“Now I’ve got a surprise for you,” said Sam, glancing at the clock as we finished our coffee. It was still early in the evening. “There’s a very special lady coming to see you.”
I was aghast, thinking he had been fool enough to summon Vivienne, but he said this was someone who had returned to New York from overseas the day after I left for Bar Harbor.
In bewilderment I followed him to the window. A car was crawling up the drive and when I saw who my visitor was the tears filled my eyes again because Sam had produced my strongest surviving link with Paul.
I ran into the hall, elbowed my bodyguards aside and flung wide the front door. She was already walking away from the car, but when she saw me she stopped and held out her arms.
“Cornelius!”
“Sylvia?” I said, hardly daring to believe she was really there, and overcome with an enormous feeling of comfort, I stumbled toward her down the steps into the driveway.
IV
“Paul would have been so disappointed in me.”
They were the first words I said to her when we were alone. Outside the sun had set, and when I glanced beyond the window I was reminded of my conversation with Paul which had also taken place at Bar Harbor at dusk.
“Cornelius, Paul’s first marriage must have been very like yours. He would have understood.”
“But he warned me …”
We talked for a long time. Her dark hair glowed red whenever she leaned forward into the last fading shaft of light, and her face, quiet in repose, was still luminous with that mysterious inner radiance whenever she smiled. To me she would always represent peace and tranquillity, an oasis of perfection in a world of false glitter and bitter back-chat, and whenever I saw her I knew why Paul had wanted her to be his wife; he might have had to work all day in the savage tundra of Lower Manhattan, but once he came home to Sylvia he could be sure of crawling out of the cold.
“If only there were no child,” I burst out at last. “You can’t imagine how guilty I feel, how much I hate myself for having made such a mess of everything.”
“Paul felt that way about Vicky at first. Yet later he said Vicky had made sense of the whole disaster of his first marriage.”
We started to talk about Paul, but stopped. We both knew our thoughts were identical.
“I don’t believe I’m going to have a son,” I said. “I’m going to have a daughter. Did I ever tell you that Vivienne and I often discussed names and she said how much she liked the name Vicky because it was so cute and unusual?”
“Cornelius …” She rose impulsively to her feet. I was already pacing around the room.
“Paul and I both had intellectual mothers and older sisters,” I said. “Our fathers both died before we were grown up. We both had delicate secluded childhoods. We both had to fight for survival on Wall Street when we were very young. We both had disastrous first marriages. Sylvia, I’m beginning to think Paul passed on to me more than his money and his position. I’m beginning to think he gave me his whole life to live again.”
She said that was impossible. I had never heard her speak so strongly, and as she walked right up to me I saw that her tranquillity was destroyed.
“Paul’s dead,” she said. “His life is finished and the door which leads to his life is closed. Don’t try to open that door, Cornelius. Paul had his own special demons which died with him. Let them be.”
“But the likeness—”
“It’s a mirage. An illusion.”
“But I want to be like him!”
“You’re yourself. Be thankful.” She kissed me and held me close. We were silent for a long time, and when she spoke again it was merely to invite me to stay with her after I returned to New York.
Aware that I had trespassed too long on Sam’s hospitality, I accepted her invitation with relief, but when I reached New York in September I found that all offers of hospitality were unnecessary. My house on Fifth Avenue was empty. Vivienne had moved out with the Georgian silver, the Coalport china and all the Renoirs, and was staying with friends in Tuxedo Park.
At first I was delighted, but within days I was reconsidering Sylvia’s invitation to stay. I had never lived alone in my house before and I hated it. The huge rooms were lonely and the endless corridors depressing.
At the beginning of October I called Sylvia.
“Cornelius!” she exclaimed warmly, so much her old self that it was hard to believe I had seen her so agitated at Bar Harbor. “I was just about to call you! I’m having a little reception at home next Thursday for the French consul with dinner afterward. I won’t ask you to the dinner, because I’m sure you’d hate it, but do stop by at the reception. It’ll do you good to get out, even if you only stay ten minutes. I hate to think of you all alone in that house.”
I dithered about whether to go but finally, having nothing better to do, I went. Besides, I wanted to see Sylvia again and thought that during my brief appearance I could invite myself to stay.
The reception was held in the floor-through drawing room on the second floor of Sylvia’s brownstone, and a collection of immaculate footmen served some impressive champagne in addition to the inevitable cocktails. “Saint-Pierre et Miquelon!” whispered Sylvia, naming the Canadian islands where the liquor smugglers picked up the best French wines. In addition to the champagne there was a generous selection of hors d’oeuvres, a varied collection of diplomats, dowagers and dilettantes and unfortunately a small but beady-eyed bunch of debutantes. I saw them eying me as soon as I entered the room.
I was late. Sylvia introduced me to a plump contralto who talked about Wagner and to a British tea planter who talked bafflingly about South American coffee, but then she was diverted and I was on my own. Seconds later the debutantes were closing in.
“Cornelius, how are you?”
“Cornelius, remember me? Leonie from Tarrytown!”
“Why, Cornelius, I haven’t seen you in ages!”
A dowager festooned with diamonds outflanked them slickly. “Mr. Van Zale, I was just devastated to hear about your recent misfortune. …”
The plump contralto stopped talking about Tannhäuser and pricked up her ears. Other people too turned to stare, but when I looked frantically for Sylvia I saw she was talking to her guest of honor, the French consul. Abandoning all hope of rescue, I began to edge away from my pursuers.
In the far corner a girl was sitting quietly, a glass of orange juice on the little table beside her. Her face was averted from me as she gazed out the window, but I did notice that she was wearing a maternity dress. The one certainty of my present situation, I thought feverishly, was that a pregnant woman would make no attempt to seduce me.
“Excuse me, please,” I said to the vultures, “I’ve just seen someone I have to talk to.” And showing them my back before they could argue with me, I wove my way through the crowd to the far side of the room.
“Good evening,” I said to the girl. “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Cornelius Van Zale.”
She turned to look at me. Gray-green catlike eyes, cool and restless as some remote northern sea, sent a glance which flicked over me from head to toe. Pale lips parted for a second over small white even teeth as she smiled in acknowledgment. She wore no makeup and no jewelry, and her black dress was so plain it was stark. She was beautiful.
“No, we haven’t met,” she said. “I’m Alicia Foxworth.”
“May I join you, Mrs. Foxworth?”
“Please do, Mr. Van Zale.” She seemed to have no trouble with my name, but it was impossible to tell whether the name was familiar to her or whether her hearing was perfect. She spoke in one of those bloodless Eastern accents which only the most expensive education can buy, and her conversation was conducted in a low hypnotic monotone.
“Did you pick this corner because you wanted to escape from everyone?” I asked, anxious that I might have been intruding.
“No, but I can see you did. I’ve been watching your reflection in the glass.”
Glancing at the window, I saw that by a trick of the light the room was mirrored in the pane.
“So you’re a spy!” I sat down on the chair next to hers.
“No, just an observer. I was watching the debutantes and thinking there really are some compensations for being married.”
“Which of these men is your husband?”
“He’s not here. He was delayed in Albany as usual.”
“He’s in government?”
“The State Senate. He’s going to try for Washington in the next elections, and since he has unrestricted access to my money I guess he’ll get in.” She sipped her orange juice and looked bored.
“Have you been married long?” I said tentatively.
“Three years.”
“You must have been under the age of consent three years ago!”
“I was seventeen.” She finished her orange juice and opened her purse for a cigarette. “It was either marriage or suicide,” she said, “and I didn’t have the nerve to kill myself. Do you have a light?”
I patted my pockets for several seconds before I remembered I had given up smoking. Eventually I found a bowl of matches near the fireplace.
When I had lit her cigarette she said, “You’re married, aren’t you? Isn’t your wife here?”
“We’re separated.”
“Oh yes, I remember now. I’m sorry. I never bother much with gossip. Where do you come from? You couldn’t have lived long in New York or I would have met you before we moved to Albany. My father’s Dean Blaise of Blaise, Bailey, Ludlow and Adams,” she explained as an afterthought, “and he used to play tennis regularly with Paul Van Zale. How all those Yankee banking houses hang together!”
I took a moment to marvel what a small world it was and then asked her if she had always lived in New York.
“Of course. Where else is there to live?”
“Well, there’s Boston—or Philadelphia—”
She gave me the New Yorker’s classic response. Boston was ignored. She simply said with amazement, “Philadelphia?”
“Well, perhaps Europe—”
“Europe’s so unsanitary,” she said. “And it’s so depressing not to understand what people say. I detest Europe. Where did you say you came from?”
“Cincinnati, Ohio.”
“Such a pretty name! I’ve always wanted to go to the Midwest, but St. Louis is such a long way and my father never did approve of Chicago. Where exactly is Cincinnati?”
A shadow fell across our table as Sylvia paused to be a good hostess. “Alicia dear, it’s really so sweet of you to come without Ralph—I do appreciate it. These politicians with their busy schedules! And how’s your little Sebastian? He must be quite big now.”
“Eighteen months. Yes, he’s running all over the place. He’s lovely.” Long dark lashes swept downward to cover those gray-green catlike eyes. Her smooth opaque hair swung forward to brush against her creamy skin. She still spoke in that hypnotic monotone, but I sensed that the mention of her little son disturbed her, just as I had sensed she had nothing but contempt for her husband. When Sylvia failed to notice her distress I felt as if I had discovered an extraordinary talent in myself for interpreting a complex work of art.
“… and I didn’t know you knew Cornelius!” Sylvia was saying pleased.
“We’ve just met.”
“How strange—you look as if you’ve known each other for years,” Sylvia said vaguely, and swept off to attend to the British tea planter who was reclining sadly against the far wall.
I looked at Alicia. Alicia looked at me.
“Your husband married you for your money, didn’t he?” I said.
“Yes.”
“But you’ve only just found out.”
“Yes.”
“And you daren’t leave because you’re afraid he’ll try and take Sebastian.”
Now she was the one to be hypnotized, and as we gazed at each other I saw the missing half of my personality and felt an enormous joyous relief. The expression in her eyes changed, and suddenly my own knowledge was reflected brilliantly back at me in a blaze of emotion which lit the room. The other people seemed to fade away, the noise of conversation became a mere distant drone, and then as I reached for her hand at the exact moment that her hand groped blindly for mine, our lives touched, merged and streamed forward together in a single irreversible tide.
Five
I
WHEN ALICIA’S HUSBAND ARRIVED in New York two days later she refused to return with him to Albany and tried to remain with her parents. However, when her father flew into a rage and her stepmother refused to have a deserting wife in the house, she left them too and moved with her little boy and his nurse into my house on Fifth Avenue. She was five months pregnant at the time.
At least on this occasion I no longer had to worry about what my mother would think, although probably in view of my feelings for Alicia I would have told even my mother to mind her own business.
New York society spluttered in horror. We were shunned. Cholly Knickerbocker’s column could only refer to us obliquely; our names were so drenched with sin that they would have defiled any decent newspaper. I had to hire extra secretaries to sift the fevered hate mail from fundamentalists, itinerant preachers and little old ladies in Dubuque. I had to hire two extra bodyguards to fend off the fanatics who waited at the gates of my house to pelt me with rotten eggs, and two new lawyers to cope with the legal abuse Foxworth kept slapping on me. Little Sebastian’s nurse could no longer take him for walks in the park. I was called depraved, debauched and disgusting, while Alicia was described as a harlot, a hussy and a horrible disgrace to motherhood.
It never ceased to amaze me how people passed judgment on us without having any idea of the true facts. Alicia and I both believed in the sanctity of marriage and motherhood— of course we did. Our joint ambition in life was to marry, raise a family and remain faithful to each other in the conventional Christian fashion. It was all very well for my critics to scream that I had walked out on my pregnant wife and taken a pregnant woman away from her husband, but they entirely misunderstood the options that were available to me. My choice lay not between fidelity and adultery but between honesty and hypocrisy, and I’m no Victorian—I’m a twentieth-century man, and I had no intention of building my private life around a lie in order to appease the petty demagogues who dictated society’s conventions. I didn’t choose to meet Alicia when she was pregnant—or even when she was married—but since I had met her I saw no point in pretending we could ever have lived apart. Similarly, once my relationship with Vivienne had been destroyed I saw no point in pretending that any part of it had survived. I was honest with myself and with other people, and if that shocked everyone I was sorry but I wasn’t about to jettison my honesty to accommodate them.
However, I had to admit that the uproar caused by my behavior was tiresome, and it took me some time before I became too bored with the fuss to pay it further attention. Fortunately I was busy at the office and although I missed going out for a walk in the lunch hour I was equally happy to sit at my desk with a hot dog and a bottle of Coca-Cola while I browsed through statistical reports. I had soon given up eating in the partners’ dining room, as all the other partners were so priggish about my situation and I hated to see how much Steve was enjoying my discomfort. I knew that the scandal was bad for my career, but I knew too that if I continued to work hard, complete my assignments and make no mistakes my reputation as a banker would ultimately be un-dimmed. The worst aspect of my situation was that it seemed to confirm the opinion that I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid who was too immature to be taken seriously, but again time was on my side. I would grow older; I would eventually be able to marry Alicia; and we would sink into the most stifling respectability imaginable.
In fact we already lived quietly and my evenings were no more remarkable than my hard-working well-disciplined days. What our critics thought we did with ourselves I have no idea. Perhaps half their fun was der
ived from the conviction that we indulged in orgies which would have put the ancient Romans to shame, but the truth, as so often happens, was more prosaic than any fantasy. I would come home from work and we would sit on the couch in the upstairs drawing room for half an hour while we exchanged news. I would drink some tomato juice, Alicia would sip a glass of milk and we would hold hands. When our drinks were finished I would go to my rooms to shower and change for dinner before I joined Alicia in the nursery to say good night to Sebastian. Dinner would be a light meal, usually fish followed by fruit. Alicia lost interest in meat during her pregnancies and developed a craving for apples. After dinner we would listen to our favorite radio shows—we would be holding hands again by this time—but by nine-thirty Alicia would be yawning and ready for bed. She tired easily in pregnancy and needed at least ten hours sleep a night.
No middle-aged suburban couple embedded in the most respectable of middle-class suburbs could have led a more exemplary life, yet of course I have to admit there were difficulties. Unfortunately it is not in the least natural for a young couple to live like middle-aged suburban marrieds when they’re in the grip of the hottest love affair in town.
Naturally I tried to make love to her. I tried several times, but the baby came between us. I could feel him. He moved a lot. He aroused all the guilt I felt as a young man brought up decently in a Christian household, and then all my brave words about being a twentieth-century man counted for nothing and I would tremble at the thought of the Ten Commandments. I didn’t seriously believe God cared a jot whom I was sleeping with, but childhood beliefs often run too deep to be easily exorcised by logic, and after the third time I had failed to make love to Alicia I said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. It’ll be all right after he’s born, but it’s no use when he’s right here in bed with us. I’m very, very sorry. Please try not to be too angry with me.”
The Rich Are Different Page 67
