The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  These were very bad days at The Bluff—after the murder, and during the sensational trial that followed. Jacob Auerbach felt personally assaulted by the murder, and felt that it befouled the reputations of all Jews, particularly Jews such as himself who had worked to establish themselves as productive and responsible American citizens. The case was helping to fan, he felt—and with certain justification—the flames of anti-Semitism that were billowing across America in the 1920s. The case brought back ancient canards about Jewish ritual slaughtering of young children. Henry Ford, an outspoken anti-Semite, had caused to be published in his Dearborn newspaper the spurious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which alleged to portray an international conspiracy of Jews to take over the world’s money. In Germany, a young man named Adolf Hitler had founded his National Socialist German Workers’ party and, the previous November, had staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

  Jacob Auerbach could not seem to shake the case from his mind, and railed about it nightly from the head of his dinner table. “Filth … scum … perverts. A disgrace to their parents, a disgrace to their religion, a disgrace to America … vile creatures. The worst crime a son could ever commit against his father—against his God! Fairies … queers … they should be castrated in public, strung up by their heels. We can never have the Loebs or the Leopolds in this house again. No, perhaps we should write or try to call them, Essie, and tell them how we share their suffering over this terrible thing. What do you think? Which should we do? Their monsters of sons have made them the most miserable human beings on this earth. Should we hold them responsible for what their sons did?”

  “Well, if you’re talking about appearances—” Essie began.

  “Appearances!” he shouted. “How can you mention appearances, after the way those perverts have made us all appear? They’ve made Jews appear to be fiends and madmen. Discipline—the right discipline—must have been lacking in their homes. There must have been some clue their parents were too blind to see. How can you have a son that’s a monster and a queer besides and not notice something? There are ways of finding out about perverts—supervision … discipline … punishment. Miserable perverts must be stopped before they get to this!”

  During this period, Hans, who was not unaware of these dinner-table fulminations, began upping his demands.

  And so, late one October afternoon when the leaves had begun to turn and there was a chilly whiff of winter in the air, the older of Jacob Auerbach’s two sons took out a pen and a piece of letter paper, sat at his desk and wrote:

  Dear Mother and Daddy—

  I know that you have always wanted me to be a good son, and I have tried to be a good son, but I have failed, and that is why I am going to do what I am going to do.

  You see, Daddy, I am a pervert, too, like Nate Leopold and Dickie Loeb. I am a pervert, like them (and I even knew about them long before this happened), and Hans and I have been perverts together for about three years.

  I know you would not want to live with a son who is a pervert, and would not want to live with a monster. I don’t want to live as one, either, which is why I am going to do what I am going to do. I’m sorry. I love you. So long.

  Prince

  He folded the letter and placed it carefully on the center of his desk. Then he walked quietly down to Hans’s room, where Hans lay sprawled on his bed asleep. Hans’s service revolver, in its holster, lay slung across the back of a chair with Hans’s clothes. Prince lifted the pistol from the holster, put it in his pocket, left the room and closed the door behind him, making no noise at all.

  Then he went downstairs and into the garden, past the swimming pool, down the wooded pathways until the house was no longer visible. There he sat down on a jutting outcropping of rock. He took the gun out of his pocket, and studied it for a moment or two. He released the safety catch, as Hans had taught him to do. Then, as though there were nothing else in the world to do, he placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I’m sorry, Daddy! The Undersucker had come at last.

  One of the gardeners, whose name was Giovanni, heard the shot, hurried to the place, and found him there. He went running to the house for help.

  Jake read the note, and now the revolver was in his hand.

  “Stop it, Jake!” she screamed. “Put that thing down!”

  But he was already heading down the long corridor toward Hans’s room.

  Running after him, she cried, “Stop! Stop this!”

  The door to Hans’s room was flung open, and Hans sat there naked in his bed, rubbing his eyes. Jake pointed the gun at him.

  Essie threw herself across her husband’s back, wrestling his arm down, screaming, “Stop this! Do you want to be a murderer too!”

  Finally, she felt her husband’s arm relax, and she heard him say to Hans, “You came into this house with nothing but the clothes on your back. That’s all you’re leaving with.”

  Then, for the next hour or so Jake Auerbach went on a rampage of fury and grief, or both, which Essie, numb, could only watch. He strode from room to room of the house, and wherever a picture of Prince stood on a table it was snatched up, hurled to the floor, smashed and trampled on. From photograph albums going back sixteen years, whole pages of family pictures which contained Prince’s image were ripped from their bindings and hurled into the huge baronial fireplace in the library where, soon, a bonfire raged. Then it was up the stairs to Prince’s room, where the contents of his desk were dumped on the floor, gathered up, and consigned to the flames. Next came the contents of his closets and dresser drawers—shirts, sweaters, suits, socks, underwear, even shoes and toilet articles and pieces of jewelry were flung into the fire. Into the fire went Prince’s stamp collection, his books, his chess set, his collection of phonograph records, the model airplanes he had made of rice paper and balsa wood. “Oh, stop …” Essie moaned, when she saw the airplanes go up in flames. But he would not stop, and from the central chimney of The Bluff, oily black smoke, as though from some bizarre cremation, belched upward into the clear October sky. Within an hour, or so it seemed—for who, after all, was keeping track of time?—every trace and vestige of their son’s life was burning or in ashes. Through it all, Jake kept roaring, “His name is never to be mentioned in this house again!” while the servants did the prudent thing, and kept their distance.

  The death of young Jacob Auerbach, Jr. was listed in the papers as accidental.

  Only later, when it was necessary to go over Prince’s financial affairs with an officer at the bank, and all the checks that had been written to Hans came to light, did Essie wish that she had let her husband pull the trigger.

  “Was there some clue, some signal that I should have got, but didn’t?” she said to Charles when he came to pay a condolence visit. “Was there something I should have noticed—some warning—that I didn’t see? For instance, he was always so … neat. Not just about his clothes and person, but about his room. Was that it? I mean, you know how messy most young boys are about their rooms. But with him, everything had to be in its place, just so. I can see him building those little model airplanes—all those little pieces laid out in order, just so, just as the instructions said. Picking up those tiny pieces with a tweezers, applying a little thread of glue. Everything perfect. And there was such a sensitivity about him. I’d be sketching out a design for an opera program—I can see him, standing over my shoulder, making a suggestion every now and then—‘Don’t you think that would be better in a lighter blue?’ So sensitive to little things like that. Or didn’t I spend enough time with him later on? His stamp collection. He asked me once if I could paint the flags of the various countries at the head of each … section … of the album. I told him I was too busy then, I’d do it later. I forgot about it. I never did it. He never asked again, and I forgot about it—that’s all! And he was so gentle. He loved his pony so. I’d hear him, in the stable brushing and currying his pony, talking to it. Not talking like he was talking to a horse, you know, but as though he w
as talking to a person. I can hear him talking to his pony. I can’t remember what—or—or—or was he so unhappy in this family, in this house, that he couldn’t bear it any longer, and was there some way I could have known this, or sensed this, and helped him somehow, and come to him and said—what? Where were the little signals that I missed, Charles? Or were they there—or what? Why didn’t I see the danger that was living in my house, under my nose? Where was it, why was it—that I couldn’t even see it? Where? Or were there signals that I didn’t want to see, was afraid to see?”

  Charles was studying, very hard, the changeless pattern of the square of carpet between his feet. At last he said, “There are no answers to any of these questions, Essie. You mustn’t keep asking them of yourself.”

  The

  BOOK

  of

  REVELATIONS

  Twenty-three

  It is April, and Linda Schofield, Essie’s great-granddaughter, is finishing her Winter Work Period for Bennington, and will soon be going back to Vermont. Linda is interested in a career in television broadcasting, and has spent the winter term working as a “gofer” for the Today show at NBC. (“I gofer coffee, I gofer sandwiches, I gofer the makeup man’s cigarettes, but I learn a lot about what goes on.”) Today she has stopped by the apartment, on her way home, for tea. Sometimes, Linda calls Essie “Great-Grandma,” and sometimes it is “Gee-Gee.” Today it is Gee-Gee.

  “Did you know that Mother’s going to marry that man, Gee-Gee?” Linda says as Essie pours the tea. “That Daryl Carter?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Essie says. “Well, I suppose I should say I hope she’ll be very happy.”

  “He’s a wimp,” Linda says, “but he’s a nice enough wimp. Of course he’s closer to my age than to hers.”

  “Well, if he loves her—”

  “I’m not so sure about the love bit,” Linda says. “But I’ll say this for him. He’s gotten on Mother’s case about the drinking, and she’s been looking a lot better.”

  Essie glances at Linda out of the corner of her eye. “Good,” she says. “Good, because I did think Karen was drinking a bit too much.”

  “She’s an alcoholic, Gee-Gee—face it.”

  “Well, dear, everything is relative.”

  “He’s gotten her to go to A.A. meetings. He goes with her.”

  “Well, good,” Essie says.

  “Of course I think it’s a purely sexual thing with Mother. For her, Daryl is just a sex object.”

  Essie hesitates. “Well, as long as he’s kind to her,” she says.

  Linda lifts her teacup to her lips and, in this little gesture, Essie sees another young girl lifting a teacup in a crimson parlor years ago. Yes, in Linda, there is something of the girl she had once scrutinized in her mother’s hand mirror years ago, a definite resemblance. Funny that it would have skipped not just one but two generations, for Essie has never been able to see much of herself in any of her own children.

  “I’m in a sexual relationship myself right now, Gee-Gee,” Linda says.

  “Really?” Essie says. “Well, I suppose that’s very common these days for girls your age, Linda. It wasn’t in my day. We waited for marriage, but I’m willing to admit that times have changed. I suppose you’re—as they say—on the pill.”

  “Oh, naturally,” Linda says. “It’s a boy in my class at Bennington.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Gosh, I don’t have any idea. I’ve never asked him.”

  “Well, even that doesn’t make much difference anymore, does it? At least not in this family. If my father knew what’s gone on in this family, he’d be spinning in his grave.”

  “What was he like, Gee-Gee?”

  Essie thinks to find the right words. “Stern. Pious. Scholarly. Rigid. Unforgiving.”

  “Unforgiving? What was there to forgive?”

  “Oh, plenty.” She nods towards Jake’s portrait. “He didn’t approve of my marriage, for one thing. He had another man all picked out.”

  “Hmm. Well, frankly, I don’t think it’s all it’s cracked up to be, Gee-Gee.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Sex. This sex business. I mean, what’s there to it? I find it all kind of a big bore.”

  “Ah,” Essie says. “I’m sorry to hear that, Linda.”

  “Sorry? Why?”

  “It shouldn’t be a big bore. That’s all.”

  “What should it be?”

  “Well,” Essie says, again choosing her words carefully, for this is not the kind of conversation she had been prepared to have this particular afternoon, and thinking that Linda must have some motive for the direction their talk is taking, and wondering whether—perhaps—her great-granddaughter has come to her as some sort of oracle possessed of the great wisdom that is supposed to come, but rarely does, with old age. “I can only speak of my own case,” she says. “I’ve always felt that when you love someone, sex can be a very beautiful part of life. When you’re really close to someone, when you’re like—well, like one soul, not two. The beautiful thing about it is that there are no words for it. When it’s over, there’s not much that you and your lover can say about it. You laugh a little. You touch each other a little. Then you get up and go about your day as usual, but just feeling a little better. There’s nothing to discuss, because there are no words, no language for it. I’ve always thought of sex as a kind of love poetry without words.”

  “Hmm,” Linda says, frowning into her teacup.

  “And so I suspect that you are not very much in love with this young man.”

  “That’s true. I’m not.”

  “Then sex won’t mean much, and what’s the point of it? At least that’s what I say.” I want to replace my little Prince, she thinks. “I had another son,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Woolgathering. Anyway, that’s what I say.”

  “But I suppose it goes away in time, doesn’t it—sex?”

  Essie laughs. “Oh, no. It doesn’t go away. It just gets—lovelier.”

  “But not at your age, Gee-Gee!”

  “Oh, yes. Why not? As you get older, it gets lovelier—softer, more tender—because there are less distractions. Like worrying about getting pregnant, for example. It becomes more concentrated, less—cluttered up, I guess is the expression. No, I have as much sexual drive, as they say, at eighty-nine as I did at eighteen.”

  “That’s incredible, Gee-Gee!”

  “Incredible, but true. Remember you heard it here. More tea?”

  Linda offers her empty teacup and changes the subject. “Grandma says that that Arthur Litton, who died, was some sort of relative of ours.”

  “He was my brother.”

  “Ah, Gee-Gee, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He was not a nice man.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Tell me, how is Joan getting along?”

  “She’s talking about reorganizing the newspaper.”

  “Honestly,” Essie says, setting down her teacup. “I simply do not understand your grandmother. She’s my own daughter, and I cannot understand her. Can you explain her to me? She talks about going broke, and owing money all over town—and she and her sister aren’t speaking because she owes money to Babette. But she still drives around town in a chauffeur-driven car, still has her butler, her cook—how do you explain that?”

  “We think she’s found a new angel.”

  “Well, she’d better pay back some of the old angels first,” Essie says.

  “I know she’s hired a fancy new Madison Avenue lawyer who’s handling her affairs. He’s ‘investigating certain improprieties,’ she says.”

  “Huh! She’d better straighten out her own improprieties first.”

  “Well, I don’t pay too much attention to all the capitalist talk,” Linda says, adding casually, “I’ve become a Marxist, did I tell you?”

  “No! Well, stranger things have happened in this family. I once marched in a
children’s strike on the Lower East Side.”

  “Hmm,” Linda says, crushing her lemon slice to a pulp with the tip of her teaspoon at the bottom of the cup. “It was interesting what you had to say about sex, Gee-Gee. Even at your age.”

  “Yes,” Essie winks. “Even at my age, Linda.”

  “Interesting.” She continues to worry and poke at what remains of her lemon slice. “And it would be interesting to know what would have happened to his family if Great-Grandpa hadn’t made all that money.”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question!” Essie whoops.

  Interesting. Yes. “It’s just that I’m weary of them, Charles,” she had said to him several years ago. “It’s not that I don’t love my children, but I’m weary of them coming back to me, again and again, demanding this or that. I wanted nice children—not dependents. Why haven’t they learned to take care of themselves, to have responsibilities? Why haven’t they learned that? Was there just too much money?”

  “Josh learned it.”

  “I admit I tried to raise him differently. No bodyguards. No nannies. I guess I thought the others had examples of strong, independent, responsible people all around them. You, me, Jake—even Daisy. No one was more independent than Daisy! I guess I made a lot of wrong assumptions.”

  It was the year that Joan had married Richard McAllister and, with him, was trying to get her newspaper started, and had succeeded in extracting $250,000 out of Essie for that project, even though it was less than half the figure Joan wanted. Looking back, after this latest debacle, Essie has decided that she should have given her nothing.