The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “What a question! Hush and let your grandmother finish what she has to say.”

  “I’m never going to get married,” Linda says. “Everybody in this family just gets divorces, anyway. I’m going to live in sin.”

  “Papa,” Joan goes on, “was a great philanthropist, and a great humanitarian, as the world knows. But at heart he was a great businessman, who built a little company called Eaton and Cromwell into the corporate giant it is today. He never undertook anything which wouldn’t show a profit. And I, his oldest child, who knew him longer and better than anyone in this room …”

  Except me, Essie thinks.

  “… feel that I can safely say that Papa would be proud of me today. Thank you, my darlings, and to all of you a merry Christmas, and a happy, and profitable New Year.”

  “Joan would do well on Hyde Park Corner,” Josh says in an amiable voice, and Joan throws him an angry look.

  “Now I want to make a toast!” Karen says somewhat loudly. She starts toward the ladder, drink in hand, weaving slightly.

  “Don’t forget an ornament,” someone says.

  “Fuck the ornaments. I want to make a toast.” She starts up the ladder, misses the bottom rung and her drink sloshes in her hand and trickles across her lower arm.

  “Karen!” Joan says sharply.

  “I want to make a toast!” She tries for the ladder again, misses again, and falls clumsily against the ladder. This time, the drink spills across the front of her pale green dress.

  “Karen, you’re making a fool of yourself!” Joan says.

  Karen straightens up, looks down at her dress. Then she drops her glass—it rolls harmlessly on the thick carpet—bursts into tears and runs from the room.

  In the silence that follows, Mr. Daryl Carter, his pale face now very red, rises and follows her out of the room.

  Joan, still standing, says, “Don’t pay any attention to her. That’s all she does it for—attention.” And Karen’s daughter, still kneeling by Essie’s feet, merely stares up into Essie’s face.

  “Actually,” Joan says, changing the subject, “Josh brought up a good point a moment ago. You’re not getting any younger, Mother, and I think all of us would like to know what you’re planning to do with your and Papa’s art collection. Let’s be realistic, after all.”

  “I’m leaving it to the Met,” Essie snaps. It is a perfectly spontaneous response. Actually, not until that very moment had she decided to leave it all to the Met, though she has certainly considered it and Mr. Hubbard has paid several polite calls. But now the decision is made, final, done.

  “Mother, don’t be a fool. If all this goes into your estate, you’d be crucified for taxes.”

  “Crucified? I’d be dead.”

  “Why, the value of the Goya alone—”

  “Joan, this is neither the time nor the place,” Josh says.

  “Josh is right,” Essie says.

  Joan’s tight, compressed body seems to gather into itself, to become tighter, more compressed. Wellsprings of resentment and old grudges are bubbling up. “‘Josh is right,’” she mimics. “Josh is always right, isn’t he? Who the hell is Josh? Who the hell is he, besides your favorite? Everyone has always known that Josh is your favorite!”

  Richard McAllister is finally bestirred. He stands up. “Joan, please …”

  “Shut up! I raise a perfectly good question, a perfectly reasonable and practical question which concerns us all, and what am I told? ‘Josh is right.’”

  “For Christ’s sake, Joan!”

  “And what about all that Eaton stock that Mother is sitting on?—three hundred thousand shares!”

  “Three hundred and twenty-five thousand,” Essie corrects.

  “That’s right! What’s going to happen to that? I don’t know—does anyone in this room know? Oh, I suppose Josh gets that, because Josh is right. Who the hell is Josh, Mother? What does he do besides tell you how to vote your proxies, which happens to be absolutely against the law?”

  “Among other things, Josh is the president of the company from which we all derive a comfortable living,” Essie says. “And he’s your brother.”

  “But he’s not a real Auerbach! He’s not even a real member of this family.”

  “We’re all members of this family, Joan,” Josh says.

  “Joan, you’re ruining my party,” Essie says. “I take that back. You’ve already ruined it.”

  “He’s not! He’s not!”

  “Joan, what on earth are you talking about?”

  Joan is as angry as Essie has ever seen her, but she seems nowhere close to tears. “You know exactly what I mean, Mother. Some Auerbachs are real, and some aren’t. My analyst explained it all to me years ago, and I explained it all to you. We’re two families, we had two different sets of parents. Does Josh remember 5269 Grand Boulevard? No, but I do! Babette and I do! Babette and I remember a little house at 5269 Grand Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, that had only one john, and it didn’t always work! And we had a mother who cooked our meals and ironed our dresses and darned our stockings and patched our underwear and walked us to the streetcar stop for school, and a father who came home at night in his shirtsleeves for dinner at the kitchen table under one bare light bulb. Oilcloth on the table. Catsup in a bottle. Boiled potatoes. And we had a mother who read us stories before we went to bed at night, holding the book in hands that smelled of onions and were red from washing dishes. Those were our parents, Mother. We were their children. Then Papa got rich. Then, when I was nine years old, along came Mogie, and ten years later came Josh. They never set foot in 5269 Grand Boulevard. They were brought up not by parents but by governesses and nurses and bodyguards and servants—a cook who wouldn’t even let the children into the kitchen of their own house, and a big estate in Lake Forest with a guard at the gate because of kidnappings. They had a mother who had a butler and a chauffeur and a German private secretary who guarded her like a hawk and who said, ‘You may go in to see your mother now, but she only five minutes has,’ and a mother who, if she was home at all, was dressing to go out to some grand ball. And a father who, if he ever came home at all—if he wasn’t in somewhere like Brussels or Copenhagen or Milan or the end of the world on business—if he came home at all, he came home in a tall silk hat in a private railroad car, to attend a reception for the Governor, or Henry Ford, or John D. Rockefeller. And if he came home at all, he was soon off again to address the League of Nations in Geneva. Those were Mogie’s and Josh’s parents, Mother. They weren’t my parents, Mother! Babette, remember the lemonade stand? Remember our lemonade stand? Two cents a glass, and we gave the money to Mama. Did Josh ever have a lemonade stand? No, everything was handed to him on a solid silver platter. Babette—” Her eyes are streaming now, but there are no sobs. “Babette—tell them about our lemonade stand. Tell them … tell them … Oh, please tell them.…”

  Babette fidgets nervously with her bracelets, twisting them this way and that. “I don’t remember it,” she says at last.

  Josh rises, a little wearily, and says in a flat voice, “Would anyone like a little music? How about some Christmas carols?” He walks to the piano, sits down, and runs his fingers over the keys. He begins to play “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” “C’mon. Let’s sing. It’s Christmas.”

  At first, no one responds. Then Linda quickly stands up and says, “If no one else will sing, I will.” She goes to the piano and begins to sing in her clear young voice, while Josh Auerbach accompanies her:

  O Little Town of Bethlehem,

  How still we see thee lie.

  Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

  The timeless stars roll by.…

  All at once Joan rushes across the room to the piano and screams at her brother, “Josh, you little shit!” Then she bangs down both fists hard on the upper register of the keyboard.

  In the echoing, jagged silence that follows, Essie stands up and walks out of the room, to leave them to their bickering.

  The terrace of
Essie’s apartment wraps around two sides of the building, the south and the west. The terrace is bare now, the awnings down, the garden furniture stored away, the planters and the window boxes empty. But on the first of May, all the things will come out again from their storage places, and the men from Woodruff & Jones will come, and the freight elevators will fill with new trees and shrubs and flowering plants and ivies. The December night is clear and cold, and Essie has thrown a cashmere shawl over her shoulders, but the fresh air is tonic and the view from the twenty-ninth floor at the corner of Seventieth Street and Park Avenue where Essie lives has a certain splendor. Below her, the lights from the cars along the avenue crawl silently by, then stop while the light turns red, then crawl on again. Though there are no sounds from the streets, the air is filled with the city’s persistent hum which never goes away. Was it always like this? she asks herself. Was it always so awful, so much unkindness? Perhaps, if Jake were still alive, it could have been different, but only perhaps. If, by some magic, she could command him back, but no, the trouble is—the shameful, awful, secret thing is—that she doesn’t want Jake back. And of course much of what Joan said is true. Though she shouldn’t have said that about Josh not being a real member of the family, even though Josh has always been different, special.

  There would be stars on a night like this, if the lights of the city didn’t always manage to outdazzle them. Essie has often noticed how the lights from her terrace with its two views, the south and the west, are different, depending on which way one faces. The two views are like two parts of a symphony. To the south, downtown—the New York Central Building, the Empire State Building, the Pan Am Building and, at the farthest reach, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, none of which were there when she was a girl—the lights strike an aggressive, almost warlike chord: intense, full of furious enterprise, crackling with the fiery notes of money. To the west, across Central Park, through the bare branches of the trees, the residential lights of the West Side are softer, pinker, quieter. These strike more lyrical and modulated chords of domesticity and care and love. Oh, my city! Essie thinks, gripping at the half-wall of her terrace and looking at the contrasting rhythms of the lights.

  It was not so long ago—surely not nighty-nine years ago—and not that far away, where it all began. How many miles is it from here to Norfolk Street, to a place that now lies buried somewhere deep behind that strident Midtown skyline? Essie used to know how many city blocks there were to a mile, but it is not that many blocks, and even fewer miles. It is not so far, or so long ago, to where she came from. And now they are all waiting for her to go away.

  Norfolk Street—is that what a life comes round to at the end? A small circle, with the journey finished almost within sight of where it started? Essie wonders suddenly whether the ghosts of her mother and her father still linger somewhere in the walls and stairwells of the old building, the way the scent of a man’s or woman’s presence will hang in the air long after he or she has left the room. All at once she can smell the smell of cabbage cooking, and the chocolatey smell of her mother’s fingers, and hear the sound of her father’s voice:

  “Outlaw. Pariah. When you defy your parents, you defy the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. He who separates himself from his people buries himself in death. This is written in the Torah.”

  “But I was young, Papa, and I loved him, and I wanted to marry him!”

  Suddenly Essie realizes that she is not alone on the terrace.

  “Mary! I thought you’d gone home hours ago.”

  “I had a feeling in my bones, Mrs. A, that things wouldn’t go so well tonight. I’m sorry.”

  “Did Karen leave?”

  “Mr. Carter took her home.”

  “He’s much too young for her. That’s the trouble.”

  Mary touches Essie’s hand, very lightly, where it rests on the half-wall. “Mr. Wilmont’s in the library, Mrs. A, and he’s alone.”

  The library is Essie’s favorite room in the apartment, all done in warm and earthy colors, golds, browns, yellows, and deep greens, the colors of the bindings of the fine old books that line the walls behind glass casement doors. Arrayed in the cases, too, are all the awards, medals, and citations of Jake’s lifetime, as well as her own, the signed photographs of Presidents, some of them a little yellowed now, and over the mantel hangs Jake Auerbach’s Chandor portrait under its museum light. At night, the lamps with their dark parchment shades cast a warm glow. Essie enters the room from the terrace, and finds Charles there, sitting in one of the leather chairs, nursing his pipe.

  “Well, well, old girl,” he says.

  “Oh, Charles,” she says. “It’s not kind, is it? None of it is kind.”

  Charles says, “Each of them loves you, Essie—in his own way.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she says, taking the chair across from him beside the dying coal fire in the fireplace. “I’m not so sure at all.”

  “Would you like a brandy?”

  “Yes, I think I would.”

  He rises, goes to the bar, and fills two small brandy glasses from the decanter. Returning, he hands one glass to Essie, and touches his glass to hers. “Cheers, old girl.”

  “Cheers, Charles.”

  He returns to his chair, and they sit in silence for a while, sipping their brandy. The fire smolders in the grate. Above them, in the center of the wall, over the mantelpiece, looms the portrait of Jacob Auerbach, which he sat for with Douglas Chandor in 1929. He glowers down at them, his face frozen in disapproval. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for the great man, the great humanitarian, the great philanthropist, to have let the artist depict him with even the slightest semblance of a smile? But no, a smile had evidently not been what Mr. Chandor’s subject wanted, and so instead we have Jacob Auerbach perpetually frowning from eternity. Sometimes, alone in the room, Essie talks to the frowning face, which now has no way of articulating its displeasure. She mocks it, tries to make it smile. Nothing works. His portrait dominates the room, lords it over the entire apartment, just the way he used to dominate their lives. I want to replace little Prince. Please let me try!

  “Should I be worried, Charles?” she asks him suddenly.

  “Worried? Why?”

  “The things Joan was saying. About Josh.”

  “That was just her analyst talking,” he says.

  “Joan wants more money. I can smell it.”

  He laughs softly. “Joan always wants more money.”

  “But she’s not getting it from me. Is she?”

  “You know how I feel about that. I think you’ve done more than enough for her.”

  “So do I. But still—”

  “But still what?”

  “Charles,” she says quickly, “do you think that Joan knows something? Something that could hurt us? Hurt us all?”

  “Of course not. How could she possibly?”

  “Joan can be destructive. Do you remember that kidnap letter years ago? That was Joan.”

  He whistles. “Really? Did Jake ever know that?”

  “No. I saw to that. If he’d known, there’d have been hell to pay. But it was Joan.”

  “But she was just a little girl—”

  “She’s always been like that. Destructive.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about her, Essie. For one thing, I think she’s going to have her hands full hanging on to this latest husband.”

  “And her paper.”

  “And that.”

  Her eyes wander upward to the portrait. “Sometimes I wonder, if Jake were still alive, whether he could straighten everybody out.”

  “But it was usually you who straightened everybody out, Essie. Remember?”

  “Or you, Charles.”

  “Yes. You or me. What was that Yiddish word you used to call him?”

  “Shmendrick?” Essie laughs. “I’d call him that when I was angry, yes. But Jake wasn’t a shmendrick, exactly. A shmendrick is a little man who wants to do big things. But Jake w
as a big man who wanted to do big things. And did.”

  “With a lot of help from other people.”

  “Oh yes. Who got no credit. Do you know—tonight—in the middle of everything—Linda asked me if I loved him?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t know what to say. The question knocked me nearly off my pins.”

  Smiling, he says, “It would take more than that to knock you off your pins, old girl.”

  “I don’t know. My pins aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

  “Miracle worker.”

  “Yes … I remember that. When was that, Charles?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly. It was September twentieth, nineteen thirteen.”

  “A Saturday …”

  “And you’d been drying dishes. The dishtowel was blue.”

  “Yes …”

  “So remember the miracles, Essie.”

  She studies his kindly, one-of-the-family face. “I’ll try. Still, I’m worried, Charles,” she says.

  Two

  The town house residence of Mr. Mogie Auerbach on Beekman Place is always kept very dark. Even during the daytime, the heavy blackout shades and draperies are kept securely drawn on both the east and west exposures of the house, and the purpose of this, Mogie explains to guests, is to preserve the delicate hues of the Chinese silks with which the sofas and chairs are covered, the tones of the Aubusson and Oriental rugs, and the soft pastels of the antique scenic Zuber wall coverings. The darkness also serves the better to display Mogie’s personal collections, the precious Amatis, the uncut gems, the silver and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century toys, which are arranged about the downstairs double drawing room in lighted glass cases. His long years of bachelorhood have turned Mogie Auerbach into a creature of fixed and immutable habits. Nothing in his house can ever be changed from its original arrangement, and small chalk marks on the floors and shelves and walls indicate where each object must be replaced when it has to be moved for dusting. Here, Mogie likes to imagine acquaintances thinking as they enter his house, is the home of a gentleman, scholar, and esthete.