The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Would they really be that vindictive, Essie?”

  “Oh, yes. Joan would, certainly. She hates Josh. Babette—perhaps not. Babette is too interested in seeing her name in the society pages. And Mogie—well, Mogie is a loony, you know that.”

  “Do any of them suspect?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Surely, if any of them did, you’d have heard about it before now.”

  “Yes, that’s a point.”

  “I’m sure your secret is safe, Essie,” Henry Coker said. “It’s certainly safe with me. What you’ve told me this morning will never go beyond the four walls of this room. I wouldn’t worry if I were you. In fact, I urge you not to.”

  Then Henry had left, kissing her hand in his courtly way, as though he had told her nothing at all of importance. And though he had told her not to worry, not to worry if he were she, Essie kept thinking that she was not Henry Coker, and what is a greater potential cause for worry than to be told not to worry? But then she had thought of Daisy Stevens, and wondered whether she should telephone Henry at his office and ask him to insert another bequest for Daisy. Of course such a thing would probably come as a great surprise to Daisy. But it would be done in the spirit of what Essie’s father used to talk about, zedakah—righteousness. And thinking of Daisy reminded her of something she had not told Henry Coker—something that might, in fact, be very useful, the card up the sleeve, the chip that might win the game if and when the time came for it to be played. After all, Daisy was a part of the puzzle, too. Essie had buzzed for Mary Farrell and asked her to try to locate the whereabouts of Mrs. Daisy Stevens St. George. With that project under way, Essie found herself feeling somewhat better. “Cherchez la femme,” she had said with a wink to Mary Farrell.

  During the day, too, and for the past several days, there have been a number of telephone calls from Joan, which Essie has chosen not to take. Though nearly a week has passed, she has not yet forgiven Joan for her performance at the tree-trimming, and Mary had offered Joan various excuses—that Mrs. Auerbach was out shopping, that Mrs. Auerbach was at lunch, that Mrs. Auerbach was taking a nap, and so on. And, needless to say, in the meantime these unsuccessful telephone attempts and unreturned calls have not created an atmosphere of serenity at the South Street offices of the publisher of the New York Express, Joan Auerbach McAllister, or, as she calls herself professionally, Mrs. Joan Auerbach.

  “I know that that bitch is lying,” Joan says to her secretary after the latest failed try to reach her mother. “I know that Mother’s right there in the apartment.”

  It is at this moment that Richard McAllister steps into her office. “Can I talk to you about South Africa?” he asks her.

  Joan presses her fingertips against her temples and says, “Please, Richard, not now. I’ve got to talk to Mother first, before we make any decisions. It’s important.”

  “Joan,” he says, “I love you very much, and I admire you even more, for your spunk and determination to keep this paper going. But you know as well as everyone else that the handwriting’s on the wall. I’ve got to think of my own career now.”

  “Richard, I’ve told you before—give me six months. Just six months. That’s all I ask.”

  “In six months, there won’t be any more New York Express. You know that as well as I—”

  “Please!” Joan cries. “I’ve got a plan, I tell you—a plan!”

  And, while all this is going on, Josh Auerbach is with Essie in the large sitting room of the Park Avenue apartment, pressing on her a plan of his own for which Essie really has no enthusiasm. It is five o’clock, and Essie knows she is in a cranky mood. Her meeting with Henry Coker that morning has left her feeling irritable and out of sorts.

  “Oh, no, no,” she is saying. “I don’t want to go back to Chicago. I always hated Chicago, you know that.”

  “Now, Mother, I don’t know that at all. I remember wonderful times growing up in Chicago.”

  “If I went, I know I’d want to go back to see The Bluff, and I really don’t want to see it now—all developed and built up with whatchamacallit—middle-income housing? No, Josh.”

  “Everyone’s coming—Mayor Byrne, the Governor of Illinois, Chuck Percy. It’ll be a party—like the old days.”

  “No, no. I’m too old for that sort of thing.” The occasion is to be the dedication, in the upcoming year, of the new Eaton & Cromwell Tower in Chicago.

  “Just think of it, Mother. The tallest building in the world.”

  “Yes, and I don’t like the whole idea of it. Too showy. Your father would have hated it.”

  “Nonsense. Dad was a real glory boy, you know that. He loved to throw it around.”

  “You should invite some prominent black people, too, you know, for your father’s sake,” she reminded him.

  “All been taken care of. Jesse Jackson, Benjamin Hooks—they’ve all accepted. But we need you there, Mother.”

  “But why? Why? I never had anything to do with the business.”

  “Don’t you see? You’re the living link. You’re the last living link to Dad and his work. You’re Mrs. Jacob Auerbach.”

  “I’m not sure I fancy being thought of as a link,” Essie says. “When I think of links I think of chains and prisons.”

  “It could be thought of as Dad’s crowning achievement. I think you owe it to his memory to be there.”

  “Now we’re invoking the dead,” she says. “What do we owe the dead?”

  “In this case, quite a lot, Mother,” Josh says.

  At this point, Mary Farrell slips quietly into the room and places a typewritten note on the table by Essie’s chair. Josh glances at it and reads:

  Mrs. Burton St. George (Daisy Stevens)

  Gramercy Park Hotel

  52 Gramercy Park North

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  475-4320

  “Now, Mother,” he says with some annoyance, “why are you getting involved with her again?”

  “Never mind. I have my reasons,” Essie says.

  “Anyway, it’s important that you be there,” he says. “Right up on the platform—Jake Auerbach’s widow. It’s a symbol.”

  “I don’t want to be a symbol. They’d ask me to make a speech. I’m terrible at making speeches.”

  “Just a few words, Mother. It doesn’t have to be a speech. Anyway, it’s nearly a year away. Will you at least think about it?”

  “A year from now—who knows? I’ll probably be planted under a tree at Salem fields.”

  “Now, Mother, don’t talk like that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve never been in better health.”

  “Well,” she says, hesitating. “What does Charles say?”

  “Charles feels very strongly that you should be there, just as I do.”

  “Well,” she says, “as you say, there’s lots of time. Let me think about it, Josh.” Then, trying to be less irritable, she says, “I’ll try to think about it in a positive light. Now give me a kiss, dear.”

  It is easy to remember The Bluff in terms of the parties or, as Mr. Duveen used to call them, the grand entertainments. But when Essie Auerbach thinks of the house in Chicago, she prefers to remember the quiet times, when she was alone there. The garden—or, as some people had begun to call it, the park—had been her bailiwick. Cattle had once been fielded there, and the trails they had carved across the hillside behind the house became the pattern for her landscape design of tan-bark walks and bridle paths for the children’s horses. She had left most of the standing growth—the birches, tamarisks and hemlocks—as it was, and had supervised the planting of smaller trees and shrubs—azaleas and dogwood—at points which seemed to demand a burst of spring color. She had overseen the planting of hundreds of wildflowers—trillium, arbutus, lady’s slipper, jack-in-the-pulpit, anemones, ferns and mosses, columbine, yellow and purple violets. Natural rocks were rearranged, just slightly, to set off clumps of spring bulbs, tulips, daffod
ils, and hyacinths. The garden came to its full glory in May and early June, when a tent was often raised over the tennis court for a party, but Essie’s best moments were the solitary ones, walking through her woods with one of her children by the hand, thinking: this is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. Her beautiful house might have been the creature of Joseph Duveen, but her beautiful garden was her own. “How can I have had such a vision?” she would ask herself, years later, when it was time to say goodbye to The Bluff forever. Where did it come from? From some lost ancestor in the Ukraine who had looked at a forest and imagined a wild garden? Who knew? Who knew where the notion had come from of damming a stream with a few rocks and creating a pond for carp and water lilies? Or the labyrinth of paths that led to secret grottoes and sudden surprises of open spaces? There had even been a fairy ring circled by flat stones where elves and gnomes could sit when they assembled in the moonlight. “Let’s go exploring in the garden, Mother,” Prince would say to her.

  Exploring. That had been his word for it—their firstborn, Jacob Junior, whom they had nicknamed Prince. It is hard to remember now, after everything that happened, so many years after he was banished from the memory of all of them forever, that he was once a very real, living and breathing presence in their lives. Had they asked too much of him, expected too much of him? Had they favored him too much over the others? One year later, Joan had been born, and Babette the year after that, but somehow Prince had always seemed to occupy a special, central place, over the little girls. He had seemed while he grew up the perfect child, the perfect little boy, and to have earned the nickname. Had Essie doted on him too much, let him have his way too quickly, and let him know too early that perfection was simply all that was demanded of him? So that when the time came, when perfection was discovered to be a human impossibility, when frailty came and the sin of one tiny error, when the sentinels that his heart was supposed to post to alert him that God was watching could no longer do their duty …

  The answer to all these questions is perhaps yes. Given hindsight, anything is possible. Such are the penalties of love.

  “I want to replace our little Prince!” she had cried to her husband.

  Tell me a story, Mother.

  But not now, Prince. I have no time!

  In 1919, Jacob Auerbach, Jr.—Prince—was eleven, and the talk was of where he should be sent to boarding school. Lawrenceville had been selected. “Is the boy in any part Hebraic?” the application had asked, and Essie had watched in some amusement as her husband wrote “No,” firmly, in the blank space. We are now only Jews when we want to be, she had thought—when it suits us, not when it doesn’t. A bodyguard had been selected for Prince, because of the phobia about kidnappers. His name was Hans, and he had been a Chicago policeman. Now, of course, he wore civilian clothes, though the outline of a police revolver in its holster bulged beneath the jacket of his suit. His suits were invariably blue. Perhaps his years with the police force had conditioned him to that color. Hans was blond, blue-eyed, German, handsome in a rough sort of way, and muscular. Essie would see him, in bathing trunks, exercising with weights and barbells beside the swimming pool. His other duties were to teach the children swimming, tennis, and horsemanship. Essie cared little for Hans, but then there was little occasion for contact with him. In the fall, it was understood, Hans would accompany Prince to Lawrenceville. All these decisions were made by higher-ups than Essie.

  But the one servant she could not abide was Spencer, the majordomo. Theirs, from the outset, had not been a meeting of the minds.

  “Everyone has an English butler,” her husband had said to her.

  “I can’t help it. I don’t like him.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “He tries to boss me around. If I say I think we’ll use the green china, he’ll say he thinks the blue is more appropriate. If I want white flowers on the table, he’ll say pink roses would be better. I can’t get along with him, Jake. I don’t like his superior attitude, and I don’t like his English accent. And I don’t like him being taller than me.”

  “Essie, you are a fool.”

  “I don’t care,” she said defiantly. “I want someone smaller than I am. How about—a Japanese?”

  “Very well,” he had said at last, picking up his Wall Street Journal. “Do as you wish. See Charles about it.”

  And so, over the years, there had been a series of them, all with names like Taki, Suki, and Yoki. During the second war, Essie had succeeded in keeping her Yoki out of an internment camp. A telephone call to Herbert Lehman had done it.

  Put something together. This is the way the orders descend from the Auerbach High Command. Home from San Francisco, where a new distribution center is being developed, Jacob Auerbach advises: “The Danish ambassador to the United States is coming to Chicago next week. Put something together.” And so it is done. The bootlegger is notified, the invitations are telephoned or mailed, the servants are advised, down through the chain of command. “I never remember the names of my servants,” Mrs. Bertie McCormick once airily told Essie Auerbach. But, if pressed to do so, Essie could recite to you the names of every one.

  Now it is late. The servants have retired for the night, Mary Farrell has left, the telephone has been turned off, and Essie is alone in her bedroom where a glass of warm milk and a plate of fresh fruit have been placed on her bedside table. It has been an oddly unsatisfying day, full of loose ends, full of unresolved questions, unmade decisions. Starting with Daisy, the memories have kept crowding back, pressing through unexpected openings like children at a grownups’ party begging to have their presence heeded. Norfolk Street—perhaps some day she should take Josh back to see that, just to drive slowly past the building in the car to look up at the fifth-floor windows, and point—there. But who knew if the building still existed, or whether she would see the ghost of her father there?

  What would he have made of all this?—Christmas parties. Think of it!

  “Apostate!” she can hear him shouting at her from his troubled grave. “Whore of Babylon! Jezebel! You have reared up an altar to Baal to provoke the God of Israel. Can you touch pitch without being defiled? Neither can you hold on to all your money without losing your soul. Poverty becomes a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse. But you’re no longer a Jew. You’re a meshumeides. You have earned every shred of suffering that has befallen you.”

  “But Papa,” she cries back to him, “why did we come to America if it wasn’t to find something better than what we had in Russia?”

  He will not answer this.

  “Shmendrick!” she shouts at him.

  Four

  “She will marry a rabbi,” her father used to say, “or at least a rabbi’s son. But even that would not be good enough for her.”

  Then he would sit her on his knee and tell her the story of Esther, in the Bible, after whom she had been named: about the disobedient queen Vashti who had refused to comply with the commands of her husband, King Ahasueris, thereby setting an example for all women to defy their husbands. And of how the king had renounced Vashti and, after viewing all the eligible virgins of the kingdom, had selected the orphan girl, Esther, who had been raised by her uncle Mordecai, a Benjamite, to be his new queen. And of how, when the wicked Haman conspired to destroy the Jews, Esther interceded with the king on the Jews’ behalf, and of how she had thus saved thousands of Jewish lives, and had had her revenge in seeing Haman and his ten sons strung up on the gallows that had been prepared for Mordecai. To celebrate Esther’s deed, the festival of Purim had been created. “Think of it!” her father would say.

  Essie’s father, Shmuel—later Samuel—Litsky claimed that he himself was a descendant of the Benjamites, that is the Tribe of Benjamin. The Benjamites were famous for the bravery of their warriors and for the beauty of their women, of whom Esther was just one shining example. Also, so pure was their faith in God that the Benjamites marched fearlessly into the parting of the Red Sea while other t
ribes held back, suspecting a trick, worried that the sea might close up on top of them. The Benjamites had also provided Israel with its first king, Saul, who was “swifter than eagles … stronger than lions.” “Your ancestors,” her father would say. “Think of it!” According to Sam Litsky, Essie’s ancestors also included a great array of rabbis and scholar-teachers going back to the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century B.C.—Men of the Book who, like Sam himself, spent most of their waking hours studying the Scriptures and the Midrash, and endlessly scribbling interpretations of the Talmud, when they weren’t praying in the synagogue. But, as far as Essie knew, there had never been a family tree to prove, or disprove, any of this:

  The earliest home that Essie could remember was the one on Norfolk Street, number 54. There had been one other, before that, on Canal Street, about which her mother had simply told her that it was “not so nice.” Essie had no memory of that place. Nor could she remember anything of the little shtetl in Russian Poland, as it was then, where she had been born, and which she and her parents had left in 1892, when she was less than a year old, to come to the Goldene Medina, the Golden Country. The town was called Volna, in the Ukraine, and the nearest city of any size was Kiev—that much she knew. And on a little shelf above the stove on Norfolk Street there was kept a heavy, old-fashioned, rusted iron key. This was the key to the alte heim, which Minna Litsky had brought with her to America. “What was the old home like?” Essie would sometimes ask her mother, but she only got vague answers. “It was built of wood,” Mama would say. “There was a river near. Sometimes, in the winter, it was so cold that there was ice on the inside of the walls.”

  “What was the town like, Mama?”

  Her mother would shrug. “It was a nothing of a place. It is better here. We are lucky.”

  “Would you ever want to go back, Mama?”

  “Never! Now don’t ask me so many questions. Tell me what you learned in school today.”