However, I was only fifteen years old when my father died, I had led a sheltered life, and I was deeply shocked. I had often been frightened of my father but I had hero-worshiped him devoutly and longed to be like him. It was many years before I could regard him as dispassionately as my mother did, and during the latter years of my adolescence I recoiled from the thought of his shoddy private life.
Meanwhile my mother had succeeded in her dearest wish and made a classical scholar of me. It was she who hired my tutors—the only stipulation my father ever made regarding my education was that I should be taught to read and write— and when no tutor succeeded in meeting her exacting requirements, she taught me herself, just as she had once taught my sister Charlotte. Charlotte was ten years my senior and good with children; she used to play with me endlessly when I was a toddler, and when she married at eighteen and went away I wept all night into my pillow. In my lonely childhood Charlotte had too often been my sole companion, and when I became an uncle at the age of nine I regret to say I regarded my niece Mildred with all the jealousy of an only child who wakes one morning to find himself obliged to share his parents with an objectionable new infant.
To ease the situation my mother suggested that Charlotte and I write to each other once a week in Greek. Constructing a suitable Greek epistolary style would, she thought, undoubtedly take my mind off my jealousy. Charlotte suggested more humanely that I visit her instead so that I could see she hadn’t forgotten me, but my health was poor at the time and it was considered impossible for me to make the long journey from New York to Boston.
I was so disappointed by this decision and so frustrated by my life of absolute seclusion that my parents once more took me to the leading doctors, but all the doctors said there was no hope. The illness ran raggedly through the family, usually passing by the females and affecting two males in three. Few of those afflicted males survived childhood; the illness was severe in infancy and led to complications such as skull fractures which often resulted in death. The Van Zale males who survived infancy either were born healthy like my father or else were never mentioned, like my father’s brother or the long-forgotten great-uncle who had spent his days in seclusion.
“I regret to say there is as yet no cure for this most distressing affliction,” said the last doctor. “This is unfortunately a cross which the child must become resigned to bear.”
My father drew himself up to his full height. I saw his splendidly luxuriant moustaches bristle with antagonism. “You may advocate resignation to my son, sir,” he said with all the pigheaded stubbornness for which he was famous, “but I never shall.” And turning to me with immense dignity he announced grandly, “I shall cure you, my boy.”
Acting on the Victorian principle that a mens sana must inevitably repose in every corpore sano, he proceeded to devote every moment of his time during the next five years to transforming me into a healthy sportsman. I was dragooned into swimming pools, dragged on twenty-mile hikes and drummed onto the tennis court. My mother objected fiercely; I think it must nearly have terminated their marriage. Charlotte thought he would kill me. The doctors said he was a fool.
But I lived. I was transformed. He won.
How he achieved my transformation must always, I suppose, be a medical mystery, for exercise alone can hardly have been responsible for my improved health. Later I strongly suspected that an element of faith healing was involved. I believed without any doubt that my father could cure me, and combined with my childish faith was my passionate desire to live a normal life. However, there was no denying that my health improved enormously, and when I was fourteen and had been well for over nine months my father decided that I could at last meet a contemporary from the outside world. When we retired to Newport that summer he immediately called on our neighbors the Da Costas and asked if the son of the house would join us one morning for tennis.
I was three years younger than Jason Da Costa, but my father had coached me so rigorously that I was already capable of winning a game against boys of seventeen. I would have been more than a match for Jay Da Costa if I had not suffered so acutely from nervousness in his presence, and when I found that his habitual manner was one of condescending arrogance I became obsessed with the fear that he already knew about my illness. My father assured me this was impossible; he had long since boldly informed the world that I suffered from asthma, and any servants who had found out the truth had always been dismissed before they could gossip. Yet my fears continued, and as I lost every match by an ever-widening margin my father’s patience with my performance became increasingly threadbare, until at last he bawled out from the sidelines, “For God’s sake, Paul, stop behaving like a namby-pamby little idiot!”
In misery I turned back to face Jason Da Costa, and there was my nightmare become reality, the eerie distortions at the far end of my vision.
Afterward I could remember their faces, both ash-white and strained. My father was rigid with tension but Jay was shivering like a dog, his arrogance smashed and his composure destroyed. My father made him promise he would never reveal what he had seen.
I thought I would die of the shame.
“And if you ever break that promise, Jason …”
“No, never, Mr. Van Zale, I swear it.”
He went away. My father watched him go and wiped the sweat from his forehead. No one ever came to play tennis with me again, and the following year when my father died we had to sell the cottage at Newport.
Ironically that was my last relapse. After that incident with Jay I was well for over thirty years.
A year after my father died my mother decided I should have some masculine company, and as my health had been perfect for many months she took a risk and sent me to Newport to stay with the Clydes. Mrs. Lucius Clyde was her sister, and my cousins the Clyde boys were my own age. To Lucius Clyde himself, the senior partner in the investment banking house of Clyde, Da Costa, my mother awarded the dubious role of substitute father. The Clyde boys thought I was undersized and eccentric, while I thought they were boring illiterate morons. I hated my summer at Newport and I hated it even more when I was once more confronted with my cousins’ best friend, Jason Da Costa.
Already Jay was becoming a legend. My cousins regarded him simply as “the best fellow around,” my Uncle Lucius regaled me with tales of Jay’s brilliance, and in the Da Costa home Jay was surrounded by doting sisters, a worshiping mother and a proud boastful father. By this time he was nineteen years old, handsome, self-assured, clever, perfect and insufferable.
“I kept my promise to your father, Paul,” he said as soon as we were alone, “and you needn’t be afraid I won’t keep it now he’s dead.” But when he smiled that lazy arrogant smile I remembered so well I saw the cruelty glow in his eyes and knew he planned to eke as much enjoyment as possible out of my fear that he would break his word. He played the game skillfully, making me sweat on countless occasions with his hidden allusions and double entendres, but he never gave the game away. That would have destroyed his fun, and whenever he couldn’t be bothered to make me sweat with fear he would regard me with a mixture of absent-minded pity and crushing contempt. I felt deformed in his presence, unspeakably humiliated, and when I returned to New York from Newport I felt that all I ever wanted to do in life was relieve this latter-day Jason of his intolerable golden fleece.
“Revenge,” said my mother sternly, “is not Christian, Paul.” But she never suggested I spend another summer with the Clydes, and the following year I went not to Newport but to Cape Cod, where my sister Charlotte had a summer retreat. It was there that I fell under the influence of my brother-in-law, an Episcopalian clergyman. No doubt my lingering revulsion with my father’s morals coupled with my desire to escape from the harsh world which Jay’s behavior represented to me had made me ripe for a religious conversion, and when I was eighteen I told my mother that I wanted to enter the church.
“How nice, dear,” said my mother, magnificently suppressing her horror, “but if you�
��re to be a clergyman I insist that you be a well-educated one. I shall ask your Uncle Lucius if he will be generous enough to send you to England so that you can take a degree at Oxford.” Of course she knew that once I saw Oxford I would immediately fall in love with the academic life she had always planned for me.
I arrived at Oxford with my idealism and my virginity intact and within six months was deliriously in love with Dolly. We met by chance outside a sweetshop, where she was sobbing pathetically because she had lost the purse containing her week’s wages, and since I was a chivalrous young man I offered her a handkerchief for her tears, a cup of tea for her nerves and half a crown to cheer her up. My sole intent was to play the Good Samaritan, not the Wicked Seducer, but when she seemed perfectly willing to be seduced I found I had underestimated my susceptibility to pretty girls. I was nineteen at the time.
I was twenty when she told me she was pregnant, and my romantic idealism, despite my lapse from celibacy, was still in full bloom. It never occurred to me not to marry her. I knew, as only a well-brought-up Victorian young man could know, that if one did the right thing all one’s troubles would eventually be resolved and besides, I was so infatuated with Dolly that I was quite prepared to give up all for love.
Lucius Clyde cut off my allowance immediately and ordered me home. I had no choice but to go. My mother existed modestly on the small annuity which was all that remained to her after the payment of my father’s debts, and I had no money of my own.
When I arrived in New York with my pregnant wife my uncle summoned me not to his house but to his office downtown, and it was then that I first crossed the threshold of the mighty Renaissance-style building on the corner of Willow and Wall.
I saw the starry chandeliers and the high ceilings and the sumptuous furnishings of an exotic alien world, and I forgot the quiet quadrangles of Oxford and the cloistered peace of academic life. I looked down the great hall of the House of Clyde, Da Costa and felt the power shoot through my veins. I was enslaved. I was Saul on the road to Damascus—or De Quincey on his first visit to the opium den. I walked into Lucius Clyde’s private chamber with every muscle taut with a sense of mission because for the first time in my life I had absolutely no doubt what I wanted, and what I wanted was to be king of that palace at Willow and Wall.
“You surprise me, young man,” said my uncle sarcastically. “You always acted as if banking was far beneath you. However, you’re not the fool your father was and if you’re willing to soil those patrician hands of yours with a little hard work I daresay we can make something of you. I’ll give you a position here—but on one condition. You must divorce your wife. Your marriage is a disaster. No man ever rose to prominence in an eminent Yankee banking house with a parlormaid for a wife, and the sooner you get rid of her the better.”
The red rag had been waved to the bull, and the bull at once reacted with predictable madness. “No man tells me to divorce my wife!” I said proudly. “I’d give up the whole world rather than break the promises I made at my wedding!”
“Then welcome to penury, and good riddance!” cried Lucius Clyde, and summoning his assistant he said with contempt: “Throw this boy out, will you? Asinine juvenile histrionics are always so damnably tedious.”
“I’ll be back!” I shouted at him. “And when I come back I’ll be sitting in your chair!”
I rushed from the room, ran the full length of the great hall, burst out into the street—and collided with Jason Da Costa. At twenty-four he had already been offered a junior partnership by my uncle, and his success was the talk of Wall Street.
“Why, it’s the hero of the tennis court at Newport!” he drawled. “I thought you were loafing around Europe with your nose in a Latin textbook. Oh, no, I forgot—you married a parlormaid! A bit rash, wasn’t it? But I suppose with your—shall we say background?—you never thought you’d be capable of fatherhood. May I offer you my congratulations?”
I lashed out at him. He laughed, sidestepping the blow, and ran lightly up the steps into the palace which would someday be his. I stared after him, and in the midst of all my rage and hatred my passing ambition took root within me and set me squarely on the bloody road to revenge.
II
I was penniless.
“But you’re rich!” said Dolly frightened. “All Americans are rich, aren’t they? You’ve got to be rich!”
That was when I knew that my money meant more to her than I did. I had given up all for love only to find that the love was an illusion. So much for my romantic idealism.
I could not get a job. My Uncle Lucius was a vindictive man and he saw to it that not even a second-rank Yankee house would give me a position. My mother flatly refused to receive Dolly, and I was too proud to ask her for a financial aid she could not afford to give me. At last I became sufficiently desperate to venture down the one remaining avenue in the world of banking, but I was convinced before I started that I would be wasting my time.
I went to the Jews. I went to the great Jewish House of Kuhn, Loeb, who refused me outright, I went to Seligman Brothers, who were more polite but equally firm in their rejection, and finally I went to Reischman’s.
Although I was unaware of it the patriarch of the house had a bone to pick with Lucius Clyde. Expecting to be summoned into the presence of some minor official, I found instead to my astonishment that I was being ushered into the chamber of the senior partner himself.
“Sit down, Mr. Van Zale,” said Jacob Reischman, seventy-three years old and a legend in his time.
He had been born in Hamburg and had come with his three brothers to America when still little more than a boy. They had begun their careers as peddlers, then moved into letters of credit and foreign-exchange commissions. By the time I met him Jacob Reischman had one of the front-rank investment banking houses in New York, a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a complicated dynasty of sons, grandsons, nephews and great-nephews to carry on his illustrious name. His surviving brother was head of the largest merchant bank in Hamburg, and his name was as famous in Europe as it was in America.
“You seem a bright willing young man,” said old Mr. Reischman sociably when we had talked for twenty minutes, “but there are a great many bright willing young men in my own family and in the families of my friends. First I must take care of my own, Mr. Van Zale.”
“Mr. Reischman,” I said, knowing my entire future depended on his employing me, “we may not both be Jews but we’re both New Yorkers, and it’s as a New Yorker that I come to you to seek my fortune. When you got off the boat from Hamburg all those years ago, was there no New Yorker, Jewish or gentile, who was willing to give you the chance you deserved?”
I watched the faraway memories flicker at the back of his rheumy old eyes, and I was just thinking I could bear the agony of suspense no longer when his face softened as he smiled.
All he said was, “Lucius Clyde has been a fool.”
I went to work at Reischman’s as an office boy at a salary of five dollars a week, and was the only gentile in the entire establishment. It was popularly supposed that old Mr. Reischman was sinking into his dotage. I was treated with politeness but with a certain intelligent curiosity, as if I were some strange animal acquired from the zoo and given the chance to become a household pet. The other office boys conducted interminable discussions in Yiddish in my presence, and from the way the word goy appeared with frequency I knew I was the subject of speculation and possibly scorn. Finally after befriending the senior grandson of the house, a highly educated worldly young man of my own age, I asked him if he would talk to me in Yiddish whenever we met.
“Good God!” exclaimed Young Jacob, much offended. “I don’t speak that peasant patois! Who do you think I am? Some unwashed horror from the Lower East Side?”
I apologized hastily, but that night when I returned to our two-room apartment in a Lower East Side tenement I called on the tailor who lived next door and asked him to teach me Yiddish.
I picked it up quickly. I have a certa
in facility in languages and I already had a working knowledge of German. One morning six weeks later when the office boys were discussing me as usual I turned around and told them in Yiddish exactly what I thought of them.
The news spread all over Reischman’s from the top of the house to the bottom in less than half an hour, and for the first time since I had been hired I was summoned to the senior partner’s chamber.
“Chutzpah!” said old Mr. Reischman, who unlike his grandson had no embarrassment in recalling his humble family background. “I like that!” And my salary was raised by twenty-five cents a week.
It was unfortunate that I was not as successful at home as I was at the office.
Dolly hated living in poverty among the immigrants of the Lower East Side as much as I did, and she was bitterly homesick for England, just as I was bitterly homesick for that other New York uptown. Naturally I could not take her anywhere, and even if we had lived in an acceptable neighborhood we could not have afforded any social life. Pregnancy did not agree with her. I had to borrow money from my brother-in-law to pay the inevitable medical bills. I was cut off from my culture, cut off from my class, cut off from any comfort I had ever known.
The baby came. I had pawned my father’s watch to engage a better doctor, but he never arrived and an old Russian woman who claimed to be a midwife was the only person I could find to help. When I could bear Dolly’s screams no longer I walked down to the bank and worked through the night. On my return at dawn I found the baby alive, Dolly looking on the point of death and the old woman whining for five dollars.
The Rich Are Different Page 10
