The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  We eventually agreed to meet in the Tea Room at the Plaza, and three days later beneath the glass dome I began my attempt at peacemaking. The palms drooped elegantly in the muted indoor light, and the small orchestra was playing Viennese tunes as the waiter arrived with our tea.

  “Of course it’s about that row you had with Paul before the wedding,” I said after we had spent an awkward five minutes exchanging pleasantries.

  He sighed, ran his fingers through his thick hair and took off his glasses to polish them with a grubby handkerchief. He was dressed casually in a tweed suit with an unpleasant red-spotted necktie. There was a smudge of ink on one of his cuffs. He looked erudite, distracted and vaguely bohemian.

  “Sylvia, I don’t see how we can possibly have a profitable conversation on the subject. If you’re aiming at a dramatic reconciliation complete with tears of joy on both sides and a pounding piano accompaniment in the best tradition of motion-picture melodrama, you’re just wasting your time.”

  “What about a quick cocktail on Christmas Eve? No tears, no pounding piano, no fuss. I’ll invite about a dozen other people and we’ll have the traditional eggnog.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t understand. Paul and I are finished. I spent twelve years trying to pretend for my mother’s sake that we were still friends, but when my wedding came I realized I couldn’t go on with such a farce just to please my mother. Was Paul really so upset? He surely couldn’t have been surprised. He must have been well aware that we haven’t had an honest conversation with each other since I was seventeen.”

  “Yes, Paul told me what happened when you were seventeen.”

  “He did?” He flushed. “I bet he didn’t tell you the whole story.”

  He looked away from me as the orchestra began to play Tales from the Vienna Woods, and when he said nothing more I felt obliged to add, “He told me there had been a very unhappy scene.”

  “We quarreled.” Unexpectedly he looked me straight in the eyes. “It was about you.”

  “Me?” I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “When I was seventeen it was 1912, Sylvia. The April of 1912.”

  “When Paul and I became engaged.”

  “Exactly. I went down to Willow Street—it was before the merger, so he was still at Nineteen Willow in his old office—and I told him to break off the engagement with you and marry my mother.”

  After a moment I took a sip of tea. “Go on.”

  “Is this going to upset you? I have no quarrel with you now, Sylvia—”

  “Go on, Bruce.”

  “Well …” He took a tea cake and shredded it with quick nervous movements of his hands. Across the room Tales from the Vienna Woods swept into a lush new coda. “My mother had been hoping to marry Paul for several months. She told me so—she was quite frank about it. She said she knew he’d decided to remarry, and she was convinced that he’d eventually come to the conclusion that she was the only woman who could possibly be an adequate wife to him. But when I asked her why she didn’t immediately seek a divorce from Eliot and make Paul aware of what she wanted, she said no, she couldn’t do that, because that would put her in the same category as all the women who chased him, and her entire success with Paul had always lain in the fact that she had never put any kind of pressure on him. Well, you know what happened. She knew about you, of course, but she never thought he’d marry you. She said you were too young and unsophisticated, and that Paul needed a mature woman, not an inexperienced girl. Paul was visiting our house, you know, all that winter he was seeing you, and—I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Dear Bruce, don’t let’s get bogged down in embarrassment. I’m perfectly well aware he continued his affair with your mother both before and after he married me. What did Elizabeth do when she heard he was engaged to me? Was there some frightful scene between her and Paul?”

  “Oh God, no! My mother had too much pride for that. She congratulated him and said she hoped he would be very happy. Then she went to her room and cried all night. Eliot, thank God, was away somewhere, but I was down from Groton for the Easter recess, and after I’d heard my mother cry all night I couldn’t bear to think of her suffering anymore, so I went downtown to see Paul. Of course it was a complete failure. He just told me I was too young to understand his relationship with my mother, and then I ruined everything by dragging in the paternity issue to try to persuade him to listen to me. What a mistake! The entire issue of his marriage was forgotten and we had to exhaust ourselves establishing just who on earth I was. However, when he had finally finished demonstrating that I wasn’t his responsibility and that he didn’t give a straw about my mother, he went on board his yacht with you and sailed off into the sunset. Happy ending!”

  “I can see Paul must have hopelessly mishandled his interview with you, Bruce,” I said steadily, “but he sincerely felt he had to be honest with you. I’m sure you’ll admit what a passion he has for honesty.”

  “Honesty? Paul Van Zale? My God, he’s the biggest liar in town! All that trash about what a unique relationship he had with my mother—all that garbage about how he was so fond of me! He treated my mother like a whore and our home like a brothel and me like some amusing little lapdog who could be trained to perform clever tricks. He didn’t care about me! When I got in his way and made a boring scene I was just a nuisance to be flicked out of the way. Year after year he pretended to be a father to me, and then suddenly it’s ‘No, we’re not related, I’m sorry, can I get you a cab uptown?’ I no longer amused him, so I was discarded—and the same thing happened to my mother. For years she listened to him saying she was the most important woman in his life, and then suddenly it’s ‘Oh, I don’t think I want to sleep with you anymore. Goodbye, see you again sometime.’ ”

  “I always wondered why their affair ended so suddenly.” I was trying to deflect him from his pain by altering the focus of the conversation. I was disturbed to see how distressed he had become; his face was white, there was sweat on his forehead, and his hands had abandoned the ruined tea cake and were locked together in a tight agonized clasp.

  “It had something to do with Vicky’s death,” he said at once. “It all dated from that time when she broke the news to him. My mother would never speak of it afterward except to say she had come to know Paul so well that the affair could no longer be sustained.”

  I was baffled. “What on earth could she have meant by that?”

  “I think she found out what a liar he was,” said Bruce. “I think she discovered that although Paul pretended to be bosom friends with Jason Da Costa he hated his guts and planned to ruin him. In the shock of Vicky’s death Paul could easily have admitted that.”

  “But it’s not true! Are you saying that Paul hated Jay even before Vicky died?”

  “When my mother first knew Paul,” said Bruce, “when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, he told her that the one man on earth he was going to get even with eventually was a young banker down on Wall Street called Jason Da Costa. Later she thought he’d got over all that, particularly when he encouraged Jay to marry Vicky, but—”

  “You surely don’t think …”

  “I think it just took Paul twenty-five years to rig the Salzedo affair and get the revenge he’d always wanted.”

  “Bruce, that’s the most terrible slander!” I tried to rise to my feet but was riveted to my chair. “How can you possibly believe such a thing?”

  “I know the Da Costa brothers.”

  “Ah, that explains it! They’d say anything against Paul!”

  “Can you blame them? Quite apart from what he did to their father, he’s succeeded in forcing them out of the country. They were being investigated for tax evasion. Paul fixed that because they were trying to make trouble for him by reopening the investigation into the Salzedo affair—they unearthed some secretary who said she saw the confidential report on Paul’s desk, and of course Paul always swore he never saw that report from Terence O’Reilly.
Anyway, Paul came back from Europe at the end of 1922 in order to put an end to the trouble. He bribed the secretary in order to prove she was venal and her evidence worthless, and then he told the I.R.S. to hustle Stewart and Greg out of town.”

  “Paul couldn’t possibly do that!” I exclaimed, but I knew he could. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Not even the President could do such a thing!”

  “Sylvia, there’s nothing that husband of yours can’t do. He’s so darned rich and so darned powerful he can buy himself whatever he wants, and if he can’t buy it he can extort it. Those people in government all owe him favors. All he ever has to do is pick up the phone and exert a little pressure.”

  I fell back on the defense which had always reassured me whenever I had felt ambivalent about Paul’s power. “But Paul is an honorable man. The investment bankers rely absolutely on their integrity. All the bankers said that to Untermyer during the Pujo investigation.”

  Bruce shrugged aside the ancient testimonies of 1912. “I can’t speak for all investment bankers—I can only speak for Paul, and all I know is that there’s no law that can touch him, and his very existence makes a mockery of American democracy. Why do you think I became attracted to Communism? It was because I came to resent not only Paul’s private life but his public life as well. I think it’s a crime that men like Paul Van Zale can make half a million dollars by a couple of handshakes on Wall Street while people are starving in the rural South or toiling in the industrial sweatshops of the North!”

  “I don’t want to argue with you about politics, Bruce. I just want to argue with you about the Da Costa brothers. If the tax evasion was a trumped-up charge, why didn’t they stay in this country to fight it?”

  “The choice was between footing a huge legal bill—and maybe going to jail—and retiring to a beautiful ranch in Mexico with a guaranteed annual income. Greg and Stewart aren’t rich—Jay left most of his estate to that fifth wife of his—and they’re not particularly smart. I’ve no doubt they probably did get into a fiscal mess with the money they inherited from Jay before they blew it all in the market, and in the circumstances a life south of the border could have had certain attractions.”

  “But how on earth do you know Paul bought them the ranch in Mexico?”

  “Greg told me.”

  “I don’t believe Greg Da Costa!” I was pulling on my gloves, or trying to. My hands were shaking.

  “Sylvia … Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, I really didn’t. But your husband’s a dangerous man, and if you don’t know that then I can see he’s been lying to you as efficiently as he’s been lying to everyone else. How well do you really know Paul, Sylvia? Do you know him well enough to realize you’re much too good for him?”

  “Bruce—”

  “Don’t let him treat you as he treated my mother, Sylvia. Don’t let him take and take and take until one morning you wake up and find there’s nothing left.”

  I had finally managed to get my gloves on, but although I looked around feverishly for the waiter I could not remember what he looked like. The desire to escape from the opulent prewar atmosphere and the Strauss waltzes was overwhelming.

  It was Bruce who discovered the waiter and insisted on paying the bill.

  “I expect you’re now wishing you’d never suggested this meeting,” he said as he escorted me outside. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?” I kept my voice calm and pleasant. “Well, if you’re really sorry, you’ll stop by with Grace on Christmas Eve for a cup of eggnog.”

  He swallowed awkwardly. “Well, I … All right. What time?”

  “Six-thirty. And please be civil to Paul. I shan’t expect you to stay more than ten minutes, so you can say you’re on your way to another Christmas Eve party.”

  “May I ask whom I’m doing this for? I can’t believe Paul truly cares whether we’re estranged.”

  “You’re doing it for me. It’s the price I’m asking you to pay for repeating all those wicked rumors the Da Costa brothers have been inventing ever since Jay died. And you’re doing it for Paul. He does care, Bruce—and I can say that because I know him better than you do. And you’re doing it for your mother, because I happen to know she’s upset that you and Paul are estranged. And lastly you’re doing it for yourself, because I don’t think you’ll ever be at peace with yourself until you’re at peace with Paul.”

  “Are you trying to tell me I’m neurotic?”

  “I don’t understand all these fashionable modern words. I think you’re unhappy about Paul and I’d like to give you both the chance to sort things out. That’s all.”

  “It’ll never happen, Sylvia.”

  “Six-thirty on Christmas Eve, Bruce. Don’t forget,” I said, and left him abruptly on the steps of the hotel.

  III

  Paul was out that evening, but although I meant to write some letters I did nothing. I went to bed-early and when midnight struck I was still thinking about Bruce. Two of his many disturbing disclosures ran persistently through my mind. The first was that the Da Costa brothers had been responsible for bringing Paul back from Europe in 1922, and the second was that Elizabeth, calm, dignified, self-controlled Elizabeth, had cried all night when she had heard of my engagement to Paul. It was hard to know which disclosure troubled me most, but the two together were certainly enough to ensure insomnia. I lay awake till dawn.

  I had never taken the Da Costa brothers’ hysterical accusations seriously, but Bruce’s claim that Paul had come home because they had made trouble for him had the unpleasant ring of truth. It would have taken a crisis of that dimension to drag Paul back from Europe, I could see that now, but if I believed Bruce’s story I would also have to believe Paul had something to hide.

  It took me some time to devise an explanation which still allowed me to believe in Paul’s innocence, but I managed it in the end. Guilty or innocent, Paul would have had to suppress any whiff of scandal because the bank could never have afforded a resurrection of the Salzedo affair. Any preposterous lie could thus make life awkward for Paul, and the Da Costa brothers, bent on trouble as usual, would have had no scruple in exploiting the situation for their own ends. A ranch in Mexico would certainly have been worth a lie or two to them.

  In the end, I thought to myself at two in the morning, and in the absence of proof, one was thrown back on the personalities of the people involved. The Da Costa brothers were notoriously unreliable, with bad reputations. It was far easier for me to believe they had dabbled in lies and extortion than to believe that Paul had arranged the Salzedo affair to ruin their father.

  I discounted Bruce’s nonsense that Paul had always hated Jay, because I could see no reason why such bitter hatred should have existed. They had seen little of each other in their early years, and if there had been some dramatic clash—over a woman, perhaps—someone would surely have been only too willing to tell me about it. I conceded that they might have disliked each other when young and that on Paul’s side the dislike had been tempered with jealousy, since Jay had won success so early in life, but I did not see why this early antipathy should preclude a later friendship. People change, and besides, Paul himself had often said that he and Jay were uniquely well-suited as business partners.

  On the other hand, I thought as a faraway clock struck three, there was no doubt that when Jay died Paul’s feelings were tortuous in the extreme. I began to wonder if anyone would ever unravel the full story of Paul’s relationship with Jason Da Costa, and then just as I was debating with myself how much Elizabeth could possibly know, I remembered O’Reilly.

  O’Reilly was the only person still alive who knew beyond a shadow of doubt whether Paul had arranged the Salzedo scandal, because the scandal could not have been arranged without O’Reilly’s connivance. I thought of him for a long time, but could see no possible way of asking him for the truth without creating a flammable situation. O’Reilly and I had ostensibly returned to our formal relationship, but I had the uneasy feeling that once he was certa
in I would not report him to Paul he would think nothing of making a heavier advance.

  Brushing the worrying thought of O’Reilly aside, I was at once confronted with Elizabeth again. How she must have resented me at first! I felt shattered when I remembered how courteous she had always been to me, and when I wondered how long it had taken her to come to terms with Paul’s decision my thoughts inevitably turned to the beginning of our friendship—when she had stopped sleeping with Paul.

  Bruce had not solved this mystery, only made it more unfathomable. What could possibly have happened when Elizabeth had broken the news of Vicky’s death? Even if I had believed Bruce’s theory that Paul had immediately revealed a long-standing hatred of Jay, I could not for the life of me see why this should result in the instant termination of a twenty-five-year-old love affair. It seemed more plausible that Paul had made some very emotional scene which had afterward embarrassed him so much that he could never see Elizabeth without being reminded of it. Yet that didn’t sound like Paul either. I myself had seen him prostrate with grief after Vicky’s death, but he had shown no sign whatever of being hysterical.

  “How well do you really know Paul, Sylvia?” Bruce had asked me hours earlier, and as dawn broke over Central Park the next day I could only answer: well enough to know that I love him whatever he’s done. But I could no longer tell myself that his past could not affect our present, and as the days passed and the unsolved mysteries seemed to grow larger, I began intuitively to be afraid of a future when they might overwhelm us all.

  IV

  I was surprised when Bruce duly appeared at our house on Christmas Eve. I had not told Paul I had invited the Claytons because I had doubted they would come, and when Bruce walked into the room I wondered if he could remain unmoved by the spontaneous expression of joy which swept across Paul’s face. They shook hands and then I kept Grace busy with the other guests while Paul and Bruce talked in a corner. To my delight the Claytons stayed a full half hour, and when Bruce said goodbye to me I told him how grateful I was that he had made the effort to keep his promise.