“Uh-huh.”
“You know, before I took over Eaton’s it was a pretty shabby business. It was a dishonest business. They sold things that were no good—medicines that wouldn’t cure anything. Machines that didn’t work. People who bought them were pretty unhappy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I changed all that. I saw to it that our customers got what they were paying for. That made them happy. That’s why we’ve been so successful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A service business. And—you know—now that you’re getting to be a young man, and beginning to think about your future, I hope you’ll also think about coming into Eaton’s with me. It would be a good feeling to know that you’re at least thinking about it. Will you at least think about it. Prince?”
“All right, Daddy.”
“Thirteen is a good age to begin thinking about things like this.”
“Fourteen.”
“Right. It’s funny, when I was your age and even older, I didn’t think that way at all. I didn’t think that it was important to go into a business that was a family business. Of course, my circumstances were a little different. My father didn’t own the family business, he just worked for them—his wife’s family. I was always under somebody’s thumb.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But to go into a family business which your own father heads—that can be a wonderful advantage for a young man. It can be a wonderful opportunity.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it would give me a wonderful feeling if you did, Prince.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I’ll tell you this. From the way things look right now, in nineteen twenty-two, our possibilities for expansion seem downright limitless. For instance, we’ve been following very closely what Mr. Woolworth has been doing. On our drawing boards right now are plans to move out of mail-order and into stores all over the country, all over the world. Same honest merchandise, same honest prices, but in a chain of stores. It’s the coming thing. Does that sound exciting, Prince?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“After all, an airplane pilot can only serve a few people at a time. We serve hundreds of thousands, millions of people every day.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll tell you what. Would you like me to take you down to one of our plants and give you a little tour—give you an idea of how our operation works? Would you like that?”
“Sure, Daddy.” It was an offer that had been made often in the past, and it was always postponed.
“Good. Maybe next week, when I get back from Washington. When I get back from telling President Harding what he’s doing wrong.” His father laughed. “How do you like that, Prince? Your dad going down to Washington to tell President Harding what he’s doing wrong.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty funny.”
“Anyway,” his father said, “think about what I’ve been saying. No need to make a big decision now. Plenty of time. But it’s good to be able to talk to you about things like this because, you see, my own father—” He hesitated, clearing his throat. “I could never really talk to my own father because he wasn’t—successful. Oh, he was perfectly nice to me. But we all lived together, in one big house—my mother, my father, and my two uncles, and nobody ever listened to anything my father said. They had no respect for his judgments, and so finally he sort of just stopped talking. Can you imagine what that was like, Prince, when I was your age—to realize you had a father nobody paid any attention to? Not even my mother. Oh, he was very good looking, quite the blade, when he was a young man, and I suppose that was why my mother—I suppose that was what she saw in him. But he seemed to lack basic intelligence—in the business sense, that is. He was a disappointment to the family, and I knew that from the time I was a little boy.”
“Basic intelligence?” Crazy.
“Not clever in a business sense. They all criticized him behind his back. Or maybe it was because they refused to give him any real responsibility. And my uncles—they just didn’t believe in talking to children. And when I was growing up, with a father nobody listened to, and with nobody to listen to me, I got the impression that nobody thought I had much basic intelligence, either, that I was rather worthless, too, like my father. And it was rather lonely for me, even in a house that was filled with people. Nobody ever thought I’d be successful, but I guess I’ve managed to prove to them that I could be. Do you see why I’m telling you this, Prince? I grew up with a father who I thought had nothing to teach me. I want you to grow up with a father you believe has something to teach you, from my own success. And I want—I hope—you’ll grow up with a father you can respect. Do you mind me talking to you like this?”
“No, Daddy.”
“And so I grew up feeling that I was some kind of accident. Why didn’t I have brothers or sisters? It must mean that I was an accident, a baby they didn’t want. And then I found out that—in fact—I was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“A son they didn’t really want is one way to put it, Prince. But you weren’t an accident. Your mother and I wanted you very much. There’s a big difference. And then, a few years ago—” He broke off.
“What happened a few years ago, Daddy?”
“A few years ago, when he was in his fifties, my father became—well, the doctors diagnosed it as a kind of premature senility.”
“What’s that?”
“He became—funny in the head, I guess you’d say.”
Crazy!
“He had to be watched all the time because he did—terrible things. To keep an eye on him they—”
“What things?”
“Children. Little boys and girls. He’d try to touch them, and hurt them. But I don’t want to talk about that.”
But there it was again, with its coiling and outreaching arms and thorny tail in the deep water the Undersucker.
“But do you know they still keep him in the office?” He laughed. “For appearances sake—can you imagine that? But that’s why you’ve never met your grandfather. He’s become the secret family shame. To keep an eye on him, they keep him at the office. But it’s taken my mother and her brothers—how my mother does it, I’ll never know. But she’s very strong—” He broke off once more. “Funny, but from a distance, it’s made me love him even more, but in a pitying way. And it’s funny, but I’ve never told anyone about this—not your mother, not Uncle Charles, not my doctor, not even Aunt Daisy. Only you. Because still, when I get to feeling low in my mind—even with the success I’ve had, Prince, I still sometimes feel that there’s something shameful about the Auerbach name. I wanted to change it once, but now it’s too late. And I wanted you to know all this because I never want you to be ashamed of your name, or to have a father you mostly pity. I want you to make the name proud.” Tears seemed to glisten in his father’s eyes.
“Aren’t you proud, Daddy?” It embarrassed him to think that his father might be going to cry. Whenever his father talked intimately to him like this, he felt vaguely uneasy; it was as though, whenever small cracks appeared in the mask, it was a black reminder that there was a mask. The cracks revealed uncharted territory, and he was on safer ground when the mask was intact and in place.
“How can an accident be really proud? But I’ve taught myself pride, trained myself, by trying to forget the past. Some days, I actually believe there wasn’t any past. That’s why I’m telling you this, Prince. You have no past to hide. You only have a future. You’re going to be my pride. Do you understand?”
“Uh-huh.” But no, sometimes when his father talked to him like this, he did not completely understand. From where he sat on the edge of Prince’s bed, his father reached out a little awkwardly and tousled Prince’s dark hair with his big hand and said in his gruff voice, “You know, Prince, I love you very much. I really do.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
Then his father stood up, cleared his throat once more, and the mask fell into place again. “Well
, I’ll leave you to whats-its-name, the Wright brothers’ plane. Anything you need?”
“Daddy—”
“Yes?”
“Daddy, could I have a lock put on my door?”
His father looked down at him, frowning slightly. “A lock on your door? Which door? This one?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn’t this door have a lock? There’s a key—”
“Yes, but I mean a lock that I can lock from inside, and that can’t be opened with just a house key.”
“Why would you want that, son?”
“I don’t know. At school, they don’t let us have locks on any of our doors. Guys are always barging in and out. And they have these surprise inspections. I just thought—”
“Well, at school I suppose there are a lot of reasons,” his father said, still frowning. “Such as fire, and—” Then he smiled. “Still, I see no reason why a young man your age shouldn’t be able to have a certain amount of privacy in his own home. I’ll get somebody to take care of it in the morning. I’ll speak to Hans.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Prince said, and his face flushed, for he had just had the sensation of having driven a small stake into his father’s heart.
Because there is a monster in this house. It has a name. Its name is Auerbach, Undersucker Auerbach.
Of such scenes, as has been noted, Essie Auerbach had no awareness. But there must have been other scenes, which, given hindsight, occurred that same year or thereabouts. Hans. Hans the bodybuilder, the bodyguard, the keyholder. Here, for example, is a scene which Essie only imagines happened. It happened—where? Who knows? But it happened. Perhaps it was at Lawrenceville. Perhaps it was at the horse ranch in Wyoming, during that first European summer. Hans—Hans and young Jake are alone somewhere, somewhere in a room. Hans—Hans for Handsome—has been playing his mandolin. Have we mentioned that Hans plays the mandolin? Because he does, he plays the mandolin not badly and smokes many black cigarettes, so put in the mandolin, for music and for magic, and paint the colors dusk.
“You’re a beautiful boy,” Hans says, laying down his instrument. Which is true. Young Jake—Prince—is beautiful—too beautiful, some might say. With large dark blue eyes, smooth skin—no adolescent acne for our Prince—dark, curly hair, what used to be called a Roman nose.
“A very beautiful boy,” Hans says, perhaps touching his knee, perhaps running his hand softly along his thigh, perhaps covering the boy’s bare foot with his own, while Prince—who knows what Prince is thinking, feeling? One can only guess.
“A beautiful boy,” Hans repeats in that lazy, hypnotic way, smiling that crooked, lazy smile, moving closer until their knees touch, saying, “Look here, Princey, I want to show you something.…”
Who knows whether this scene actually occurred? Essie was not there to see it, and the two principals involved in the scene are no longer here. But something of the sort did. And given foresight—but none of us is ever given that.
Here, on the other hand, is a scene Essie remembers very well. That extravagant decade—the Era of Wonderful Nonsense that was the 1920s—is under way, and Essie has come home late at night from an Opera Guild benefit. It is spring, and Jake is in New York on business. Prince is home from Lawrenceville for the spring holidays. The servants have retired for the night, and Essie goes directly to her room, where the coverlet has been turned down and where a glass of warm milk has been placed for her on her bedside table.
Some time later, she is awakened from a deep sleep by the sounds of some sort of commotion in the hallway outside her room. She turns on her lamp and tries to identify the scratching, scuffling sounds. She rises, goes to her door, opens it, and there, in the weak light from her open doorway, she sees her son, fifteen, in the dark hallway, struggling to open his bedroom door just down the hall. His dark hair is tousled, his necktie is loosened, and his shirt front is unbuttoned. Half-leaning against the door jamb, he is twisting nosily at the knob, which seems to resist him.
“Prince,” she cries, “what is it? What’s the matter?”
“Party,” he mumbles. “Kids from school … drove me home … can’t get …”
“Is your door locked?”
He mutters something she cannot understand. Then, as she watches, he leans back against the closed door and slides slowly to the floor, where he lands in a kneeling position. Then, falling forward on his hands, he vomits noisily onto the carpet.
“Prince, what’s the matter with you?” Essie cries, running to him. Dimly, from the far end of the long corridor, she sees a pale shape approaching. It is Hans, wearing only a white terry cloth robe, carrying his heavy ring of keys.
“Hans—what’s wrong with him?”
Hans bends over her son. “Nothing,” he says. “He’s just drunk.” Saying, “Come on, Prince, old boy,” he lifts him by the arms and swings him over his shoulder in a football-player’s half-carry. “You go back to bed, Ma’am,” Hans says. “I’ll clean him up and get him to bed. Don’t worry—he’ll be fine. I’ll clean up the mess.” With his free hand, he quickly unlocks the door to Prince’s bedroom and carries him inside.
Twenty
The Florida night is warm and moist and, from the terrace of his penthouse condominium where Arthur Litton stands, the only sounds are the susurrous rustle of the Atlantic surf on the beach below, the gnatlike buzz of small planes in the distant sky, and the occasional, jarring sound of an ambulance siren making its way southward toward Miami General on Route One. Florida, after all, is where old people come to die, and the sounds of the vehicles that minister to their needs are never far away. The night is clear, but moonless, and on nights like these there is more than the usual small-aircraft traffic heading toward the Everglades. These planes invariably fly low, out of radar range, and without lights, for they are almost always involved in drug traffic. Their activities amuse Arthur Litton in a grim way, because this is a business in which he has chosen not to involve himself, though he has been offered numerous opportunities. That is a business, he thinks, only for human beings who are little better than animals, the dregs of the world, traffickers in misery and death. No, that is not at all his cup of tea, and he is proud to have kept it firmly at arm’s length. Except for once. But that had been as a favor to Essie.
Inside the apartment, he has kissed his sleeping Angelique good night, where she has dozed off with her reading light still on, with her copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country spread out about her, her pale arms and yellow hair loose across the white satin sheets and many tiny lace-edged pillows. Angelique, he thinks, has been well-named. She is an angelic woman, and it is a wondrous thing to him that a new love such as this one should have been offered to him in old age, a kind of miracle. How could he have faced old age without her?
Arthur Litton has been in retirement for some years, and his principal activities are playing golf with his old friend and sometime partner, Frankie Corelli, fishing in the waterway from the pier, and sunning himself here on the terrace or downstairs by the building’s pool. In the evenings, he and Angelique often read to one another, and occasionally they go into Lauderdale or Miami Beach for dinner, or have a few friends over—Frankie Corelli and his wife, a few others—for a get-together. It is a quiet life. And it also amuses Arthur Litton that this quiet life is so much in contrast with the kind of life the newspapers try to depict for him from time to time—the mastermind of the Underworld, genius of the Mob. The Mob, if it can be called a Mob, hasn’t solicited his opinion, advice, or help in years, and their concerns are no longer his. It is true that he will sometimes notice an FBI agent tailing him when he walks his dog—Arthur Litton will usually recognize the fellow and throw him a jaunty salute—or he will see someone from the State Prosecutor’s office making notes of license plates of certain friends who come to visit him, but he is used to this. These are minor nuisances. And it is true that he assumes that his telephone line is still tapped, and so he simply makes his important calls from pay booths. H
is trouser pockets always jingle with dimes and quarters, telephone change. Aside from these little inconveniences, it is an easy life.
Mastermind of the Underworld. To Arthur Litton, this is funny, too. Of all the state and federal charges that have been leveled against him over the years, not a single one has been made to stick and, each year, he has smiled as the statute of limitations on one or another unproven allegation has run out. In the meantime, he has educated two fine sons, one at Stanford and one at Amherst, seen them launched in fine careers—one in real estate, the other a dentist—seen them marry and have fine children of their own. It is a good life, and he and Angelique have everything they want. Arthur Litton has only one serious complaint. Washington, as though in a fit of pique or frustration, has denied him a passport. It is as though, unable to prove any actual wrongdoing on the part of the Mastermind of the Underworld, Washington has decided to keep America’s public enemy securely on America’s shores. America, love it—or stay, seems to be their motto, and Arthur Litton is bitter that he cannot go with Angelique to Rome and Paris when she goes to shop for clothes.
Oh, Arthur Litton will not deny that he made a lot of money during Prohibition; he did, and so did a lot of other people. When people talk of his “debt to society,” he thinks wryly that society’s heaviest debt is to itself—for the millions of dollars that it lost to its Volstead Act, that monstrous example of mass self-delusion. American society, in his opinion, is still paying for that, and may go on doing so for generations. Prohibition made a great many people rich, including men who are now regarded as the pillars of American business. Well, Arthur Litton could tell you a thing or two about these men and they would not be described in lapidary terms, unless as extremely rough diamonds. These were men who had people killed to get what they wanted, and, despite claims to the contrary, Arthur Litton has never killed anyone, nor has he ordered the killing of anyone. He ran his business like any other business, and when his people turned in poor performances, or failed to follow orders or do their jobs, they were reprimanded or dismissed—punished, just as cheats, liars and malingerers are punished in any business. He is proud of his record on that score. His record is clean on that score, it has been a clean life.
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