There was a storm that night, and the next day was cooler. However, it was still hell at the office and by midafternoon I was already longing for my first drink of the evening. I had made up my mind not to drink at the office that day, but when my secretary told me that Paul’s great-nephew was asking for an audience I automatically reached for my hip flask.
“Christ, I can’t mess around at present with a little boy just out of diapers! Pass the kid on to one of the other partners, for God’s sake,” I ordered irritably, and thought I had rid myself of Cornelius, but ten minutes later there was a knock on my door and old Walter peeked in.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Steve—”
I had been about to call the undertakers about the funeral, but I hung up with a crash.
“—but I’ve just been talking to young Cornelius and he’s really most anxious to speak to you.”
“Show him in,” I growled. The day was obviously going to get worse before it could get better. I tried not to grind my teeth.
Walter withdrew. The door opened wider, then closed very softly. I had been pretending to read a letter, but at last I had no choice but to drop it and take a look at Master Cornelius Blackett from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Sullivan,” he said.
He was slim, slight and narrow, with some sharp little features, dusty-gold curls and a pair of gray eyes which would have looked well with mascara. However, there was nothing effeminate about his clothes. He was conservatively dressed in black. His manner, punctuated by a meticulous Ohio accent, was both civil and charmless.
“Hello, Neil,” I said. Out of respect for Paul’s memory I mustered a smile and gestured to the client’s chair. “Have a seat.”
He sat down. We faced each other. He waited for me to speak, but when he realized I wasn’t about to commiserate with someone who had hardly known Paul and had just walked into umpteen million dollars he said respectfully, “I hear Mr. Blair is to be the new senior partner, but you’re the partner who really counts, aren’t you, sir?”
This was very gratifying. I hadn’t expected him to be so smart. “You could say that, I guess,” I said benignly. “How can I help you, sonny?”
“Well, sir,” he said, meek as a bishop in gaiters and pretty as a daisy chain, “I just wanted to assure you I have no intention of withdrawing Paul’s capital from the firm.”
There was a silence. I forgot the police, the press, the funeral. I even forgot the power struggles that morning at the partners’ meeting before Charley had been elected senior partner.
“I believe the amount is twenty million dollars,” said little Cornelius Blackett from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Yeah,” I said, getting my breath back. “Something like that.”
“I guess it would suit you better if it stayed in the firm.”
My lips were dry. I quickly slid my tongue around them. “Yeah. Well, yes. Uh, let me explain …”
“I realize the firm’s in an unstable state right now and it wouldn’t help if there was a massive withdrawal of capital.”
“Uh … exactly. Right. That’s it.” I wished the other partners were listening in. We had all been so busy arguing about the redistribution of profits that it had never occurred to us to worry about a capital withdrawal. I guess we had all assumed an eighteen-year-old nonentity would just do as he was told.
“Of course we’ll make a suitable financial arrangement with you,” I said smoothly, deciding it was time to rev up the Sullivan charm. “You won’t be out of pocket, I promise you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the kid without batting his long curling eyelashes, “but I’m not pressed for cash. I was thinking in terms of a place in the firm.”
“You were?” I said, amazed. He looked like the sort of youth who would be incapable of doing anything except writing bad poetry in a garret. “Well, that’s nice!” I said, remembering the twenty million dollars and swallowing my amazement in a single gulp. “You’ll go to Yale first, of course, and then have a year in Europe.”
“No, sir, what I have to learn is right here at One Willow Street, and I’d like to begin my training immediately after the funeral.”
Well, it was obvious he wouldn’t last six months, but I knew I had to humor him.
“That’s wonderful!” I said, smiling so broadly my face ached. “Congratulations and welcome!”
“Thank you, sir. Incidentally, I have a friend whom I’d like to bring with me into the firm. His name’s Sam Keller.”
I remembered Paul talking about his latest protégés. “Is he one of the kids who have been spending the summers with you at Bar Harbor? Keller—wouldn’t that be the caretaker’s boy? Well, I don’t know whether socially he’d be able to make the transition …”
“Paul chose him, sir.”
It was odd to hear the kid calling him Paul. Disrespectful and too familiar. I didn’t like it.
“Well …” It was becoming harder to remember the twenty million dollars. I had to make a great effort. “I’m sure that can be arranged, Neil.”
“Pardon me, sir, but I prefer to be called Cornelius. ‘Neil’ was Paul’s special name for me, and only my Bar Harbor friends use it. Oh, and talking of names, Paul wanted me to take his name when he died—so there’ll still be a Van Zale at Van Zale’s,” he added unnecessarily, flashing me a tight triumphant little smile.
“That’s nice!” I said, instantly resolving to give him the toughest training any would-be investment banker ever had, but I wasn’t worried. With fifty million dollars at his fingertips in addition to his twenty million in the firm, he’d soon discover there were more amusing ways of occupying his time, and besides, he was just too much of a pretty-boy to take seriously.
“If he had balls it’d be different,” I explained later to Caroline. “God knows what Paul could have seen in him.”
“People used to make similar remarks about you,” Caroline reminded me tartly. “ ‘God, what’s Paul doing with that lout who looks like a bouncer?’ I can hear them saying it now.”
“I may not look like an investment banker,” I shot back at her, “but at least no one could ever have thought I had no balls! Hell, Cal, that kid couldn’t even be a pallbearer at the funeral. He’d be ground to dust as soon as he tried to shoulder the coffin!”
“Talking of the funeral,” said Caroline, “have you—”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well, go and lock yourself in the library and don’t come out till you’ve done it.”
I sighed. I had to get some words about Paul down on paper, and the time was coming when I could put it off no longer. Not only was the funeral looming large on the horizon, a test of endurance for anyone who’d been close to Paul, but Sylvia had gone and asked me—me of all people!—to give Paul the eulogy he deserved.
V
I’m not much of a one for speeches. It’s one thing to sit back at a partners’ meeting and chat for half an hour about the financial state of a big corporation, and quite another to stand up before a packed church and talk of one’s dead friend.
I tried to get out of it. “Perhaps Charley—or Lewis,” I urged Sylvia. Lewis was such an expert eulogizer that he had almost reached the stage of patenting the entire performance and retiring to live on the profits.
“I don’t want someone who just liked Paul,” said Sylvia. “I want someone who cared.”
She was implacable. I gave in.
“And for God’s sake don’t be too maudlin,” advised Caroline as I settled down to prepare the speech. I sharpened six pencils and sat in front of a blank pad of paper. I even wrote at the top of the page: “Paul Cornelius Van Zale: 1870-1926.”
I wrote no more, but for hours I looked at those words and thought of him.
I remembered how we had met. I was eighteen years old, I’d just been tossed out of military academy and everyone had agreed I was unmanageable—no big news, since my brothers and I had been unmanageable for as long as anyone could remember. Part of th
e trouble was that our father died young—I was only nine at the time—and there’s no doubt three boys get into bad habits when there’s no father around to knock them into shape. I remember my father well. He was good-natured and generous, always the life and soul of every party, but if we put too big a strain on his good nature we soon regretted it. I can still remember not being able to sit down for two days after I’d put an egg in each of his riding boots.
There was plenty of money in the family but my father, being generous, spent pretty freely so that when he died there wasn’t too much left in the bank. All in all, it was probably a good thing when my mother remarried quickly. My mother was a lovely lady, better connected than my father, although I never once heard her make any derogatory remark about our Irish name, and she was slim and always looked very cool and read expensive fashion magazines whenever she wasn’t getting dressed up to go out. They don’t make ladies like that anymore; nowadays nobody knows how to be idle with grace and beauty and style. She was the kind of woman who should have had daughters instead of three rowdy sons, but after Matt and Luke were born she had no more children, not even when she remarried.
My stepfather was a nice guy, generous and good-natured like my father but without my father’s tough streak. Of course, being a stepfather’s a hard job, I realize that. He wanted us to like him, so he turned a blind eye to our escapades until we were walking all over him. We liked him well enough, but we didn’t respect him and we never knew how well off we were in his care until he died and Uncle took charge.
My expulsion from military academy coincided with Luke and Matt’s simultaneous expulsion from school, but my mother was too distraught by my stepfather’s death to cope with us, so she was relieved when my father’s younger brother, the sober industrious president of Sullivan Steel Foundries, arrived to sort us out.
Uncle took one look at us and decided we were steel bars who had to be welded very firmly into some kind of conventional shape. Luke and Matt were sent to different schools, both institutions run by Methodists, and I was given a one-way ticket to New York to earn my living. I was also given an introductory letter to a distant family connection, the son of my maternal grandmother’s second cousin, Mr. Paul Cornelius Van Zale.
I’ll never forget the interview he gave me. It was an interrogation. I started out bullish and brazen and ended up contradicting myself, stammering and damned near weeping with humiliation. When I was finally reduced to a white-faced, sick-to-the-stomach, trembling young kid humbly silent in his presence, he said shortly, “You’re a bright boy. It’s possible I can do something for you, but I shall expect absolute obedience, total loyalty and more hard work than you can at present imagine. If you can’t face that …”
I said I could. By that time I was in such a state I would have said anything, but he must have known that after years without discipline I would find the rewards of hard work addictively sweet. I grasped the chance he gave me, but although he always took a sharp interest in my progress we were never close friends until he took me with him to Europe after his daughter Vicky died. The seventeen-year gap in our ages began to close. He taught me how to play tennis. We swam and sailed together. I have no doubt all his intellectual friends had a hard time figuring out why he enjoyed my company, but the very reason why Paul and I got along so well was because we were so different. Anyway, I think Paul often got bored with his intellectual friends and the effort of being so exquisitely civilised. When he was out with me he could just be one of the boys. He’d had a stuffy sort of upbringing from that old battle-ax of a mother of his, and in later life he found it a real luxury to bum around with someone like me and say “shit” or “fuck” without anyone having the vapors.
That was a side of Paul his women never saw.
I often wondered what Paul really thought of women. He had more success with them than any other man I knew, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t broad-shouldered or spectacularly well-muscled. He didn’t have much hair, although curiously women never seemed to notice that. Maybe that was because he was capable of spending ten minutes in front of a mirror while he arranged his front strand as cunningly as possible. He had cheerful dark eyes, a gap between his two front teeth, and deep hard lines around his tough straight mouth. Some people thought he had an English accent, but they were always the people who had never been to England. He spoke very fast and could outtalk anyone under the sun—a fact which could help explain why women so often ended up in bed with him—and of course he was charming to women, I’m not denying that. But the charm was like a light switch which could be flicked on and off. Until I saw him fall apart under the pressures of his affair with Dinah Slade I had always wondered if he was capable of a truly spontaneous relationship with a woman.
His wealth alone would have made him a target for the gossipmongers. His wealth combined with his spectacular success with women was enough to drive them crazy with curiosity, disbelief and just plain jealousy. No rumor was so wild that it couldn’t be tacked onto Paul Van Zale and passed off as gospel truth, and one member of a certain uptown club even asked me once if Paul was bisexual. Yet when I repeated this story to Paul in a fever of indignation, Paul just laughed. No rumor could faze him. As far as he was concerned all publicity was good publicity in his ceaseless efforts to get around the law that a private banker must never advertise.
“But supposing people believe that kind of stuff!” I said horrified.
“How can they,” he said placidly, “when it’s so patently untrue?”
And indeed he was so damned busy making a fortune and laying every woman in sight that he hardly had the time to step out with his own sex. I think the rumor began because there was a gap between what Paul said and what he actually did. It was one of his nineteenth-century characteristics. He was quite capable of arguing in some intellectual discussion that the laws against homosexuals should be reformed and that it was irrelevant how people expressed themselves sexually, but in practice he made damned sure that all his close friends chased nothing but skirts. The most any queen could ever have expected from him was a cool handshake over a business deal.
He gave me some severe lectures about skirt-chasing when I was young, but when I still managed to marry the wrong girl he helped me get the divorce and introduced me to Caroline. Caroline and I had always got along pretty well. We’d been married fourteen years so we had to be doing something right, and the only serious bone of contention between us was children. I wanted more and she was content with our two boys. However, as she herself said, if I’d had to spend nine months being pregnant, maybe my views would have coincided with hers. Caroline’s pet project was the dissemination of birth-control literature to the poor, and she was always chasing around organizing groups of emancipated females who agreed with her that birth control was the only defense women had against a lifetime of oppression by lusty males. At first this had annoyed me but now I’d got used to it. Modern women were really kind of cute, and anyway every woman should have a hobby to keep her occupied.
Our two boys were the greatest little fellows in the world and well worth all the tussles and spats Caroline and I used to have. Scott was six years old and already very spunky with a baseball bat, while Tony was three and could rip up the nursery in less time than it took to recite his favorite nursery rhyme. We had waited a long time to have children because Caroline hadn’t been able to face it, and she had given in only when our marriage was within an ace of running onto the rocks. Scott was planned, but Tony was an accident—and Caroline, in between her speeches about birth control, never let me forget it. However, underneath all this tough talk she was devoted to both kids and always made sure they had nothing but the best. Even their nurse had once worked for European royalty.
Caroline was thirty-six, three years younger than I was, and looked smart as paint. She had black hair, black eyes, a sleek streamlined figure which always gave me a thrill whenever I prised it loose from those godawful boyis
h-form corsets, and legs which made one want to praise God that women’s hemlines had finally risen to the knee. She was no fool either. She read Vanity Fair, so she knew exactly what Frank Crowninshield’s intellectuals were saying, she played a steely game of bridge and she could arrange a dinner party for sixty people without turning a hair. She kept my domestic life ruthlessly well-organized and had no patience with slackers.
“Well, Steven!” she said sternly, sweeping into my study at midnight to find me still sitting in front of my blank notepad. “Time to start rehearsals! Where’s the eulogy?”
“It’s still an unwritten masterpiece. Fix me a drink, Cal.”
“Oh, darling, you can’t get drunk tonight and be hung over tomorrow at the funeral!”
“Oh, yeah?”
After I had crawled into my black suit next morning I took some salts for my stomach, added a slug of gin to my orange juice to wake me up, and set off for the funeral still with no idea what I was going to say.
The service was to be held at St. George’s on Stuyvesant Square, with a private interment later at the family mausoleum in Westchester.
Everyone was there, all Wall Street and half Washington, the big names, the famous firms, the men who, like Paul, were legends in their time. The twin aristocracies of New York, Jewish and Yankee, for once met and mingled, for Paul had spanned the two worlds in his long unorthodox career. Jacob Reischman—always “Young Jacob” to Paul even though he was now in his midfifties—said, “I remember when he was very young and first came to our House.” But someone younger said, “I can’t remember when I first met him, because it seemed he was always there.”
“And with us still,” said someone else, and suddenly I knew that for once this was no empty platitude but the truth. For there was another contingent at the funeral, a group unrecognized by the press and unknown by the sightseeing crowds, a club only dimly acknowledged by Wall Street but just as exclusive as any club uptown.
The Rich Are Different Page 44
