Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “I …”

  “Yes?”

  “I was an accessory …”

  “An accessory?”

  “… before the fact …”

  “Before the fact? What fact?”

  “… of his murder,” I said. “Of course. What else?” And slumping down on the ottoman I buried my face in my hands.

  III

  “But your father wasn’t murdered,” said Vicky.

  “Yes, he was. He was driven into alcoholism and harassed to his death. And I stood by and let it happen. I turned away from my father. I was loyal only to the man who killed him.”

  “But your father walked out on you!”

  “No, he always wanted me and Tony to live with him. He walked out on Emily but not on us.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I was upset because I loved Emily so much. I was only fourteen and I didn’t understand anything. Then Cornelius stepped in and took me over. I shouldn’t have let him, but I did. It was a terrible thing to do. I turned my back on my father and made up my mind to have nothing more to do with him.”

  She was appalled. “Are you trying to tell me that my father …?”

  “Your father’s not really an issue here. Don’t get sidetracked. The main issue’s between me and my father. Your father’s just a figure on a chessboard whom I have to manipulate in order to reach my father and make amends to him. I have to make amends, you see. It’s my one justification for being alive. I wouldn’t be fit to live otherwise. I did such a terrible thing, siding with his murderer, conniving at his guilt … How can people do such terrible things and survive? My father died, my brother died, my mother died—and yet I lived. It seems so wrong, and that’s why I’ve got to justify myself, I can’t die now till I’ve justified my survival. If I can bend my undeserved life to rewriting an undeserved past … You understand, don’t you? You do understand?”

  “You couldn’t have treated your father that badly! You were so young, you were mixed up, this has all got exaggerated in your mind …”

  “My father loved me. I hated him and hoped he would die. When he did die, I was glad. I actually said to Cornelius, ‘Thank God he won’t be around to bother us anymore.’ Can you imagine that? I actually said—”

  “This is all Daddy’s fault, I know it is. It’s utterly wrong that you should blame yourself like this.”

  “I shouldn’t have let myself be influenced by Cornelius. Tony wasn’t influenced. He always saw straight through him.”

  “Tony’s position was probably different from yours. He was younger, at a less vulnerable age. And Daddy never liked Tony, did he? Tony was probably not subjected to the same influence. You shouldn’t compare your behavior with Tony’s.”

  “I even turned my back on Tony, and later I never had the chance to make it up with him. I never had the chance to make it up with my father, either. They died and I was left with no way of unloading my guilt—no way except one way, and that was the way I had to take. … God, can’t you see the kind of past I had to live with as soon as I read Tony’s last letter to me and realized exactly what I’d done? Well, of course, the truth was I couldn’t live with it. I saw at once I had to rewrite it through Cornelius and the bank. There was no choice. There was nothing else for me to do. I did think of killing myself, but—”

  “Scott!”

  “Well, of course I did! Of course! And if I fail to rewrite the past, I’ll think of it again, because then I wouldn’t want to live anymore.”

  “You mustn’t talk like this! It’s wicked! It’s wrong!”

  “Why? Death and I are old acquaintances—I think about him often, I live with him all the time. Sometimes I see him watching me when I look in the mirror, and then I go to the bathroom and get the razor, and sometimes I even run the water in the bath. … The Romans committed suicide that way—a hot bath, the severed veins, and then death comes without pain, very peacefully, you just drift into unconsciousness, but always I’ve thought, no, I can’t die yet, I can’t die until I’ve completed my quest and succeeded where my father failed. …”

  “Scott … Scott, listen … Scott, please …”

  “Ah, Vicky, Vicky, you never knew my father, but he was such a wonderful guy, so full of life—yes, that’s what I remember best, I remember how full of life he was, and that’s why I’ve got to go on, Vicky, that’s why I live the way I do, that’s why nothing matters to me but to rewrite the past, to bring him back from the dead, and to make him live again. …”

  IV

  I was in the kitchen in the dark. My body was racked with silent sobs and my eyes were burning with pain. I was so unused to crying that I couldn’t begin to handle such humiliation. I could only give way and wait for it to pass.

  “Scott …” She was in the lighted living room beyond the doorway. Her voice was gentle.

  I tried to say: “I’m okay,” but I couldn’t.

  “Do you want to be alone?” she said. “Shall I go?”

  I was so sure I could say “no.” It was such a simple word, one of the first words a child learns. But I couldn’t say it.

  “Don’t hurry to answer,” she said. “Take your time.”

  She moved farther back into the living room and I was left to battle with my humiliation in private. I tried to remember when I had last cried. I thought it must have been after my mother’s death, when I was ten, but then Emily had been there and Emily had expected children deprived of their mother to cry, so I had cried. In fact, I had seen little of my mother. Tony and I had been brought up by a succession of nurses, and the one permanent feature of my childhood had been not my mother, who was always so busy with her social activities, but my father. My father had worked hard all week in the city, but every weekend he had come home to Long Island to play with us and take us on expeditions.

  I opened the door of the refrigerator and looked at all the bottles inside.

  “God, I could use a drink,” I said, and astonished myself by sounding normal. Perhaps the road to recovery lay in making trivial observations.

  “Then why don’t you have one?” called Vicky casually. “You’re not an alcoholic, are you?”

  “No, I was never an alcoholic. But drink didn’t suit me,” I said, uncapping a bottle of Coke with clumsy fingers. “I felt better when I’d given it up.”

  “I envy your strength of mind. I know I drink too much at the moment.”

  “I doubt very much if you know what those words can mean.”

  “Well, naturally I don’t go on binges! But I always have two martinis a day, and in my opinion, that’s at least one too many. … Would you mind if I had some coffee? I’ll make it myself, if you like.”

  “No, I’ll make it.” I switched on the light and filled the kettle. The gas flared on the stove. I put the kettle down and stood watching the steady flame.

  “I meant to go on the wagon years ago,” said Vicky, watching the flame with me. “But somehow I never seemed to be able to get through the day without a martini to help me along.”

  “Plus the occasional playboy?”

  “Oh, them! They never mattered. I was just trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t frigid.”

  “Frigid?” For the first time I was able to look at her directly. I prayed my eyes weren’t bloodshot after the tears. “You? I don’t believe it!”

  She laughed. “If I told you the real truth about my supposedly glamorous private life, your head would be so swollen you wouldn’t be able to walk through that doorway!”

  I tried to figure this out. I was feeling better, but still confused. I had to make a great effort to concentrate. “And if I told you the real truth about my supposedly glamorous private life,” I said, “your head would immediately be as swollen as mine.” That seemed like a neat thing to say. I had a sudden picture of us effortlessly swapping bright, brittle remarks as we stood kettle-watching in the kitchen.

  “You make it sound as if we both suffered from the same problem,” said Vicky, surprised. “But m
en don’t have that kind of problem … or do they?”

  “Men have all kinds of problems, believe me.”

  “You mean you couldn’t get it up?”

  “No, that was easy.”

  “I see. So in that case you must mean you couldn’t …”

  “Yes. Of course, it was all very trivial.”

  “Of course. But don’t you think it’s so often the trivialities of life which cause the most misery, once their cumulative effect becomes a back-breaking burden?”

  “Christ, you can say that again.” The kettle was starting to boil. I groped for her hand and found it.

  “I often think sex is like money,” said Vicky. “When you’ve got it, you never think about it, and when you haven’t got it, you think of nothing else.”

  I squeezed her hand tightly and kept my eyes on the kettle. “What would someone like you know about having no money!”

  “What an insulting remark! Do you think I’m totally devoid of intelligence and imagination? Do you think I’ve never wondered what it’s like to live in poverty on a diet of rice with ten children under ten and no birth control?”

  “Incidentally …”

  “Yes, I was wondering when you were going to ask. I take a little pink pill. No fuss, no mess, no mistakes. Sebastian would no doubt call it the ultimate product of our plastic society.”

  “And what do you call it?”

  “Liberation.”

  We had our coffee in the living room. By her own choice she sat on the ottoman and I sat opposite her on the recliner, but after a while that didn’t feel right, so we sat side by side on the floor with our backs to the wall and held hands again.

  “What did I do in bed that everyone else didn’t?” I said curiously at last.

  “I don’t think you did anything in particular. Oh, God, sorry! That’s not very complimentary, is it? Of course you were great. That goes without saying, but what I really meant was—”

  “It was the anonymity, wasn’t it? The secret was that I thought you were someone else. It set you free to be yourself.”

  “Yes. That’s it exactly. And later …”

  “You’d established a new identity and didn’t feel like a prisoner anymore.”

  “Later,” corrected Vicky firmly, “I realized you were the sexiest man I’d ever met.”

  “I’m flattered! But please don’t feel you have to anesthetize me with compliments.”

  “I don’t. But since we’re being so frank with each other …”

  “God, yes. It’s more of a relief than you could ever imagine.”

  “You’d be surprised what I can imagine. I know all about being buttoned up in a straitjacket with my mouth gagged and my hands tied behind my back.”

  I kissed her.

  “Do you want to go to bed now?” said Vicky later.

  “Yes, very much. But I’m still so shook-up I’ll probably be no good.”

  “Well, we don’t have to do anything, do we? We’re not circus performers. No one’s watching, so who do we have to impress?”

  “My God, what a marvelous woman you are!” I said, and took her to the bedroom.

  “I can’t think what you were worried about,” she said later as I lit her cigarette.

  “Neither can I.” I went to the kitchen and brought back two more bottles of Coke.

  “Scott …”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “If this question upsets you, don’t answer it, but did my father make a real effort to turn you against your father? I mean, it wasn’t a few careless remarks here and there, was it? It was an all-out, deliberate brainwashing?”

  “Yes.”

  “How horrible. And how wicked. Are you speaking the truth when you say he’s so unimportant to you nowadays? Surely you must loathe and detest him!”

  “You can’t live daily with violent emotion, Vicky. To survive, you have to distance yourself from it. Besides, it’s unlikely Cornelius deliberately set out to be wicked. Knowing him, I’d say it was more likely that he’d conned himself into believing he was acting with the purest possible motives.”

  “But that makes him all the more repulsive! How could you ever have worked at his bank day after day and allowed him to treat you as a substitute son?”

  “But I didn’t,” I said. “I just stayed home. It was Scott who went to the bank and dealt with Cornelius.”

  She switched on the light. We were very close on my narrow single bed, and I had felt the frisson which had made her whole body rigid in my arms.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Big mistake. Now you think I’m crazy.”

  “No. I just feel frightened to think of the kind of strain you must have been living under.”

  “But don’t you see? Scott was my solution to all the strain … Scott was my way of distancing myself from all those violent emotions which I couldn’t live with on a daily basis!”

  “But didn’t you tell me yesterday,” she said, “that Scott had died?”

  “Yes, he had to die. There would have been no room for you in Scott’s life. I had to choose between the two of you, and I chose you.”

  “I see. Yes. And may I ask how you’re now going to manage without him?”

  “I’ll get along. At least I have you. I’ll be all right.”

  “Great. And what happens about my father? Has he received news of Scott’s death yet?”

  “You’re laughing at me!”

  “I assure you I’m not. It’s no laughing matter, is it?”

  I was reassured. “Yes, your father knows.”

  “An unpleasant shock for him?”

  “Yes. He’d just got rid of Sebastian and he suddenly found himself locked up with a tiger in a rapidly shrinking cage.”

  “Tell me what happened. Everything. I’ve got to know.”

  I talked for sometime while Vicky smoked her way through another cigarette. In the end all she said was, “Poor Sebastian.”

  “He’ll be okay. He’ll easily walk into another top job somewhere else.”

  “He only cared about Van Zale’s.”

  “I appreciate that. I’m sorry for him too, but he was asking for trouble. He behaved very foolishly.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “We recuperate from the explosion and get back to normal. I think if I’m very careful now, I’ll still be able to weather this storm.”

  “Good. I want you to get the bank. I’m sure it’s the only just solution after the way Daddy’s behaved in the past, and I’m all for justice. … What will you do when you finally get control? Put the name Sullivan in the title alongside Van Zale? That would be justice too, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well …”

  “I can’t see why Daddy wouldn’t agree to that. The bank will go back into the Van Zale family eventually, as you’ve no sons of your own, so why shouldn’t he be generous to you?”

  “Hm.”

  “Funnily enough, Eric’s anxious to be a banker. I can’t imagine why, but I’m glad for Daddy’s sake. Poor Daddy. I can’t help feeling sorry for him in spite of everything. Is that guilt too? I wonder. Maybe it is. I always feel his life would have been quite different if he’d had a son instead of a daughter.”

  “I doubt that very much. Cornelius has glamorized the idea of having a son. We always glamorize what we don’t have. A real son would almost certainly have been a disappointment to him.”

  “Perhaps. … I wish I could convince you not to think of yourself as a disappointment to Steve. Surely, Scott, if he was the wonderful father you say he was, he would have forgiven you for all those mistakes you made?”

  “That only makes the burden of my guilt more intolerable. If he would have forgiven me in spite of everything—can’t you see how that would make me feel all the more ashamed of myself?”

  “But you must try to see this from a different point of view. You’ll never have any peace otherwise. You’ll just stay trapped in this terrible cycle …”

  “Once I get the bank, I’ll be at peac
e.”

  “I wonder about that. I wonder very much.”

  I sat up in bed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I have this unpleasant suspicion that no matter what you do to make amends to your father, you’ll find it’s never enough. I suspect this quest, as you call it, has no real end.”

  “No, no, you’re wrong! Once I’ve rewritten the past—”

  “Oh, Scott, those are such empty words—that phrase has no real meaning! You can’t rewrite the past. The past is over, the past is done, and to talk of a past recaptured is, if I may say so, just classic fin-de-siècle romanticism with no valid root in reality!”

  “You don’t see time as I see it,” I said. “My time is different from yours.”

  “But that’s absolute …” She checked herself. Then she exclaimed passionately, “Scott, can’t you see your situation as it really is? You’re wasting your whole life doing something you don’t really want to do in pursuit of a release from a pain which is largely a self-inflicted illusion! You’ve bound yourself to some kind of nightmarish wheel, but you don’t have to stay there, you don’t have to go round and round—that’s all an illusion too! If you could only forgive yourself, you could step off the wheel, you could free yourself of all these illusions, you could start at last to live the kind of life you really want to live!”

  “I wouldn’t want to live. I’m sorry you see the situation that way. I’m sorry you don’t understand.” I started to get out of bed, but she grabbed me and pulled me back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said rapidly. “Don’t be angry. I love you. Don’t cut yourself off from me. I’m trying so hard to understand, I want so much to understand. Please believe me.”

  “Shhh.” I extinguished her cigarette and started kissing her. “Let’s not talk anymore. We’ve both talked more than enough, and there’s so little time.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I’d realized what I’d said. I saw her eyes widen, heard her sharp intake of breath, and I cursed myself for triggering the big scene I’d made up my mind to postpone.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “Why do we have so little time?”

  And it was then, with the greatest reluctance, I told her that her father was transferring me to London.