying his great cross into battle—they were real people!” and we would laugh together and be the friends we were meant to be instead of rivals becoming gradually more divided by our ambition.

  I got up restlessly, moved to the window, and tilted the slats of the blinds so that I could stare across the dark park to the lights of Queens. The thought of my ambition had reminded me of Cornelius again. What did I feel toward Cornelius now? An exasperated dislike? No, not even that. Once long ago I had hated him, but that white-hot hatred had burned up all emotion and left only the scorched scars of indifference. Scott had made sure of that. Scott had understood that a man makes mistakes when he’s under the influence of hatred, just as he makes mistakes when he’s under the influence of love. Scott had made it clear to me that there was no room in my life for the violent extremes of emotion, and anyway, Scott was fond of Cornelius and found him amusing. Cornelius had been very good to Scott, a fact which meant nothing to me, but of course it was not surprising that Scott should feel grateful.

  The truth was, Cornelius was just an object to me now, a little ivory figure retreating before me upon the chessboard, and one day soon I’d be able to reach across that board, pick him up, and toss him into the garbage can along with his grandsons. Would I then feel some emotion? Yes, I’d probably feel the most acute relief that the long game had finally been concluded, and then … Then I’d be able to set aside my fear
of death at last, then I’d be able to lead a normal life—

  The telephone rang.

  “Hi, Scott. Cornelius … no, relax! I’m not about to haul you over here for a game of chess—I know you’re getting ready for your vacation. I just wanted to say have a good time and send me a card if you get the chance, and … say, how about telling me where you’re going? You’re always so closemouthed about your vacations!”

  “California.” I often lied to Cornelius about my destination because I didn’t want him dragging me back to the office if some unforeseen crisis arose.

  “That sounds nice! And November’s a good time to go chasing the sun.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Well … that’s all, I guess. So long and good luck.”

  Scott said good-bye and vanished. I hung up the phone and wondered with a detached intellectual curiosity whether it was abnormal to feel such an absence of emotion. Then I decided that abnormal or not, lack of emotion was safe. It merely proved I was totally in control of my life.

  I went to bed and dreamed I was halfway through a bottle of Scotch and smashing a bloodstained faceless head against a wall.

  IX

  I was alive. I had cast aside the deadweight of Scott’s persona and my spirits were soaring as high as the Pan Am 707 which swept me off the tarmac in New York and climbed up and up and up into the coruscating sunlight of my liberation. The bank was far away now, as far away as the recluse’s life I had to lead off-duty to recuperate from my working hours, and as far away as the Middle Ages where myth and reality had mingled so effortlessly in that war-torn, plague-infested, death-ridden landscape. I was in the twentieth-century present, surrounded by twentieth-century technology. I was a twentieth-century American with Time magazine in my hands and a pretty young stewardess at my elbow.

  “Can I get you a drink now, sir?”

  I smiled at her, and as she turned a delicious shade of pink, I suddenly wanted all the pleasure I could get; I wanted champagne foaming from a gold-necked bottle, I wanted caviar, I wanted a king-sized bed with a mirror above it in the ceiling, I wanted six women one after the other, I wanted to spend a thousand dollars a minute for twenty-four hours straight, I wanted each one of the seven deadly sins gift-wrapped in gilt and garnished with a scarlet bow.

  I laughed at myself, and the pretty stewardess laughed with me, not understanding but responding instinctively to my mood.

  “How about that champagne?” she said, remembering I had declined champagne earlier.

  “Make it a ginger ale. Say, how long’s your stopover in Puerto Rico?”

  It was six o’clock that evening when I reached the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan and checked into a suite overlooking the ocean. The entryway, bedroom, and bathroom covered a bigger area than my New York apartment. After a shower I toweled myself down by the windows facing the sea and thought how much ascetic, intellectual Scott would have detested the plush American hotels overseas, but I was entertained by their twentieth-century opulence and the brash vulgarity of those guests celebrating life as crudely as they knew how.

  I went downstairs to the bar.

  A brunette of uncertain age but certain obvious charms was killing time drinking daiquiris before heading to the airport to take a plane home to New Orleans. I offered to pick up the tab for the drinks and was accepted. Two hours later, after I had seen her into a cab, I only just had time to run back to my room to straighten the bed before the pretty stewardess called me from the lobby on the house phone.

  The stewardess had to leave me by nine o’clock the next morning, but by nine-thirty I was sunning myself by the pool. I wore my tightest, whitest pair of swimming shorts, but I needn’t have troubled to make myself so noticeable. All I had to do was lie on my chaise in the sun and admire the originality of all the women who devised ways of striking up a conversation.

  I spent the day much as I had spent the night, and spent the following night much as I had spent the previous day. Then I checked out of the Sheraton and checked into the Hilton so that I had a change of pool and a new chaise. By this time I had convinced myself I was in the midst of a highly enjoyable vacation. So far all the women had complimented me, and whenever it had become necessary to gloss over my imperfections, I had delivered my word-perfect excuse with a smoothness any con man would have envied.

  “I believe in conserving my energy … I don’t want to wind up worn out before I’m halfway through my vacation …”

  The absurd words would have made me laugh if the situation had been less awkward, and when every woman accepted the absurdity unquestioningly, I often did laugh, particularly when admiring remarks followed about my technique and stamina and consideration for my partner; one woman even asked if I had any tips she could pass on to her lover back home. However, when I laughed, the women just thought I was being modest, so I got away with my deception time after time and emerged from each encounter with nothing worse than a well-exercised body and a vague incredulity that so many women could be so easily deceived.

  And then one afternoon I found myself in bed with a chaste-looking schoolteacher—I was always more attracted to the ones who looked chaste—and within minutes I knew not only that her chastity was as much an illusion as my competence, but that she was quite sharp enough to laugh outright at any garbage I might try to hand her when the time came for an explanation.

  It was not an unknown situation for me to find myself in, but it was a situation which never failed to appall me. No con man ever enjoys being unmasked. The disaster would no doubt have reduced many men to impotence, but on me it had exactly the opposite effect. As soon as I realized I was on the brink of being found out, my extreme tension not only made a climax out of the question but made me afraid to withdraw for fear my lack of satisfaction would be so obvious.

  “What’s your problem?” said the woman when she was well-satisfied and had obviously had enough.

  “No problem. I …” I couldn’t make up my mind what to do. With a less-experienced woman I could have tried faking it; that usually worked, although the women had probably speculated afterward about the physical evidence—or the lack of it. Then I wondered if I could have some convenient attack of sciatica, or perhaps trouble with a disk which slipped at inconvenient moments. I lay there propped on my elbows, sweating profusely, breathing rapidly and no doubt looking as thoroughly ridiculous as I felt, and then before I could make up my mind how I should extricate myself from the mess, the woman herself took charge of the situation.

  “Let’s call it a day, shall we?” she said, pushing two competent hands firmly against my chest. “I’ve met guys like you before. You’re not interested in your partner—you don’t have the time. You’re too busy worrying over your ego and wondering why the hell you can’t get all the fancy equipment to work properly.”

  I somehow managed to pull out and drag the sheet up to cover myself, but I was trembling and it was hard to make even the simplest movements. I was also in considerable physical discomfort. I managed to say without looking at her, “I’m satisfied with the equipment. If you’re not, shop around,” and then I blundered away into the bathroom to relieve myself. It was several minutes before I could summon the nerve to go back into the bedroom, but when I eventually opened the door, I saw the bed was empty and I knew I was alone again in yet another hotel room a long way from home, unbearably alone, unbearably humiliated, unbearably conscious of an unbearable failure.

  I wanted to rest, but I couldn’t. I got dressed and went right down to the nearest bar and picked up another woman. Then I went through the whole performance again, except that this time the woman went away happy and unsuspecting. But I was still alone, still a failure. I said aloud to myself: “It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.” But I knew that it did. I wanted to get drunk then, but I knew that was the one escape route I must never try, so I went down to the casino instead and dropped a thousand dollars at the tables. It took me all night to lose the money, but I didn’t mind that, b
ecause I didn’t want to go back to that empty room.

  I felt glad I was due to leave the hotel the next morning to join my cruise ship at the docks. As I knew from past experience, it was almost impossible to feel alone on a cruise ship. That was one of the reasons why I so often spent my vacations at sea; the other reason, of course, was that a cruise provided unlimited opportunities for casual sexual connections.

  Blotting out the memory of my disastrous encounter with the schoolteacher, I checked out of the hotel, took a cab to the docks, and boarded the snow-white European ship with a determination to recapture my high spirits and salvage my vacation.

  My stateroom on A deck seemed more than adequate for nocturnal adventures. Checking the stewardess, I found her unattractive, but undaunted, I unpacked my suitcase and strolled back to the promenade deck to inspect the public rooms. The bars where I would be consuming vast amounts of ginger ale were plush, the ballroom large but not cavernous, the inevitable casino well-appointed but discreet. The passengers as always would be an unknown quantity, but since the cruise was short, it was likely that a high percentage of them would be young; I always avoided the longer cruises dominated by the geriatric set.

  I had just decided with satisfaction that I could spend ten entertaining days and ten equally rewarding nights aboard this particular ship when a brace of well-manicured college girls asked me the way to the aft bar and I had to pause to get my bearings. Ahead of me I could see the main hall, and after I had dispatched the girls up the nearest stairway, I moved on toward the purser’s office with the idea of cashing a traveler’s check.

  The main hall was crowded, as passengers were still boarding, and as I stepped sideways to avoid a seaman wheeling a baggage cart, I bumped into a woman who was standing in front of a notice board with her back to me. Her huge straw hat was tipped askew by the collision, and as the strap of her bag slipped off her shoulder, she turned with annoyance to face me.