Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Excuse me!” I exclaimed. “I …”

  The words died.

  Scott tried to step in front of me, but Scott was in New York and there was no summoning him. I stood there, stripped of my protective persona, and felt as defenseless as if I’d been staked stark naked to an anthill.

  “Scott!” The familiar voice was appalled.

  Like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, the sound of his name jolted me into action. It was useless even to pretend to be Scott. Scott would never set foot on a cruise ship, never wear bright, tight casual clothes or a silver medallion, never find himself face to face with the wrong woman in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Scott? Scott, it is you, isn’t it? Or is it your double?”

  “Of course it’s me!” I said, laughing, but as she spoke, I realized with astonishment that she was just as disoriented as I was. For she had left Vicky behind in New York, just as I had left Scott behind, and like me, she had come to the ship in her other identity to pursue that twentieth-century chastity: pleasure without involvement, total abstention from a commitment of any kind.

  “Why, what a surprise to see you, Vicky!” I heard myself say smoothly. “Welcome to good times!”

  Chapter Three

  I

  SHE WORE A DUSKY-ORANGE sundress, cut low, and a thin gold pendant round her neck. Her short bright hair was barely visible beneath the huge hat. She already had a delicate tan. Her wide gray eyes remained dismayed.

  “But what in heaven’s name are you doing here, Scott?”

  “Guess!”

  I had never seen her look so baffled.

  “Relax, Vicky, there’s no problem! We’ll make a pact. You go your way and I’ll go mine and neither of us will say one word afterward to either Cornelius or anyone else in New York. Okay?”

  “Okay. … You mean you’re not exactly a eunuch after all?”

  I just laughed.

  She blushed. “I’m sorry, I know I’m behaving stupidly, but it was just such a shock to see you like this …”

  “Then I’ll leave you alone to recover. So long, Vicky—enjoy yourself.”

  I moved on through the crowd, but when I reached the purser’s office and glanced back I saw she had remained motionless, the bemused expression still in her eyes but a faint smile curving the corners of her father’s firm, familiar mouth.

  II

  The ship departed for St. Thomas, and soon the passengers had sloughed off the polite mannerisms of twentieth-century convention and had adopted the bawdy camaraderie displayed by Chaucer’s pilgrims on their immortal journey to Canterbury. Abandoning all memory of Scott in his New York role of the Clerk of Oxenford, I adopted the role of the Knight and set out to see the world with my own code of chivalry stamped well in the forefront of my mind. I saw a young girl I liked, but rejected her as too vulnerable; I met someone older but rejected her as too neurotic. I had no wish to hurt them. However, within hours I had found a widow of my own age from Atlanta, and once I had discovered that her attitude to vacations coincided with mine, we were soon busy proving our mutual theory that cruises had more to offer than vacations ashore.

  I did my best to avoid Vicky, but on a ship it’s hard, if not impossible, to overlook a glamorous young divorcée who attracts more than her fair share of attention. Resplendent in their white uniforms, the officers fluttered around her as soon as the sun sank into the sea; the cruise staff, personable young men hired to look after the passengers, recklessly ditched their attentive wallflowers to dance with her. At first it seemed Vicky preferred the cruise staff because the majority of them were uninterested in smothering her with sexual attention, but presently she eyed the officers and selected the chief engineer. The captain, an inscrutable man who operated with great discretion, had probably signaled that he was willing to wait.

  I enjoyed my widow from Atlanta, but of course I had to move on; the disaster in San Juan had only enhanced my dread that my incompetence would be discovered unless I changed partners regularly. But it was with genuine regret that I edged away, trying a quick fling with another widow before making a fleeting connection with a B-deck stewardess who turned out to be frigid. I was just beginning to feel depressed again when on the approach to Martinique I spotted an interesting-looking woman who was sharing a cabin with an individual soon known to one and all as “Old Blue-Rinse.” The interesting woman, who was plain but with an excellent figure, proved to be a poor relation to this formidable Miami matron, and had been offered a free cruise on condition that she wait on her benefactor daily from dawn till dusk.

  I circled the pair warily. First I decided that an unmarried, obviously chaste woman in her mid-thirties would expect too much if I started paying her attention, but then I changed my mind. The sheer misery of life as Old Blue-Rinse’s lackey would hardly have encouraged the woman to hold high expectations of the cruise, and any encounter, no matter how fleeting, was likely to be gratefully received.

  I rashly decided to give her a voyage to remember.

  “Hi, Judy!” I said one afternoon when we met by chance outside the library. “Are you free for shuffleboard?”

  It was hardly a brilliant opening, but on cruises even the most unoriginal proposal will suffice.

  Judy was obviously pleased to be noticed, but she declined the invitation. Having just taken a book from the library, she was on her way back to the tyrant for the afternoon reading session.

  “How about a drink this evening?” I persisted, spelling out the proposition in letters a yard high.

  “Gee, I’d love to, but …” Judy was entranced by the offer but terrified of Old Blue-Rinse.

  “I can wait,” I said, “until after Mrs. Miami Beach is stashed in bed in her curlers.”

  “Oh! Well …”

  “Think about it,” I said kindly, moving past her into the library doorway. “I’ll be in the forward bar.”

  Judy stammered her thanks and rushed off in confusion to her jailer. Feeling somewhat as Santa Claus might feel after paying a pre-Christmas visit to a deserving child, I strolled on into the library to cast a glance over the shelves.

  Sitting just inside the door, her feet tucked up beneath her on the couch, was Vicky.

  “Hi!” I said. “Reading something mindless?”

  “Deliciously banal!” She showed me the title of the costume romance and we laughed together.

  I was more at ease with this other Vicky now because I had trained myself to think of her as someone entirely different from the Vicky that Scott knew in New York. That Vicky had a narrow, uneducated mind and irritated Scott by her phony intellectual poses. This Vicky was smart enough to know poses were a waste of time. The New York Vicky, surrounded by children, servants, and a doting husband or father, was distracted and moody, totally encased in a rich spoiled woman’s discontent. This Vicky was as direct and relaxed as her father when Scott met him at night for a game of chess.

  I looked at the costume romance in her hands and thought of Cornelius reading a book by Harold Robbins. It was odd that Vicky should remind me of Cornelius, not Emily, but I had long known that Vicky was radically different from her aunt, just as I had long realized the great irony implicit in Cornelius’ relationship with his daughter. He had wanted a daughter who was the mirror image of the sister who had personified all the traditional virtues of womanhood to him, but instead he had produced a daughter who was far too like him for him to dare to accept her as she was.

  If Cornelius had been able to see his daughter as she was, he would hardly have wasted time worrying about whether she was drinking, drugging, or sleeping herself into an early grave. This woman was a survivor. She had that same frail delicate look which Cornelius had perfected to fool his enemies, but I wasn’t fooled for a minute. In my detachment I saw so clearly that this was a woman who had endured a broken home, two unfortunate marriages, five children, the Van Zale fortune, even the efforts of Cornelius himself to bend her into Emily’s image—and yet still she had emerged fr
om the wreckage with enough strength to carve out a new life of her own. I was reminded of Cornelius enduring a secluded childhood, poor health, a domineering mother, years of stupefying middle-class boredom in Velletria—and yet still managing not only to escape but to grab the Van Zale bank and the grudging respect of everyone who had previously written him off as a nonentity.

  Yet no matter how admirable their survival record, survivors should always be treated with care. They’re tenacious, going after what they want and clinging on till they get it, and such single-mindedness can be dangerous; having long ago bracketed Vicky with her father as a survivor, I had simultaneously resolved to keep her at arm’s length at all times.

  “Aren’t cruises extraordinary?” she was remarking, amused. “I’ve never before stepped into such an unreal world!”

  “I don’t see anything unreal about everyone running around submitting to their basic instincts. You could even argue that this is a more real world than the world we know in New York.”

  “Some reality! Say, Scott, I sure hope Judy can escape tonight. If I were in her shoes, I’d have murdered that old bag on the first day out of San Juan!”

  “I believe you!” I drifted away again, reflecting idly on the difference between Judy’s vacation and Vicky’s. Vicky had discarded the chief engineer after Martinique and to everyone’s astonishment had annexed the chief officer before Barbados. The captain was still waiting discreetly in the wings. I guessed he’d make his move as we sailed out of Curaçao on the last section of the voyage back to Puerto Rico.

  Returning to my cabin, I took a nap to catch up on all the sleep I was missing and crawled off my bed to dress for dinner. A couple of envelopes had been pushed under the door while I slept. One was an invitation to a party, but the other was a note which read: “Hi! I’d love to see you this evening, but please not in the bar in case word gets back to Mrs. B. Could we get together in your cabin? Mrs. B. will be asleep by 11:30, so I could slip away around midnight. If this is okay, please wear a white carnation in your buttonhole at dinner this evening. Judy. P.S. Please could the cabin be totally dark because I don’t usually do this kind of thing and I am very shy.

  I whistled my appreciation. It was true that Old Blue-Rinse would have driven even the nicest woman to a clandestine assignation with a stranger, and it was also true that on board ship anything can happen, but I was still impressed by the panache of the girl’s counterproposal. A white carnation at dinner followed by a midnight rendezvous—without any boring preliminaries—between the sheets! I was not only greatly entertained by this odd combination of the romantic and the bawdy; my palate, which by this time was becoming jaded, even showed signs of being titillated. I certainly forgot about my depression, and after buying a very large white carnation at the florist’s, I ran down to dinner with unprecedented eagerness. If I had been a drinker, I would have ordered champagne for everyone at my table.

  I smiled at Judy across the dining room, and Judy smiled at me.

  After idling away the evening in the casino without losing too much money, I retreated to my stateroom, and by midnight I was tucked up in bed with the lights out. To say I was excited would have been the understatement of the year.

  The door opened.

  I could not see it, for my cabin was L-shaped,” the door opening into a tiny corridor which connected the bathroom with the rectangular bedroom. Since the bed was in the far corner, all I could see of the corridor was the beginning of the row of closets which ran along one wall, and when the door of the stateroom opened stealthily, it was not the door I saw but the shaft of light which filtered in from the main passage outside.

  The door closed. The light died. There was a silence while we both held our breath.

  “Hi!” I called softly at last. “Can you see anything? Sure you wouldn’t like some light?”

  “No, I’m okay,” she whispered. “No lights. Please. I wouldn’t know where to look.”

  “Relax! I admire your guts in getting away for some fun! You’re wonderful!”

  This seemed to give her the encouragement she needed, for she groped her way to the bed and I heard the rustle as she discarded her dress. Static from the hot nylon flashed in the dark, but apart from an anonymous moving shadow I could see nothing.

  She slipped between the sheets into my arms.

  Since the circumstances were unique, even in my broad experience of cruises, and since I sincerely felt that she deserved the best possible reward for her originality, I decided I must do everything I could to make the occasion memorable for her. So I took the time to linger over each caress, and as my hands moved across her body I discovered to my surprise that her figure was even better than I had supposed.

  Her response was silent but avid. We twisted together with increasing fervor for some minutes, and then when I felt at last that I had completed my outside reconnaissance, I unleashed my most urgent inclinations and went in.

  It was the most remarkable visit.

  The most erotic part of all was that she was completely silent. I had never before made love to such a silent woman, but I knew from the movements of her body and the texture of her hidden flesh that the experience was as exceptional for her as it certainly was for me.

  She was breathing swiftly, but still not even a whisper passed her lips, and suddenly the anonymity of her silence smoothed away all tension from my mind. I began to feel as if I were making love not to a specific woman but to an entire world which I had been forbidden to enter, and yet I found myself enrapt by it, drawn on and on until the word “forbidden” was meaningless and all that mattered was the magnetic light of that other world, the world which existed in a dimension where death had no part to play. And with the distractions of speech excluded and all trace of my shackled personality smoothed away, I was free to bend both mind and body toward celebrating my escape from the shadow of the death I feared so much; I was free to pass beyond my dread that one false step would lead me to the grave with my life’s ambition unrealized; I was free to be free, free to be myself, and free, free, free at last from my fear of losing control. …

  III

  “Oh, God!” cried the woman beneath me, rocketing me back into the other world, and the involuntary thrust of her body shoved us both violently against the wall alongside the bed.

  The shock streaked through me like a high-voltage explosion. I knew that voice and it didn’t belong to Judy.

  I punched on the light.

  She screamed.

  For a second we both had to shield our eyes against the glare, but as we let our hands fall we stared at each other, each of us unable to look away. Her pupils were utterly opaque. The irises were a petrified pristine gray.

  Neither of us spoke.

  A second later I was moving. I had kicked aside the tangled lump of sheet and was on my feet. The floor felt cold. I was so dizzy that I had to put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, but at last I reached the sanctuary of the bathroom and rammed home the bolt as soon as I had slammed shut the door.

  IV

  Vicky tapped timidly on the panel. “Scott?”

  I did not answer. I was trying to turn on the cold tap, but my fingers had no strength in them. I tried again, using both hands, and the next moment the cold water was burning my hands like dry ice. After dowsing my face, I nerved myself to look in the mirror, but the reflection there was the one I wanted to see, and I knew I was safe. I’d been afraid I would see Scott. That would have been very serious, but Scott was evidently still back in New York along with the New York Vicky, and I was still myself, emerging from yet another one-night stand with just another chance acquaintance. That was a manageable situation. That was something I could handle with one hand tied behind my back. That was something I could control.

  I grabbed a towel, tucked it around my waist, and unlocked the door.

  She was there. She had pulled on one of my shirts to hide her nakedness and was hugging it tightly to her body. Her bright hair was disheveled.
She looked sick with fright.

  “Oh, Scott …”

  “You want to use the bathroom? Go ahead. Sorry I was so long.” I stepped past her, and as the door closed quietly I began to make the bed as if I could somehow unmake what had happened there. Halfway through straightening the blankets, I had to sit down. I felt exhausted, and suddenly I was aware of the soiled sheets, the smell of sex, the satiation in the groin, the danger, the horror, the fear … The shock reached me at last, and I was stupefied. I felt no joy, no triumph, no excitement. Now that I knew who she was, the success would never be repeated. And now that I knew who she was, the success was no longer a success but an unbelievable lapse in self-discipline.

  The shock deepened. I abandoned the idea of making the bed and began to grope around for my clothes. I could no longer think clearly. I hardly knew what I was doing.

  The bathroom door opened.

  “Scott … No, please! Let me speak! I must tell you how very sorry I am—I must at least ask you to forgive me! It was a cheap, sick, decadent trick, and … Oh, God, I’ll never go on another cruise again, never, never, never …”

  She stopped. I knew instinctively, like some masterly actor faced with a world-famous speech by Shakespeare, that this was where I showed my years of training, experience, and class. I groped for my identity—but which identity? Not Scott. He would never have got himself into such a mess. That left myself, the cripple who conned his partners he was uncrippled, and I saw at once with the most violent self-loathing that even though I had just proved I need not be crippled, I would still have to go right on living my crippled life. The only way to extricate myself from danger was to continue to play the con man. I had to go right on being a liar, a loser, and a cheat.

  “Relax, Vicky!” my voice said, laughing. “Spare me the great soul-searching agony! What’s the big deal? It was fun! Sure it was a trick you’d never dream of pulling on shore, but so what? Half the fun of a cruise is that you do all the things you’d never dare do anywhere else! Now, let’s be honest—it was a brilliant maneuver superbly executed and we both had a great time. So why don’t we celebrate? Let me take you to the aft bar for a drink so that we can toast each other’s health before we go our separate ways!”