III
“Oh look, Cornelius!” exclaimed Emily. “Aunt Dora’s samplers! Do you remember them hanging on the wall in the front parlor of the farm?”
We were in the attic of my old home in Velletria. Around us were the possessions which my mother had accumulated during the twenty-five-year span of her two marriages, and we were engaged in sorting out the clothes for the local charities, the trash for the junkman and the family memorabilia for ourselves.
“Do you remember?” said Emily, arraying the five framed texts against a dusty brass bed. “When I learned to read I used to recite them to you—poor little boy! But you loved them and learned them by heart. That’s odd—surely there were six and not five? Which one’s missing?”
“The mills of God,” I said. “I keep it in my office, but it hasn’t been very popular since the Crash.” With a sigh I turned back to the trunk full of old photographs, and the next half hour passed very pleasantly as we were reminded of prewar Thanksgivings, forgotten toys and my mother’s exotic selection of Easter bonnets. A glow of nostalgia cocooned us from the pain of loss.
Suddenly Emily said, “Look! Papa!”
We stared curiously at the man who had besotten us. He was standing stiffly, ramrod straight, in his black Sunday suit before the front door of the farmhouse. His fair hair was parted severely and plastered to his scalp, while his mouth, which neither of us had inherited, turned down fractionally at the corners. His light eyes were cool and watchful.
“My God!” I said startled. “What a tough customer he looks!”
“But this picture doesn’t do him justice!” said Emily, who remembered him much better than I did. All I could remember was his large Western hat, which he had worn indoors and outdoors to make him look taller. “He was really rather good-looking,” she added, after I had remarked how odd he looked without a hat. “And he had the sweetest smile.”
We flicked through the remaining photos in the album, but in every other picture the ubiquitous hat shaded his face.
“I do wonder if Mama was happy with him,” said Emily idly as she closed the album. “I always wanted to ask her but never quite had the nerve.”
“But why shouldn’t she have been happy with him?” I asked astonished.
“Well, it must have been dreary on the farm for a cultured, well-educated woman, and Papa couldn’t exactly hold intellectual conversations with her. Don’t you remember the country accent he had? It wasn’t really Midwestern at all. More, like Kentucky. And he used to say ‘ain’t’ and all that sort of thing.”
I digested this in silence. “Well, I’m no snob,” I said, “and I have nothing against Papa, of course, but I used to think I was a genetic freak until I got to know Paul. Paul’s the one I really resemble.”
“Oh, I do hope not!” said Emily. “I was fond of Uncle Paul, but he was so dreadfully immoral! Cornelius, I hope when you marry you won’t keep mistresses all over the place.”
“Certainly not!” I exclaimed. “After all, one gets married to avoid all that kind of thing.” I tried and failed to imagine myself looking twice at any woman except Vivienne. Paul’s philosophy of marrying for convenience and committing adultery for satisfaction was one which had no appeal to me; it struck me as being Victorian in its hypocrisy, tiresome in its ambivalence and destructive in its bearing on the solidity of family life. I did realize that since Vicky had always lived with his mother Paul had been free to behave as he pleased, but if one had children in one’s care one really had to live in a decent Christian fashion or else the children turned out to be monsters. I thought of Steve Sullivan, bucketing from bed to bed, walking out on his wife and abandoning his pregnant mistress, and shuddered. God only knew how his children would turn out.
“I’ve sown my wild oats,” I said to Emily, “and now I intend to settle down and be a good husband and father.” I pushed the photograph albums aside and began to pace about the attic. “I’ve got my entire life mapped out,” I said. “For the next few years I won’t have much time for anything except the bank, but when I’m—” I remembered just in time that I wanted her to marry Steve, so instead of saying, “But when I’m sole senior partner,” I said, “When I’m more secure I’ll be a philanthropist. I’ll build an art museum to help struggling artists and I’ll buy a magazine to help struggling writers. I’ll promote plays. I’m going to be one of the biggest patrons of the arts in New York. Then I’ll feel I’ve contributed to the culture of America even though I’m not artistic myself. I’d like that.”
“Oh, Mama would have been so proud of you, Cornelius!”
We became sentimental again. Emily started to cry, and I shed a private tear. A death in the family is a very affecting experience.
As soon as I returned to New York I made an appointment to see a specialist about my asthma, but before I could reach his office I fell ill with bronchitis. By the time I was better my wedding day, January the fifteenth, was shimmering tantalizingly on the horizon, and when the doctor suggested postponing the wedding to allow me more time to convalesce I was horrified. I was tired of being ill; I was desperate to return to the office; and I could hardly wait to sleep with Vivienne with the blessing of God, my surviving family and the full roster of New York society.
I got my way about the convalescence, but while I was still recuperating all three of the specialists who had been attending me lined up at my bedside and told me I could never again smoke another cigarette.
I did try to argue, but this trinity of medical opinion was too much for me.
I gave up cigarettes.
I had never known that such deprivation could exist. I bought chewing gum and bags of cornchips to alleviate the craving, but postcoital relaxation was never the same. Lighting a cigarette in the dark is romantic; crunching a mouthful of cornchips borders on perversion. During our honeymoon in Florida, where Lewis Carson had loaned us his Palm Beach château, I even refused to go into town in case I should see someone smoking a cigarette, although, as Vivienne reminded me dryly, the inhabitants of Palm Beach were hardly the sort of people who trailed up and down Worth Avenue with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
We had a quiet wedding at the Little Church Around the Corner, with only sixty guests and all the photographers locked out in the street. Sam was best man, and since Vivienne’s father was dead and she had no brothers Greg gave the bride away. However, both her sisters came to the wedding as well as some Philadelphia cousins, so for the first time I had the chance to meet her family. Emily arrived with Steve and his two sons, and everyone remarked afterward that the Sullivans were unrecognizable. Both boys were clean, well-behaved and smartly dressed, and Steve was sober as a Mormon. When I saw that Emily looked almost as radiant as Vivienne I decided the time had come to give her a helping hand, and at the reception afterward I closed in on Steve after my second glass of champagne.
“Don’t you think you should do something about my sister?” I said politely.
He almost dropped his glass. “What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” I said, and glided away.
Half an hour later he caught up with me. Champagne was still flowing as if it were piped directly from a reservoir in Central Park.
“Your sister’s an honest woman,” he said to me in a low voice which still managed to be aggressive. “Your sister’s a perfect lady at all times.”
“My sister’s a fool. No self-respecting girl runs a man’s house with nothing to show for it but a lost reputation.”
“She does it because she’s a saint.”
“She does it because she’s crazy about you!”
His eyes widened. He really was extraordinarily naïve sometimes. “I’m not good enough for her,” he stammered with nauseating humility.
“That wouldn’t bother Emily. Ask her and find out,” I said before I glided away again.
He caught up with me for the last time just before Vivienne and I left on our honeymoon.
“You’re a smart guy,” he sa
id. “Don’t think I don’t realize how smart you are. You’re right too. This is the best solution for all of us. Are you really willing?”
“For God’s sake!” I exclaimed exasperated. “Don’t ask me—ask her!” I then escaped to Florida, but as soon as I returned to New York Emily was the first person I called.
“Cornelius! I’ve got some wonderful news. I do hope you won’t disapprove, but …”
Steve had proposed to her that morning. I congratulated her wholeheartedly and said with truth that all I wanted was her happiness; if she thought she could be happy with Steve that was good enough for me.
“Cornelius dearest, how sweet of you!” My unqualified consent evidently removed a load from her mind, and she chattered on brightly about her proposal, where it had happened, what Steve had said to her, what she had said to him, what the children had said to them both and what they had said to the children. “… So we’re going to set a wedding date soon, probably in May. Of course, I know we should wait till Caroline’s been dead a year, but—”
“Quite unnecessary,” I interrupted, knowing how unsuited Steve would be to long engagements. “Do you have a ring?”
The engagement was formally announced in early February, and the very next day Hal Beecher heard from his London friends that Dinah Slade had produced her twins two weeks earlier.
“A boy and a girl,” groaned Hal, who having known Miss Slade when she had been a penniless nobody, felt a paternal responsibility for her. “Isn’t it tragic to think that such a bright girl could make such terrible mistakes?”
But I understood Dinah Slade better than Hal did. The pregnancy had been a smart move. The mistake had been her quarrel with Steve.
I often wondered how she could have made such a mistake, but I never found a satisfactory explanation. For someone playing with great calculation for high stakes, the error was incomprehensible, and I began to wonder if I had missed some vital sidelight on her character. The thought bothered me. I wanted to understand her well enough to predict her moves, and when she remained an enigma to me I found I was worrying about her future plans.
“Forget it, Neil,” Sam advised. “You’ve outmaneuvered her. She may have future plans, but you and the bank can’t possibly figure in them.”
But I could only think of Paul saying, “You and Dinah! Such ambition!” and I knew very well that I hadn’t heard the last of the mysterious and sinister Miss Slade.
Four
I
THE CRASH HAD SHATTERED America, but everyone assumed the market would rise, like Lazarus, from the dead and the country would totter back onto its feet again. Every day the crowds gathered outside the Stock Exchange to await the resurrection, and if one opened one of the Wall Street windows of the bank one could hear the drone of voices, neither angry nor hysterical but merely patient and enduring. New rumors of stock swindles during the past summer were rampant, and the search for a scapegoat for the disaster became fiercer every day.
Nineteen-thirty arrived, a new decade, a new dawn. To everyone’s joy the market showed signs of rising, but it got no further than its knees before sinking back into the grave.
Gradually people began to realize there would be no resurrection.
The country drifted on into uncharted economic waters and discovered that the world was not round after all but flat. The medieval sailor’s nightmare became an inescapable reality, and slowly, with a grinding inevitability, we slipped over the edge of the known world and started falling into the dark monstrous void of the Depression.
“Say, Neil!” Sam would exclaim to me. “Have you heard the latest joke about the Crash?”
Everyone was laughing at Crash jokes. It was wonderful how we all laughed. Broadway blazed more brightly than ever, and motion-picture theaters were packed to overflowing. Everywhere was brilliantly gay as everyone rushed to escape from reality, and reality was the empty bottles littering the gutters, the drunken parties where no gossip was too cynical to be batted around, and the bootleggers, rich as Croesus, riding down Fifth Avenue in their limousines.
It was as if we had lost a war, the five-day war of October 1929, and were now occupied by some invisible brutalizing enemy. And again, as in the Crash, few people truly understood what was happening and no one could foresee where it could possibly end. Hoover kept burbling platitudes from the White House, John D. Rockefeller promised everyone all would be well, and the unemployment figures crept upward as the numbers slid downward on the Dow.
Sam had lost all his savings in the Crash and was bitterly depressed. I had to be careful what I said to him, and in fact I went to great lengths to avoid the subject because the embarrassing fact was that I was richer than ever. Since my accountants’ primary aim had always been to provide me with tax-free income, they had never been tempted to speculate on my behalf in the lushest excesses of the great bull market, and although I had gambled on the market for fun I had sold out when I decided Martin’s depressing forecasts really were the voice of prophecy. My losses had been nil.
To atone for this good fortune I guiltily increased all my charitable donations and listened patiently while everyone moaned of their disasters, but the sad truth is that when one’s life is going well one doesn’t care to dwell on other people’s misfortunes. I did my best, but my attention often wandered.
Meanwhile my house had become as well-oiled and immaculate as a deluxe hotel. People went to enormous lengths to obtain invitations to our smart dinner parties, and later when I decided to practice my future career as a philanthropist, the invitations to my literary soirees were sought with equal enthusiasm. My friend Kevin, who had published one novel and was now trying to write the Great American Play, helped by introducing me to a wide range of literary figures, from despotic critics to struggling authors, and soon I had hired another aide to read all the important books as soon as they were published and present me with competent synopses. I was not illiterate; I like to read as much as anyone else, but my time was necessarily limited and the synopses were a necessary compromise. Hemingway was my favorite author. I read his books myself, since they weren’t too long. I liked his spare tough masculine style although I thought it was a pity he so often wrote about losers.
My knowledge of current music waned as soon as Sam moved out of my house into a lavish bachelor apartment on Park Avenue, but when I returned from my honeymoon I found he had lost interest in jazz and was devoted to a far less attractive sound. He tried to make me listen to the records of Glen Gray, but frankly, as I told him on more than one occasion, I preferred listening to Miff Mole’s Molers version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
The third of my Bar Harbor companions, Jake Reischman, had returned from Germany, where he had been studying for three years, and was now working in his father’s banking house. Sam and I would meet him for lunch sometimes, but we felt sorry for him starting at the bottom of the ladder while we were already storming the top rungs. His father had traditional ideas about training young bankers, and Jake observed glumly that he had no hope of a partnership before he was thirty.
“Work with us at Van Zale’s!” I urged.
“A Jew in a Yankee house?” he said laughing.
“That’s old-fashioned talk, Jake!” argued Sam. “Why, not even Kuhn, Loeb is exclusively Jewish anymore.”
“Is there a Jew at Morgan’s?”
We persisted, but although he said with a smile that he couldn’t wish for better friends, he turned us down. I had expected it, but I was still disappointed when he said his first loyalty had to be to his father’s house.
We accepted his decision as phlegmatically as we could, but soon the disparity of our positions in the banking world became awkward and we saw him less often for lunch. I would have been willing to break the tradition of New York’s twin aristocracies by seeing him socially, but Vivienne told me in no uncertain terms that despite a certain blurring of social lines in the twenties, no one really wanted to encourage intermingling.
“They h
ave their crowd,” she said, “and we have ours. They prefer it that way. Think of Otto Kahn. When they finally offered him a box in the Golden Horseshoe he refused to sit in it.”
“Yes,” I said, “because after he’d spent years pulling the Met back on its feet he regarded that grudging delayed gesture as an insult.” However, I did not argue further with Vivienne because Jake’s mother was one of her deadliest enemies. Mrs. Reischman had once cut Vivienne dead at the theater and had later referred to her as a scarlet woman.
“But now I have a new respectability!” Vivienne boasted to me in the spring. “Even Mrs. Reischman will approve of me now.” For after our marriage we had ceased to bother with birth control and Vivienne had wasted no time in becoming pregnant.
It surprised no one that I was delighted by the news, but everyone was astonished to discover that Vivienne was not only delighted but ecstatic. After spending her earlier years not wanting a child, she had swung to the other extreme, as if she had tired of her sophisticated society life and craved only the simplest of human pleasures. She lost interest in her dinner parties, drifted dreamily but inattentively through my soirees and spent her leisure hours reading baby books, designing her maternity clothes and hiring and firing interior decorators to produce the perfect nursery. Society would hardly have been more surprised if Mae West had announced her intention of entering a convent, but when her archenemies labeled her behavior a pose Vivienne simply smiled. “My old life was so empty,” she said to Greg when he visited us, “but this is real and meaningful.”
Like all her New York friends, Greg looked first polite, then disbelieving and finally amazed. He himself was doing better in life. I had shipped him to Florida, bought him a yacht and prayed he would bother me as little as possible, and so far the move had been a success. He spent his time taking wealthy tourists from Key West to the Bahamas, and actually seemed to be earning his keep. Of course I knew he smuggled rum on the side, but I figured that if he was ever caught I could buy him out of trouble without upsetting Vivienne. It seemed I had finally found the solution to the eternal problem of what to do with Greg Da Costa, and the relief was considerable to me.
The Rich Are Different Page 65
