“I’m all for improving the London office,” said Martin when we discussed the idea in a partners’ meeting. “It’s obvious the financial picture has changed there now that the foreign-government-loan business has all but ceased, and it’s equally obvious we’ve got to make a greater effort than ever before to capture the domestic industrial and commercial markets. Paul was an expert on British industry and you spent two years with him in England, Steve. Offhand I can’t think of anyone in the Street better suited to restructure our London office and evolve a really innovative new policy.”
All the partners made sympathetic approving noises. I could see that Lewis was already savoring the idea of being sole senior partner in New York, while Clay was reveling at the thought of more elbow room. I permitted myself a small cynical smile. Cornelius could take care of them both and save me the bother. I now had great faith in Cornelius’ ability to take care of anyone who stood in his way.
I looked at him. He was already looking at me. As we exchanged gracious smiles he said pleasantly, “You’re an Anglophile, aren’t you, Steve? I’m sure you’ll do a great job. Do you still have a lot of friends there?”
“You bet I do,” I said, smiling at him lazily across the table, and for some reason the very first person I thought of was Dinah Slade.
Five
I
IT WAS MARCH 1929 when I arrived in England. Caroline was to join me in June when the boys had finished school, so I was on my own. At Southampton my ship docked in the rain, but by the time I reached London the sky was pastel blue and the short grass in the parks was rippling in the spring breeze. Flinging open a window in my suite at the Ritz, I sucked in a lungful of mild air and pictured the usual winter’s-end blizzard which was probably howling through New York. Next door to the park traffic was roaring down Piccadilly.
I wasted no time sighing nostalgically for Broadway but ordered up a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch, dispatched my secretary to buy the day’s newspapers and had my valet unpack my best British tweeds right away.
The next hour passed very pleasantly. I browsed through the financial columns. Woolworth’s was flourishing like a weed. I made a mental note to buy more shares. The financial highbrows were twittering about the effect on the working classes of “hire purchase,” which I thought was a real cute English phrase, the kind you want to can and take back to the States. I cast my eyes over the big industrial names, Portland Cement, Shell Oil, Courtauld’s, Austin and Morris, and remembered I had to buy a car. The Rolls-Royce would have to be black—I could remember how they despised bright colors in the City—but I thought I might buy a flashy Frazer Nash Boulogne for roaring around on weekends.
I glanced at the sports pages but found only English football, checked the list of theaters and earmarked a couple of plays. As I absent-mindedly fixed myself another tot of the best scotch that ever flowed out of Scotland I shuddered at the memory of the unaged whisky from the New Jersey stills, but America was already receding and Europe, foreign and exotic, was seeping sensuously through my mind. I felt as if I had just arrived at some splendid party. All I had to do to have the time of my life was join in.
Picking up the phone, I called Dinah Slade’s office a stone’s throw away in the heart of Mayfair, and asked to speak to the boss.
The line clicked. Dinah’s voice said suddenly, “Steve?”
“Dinah! How are you? Did you get my letter?”
“I certainly did! Lovely to hear you again, Steve!” Something had happened to her mesmerizing English accent. The keep-your-hands-off-me-you-brute flavor had mellowed into a suggestion of maybe-you-and-I-could-get-along-after-all. “Welcome to England!”
“Thanks!” I said. “It’s great to be back. How’s business?” We spent a couple of minutes telling each other how wonderful it was to be alive and well and making money. Finally I purred, “Say, Dinah, I guess your social calendar must stretch from here to Christmas, but could you take pity on a poor expatriate American and have dinner with me tonight?”
“Steve, how sweet of you to ask!” she purred right back. “I’d absolutely adore to. Come to my house first for a drink—you’ve got my new address, haven’t you?”
This was quite a welcome. I began to feel in very high spirits. “I sure have. Thanks a lot, Dinah,” I said, and after we’d fixed the time I hung up, yodeled “Yippee!” as exuberantly as any cowboy and poured myself another slug of vintage scotch in celebration.
II
I was kind of annoyed with Caroline at the time. When I had first told her of my decision to go to Europe she had been livid. “Europe! Steven, you must be out of your mind!” She had wanted a reason for my decision, but I could hardly tell her I’d just been worsted in a power struggle and that the move to Europe was a brilliant maneuver to recoup my losses.
“You enjoyed Europe when we were there with Paul and Sylvia during the War!” I said hotly.
“Yes, but when you’re young you don’t mind living in a foreign country for a couple of years! But now—England—all those frightful aristocrats and stuffy traditions and the terrible food and plumbing—oh, Steven, you’ve got to change your mind! I just won’t stand for it! I refuse to go!”
We lost our tempers. Caroline locked herself in one of the guest rooms and I got so exasperated I broke down the door and hauled her out. She screamed loudly, but she was always impressed by a show of strength and although I did give her the chance to tear herself away she let me catch her in the bathroom so that we could have a steamy reconciliation beneath the shower.
“No showers in those dreadful English bathrooms,” she reminded me darkly as we rolled ourselves up in a towel, but she no longer tried to persuade me to change my mind.
Still, by the time March came I could hardly wait to have a break from married life. Caroline was complaining constantly that she couldn’t bear to leave her friends, charity work, birth-control organizations, home, garden, servants and all the amenities of American life. Our reconciliation under the shower had been short-lived. Caroline’s interest in sex had plummeted to zero again, and the more she sulked the more annoyed I became because I was afraid her attitude would upset Scott and Tony.
Eventually I tried to engineer a truce by asking her to keep an eye on my brothers for me. This innocent request cleverly served two purposes: it placated Caroline by stimulating her vicarious interest in my career, and it made me feel less guilty about leaving Luke and Matt to manage on their own. Since they were useless correspondents, they were relieved when I told them Caroline would relay their news to me, and I made them promise to meet her once a week to tell her what was going on. How I was going to keep an eye on them when Caroline joined me in June I had no idea, but I figured that if they could keep their noses clean until she left New York I might feel more confident that they could operate without supervision.
Before I left New York I installed Luke, the respectable twin, as my watchdog at Willow and Wall. His brokerage firm continued to handle the Van Zale Participations account, but Luke took my place in running the trust. I invented a title for him, “Supervising Officer, Interdepartmental Investment Trusts,” gave him a desk in the great hall and arranged for him to report to old Walter once a week, but since Walter knew next to nothing about investment trusts this meant Luke had a large amount of autonomy. Of course, Luke wasn’t a banker and never would be, but he had brains of a kind, he had been watching me run the trust since 1926, and as the trust’s broker he had the portfolio at his fingertips. It made sense to employ him as my deputy, and since I knew Caroline would scent trouble right away if the job proved more than he could handle I reckoned I’d taken the appropriate safeguards. Anyway, I liked the idea of receiving inside reports from One Willow Street. If Clay tried to muscle in on my territory or Cornelius suddenly decided to bone up about investment trusts, I wanted to read all about it that same day in a transatlantic cable.
That took care of Luke. As for Matt, who was enjoying himself representing Van Zale Participation
s at three-hour business lunches every day, I told him very plainly what kind of behavior I expected from him in my absence.
“No pool operations,” I said sternly. “No bucket shops. No hustling around notorious flimflam men. No scenes in speakeasies. No gambling with gangsters. And no bumming around with those bootlegger friends of yours up in the northern hills of New Jersey. The last thing I want to hear when I’m in Europe is that Matthew Sullivan, president of Van Zale Participations, was arrested by revenue agents while transporting half a dozen jars of applejack over the state line.”
Matt promised to be good as gold. Luke swore I wouldn’t regret my decision to trust him. Both of them hugged me emotionally when they came down to the docks to say goodbye and I admit I had quite a lump in my throat at the thought of not seeing them for twelve months. I planned to return to New York once a year to check up on everyone, but a year is still a long time.
“Goodbye, Steven darling,” said Caroline, offering me a cool cheek after my brothers had stumbled off moist-eyed down the gangway. “Ï guess it’s useless to ask you to behave yourself, but do try not to drink too much, there’s a lamb.”
I would have roared like a lion, but Scott and Tony were there and Caroline and I never quarreled in front of them.
It certainly wasn’t one of the brighter moments of our marriage, but even a good marriage has its sticky patches and we both felt our marriage was a good one. It was true we shared what the old fogies called “modern attitudes,” but marriage is a flexible institution and just because Caroline and I had long ago hammered out our own rules our modern style didn’t mean we were less successfully married than a conventional couple. I wasn’t faithful to her, but Caroline knew all about that and actually encouraged me to have as many women as I wanted. “Sexual frustration,” intoned Caroline with her bowdlerized version of Freud in one hand and her volume of Marie Stopes in the other, “should have no place in a modern marriage. In this dawn of a new era both men and women should be freed from the tyranny of sexual enslavement.” Loosely translated, this meant that a wife should be able to say no as often as she liked and if a husband wanted more he could damn well step out and get it.
This coincided with Paul’s theory that a good marriage has nothing to do with fidelity, and I must say the philosophy did have its attractions. The only aspect that bothered me was the thought that Caroline might practice what she preached as enthusiastically as I did. I wouldn’t have liked it at all if she’d gone stepping out with any man who caught her fancy.
“Don’t be dense, Steven!” said my wife crossly when I confessed my fears to her. “You’ve missed the whole point. I’m not frustrated. You satisfy me absolutely, so why should I go to bed with anyone else?”
Why indeed? I thought, much reassured, and thought how great it was to be married to a modern sexually enlightened woman. All those old dodderers who complained that true womanhood had been wrecked by the War, jazz, cosmetics and a dozen other godless disasters just didn’t know what they were missing. I wouldn’t have left Caroline for the world. Each time I had a fling it was a relief to go home to my smart competent wife who managed our marriage in such a splendidly understanding fashion, and I often thought how lucky I was to be married to the right woman.
Now I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to sleep with Dinah Slade, but it was nice to know that if I did I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. I vaguely thought I might make a play for her if she was nice enough, but I knew that nothing serious would come of it. Paul’s taste in women wasn’t mine and I could no more imagine myself falling heavily for Dinah than I could imagine myself going crazy over Sylvia. Dinah would be my introduction to the free-and-easy side of London social life and possibly—though by no means probably—a partner in an amusing Charleston or two between the sheets. But that was all.
When my second drink was finished I went for a walk, cutting through Green Park to the Mall, and took a closer look at the English. God, what a race! I’ll never forget the shock I had when I first came to Europe and saw them at close range. I felt just the way a big bold lobster must feel when he’s flung into a pot of boiling water. After all, I’d grown up on the Eastern Seaboard and my parents were society people; I know the Irish name gave people the chance to be snobbish, but my mother was descended from a Signer and we all knew that Great-Great-Grandfather Sullivan had been named in dispatches by General Washington himself. I came to England thinking I’d muscle into every old castle in sight, but all I got were glacial looks, as if I were a footman who had got so big for his breeches he’d burst his backside seam. I was never so shocked in all my life—and hurt too. I had only wanted to be friendly.
Paul took me in hand. Paul had an English personality which he could pull on like a glove and a pedigree receding to the seventeenth century, and the English, as Caroline remarked, thought he was “just darling.” He taught me how to behave, how to be tolerant, how to turn the other cheek whenever the English looked at me as if I were an exotic animal who would definitely be better off running wild on the other side of the globe.
“But the English love animals!” protested Paul when I complained. “When you’ve proved you’re tame they’ll lavish affection on you!”
He was right. I became “a pretty decent sort of chap for a foreigner,” which is the English equivalent of “He’s a nice guy—for a Negro.” Later I graduated to “He’s a sporting sort of fellow—for an American,” a great improvement since the English love sportsmen and think Americans are the smartest kind of foreigner because they can speak English. At the end of my two-year stay came the crowning triumph. There were no official test matches in 1919, but the Australian Imperial Forces team played England at cricket, and one day in London I met someone who asked me if I knew what the score was. Of course I had no idea, but before I could speak the guy gasped thunderstruck, “My dear chap, forgive me! I quite forgot you were an American!”
I sailed home in a cloud of glory.
However, now that I had returned to England I had no illusions about the difficulties which were waiting to depress me. If I wanted all the social doors to be flung wide open it was no good crashing around like a New York bull in a china shop. It was not enough either just to tone myself down and make sure I knew who was winning the Test Match. Someone English had to vouch for me. Someone English had to take me by the hand and tell everyone how civilized and domesticated I was. And that someone was going to be Dinah Slade.
Crossing the Mall into St. James’s Park, I wandered over the lawns and paused on the bridge to watch the towers and minarets of Horseguards. Suddenly my exuberance returned with a bang. To hell with the English, I thought as I had so often thought before, England’s a great country! Later, crossing Piccadilly, I savored the narrow twisting little streets of Mayfair, the sedate rows of townhouses and the old-fashioned horse carts still mingling with the tiny trucks and automobiles. It was just like a giant movie set out of Hollywood. I liked all the funny English accents too, and the English newspapers with their Old-World spelling, and the Union Jack flying everywhere instead of the Stars and Stripes. In fact, it was really a great little place and I was more convinced than ever that Americans who turn up their noses at Europe are missing a wonderful experience. Of course, America’s the best country in the world, we all know that, but I don’t believe it’s unpatriotic to admire a country other than one’s own.
Back at the Ritz, I splashed around in the bath and dressed for dinner. In an effort to look English I removed my diamond ring, wore my plainest set of cufflinks, and flattening my curly hair with water I brushed it until it gave up trying to do anything except lie down. To my relief I saw I could almost pass for an investment banker, and feeling pleased with myself I ran downstairs, grabbed a cab and sailed off along Piccadilly to Dinah’s address in Belgravia.
III
She had the quaintest little mews house. The mews reminded me of Macdougal Alley in New York, but the alley was probably a couple of hundred years younger. The narrow
street was cobbled. Dinah’s house was painted white with black trim and there were geraniums planted in every window box. The eight other houses in the row were just as smart, and after paying off the cab driver I paused again to admire the scene before I rang the bell.
The door was opened by a small thin boy with a chocolate moustache.
“Hello, Alan!” I said to Paul’s son. “Remember me?” And suddenly Paul’s memory was reaching far across my mind.
“Of course I remember you!” said the little kid peevishly, speaking with a snooty English accent which would have tickled Paul pink. “I remember everything!” He offered me a sticky hand to shake and added in his high adult little voice, “Please come in, Mr. Sullivan.”
I stepped directly into the living room, where a couch and armchairs were grouped around a fine fireplace. Flanking the mantel on either side were a bookcase and a dresser, both antiques, and a bowl of daffodils glowed on a highly polished table. A print of a knight hung on the wall by the staircase at the far end of the room. Having expected to find Dinah in some grand townhouse sumptuously furnished by the best decorator in London, I was greatly surprised by this cozy little pied-à-terre. I wondered where she gave her cocktail parties and big dinners. Perhaps she had rooms set aside above the salon on Grafton Street.
The Rich Are Different Page 51
