The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Essie, are you saying—”

  “I want to be a mother again, Jake—it’s not too late! I want to give you a splendid son, the kind of son you deserve. I want you to make love to me, so that I can try to give you one more splendid son.”

  Slowly, he reached out and covered her hand with his.

  She was weeping now. “Don’t you see? I want to fill up your life again and mine. I want to fill that empty place in my heart, and in yours. I want to fill that empty bedroom. I want to replace my little Prince! Please let me replace my little Prince. Please let me try!” She fell forward across his knees and, with her cheek pressed tight against his chest, repeated, “Please let me try.” His hand moved up her arm to the back of her neck.

  “Essie,” he said softly, “I had no idea—”

  Later, when it was over, and she lay beside him on the big bed, in the darkened bedroom with tears still standing at the corners of her eyes, she said to herself: There. It is done. You have done it. You are what your father said you were, the Whore of Babylon.

  Twenty-six

  Joan Auerbach and Cecilia Wilmont had, interestingly enough, become good friends, even though there was a difference in their ages of nearly eighteen years, and the two women often had lunch together at Eddy’s, a popular speakeasy in the Loop where both were known. Cecilia used Joan as a kind of channel for information about the senior Auerbachs, of whom she saw little. Cecilia had long been aware that Essie Auerbach didn’t like her, and she would happily admit—though not to Joan—that the feeling was mutual, thank you. Cecilia Wilmont also made no secret of the fact that she felt that her own husband’s brilliance was responsible for Jake Auerbach’s great fortune. And she also resented the fact that, though her husband was paid a handsome salary and though she and Charles lived in great comfort on the North Shore, Charles had hardly become a multi-millionaire like Jacob Auerbach. Through Joan, Cecilia was able to enjoy her resentment vicariously.

  Joan, at twenty, had just married Horace Schofield, whom she had met in Palm Beach at a dance at the Everglades Club. They had danced to “Sweet Sue—Just You,” and Horace had admired her legs. They had gone to bed together that night, and been married the next morning by a Florida justice of the peace who asked no questions. The fact that he had asked no questions created certain difficulties at the time, since Joan’s divorce from Jean-Claude de Lucy was not yet final, and it had cost her family a certain amount of money to straighten everything out with Mr. de Lucy, who threatened to sue his wife on bigamy charges. Joan’s father had also been distressed when he read in the newspapers that his new son-in-law was “a Palm Beach socialist.” Joan explained that this was a misprint, and should have read “Palm Beach socialite.” Of course all this was long ago in what Joan sometimes referred to as “my Flaming Youth Period.” You had to admit that, when you looked at photographs of Joan in those days, she was a striking, haughty beauty.

  Today, she and Cecilia were sitting at their regular table, sipping gin rickeys, prior to what would typically be a very light lunch, and Cecilia was saying, “You never really drink a drink, do you, Joan? You just sort of play with it with your straw. Here I’m ready for another, and your glass is still full.”

  “I can’t seem to get used to the taste of alcohol,” Joan said. “Mother can toss off three martinis just like that, and not feel a thing. Not me.”

  “Really …”

  It was a delicate subject, Joan knew, because Cecilia had a certain reputation in Chicago for drinking a bit too much on occasion, and making a fool of herself at parties. “Speaking of Mother,” Joan said, “are you ready for some perfectly revolting news?”

  “What’s that?” said Cecilia, all ears.

  “She’s gotten herself, as they say, in an interesting condition.”

  “Really!”

  “Enceinte. I think it’s disgusting.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Don’t you think she’s a little old to be having another baby?”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirty-seven. And how can I possibly relate to a baby brother or sister that much younger than myself, who’ll be spoiled rotten, you know that.”

  “Yes …”

  “And suppose Horace and I decide to have a child. I’ll have a baby brother or a sister just about the same age as my own child. It’s embarrassing.”

  “I see what you mean,” Cecilia said.

  “I think older people ought to use a little more—restraint.”

  Cecilia’s fresh drink had arrived. “Of course, I don’t really have to worry about that,” she said. “My husband’s not really interested in sex.”

  “Really, Cecilia?”

  “Minimally. For a while I wondered if he was—you know, one of those. But then I decided that it’s just because all his energy goes into business.” She sighed and sipped her drink. “How’s Horace in that department?” she asked. “I must say when I saw him in his tights at the Souters’ masquerade party, he looked awfully—well hung.”

  Joan giggled. “He likes to tie me up,” she said.

  “Really?” Cecilia said, leaning forward eagerly. “Is that fun, Joan?”

  Joan extracted a cigarette from her gold case and lighted it with a gold lighter that matched. She inhaled, blew out a thin stream of smoke, then put her head back, shook her short bobbed hair, and smiled mysteriously. “’Nuff said,” she said at last.

  Of course it was not until several years later, after Joan’s daughter Karen was born, that Horace Schofield accidentally tied his wife up too tightly in that California hotel room, and there were screams, and blood, and the police came, and the ambulance, and there was all that unpleasant business in the newspapers, and Horace tried—but all that was long ago, and ancient history. If you read about it then, you wouldn’t want to hear about it here.

  It was not from Essie, but from his wife, that Charles heard the news, which was not the way she had planned for him to hear it, but then she had developed no clear plan for how to tell him, or what to say, or when.

  “There’s a question I could ask you,” he said quietly. “Unless you’d rather that I didn’t ask it.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “I think I’d rather you didn’t ask,” she said finally.

  “Very well. I won’t,” he said. “Ever.”

  “I’ll just tell you that Jake suspects nothing.”

  He nodded.

  “And he never will.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will this affect the way you feel about me, Charles?”

  “Everything that happens to you affects the way I feel. I can’t help that. It always has. It always will. Nothing ever happened before I met you. Cecilia was supposed to drive you out of my thoughts. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. This won’t do it either.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I think we should never speak of this again.”

  “Never. To anyone.”

  “Never. Not to each other. Not to anyone.”

  “Ever.”

  The years go by, pulling their threads of memory behind them like the ripples from a hand drawn through clear water. Look, there is a deer drinking water from the lake, no it is two deer, a doe and her fawn, do you see them, darling? I love the lake in August, the smell of the pines. We should come here in winter, where we would have the lake quite to ourselves, and where the nights are so cold that the pockets of frozen sap in the pines explode with the sound of gunfire, at forty below, here in the Adirondacks. This house has no heat, but we could use log fires. For water, we could melt blocks of ice from the lake. Will we ever do it? Probably not. How far is it to Saratoga? Not far, twenty miles as the crow flies, we could go to the races there. No, I’m afraid I’d run into my brother; he plays the horses. I feel freer here. Why do we feel free? Because Jake is dead, and Cecilia is dead. Shall we see what they’ve packed for us for sandwiches? Are we getting old? I think this will be my last summer here, this place is just too big to keep up. Is th
at a bird calling? No, I think it is a tree frog, calling its mate. There—I hear it again.

  She had named the baby Joshua, and as soon as he was old enough to understand she explained to him that he had his own book in the Bible, and she read to him from it: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.… Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.… And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.… His fame was noised throughout all the country.…”

  In a curious way, with this child, she felt that she was returning to the traditions of her own father. Not to the relentless unforgiveness of his later years, but to the discipline and faith she remembered in him when she was a child, when he took her on his knee and read to her from the Book of Esther. These were the disciplines and traditions which it now seemed important to honor. Once she had been willing to cast them all aside, but now, with this child, they seemed to be coming back, and she found herself telling her new son all the stories her father had told her—about Josh’s great-grandfather, the blacksmith, and the great-grandmother who had owned the horse, about the hard times for the Jews in the days of the czars. She even, from time to time, began to entertain the odd, surprising notion that it might be nice if Josh decided to become a rabbi. It was an irony.

  And Jake, too, with this son, seemed to want to come back to her, and to his family. She would listen to him talking to Joshua, explaining the stars, naming the constellations, explaining the movements of the planets around the sun, the moon around the earth, the galaxy of which the Milky Way was the outer rim, the universe. Perhaps it was because he was getting older, and felt at last secure in his wealth and position, relaxed into what he had become, that he wanted to return to all of them and grow closer to this son than he had been to the other children. She would listen to him explain to Joshua what caused the tides in the ocean, and what made the lightning streak across the sky, and how this created the thunderclap that followed, and how, by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, you could roughly judge the number of miles between yourself and the center of the storm, and thus tell whether it was approaching or receding. “Perhaps you’ve heard that if an electric light bulb is not screwed tightly into its socket, or if an electric plug is not plugged into every outlet in the house, the electricity will leak out into the room, like lightning,” she heard him telling Josh. “This is not true.…” The words had a familiar ring. She had read or heard all this somewhere before, and then, with a little start, she remembered his lecture, years ago, in her school on Our Friend, Electricity.

  “I’m going to Paris in June,” he had said to her. “Will you come with me?”

  “Will Daisy be going too?”

  “Not on this trip, no.”

  The year was 1932, and Josh was four. What would later be known as the Great Depression was settling in, hard, and there were breadlines in the streets of cities. Essie knew that Eaton & Cromwell’s stock had suffered along with others, and that the company had negotiated a number of very large loans from banks which were still unpaid, but the hard financial times had not seemed to affect Jake Auerbach’s style of living. “We’re lucky we deal in basic consumer goods,” he would say. “Even in the worst of times, people still need warm coats, they need shoes, underwear, soap—the basic things.” Also, earlier that spring, the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped. A huge ransom had been demanded, and paid, but the child had not been returned and, two months later, its body would be found near the family’s New Jersey estate. Among the Auerbachs and their friends who also had small children, there had been much worried talk, but between Jake and Essie there had been no mention of bodyguards.

  “If I go, I think we should take Josh with us,” she had said.

  “I agree,” he had said.

  Then he had told her the purpose of the trip. He was to be presented with the French Legion d’Honneur.

  “Will you wear your emeralds for the ceremony, Essie?”

  “If you like.”

  Extraordinary! This new attentiveness to her. It had begun to express itself in other ways as well. He would knock at her door, and ask to come in. He would sit on her bed and ask to make love to her. Love! Sometimes, while he stood looking lonely and almost disconsolate in her doorway, she would say to him, “No, Jake, no—please, I’m too tired tonight. Please, I’m sorry.” But there were other times when she could not force herself to be so cruel. Was this a part of her punishment? To have to accept unwanted love? Was this how justice was meted out? Was this her retribution? If so, she decided, she must accept it. “I love you,” he would sometimes whisper. But I don’t love you, she would think. I haven’t loved you for a long time. I can even put a date on it, I think. I think it was the day when Prince … went away … and you turned his life into a bonfire at The Bluff.

  But I don’t hate you, either. Who are you, Jacob Auerbach, Legion of Honor wearer, friend of electricity? The simple answer came: my husband. The man I asked to marry me. And somehow, just as she had managed to do it once, accidentally, inadvertently, she had managed to make this husband fall in love with her all over again. Extraordinary! So strange! It was another irony, another riddle. Was that what life was in the end—a conundrum? A question, or a puzzle, to which only a conjectural answer can be made?

  Some specifics:

  “You’re going to be gone a long time,” Charles had said to her.

  “Only six weeks,” she said.

  “We can’t turn the clock back, can we,” he said, and she had studied his face, wondering what he meant, because it was not like him to speak in clichés.

  “Do you mean you have regrets?” she had asked him finally.

  “No. But it’s so funny. His new dependency on you. When did it start?”

  “I think you know that answer.”

  “But how do I feel about it? Am I jealous? Is that it? I have absolutely no right to be.”

  “And I don’t want you to be.”

  “Or am I jealous because, as he grows more dependent on you, he depends less on me? Or is it because he can have you whenever he wants, but you and I have to meet in secret? All I can say is that, at times, my feelings are very complicated, Essie. Sometimes I think it’s I who should be in Silver Hill, and not Cecilia.”

  “Complicated,” she repeated. She smoothed his brow with the palm of her hand. “It’s complicated for me, too,” she said. “Difficult. All I can say is that if it weren’t for you it would be just—unbearable. No, that’s too strong a word. Empty. Dust in the mouth.”

  “For me also.” Then suddenly, “It’s just that I can’t bear the thought of him touching you!”

  She lied to him. “He doesn’t touch me!”

  He turned his eyes away.

  Jake had developed another curious interest—genealogy. He had begun constructing the Rosenthal family tree, writing to distant relatives in the Rhenish Palatinate, full of questions, gathering as much information as he could find about the Rosenthal antecedents. On that trip to Europe in the summer of 1932, they had also visited Germany, where Jake had uncovered long-lost cousins and where they visited cemeteries and copied inscriptions from headstones.

  “Why don’t you do the same for the Auerbachs?” she asked him.

  “The Auerbachs were small potatoes,” he told her. “But the Rosenthals are a distinguished family. Mayer Rothschild the First was a second cousin of one of my great-grandfathers.”

  Strange to think, of course, that many of those newfound cousins Jake Auerbach had discovered in the early 1930s would later perish in places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. By the time it became clear that Hitler’s attacks upon the Jews, which at first had been only verbal, amounted to more than a temporary political aberration—and Jake was offering to send money to help members of his family to esc
ape—it was too late. But still the family tree grew, and it was all, Essie sensed, somehow for Josh’s benefit.

  “Where should we send him to boarding school?” he had asked her.

  Again, astonishing! He had never consulted her about schools for the other children. “The boys have always gone to Lawrenceville,” she had said to him.

  “But for Josh—we might think of something different.”

  “Well, what if you and I were to take him around to various schools, and let him make up his own mind?” she said.

  “Excellent idea. We’ll tour him around.” And he added, “This summer. Together.”

  “But Jake, he’s only eight!”

  “Can’t get him registered too soon. Besides, he’s bright for an eight-year-old.”

  And so the three of them, in a series of chauffeur-driven cars, had toured Eastern boys’ schools, and Josh had selected the George School in Pennsylvania, a school which, as it turned out, was operated by the Society of Friends. Josh had chosen it because he liked the big trees.

  “I never felt that Lawrenceville really welcomed Jewish boys,” Essie said.

  “Neither did I,” said Jake.

  “Am I a Jew?” Josh had asked his father.

  “Well, in a sense, I suppose yes,” Jake had replied. This would have been in the winter of 1940, when Josh was twelve, and home for the Christmas holidays after his first semester at the George School. There was some anti-Semitism there, it seemed, even among the Quakers and the Brotherly Love.

  “Why don’t people like us?”

  “The fact is,” Jake said carefully, “that some Christians don’t like some Jews. Some Christians feel that some Jewish people like ourselves, who are well-to-do, have too much money. They are envious. They don’t appreciate what men like myself have done for the less fortunate. You’re too young to remember it, Josh, but there was one day in late October of nineteen twenty-nine—it was called Black Thursday—when I had the experience of seeing my personal fortune reduced by exactly one hundred million dollars. Think of that. And do you know why that was? It was because when the stock market crashed I personally wired every Eaton and Cromwell branch manager to say that I would personally guarantee the brokerage account of any Eaton employee who was in trouble. That day cost me—personally—a hundred million dollars, but it was one of the happiest days of my life.”