The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “Excuse me,” I said, overcome with curiosity, “but may I be very inquisitive and ask where you bought your lipstick? It looks like just the kind I want.”

  “Isn’t it nice! I’m glad you like it, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you because I bought it in London. Do they have Diana Slade cosmetics over here?”

  For a split second I was back in that lonely summer of 1922. “Is that D-I-N-A-H?” I said.

  “No, D-I-A-N-A.”

  I wondered if it could be a different woman, but the coincidence was just too great. I began to consider Dinah Slade not merely as a discarded mistress but as a successful client. No wonder Paul had stayed with her so long! Protégée and mistress—what a stimulating combination, especially when the roles were combined in the person of a young girl who, could offer him a medieval mansion and a set of postwar morals.

  By the time I arrived home I was in the most unreasonable panic, but the more I told myself I was being ridiculous the more panic-stricken I became. I thought he would have severed all his links with Miss Slade when he left England, but now I saw that it was more likely that the two of them were still in touch.

  Eventually I pulled myself together, dressed with care for the evening and drank two glasses of sherry too fast as I waited for Paul to come home.

  Of course it took him no more than five minutes to find out what was wrong.

  “I was just so startled!” I said, trying not to talk too rapidly. “I think it was the idea of your having a protégée—with an extra e—for a change! She must be awfully clever. How exciting that she’s making a success of it!”

  “She’s been lucky,” he said abruptly. “She didn’t do a single thing I told her and I hear she’s turned Hal Beecher’s hair snow white. Still, she’s Hal’s problem, not mine.”

  “Oh, you mean you’re not in touch with her?”

  “No. Well, occasionally she writes a line to brag about her sales figures. That’s all.” He drank some tomato juice and seemed about to change the subject, but he could not resist saying, “It was good lipstick, was it?”

  “Marvelous! I wish I could get hold of some!”

  “I dislike lipstick on women,” said Paul.

  I felt much better once I knew he was not in regular correspondence with Miss Slade, and I did not think of her for some months after that conversation in January 1924. I was too busy with the migration to Florida, and at the end of February I sailed with Paul from Fort Lauderdale on a visit to South America. Paul had business in Caracas and we did not get back to New York until mid-April. As usual on my return I was engulfed in domestic problems, and I had hardly straightened out my correspondence when the bill from Tiffany’s arrived.

  I had bought some additional dinner plates there before we departed for Florida, and my first reaction when I saw the Tiffany envelope was that I was still being billed for them. I know the rich are supposed to be chronically tardy about paying bills, but I was brought up to believe this was ill-bred as well as inconsiderate behavior, and I paid my bills promptly.

  I sighed, reached for my paper knife and slit the envelope.

  At first I thought Tiffany’s had gone mad.

  “One silver christening mug,” I read with astonishment, “engraved: ‘A.S. March 27, 1923’ …”

  Various thoughts flashed dizzily through my mind. “A.S.” Anthony Sullivan? But Steve and Caroline’s little boy had been born directly after Christmas in 1922. And anyway I had sent him a silver rattle. Which baby had been born in March just over a year ago and had recently been christened? No baby I knew, and I definitely had not bought a silver mug at Tiffany’s on … I checked the date. April the fifteenth. That was the day after our return from South America. In bewilderment my glance swept on down the page.

  “… plus registered postage to England as per the address below …”

  I reached the bottom of the bill.

  “Master Alan Slade, Mallingham Hall, Mallingham, Norfolk, England.”

  After a long while I realized that my hand was shaking, so I put down the bill. As I sat motionless in the still room I could hear the rain hurling itself futilely against the windowpane.

  Putting the bill back into the envelope, I tried to find some sticky tape to hold the slit envelope together but then realized I had no idea why I wanted to reseal the envelope. Perhaps I had thought I could avoid the implications of the bill if I pretended I had never read it. What cowardice! Reality was dangerous only when one refused to face it. Taking a deep breath, I drew out the bill again and reexamined the information it contained.

  “One silver christening mug …” Imagine Miss Slade having her illegitimate child christened! It seemed a hypocritical gesture, but the English considered christenings a social tradition which had little to do with religion.

  “Master Alan Slade …”

  I liked the name Alan but there were other names I liked better. My son would have been called Michael.

  I swallowed with difficulty. Reality was proving too harsh for me after all and I told myself there had to be some explanation other than the one I could not face—obviously the baby had nothing to do with Paul, but perhaps Miss Slade had asked him to be godfather and he had felt obliged to send a handsome present.

  Born at the end of March. Conceived … And again I remembered the hideous summer of 1922 when I had been alone in New York and Paul had been in England.

  I groped for composure, for reassurance, for a peace of mind which I knew was already destroyed. The baby could not possibly be Paul’s, because he had promised me before we were married that if he ever had any other children they would be mine as well as his. Paul never broke such a promise, never, it was unthinkable, for after all if he started breaking his word like that, who knew what other promises he might cast by the wayside?

  I felt as if the foundations of my life had been uprooted by some monstrous plow, and although I searched for something recognizable in that distorted new world I saw only the bill from Tiffany’s, the slit envelope and beyond them the rain hammering against the pane.

  “I don’t want a son. … I’m no longer in touch with Miss Slade. … It’s over. …”

  How he had lied! And I had believed him, every word, all of it.

  My fear was gone. I was immensely angry, so angry that for some minutes I merely sat trembling in my chair, but I never cried and gradually I became more composed. I waited a full half hour to make sure I had myself totally in control, and then I rang the bell and summoned the Cadillac to the door.

  Four

  I

  “WILLOW STREET AND WALL,” I said to the junior chauffeur.

  “The bank, ma’am?” said Abrahams incredulously.

  “The bank.”

  I had been to One Willow Street to celebrate the merger of Van Zale’s with Clyde, Da Costa in 1913, but I had never been there again. The bank was a world I could never enter, a masculine preserve from which women were automatically excluded, and Paul had always made it clear to me that my place was at his home on Fifth Avenue and not at his office on Willow and Wall.

  When the chauffeur opened the door I climbed out awkwardly, my limbs stiff with tension, and paused in the rain while the doorman dashed out with an umbrella. He had recognized not me but Paul’s monogram painted on the side of the Cadillac.

  “This way, ma’am.”

  I followed him up six marble steps to the pillared doorway. The great doors, steel-studded and silver-embossed, stood open, but the inner doors beyond the vestibule were closed. Long ago before I had visited One Willow Street I had imagined “the bank” to be much like an ordinary commercial bank, with a host of ordinary customers who cashed checks, made deposits and asked for loans. I had pictured a solid little building with the name over the doorway and a pleasant friendly atmosphere within. But no name marred the splendid façade of One Willow Street; if people did not know that the premises represented the great House of Da Costa, Van Zale and Company, the bank most certainly had no wish to kno
w them. Neither did one walk in off the street and open an account. One had to be invited to be a client, and if one was granted such an honor one had to keep at least a hundred thousand dollars on deposit. The clients of Da Costa, Van Zale could only regard it as a small price to pay for the privilege of doing business at Willow and Wall.

  The doorman touched a bell concealed in a pillar as he opened the inner doors for me, and I walked into the cold bleak marble lobby. I stopped. Before me was a line of columns, and beyond them I could see the hushed splendor and mesmerizing opulence of the great hall.

  A clerk hurried to meet me. He was white-haired and wore a wing collar and spoke in a voice slightly above a whisper. “May I help you, madam?”

  “I’m Mrs. Van Zale. I would like to see my husband, please.”

  He looked at me incredulously over the top of his spectacles. My self-confidence faltered. I blushed.

  “Please be seated over here, ma’am, and I shall ascertain if Mr. Van Zale is in the building.”

  He never asked if I had an appointment. Wives did not make appointments with their husbands during business hours, and good wives never upset tradition by appearing without warning at the bank in response to some eccentric feminine whim.

  Without a word I sat down and tried to recall the anger which had carried me downtown in such style, but now I was only terrified of interrupting Paul in his work. I waited, trying to cling to my composure. It was immensely quiet. I could not even hear the rustle of papers in the great hall nearby. I was just succumbing to panic and wondering if I could tiptoe away before the clerk returned, when the inner doors of the vestibule swung open and Steven Sullivan strode into the lobby.

  I tried to hide by shrinking farther into my chair, but he saw me and stopped short in surprise.

  “Sylvia! Land’s sakes, what are you doing here?”

  “Well, I—I—”

  “Who kept you waiting? That little dried biscuit with the wing collar? Just wait till I see him—Ah, here he is! Fullerton, do you know who this lady is? What do you mean by keeping her out here as if she was a two-bit grafter chasing the cheapest loan in town? My God, if you’d tried that on my wife she’d have disemboweled you, wing collar and all!”

  “I beg pardon, ma’am,” said the little man flustered to me. “I meant no incivility. I thought Mr. Van Zale had gone out to Reischman’s, but it seems he came in through the back entrance. He’s in conference now, sir,” he added hastily to Steve.

  “Forget it. I’ll take care of Mrs. Van Zale. This way, Sylvia.”

  I followed him obediently into the great hall. In the old days before the merger the partners had sat at mahogany desks isolated like islands in the vast sea-green carpet, but now that the bank was bigger lesser luminaries had taken over the hall. The partners had comfortable rooms upstairs, and only the senior partner’s room, a large chamber on the ground floor at the back of the building, had remained unchanged by the reorganization.

  “You mustn’t mind Fullerton,” Steve was saying to me. “He’s such a period piece he still refers to the bank as Clyde, Da Costa, and even now that we’re officially P. C. Van Zale and Company you can bet the most he’ll ever manage is to call it Da Costa, Van Zale. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “A long time ago.” I followed him down the aisle. The chandeliers, fully lit despite the hour of day, glowed on the moldings of the high ceiling and illuminated the oil paintings on the walls. The paintings were of past partners, some lean and melancholic, some rosy-cheeked and benign, some hatchet-faced and inscrutable, but although I looked for Jay’s face I could not find it and later I realized Lucius Clyde’s portrait too was missing.

  At last we reached the pair of doors which opened into the back lobby. A superb staircase curved without apparent support to the floor above, and as we emerged from the great hall Paul’s chief assistant, Terence O’Reilly, appeared on the upstairs landing.

  He could hardly believe his eyes when he saw me. An expression of consternation crossed his face as he hurried downstairs.

  “Mrs. Van Zale! Is something wrong?”

  “Is he in his office?” said Steve before I could reply.

  “No, he’s in the second-floor conference room with Mr. Carson, Mr. Blair, half Morgan’s and all Reischman’s. I’m afraid the meeting will last till lunchtime.”

  “Go and tell him his wife’s here, will you?”

  “Well, I don’t know if I should interrupt—”

  “Come on, Terence, this is his wife, remember? Of course he must be told she’s here!”

  They stared at each other crossly. They were both in their midthirties, both Paul’s protégés, and both had Irish surnames, but there the resemblance ended. Steve, who was the youngest of Paul’s six partners, was well over six feet tall, with such a muscular physique that whenever I saw him swimming with Paul in our pool I had to make a conscious effort not to stare. He was undeniably a good-looking man, but I must have been one of the few women in New York who found him resistible, for I thought his charm was abrasive, his wit vulgar and his physique coarse. However, his position as Paul’s protégé had always fascinated me. Most people would have looked at him and seen only his brawn, but twenty years ago Paul had looked at him and seen only his brains. He was certainly the only investment banker I knew who might have been mistaken for a football quarterback.

  Glancing from Steve to Terence O’Reilly, the ex-Jesuit who had left his seminary, quarreled with his family and arrived in New York with twenty dollars and Paul’s address, I was aware of a great contrast. O’Reilly was slim, not tall, and had some well-combed dark hair which was never out of place, a stiff erect bearing and one of those voices which seem to belong to no particular region or class, although once after a glass of champagne at Christmas he had betrayed the trace of a Boston accent. Paul had put him through Harvard and had employed him ever since his graduation—in fact, it was hard for me to imagine how Paul would have managed without O’Reilly, whose job in some ways resembled mine. I managed Paul’s domestic life, and O’Reilly managed Paul’s business life, while each of us controlled large staffs. Since we were both available to Paul twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, it could even be said that we worked the same hours, and although those hours suited me admirably I could not help but think they constituted a very unnatural life for a young man.

  Presumably O’Reilly disagreed with me, although it was hard to guess what went on in his mind. Seemingly incapable of small talk, he was so reserved that I found him unwilling to discuss any matter which did not relate to his job. It had been a surprise to discover he had known Bruce Clayton socially since their days at Harvard. It was not simply that I could not imagine when O’Reilly ever got time for a social life, but I could never imagine him having any inclination to be sociable. He was several years older than Bruce, but since he had gone late to Harvard they had graduated together in the class of ’17.

  O’Reilly had a suite set aside for him at our house on Fifth Avenue, and once when he and Paul had been away on a business trip I had taken a quick look at his room. It had been both immaculate and impersonal, devoid of bric-a-brac, the bookshelf containing only American novels like Babbitt which were so popular that they gave no real clue to his literary taste. Afterward I had despised myself for pandering to such curiosity and had told myself crossly that it was all O’Reilly’s fault for being such an enigma. An enigma he had remained too, and certainly I knew no more about him now, as I stood facing him in the back lobby of the bank, than I knew when he had joined Paul’s staff in 1917.

  “Please don’t worry, Mr. O’Reilly,” I heard myself say embarrassed. “I don’t want you to get into trouble by interrupting my husband in an important conference.”

  “Don’t take any notice of him,” said Steve Sullivan. “He’s always like this. He loves to be pernickety. Go on, Terence. The sooner you go the less chance there is of my carrying you bodily up to the conference room and throwing you across the threshold.” />
  “That’s just fine, Steve,” said O’Reilly unperturbed. “I don’t mind interrupting Mr. Van Zale so long as you accept full responsibility. Mrs. Van Zale, would you care to wait in your husband’s office, please?”

  The office consisted of two rooms linked by a broad archway. The room we entered was where Paul worked, while the far room was furnished as a drawing room. It was even used as a drawing room too; every afternoon at four o’clock various carefully selected people withdrew from their labors and gathered there for a fifteen-minute break. To be invited to drink tea with the senior partner was considered an immense privilege. Wedgwood china was used, English biscuits were circulated and if anyone was so crass as to smoke he was immediately asked to leave.

  “I can’t offer you any ladies’ magazines to read while you wait,” said Steve, who had followed me into the room. “But there’s always the New York Times.”

  “Oh, please don’t worry about me anymore, Steve—I don’t want to keep you from your work! Thanks so much for rescuing me in the front lobby.”

  “Any time!” He gave me his wide smile and I told myself I was unreasonable not to like him more than I did. Underneath his flashy manners he could be very kind.

  When I was alone I wandered restlessly to the window. In the middle of the patio beyond stood a fountain which had been imported from Europe, and nearby, rising in gnarled splendor against the fifteen-foot back wall, was an ancient magnolia tree. The wall was surmounted with spikes, broken glass, wire and burglar alarms, for it separated the bank from Willow Alley and the outsidą world. Set into the wall was a door, reinforced with steel, its triple locks glistening in the rain. This back entrance of the bank was seldom used—only the partners had the necessary keys—but Paul occasionally found it convenient to slip in and out of the building unobserved. The patio was inset into the building so that it was surrounded by the bank on three sides, while the high wall completed the quadrangle.

  For a time I watched the birds singing by the fountain, but when I become too nervous to stand still I began to wander around, looking distractedly at the books, the furniture and the objets d’art. Paul’s desk was uncluttered. There were no photographs. The bookcases which rose from floor to ceiling on either side of the Adam fireplace contained works ranging from bankers’ reference books to untranslated editions of Homer and Virgil, and on the Chippendale table by the window a vase of uncertain age and great beauty also bore silent witness to Paul’s devotion to classical civilization. On the walls hung some rare prints of Old New York together with a framed deed recording a grant of land to Cornelius Van Zyl of Nieuw Amsterdam, and one of Rembrandt’s more cheerful self-portraits hung above the fireplace. I was just staring blankly at the brilliant use of the oils when the door opened again.